By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan A collateral-free education loan guarantee that reached 410,333 borrowers by November 2019 sent about 70% of its sanctioned money to General-category borrowers and about 9.5% to SC and ST borrowers combined; a 2026 study of caste-marginalized market actors suggests why access alone does not guarantee fair inclusion. Why markets are not caste-neutral A 2026 Business & Society study by Jagadale, Mohapatra and Singh argues that market inclusion is not the same as fair participation when caste shapes the terms of exchange. Bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) and subsistence-marketplace research, the authors say, treats poverty as a shortage of income and access, and so overlooks birth-ascribed hierarchies that decide who is trusted, who is served well and who is treated with dignity. The authors propose the Bottom of the Caste Pyramid (BOCP) as a relational and processual lens. It is relational because caste-marginalized actors are pushed to the bottom thro...
Non-State Special Operations: Capabilities and Effects — A Book Review Article Ian Rice and Craig Whiteside, London: Routledge, 2026, 167 pp., US $190 (hardcover) Nov 10, 2026 · Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan Rice and Whiteside argue that violent non-state actors (VNSAs) do not only bomb, ambush and terrorise: some of them plan and execute operations built to change the course of a whole campaign, much as state special operations forces do. That claim is the core of Non-State Special Operations: Capabilities and Effects , and it challenges a field that has long treated special operations as the preserve of states. Why the question matters Special operations scholarship has been written almost entirely from the state's point of view: elite units, selection, doctrine, and the strategic value of small teams. Terrorism and insurgency scholarship, for its part, tends to treat attacks as a stream of incidents to be counted and categorised. Between the two sits a set of events that fit n...