India has already made a constitutional commitment to reserve one-third of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies. The national task now is to translate that commitment into an orderly, transparent, and time-bound implementation process so that the objective is achieved well before the 2029 general election. Byline By Kallol Saha   India has reached an important democratic milestone in accepting the principle of greater representation for women in legislatures.

India does not need another symbolic endorsement of women’s political representation. It needs implementation. The constitutional principle is already settled: the Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023 provides one-third reservation for women in the Lok Sabha, State Assemblies, and the Delhi Assembly, including within SC and ST reserved seats. But the same law also postpones implementation until after delimitation based on the first census figures published after the Act’s

The Lok Sabha on Friday, April 17, 2026, turned into the centre of one of the most consequential constitutional debates in recent years, as Members discussed a package of three linked measures: the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, the Delimitation Bill, 2026, and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026. The government argued that the package was meant to operationalise one-third reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies before the 2029 ge

By Shree Shree Shachandra Das There once lived a weaver and his wife. They were very poor. The weaver begged for alms every day, and that was how the two of them survived. But his wife was hard to please! On days when his begging bowl was empty, the weaver dreaded returning home. By ill luck, one day the weaver could not get a single alms. After wandering all day, he was returning home in the evening with empty hands when he sat down near a dense forest and began to cry. Sudd

In a certain city of Baghdad, there lived a barber named Alishakul. He was especially renowned in that city for his skill in shaving and hair-cutting. People came to him from faraway lands for his services. Gradually, his business flourished. But when his position became secure, his greed for money grew so strong that he began devising new schemes to cheat people and make easy profits. If a simple, unsuspecting person came to him, he would entrap him in clever talk and take e

At the home of a wealthy man in New Zealand, preparations were underway for his son’s wedding. He was a refined, generous-hearted gentleman, courteous to everyone, regardless of status. For his only son’s wedding, he decided to invite acquaintances of all ranks, both high and low, and to celebrate the occasion with great pomp. Invitations were sent far and wide to friends and associates. Several days before the wedding, the arrangements for feeding the guests began. There was

Original Story By Shri Jaladhar Sen There was a little girl named Hiron. She was as beautiful as Lakshmi, and just as virtuous. But alas! The poor girl’s life was full of sorrow. When Hiron was two years old, her mother died. Her father remarried. After some time, Hiron had a younger sister, whom her father named Kiran. But Kiran did not resemble Hiron in appearance. Her complexion was dark, her nose was broad, her forehead high, her eyes small like tiny beads, and she had ve

On a winter evening when the clouds over Europe sagged like tired banners after a parade, the Owl arrived and chose a crooked chimney outside a bomb-scraped town to be his perch. From there he could see a field that used to be wheat and was now a geometry exercise in craters, and beyond that the ribbon of a road where headlights flowed towards the border and never seemed to come back. The Owl blinked, the way owls do when they have seen this scene before in other centuries wi

My name is Khoka. I am not a hero. I am not a vlogger. I am not even a particularly brave person, as my mother reminds me whenever a cockroach enters the kitchen and I climb onto the dining table like a monkey who has forgotten his caste. But I was there. On the Madhumati Dreamliner. And what I saw has permanently rearranged the furniture of my imagination. First, you must understand the boat. The Madhumati Dreamliner was a name that required a visa to enter the country of tr

Part One: The Two Religions of the Everyday Apocalypse Kolkata commuters, as any student of human desperation will attest, subscribe to exactly two religions. The first is chai—that sacred, milky, cardamom-scented elixir without which the concept of morning remains an act of cosmic cruelty. The second is reaching on time, a faith far more demanding than the first, requiring daily pilgrimages through roads that resemble the surface of a forgotten planet, across bridges held to

In the eastern corner of the village square stood a neem tree older than anyone alive. Beneath it lay three wooden benches, uneven in height, polished by decades of arguments, reconciliations, and tea spills. That was where governance unfolded. It began with something practical. The canal gates had to be opened two hours earlier for the winter crop. A meeting was called. The meeting lasted three hours. By the end, nothing had been decided, but four subcommittees had been form

Two-thirty in the afternoon.At Birpur Police Station, the sub-inspector—known to all and sundry as “Slow Inspector” —has just finished two helpings of rice and lentils, wiped his hands, and settled into his chair. A check has risen. He calls it “the Check of Dissatisfaction.” For to eat lunch in the middle of work means this: without judging food or non-food, edible or otherwise, somehow shovelling everything down the stomach in one go. “Shovelling” —the “shovel”  here meani

One afternoon, a new storm—this time without any Excel sheet—arrived quietly in everyone’s inbox. The HR department sent a mail with the subject line that every employee fears more than appraisal: “Strict Attendance Policy – Effective Immediately.”  It was written in polite corporate English, but its soul was pure dictatorship. All employees must log in by 9:00 AM sharp. Not 9:01. Not “just reached.” Not “system starting.” Latecomers would face penalties. Repeated offenders w

A Dr. Samudra Garjan sci-fi mystery   At precisely 5:12 in the morning, when the neighborhood dogs of Bagha Jatin were debating territorial sovereignty and the milk packets of Kolkata were making their daily migration, a shrill alarm began screaming beneath the three-storied building called Garjan Bhavan . Not upstairs. Upstairs the world looked innocent: one locked study, two dusty verandahs, one suspiciously ordinary storeroom, and a sign reading “Tuition Closed Until Furth

Inspired by recent geological research on the Afar Triple Junction and East African rifting — including evidence of deep-crustal magma inflow and mantle upwelling linked to continental breakup — and by the modern geopolitics of critical minerals in Africa, the story below is fictional but grounded in those real scientific themes. Dr. Samudra Garjan created such an uproar at the lunch table that even Rambhuja, who had once continued serving pulao through a short circuit, stopp

In the time of the First Ones, before the lands were divided into castes and creeds, there was only the Jungle. And the Jungle was not a place, but a being. Its heart was the Sal tree, the Sarhul. And the soul that moved through its roots, its branches, and every living creature was Dharti Aaba, the Earth Father. Dharti Aaba was not a king who sat on a throne. He was the law. His law was simple: Hokar, Jar, Jine—To be, to live, to thrive. It was a law of reciprocity. The Horo

Characters: BAPIN BIHARI BASU (B.B. Basu):  A man of principle, or so he claims. A self-appointed neighborhood watchdog with the tenacity of a terrier and the moral compass of a... well, a very certain compass. BIPLAB CHATTERJEE (Bip Da):  A man with a newly built house, a guilty conscience, and a terrible habit of over-sharing his anxieties. CHOTON SARKAR:  A young, overly earnest process server from the district court. He sweats easily and trusts everyone. The Ghost of Sara

In the bustling glass-and-steel corridors of Krishnanagar Global Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a mid-sized consulting firm that prided itself on blending tradition with modern efficiency, the employees often joked that the company was less of an office and more of a royal court in disguise. At the center of this curious kingdom sat Mr. Krishna Chandra Sen, the Managing Director—sharp, dignified, and occasionally unpredictable  And among his team, one employee stood out not for his des

The scientific seed here is a real recent advance: in February 2025 Oxford researchers reported teleporting logical quantum gates between separate processors over a network link, and in November 2025 Stuttgart researchers reported a key quantum-repeater teleportation milestone toward a quantum internet.   On the evening in question we were sitting, as civilized men have sat since the fall of empires, around a chipped centre table under a lazily rotating fan in Bagha Jatin, wh

The whisper of this tale begins not with the scholar’s chisel, nor the archaeologist’s brush, but with the breath of the monsoon, the very same wind that fattened the sails of the Yavana ships and carried them across the waist of the world. It is a tale of salt and stone, of a man named for a king and a sea-shell, whose desire to leave a mark upon the earth was so potent that it outlasted empires. Know, then, of Cikai Korran. He was not a prince, though his spirit was as rega