Moin Qazi, Academician & NITI Aayog Member

India’s coronavirus crisis is worse since the pandemic began, and it will probably worsen before it gets better. Hospitals and clinics around the country are facing a shortage of essential supplies, including beds, oxygen, drugs, vaccines, and COVID-19 tests. Hope shone in this dark tragedy through the work of NGOs—a catchall term for the roughly...

Among the many challenges that have gained urgency in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, housing requires a highly creative response. The huge exodus from cities to villages was necessitated on account of lack of proper housing in cities. Expanding access to affordable housing is essential not just for equitable development but also social...

The current pandemic is an unprecedented calamity — none of us has faced a similar situation in this lifetime. We don't have earlier experiences on which to draw upon for handling it. The economic and social pain of the pandemic is immense. The worst affected are the populations who subsist on daily wage or...

India’s economy is soaring and is now the world’s envy, but its healthcare system remains an Achilles’ heel. For millions of people, the high cost of treating illnesses continues to undermine economic progress. This is largely on account of India’s dilapidated healthcare system: a major symptom of the dire lack of funding. India ranks...

One of the most promising ways to close the stubbornly persisting gender divide is technology. While inclusion is growing for everyone, women tend to lag men globally when it comes to having access to financial products in emerging markets. In many contexts, women have less access and are less adept in the use of...

Today, knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially… Today, knowledge is free. It’s like air, it’s like water…There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you… What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know. Tony Wagner, author of Creating Innovators The change that has occurred...

Among the many challenges India faces, the most underappreciated is the ongoing mental health crisis. Mental illness is actually India’s ticking bomb. An estimated 56 million Indians suffer from depression and 38 million from anxiety disorders. For those who suffer from mental illness, life can seem like a terrible prison from which there is no hope of escape;...

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life fairer for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie ― Gloria Steinem Gender inequality is not only a pressing moral and social issue but...

"Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million." Jean-Jacques Rousseau Inequality and exclusion are two of the most pressing challenges facing the world today. In recent years, policy planners have realized that development will be uneven and not wholesome if we do not address...

"Women are not dying because of diseases we cannot treat… They are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving." – Mahmoud Fathalla, Chair of the WHO Advisory Committee on Health Research Inclusive growth is now perhaps the strongest buzzword in development discourse. We have all been talking about growth...

Andrew Carnegie, steel tycoon and one of the greatest philanthropists whose business ethos was to "do well in order to do good" was one of the early advocates and steward of CSR. Mahatma Gandhi’s theory of trusteeship intended to avoid the evils and combine the benefits of capitalism and communism, to socialise property without...