I am writing to you from New Delhi, India. I am here to visit a Claremont Graduate University schoolmate before her post at the U.S. Embassy is over.
I am trying hard to see the city for the city, not through an American lens, judging living standards and way of life. This has been easiest to do in the automobile, where lines for lanes are just a suggestion, the horn is a language (said my driver today as he lamented about drivers getting their licenses online), and sitting in the front seat is not for the weak at heart. I now happily sit in the back.
What makes the news
I saw an article yesterday (10/13/2026), “Retail prices on 41 of 42 essential commodities up in a year; onion rates shoot up almost 113%.” It reminded me of a WISER Wednesday by Himaja Nimmagadda titled “How much for a bunch of onions?” in which she talked about how the price of onions was her personal inflation metric.
In India, onions are the culinary base across nearly every regional cuisine. So, a doubling of onion prices (or any increase) affects the meals served and the household budget. I was surprised to learn that increases in onion prices have been attributed to political unrest. Then I realized onions are the equivalents of eggs, milk, and a gallon of gasoline in America, the bellwethers of economic anxiety.
In today’s (October 14, 2026) The Times of India, the op-ed “To Make India’s Demography A Dividend…” notes that since 2005, India has had more working-age adults than dependents, and this ratio is expected to last until 2055 and peak in 2036, if projections are correct. An increase in working-age adults means more working-age women and a greater need for jobs. But unlike China, and despite government policies and incentives, India’s manufacturing sector has underperformed. The author states that the low labor force participation of women, which is between 35% and 41%, and approximately 25% for urban female participation, is an ‘underutilised resource’. His view reflects the classic orthodox macroeconomic view focused on tax revenues, export productivity, and formal payrolls. He is ignoring that women are providing eldercare, cooking, fetching fuel, and childcare—unpaid labor that generates no recorded market transaction, so mainstream economists label them “unproductive.”
For decades, feminist economists have argued that national accounts must count unpaid care and domestic labor as real economic output, because this work subsidizes the entire formal economy. It gets better, the author writes, “Substantially increasing women’s labour force participation requires expanded skills training programmes and improved child support infra.” Perhaps now that a mainstream macroeconomist has written it in the business pages, child support infrastructure policies may follow.
What I have found most fascinating about the newspaper are the photos of unidentified deceased men and missing women. In Indian dailies, the “unidentified bodies” and “missing persons” notices are statutory police advertisements required under police standing orders and inquest procedures under the Code of Criminal Procedure. In Western papers, local obituaries and classifieds served a parallel civic function before local municipal print journalism collapsed. It made me think about how valuable local papers, if many still existed, could be in locating missing children and women.
Stay sharp, and ask what happens to a community when local papers go missing.
Rhonda V. Sharpe is the president and founder of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race. Her research focuses on gender and racial inequality, STEM diversity, and the demographics of higher education.