Counterview

By A Representative   Power and climate policy analyst Shankar Sharma has written to Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman seeking urgent fiscal and policy interventions to address the growing threats posed by climate change and ecological degradation in India.

By Bharat Dogra   There are some regions that have repeatedly made headlines because of the serious challenges they face. Bundelkhand, spread across 14 districts in the central Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, is one such region. In recent decades, it has frequently been in the news because of water scarcity, prolonged droughts, adverse weather conditions, natural disasters, the crisis faced by farmers, and large-scale migration in search of livelihoods.

By Vikas Meshram  Nestled amid the Mangarh Hills of southern Rajasthan lies Khandora, a small tribal village in the Jher Gram Panchayat of Anandpuri block in Banswara district. Home to just 696 people and around 120 families, the village is steeped in indigenous traditions and cultural heritage. Yet for years, a quiet concern united almost every household: Khandora’s children did not have a proper Anganwadi centre.

By Mohd. Ziyaullah Khan   Since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power at the Centre, a growing trend of renaming cities, roads, railway stations and public institutions has become increasingly visible. While governments have every right to commemorate historical figures and cultural icons, the pattern of these changes has often raised concerns, particularly when institutions named after Muslim personalities become targets for renaming. The latest example is Barkatullah University in Bhopal.

By Ravi Ranjan*  Tarun Bhatnagar, a senior civil servant in Madhya Pradesh who stands in India's distinguished litterateur-bureaucrat tradition, has produced in his short story "Zakhme-Kuhan"—an old wound that appears healed yet continues to seep from within—a work of remarkable philosophical depth. The story centres on a young boy named Sundar, his teacher Kshitij, a school, birds, a tree, and rain. Yet within this apparently simple narrative frame, Bhatnagar unfolds nothing less than a fundamental critique of modern civilisation's disciplinary mechanisms, its relationship with nature, its colonial inheritances, and its systematic erosion of human sensibility.

By A Representative   More than a century before solar panels became a common sight on Indian rooftops, a little-known British bureaucrat in Bombay built a working solar steam engine —only to see his revolutionary vision crushed by the very colonial system he served. Now, a new historical analysis argues that William Adams ’ forgotten story holds urgent lessons for today’s energy transition. In an article published May 29, 2026, in The Conversation , researcher Deenesh Sohoni—author of an upcoming book on the global history of solar steam engines—rescues Adams from obscurity. Sohoni, who is working on a postdoctoral project about 19th-century solar pioneers, says Adams’ tale is one of “an inexhaustible source of wealth” ignored by shortsighted rulers. A Clerk’s Obsession, Ignited by the Sun Adams first became entranced by energy while working as a clerk in a London patent office in the 1860s. There, he saw early British designs for harnessing the sun. But it was French ...