Table of Contents
Today’s brief reads three articles. Sreemoy Talukdar in Firstpost reads five visits between April and July as one Indo-Pacific plan, drawn from Kautilya’s mandala. Bina Agarwal in the Indian Express asks why the new reports on inequality count what women earn and not what women own. Meera Shankar and Ajay Shankar in The Hindu argue that India should reach 100 GW of nuclear power with its own reactors.
Five visits in three months are one Indo-Pacific plan and not five separate trips.
Sreemoy Talukdar writes that India’s recent visits in the Indo-Pacific belong to one plan. He counts the engagements from the third week of April to the second week of July. The order of them, he argues, was not a matter of chance. His frame is Kautilya’s mandala, the ring of states drawn around a state, and he applies it to the sea.
The record
- South Korean President Lee Jae-myung came to India on 19 April 2026. It was the first state visit by a Korean president in eight years.
- Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi followed on 1 July for the sixteenth annual summit. It was her first visit to India after she took office.
- Within 72 hours of her departure the Prime Minister left for Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. The journey ran six days, from 6 to 11 July.
- Indonesia became the third country to buy the BrahMos missile. It is also the first buyer of Astra Mk-1 BVR missiles.
- Australian uranium exports to India have begun. They were held up for about ten years after the civil nuclear agreement of 2015.
- India and Japan signed their first defence project for joint development. Both stated their concern about economic coercion.
The argument
The method is the point. India is not putting together a military bloc. It builds partnerships one issue at a time, in defence, connectivity, technology and trade. Talukdar’s claim is that this raises the cost of coercion without inviting a direct quarrel. What he wants at the end of it is a maritime order with many centres of power, and not a coalition against China.
The brief records the frame as Kautilya’s mandala, adapted for the present century. That puts the article under two syllabus heads at once. It is the Arthashastra in Paper I and the Indo-Pacific in Paper II. The strategic autonomy the author defends is the old aim of not being tied to a bloc.
“India’s strategic imperative is to bypass its immediate continental constraints and forge deep, structural alliances with the outer ring of maritime states.”
Firstpost
The new reports on inequality count what women earn and never what women own.
Bina Agarwal writes about two reports. The World Inequality Report 2026 came out in June. The United Nations report Counting What Counts came out in May. Both take up gender inequality, and both take it up through the labour market alone. Neither mentions women and wealth. Her charge is that this is not a small gap. It leaves the main source of women’s economic inequality out of the count.
The record
- The World Inequality Report 2026 was published in June 2026 by the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics. The United Nations report Counting What Counts was released in May 2026.
- In the Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2023-24, about 86 per cent of all women workers and 91 per cent of rural women workers are informally employed. About 77 per cent of the latter work in agriculture.
- 73 per cent of rural women workers are “self-employed”, mostly as unpaid workers on family farms or in small business enterprises. Barely a quarter of rural women workers are in wage employment.
- Indian women own land in only 12 to 16 per cent of rural landowning households, though many are farmers in fact because the men go out to non-farm jobs. The figures come from the NFHS, ICRISAT and IHDS data.
- The World Inequality Lab has itself established that the main contributor to wealth inequality is inheritance and not earnings.
- Evidence gathered over three decades, from 1994 to 2024, shows that in the Global South child survival, health and education are better where the mother owns assets than where only the father owns them.
- Owning immovable assets also reduces a woman’s risk of domestic violence, and her risk of poverty if the marriage breaks down.
- Studies collated by the Food and Agriculture Organisation show that access to a productive asset such as farmland, with the inputs that go with it, can raise farm output and a country’s agricultural growth rate.
The argument
The first half of the argument is about how women’s position is measured. Both reports use average hourly earnings. Most people do not earn by the hour. A farmer, a shopkeeper or a vegetable vendor keeps no record of hours worked. Agarwal asks for annual earnings at the least, and for wealth to be counted beside them. The reports also treat unpaid work as domestic work, so unpaid work on the family farm goes missing.
The second half is about policy. What is not counted is not reached. She asks that policy for gender equality go past the labour market to equal inheritance rights, property ownership and the redistribution of assets. Policy against wealth inequality between households will not serve, because inequality within the household has to be dealt with as well. This is gender justice argued in the language of property and not of welfare.
“A common excuse for not measuring gender inequality in wealth is lack of data. This elides the issue.”
Bina Agarwal
India already builds the cheapest nuclear plants in the world, so importing reactors would be a step back.
Meera Shankar and Ajay Shankar write on how India should reach 100 GW of nuclear power by 2047. Their case begins with what the sanctions produced. India was shut out of the trade after the test of 1974, so it built its plants itself. They hold that the country should grow with that technology, bring in private firms with care, and keep its record on safety.
The record
- International sanctions were imposed on India after its peaceful nuclear test of 1974. The India-United States civil nuclear deal of 2008 ended the restrictions on the import of uranium and of nuclear power plants, with some exceptions.
- Every part going into an Indian nuclear plant was designed, developed, tested and manufactured in India, in patient partnerships between the Atomic Energy Commission and Indian firms.
- Unit size went up from 200 MW to 500 MW, and 700 MW units have now been developed. Four units are under construction and another ten are being developed.
- India builds nuclear plants at about 1,700 dollars per Kw. South Korean plants cost about 2,200 dollars per Kw, French plants over 5,500 dollars and United States plants 15,000 dollars.
- The 500 MW commercial fast breeder reactor is being commissioned after many difficult challenges.
- India makes Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors, which use natural uranium as fuel. Light Water Reactors use enriched uranium and are the type in wider use in the world. The Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver permanently prohibits the transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technology to India.
- The sector has been opened to new entrants from the public and the private sector through legislation. The price of nuclear power in India is now competitive with thermal power.
- The Atomic Energy Commission has offered its technology for 200 MW plants to new entrants. Small modular reactor designs in the West are still under development, and commercial deployment has yet to begin.
- After Chernobyl in 1986 nuclear power development came to a virtual standstill in many western countries.
The argument
The cost figures carry the argument. The advantage came from making the plants at home and not from buying them. To import costly reactors, or to be the first country to run a small modular reactor designed elsewhere, would give that away and bring back a dependence on others for technology. The authors ask that any foreign design work well for a few years abroad before it is put up in India.
The second demand is on safety. The record so far has been clean, and rapid growth with new firms is where it can break, because accidents at Indian construction sites and industrial plants go on happening. One accident would turn opinion against the whole programme, as it did in the West after 1986. So new entrants should build a few plants first, under outside auditing, and grow after that. Here self-reliance is argued on cost and safety, not on pride.
“The goal of achieving 100 GW of capacity by 2047 could be achieved safely while also strengthening self-reliance within India and enabling the country to become a globally competitive player.”
Meera Shankar and Ajay Shankar
Where this belongs in your syllabus
Open the note and read the full topic.
The questions this feeds
Questions from earlier years that today’s reading speaks to. Where the answer is written, the red link opens it. The full set is in the PYQ Vault.
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