The union under strain: India must reckon with the crisis of centralisation A democratic, pluralist republic is being hollowed out from the centre. The remedy is bold: devolve power, resources and governance back to the states that built this nation May 28th 2026 | Hyderabad India's constitutional settlement was never intended to produce a monolithic state governed by a single cultural identity. The framers of its 1950 constitution understood that a country of some thirty major languages, hundreds of dialects, and dozens of distinct civilisational traditions could only cohere through a genuine federal bargain: one in which each linguistic and cultural nationality retained meaningful self-governance, while sharing a common framework of rights, institutions and duties. That bargain is now under severe stress. The pressures are both structural and ideological. Structurally, the central government has steadily accumulated fiscal, administrative and cultural authority at the expense o...
The Triple Contract Advances, Middlemen and Debt in India's Handloom Economy Beneath the surface of India's handloom industry lay a financial architecture of extraordinary sophistication — a three-party system of contracts, advances and obligations that simultaneously enabled large-scale production and enforced the permanent economic subjugation of the weaver who did the work. Source · Report of the Fact-Finding Committee (Handloom & Mills), Govt. of India, 1942 · Chapter IV Paras 62–66 Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan In the ordinary economy of production, a manufacturer owns the raw material, controls the means of production, and sells the finished goods. The profit belongs to the manufacturer; the risk is the manufacturer's to bear. What made the Indian handloom industry remarkable — and what made the condition of its weavers so precarious — was that, by the early 20th century, this ordinary arrangement had been almost completely inverted. The weaver did the work. The merch...