Textiles | Losing the thread

THE FALLOUT: A labour-intensive sector, India’s garment industry is among the hardest hit by Trump’s tariffs. The United States, the largest market, accounts for nearly 30 per cent of the country’s total textile and apparel exports, valued at $10.8 billion (Rs 95,040 crore). Readymade garments and home textiles dominate the export basket, with a 45.7…

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Engineering Goods | Bolt from the blue

THE FALLOUT: When Manoj and Pankaj Chadha calculated the Rs 44 crore hit their company now stares at, it was clear the pain was not theirs alone. India’s $20 billion (Rs 1.8 lakh crore) worth of engineering exports to the US—part of the sector’s overall $118 billion (Rs 10.4 lakh crore)—have taken some of the…

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Burden of Trump tariffs – India Today

For 58-year-old Asad K. Iraqi, CEO of Kanpur-based footwear company AKI India Limited, Donald Trump’s whims are upending a business he spent three decades building. From Kanpur’s crowded lanes, he expanded AKI into a public listed company, with a registered office in Jajmau, and a tannery and footwear manufacturing unit in Akrampur, Unnao, employing 300…

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Leaves turned livelihoods | Dr Kamini Singh

On a warm afternoon in Mubarakpur, near IIM Lucknow, the faint scent of lemongrass mingles with the earthy smell of drying leaves. Inside a two-storey building, women in crisp hairnets and gloves move in a quiet rhythm—weighing powders, sealing soaps, sliding green tea pouches into neat stacks. Along one wall, rows of jars and packets…

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Socio-political | Democracy at a crossroads

The August 2025 poll for the India Today Mood of the Nation (MOTN) offers a telling portrait of Indian democracy in flux, marked by contradictions, anxieties and a measure of guarded optimism. In contrast to the triumphalist narratives that have defined the 11 years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the findings reveal a nation that…

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Foreign Affairs | Steadying the ship

In the realm of foreign policy, India had an eventful half-year that may well reshape its future course. The first inflection point came in May, when the government launched Operation Sindoor in response to the Pahalgam terrorist attack, accompanied by a carefully calibrated diplomatic effort to rally international support. Soon after came a far more…

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Best Chief Ministers | Saffron supremacy

Over the past decade, India’s political landscape has been defined by a powerful convergence of Hindu nationalist rhetoric and display with claims of administrative efficiency, most visibly in the BJP-ruled states. This fusion has allowed the party’s most ideologically assertive chief ministers to dominate public imagination in ways their counterparts on the opposite end of…

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Opposition | The road to revival

Indian politics is moving into a season of reckoning. After a decade of BJP dominance that has reshaped not just electoral politics but the very grammar of political discourse in India, the Opposition finds itself at a crossroads. The defeats in Haryana and Maharashtra last year were particularly bruising, coming as they did after the…

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