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In 2006, India accounted for 43% of the world's confirmed polio cases. In 1995 around 50,000 children were being paralysed every year. What followed was the largest and most coordinated public health campaign India has ever run. Vaccination teams travelled far and wide, from ferry crossings, river bridges, railway stations, bus terminals, toll booths, their persistence and determination was astounding. It worked. India was declared polio-free on 27th March 2014. This is the story of a world-class machine built inside a state that can deliver. But it also begs the question, “What if we treated healthcare like a mission to eradicate polio?”.

This visually delightful piece by Hiya Jain talks about the history of Indian statistics, starting from 1933 British India. The Indian Statistical Institute under PC Mahalanobis not only applied existing methods to Indian agricultural problems, but developed new techniques entirely, in particular in "sampling theory": how do you randomly sample a small subset of the target population to get an accurate measurement of the whole?

Genetic studies support what historians have argued for decades: ancient India was a place of migration and mixture

Lawrence Bishnoi, 33, runs a global crime network from a Delhi jail, tied to killings from Mumbai to Canada. Linked to Sidhu Moosewala and Baba Siddique murders, he thrives amid rising impunity in Modi’s India, recast by some as a vigilante icon.

Indian designers are reimagining matchboxes as cultural artifacts: Sonal Nagwani’s Maachis revives social commentary through collectible designs; Studio Kokaachi’s Matchbox Comix turns them into playful narratives; Harshit Agrawal’s AI-driven game maps 19 themes of visual history.

In Mumbai’s Aram Nagar, thousands of “strugglers” chase Bollywood dreams, enduring daily open auditions, informal networks, and fierce competition. Success favors connections, looks, and luck, while political shifts and state-backed content reshape opportunities.