Every year, India faces new challenges. With 2025 revealing the shaky foundations of global order and regional instability, our work at the Indian Foreign Policy Project is more crucial than ever. India needs informed citizens ready to engage thoughtfully with complex global challenges. That means investing in media literacy, capacity building, and education for young Indians.
As 2025 comes to an end, we look back at the incredible tangible impact we created in our communities. Here is just a short selection of them across last year.
Our India Way Magazine launched its inaugural spring edition under Co-Editors-in-Chief Muskaan Mir and Manini Agarwal, with nine thought-provoking essays from young people writing on South Asia’s escalating violence post-Pahalgam. The platform had over 64,000 readers this year, and 16K readers in December alone.
An IFPP project was awarded the Millennium Fellowship 2025 by the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) and Millennium Campus Network (MCN) for its dedicated impact on regional peacebuilding. It connected underserved school students in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh through virtual exchanges and expert modules designed to build bridges and connections across borders while tackling propaganda and misinformation.
Medhya Gupta and Neeraj BR led IFPP’s Speaker Series to add Former Singaporean Foreign Minister Dr George Yeo, Amb Shyam Saran, Amb. Rahul Chhabra and Vice Admiral Pradeep Chauhan, among others, to our growing list of influential guests.
In March, we hosted our first on-ground event at Ashoka University, partnering with the Ashoka Society for International Affairs (ASIA) to host awarded journalist Nayanima Basu, where she discussed her experiences reporting in the final days of the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in 2021 and writing her book, ‘Dispatches from Chaos’.
Our members attended multiple invite-only events in Delhi-NCR, including at the British Council, Raisina Dialogue, and Council for Strategic and Defense Research (CSDR).
Since January, our community of students, academics, and diplomats has grown to over 7000 across platforms, and we continue to share invites, opportunities, and networking events that help create awareness, scholarship and capacity-building.
Our flagship virtual program for high school students, the First Citizen Fellowship, was launched in the summer. Designed specifically for emerging leaders from South Asia, this fellowship aims to foster thoughtful, ethical, and informed global citizens rooted in media literacy, ethical reasoning, and global citizenship.
Our virtual debates on India’s core foreign policy issues were engaged by over 1.5K people over the year. You can watch our public recordings on YouTube.
The Research & Publications Division, led by Kiran C. and Abhinav S. Nambeesan, was reshaped into 3 research desks: The China Observatory focusing on India-China issues, the India Record focusing on historical Indian foreign policy, and Bindu, the South Asia desk, focusing on human rights, trade, and peace.
In the spirit of inclusive foreign policy discourse, we expanded core memberships to more than 25 colleges and universities spread across India, the UK, and Brazil.
Again, this is just a short list of all the work we’ve done this year. Powerful independent efforts for active dialogue change lives every day by making space for pragmatic ideas. If you can, please support our work today and help make that change happen.
Thank you for your love. We hope to be close to your hearts this 2026 as we go above and beyond. Happy New Year!