All Things Policy

India recorded 38,503 drowning deaths in 2022, 9.1% of all accidental deaths in the country (source: NCRB). Yet swimming is still treated as a summer hobby for the urban few, not the public-health and sporting priority the numbers demand. On this episode of All Things Policy, Malathi Renati is in conversation with Hakimuddin Habibulla OLY, 2000 Sydney Olympian and founder of Swimming Matters, abou...

India’s AI ambitions are often framed around chips, GPUs, and the race for cutting-edge models. But AI is much more than hardware. In this episode, Gopal Tomar and Dr Dheeraj Dwarakanath examine India’s AI stack from the ground up — from electricity, data centres, and semiconductor manufacturing to models, applications, languages, and digital public infrastructure. The discussion explores what “so...

Subsea cables are the fibre-optic networks laid across the ocean floor that carry approximately 95% of all intercontinental digital communications, serving as the essential, yet often invisible, backbone of the modern global internet. In India, the subsea cable ecosystem is constrained by regulatory gaps, procurement hurdles, and structural commercial barriers, resulting in significant vulnerabili...

In this episode of the All Things Policy podcast, Kavya Rai and Abhishek Kadiyala examine India's 2026 amendments to the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act and why a domestic funding law has drawn attention in Washington. The conversation frames the issue as a collision between Indian regulatory sovereignty and the rising force of religious-freedom politics in the United States. It traces the...

China's population is shrinking. Its property sector has collapsed, and taken local government finances down with it. Prices at the factory gate have been falling for years. By most conventional measures, the Chinese economy is in real trouble. And yet, last October, China made a change to its rare-earth export licensing, which sent countries scampering to think about economic statecraft. How...

Companies now tell Srikant Sastri that their chains have been removed. Dr Y. Nithiyanandam speaks with the GDPDC Chairman about whether that feeling amounts to an inflection point, what Operation Dronagiri proved in its pilot districts, where geospatial data pays off in agriculture, logistics and infrastructure; whether India can build sovereign capability in GeoAI and hardware; what students shou...

Geospatial data can predict where a flood will happen. Satellite imagery can identify vulnerable settlements before disaster strikes. Real-time mapping can guide evacuation decisions. India has all these tools. Yet our early warning systems remain fragmented, slow, and disconnected. In this episode of All Things Policy, host Kavya Rai sits with Dr Y. Nithiyanandam as he explains what needs to chan...

Five years since the Taliban's returned to power in Kabul, ties between Pakistan-Afghanistan have steadily deteriorated reaching a new low. In this episode of All Things Policy, Aishwaria Sonavane speaks to Islamabad-based scholar and investigative journalist Natasha Matloob about what went wrong between the traditional allies. They look beyond the capitals to understand how communities along...

In this episode of The Indian Radius series, Vanshika Saraf joins Shobhankita Reddy to examine the progress of the India–EU Trade and Technology Council. The discussion looks at cooperation on open source technologies, start-up ecosystems, critical minerals, and a prospective association with Horizon Europe. They also briefly discuss the Indian President’s visits to Moldova, North Macedonia and Ro...

More than a quarter of the world's countries now live under sanctions. They have become the West's instrument of choice—the thing governments reach for when war is unthinkable and doing nothing is unacceptable. Freeze the reserves, cut off the banks, choke the exports, and force a government to change course without firing a shot. The fashionable verdict, after Russia's economy failed...

As India and China navigate the paradoxes of their post-Galwan ties, stressors ranging from Delhi-Washington ties to a competition over influence in the Indo-Pacific continue to plague a strategic "reset." In this episode of 'All Things Policy', Anushka Saxena quizzes Saheb Singh Chadha on his latest research paper explaining China's India policy of "Strategic breadcrumb...

SpaceX, which has built the largest satellite internet constellation and has also made history with the largest IPO in the world is now testing the largest rocket ever developed. Recently, the Starship, as the rocket is being called, completed its 13th test flight. But what is Starship? What does its success mean for the space sector in the US and beyond? And, what does it mean for the space race?...

U.S. Under Secretary of War for Policy, Elbridge Colby, recently critiqued what he called a "collective “middle powers” strategy". In this episode, Kripa Koshy (Staff Programme Manager) sits down with Brigadier Anil Raman (Retd) (Head, Defence Fellowship Programme) to analyse the U.S.' shift toward a more transactional, burden-sharing approach to global security and examine how India can navigate...

Last month, China hosted the ninth iteration of its World AI Conference in Shanghai. Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the event for the first time in nine years, and teasing out his speech beyond the rhetoric leaves some important takeaways. Meanwhile, companies around the world are turning to open-weight models from China that increasingly deliver near-frontier capability at a fraction of t...

Artificial intelligence is being sold as the biggest economic shock in a generation, a productivity revolution that will decide which countries grow rich and which fall behind. The machinery of it has already become a contest of power: chips have become chokepoints, compute is rationed by export controls, and the routine coding and back-office work that lifted millions across the developing world...

The science of population biology and the coexistence debate with predators, how protected areas actually get expanded and monitored on the ground, and whose voices are heard in that process. This episode walks us through the science, the governance mechanics, and the on-the-ground reality of making any of this actually work. All Things Policy is a daily podcast on public policy brought to you by...

Governments can make debt less visible, but they can't make it disappear. In this episode of All Things Policy, Kripa Koshy speaks with Sarthak Pradhan about off-budget borrowing - the incentives that drive it, its implications for public finances and democratic accountability. Drawing on examples from across India, they explore why these liabilities matter and discuss reforms that could bring...

India and the UK have signed a landmark trade agreement—but what does it really mean? In this episode, Anisree Suresh and Suman Joshi discuss the contours of the recently signed India-UK CETA. In addition to unpacking the key provisions of the India–UK CETA, who stands to gain, what was left out, we also try to understand the changing nature of FTAs and why issues like carbon border taxes and indu...

In this episode of All Things Policy, Aishwaria Sonavane speaks with Raja Karthikeya about the second phase of the US–Iran military conflict and its wider implications. The conversation examines India’s role, the opening of a new front involving the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, and the future of the US military presence in the Gulf. All Things Policy is a daily podcast on public policy brought to you...

The US dollar sits at the centre of almost everything from the reserves of central banks, the pricing of oil to the settlement of cross-border debt. Lately that centre looks less solid: central banks are stockpiling gold, countries are settling trade in their own currencies, digital money is spreading, and there's open talk of payment systems built to bypass the dollar altogether. Is the dolla...

Public conversation about energy and climate tends to default to a sense of unavoidable trade-offs, where every gain is assumed to carry an equal and offsetting loss. India's own record complicates that pessimism. Fly ash, once a disposal problem piling up in ash ponds beside thermal plants, now moves into cement, bricks, and roads. Clean cooking gas has reached households that had never had a...

As the wars in Ukraine and Iran have evolved, military technologies ranging from drones and lethal autonomous weapons are becoming a matter of great debate across global platforms. In this episode of 'All Things Policy', Manoj Harjani from RSIS, Singapore, sheds light on how military technologies are shaping procurement policies and how global governance debates on LAWS and military AI are attempt...

In this episode, Shobhankita Reddy, research analyst at the Takshashila Institution, and Sai Rahul Poruri, CEO of the FOSS United Foundation, sit down to unpack the nuances of tech sovereignty, arguing that it is not about absolute self-sufficiency, but rather about having the freedom to choose and avoiding proprietary vendor lock-in. They discuss ways in which the open source ecosystem can help s...

Host Malathi Renati sits down with Ankita J Chakkraborty (Trustee & Treasurer, Avant Welfare Foundation) to unpack how NGOs actually deliver services on the ground and what real partnership with government looks like, beyond the funding buzzwords. We cover the fragmented NGO landscape (3M+ registered NGOs, one of the largest non-profit ecosystems globally), the compliance runway for young NGOs...

Tariffs are back, industrial policy is fashionable again, and over the past year the United States, the country that helped build and maintain the open trading system, has spent its energy tearing holes in it, taxing allies and rivals alike. The popular verdict in India is grim: a global trade war is on, the rules-based order is finished, and we are caught in the crossfire. But is that really what...