Table of contents for 22 December 2025 in India Today

Most Indian fliers would agree that IndiGo built an empire not on glamour or gimmicks, but on doing the simplest thing: taking off and landing on time. Indians trusted it because it did the job with astonishing efficiency. IndiGo’s 2,300-odd daily flights operated like clockwork. It was moving half a million passengers to over 90 domestic and 45 international destinations without fuss, and for reasonable fares. As rivals collapsed—Kingfisher, Jet, Go First—IndiGo only grew stronger on its operating credo of ruthless efficiency. Its 6E rose to nearmonopoly status, with over 60 per cent share of the Indian skies. Even in the US, the world’s largest aviation market, the biggest domestic airline has only 21 per cent market share. IndiGo’s profit after tax also stood at Rs 7,258 crore in FY25.…

A team of scientists monitoring the elusive snow leopard were going through camera trap pictures from the Sunderdhunga Glacier Valley in Bageshwar district, in the Kumaon Himalayas, when they were left stunned. For one the images was of a Bengal tiger, the first sighting of the big cat in the region, and what’s more at a height of 9,875 feet. The sighting is a huge surprise as the Bengal tiger is typically associated with low-land forests, plains or foothill jungles, and is seldom found in alpine or sub-alpine terrain. Most historic populations inhabit areas below 6,000 feet. This though is not the highest ever altitudinal recording of a tiger. In 2019, the Kedarnath wild-life sanctuary (Chamoli, Uttarakhand) sighted a tigress at 11,155 feet; another striped big cat was seen in…

THE MAHA VIKAS AGHADI (MVA) was looking a bit more like an ‘aghadi’—a united front—with the Thackeray cousins close to formally ending a two-decade-long estrangement. That would have been just the emotional tonic the MVA needed ahead of crucial civic polls. But what’s an Opposition front without a bit of drama and attitude? That comes courtesy the Congress. Apparently, the Grand Old Party has second thoughts on going with the alliance for the Mumbai chapter of the polls, due early next year. So the heated contest for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will see more dust being kicked up than anticipated. As it is, the ruling Mahayuti and the MVA are both uneasy triangles in themselves. The Congress will now be a runaway hypotenuse. The decision stems from a fear…

EVERY YEAR, WHEN THE INDIA TODAY BEST B-SCHOOL SURVEY ARRIVES, it performs a small but essential act of national introspection. It asks: what does ambition look like in India today? Where does the country believe managerial talent should come from? And how far will the management-education establishment go to stay relevant in a world being reprogrammed by technology, geopolitics and shifting aspirations? This year’s survey, conducted by market research agency MDRA, is the story of an industry that once prided itself on stability but now faces volatility. It’s a story of students who once measured success in salary packages but now read value in flexibility, networks and lifelong relevance. Across campuses, something fundamental is shifting. Where the Indian MBA was once a monolith—two years of classroom learning, heavy case-based pedagogy and…

THE INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT CALCUTTA—India’s first IIM set up in 1961—is one of the country’s most distinguished centres of management education, with a global reputation cemented by the elite ‘triple crown’ of accreditations from AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA. Only a limited number of business schools worldwide hold this distinction. On its 140-acre campus in Joka, IIM-C now hosts over a thousand postgraduate and doctoral students. IIM Calcutta continues to perform strongly in the job market. In the 2025-26 summer placements, all 470 participating students were placed, securing a median stipend of Rs 2 lakh per month. The final placements also saw 100 per cent success, with 456 students receiving offers and a median salary of Rs 34 lakh per annum. Placements saw robust participation from marquee employers across consulting,…

WHEN XLRI OPENED ITS DOORS IN 1949 in the steel town of Jamshedpur, it was doing something no institution in India had attempted before: creating the country’s first formal school of management education. Founded by Jesuit priests with a mandate to “respond first to the needs of the people and the nation”, the institute began as a small labour-relations school tied closely to the industrial realities of eastern India. Seventy-six years on, XLRI — Xavier School of Management is a globally networked business school with an expanding footprint. The institute’s core PGDM programmes in Business Management, Human Resource Management and General Management now sit alongside doctoral, executive and online offerings. The curriculum is periodically redesigned to include analytics, digital transformation, sustainability, labour studies and ethics, reflecting both technological change and…

Ranking is based on objective data only. Only those B-schools that submitted their objective data have been ranked. Institutes like IIM Bangalore, IIM Kozhikode, ISB Hyderabad, etc., which did not submit their objective data on time or refused to participate, have not been ranked. Only those colleges that fulfilled these criteria were considered eligible for participation in ranking: (i) Minimum 3 batches completed (ii) Offering full-time postgraduate programme in management. All scores have been rounded off to one decimal place; this may result in rounding-off errors while adding the parameter-wise score. NP = Not Participated Ranking is based on objective data only. Only those B-schools that submitted their objective data have been ranked. Institutes like IIM Bangalore, IIM Kozhikode, ISB Hyderabad, etc., which did not submit their objective data on…

With Tere Ishk Mein, it’s time for another Aanand L. Rai romantic drama which generates much debate and deliberation. Rai is already privy to the fact that words like “toxic” and “deep love” are being thrown for the way his hero (Dhanush) comes across while conversing with his lover, Mukti (Kriti Sanon). But then he’d rather have some chatter than none at all. “You want people to take the story home after watching the film,” he says. “When you have that first cup of tea in the morning, it is still with you.” The idea, he notes, stemmed from how he felt that a certain “hunger” was missing from the younger generation when it comes to matters of the heart. “There’s a kind of practicality seeping into their romance which…

Q. Prior to the semi-final call up you weren’t in the ODI national team for nearly a year. How did you cope with that? It was the saddest moment for me. The first message of support came from my backers JSW Sports who said, “We are with you”. I kept going, accepted things, and felt it was the best time to work on myself. I think the Almighty noticed all my hard work and sent me to the team. Q. It’s not easy for a 21-year-old to come in the do-or-die stages of the tournament and deliver the goods. What was going through your mind? I was very happy to get the call but it was a crucial stage so I was feeling the pressure to perform in the semis.…

Ten years after India revamped its child protection law, a new national study reveals a juvenile justice system still structurally fragile, uneven across states, and urgently in need of greater investment in personnel, capacity and oversight. Prepared by Tata Trusts in collaboration with leading civil society partners, including the Centre for Social Justice, Common Cause, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, DAKSH, TISS-Prayas and How India Lives, the India Justice Report’s ‘Juvenile Justice and Children in Conflict with the Law: A Study of Capacity at the Frontlines’, released recently, offers the most comprehensive, data-driven audit of India’s juvenile justice architecture. Built on parliamentary data and a year-long (November 2022 to October 2023) RTI exercise across 765 districts, it examines how well states are fulfilling their statutory duties under the Juvenile Justice (Care and…

IT was the afternoon of December 4, and the Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru had lost all sense of order. The departure boards blinked, then froze. Airline counters stood deserted, as people wandered around dazed and confused. Hundreds of bags lay scattered across the terminal, unattended and unclaimed. It would have been an unsettling sight in any airport, let alone one of India’s busiest. Forty-two-year-old animation designer Rituparna Sarkar stood amid the chaos, clutching a ticket she had booked weeks earlier. She was flying to Mumbai for an international animation festival she had organised herself, hoping to arrive a day early. Instead, she watched the airport dissolve into mayhem. “It was worse than a railway station,” she says. “Luggage from every possible flight was just lying there. Nobody knew whose it…

Q. Pollution is choking Delhi. How can we break this annual cycle? With policy interventions, the air quality in Delhi-NCR has improved in the past few years. Number of good days (AQI<200) rose to 200 days in 2025 from 110 in 2016. It has helped that the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) in Delhi-NCR has revisited the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) and made actions and infarction penalties more stringent. That said, greening of our degraded land to augment our carbon sinks will be critical. Under the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), cities have been asked to prepare saturation-based action plans for various sectors. Q. What is the single biggest challenge in NCR? Well, we need multi-faceted coordination across Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Punjab and various Union ministries.…

The 2025 India Today Group survey of the country’s business schools was conducted by Delhi-based market research firm Marketing & Development Research Associates (MDRA). The survey provides the most credible and exhaustive rankings of India’s Best B-schools based on the most recent data. This year’s edition includes dedicated lists for Top Executive Programmes, Top Advanced Management Programmes (for professionals with over 10 years of experience), Top Executive Fellow Programmes in Management, top on-campus Fellow Programmes in Management, and the top online MBAs in India. B-schools, offering full-time classroom management programmes (PGDM/MBA), established at least five years ago and with a minimum of three graduated batches till academic year ending 2024, were considered for the full-time MBA/PGDM rankings. An objective questionnaire was finetuned to obtain the latest relevant information (current year data)…

THE INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT LUCKNOW was set up in 1984 as the fourth campus in the country’s IIM network. It followed the early foundations laid at Calcutta, Ahmedabad and Bangalore, and carried forward the vision imagined by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Over four decades later, the institute has grown into one of the most influential management schools in the country. Over time, IIM Lucknow has expanded its academic offerings, adding programmes in Agri Business Management and Sustainable Management, along with courses rooted in Indian knowledge traditions that explore philosophy, leadership and sustainability. It has also built several Centres of Excellence that anchor its research work. These include the Centre for Public Policy, the Centre for Food and Agribusiness Management, the Centre for Business Sustainability and the Centre for…

WITH OVER 1,500 STUDENTS ACROSS DIFFERENT PROGRAMMES, the Management Development Institute, or MDI Gurgaon, focuses on developing leaders with ethics through experience-based learning. The institute has outbound leadership labs, mindfulness workshops and social immersion programmes to help students develop emotional and social intelligence and teamwork skills, along with academic rigour. Founded in 1972, MDI Gurgaon offers master’s programmes in General Management, Human Resources, International Business (dual degree), and Business Analytics. From the next academic session, it will start a master’s in Finance. The curricula are revised continually. Says Dr Arvind Sahay, director, “We include topics like sustainability, AI, digital business, and analytics in emerging areas.” Courses such as Business Analytics, Neuroscience and AI Applications are designed to meet changing demands of businesses. MDI Gurgaon employs universal teaching strategies such as simulation…

This December, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale will unfold across multiple venues in Kochi, Kerala. Titled For the Time Being, it is curated by multidisciplinary artist Nikhil Chopra, along with his Goa-based artist-led organisation HH Art Spaces. “We are placing the body at the centre of our investigation. Everything originates from the body, transforming it into the artwork, and from there to the viewer. There is a transference that moves through these bodies, and we are particularly interested in this transformation and transfer,” elaborates Chopra. Many artists are creating live and performance work that will unfold over the 110 days of the Biennale: Mandeep Rekhi will be performing with his dance company Sandbox; Anja Ibsch from Germany will spend the entire duration of the exhibition in her space, actively making her work…

Yashasvi Juyal has already made his first feature film. Co-produced by film critic Anupama Chopra and many others, The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb is yet to see the light of day. Before that happens, Juyal’s calling card in the film industry, the eloquent and elegant 37-minute The Last Rhododendron is having its online premiere on MUBI on December 26. Uttarakhand-born Juyal shot the film in his home state. It won the Gender Sensitivity Award at the 2021 Dharamshala International Film Festival. The film follows a young woman who leaves her single mother behind in a ‘ghost village’, which the best and the brightest are migrating out of, leaving behind resentful, gossiping villagers. Unusually quiet, poetic and hauntingly shot, The Last Rhododendron features Geeta Rana as Mamta, and Laxmi Devi Rana…

IN A DECISION FRAUGHT WITH POLITICAL RISK, the Mohan Yadav government wants to abandon the decentralised foodgrain procurement Madhya Pradesh has followed since 200708. The Centre has yet to move on his request that the Food Corporation of India (FCI) buy foodgrain directly from farmers. The Congress has already tossed the issue into the pressure cooker. So, what exactly is cooking? Why is Yadav giving up on a system with proven efficacy as a vote-getter? Sources say the reason is financial. MP accounts for 26 per cent of wheat supply to the central pool and 6 per cent rice. In decentralised procurement, the state buys, transports and warehouses the foodgrains till the FCI lifts the stocks. So, over and above its state-level subsidies, MP has to initially bear all the…

THE INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MAN-AGEMENT, AHMEDABAD, owes its continued excellence to academic rigour, constant innovation, deep industry engagement, and a unique research and case-study driven pedagogy. In 1961, IIM-A was established to groom future entrepreneurs and management leaders. Sixty-four years later, the institution remains fully focussed on keeping the industry and management leaders future ready. IIM-A director Prof. Bharat Bhasker attributes the institute’s record of excellence to three things—an unparalleled faculty development policy that puts a premium on intellectual capital, cutting-edge research and innovation, and industry interactions. “Our faculty development policy is one of our biggest strengths. We invest significant resources to ensure they remain active researchers and stay abreast of emerging ideas,” he says. A key component of this is the school’s longstanding case-teaching methodology, which requires faculty to…

TODAY, THE MANAGEMENT LANDSCAPE IS SHIFTING MORE RAPIDLY THAN AT ANY OTHER point in recent memory as AI, demographic changes and geopolitics reshape our industries at breakneck speed. With this, I see an unprecedented opportunity for Indian management education to leapfrog old models and shape a new paradigm for inculcating innovation in future leaders. Historically, business schools functioned as repositories of knowledge—organising, codifying and transmitting management wisdom. But in an era wherein AI delivers highquality analysis in seconds, the true value of such education is in how students learn to integrate human creativity with machine intelligence. As more analytical tasks are automated, our judgment becomes the differentiator, shifting the premium to asking the right questions, understanding context, exercising values-driven leadership, building trust and managing cultural dynamics. AI is a force…

IN BAINGWADI, A SMALL VILLAGE tucked deep inside Uttarakhand’s Pauri district, the silence begins long before the houses appear. “There are only empty houses and hanging locks to welcome you here,” says Pratap Singh, 85, a retired sub-inspector of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, who lives alone. Of his two brothers, one has settled in Pauri town, the other in Dehradun. His three daughters and one son all live outside the state. “There is no one left,” he says quietly. “People come back only when there is a wedding or a ritual that must be held here.” Village pradhan Manvendra Rawat says of the village’s 392 registered voters, 125 live else-where. “Even the MGNREGA public works are incomplete. There is no one left to do it,” says Rawat. The local school still…

A superhero film about an emotionally aloof female vampire is an ingenious idea on paper, but it’s also a box-office gamble. Few could have predicted that the idea would result in the highest-grossing Malayalam film of all time and resonate way beyond Kerala. Leading lady Kalyani Priyadarshan is still basking in the glory of Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra which recently released on JioHotstar. “We all [thought] that this is very experimental. It could go either way,” she admits. Daughter of popular filmmaker Priyadarshan, Kalyani studied architecture and began her cinematic journey behind the camera, interning with production designer Sabu Cyril. Surprisingly, Priyadarshan didn’t want either of his two kids to follow in his footsteps. “I’ve seen my father go through ups and downs. Parents don’t want the kids to experience what…