Energy, not loan waivers or polls, will be India's key challenge in 2019

The country must get its act on global alliances right in order to feed its fuel-hungry economy; On the agricultural front, reforms could be the biggest change, if handled well

Trend spotting on a global scale for 2019 shows up hardly any one that will really make a persuasive case. Commentaries for the year have, instead, thrown up a wide menu, which means the case for the year is wide open. There were strong contenders though, like President Donald Trump’s engineered shutdown of the US government into the New Year or that of Nikkei’s fall in Japan on its final trading day of the year, leading to its first annual loss in seven years. The 12.1 per cent decline of the index in 2018 broke its longest winning streak since