Hazare, Wangchuk, and the Architecture of Protest: Why Some Hunger Strikes Capture a Nation and Others Do Not
By Ennapadam S. Krishnamoorthy
New Delhi, July 20
History remembers many hunger strikes. But it does not remember them equally.
Once Sonam Wangchuk was moved to hospital by police, following growing concern over his deteriorating health, the immediate debate centred on familiar political questions. Were his demands justified? Did the government respond appropriately? A more enduring question lies beneath these: why did one hunger strike capture the imagination of a nation, while another—equally sincere, equally courageous—remained confined largely to those who already sympathised with its cause? [citation:original text]
The answer has less to do with the justice of either cause than with the architecture of how each was perceived to begin. To be clear: whether one agrees with Hazare or Wangchuk is beside the point here.
The comparison with Anna Hazare’s fast in 2011 is almost inevitable. Both men willingly embraced personal suffering to awaken the conscience of society, challenged the establishment, and possessed considerable personal credibility. Hazare’s anti-corruption movement in 2011, which began with a 96-hour hunger strike in April and a 12-day fast at Ramlila Maidan in August, forced the Manmohan Singh government to agree to form a joint committee to draft the Jan Lokpal Bill . Wangchuk, by contrast, has now fasted for over 20 days in support of the Cockroach Janta Party’s demand for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over examination irregularities . Yet the public response could scarcely have been more different [citation:original text].
The explanation may lie not only in politics, but also in psychology—perhaps, even the neuroscience of moral authority [citation:original text].
The Neuroscience of First Impressions: How the Brain Builds Working Models
Modern neuroscience increasingly understands the brain not as a passive receiver of information, but as a prediction engine. It does not build up a picture of the world fact by fact. Instead, it forms an early working model, then reads everything afterwards through that model—accepting what fits, and only reluctantly adjusting for what does not [citation:original text]. This is why first impressions carry such disproportionate weight. It is not simply that we remember them better, as the older idea of the ‘primacy effect’ suggested—they set the frame future information must fit into [citation:original text].
The same appears true at the level of groups. Crowds, too, seem to form a quick working idea of who a public figure is, and what a movement means, then interpret everything that follows to fit it. What matters most is not just who the person is, but the relationship the public first perceives: who appeared to start something, and who appeared to join it [citation:original text]. Once that relationship is set, it becomes the lens through which the movement is read. Collective minds appear to behave in much the same way [citation:original text].
One of the most overlooked aspects of public mobilisation is the direction of moral authority. When movements gather around a moral figure, conscience appears to lead politics; when a moral figure joins an existing movement, politics risks appearing to lead conscience [citation:original text]. This is rarely a conscious judgement—the collective mind registers, almost automatically, who moved first and who followed, and builds its working model accordingly [citation:original text].
Anna Hazare: The Messenger Who Summoned a Movement
Anna Hazare began as a solitary moral figure. He was a man of great moral courage, and his moral authority was a force to be reckoned with [citation:original text]. In April 2011, he began a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar with a relatively straightforward demand: a strong anti-corruption law through the creation of an independent Lokpal . When the government agreed to form a joint committee, it ended in 96 hours. His second, longer fast began on August 16 at Ramlila Maidan and ended 12 days later after Parliament passed a resolution in favour of his core demands .
What transformed Hazare’s fast into a national movement was not just the man, but the sequence. Public perception was unmistakable: conscience came first; organisation followed [citation:original text]. Only afterwards did the India Against Corruption movement gather around him [citation:original text]. That first impression stuck. Everything the movement did afterwards was read through it [citation:original text].
The mechanics of the movement also played a crucial role. Television news channels devoted extensive live coverage to Hazare’s fast, helping transform it into a national spectacle . Office-goers arrived after work, students skipped classes, celebrities visited, and solidarity protests erupted across the country . Self-righteous figures such as former police official Kiran Bedi and yoga guru Baba Ramdev joined the movement . The then key Opposition, the BJP, saw an opportunity to expose the Manmohan Singh government . Even the RSS, with its organised network, was believed to be gathering support for the movement .
Political strategist-cum-politician Prashant Kishor’s framework of the four Ms—Messenger, Message, Mechanics and Missionaries—helps explain why some campaigns acquire extraordinary momentum while others do not . On these four Ms, Hazare’s campaign aligned unusually well: an unclaimed messenger, a singular message, mechanics spanning television and civil society, and missionaries reaching well beyond activist circles [citation:original text].
Sonam Wangchuk: A Moral Figure Joining an Existing Movement
Sonam Wangchuk’s journey appeared different. Public perception ran differently from the outset: an already respected moral figure, with statehood for Ladakh already on his agenda, had joined an existing movement, the Cockroach Janta Party, protesting examination irregularities [citation:original text]. The CJP, founded by 30-year-old Abhijeet Dipke, began in May as an online satirical movement to protest against paper leaks and other irregularities in India’s top exams and gained a massive following on social media, with 22 million followers within a few days . The protesters, who call themselves “cockroaches,” have been protesting for a month now .
Instead of the movement borrowing Wangchuk’s moral authority, many observers perceived Wangchuk as entering a movement that already possessed its own political identity [citation:original text]. Perception is not always reality. But in public life, perception often determines mobilisation—and perception, this reasoning suggests, is built early and defended late [citation:original text].
The differences in political support are stark. Wangchuk has a complete lack of support from the Opposition . During Hazare’s movement, the Opposition saw an opportunity to challenge the ruling government. In contrast, the current Opposition appears divided and lacks a cohesive strategy . In Wangchuk’s success, no party sees any incentive . In contrast, Anna’s victory had a direct beneficiary: the BJP . While a few political leaders, including former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, have visited Wangchuk or appealed to the government to engage with him, the support has not translated into sustained political mobilisation .
The media landscape has also changed dramatically. On an ordinary day, in the absence of prominent political leaders, influencers or celebrities, much of the coverage at the protest site comes from independent content creators and vloggers documenting the movement . The CJP has repeatedly alleged that the mainstream media has largely ignored the agitation . Fifteen years after Hazare’s movement, public attention is fragmented across television, digital platforms and social media, making it considerably harder for any single protest to dominate the national conversation for weeks . The strongest wave of support appears to exist online rather than on the streets .
Sequence: The Fifth, Unspoken Factor
Wangchuk’s campaign, valuable as its cause is, carried a messenger with an established identity, a more layered message, and mechanics that were predominantly digital, reaching a narrower base [citation:original text]. But the four Ms may be missing a fifth, quieter factor: sequence—whether the messenger appeared to summon the movement, or the movement the messenger [citation:original text].
Sequence explains what the four Ms alone cannot. A campaign can get the messenger, message, mechanics and missionaries right and still struggle to catch fire, because none of those four factors capture how it appeared to begin [citation:original text]. If the public’s first impression is that a cause came looking for a moral figure, rather than the other way around, that impression becomes the frame everything else is read through, however strong the four Ms turn out to be [citation:original text].
The CJP’s demand—the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over examination irregularities—is rooted in a concrete reality, unlike Hazare’s abstract anti-corruption demand . Young people have been angered by the question paper leaks, which led to the cancellation of a medical college examination taken by 2.3 million candidates . But even this specificity, this legitimacy of cause, has not translated into the same level of national mobilisation.
The Government’s Response: Stonewalling and the Limits of Dissent
So far, the government has sidestepped its duty to act as a state that listens to dissent, as a robust democracy demands. While it may have won a cynical tactical game by allowing the protest to exhaust itself, it has displayed little statesmanship [citation:original text]. By effectively pushing the massive examination system crisis down the road to next year, the government has chosen cold, unyielding stonewalling [citation:original text].
On July 17, Wangchuk was forcibly removed from the protest site by police and paramilitary personnel, covered with bedsheets, and taken to Safdarjung Hospital . His wife, Gitanjali Angmo, alleged that the hospitalisation was a “charade” designed to prevent him from leading a march to Parliament . The Delhi High Court had earlier directed the government to monitor his health regularly and intervene if needed . But the government has not engaged with the protesters’ demands . CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke announced that he would begin an indefinite fast in Wangchuk’s place and called for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s resignation .
A Broader Lesson
There is a broader lesson here. Public movements often concentrate on the strength of their arguments. Neuroscience suggests they should pay equal attention to the architecture of their narratives [citation:original text]. The brain remembers not only what happened, but how meaning appeared to flow. Once the first frame is established, it becomes remarkably difficult to replace [citation:original text].
The different trajectories of Hazare’s movement in 2011 and Wangchuk’s movement in 2026 illuminate a larger truth. Collective minds do not merely evaluate ideas. They evaluate relationships. They ask who stood first, who followed, and where legitimacy appeared to originate [citation:original text]. Sometimes that almost invisible direction of moral authority determines whether a protest becomes a movement—or remains an honourable act of conscience [citation:original text].
Q&A Section
1. What is the primary difference between the hunger strikes of Anna Hazare (2011) and Sonam Wangchuk (2026) in terms of public mobilisation?
The key difference lies in the “sequence” or the direction of moral authority. Anna Hazare began as a solitary moral figure, and a movement gathered around him, so the public perceived that “conscience came first; organisation followed.” Sonam Wangchuk joined an existing movement, the Cockroach Janta Party, so many observers perceived him as entering a movement with its own political identity, rather than the movement borrowing his moral authority [citation:original text].
2. What does Prashant Kishor’s “four Ms” framework consist of, and what does it miss?
The four Ms framework consists of Messenger, Message, Mechanics (the political campaign), and Missionaries (the cadres who spread the message) . According to the article, this framework misses a fifth, quieter factor: “sequence”—whether the messenger appeared to summon the movement, or the movement the messenger [citation:original text].
3. Why does the article argue that neuroscience explains the different trajectories of the two movements?
Neuroscience suggests the brain acts as a “prediction engine” that builds an early working model and interprets everything afterwards through that model. First impressions carry disproportionate weight because they “set the frame future information must fit into.” At the group level, crowds form a quick working idea of a public figure and a movement, then interpret everything that follows to fit it. Once that first impression is established, it is difficult to replace [citation:original text].
4. What political and media factors contributed to the different responses to the two hunger strikes?
During Anna Hazare’s movement, the Opposition (BJP) saw a political opportunity and supported the protest, and television news provided extensive live coverage, turning it into a national spectacle . In Wangchuk’s case, the Opposition is divided, no party sees an incentive in his success, and mainstream media has largely ignored the protest, with support existing primarily online .
5. What was Sonam Wangchuk’s specific demand, and what happened to him on July 17, 2026?
Sonam Wangchuk was demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged irregularities in examinations such as NEET, including paper leaks that affected millions of students . On July 17, he was forcibly removed from the Jantar Mantar protest site by police and paramilitary personnel and admitted to Safdarjung Hospital, as his health deteriorated after more than 20 days of fasting .
Skyroot’s Moment Is Real. So Is The Distance Still Left To Cover
By Chethan Kumar
New Delhi, July 20
Forty-six years ago, on July 18, 1980, an Indian rocket reached orbit for the first time. SLV-3 got there on its second try, after an ignominious first attempt earlier ended in the Bay of Bengal. On Saturday, on the same date, Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 did what SLV-3 needed two attempts to do – reach orbit and deposit its payloads precisely where they were meant to go – on its very first flight [citation:original text].
It’s not clear if it were a planned coincidence of dates, but it’s hard not to read something into it. Skyroot is now the first Indian private company to have flown an orbital launch vehicle successfully, and it did so in a year that had, until Saturday, given India’s space sector very little to point to [citation:original text].
ISRO hasn’t returned to the launchpad since the PSLV mission failed on January 12 – which means the one successful orbital launch from Indian soil in 2026 so far came from the private sector [citation:original text]. That fact alone is worth sitting with for a moment, because it says something about how much distance an eight-year-old startup has covered [citation:original text].
The Launch: A Clean Maiden Flight in a Difficult Year
At 12:05 PM on July 18, Vikram-1, a slender all-carbon-composite rocket, lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh [citation:original text]. Minutes later, it secured its place in India’s space history, becoming the first orbital rocket to be designed, built, and flown by a private Indian company [citation:original text]. It succeeded on its first attempt, carrying multiple payloads into a 450-km low Earth orbit [citation:original text].
The mission, dubbed “Aagaman” (Sanskrit for “arrival”), was a validation of the rocket’s propulsion, avionics, telemetry, guidance, navigation, and control systems in flight . Skyroot Aerospace, founded in 2018, is among a new generation of Indian space startups that have attracted backing from global investors following the sector’s liberalisation . It became the first space-sector company in the country to hit a $1 billion valuation earlier in the year . The Vikram-1 launch was a test flight; the company plans to conduct a few more before moving into routine commercial flights .
The success is even more significant given the context of India’s space sector in 2026. ISRO’s PSLV-C62 mission in January failed due to a technical anomaly, losing 16 satellites, including the DRDO’s strategic EOS-N1 hypespectral imaging satellite . It was the second consecutive PSLV failure, following the May 2025 PSLV-C61 mission, which had also been attributed to a malfunction in the rocket’s third stage . These failures raised serious questions about quality control and reliability, with a WION report noting that failure analysis committee reports from both missions had not been made public . This was widely seen as a departure from the “ISRO culture” of transparency .
The Pipeline: Agnikul’s Reusability Push
The pipeline behind Vikram-1 makes the moment feel less like a one-off [citation:original text]. Agnikul Cosmos is preparing to fly its own two-stage, semi-cryogenic rocket and is chasing something more ambitious than what Skyroot has just done: recovering its first-stage booster [citation:original text]. Pull that off on a debut flight – dates are still being firmed up – and it would mark a bigger technical achievement than Saturday’s launch [citation:original text]. Why? Because reusability is the one lever that has done more than anything else to bring down the cost of getting to orbit, as SpaceX has spent a decade proving [citation:original text].
Agnikul’s Mission 02 will attempt India’s first recovery of an orbital-class rocket booster while also demonstrating an upper stage that remains operational in orbit instead of being discarded after deploying a satellite . The company holds patents in India, the US and Europe covering this convertible upper-stage architecture . The former ISRO chairman, Dr. S. Somanath, has joined Agnikul’s board as an observer ahead of the attempt , describing the programme as “a genuine technical frontier, for India and, in several respects, for the world” .
The Hard Realities: Repeatability and the Business of Launch
None of that should be undercut. But none of it should be oversold either [citation:original text]. Vikram-1 was a single flight. Before it can carry paying customers’ satellites with confidence, Skyroot has to prove the vehicle is repeatable [citation:original text]. And even repeatability won’t be the finish line: nowhere in the world has a company managed to make the business of launching rockets alone commercially sustainable [citation:original text]. Every serious player, SpaceX included, has had to lean on satellites, in-space services, or government anchor contracts to make the arithmetic work [citation:original text]. Skyroot and Agnikul will run into that same wall eventually, but flies on the wall tell us that both have begun work on building satellites, or at least have plans for it [citation:original text].
Scaling in a market where domestic demand is still thin is a problem no single successful launch solves [citation:original text]. The satellite side of the ecosystem is a useful reminder of how uneven journey in this sector can be [citation:original text]. Pixxel has a constellation in orbit, but there’s been little public sense of what its imagery is actually being used for, if being used [citation:original text]. GalaxyEe lost a satellite earlier this month [citation:original text]. Two efforts meant to give private players a real stake – the Satellite Based Surveillance (SBS) project and the Earth Observation public-private partnership – have both gone quiet after their initial fanfare [citation:original text]. A launch industry that finds its footing while the demand side stays underdeveloped is only half a sector standing up [citation:original text].
The ISRO Question: The Scaffolding on Which Private Players Are Building
Which brings up the point that matters most: none of this can be allowed to become an excuse for the government to ease off on ISRO [citation:original text]. It would be easy, in a week like this, to read private success as a licence for the state to step back. That reading would be a costly mistake [citation:original text]. Space remains a capital-intensive, high-risk, patience-testing business, and India’s startups, whatever they achieve, are still borrowing heavily from ISRO’s tech base, its launch infrastructure, and its accumulated credibility to get where they’re going [citation:original text]. Meanwhile, the country’s strategic requirements – functioning navigation, adequate defence and surveillance satellites – don’t wait politely for the private sector to mature [citation:original text]. They need an ISRO that is fully resourced now, not an ISRO quietly hollowed out because a startup finally had a good day [citation:original text].
And that ISRO is already under strain. An analysis of Department of Space employment data shows that nearly three out of every ten sanctioned posts remained vacant at the end of 2025-26, marking the widest staffing gap in at least 25 years [citation:original text]. The Department of Space had a sanctioned strength of 20,269 posts, but only 14,637 were filled, leaving 5,632 vacancies and an overall staffing level of 72.2% . The current workforce is also smaller than it was over two decades ago . In 2001-02, the DoS had 14,847 employees against a sanctioned strength of 16,423 posts, resulting in a vacancy rate of less than 10% . The Department of Space cited COVID-19 disruptions, sectoral reforms, and the adoption of more stringent recruitment procedures as reasons for the accumulation of vacancies .
This isn’t a question of ISRO versus the private sector. This cannot be an “either-or” [citation:original text]. Doing so misreads how every functioning space power has actually built its industry. NASA didn’t shrink to make room for SpaceX; NASA’s contracts and expertise were the scaffolding SpaceX built on [citation:original text]. India will need the same arrangement, not a smaller version of it [citation:original text]. ISRO has to do more than survive this transition – it has to thrive through it, properly staffed and funded, pushing ahead on its own frontier projects, even as it opens more room for Skyroot, Agnikul and the rest to grow into [citation:original text].
Conclusion: The Start of Something or Just a Very Good Day?
“Agaman” earned its celebration, and it should get an unqualified one. But whether July 18, 2026 turns out to be the start of something or just a very good day will depend less on how fast the startups fly next, and more on whether the state keeps building the foundation everyone else in Indian space still stands on [citation:original text].
Q&A Section
1. Why is the Vikram-1 launch considered a significant milestone for India’s space sector?
The Vikram-1 launch is significant because it marks India’s first privately developed orbital rocket to successfully reach space. It makes India only the third country, after the US and China, to have a private orbital launch capability . The success comes after the government opened the space sector to private companies in 2020 , and it demonstrates the growing capability of the Indian private sector.
2. What was the context of India’s space sector in 2026 before the Vikram-1 launch?
The Vikram-1 launch was the first successful orbital launch from Indian soil in 2026, following the failure of ISRO’s PSLV-C62 mission on January 12 . That mission, which was intended to be PSLV’s return to flight after a previous failure in May 2025, failed due to a third-stage anomaly, resulting in the loss of 16 satellites including the DRDO’s strategic EOS-N1 hypespectral imaging satellite .
3. What is Agnikul Cosmos planning to attempt, and why is it important?
Agnikul Cosmos is planning Mission 02, which will attempt India’s first recovery of an orbital-class rocket booster and also demonstrate an upper stage that remains operational in orbit after deploying a satellite . This is important because reusability has proven to be the most effective way to reduce the cost of accessing space, as demonstrated by SpaceX with its Falcon 9 rockets .
4. What is the current staffing situation at ISRO, and why is it a concern?
At the end of 2025-26, nearly three out of every ten sanctioned posts at the Department of Space (DoS) remained vacant, marking the widest staffing gap in 25 years [citation:original text]. Of the department’s sanctioned strength of 20,269 posts, only 14,637 are currently filled, leaving 5,632 vacancies and an overall staffing level of 72.2% . This shortfall occurs as ISRO embarks on ambitious missions, including human spaceflight, and raises concerns about the agency’s capacity to deliver on its strategic objectives.
5. What lesson does the article draw from NASA’s relationship with SpaceX?
The article argues that NASA didn’t shrink to make room for SpaceX; rather, NASA’s contracts and expertise were the scaffolding on which SpaceX built its success [citation:original text]. The article contends that India needs the same arrangement—an ISRO that is properly staffed and funded, pushing ahead on its own frontier projects, even as it opens more room for private players to grow. Hollowing out ISRO would be a costly mistake [citation:original text].
Age Bars for Social Media: Necessity or Choice? India’s Digital Dilemma
By Kajleen Kaur
New Delhi, July 20
Social media for the present generation is more than a form of simple communication; it is a holistic mechanism for socialising, education, entertainment and recognition. It has transformed the way children and adolescents engage with and explore their lives, in contrast to previous generations . However, of late, there has been a public furore on the downside of the online exposure, including digital addiction, cyber-bullying, misinformation, mental health and behavioural issues at this tender age . Many countries are thereby implementing an age limit for social media use.
The minimum age for most major social media platforms today is 13 years, which is mainly to secure adherence to data protection laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the United States . But with lax enforcement, the majority of children have access to social media long before the recommended age. Age restrictions demonstrate the importance of protecting children during their developmental period. Research shows that while adolescents’ critical cognitive and emotional abilities are developing, exposure to endless content on social sites hinders their potential intellectual growth . Excessive social media use has been associated with increased anxiety levels, depression, sleep disorders, and social comparison among teenagers . In a world where information spreads rapidly without any authentication, the young users are the most affected, as they are not able to mindfully decide about its repercussions before absorbing or spreading it .
The Indian Context: A Vulnerable Demographic
India is at an even higher risk, with one of the world’s largest populations of internet users, affordable smartphones, low-cost data, and unregulated usage . As the world’s No. 2 smartphone market with 750 million devices and a billion internet users, India is a key growth market for social media apps and does not currently set a minimum age for access . Research firm DataReportal notes that YouTube has 500 million users in India, Facebook 403 million, and Instagram has 481 million . This massive scale, combined with the digital divide and a young demographic, makes India’s children particularly susceptible to online harms.
The government has taken note of this challenge. In a Lok Sabha response on December 10, 2025, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology acknowledged the increasing exposure of children below 18 years to harmful, addictive, or age-inappropriate content on social media platforms . The ministry stated that the government is cognizant of the harms arising out of exposure to such content and has adopted a series of measures to enhance platform accountability . These include the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which impose due-diligence obligations on intermediaries, and the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, which allows Data Fiduciaries to process the personal data of children only with verifiable parental consent and prohibits processing detrimental to a child’s well-being .
The Push for Age-Based Restrictions
India’s Chief Economic Adviser, V. Anantha Nageswaran, has recommended in the annual Economic Survey that policies on age-based access limits may be considered, as younger users are more vulnerable to compulsive use and harmful content . He also called the platforms “predatory” in their approach to maximize user engagement, adding that “such algorithms are particularly targeted at youngsters between the ages of 15 and 24” . The survey report noted that 75% of young smartphone users are on social media apps and that “digital addiction negatively affects academic performance and workplace productivity due to distractions, ‘sleep debt’, and reduced focus” .
This has spurred action at the state level. The southern state of Andhra Pradesh has said it is studying Australia’s regulatory framework, with an eye to similar bans for children . Trust in social media is breaking down, and children are slipping into relentless usage, affecting their attention spans and education . The coastal state of Goa has also expressed interest in following Australia’s lead . In March 2026, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah announced a ban on social media access for children below the age of 16 , while Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu announced regulations targeting children below 13 within a 90-day timeframe .
The Central Government’s Graded Approach
However, the central government is not in favour of a blanket ban and is instead considering a more nuanced, graded approach . According to top government sources, the government is looking at specifying restrictions for children under 18 years . “There will be a certain set of restrictions for those in the 8-12 years age bracket, another set for 12-16 year olds, and different measures for those aged 16-18 years,” a senior government functionary told The Indian Express . This will be a separate law, and the government is looking at introducing it in the monsoon session of Parliament .
The government’s reasoning is that the younger generation has more exposure and is more mature compared to previous generations, so the regulations have to be nuanced and graded rather than harsh measures such as a ban . Inconsistency in defining who is a child is a concern, as different states bringing out different legislations could lead to confusion . Some activists and tech experts have also called for measures to help children and parents develop healthy and safe social media usage, saying that age-based curbs do not work as children can bypass them with fake identification documents .
The Supreme Court’s Intervention
The Supreme Court has also weighed in on the issue. While hearing a case related to obscene content, the bench suggested that an autonomous body was needed to regulate content on social media and asked whether a person’s Aadhaar number could be used to verify their age for accessing online content that may be deemed “obscene” . The bench expressed concern that “self-styled” mechanisms are not enough . The Solicitor General of India noted that there are some lacunae in what is called user-generated content, as individuals are not controlled by any statutory regulations .
A Personal Anecdote: The Real-World Impact
The importance of age bars on social media can therefore not be denied. The more pressing issue is how age restrictions are implemented. Robust age-verification and platform accountability, parental and teachers’ engagement, and digital literacy education are all important factors in effective regulation . Many countries, including Australia, the UAE, China, and several European countries, have mandated strict age verification methods like facial scans or ID checks instead of relying on self-declaration as an effective mechanism to enforce age limits .
What is needed, therefore, in this digital era is a comprehensive approach that includes protection, education, accountability, empowerment and wise engagement with technology .
Q&A Section
1. What is the current minimum age for most major social media platforms, and why is it set at 13 years?
The minimum age for most major social media platforms is 13 years. This is primarily to secure adherence to data protection laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the United States, which prohibits companies from collecting personal data from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent .
2. What is the Indian government’s proposed approach to regulating children’s access to social media?
The central government is considering a graded, nuanced approach rather than a blanket ban. It is looking at a separate law that would specify different sets of restrictions for children in three age brackets: 8-12 years, 12-16 years, and 16-18 years. The government plans to introduce this law in the monsoon session of Parliament .
3. What concerns have been raised by India’s Chief Economic Adviser regarding social media use by young people?
Chief Economic Adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran has described social media platforms as “predatory” in their approach to maximizing user engagement, targeting algorithms particularly at youngsters between the ages of 15 and 24. He has recommended policies on age-based access limits and highlighted that digital addiction negatively affects academic performance and workplace productivity .
4. What is the Supreme Court’s view on regulating social media content?
The Supreme Court has suggested that an autonomous, independent body is needed to regulate content on social media, as “self-styled” mechanisms are not enough. The court has also raised the possibility of using Aadhaar for age verification to prevent minors from accessing obscene or inappropriate content .
5. What existing legal frameworks does India have to protect children online?
India has the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which impose due-diligence obligations on intermediaries, including social media platforms, to prevent the hosting of unlawful content . The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, requires Data Fiduciaries to process children’s personal data only with verifiable parental consent and prohibits processing detrimental to a child’s well-being .
Science & Technology in Ancient India: A Guide for the Present and Future
By Aditi Nayar
New Delhi, July 20
The scientific and technological past of ancient India is not just a chapter of history, but a guide for the present and future. It showcases a wide spectrum of human genius – from mathematical abstraction to precise surgery and excellent metallurgy [citation:original text]. Long before “engineering” became a formal discipline, India was practising it. Between roughly 3300 and 1300 BCE, the Indus Valley Civilization built meticulously planned cities, covered drainage systems, and refined metalwork [citation:original text]. The Vedic period added agriculture, further metallurgy, and systematic sky-watching – the base for a scholarly line running from the Rigveda to Aryabhata, Sushruta, Charaka, Varahamihira, and Bhaskaracharya [citation:original text].
Centres of learning such as Nalanda, Vikramshila, and Takshashila brought philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine together under one roof [citation:original text]. Aryabhata’s Aryabhatiya (c. 499 CE) worked out trigonometric formulas, argued that the Earth itself moves, and calculated its circumference at 39,968 kilometres [citation:original text]. Bhaskaracharya’s Lilavati laid early groundwork for algebra, and Brahmagupta set out the rules for negative numbers [citation:original text]. The Sushruta Samhita is the earliest known text on detailed surgery, including plastic and cataract techniques, while the Charaka Samhita reads like an encyclopaedia of internal medicine [citation:original text]. Nagarjuna’s Rasashastra covered medicinal preparation, the Surya Siddhanta calculated eclipses and planetary motion, and Varahamihira’s Panchasiddhantika merged five astronomical traditions into one [citation:original text]. The rust-free Iron Pillar of Delhi (c. 400 CE) still puzzles metallurgists, and Vastu Shastra drew its architectural principles from the sun’s movement, wind, and a balance of five elements [citation:original text].
We live amid artificial intelligence, generative tools, private spaceflight, AR/VR, 5G, drones, humanoid robots, and 3D printing – alongside deepening environmental crises, rising mental health difficulties, and ethics that haven’t kept pace with technology [citation:original text]. That gap is worth naming – and worth asking what earlier Indian thought, built around balance rather than pure output, might still offer [citation:original text].
The National Education Policy 2020: A Bridge Between Roots and Wings
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recognizes the rich heritage of ageless Indian philosophy and knowledge as a guiding principle . It calls for weaving India’s Vedic and classical scientific heritage into STEM education, restoring continuity while encouraging both indigenous pride and global engagement [citation:original text]. This integration is not about blind imitation of the past or glorification of unscientific claims, but about providing education rooted in cultural foundations with a global perspective [citation:original text]. The aim is to help children understand that science is a universal human endeavor in which their ancestors also made significant contributions . As experts note, NEP 2020 envisions a modern society with the foundation of IKS and the advancements of Modern Science, aiming to intertwine the two for comprehensive learning and development .
The Indian Knowledge System (IKS) is a systematic method of passing down knowledge from one generation to the next . Under the umbrella of science in the Indian knowledge system, there are various disciplines including biology, physics, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, geology, and mathematics . Science in the Indian knowledge tradition is characterized by an integrated methodology, integration with philosophy and spirituality, and real-world applications aimed at enhancing human well-being . Bringing Vedic, Puranic, and folk ecological traditions back into education could address the root causes of environmental crises and lifestyle diseases [citation:original text].
Ayurveda: The Practice of Staying Well
Ayurveda, India’s traditional medical system, treats mind and body as one connected whole. Its purpose is captured in a well-known line: “Swasthasya swasthya rakshanam, aturasya vikar prashanamam cha” – protect the health of the well, and cure the disease of the sick [citation:original text]. That aim hasn’t aged. Ayurvedic learning follows daily and seasonal rhythm [citation:original text]. Dinacharya prescribes waking before dawn, exercise, bathing, and reflection [citation:original text]. Rutcharya divides the year into six seasons – Shishir, Vasant, Grishma, Varsha, Sharad, and Hemant – each calling for dosha adjustments; summer’s rising Pitta and Vata, for instance, call for cooling foods and plenty of water [citation:original text]. Diet follows six tastes – sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter, and astringent – eaten according to one’s digestive strength, since, per the Charaka Samhita, weak digestion is the root of nearly every illness (“Roga sarve mandagnau“) [citation:original text]. Mentally, Ayurveda describes temperament through three gunas – Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas [citation:original text].
The stakes are real: diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and heart disease are now widespread enough to strain health systems worldwide – only one country has more adults with diabetes than India [citation:original text]. Ayurveda’s answer – dosha balance through Dinacharya, Rutcharya, and the Trayopastambha, or three pillars of health – speaks directly to this [citation:original text]. Recognition extends well beyond India: the WHO estimates 80–90 percent of people worldwide use traditional medicine and now treats such systems as essential healthcare, reflected in its choice to host the WHO Global Centre for Traditional Medicine in India [citation:original text]. AIIMS Rishikesh has run a Tridosha-based AYUSH department alongside conventional treatment since 2017, the same year the All India Institute of Ayurveda in New Delhi became fully operational; the National Institute of Ayurveda continues expanding research and training [citation:original text].
Modern research is validating these principles. The Collaborative Medicine and Science (Co.M.S.) framework provides a structured approach for integrating Ayurveda with modern healthcare, preserving its epistemological integrity while adapting to global medical standards . This framework operates through three distinct yet interconnected phases: reformulation, modeling, and localization, each playing a crucial role in bridging traditional wisdom with contemporary healthcare understanding . For instance, the concept of Dosha might be modeled through systems theory, network analysis, complex systems, or pattern recognition algorithms, each model offering different insights while preserving the essential sophistication of the original concept . This understanding of Ayurveda as a sophisticated information processing system creates natural bridges between different medical traditions .
Mathematics and Astronomy: The Foundations of Modern Science
Mathematics flourished independently in India, contributing concepts such as zero, the decimal system, algebraic equations, geometry, and trigonometric functions, found in texts like Lilavati, Bijaganita, and Sulbasutras . Scholars like Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, and Bhaskaracharya developed methods equivalent to modern calculus, iterative algorithms, and infinite series, which heavily influenced global mathematics through Arab and European transmission . The Surya Siddhanta provides clear-cut calculations of the distances of planets and the Earth’s circumference, display a mathematical finesse that is equivalent to recent heliocentric theories and geodetic data . The intellectual place of ganita, according to the canons of Sanskrit literature, was located within jyotisa (astronomy), which in turn was identified as one of the six Vedangas (“limbs of the Veda”), whose purpose was to support the proper performance of Vedic rituals .
Teaching traditional models – the classical twelve zodiac signs, say – alongside Kepler’s laws could sharpen students’ mathematical-astronomical thinking [citation:original text]. India’s space programme shows the heritage still has momentum: Mangalyaan (2014) and the Chandrayaan missions, through Chandrayaan-3 (2023), extend rather than break from a much older tradition of Indian mathematics and astronomy [citation:original text].
Vastu Shastra: Sustainable Architecture from Ancient Principles
Vastu Shastra is a disciplined study of how buildings relate to their surroundings – oriented around the sun’s path, wind, the Earth’s magnetic field, and a balance of five elements to secure natural light, airflow, and energy efficiency, much of it mapping onto what’s now called green building design: passive cooling, natural lighting, rainwater harvesting, and solar power [citation:original text]. Based on various energies such as solar, wind, thermal, lunar, cosmic and light energy, Vastu Shastra provides design guidelines in a natural way . Indian Heritage structures have been proven as sustainable in terms of design, planning, materials, thermal comfort, climate adaptability, ventilation and light . The Panchamahabhuta, the five fundamental elements of Vastu Shastra (Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Space) offers a regenerative framework for sustainable design . In contrast to modernist approaches, Vastu fosters long-term environmental balance, energy efficiency, and mental well-being by aligning human settlements with natural forces .
The overlap goes beyond concept. LEED-certified buildings following Vastu’s preferred northeast-facing layout – the Ishan corner – have cut energy use by up to 30 percent in some studies [citation:original text]. Researchers at IIT Kharagpur found that Vastu-style courtyards, built around natural daylight and cross-ventilation, use roughly 40 percent less energy than typical passive-cooling designs, while local materials also cut the carbon footprint [citation:original text]. The NEP 2020 supports bringing Vastu into architecture curricula; pairing temple and haveli case studies with green-certification training and solar-analysis software could help students apply this heritage to climate-resilient design [citation:original text]. A study on Jaipur’s city planning, rooted in Vastu Shastra principles, records up to 25% wind flow optimization and a 3.5 °C improvement in thermal comfort within the city’s bazaars, reflecting the environmental intelligence of the Pitha Mandala layout .
The Environmental Ethos: Nature as Sacred
Ancient Indian thought treated nature as alive and conscious. The Atharvaveda’s line “Mata Bhumih Putroham Prithivyah” – the Earth is our mother, we are her children – framed protecting the planet as a spiritual duty [citation:original text]. Forests were designated Aranyak or Tapovan and protected; trees like the peepal and neem were revered as Devavriksha; water systems relied on rainwater harvesting, now being revived out of necessity; and the Panchatantra and Hitopadesha taught compassion toward animals through childhood fables [citation:original text]. Agriculture followed the same logic – mixed cropping and organic manure – long before synthetic fertilisers and pesticides brought side effects now well documented, alongside worsening air, water, and land pollution [citation:original text].
The ancient understanding of agriculture was sophisticated. Indian farmers historically practiced sustainable agriculture using detailed knowledge of soil texture, water availability, seasonal cycles, and crop diversity, as observed in texts like Krishiparashara and Virksayurveda . Seasonal farming guidance was provided by ancient Indian Nakshatra-based farm calendars synchronized with solar-lunar cycles, a technique still applied in climate-based crop modelling today . Similarly, site-oriented hydrological design principles used today in contemporary watershed planning as well as in remote sensing-derived water assessments are encapsulated by traditional water-harvesting structures like stepwells and johads .
Conclusion: A Shared Human Project
Ancient India’s scientific and technical achievements – spanning mathematical abstraction, surgical precision, and metallurgical skill still not fully explained – deserve a real place in the core curriculum, not as nostalgia but as proof that science has always been a shared human project Indian scholars helped shape [citation:original text]. The aim is not blind imitation of the past or glorification of unscientific claims, but to provide education rooted in cultural foundations with a global perspective [citation:original text]. This will help children understand that science is a universal human endeavor in which their ancestors also made significant contributions [citation:original text]. It will encourage them to adopt a multidisciplinary, comprehensive, and sustainable approach [citation:original text].
Q&A Section
1. What is the main objective of integrating Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) into modern education under NEP 2020?
The NEP 2020 aims to weave India’s Vedic and classical scientific heritage into STEM education to restore continuity while encouraging indigenous pride and global engagement [citation:original text]. The goal is to help students understand that science is a universal human endeavor in which their ancestors made significant contributions, and to encourage a multidisciplinary, comprehensive, and sustainable approach . The policy is not about glorifying the past, but about creating a modern society with the foundation of IKS and the advancements of modern science .
2. What are the key contributions of ancient Indian scholars in the fields of mathematics and astronomy?
Ancient Indian mathematics contributed concepts such as zero, the decimal system, algebraic equations, geometry, and trigonometric functions . Aryabhata worked out trigonometric formulas, argued that the Earth moves, and calculated its circumference [citation:original text]. Bhaskaracharya laid early groundwork for algebra, and Brahmagupta set out the rules for negative numbers [citation:original text]. The Surya Siddhanta provided calculations of planetary distances and the Earth’s circumference comparable to modern heliocentric theories . These contributions heavily influenced global mathematics through Arab and European transmission .
3. How is Ayurveda being integrated with modern healthcare practices?
Ayurveda is recognized by the WHO as essential healthcare, with 80-90% of people worldwide using traditional medicine [citation:original text]. Modern integration efforts include AIIMS Rishikesh running a Tridosha-based AYUSH department alongside conventional treatment [citation:original text]. The Collaborative Medicine and Science (Co.M.S.) framework provides a structured approach to integrate Ayurveda with modern healthcare, preserving its epistemological integrity while adapting to global medical standards . This includes modeling Ayurvedic concepts like Dosha through systems theory, network analysis, and pattern recognition algorithms .
4. What is the relevance of Vastu Shastra to modern sustainable architecture?
Vastu Shastra provides design guidelines based on solar, wind, thermal, lunar, cosmic, and light energy, which align with green building principles . Research shows that Vastu-style courtyards use roughly 40% less energy than typical passive-cooling designs [citation:original text], and Jaipur’s Vastu-based city planning records up to 25% wind flow optimization and a 3.5 °C improvement in thermal comfort . The NEP 2020 supports bringing Vastu into architecture curricula to apply these principles to climate-resilient design [citation:original text].
5. How did ancient Indian practices address environmental sustainability?
Ancient Indian thought treated nature as sacred, with forests, rivers, and wildlife considered worthy of protection . The Atharvaveda’s line “Mata Bhumih Putroham Prithivyah” (the Earth is our mother) framed environmental protection as a spiritual duty [citation:original text]. Agriculture followed sustainable practices like mixed cropping and organic manure [citation:original text]. Water harvesting structures like stepwells and johads incorporated site-oriented hydrological design principles that align with modern watershed planning and GIS-based assessments . Traditional ecological knowledge is now being re-emerging under modern agroecology and permaculture .
The Hidden Economy Behind Every AI Prompt: India’s Stake in the Intelligence Revolution
By Aditi Nayar
New Delhi, July 20
The majority of people associate AI with a chatbot, an image generator or a coding assistant. But these are merely the buildings that have a face. There is another economy behind them, an invisible economy that operates in the name of data, computing power, electricity, human work and public infrastructure. We use it every day, but do not fully appreciate who’s creating the value, who’s taking the value, who’s really paying for the value [citation:original text].
Each “prompt” from the AI generates something bigger. But there is an invisible economy to getting that seemingly easy answer; chips and electricity, water and cloud infrastructure, data and human labour and billions of dollars of investment [citation:original text]. AI is the next Industrial Revolution. However, there is an important point to the comparison. All industrial revolutions had their own infrastructure. The infrastructure of AI is not so visible. It has factories that are data centres. It’s using data as its raw material. It operates on electric fuel. It has an assembly line process, and a number of thousands of human workers train, test, and fine-tune intelligent systems [citation:original text].
This hidden infrastructure is growing exponentially. PwC has estimated that AI will have the power to add up to US$15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030 [citation:original text]. Much less consideration is given to the source of that wealth, the ownership of infrastructure that produces it, and who will benefit from it [citation:original text]. AI could contribute up to $500 billion to India’s economy by 2030, yet India currently hosts only about 3% of the world’s data centres despite generating nearly 20% of global data .
The AI Infrastructure Hierarchy: A Global Divide
The solution is as simple as a question. When a user requests an email be drafted or a spreadsheet be analysed by AI, the request goes through extremely fast networks to data centres with specialized processors. These are not regular computers, but powerful graphics processors (GPUs) that can calculate trillions of calculations per second for thousands of dollars. The reason why the response is so quick is that gigantic investments have already been made in semiconductor manufacturing, cloud computing and networking infrastructure [citation:original text].
It has just emerged that intelligence isn’t light. Nor is it free of pollution. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centres used approximately 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, which amounted to about 1.5% of global electricity consumption [citation:original text]. Each prompt thus comes with an invisible energy cost and connects AI policy with the discussions around renewable energy, grid resilience and sustainable infrastructure [citation:original text].
Countries that own AI infrastructure will export cognition. Countries that do not will import it permanently. Growth will continue in both. Power will not . This is the stark reality of the AI economy. As the global AI economy settles into an infrastructure hierarchy, India must decide whether it will own enough of it to protect its external balance, its fiscal stability, and its strategic autonomy .
India’s Data Centre Challenge: A Resource Question
India is making an increasingly ambitious bet on digital infrastructure. India’s installed data centre capacity, estimated at 1.3-1.5 GW today, is projected to expand to between 5 GW and 9.5 GW by 2030, driven by demand for cloud services, AI workloads, and data localisation requirements . New investment announcements in the June 2026 quarter jumped 30% year-on-year to about Rs 14.5 lakh crore, with data-centre projects alone adding Rs 4.5 lakh crore . Large industrial groups, including Adani and Reliance, are investing aggressively in hyperscale infrastructure, while several States are competing to become digital hubs .
However, digital infrastructure also raises a resource allocation problem that India is uniquely vulnerable to: water. India is already the world’s largest user of groundwater, accounting for roughly a quarter of global extraction. In many regions, withdrawals exceed natural recharge rates, particularly in urban and industrial centres. Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Delhi have all faced recurring concerns around water stress, while the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025 identified water supply shortages as India’s most severe environmental risk over the coming two years .
States are competing fiercely for AI investment. Gujarat offers a ₹1-per-unit power tariff subsidy and full electricity-duty reimbursement for 20 years, while Maharashtra has expanded its Integrated Green Data Centre Parks policy to 20 parks statewide . Uttar Pradesh’s draft Data Centre Policy 2026 seeks more than ₹2 lakh crore of investment and an additional 2 GW of capacity . But the Economic Survey 2025-26 cautioned against indiscriminate scaling of energy-intensive AI infrastructure, noting that in countries such as India, where resources such as electricity, water and capital remain scarce, such scaling is not sustainable in the long run .
India’s Position in the AI Value Chain: Demand-Side Advantage
There is a growing narrative in global markets that India is on the sidelines of the artificial intelligence revolution. The argument is visually persuasive: the largest semiconductor fabs are being built in Taiwan and the U.S., hyper-scale data centres are proliferating across North America, and frontier AI models are being trained in Silicon Valley rather than Bengaluru or Mumbai. From this vantage point, India appears absent from the most capital-intensive layers of the AI stack .
But this framing misses a more important structural reality. India is not missing the AI cycle. It is positioned differently within it – closer to the demand-side monetisation phase than the supply-side capital expenditure phase. And in many technology cycles, that distinction has historically determined where durable economic value is ultimately captured. Internet adoption is a case in point .
India’s economy is structurally services-heavy, digitally enabled, and increasingly platform-driven. Financial services, IT-enabled services, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, logistics, and retail collectively form a large base of AI-adoptable sectors. Unlike infrastructure-led ecosystems, India’s growth model is already consumption and services-oriented, making it naturally receptive to rapid diffusion of software-based productivity tools . McKinsey’s latest survey of global AI use shows that 88% of organisations across developing markets now report using AI in some part of their business, up from just 49 percent in 2023 .
By LinkedIn’s relative AI skill penetration index, India ranks first in the world at 2.95, ahead of the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. A workforce being shaped at this scale around AI is precisely the foundation on which a long adoption cycle is typically built . The generative AI segment has expanded rapidly in India, with active GenAI startups rising more than threefold from about 240 in the first half of 2024 to over 890 by the first half of 2025 . India has also become the third-largest global ecosystem for tech startups, with over 2,000 startups added in 2025 alone .
The Hidden Human Labour: AI’s Invisible Workforce
Another little-talked-about expense comes even further down the list: people. Although the popular notion is that AI generation will replace human jobs, it still relies on a huge amount of people to label images, check translations, moderate and filter out harmful content, and evaluate the responses of the models. Much of their work is hidden in plain sight, frequently spread out across the developing rest of the world, done away from the spotlight of AI success. All polished AI answers have a human judgment component which users are not aware of [citation:original text].
This is the reality of AI’s global division of labour. Most of the tedious data work for AI production is outsourced to the peripheries or semi-peripheries like India, while higher-valued model work remains closer to techno-economic cores, such as the United States . Most of this work is done by invisible data workers—often classified as “contractors” or “gig workers”—without the benefits, job security, or visibility of the AI engineers and data scientists celebrated in Silicon Valley. This hidden workforce is essential to the AI revolution, yet it remains economically and socially invisible .
The Cost of AI: From Electricity to Water to Capital
The costs of intelligence are distributed through a complex economic system, and thus seem free. The invisibility applies to value creation as well. All interactions with AI create economic value. The accuracy of models is enhanced by users’ questions [citation:original text].
Indian companies adopting artificial intelligence are facing rapidly rising cloud and infrastructure costs as enterprise spending shifts away from labour-heavy IT services towards GPUs, cloud subscriptions and AI platforms. Research firm Gartner said global AI spending is expected to rise 47% year-on-year to $2.59 trillion in 2026, with AI infrastructure accounting for more than 45% of total spending . At the same time, enterprise technology budgets are increasingly rotating “from people-hours to platform-subscriptions” .
The pressure is becoming more visible among Indian IT firms, banks, startups and large enterprises deploying AI tools across coding, customer support, workflow automation and internal operations. According to UnearthInsight, cloud subscription growth in FY26 ranged between 19% and 27%, while IT services revenue growth slowed to between negative 2% and positive 4% . Indian IT firms that once relied on India’s comparative advantage in cost may no longer need to do so, and to sustain their competitive edge, firms will have to evolve comprehensively .
A Strategic Dilemma for India
India has created one of the most revered ecosystems of digital public infrastructure in the world—Aadhaar, UPI, Digilocker—that can serve millions while scaling, showcasing how digital systems can scale. India also has more than 900 million Internet users, which produce one of the world’s most prolific sources of digital data . However, having a digital scale won’t guarantee AI leadership [citation:original text].
The Economic Survey 2025-26 has warned that chasing scale and building large language models for their own sake is not useful for India. Instead, India should focus on “application-led innovation, the productive use of domestic data, human capital depth, and the ability of public institutions to coordinate distributed efforts” . Without the ability to develop its own AI, India is at risk of becoming a data exporter and an AI importer [citation:original text].
The next big step in digital policy needs to go beyond promoting the use of AI. It needs to prioritise the enhancement of domestic computing power, semiconductor manufacturing, providing affordable computing to start-ups, investing in AI research, establishing high-quality public datasets and establishing clear regulations that engender trust [citation:original text].
Conclusion
The debate surrounding AI has mostly centered on the question of whether AI will lead to job displacement. That’s a very important question, but possibly not the most important one [citation:original text]. According to the International Monetary Fund, AI could impact approximately 40% of all jobs around the world. Equally important, though, is who will be the owners of the infrastructure on which AI creates wealth. Its long-term consequences will not only be related to innovation, but also to institutions, investment and public policy [citation:original text].
Each AI prompt is thus more than just a digital conversation. It is an economic exchange that is part of an extensive global system of energy, infrastructure, investment and human effort. Although the technology is invisible, its economic impact is not. Each prompt has an invisible cost; its value is invisible, and its infrastructure is invisible [citation:original text]. The hidden economy is the first step towards a technologically transformative, economically fair, and viable AI revolution [citation:original text].
Q&A Section
1. What is the “hidden economy” behind every AI prompt?
The hidden economy behind every AI prompt includes the invisible costs and infrastructure required to generate each response: powerful GPUs and semiconductor manufacturing, electricity for data centers, cloud infrastructure, water for cooling, human labour for data annotation and content moderation, and billions of dollars in investment. Each prompt has an invisible energy cost, an invisible value chain, and an invisible human workforce behind it [citation:original text].
2. Why is India at risk of becoming a “data exporter and AI importer”?
Despite having over 900 million internet users and generating nearly 20% of global data, India hosts only about 3% of the world’s data centers. Without the ability to develop its own AI infrastructure, India could find itself exporting raw data while importing AI services from global providers. This mirrors the pattern of exporting raw materials and importing finished goods—a pattern that perpetuates dependency [citation:original text].
3. What are the resource costs of building AI infrastructure in India?
AI infrastructure is profoundly physical. Data centers require vast amounts of electricity and significant volumes of water for cooling. India’s projected data centre expansion from 1.3-1.5 GW to 5-9.5 GW by 2030 will significantly increase power and water demand, competing directly with households and other industries. India is already the world’s largest user of groundwater, and many proposed data centre locations are in water-stressed regions .
4. What is India’s strategy for participating in the AI economy?
India is positioned on the demand-side of AI—embedding AI into enterprise workflows, productivity systems, and sector-specific use cases—rather than the supply-side capital expenditure layer. India ranks first globally in AI skill penetration. The Economic Survey 2025-26 recommends a “bottom-up, sector-specific” approach focused on application-led innovation, domestic data utilization, and shared digital infrastructure, rather than chasing scale for its own sake .
5. What are the financial realities of AI adoption for Indian companies?
Indian firms adopting AI are facing rising cloud and infrastructure costs that often outpace labour savings. Global AI spending is expected to rise 47% year-on-year to $2.59 trillion in 2026, with AI infrastructure accounting for over 45% of total spending. Enterprise technology budgets are shifting from “people-hours to platform-subscriptions,” and many firms are discovering that AI improves productivity but not always enough to offset rising inference, cloud, and subscription costs .
The Monsoon’s Diminishing Grip: Why India’s Economy Has Learned to Weather the Rain Deficit
By Rajani Sinha & Bharadwaja Adiraju
New Delhi, July 20
For generations, the southwest monsoon has been the lifeblood of the Indian economy, its arrival and performance a national obsession. A good monsoon meant a happy farmer, a brimming granary, and a thriving economy. A bad one brought the specter of drought, inflation, and rural distress. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that while the monsoon remains a critical factor, its hold over India’s economic destiny is weakening. As CareEdge Ratings’ chief economist and senior economist have noted, India’s farm output has grown more resilient to rainfall deficiencies, though this relief is only relative [citation:original text].
This year’s monsoon season, marked by a scorching 40% deficit in June and the looming threat of a strengthening El Niño, has revived the age-old anxiety. Yet, a closer look at the data reveals a structural transformation that is quietly reducing India’s vulnerability to the whims of the rains [citation:original text].
The Weakening Link: A Statistical Reality
The most compelling evidence of this transformation comes from a long-term statistical analysis. A 20-year rolling regression analysis shows that the linkages between rainfall deviations and both agricultural growth and overall gross value added (GVA) have weakened significantly over time [citation:original text].
In the two decades spanning 1965-66 to 1984-85, years with sub-normal rainfall saw agricultural GVA contract by an average of about 4%. This linkage began to weaken thereafter. In the decade from 2015-16 to 2024-25, agricultural GVA actually grew by a healthy 3.8% on average during episodes of sub-normal rainfall [citation:original text]. This shows that while a deficient monsoon does hurt agricultural growth, the sensitivity has been reducing [citation:original text].
Other analyses support this trend. One study found that the correlation between rainfall departure from the long-period average (LPA) and agriculture GVA has remained negligible at under 0.05 over the past 25 years . This doesn’t mean a bad monsoon is inconsequential, but rather that its impact is no longer as direct or as devastating as it once was.
The Structural Drivers of Resilience
This newfound resilience isn’t a matter of luck; it’s the result of deliberate policy and structural shifts over decades. The drivers that enabled this transformation are structural [citation:original text].
1. The Irrigation Shield: The most significant factor has been the remarkable expansion of irrigation. Gross irrigated area has increased from a mere 17% of gross sown area in 1950-51 to nearly 60% in 2023-24 [citation:original text]. This means that more than half of India’s farmland no longer depends solely on the monsoon to produce a harvest . For water-intensive crops like wheat and rice, the irrigation coverage is even higher, at 95.5% and 70% respectively, providing a robust buffer against rainfall deficiency .
However, the analysis in the original article also points out that the positive irrigation story doesn’t apply to all crops. For pulses, the irrigated area is only around 35%, and for oilseeds like soybean, it’s a meager 10% . This means that while the overall picture is one of resilience, certain crops and regions remain acutely vulnerable .
2. Climate-Resilient Crops: The government’s efforts to push climate-resilient crop varieties are also paying off. Under the National Agricultural Research System led by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 2,996 climate-resilient crop varieties were released during 2014-2025 [citation:original text]. The promotion of sustainable farming and crops that require less water, such as millets and pulses, is also playing a role in reducing the dependence of output growth on rainfall [citation:original text].
3. Income Diversification: The share of agriculture in the economy has shrunk to around 14-16% of GVA, but the sector still employs roughly 46% of the workforce . This paradox is precisely why a bad monsoon can hurt incomes and sentiment far more than its GDP share suggests .
However, even within the farm sector, there’s a positive shift. The share of income derived from crop production has declined from 63% in 2011-12 to 53% in 2023-24, while the share of allied sectors like livestock, fisheries, and horticulture has grown [citation:original text]. In fact, the allied sector GVA now contributes nearly 46% of the agriculture and allied category, up from about 35% in FY14 . Livestock’s share in agricultural income has risen from 24% in 2011-12 to 33% in 2023-24, while for fisheries and aquaculture it has increased from 4.4% to 7.5% [citation:original text]. This diversification provides a crucial cushion, as these sub-sectors are more resilient to short-term weather shocks than rain-fed crop production .
The Vulnerabilities That Remain
Despite these structural improvements, the monsoon still matters. The recent El Niño and the rainfall deficit have caused a significant drop in kharif sowing. The analysis from the image shows that the total area sown under kharif crops was 16% lower than during the corresponding period in the previous year [citation:original text]. This could translate into lower farm incomes and reduced rural spending.
The other big concern is the monsoon’s impact on inflation. Food accounts for roughly 37-46% of India’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) basket, and a sharp move in vegetable or cereal prices can quickly move the headline inflation number . Consumer price index data for June already showed a jump in food inflation to 5.3% from about 3% in the first quarter of 2026. We expect food inflation to climb to around 7% in the October-December quarter and average about 6% for 2026-27 [citation:original text]. The RBI has also flagged a deficient monsoon as a key risk to inflation and has revised its GDP growth forecast for FY27 down to 6.6% .
Conclusion
India has made significant strides in reducing its economic vulnerability to the monsoon. The expansion of irrigation, the introduction of climate-resilient crops, and the diversification of rural incomes have built substantial shock absorbers that didn’t exist in earlier decades. However, as the analysis from the image shows, a poor monsoon still hurts agricultural output and overall economic growth, but the relative impact has clearly been reducing over time [citation:original text]. The relief is real, but it is only relative. The next few weeks of rainfall data, not the seasonal forecast itself, will likely decide whether this becomes a footnote in the year’s growth story or a real headwind for inflation, consumption, and policy .
Q&A Section
1. How has the link between monsoon rainfall and India’s agricultural growth changed over time?
The link has weakened significantly. In the two decades from 1965-66 to 1984-85, sub-normal rainfall led to an average 4% contraction in agricultural GVA. In the most recent decade (2015-16 to 2024-25), agricultural GVA actually grew by an average of 3.8% during episodes of sub-normal rainfall. This shows that India’s farm output has become more resilient to rainfall deficiencies [citation:original text].
2. What are the key structural factors that have made Indian agriculture more resilient to monsoon variability?
The key factors include: (a) a massive expansion of irrigation coverage from 17% of gross sown area in 1950-51 to nearly 60% in 2023-24; (b) the introduction of 2,996 climate-resilient crop varieties during 2014-2025; (c) a decline in the share of crop production in farm income from 63% in 2011-12 to 53% in 2023-24, with growth in allied sectors like livestock and fisheries [citation:original text].
3. Even with increased resilience, why does a weak monsoon still pose a significant economic threat?
Agriculture still employs about 46% of India’s workforce, so a bad monsoon can hurt rural incomes and consumption significantly. Furthermore, food accounts for a large portion of the CPI basket, and a supply shock from a poor monsoon can quickly drive up food inflation. The RBI has estimated that a deficient monsoon could add 100 basis points to headline CPI inflation .
4. Which crops and regions are most vulnerable to a deficient monsoon despite the overall resilience?
While wheat and rice are well-irrigated, crops like pulses (35% irrigated), oilseeds (44% irrigated), and cotton (51% irrigated) remain vulnerable. Soybean, a key oilseed, has only 10% irrigation coverage. States with low irrigation coverage like Jharkhand (17.2%), Chhattisgarh (34.3%), and parts of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Karnataka are also more vulnerable .
5. How has the RBI responded to the risks posed by the deficient monsoon and El Niño?
The RBI has flagged a deficient monsoon as a key risk to inflation and growth. It revised its GDP growth forecast for FY27 down to 6.6% from 6.9%, citing weather-related and global risks. The RBI has also cautioned that a weak monsoon could impact rural demand and private consumption .
Space Startups Must Fly Far Beyond Their Origin: India’s New Frontier and the Long Climb Ahead
By Aditi Nayar
New Delhi, July 20
Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace has broken new ground in India’s space industry. Its Vikram-1 rocket reached orbit and deployed its payloads on its first attempt—a feat that eluded SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Astra and Firefly on their own maiden flights [citation:original text]. Skyroot’s success places India among a trio of countries with a notable private presence in the great beyond, the US and China being the other two [citation:original text].
The launch of Vikram-1, named after the father of India’s space programme, Vikram Sarabhai, is a moment of genuine national pride . It validates the bold bet New Delhi placed in 2020, when it opened spaceflight to private capital after decades of treating it as an exclusively sovereign function . However, pride in the origin of India’s space trajectory must be tempered with a clear-eyed understanding: the past is prologue. The real race is just beginning [citation:original text].
The Policy Foundation: From Monopoly to Ecosystem
Till 2020, the space sector was under the monopoly of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), whose trail of wins has been stellar. Its Mangalyaan reached Mars orbit on its first try, Chandrayaan-3 made India the fourth country to soft-land on the Moon (the first near its south-polar region), and Aditya-L1 is studying the Sun from a special point, while SpaDeX has shown ISRO’s capacity for auto-docking, crucial for future human spaceflight missions and space-station plans [citation:original text].
With ISRO’s launch pads available to private players, we can expect ambitions to multiply on the spur of rivalry. While reforms in 2020 opened the sector, the Indian Space Policy of 2023 created a framework for private entrants. IN-SPACe helps companies access ISRO facilities, technology and expertise [citation:original text]. The government has also created a ₹1,000 crore venture-capital fund and a ₹500 crore Technology Adoption Fund [citation:original text]. The result is that India now has more than 400 space startups, with a sectoral target of ₹40-45 billion by 2033 and ₹100 billion by 2040, an upshot from ₹8.4 billion last year [citation:original text].
The launch of Vikram-1 marks the first major orbital victory of this national thrust. Its payload haul included learning-hungry orbiters like Skyroot’s Scope and Grahana’s Solara S3, apart from German firm DcubeD’s space-tech tester and Cosmoserve’s Embrace, a robotic arm for a trial of orbital-debris capture [citation:original text]. It’s a signal that giant rockets are not all that space ventures are about, with demand evident for small gigs in low-earth orbit even as another global space race gains pace [citation:original text].
The Immediate Aftermath: A Sector Energized
Skyroot’s Saturday blast-off has boosted confidence in the sector’s future, with its rival Agnikul Cosmos and others in hot-contest mode [citation:original text]. The success has turned attention to Indian spacetech startups building rockets, including reusable ones, satellites, payloads, propulsion systems and space-data businesses as they prepare to shift from demonstrations to commercial missions .
Agnikul Cosmos is planning Mission 02 within a year, carrying paying customer satellites and attempting to land the rocket’s lower stage on a sea barge . The company, which has raised over $78 million in funding, is targeting up to 50 launches a year by 2030, roughly one launch every week, enabled by reusable technologies, rapid turnaround and repeatable manufacturing . “With recovery, repeatability and the technology we have, a launch per week is definitely possible over the next five years,” said co-founder Srinath Ravichandran .
Bengaluru-based EtherealX expects to complete qualification tests for its Pegasus upper-stage engine and Stallion booster engine by year-end, with reusability as part of the vehicle design from the start . Satellite companies are also preparing for more frequent launches. Dhruva Space co-founder Sanjay Nekkanti said more Indian launch options would help satellite companies compete globally . Dhruva is working on nano-, micro- and CubeSat missions, with a cadence to produce one satellite every month starting next year .
However, we must not lose sight of how far this industry needs to go.
The First Challenge: Talent and the Hollowing of ISRO
Skyroot’s founders are ex-ISRO and a dispersal of ISRO engineers across startups is natural, but India will need a wider well-spring of scientific minds drawn to frontier quests [citation:original text]. The success of Vikram-1 lands amid the loudest talent crisis ISRO has faced in years, and the timing is not a coincidence . More than a hundred ISRO scientists have resigned or taken voluntary retirement in recent months—enough that the Department of Space, just four days before Vikram-1 lifted off, moved to block routine exits of scientists working on Gaganyaan and other flagship missions .
The pull is not mysterious: start-ups founded largely by ISRO alumni offer two to three times government pay, equity, flat hierarchies, and freedom from layered bureaucracy . Those leaving are not junior hires; many carry specialised experience from missions such as Chandrayaan-3 and SpaDeX . They are exiting a public agency already facing missed deadlines on some of its own flagship launches—for a private sector that just launched India’s first private orbital rocket .
Optimists call this redistribution rather than drain, likening it to how engineers cycle between NASA and SpaceX in a maturing market . That comparison could prove right—but only if India’s space ecosystem grows large enough to absorb the churn, keeping ISRO staffed for the missions only a state agency can run even as it keeps seeding the companies extending India’s reach commercially . Vikram-1 shows what that ecosystem is capable of when it works. Whether ISRO stays intact enough to keep supplying it, mission after mission, decade after decade, is now the harder question hanging over India’s space programme .
The Second Challenge: Scale and Competition
The second challenge is scale. Globally, the SpaceX-led US industry dominates private orbital launches, with about 100-165 liftoffs a year and over 10,000 active satellites in orbit. China’s competitive but state-led sector sees 40-90 launches annually and has some 1,200 orbiters in operation. China is hot on SpaceX’s trail with reusable rockets, which have transformed haulage into a game of scale savings [citation:original text].
Skyroot is gearing up for at least one more Vikram-1 test mission by the end of this year and hopes to be ready with a 1,000kg payload capacity rocket—Vikram-2—for launch by the end of next year . The ultimate goal is to reach a cadence of producing one rocket per month . But even repeatability won’t be the finish line: nowhere in the world has a company managed to make the business of launching rockets alone commercially sustainable. Every serious player, SpaceX included, has had to lean on satellites, in-space services, or government anchor contracts to make the arithmetic work [citation:original text].
The Third Challenge: Finance
Indian ventures must not fall short of capital. Skyroot’s billion-dollar valuation still lacks a clear exit route; and we await pure-play space-tech public offers [citation:original text]. While grants and early-stage support from IN-SPACe and government bodies have improved, growth capital for scaling space-tech start-ups remains scarce . Making it difficult for space-tech start-ups to sustain momentum and achieve commercial viability .
The deep tech momentum masks persistent gaps in demand, policy and talent . While the government is the largest consumer of space data, demand across ministries and sectors remains fragmented, with most having only procured data from other government ministries, rather than from the private sector . Fragmented ministries, uneven execution and thin expertise force startups to lean on global markets before domestic ones mature .
The Competitive Landscape: Differentiating in a Crowded Field
The third challenge is stiff global competition. SpaceX’s ride-share model aims to take small satellites on big rockets. Indian launchers must therefore compete on speed, flexibility, orbital precision and other counts [citation:original text]. Unlike taking on SpaceX head-on, India is carving out a niche in the global launch market by focusing on small satellites weighing under 300 kg destined for low-Earth orbits .
Agnikul has developed technologies across design, manufacturing and operations to solve the flexibility problem: modularity, extensive use of 3D printing and automation, and reusability . The entire rocket engine is 3D printed in a single shot. The rocket is capable of being recovered and reused. The upper stage is also retained in space and used as an orbital platform . “If it feels like a satellite and functions like a satellite, you may as well make it a satellite,” said co-founder Srinath Ravichandran .
SatSure’s Prateep Basu notes that India’s talent is certainly impressive, but compared to the US and Europe, where the private space sector has been active and mature for much longer, India’s talent pool is still evolving . “What we need are more individuals who are industry-ready, equipped with practical skills and able to contribute meaningfully from day one in a commercial space-tech environment,” he said .
Conclusion
Pride in the origin of India’s space trajectory is valid, but let’s be clear: the past is prologue [citation:original text]. India’s space industry has the scale, talent and cost advantages that give it the chance not only to participate in this global race but also to set its own terms . But the lines we draw today will decide whether we are remembered as passengers in space, or as the ones who redrew the constellations ourselves .
Q&A Section
1. What is the significance of the Vikram-1 launch for India’s space sector?
The Vikram-1 launch marks the first time a privately developed Indian rocket has reached orbit, making India only the third country, after the US and China, with a private company capable of orbital launches. It validates the government’s policy of opening the space sector to private participation and demonstrates the growing capability of the Indian private sector .
2. What challenges does the Indian private space sector still face?
The sector faces four key challenges: (a) talent, as ISRO faces a brain drain of engineers to startups; (b) scale, as India needs to ramp up launch frequency to compete globally; (c) stiff global competition from SpaceX and others; and (d) finance, as growth capital for scaling space-tech start-ups remains scarce .
3. What is the talent crisis at ISRO, and why does it matter?
More than a hundred ISRO scientists have resigned in recent months, drawn by startups offering two to three times government pay, equity, and flat hierarchies. The Department of Space has moved to block routine exits of scientists working on flagship missions like Gaganyaan. While this redistribution could be healthy in a maturing ecosystem, it risks hollowing out the agency that remains the scaffolding for India’s space ambitions .
4. How is Agnikul Cosmos differentiating itself from Skyroot and other players?
Agnikul is focusing on liquid propulsion-driven systems with 3D-printed engines, which are more efficient and enable reusability. The company’s rocket is designed to be recovered and reused, with the upper stage retained in space as an orbital platform. Agnikul is targeting up to 50 launches a year by 2030 .
5. What does the future hold for India’s private space sector?
The sector is expected to grow from its current value of $8.4 billion to $40-45 billion by 2033 and $100 billion by 2040. While Skyroot’s success is a major milestone, the real test will be whether Indian startups can achieve repeatable manufacturing, build a real order book, secure launch-pad access, and raise enough capital to bridge the years to profitability. The next few flights and whether the cryogenic Vikram-2 arrives on schedule will tell us more [citation:original text].
In Defence of GDP as a Measure: Don’t Abandon It, Build Upon It
By T.C.A. Anant
New Delhi, July 20
I was recently at a conference where an eminent economist said it’s time to move beyond gross domestic product (GDP) and use broader measures in our discussions. His observations were clearly influenced by a recent report of the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Group titled, Counting what Counts: A Compass of Progress for People and Planet [citation:original text]. His remarks prompted a question. Economists have debated the limitations of GDP for more than half a century. Yet, despite repeated calls to replace it, GDP remains the single most influential statistic in economic policymaking. Why? [citation:original text]
The debate on moving beyond GDP often overlooks an important fact. GDP today is much more than a measure of economic activity or welfare. Over the past seven decades, it has become deeply embedded in the institutional architecture of modern economies. Governments use it to frame fiscal rules and budgets; financial regulators use it to monitor systemic risks; investors use it to assess sovereign and corporate performance; and international organizations use it to determine contributions and voting rights [citation:original text]. The question, therefore, is not simply whether GDP is an imperfect measure—which it undoubtedly is—but whether any alternative can perform all these functions with equal credibility and comparability [citation:original text].
The Institutional Entrenchment of GDP
One way to understand how GDP becomes embedded in governance is to examine why governments use it in routine budget-making. A recent OECD report on revenue statistics shows that since 1965, aggregate tax revenue as a share of GDP has remained remarkably stable, rising by about 9 percentage points. For most mature economies, the tax-to-GDP ratio stays within a narrow band for long periods unless there is a major policy reform or structural change [citation:original text]. In India too, the ratio has gradually increased, from 13% of GDP in the early 1980s to around 19% more recently. This stability is of great use to finance ministry officials, enabling them to forecast tax revenue for budgeting. A consequence of this medium-term stability is that it leaves a big hole in the arguments of critics who, in recent years, have been saying that India has been overestimating its GDP. Since aggregate tax revenue is a tangible measure audited by an independent agency, misrepresentation of GDP should have led this ratio to fall, but it did not [citation:original text].
GDP has also been embedded in many pieces of legislation. In India, for instance, the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act mandates that the Union government maintain its fiscal deficit at 3% of GDP. (That it has not done so for the last two-plus decades is another story.) This provision was inspired by a 1992 treaty of the European Union (the Maastricht Treaty), which required EU member states to keep their budget deficit at 3% of GDP [citation:original text]. In addition, GDP is used as an anchor in many legislative or regulatory frameworks. Thus, we have a NATO agreement on defence spending by member states; EU merger guidelines are triggered when the turnover of the concerned companies exceeds a specified percentage of the member country’s GDP; and so on [citation:original text]. The various metrics proposed in the UN High-Level Group’s report, while practicable, do not yet have cross-country comparability or methodologies that permit their use in a similar manner [citation:original text].
In addition to governments, private actors such as sovereign risk-rating agencies, bond and equity market investors, and multinational corporations use country GDP estimates and related indicators, either directly or as a key measure, while planning their activities. The UN and associated multilateral agencies use GDP and related indicators to assess member contributions [citation:original text].
The Network Good: Why GDP Persists
These examples can be expanded. GDP or GDP growth is not merely an indicator of a country’s performance; it has become a key component of the architecture of global governance. The widespread adoption of GDP by a wide range of stakeholders is not because they believe it is a perfect measure, but because it possesses three attributes that few other indicators combine [citation:original text].
First, it is produced regularly using an internationally agreed methodology, making it comparable across countries and over time. Second, it is sufficiently stable and well understood to serve as the basis for legislation, regulation and contracts. And third, it enjoys institutional legitimacy: governments, markets, multilateral agencies and courts accept it as an objective measure for setting fiscal rules, allocating resources and monitoring performance. Most proposed alternatives satisfy only the first of these conditions. Very few possess all three. To use an economist’s term, GDP has become more than a statistical measure; it is a network good. Its acceptability is driven substantially by the fact that others find it useful. Other indicators, therefore, face a huge challenge before they can replace GDP [citation:original text].
The “Beyond GDP” Movement and the UN’s Response
This discussion should not lead us to conclude that the call to reform GDP measurement is without merit. The debate has intensified significantly in recent years, with the UN’s “Beyond GDP” movement gaining traction. The UN Secretary-General’s Independent High-Level Expert Group report, “Counting What Counts,” proposes a dashboard of 31 indicators to measure well-being, equity, and sustainability . The report argues that GDP growth and public sentiment “have come apart,” and that “people increasingly believe their governments cannot meet their needs, and that the economic and political system is rigged toward the ultrawealthy” . The expert group’s framework is built on four pillars: foundational principles (peace, human rights), current well-being, equity and inclusion, and sustainability and resilience .
The case for a broader understanding of progress has been deemed urgent by the UN, with Secretary-General António Guterres stating, “This report is a landmark step in correcting a longstanding blind spot in measuring progress: the over-reliance on GDP” . The report acknowledges that while GDP “remains an essential measure of economic output, relying on GDP alone risks an incomplete picture of progress—one where the economy can grow even as critical dimensions of well-being, like safety or environmental quality, deteriorate sharply” .
The SNA 2025: Change with Continuity
The path forward, however, is very different from replacing GDP. The UN Statistical Commission outlined a solution to these challenges. The recently adopted System of National Accounts (SNA) 2025 does not seek to replace GDP with a broader measure of well-being or sustainability. Instead, it embraces a philosophy of “change with continuity.” It preserves GDP as the internationally comparable measure of production while expanding the statistical system through distributional accounts, environmental-economic accounting, and new measures that reflect digitalization and globalization [citation:original text].
As Steve MacFeely, an expert on national accounting, explains, the 2025 SNA introduced several changes to address measurement challenges arising from increasing globalization, digitalization, and longstanding criticisms regarding well-being and sustainability. These changes include the recording of depletion of natural resources as a cost of production, a greater emphasis on net measures to reflect actual value created by production, and the introduction of data as a produced asset in the national accounts . The SNA 2025 includes new chapters on wellbeing, sustainability, and digitalization—a first in its history—and treats the depletion of natural resources as a deduction from income, a significant step forward in overriding the “misleading compass” of economic statistics built on unsustainable resource extraction .
Why Alternatives to GDP Face a Huge Challenge
However, the implementation of these changes is not without difficulty. The 2025 SNA guidelines exceed 1,200 pages (compared to 662 pages in the 2008 edition), placing an enormous burden on countries and requiring substantial upfront investment in human and financial resources . Moreover, as of 2022, only two-thirds of countries had implemented the 2008 SNA guidelines, raising questions about the feasibility of broader adoption . The UN’s proposed dashboard of 31 indicators, while ambitious, faces practical challenges in terms of cross-country comparability, methodology, and institutional legitimacy .
This is where the argument of the original article finds its strongest footing. GDP has become so deeply embedded in the institutional architecture of governments, markets, and international organizations that replacing it is neither practical nor necessary [citation:original text]. Instead, the answer is to build around it—to supplement it with new metrics that capture well-being, sustainability, and equity, without abandoning the core measure that has served as the foundation of global economic governance for over seven decades [citation:original text].
The Indian Context: GDP as an Anchor
In India, the role of GDP as an anchor extends beyond the FRBM Act. As recent economic analysis shows, the tax-to-GDP ratio in India has gradually risen from about 13% in the early 1980s to around 19% more recently, and a key policy objective is to raise it further [citation:original text]. The FRBM Act’s fiscal deficit target of 3% of GDP, the debt-to-GDP ratio as a fiscal anchor, and the government’s goal of reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio to 50% by 2030 all rely on GDP as the denominator . The release of a new GDP series calibrated to a new base year has significant implications for these fiscal metrics, demonstrating how deeply GDP is embedded in India’s fiscal governance . The NIPFP has noted that the low tax-GDP ratio in India is a structural feature, resulting from tax exemptions, poor tax administration, and other factors, but the ratio itself is a critical benchmark for fiscal policy .
Conclusion
The call to “move beyond GDP” is well-intentioned and reflects genuine concerns about the inadequacy of GDP as a measure of well-being and sustainability. However, the solution is not to abandon GDP, but to recognize its institutional entrenchment and to build around it. As the UN Statistical Commission has done with the SNA 2025, the path forward is one of “change with continuity”—preserving GDP while expanding the statistical system to include measures that capture what truly matters for people and planet [citation:original text]. The answer, therefore, is not to move beyond GDP, but to build around it [citation:original text].
Q&A Section
1. Why does GDP remain the single most influential statistic in economic policymaking despite decades of criticism?
GDP remains influential because it has become deeply embedded in the institutional architecture of modern economies. It is used to frame fiscal rules and budgets, monitor systemic risks, assess sovereign and corporate performance, and determine contributions to international organizations. It possesses three critical attributes: it is produced regularly using an internationally agreed methodology, it is stable and well-understood for legislation and contracts, and it enjoys institutional legitimacy. This combination makes it a “network good”—its value increases as more stakeholders use it [citation:original text].
2. What is the “Beyond GDP” movement and what does the UN’s High-Level Expert Group propose?
The “Beyond GDP” movement calls for broader measures of progress that capture well-being, equity, and sustainability, not just economic output. The UN Secretary-General’s Independent High-Level Expert Group report, “Counting What Counts,” proposes a dashboard of 31 indicators covering four pillars: foundational principles (peace, human rights), current well-being, equity and inclusion, and sustainability and resilience. The report argues that GDP growth and public sentiment have diverged, and that GDP alone fails to reflect the lived realities of people .
3. What is the System of National Accounts (SNA) 2025 and how does it address the limitations of GDP?
The SNA 2025 is an updated international accounting standard adopted by the UN Statistical Commission in March 2025. It does not seek to replace GDP but to build upon it. The key changes include: recording depletion of natural resources as a cost of production, emphasizing net measures to reflect actual costs of production, introducing renewable energy resources and crypto assets as new asset classes, and including data as a produced asset. For the first time, it includes chapters on wellbeing, sustainability, and digitalization .
4. What are the practical challenges facing the adoption of “Beyond GDP” indicators?
The proposed “Beyond GDP” indicators face several hurdles: most alternatives lack cross-country comparability and established methodologies; they do not possess the institutional legitimacy of GDP; and they are not yet embedded in legislation, contracts, or international agreements. Additionally, implementing new indicators places a significant burden on national statistical systems, many of which are still struggling to implement existing SNA standards. The SNA 2025 guidelines exceed 1,200 pages, making adoption costly and complex .
5. How is GDP embedded in India’s fiscal governance and policymaking?
GDP is deeply embedded in India’s fiscal governance through: the FRBM Act, which mandates a fiscal deficit target of 3% of GDP; the debt-to-GDP ratio as a fiscal anchor, with a goal to reduce it to 50% by 2030; the tax-to-GDP ratio as a key benchmark for fiscal policy; and budget forecasting, where the stability of the tax-to-GDP ratio helps finance ministry officials forecast revenues. The recent release of a new GDP series with an updated base year has significant implications for these fiscal metrics [citation:original text].
The Risk of Jony Ive’s OpenAI Speaker is That Users Will Love It
By Parmy Olson
New Delhi, July 20
After sinking $6.5 billion in building its very first gadget, OpenAI cannot afford to lose it to a product graveyard that includes a failed browser, video generator and shopping tool [citation:original text]. The latest reports about the device suggest the company has settled on a strategy for making this one a winner: keep it at home and make it human-like [citation:original text].
OpenAI’s long-awaited device will be a screenless smart speaker that users can move from room to room. As reported, its defining feature will be its “personality” and ability to connect with users [citation:original text]. That means OpenAI is following a well-trodden path pioneered by Amazon’s Alexa. But it is also a potentially smarter approach to an AI product that people feel comfortable creating a personal relationship with, something that has eluded the wearable gadgets made by some of its smaller rivals [citation:original text].
The Smart Speaker Graveyard: A History of Unfulfilled Promise
Smart speakers have underwhelmed and disappointed for years because their underlying technology hit a capability plateau [citation:original text]. Instead of the sci-fi dream of a conversational companion, they have in practice become over-priced timers, music players and light switches [citation:original text].
Despite the advent of AI chatbots, it has not been easy for Amazon, Apple and Google to upgrade their speakers with the ability to fully converse [citation:original text]. Doing so required them to rebuild the devices to work with large language models, which are slow to process, expensive to run and sometimes hallucinate—without breaking the systems’ millions of existing functions [citation:original text]. Apple has yet to ship its virtual assistant Siri with a ChatGPT-style upgrade, but Amazon’s Alexa+ and Google’s Gemini for Home can now respond to users with natural speech and follow-up questions, and take a series of orders, like “dim the kitchen lights, play relaxing music and set a timer” [citation:original text].
Reviews for both souped-up assistants have generally been positive, meaning OpenAI is entering this market—unveiling its device in 2026 and release in 2027—just as Amazon and Google are figuring out how to thwart the AI giant [citation:original text]. A reviewer at Trusted Reviews found Gemini for Home lacking, noting it “can’t change alarms,” “can’t deal with PDFs,” and “gets caught out by simple questions,” concluding that “Amazon Alexa+ feels a long way ahead of Gemini for Home” . This suggests that the battle for smart speaker supremacy is far from over.
Jony Ive’s Moat: Personality and Proactivity
That requires Jony Ive, the former Apple designer whose team Sam Altman nabbed last year, to create a moat for his new employer [citation:original text]. Naturally, for a company that has built a product many people have become emotionally attached to, the answer lies in giving the device a personality [citation:original text]. It will probably have a name and, according to Bloomberg News, will include “mechanical elements that can move on their own, creating a sense that it is alive and not just an object responding to commands” [citation:original text].
The device will draw on personal information such as emails to build a picture of whoever owns it, and the pitch is proactivity—OpenAI wants the thing to anticipate needs and volunteer information rather than wait to be asked, growing more personalised as it learns its owner . This is a significant departure from the current smart speaker paradigm. Internally, OpenAI does not describe it as a speaker at all; it calls the product the first of its kind, a computer built for AI and aimed at making busy people more productive .
The Home Advantage: Learning from Wearable Failures
OpenAI is going down a potentially lucrative if morally fraught path [citation:original text]. That is why it makes sense for OpenAI to keep the device in the home rather than making it wearable or portable [citation:original text]. Other startups tried making AI companion gadgets, but in the form of pendants worn throughout the day. These have faced the same social discomfort issues that bedevilled Google Glass [citation:original text]. Talking to AI in public is awkward and wearing an on-device microphone feels invasive to others. Both issues go away when the device starts off in your house; and perhaps with enough earned familiarity, it could turn into a smaller product that fits in your pocket like a pen [citation:original text].
The failure of companion wearables is well-documented. Friend, which launched a massive marketing campaign for its AI pendant in New York City subways, received widespread public backlash; ads were widely defaced with messages like “Call your mom” . The public verdict on the wearable AI companion model has been “resoundingly clear,” with most people uninterested in being surveilled by a portable AI chatbot . Similarly, Humane’s AI Pin was hyped as the harbinger of a major new tech trend before it too failed to catch on with consumers, later selling its assets to HP . By keeping the device in the home, OpenAI is avoiding the social discomfort and privacy concerns that have plagued wearable companions.
Technical Hurdles and Legal Challenges
OpenAI’s expertise in frontier AI models will give it an edge on relationship-building too [citation:original text]. The new device will use an advanced version of ChatGPT’s new voice mode, which allows it to listen and speak simultaneously, so users can interrupt it mid-sentence without confusing the system [citation:original text]. This “full-duplex” voice capability sets it apart from current smart speakers, which require users to wait for the assistant to finish processing before they can speak again .
However, the project has faced significant roadblocks. OpenAI and Ive have struggled with deciding on the device’s “personality,” privacy issues, and budgeting for the computing power required to run OpenAI’s models on a mass consumer product . One source close to Ive noted, “Amazon has the compute for an Alexa, so does Google [for its Home device], but OpenAI is struggling to get enough compute for ChatGPT, let alone an AI device — they need to fix that first” .
Adding to these challenges, Apple has sued OpenAI for trade secret theft, seeking an injunction that could stall the launch. Apple’s complaint describes the allegations as merely “the tip of the iceberg,” while OpenAI denies wrongdoing, saying it’s seen no evidence the complaint has merit . OpenAI has also hired more than 400 people from Apple, the recruiting spree the lawsuit is really about .
The Morally Fraught Path: Attachment and Addiction
It is easy to point to established smart speakers and say that OpenAI is revisiting a tired user interface. But when the iPhone came out in 2007, several touchscreen phones existed. Steve Jobs and Ive simply created a better version. Ive could do the same with Altman [citation:original text].
A focus on companionship could create a similar hazard to the one about the smartphone. Alexa and Gemini are competing on usefulness and Apple calls Siri a utility, not a companion. But OpenAI is pioneering a potentially lucrative and morally fraught path with a device that competes on attachment and is engineered to feel alive [citation:original text].
That could find a loyal following among ChatGPT users who want a deeper connection than simply syncing the chatbot to their emails. How might that behaviour evolve when a personified ChatGPT is always at the ready in their home? If Ive is seeking redemption by building less-addictive technology, he may find that goal comes into direct conflict with his employer’s business model [citation:original text]. The irony is rich: the designer who helped give us the iPhone may now have to invent the thing that rescues us from living inside it . If he gets it right, he will not just design the next device; he will define the next human habit—if the iPhone was the gadget that made us look down, Ive’s next creation will be the one that finally makes us look up again .
Q&A Section
1. What is OpenAI’s first hardware device, and how does it differ from existing smart speakers?
OpenAI’s first hardware device is a portable, screenless smart speaker with a camera, environmental sensors, and mechanical moving parts designed to make it feel alive . Unlike existing smart speakers, it will run on a more advanced version of GPT-Live (full-duplex voice that listens and speaks simultaneously), will be proactive rather than reactive, and will draw on personal data like emails to anticipate needs . It is designed to move from room to room on a rechargeable battery and will have a “personality” .
2. Why is OpenAI focusing on the home rather than wearables for its first device?
Other startups that tried AI companion gadgets in wearable form (like Friend’s pendant and Humane’s AI Pin) failed to gain consumer traction due to social discomfort, privacy concerns, and the awkwardness of talking to AI in public . By keeping the device in the home, OpenAI avoids these issues and can build a relationship with users in a more natural, private setting [citation:original text]. The company hopes that enough earned familiarity in the home could eventually allow it to evolve into a smaller product [citation:original text].
3. What legal and technical challenges does the device face?
Legally, Apple has sued OpenAI for trade secret theft, alleging that OpenAI hired over 400 former Apple employees and that its hard product “veers significantly” from anything Apple sells—while Apple sells the HomePod . Apple seeks an injunction that could stall the launch . Technically, OpenAI and Ive have struggled with deciding the device’s “personality,” privacy issues, and budgeting for the computing power required to run OpenAI’s models on a mass consumer product .
4. What is the “full-duplex” voice technology, and why is it important?
Full-duplex voice, which OpenAI is using in GPT-Live, allows the device to listen and talk simultaneously . This means the user can interrupt the device mid-sentence without confusing the system, creating a more natural, human-like conversation. This is a significant improvement over current smart speakers, which typically require users to wait for the assistant to finish processing before they can speak again [citation:original text].
5. What are the moral concerns around a device engineered to form emotional attachments?
OpenAI is pioneering a potentially lucrative but morally fraught path by competing on attachment [citation:original text]. Unlike Alexa and Gemini, which compete on usefulness, and Siri, which is described as a utility, OpenAI’s device is engineered to feel alive and build a personal connection [citation:original text]. This could lead to the same addictive behaviors seen with smartphones. If Jony Ive, who has lamented the “unintended consequences” of his iPhone creation, is seeking redemption by building less-addictive technology, this goal may come into direct conflict with his employer’s business model of maximizing user engagement .
Bulldozer Action: The Supreme Court’s Pivot and the Enduring Battle for Due Process
By Aditi Nayar
New Delhi, July 20
The Supreme Court of India has passed a significant order shifting contempt petitions concerning alleged violations of its landmark 2024 “bulldozer justice” judgment to the respective High Courts . The decision, made on July 16, 2026, by a three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, acknowledges the practical difficulty of examining hundreds of cases involving disputed facts from across the country . This judicial move comes less than two years after the Supreme Court declared illegal demolitions conducted by States on private properties and homes, especially of people accused in criminal cases, as an “arbitrary use of power” .
The recent hearing, however, reveals a continuing challenge. Petitioners argue that demolitions have persisted despite the Court’s directions, and bulldozers are sometimes being used as instruments of intimidation or retribution . Authorities contend that illegal structures were razed after following the prescribed legal procedure . Determining the truth in each case requires evidence, records and detailed factual inquiry — tasks that high courts are better placed to undertake .
The 2024 Judgment: A Landmark Declaration
It was in November 2024 that the apex court had declared illegal demolition of private property, especially of people accused in criminal cases, as an “arbitrary use of power” by state governments . The SC had made it clear that guilt must be established through the judicial process, not through administrative force . The court’s November 2024 judgment termed the “chilling sight of a bulldozer demolishing a building, when authorities have failed to follow the basic principles of natural justice and have acted without adhering to the principle of due process” as a lawless state of affairs where “might was right” .
The judgment issued a series of directions mandating due process before demolition and stressing that the State cannot engage in retributive action. The court had established that erring officials would be hauled up for contempt and personally liable to restore the demolished property . The 95-page judgment followed petitions representing citizens from several States, including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, who had sought redress against the States’ “bulldozer culture”. They had complained that their properties were demolished by the State machinery without due process of law on the ground that they were accused of criminal offences. The petitions even claimed the demolitions had a communal tone .
The Rationale for Transfer: Disputed Facts and Procedural Practicality
On July 16, 2026, the Supreme Court Bench said High Courts were better suited to hear petitions seeking contempt proceedings against officials for violating the November 2024 judgment. Each one of the contempt petitions involves disputed facts which would require separate and in-depth enquiries, the Chief Justice said . The CJI even suggested separate Benches to hear the contempt pleas .
Justice Joymalya Bagchi, on the Bench, pointed out that the 2024 judgment had not specified that only the Supreme Court could hear contempt petitions. The third judge on the Bench, Justice S.V. Mohana, said the contempt petitions were from all over the country . “Whether there is contempt or not would itself be a disputed question. Maybe these are title disputes after all… In the High Courts, you may get a better opportunity to make your case on facts… Besides, if there is a violation of this judgment throughout the country, as you allege, can everybody come directly to the Supreme Court?” Justice Mohana addressed the contempt petitioners .
Senior advocate Huzeifa Ahmadi, for one of the petitioners, said some of the violations raised in the contempt proceedings were egregious. “Whether we could come directly to the Supreme Court depends on the facts of each case. We could come, even if it gets a little cumbersome, if the Supreme Court’s directions are being violated all over India… Ultimately, it is the rule of law which stands at a much higher footing,” Mr. Ahmadi responded . Mr. Ahmadi was appearing in a contempt petition on the partial demolition of the Madni Masjid in Hata town of Uttar Pradesh .
Senior advocate C.U. Singh flagged that the court’s intervention in 2024 had come at a time when State authorities and local administrations would proudly display bulldozers near demolished structures. “But the demolitions have continued in the teeth of the 2024 judgment, as if cocking a snook at the court,” Mr. Singh submitted . He was appearing in a contempt petition from Maharashtra . Mr. Ahmadi said the powers behind the bulldozers pick and choose their targets .
“Bulldozers must be used when the rule of law is thwarted by a comfortable corruption between municipal authorities and illegal encroachers… Bulldozers should not be used as a means of targeted reprisal by the State,” Justice Bagchi agreed .
The Arguments: Allegations of Violations and Spectacle
The petitioners’ legal counsel presented compelling arguments. Ahmadi argued that the court should still step in wherever violations were “egregious” and “patently evident from affidavits,” offering to demonstrate the same within 15 minutes if given the chance . His petition concerned the alleged illegal razing of mosques in Somnath. The demolition had reportedly followed a local politician’s letter asking “how can we have Asia’s largest mosque in this particular state.” Ahmadi insisted the structure in question did not stand on public land .
Singh, arguing a contempt case from Maharashtra, told the bench that several such demolitions were preceded by public declarations from local politicians announcing “bulldozer action” in advance. This sequence, he said, pointed to punitive intent rather than routine enforcement. Singh further claimed that the state’s own affidavit in his client’s matter showed that the process mandated by the Supreme Court had not been adhered to and that the hastiness of the demolition, combined with celebratory political statements afterwards, made the punitive character of the action self-evident .
Senior advocate Sanjay Hegde described how his client’s fruit juice stall had been destroyed by a bulldozer while a television anchor sat nearby live-telecasting the demolition. The nature of the demolition, he argued, captured how such actions had become spectacle rather than law enforcement .
The Bench’s Response: “Bulldozers Will Have to Roll” but Within Bounds
Pushing back on the request for direct intervention, the CJI highlighted that the 2024 judgment itself carved out exceptions under paragraph 94 for structures encroaching upon public land. He added that whenever authorities invoked these exceptions as defence, the matter became a factual dispute unsuited to the court’s contempt jurisdiction .
Justice Mohana, echoing the CJI’s arguments, questioned whether disputes once contested by the state could realistically be settled under contempt proceedings at all. “All over India, whatever happens, can everybody come directly to the Supreme Court?” she asked .
Justice Bagchi further noted that the 2024 ruling cannot be read “as a statute” and should be divorced from the facts of the case . Referring to contentious practice utilised by state governments, especially those governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), where authorities demolish homes and premises of individuals under the garb of anti-encroachment drives, Justice Bagchi remarked that “bulldozers will have to roll” when a “comfortable corruption” between municipal officials and illegal encroachers undermines the rule of law . Simultaneously, he cautioned that the same enforcement must not become a tool for targeting individuals or for overriding the presumption of innocence .
The Larger Issue: Political Symbolism and the Rule of Law
The larger issue goes beyond individual cases. The growing political symbolism attached to bulldozers represents a worrying shift in public perception, where instant destruction of buildings can be mistaken for effective governance . A constitutional democracy cannot measure justice by the speed at which punishment appears to be delivered. The rule of law requires patience, procedure and fairness .
The problem with bulldozer justice lies precisely in the fact that it substitutes spectacle for procedure. Demolitions carried out immediately after an alleged offence, often before investigations are completed, blur the distinction between punishment and an extrajudicial action carried out by the state. In such cases, the state assumes the role of investigator, judge and executioner at once. This dissolution of power between the organs of the state undermines the very principles that underpin a constitutional democracy .
The image of swift destruction creates an impression of decisive leadership, but it also normalises the idea that executive authority can override legal safeguards whenever public anger demands immediate retribution. Over time, this risks weakening institutional credibility and erodes citizens’ trust in lawful processes .
The SC’s November 2024 Guidelines: A Recap
The Supreme Court, in its November 2024 verdict, laid down a series of “binding directives” to fasten accountability on public officials . They include:
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15 days’ prior notice of demolition to the occupants; the notice must provide details of the nature of the unauthorised construction, specific violations and grounds warranting demolition .
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The owner or occupants who want to challenge the State action must be given a fair opportunity by the designated authority .
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The final order of the authority must have reasoned conclusions .
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The actual demolition must be videographed .
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Violation of the directions would lead to contempt action against the officials responsible and their prosecution. They would be personally liable for the restitution of the demolished property .
The Path Forward: High Courts as the First Line of Defence
The court finally issued the standard order, transferring the contempt petitions to the relevant High Courts. It said the High Court could obtain the necessary records and evidence from district courts while deciding these petitions. Any interim protections granted by the Supreme Court in these cases would continue . The court also requested the high courts to decide the matter preferably within four months .
The Supreme Court needs to ensure that the high courts do their job thoroughly and fairly . At the same time, protecting due process does not mean shielding encroachers or preventing legitimate enforcement of municipal laws. The Supreme Court has itself clarified that unauthorised structures on public land or those demolished under judicial orders cannot claim immunity . The concern is the alleged misuse of State power. A bulldozer may raze a building in minutes, but rebuilding public trust in institutions requires sustained adherence to constitutional principles .
Q&A Section
1. What was the Supreme Court’s landmark 2024 judgment on “bulldozer justice”?
In November 2024, the Supreme Court declared that illegal demolition of private property, especially of people accused in criminal cases, is an “arbitrary use of power” by state governments. The court ruled that guilt must be established through the judicial process, not through administrative force, and laid down pan-India guidelines including 15 days’ prior notice, a fair hearing, reasoned orders, and videography of demolitions .
2. Why did the Supreme Court transfer the contempt petitions to High Courts in July 2026?
The Supreme Court transferred the petitions because they involve disputed facts that require separate and in-depth enquiries. The court reasoned that High Courts are better placed to examine evidence and records, and it would be impractical for the apex court to hear hundreds of cases from across the country. The court also noted that its 2024 judgment had not specified that only the Supreme Court could hear contempt petitions .
3. What arguments did petitioners make about continued demolitions despite the 2024 judgment?
Petitioners argued that demolitions have persisted in the teeth of the 2024 judgment, with authorities “cocking a snook at the court.” Senior advocates highlighted specific cases including the demolition of mosques in Somnath, a fruit stall destroyed while being live-telecast, and multiple demolitions preceded by public declarations of “bulldozer action” by local politicians, indicating punitive intent rather than routine enforcement .
4. What was Justice Joymalya Bagchi’s observation about the proper and improper use of bulldozers?
Justice Bagchi remarked that “bulldozers will have to roll” when a “comfortable corruption” between municipal authorities and illegal encroachers undermines the rule of law. However, he cautioned that the same enforcement must not become a tool for targeting individuals or for overriding the presumption of innocence .
5. What are the key procedural safeguards mandated by the Supreme Court’s 2024 judgment?
The judgment mandated: 15 days’ prior notice of demolition to occupants with details of violations; a fair opportunity for owners to challenge the State action; reasoned conclusions in the final demolition order; videography of the actual demolition; and contempt action and personal liability for restitution against erring officials. These directions are not applicable to encroachments on public property or demolitions ordered by courts .
Scrap Smart: Haryana’s Bold Bet on Scientific Vehicle Scrappage and the Road to Clean Mobility
By Aditi Nayar
New Delhi, July 20
Haryana’s decision to introduce five incentive schemes for scientific vehicle scrappage marks an important shift in the way ageing automobiles are viewed . Instead of treating end-of-life vehicles as mere waste, the policy recognises them as a source of recyclable materials, green jobs and cleaner air. It is a welcome step towards building a circular economy [citation:original text].
The need is pressing. According to the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, India has over 3.4 crore end-of-life vehicles, including around 2 crore two-wheelers and 1.2 crore four-wheelers, many of which continue to ply on roads . These ageing vehicles emit significantly higher levels of particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide than newer models, worsening air pollution and public health [citation:original text]. Scientific scrappage can recover valuable steel, aluminium, copper and plastic, reducing dependence on virgin raw materials and lowering energy consumption in manufacturing [citation:original text].
The scale of the challenge is only set to grow. NITI Aayog has projected that the number of End-of-Life Vehicles (ELVs) in India could increase from 23 million in 2025 to 50 million by 2030, driven by rapid motorization and the growing penetration of electric vehicles . This makes a circular economy for the automotive sector not just an environmental necessity but a strategic imperative, central to realising the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision of sustainable and inclusive growth .
The Policy Framework: From Monopoly to Ecosystem
Haryana’s Industries and Commerce Department notified the five incentive schemes on July 14, 2026, under the Haryana Registered Vehicle Scrappage & Recycling Facility (RVSF) Incentive Policy, 2024 . The Registered Vehicle Scrappage & Recycling Facilities (RVS&RFs) are accorded the status of ‘industry’ for the purpose of such incentives . Together, the schemes establish a complete ecosystem for investment promotion, modern recycling infrastructure, research, innovation and skilled manpower development in the sector .
The five schemes are:
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Capital Subsidy Scheme: One-time financial assistance to eligible facilities set up in notified industrial blocks. The first 30 Micro and Small units will get a subsidy of 25% of capital expenditure, up to ₹40 lakh in Category D and C blocks, and ₹35 lakh in Category B blocks. The first 15 Medium units will receive 20% subsidy up to ₹50 lakh, while the first 15 Large units will get 10% subsidy up to ₹10 crore. The first two Mega projects will be eligible for 20% subsidy up to ₹20 crore .
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Net SGST Reimbursement Scheme: Under this, the first two Mega projects will get reimbursement of up to 50% of Net SGST for the first five years, followed by concessional reimbursement for another three years, linked to Fixed Capital Investment. Eligible MSME start-ups will get reimbursement of 50% of Net SGST for seven years .
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Park Developers Scheme: This envisages Eco Parks and Recycling Parks spread over 50 acres in Hyper/High Potential Zones, 25 acres in Medium Potential Zones and 15 acres in Low Potential Zones, with minimum investments ranging from ₹45 crore to ₹150 crore. Developers will get financial assistance equivalent to 10% of eligible project cost, up to ₹20 crore, along with stamp duty reimbursement of up to 100% .
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Scheme for Centre of Excellence for Skill Development: Three Centres of Excellence set up by government organisations, PSUs or private companies will get grant assistance equivalent to 50% of project cost, up to ₹5 crore .
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Scheme for Financial Assistance for Skill Development: Ten State Skilling Institutions, Government ITIs and Government Polytechnics will receive reimbursement of up to ₹25 lakh annually for five years, covering up to 75% of net training expenditure, with each institution required to train at least 125 candidates every year .
The National Context: Progress and Challenges
Haryana’s initiative comes at a critical juncture for the national vehicle scrappage programme. According to official data from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, 129 Registered Vehicle Scrapping Facilities (RVSFs) are currently operational across 21 States and Union Territories, and a total of 4,30,306 vehicles have been scrapped as of January 30, 2026 . The central government has allocated ₹2,000 crore under the Special Assistance to States for Capital Investment (SASCI) 2025-26 scheme to incentivize scrapping of old vehicles .
However, the first year of mandatory vehicle recycling obligations under the Environment Protection (End-of-Life Vehicles) Rules, 2025, which took effect on April 1, 2025, has revealed a significant compliance gap . The sector missed its steel-recovery obligations for FY26 by roughly 70 percent . Only about 2.42 lakh vehicles reached registered scrapping centres in FY26, a shortfall of roughly 5.2 lakh, close to 70 percent of the requirement . The gap is largely a supply gap: vehicles are simply not reaching authorised facilities in sufficient numbers .
The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) has estimated a one-time gross impact of around ₹25,000 crore for FY26 due to the shortfall, driven by provisioning against past sales under accounting standard Ind AS 37 . SIAM has written to the ministry seeking a phased transition, arguing that automated testing stations are generating negligible ELV volumes and that other automotive steel scrap should be permitted in the initial years until the recycling ecosystem matures .
The Supply Side: The Need for Public Trust and Incentives
This is where Haryana’s policy, and the broader national effort, faces its most critical test. The policy’s success will hinge on more than industrial participation. Vehicle owners must also become willing partners [citation:original text]. For many families, an old vehicle is not just a depreciating asset but a livelihood [citation:original text]. Unless they receive fair compensation, simple procedures and convenient access to authorised scrapping centres, many will continue to rely on the informal sector [citation:original text].
The experience of Abhishek K Kaiho Recyclers Pvt. Ltd., located near Manesar, Haryana’s first RVSF under the new framework, is instructive. The facility, set up with Japanese collaboration, has the capacity to scrap around 24,000 to 25,000 vehicles annually . The scrapping process for a car takes just 80 to 100 minutes, from registration to getting the scrapping certificate, and the government offers rebates on registration tax and discounts on new vehicles . Yet, despite these efficiencies, the sector is struggling to achieve its targets.
The Way Forward: A Multi-Pronged Strategy
Haryana’s integrated incentive package is expected to accelerate investment in organised vehicle scrapping and recycling facilities, facilitate creation of world-class recycling infrastructure, promote circular economy practices and generate skilled employment opportunities . However, as the article from the image correctly notes, “Cleaner air cannot be achieved by regulation alone. It requires policies that are economically viable, environmentally sound and socially fair” [citation:original text].
The state government has also taken other complementary measures. In June 2026, Haryana announced 100% Motor Vehicle tax exemption for new BS-VI-compliant trucks and buses, including electric vehicles (EVs) and CNG-powered vehicles, in NCR districts for a period of 10 years . This is designed to accelerate the replacement of older, high-emission commercial vehicles with cleaner alternatives . The government has also waived outstanding Motor Vehicle tax liabilities on BS-IV or older trucks and buses registered in Haryana’s NCR districts that have remained pending for more than one year . The policy requires BS-III and older vehicles to be scrapped at a Registered Vehicle Scrapping Facility within Haryana .
If Haryana succeeds in balancing these objectives, it could emerge as a national model for sustainable mobility — where yesterday’s vehicles become tomorrow’s resources, and cleaner skies become the shared dividend [citation:original text]. The challenge is real, but so is the opportunity. The success of this model will depend on whether the state can bridge the gap between industrial participation and public trust, ensuring that vehicle owners are not just passive subjects of regulation but active partners in the transition to a cleaner, more sustainable future.
Q&A Section
1. What five incentive schemes has Haryana introduced for vehicle scrappage?
Haryana has introduced: (1) Capital Subsidy Scheme providing one-time financial assistance up to ₹20 crore; (2) Net SGST Reimbursement Scheme offering reimbursement of up to 50%; (3) Park Developers Scheme for Eco Parks and Recycling Parks; (4) Scheme for Centre of Excellence for Skill Development; and (5) Scheme for Financial Assistance for Skill Development .
2. What is the scale of India’s end-of-life vehicle problem?
India has over 3.4 crore end-of-life vehicles, including around 2 crore two-wheelers and 1.2 crore four-wheelers [citation:original text]. NITI Aayog projects that the number of ELVs could increase from 23 million in 2025 to 50 million by 2030 . Many of these vehicles continue to ply on roads, emitting significantly higher levels of pollutants [citation:original text].
3. What is the current status of India’s vehicle scrappage programme?
As of January 30, 2026, 129 Registered Vehicle Scrapping Facilities (RVSFs) are operational across 21 States and UTs, and a total of 4,30,306 vehicles have been scrapped . The central government has allocated ₹2,000 crore for incentives under the SASCI 2025-26 scheme . However, the sector missed its FY26 steel-recovery obligations by roughly 70% .
4. What challenges does the vehicle scrappage programme face?
The primary challenge is the supply gap: vehicles are not reaching authorised facilities in sufficient numbers. Only about 2.42 lakh vehicles reached RVSFs in FY26, a shortfall of roughly 5.2 lakh vehicles . Many owners continue to rely on the informal sector due to concerns about fair compensation and convenience [citation:original text]. The cost of non-compliance to the industry is estimated at around ₹25,000 crore .
5. What complementary measures has Haryana taken to promote cleaner mobility?
Haryana has announced 100% Motor Vehicle tax exemption for new BS-VI-compliant trucks and buses, including electric vehicles and CNG-powered vehicles, in NCR districts for 10 years . The state has also waived outstanding Motor Vehicle tax liabilities on older vehicles and mandated that BS-III and older vehicles be scrapped at authorised RVSFs .
Shrinking Space for Independent Think Tanks: The Battle for Institutional Autonomy in India
By Ajay K. Mehra
New Delhi, July 20
Two recent events raise the question of whether independent think tanks, which have been part and parcel of India’s democratic journey since the Nehruvian era, can continue to exist [citation:original text]. First, the inauguration of a new FCRA (Foreign Contribution Regulation Act) 2.0 portal by Union Home Minister Amit Shah on June 30. Second, the reported notice to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) — the agency that has been providing core grants to the CSDS and 24 other institutions — for data manipulation [citation:original text].
The timing is telling. Just as the government modernises its regulatory machinery for foreign contributions, it appears to be tightening its grip on institutions that have long formed the bedrock of independent social science research in India. The question is no longer whether independent think tanks can survive, but what form they will take if they do.
The FCRA 2.0 Portal: Modernisation or Tightening Control?
On June 30, 2026, Union Home Minister Amit Shah launched the FCRA 2.0 Portal, a fully digital platform designed to simplify compliance under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act and strengthen monitoring and enforcement mechanisms . The portal, hosted on the Government Cloud (MeghRaj), includes features such as process re-engineering, an integrated dashboard, Aadhaar-based authentication, e-Sign facility, and OCR-based document analysis . It is integrated with major government databases and banks, including PAN, Aadhaar, OCI, NGO Darpan, and the ICAI’s UDIN system .
Shah framed the initiative as a governance upgrade: “When the intention is pure, policy is clear, and there is a mindset to embrace technology, then governance becomes easy for honest people and strict on wrongdoers” . He noted that prior to 2014, the FCRA system was “entangled in files and was beyond any monitoring,” and that the government had strengthened the system after coming to power .
The numbers underline why such an overhaul was considered necessary. India currently has nearly 14,500 active FCRA-registered organisations. Every year, authorities process approximately 15,000–20,000 applications along with nearly 17,000 annual returns . The new portal seeks to replace this with an integrated digital ecosystem capable of handling high transaction volumes while improving regulatory efficiency .
Yet, the underlying philosophy remains unchanged: FCRA’s monitoring is in the hands of the Ministry of Home Affairs, not the Finance Ministry, and the new portal’s stated purpose is to ensure that associations “function in a manner consistent with the values of a sovereign, democratic Republic, and that such acceptance is not used for activities detrimental to the national interest” [citation:original text]. This framing continues to blur the line between financial accountability and ideological conformity.
The CSDS Crisis: A Precedent-Setting Move
The controversy dates back to August 2025 when CSDS professor and political analyst Sanjay Kumar posted on X that the number of registered voters in Ramtek and Devlali in Maharashtra had declined sharply between the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. He later withdrew the post and apologised, saying the research team had misread the data . However, the damage was done.
On August 28, 2025, the ICSSR issued a show-cause notice to CSDS, questioning the “impartiality, objectivity, and quality” of its research, alleging possible political bias and a deliberate attempt to malign constitutional authorities . It also raised issues relating to the institute’s administration and finances, and constituted an inquiry committee to examine the matter .
The committee, in its report submitted to the ICSSR, is understood to have alleged “irregularities”: academic appointments in violation of UGC regulations, processing of financial matters without complying with General Financial Rules, and appointment of non-academic staff without public advertisement . It has recommended that ICSSR take action against CSDS as per its “grants-in-aid” rules, which can mean suspension of grants . The stakes are existential: CSDS receives nearly 83 per cent of its income from ICSSR grants, which fund approximately 90 per cent of its salary bill .
In a significant development, CSDS faculty broke their silence for the first time on July 10, 2026, expressing “deep concern” over the possibility of losing government funding. In a resolution passed at a faculty meeting, they noted that “never in the past” had faculty and staff been denied salaries — “Even in the years of the Emergency, which most CSDS faculty opposed, the ICSSR grant was not suspended” . The faculty also disclosed that CSDS has not received grants from the ICSSR since July 2025, and that salary disbursement has been “irregular” since then .
The CPR Precedent: A Cautionary Tale
The CSDS situation echoes the fate of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), another ICSSR-aided institution. In 2023, CPR faced a cascade of actions: an Income Tax Department survey in September 2022, suspension of its FCRA licence in February 2023, cancellation of its tax exemption status in June 2023, and finally, cancellation of its FCRA licence in January 2024 .
The government’s case against CPR was multi-pronged. The FCRA suspension order alleged that CPR had used foreign contributions for “purposes other than that for which it is registered” and “for undesirable purposes,” transferred foreign contributions to other entities, and was “publishing news articles in violation of section 3 of the Act” . The final cancellation order reportedly cited reports published by CPR on “current affairs programmes” as one of the reasons .
CPR has maintained that “the publication on its website of policy reports emanating from our research” has been “equated with current affairs programming” . The institution, which once employed 150 people, saw its staff strength reduced to just 20 . Its President, Yamini Aiyar, described the situation as “beleaguered but confident,” noting that funding had been “choked” and programming was down to a bare minimum . CPR has sought legal remedy, and the Delhi High Court has stayed the income tax proceedings .
The Historical Context: From Patronage to Regulation
The current tensions are not without precedent. The relationship between the state and independent research institutions in India has been complex from the outset. The Societies Registration Act, 1860, enabled literary, scientific and charitable societies to function with societal support, leading to the proliferation of several institutions [citation:original text]. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi enabled grants to stimulate India’s intellectual tradition, but also brought in the FCRA during the Emergency, invoking the “foreign hand” to regulate foreign funding [citation:original text].
The establishment of the Indian Council of Social Science Research in 1969, at the initiative of educationist Prof JP Naik, enabled academic institutions such as CSDS and CPR to pursue independent research with core grants [citation:original text]. Yet, as the CSDS faculty resolution noted, “It will not be an exaggeration to say that the CSDS has been one of ICSSR’s flagship institutes” — and even it is now facing an existential threat .
The Broader Implications: A Shrinking Space
The implications of these developments extend far beyond CSDS and CPR. The ICSSR provides core grants to 25 institutions across India. The discontinuation of the ICSSR grant to intimidate such institutions has been done for the first time [citation:original text]. These institutions have no other financial resources, given India’s weakness in philanthropy [citation:original text]. As the CSDS faculty warned, any attempt to “shut down or financially cripple” the institution would be “a major loss for ideas all over the Global South” and would cause “irremediable hardship” to its staff .
The broader question is whether independent think tanks can continue to exist in an environment where research that exposes loopholes in government programmes is met with stricter scrutiny [citation:original text]. As the original article noted, “In several research papers and analyses, the present political dispensation comes out on the wrong side of the democratic practice. When this is exposed, the whip is cracked” [citation:original text].
There is, however, a precedent for a different approach. During Narasimha Rao’s government, when the CPR was conveyed the government’s displeasure on some critical writings, its founding Director, Dr Vai Pai Panandiker, wrote back that CPR did not have any political view, but its faculty had the academic freedom to express themselves and be critical of the government. The matter ended there [citation:original text]. That spirit of tolerance and mutual respect appears to be in short supply today.
Q&A Section
1. What is the FCRA 2.0 Portal and when was it launched?
The FCRA 2.0 Portal is a fully digital platform launched by Union Home Minister Amit Shah on June 30, 2026, to simplify compliance under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act and strengthen monitoring of foreign contributions. It includes Aadhaar-based authentication, e-Sign facility, and integration with government databases like PAN, Aadhaar, and NGO Darpan .
2. What action has the ICSSR taken against the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)?
The ICSSR has issued a show-cause notice to CSDS and formed an inquiry committee that has recommended action against the institute under its grants-in-aid rules. This could mean suspension of grants that account for 83 per cent of CSDS’s income. CSDS has not received ICSSR grants since July 2025, and salary disbursement has been irregular since then .
3. What happened to the Centre for Policy Research (CPR)?
CPR faced a series of actions: an Income Tax survey in September 2022, suspension and eventual cancellation of its FCRA licence in 2024, and cancellation of its tax exemption status. The FCRA cancellation cited CPR’s publication of “reports on current affairs programmes” as a violation. CPR’s staff strength fell from 150 to 20 .
4. What did the CSDS faculty say about the possibility of losing funding?
In a resolution passed on July 10, 2026, CSDS faculty expressed “deep concern” over the potential loss of government funding, noting that “even in the years of the Emergency, which most CSDS faculty opposed, the ICSSR grant was not suspended.” They warned that any attempt to “financially cripple” the institution would be “a major loss for ideas all over the Global South” .
5. What is the historical context of government support for independent think tanks in India?
Independent think tanks have been part of India’s democratic journey since the Nehruvian era. The Indian Council of Social Science Research was established in 1969 to enable institutions like CSDS and CPR to pursue independent research with core grants. The FCRA was introduced during the Emergency to regulate foreign funding. The current situation, with the discontinuation of ICSSR grants to intimidate institutions, is unprecedented [citation:original text].
Serving Nomadic Communities: When Public Services Move With the Citizen
By Abdul Khabir
New Delhi, July 20
During one of my field postings, I remember standing on a road near the Pir Panjal and watching a Bakarwal family pass by. The family had already been on the road for several weeks. Their forefathers had camped there along the same route, as they told me [citation:original text]. That family came back to my mind when I read that the United Nations had declared 2026 as the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, with July set aside for services and infrastructure for pastoral communities [citation:original text].
How do official services remain accessible to such families who spend months away from their permanent address? For a Bakarwal family, leaving Rajouri or Poonch and crossing the Pir Panjal to reach a summer pasture in Kashmir is not just a change of place. The family is continuing a way of life that has been built over generations [citation:original text].
The Global Context: The International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists
The proclamation of 2026 as the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists by the United Nations General Assembly reflects an important recognition: pastoralism is far more than a means of livelihood. It is a dynamic way of life, deeply rooted in diverse ecosystems, cultures, identities and traditional knowledge that has enabled communities to live sustainably with nature over generations .
Rangelands stretch across nearly half the world’s land surface and pastoralism sustains several hundred million people. In Jammu and Kashmir, these figures became real for me when I met families along the migration routes . Rangelands provide almost 70 per cent of livestock feed globally, making them critical to food systems . Up to half of the world’s rangelands are now degraded or at risk, with serious consequences for food and water security, biodiversity, climate resilience and rural livelihoods . As UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted, “To protect our future, we must protect the land. Together, let us ensure that rangelands everywhere thrive for generations to come” .
The Transhumant Reality of Jammu and Kashmir
Different pastoral communities follow their own routes and rhythms. The Gujjars, Bakarwals, Gaddis and Sippis move according to the geography and climate of the areas they inhabit [citation:original text]. The Changpas herd their pashmina goats across the cold desert of Ladakh. The Van Gujjars descend from the Shivaliks with their buffaloes each winter. The Raikas of Rajasthan and the Dhangars of the Deccan follow their own calendars. Their routes and timings have developed around local weather, water availability and grazing conditions . These communities carry detailed knowledge of pastures, water sources, weather, livestock and mountain routes. In many cases, they understand the land through experience passed from one generation to the next [citation:original text].
The first survey of transhumance conducted by the Tribal Affairs Department in 2021, aimed at evidence-based policy making, pegged the ethnic migratory pastoral population at 612,000—the largest anywhere in the world . This section—Gujjars, Bakerwals, Gaddi, Sippi, Dard-Shin and Bot—constitutes more than 30 per cent of the UT’s tribal population . At nearly 6 lakh, the transhumant tribal population of Jammu & Kashmir is more than the total population of many countries such as the Maldives, Iceland, Malta, Suriname, Luxemburg, and Brunei. To be precise, the transhumant population is more than the individual population of as many as 55 countries in the world . The nomadic population is believed to be around 25% to 30% of the total tribal population in Jammu & Kashmir .
The transhumant population in J&K undertakes four different migration patterns: Intra-district, where people migrate from villages in plains to highland pastures; Inter-district migration involving movement from Jammu plains to highlands in Udhampur and Chenab region; Inter-province migration covers the maximum population, involving movement from most districts in Jammu province to the Kashmir province; and less than one-tenth takes the inter-state/Union Territory route, reaching Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab . The migration journey can range from two weeks to up to four to six weeks, involving halts at various transit points. In many cases, the groups travel up to 600 km on foot, along with livestock .
The biannual migration involves travelling—this includes women, children and the elderly—up to 600 km along with livestock and household goods . “Dhoks” or “Behaks” are the tribal habitations in highland pastures that are inhabited for more than half of the year. The survey revealed that there are 168 such “Dhoks” with a cumulative population of 1,16,207 . These hitherto ‘missing villages’ will now find a place on the policy and developmental maps .
The Challenge of Service Delivery
But public services are organised through fixed locations and mobile initiatives extend their reach to pastoral families during seasonal migration. Schools, health centres, ration depots, veterinary institutions and revenue offices form the village-based network through which services reach communities [citation:original text]. A migratory family may remain away from that place for a few months. Because of mountain terrain and long distances, reaching the nearest institution during migration can take a lot of time [citation:original text].
This is where planning suited to migratory families becomes important [citation:original text]. For pastoral families, planning can consider not only their home village but also their routes, resting points, water sources, mountain passes and summer pastures . Surveys conducted while families are on the move can complement administrative information. Departmental activities can be aligned with migration seasons. Bringing different services to the same transit point during the same period can improve access and coordination [citation:original text].
The 2021 Survey: A Watershed Moment
I saw this firsthand in 2021. The J&K Tribal Affairs Department carried out a special survey and geo-tagging exercise covering more than six lakh members of the migratory tribal population. The population was spread across large areas and was constantly moving. But the survey helped the administration understand where these families lived during different seasons and the routes they followed [citation:original text]. The comprehensive survey was conducted with a budgetary allocation of Rs 3 crore, involving more than 10,000 officials who traversed difficult terrains to reach the highland pastures . The survey would be followed by complete documentation and issuance of smart cards with all details to the people of nomadic tribes .
Mobile Schools: Education on the Move
Mobile schools are another notable example. The schools accompany children during their movement to pastures [citation:original text]. In Jammu and Kashmir, mobile schools for tribal people are a unique educational project aimed at solving the difficulties that the nomadic tribal communities face. With their livestock, these people have always moved seasonally, spending the summers on highland pastures and the winters at lower elevations. Many tribal children are deprived of basic literacy and education because of this continuous travel, which breaks up their educational continuity .
The concept of mobile schools was implemented to address this problem. When nomadic families move seasonally, these specially designed portable schools—often housed in tents or vehicles—move with them. The curriculum frequently incorporates locally spoken languages and culturally acceptable materials, emphasizing life skills alongside literacy . The Seasonal Education Programme, launched in 2003 through a collaboration between the J&K government and the central government, recruits hundreds of teachers every year to run these mobile classrooms in remote pastures . Government data shows that 28,518 children were enrolled in seasonal schools in 2015–16, and 22,946 in 2016–17. Recent reports suggest the number has now risen to over 33,000 children, taught by nearly 1,500 seasonal teachers each year across Jammu and Kashmir .
For children like Ifrat, a young girl in these seasonal schools, these schools mean everything. “My grandfather, father and mother take the goats out to graze. But I don’t go with them. I come to school. I want to become a doctor,” she said . Despite the challenges—teachers like Hilal Ahmed walk nearly seven kilometres daily to reach their students, often in harsh weather—these tent schools are a lifeline . As one tribal elder noted, “Every summer, we bring our livestock here—and now, our children can study too” . However, the challenges remain immense: as the teacher noted, “The government gives us tents, but when it rains, they leak. We have to shut down for the day” .
Practical Lessons for Coordinated Planning
Four practical lessons from this work stand out .
First, the route mapping undertaken in 2021 provides a valuable foundation for regular updating and more detailed documentation. Major migratory routes can be documented in detail, including traditional resting places, water points, grazing areas, difficult stretches, approximate dates of movement and the places where families halt . Sharing this information across education, health, animal husbandry, food supplies, revenue and tribal affairs can provide a common basis for coordinated planning [citation:original text].
Second, departments have worked together well during these drives and that cooperation can be taken to the important resting points along the routes. During the migration period, common camps can bring together veterinary care, vaccination, health check-ups, immunisation, school enrolment, Aadhaar updates and verification of entitlements . This saves the family’s time and also enables departments to reach more people in an organised manner .
Third, portability measures are helping ration cards, health entitlements and school records remain useful when families move away from their permanent place of residence. One Nation One Ration Card has opened up food entitlements outside the home location . The Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana allows eligible beneficiaries to receive cashless treatment at empanelled hospitals . For a pastoral family, the value of these schemes is greatest when access remains available during the journey, at transit points and near summer pastures .
Fourth, the detailed knowledge of herders can also be incorporated through existing participatory planning mechanisms . The herders I have met know which routes stay open in which months, where water is available, which pastures are under stress and which passes turn dangerous after snowfall . The participatory planning mechanisms provide a suitable way to record this knowledge and use it when deciding where and when services can be provided .
Portability of Entitlements: A Critical Enabler
For pastoral families, the lack of identity documentation is a persistent barrier. Families are often on migration when identity documents are issued in home villages. This leads to restricted access to social entitlements including housing, political recognition and financial services . Children are often born in fields, making the entire process of registration of birth, infant immunization, antenatal care and maternal health extremely difficult . Lack of identification means migratory groups are not able to access provisions such as subsidized food, fuel, health services, or education .
The portability measures mentioned above address this gap. However, the enumeration of pastoralist communities remains a critical need. No exact population figures for pastoralist communities exist in India. Enumeration of populations and disaggregated data particularly for marginalised groups are vital in order to assess the extent of the health, education, and economic barriers they face .
A Model for the Future
What is encouraging is that much of the groundwork is already in place. The administration has surveys, digital platforms, departmental coordination mechanisms, gram sabhas, health camps, veterinary outreach programmes and welfare schemes. Together, these tools provide a strong framework for serving people who move seasonally .
The International Year gives us an occasion to recognise this work and share its lessons more widely. India has a wide administrative network and strong digital systems. It also has long experience of working with communities living in varied geographical and social conditions . Jammu and Kashmir, in particular, has much to contribute because seasonal migration is part of the social and economic life of the region .
Good governance means taking services to the doorstep of the citizen. For a pastoral family, that doorstep changes with the season. The administration has a sound framework for responding to this seasonal reality [citation:original text]. When the citizen moves, the reach of the State can move with the citizen . This principle of mobile governance—where public services are as adaptive as the communities they serve—represents the gold standard for a truly inclusive welfare state. The examples from Jammu and Kashmir’s tent schools to Rajasthan’s bus-based mobile classrooms demonstrate that India has the imagination and capability to bring governance to the last mile, even when that mile moves with the seasons.
Q&A Section
1. Why was 2026 declared the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists by the United Nations?
The UN declared 2026 as the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists to recognize that pastoralism is far more than a means of livelihood—it is a dynamic way of life deeply rooted in diverse ecosystems, cultures, identities and traditional knowledge that has enabled communities to live sustainably with nature over generations. Rangelands cover more than half of the Earth’s land surface and support hundreds of millions of people directly or indirectly .
2. What is the scale of the transhumant tribal population in Jammu and Kashmir?
The first survey of transhumance conducted by the Tribal Affairs Department in 2021 pegged the ethnic migratory pastoral population at 612,000—the largest anywhere in the world. This section constitutes more than 30 per cent of the UT’s tribal population . At nearly 6 lakh, the population is more than the total population of many countries, including the Maldives, Iceland, Malta, and Suriname .
3. What are “dhoks” or “behaks” and why are they significant?
“Dhoks” or “Behaks” are the tribal habitations in highland pastures that are inhabited for more than half of the year. The 2021 survey revealed 168 such “Dhoks” with a cumulative population of 1,16,207. These were previously “missing villages”—now under consideration for proposed tribal welfare schemes .
4. What are mobile schools and how do they work in Jammu and Kashmir?
Mobile schools are portable schools that accompany nomadic communities during their seasonal migration. They are often housed in tents or vehicles and move with the families. The Seasonal Education Programme, launched in 2003, recruits hundreds of teachers annually. Recent reports suggest over 33,000 children are now enrolled in seasonal schools across J&K, taught by nearly 1,500 seasonal teachers each year .
5. What practical lessons can be learned from the 2021 survey of the transhumant population?
Four key lessons stand out: (1) route mapping provides a foundation for coordinated planning across departments; (2) common camps at resting points can bring together multiple services like health, veterinary care, and school enrolment; (3) portability measures like One Nation One Ration Card and Ayushman Bharat enable families to access entitlements even when away from home; and (4) traditional knowledge of herders can be incorporated through participatory planning mechanisms .
AI’s Governance Sutras ~ II: The Financial Sector Writes the First Draft of India’s AI Rulebook
By Aditi Nayar
New Delhi, July 20
Finance did not wait for the national framework; it wrote the first draft of it . Three months before the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) published its national AI governance guidelines in November 2025, the Reserve Bank of India released its committee’s report on a Framework for Responsible and Ethical Enablement of Artificial Intelligence – the FREE-AI report, submitted on 13 August 2025 – setting out seven guiding sutras, twenty-six recommendations and six pillars: infrastructure, policy, capacity, governance, protection and assurance .
Those seven sutras are, in substance, the seven that MeitY would adopt for the nation in November . The finance regulator drew the thread first, and the country took it up; for the practitioner, that lineage is not trivia but a signal – the sutras reach finance already load-bearing, road-tested in the economy’s most regulated corner before being applied to the whole .
The FREE-AI Report: A Blueprint for Responsible Innovation
The RBI constituted the FREE-AI Committee in December 2024, chaired by Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Professor at IIT Bombay, with a distinguished panel including Debjani Ghosh of NITI Aayog, Dr. Balaraman Ravindran of IIT Madras, and Rahul Matthan of Trilegal . The Committee’s mandate was to assess AI adoption in financial services, review global regulatory approaches, identify risks, and recommend a governance framework for responsible and ethical AI adoption in the Indian financial sector .
The Committee’s report, released on 13 August 2025, articulated seven guiding principles or “Sutras” :
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Trust is the Foundation – Building and protecting public trust in AI systems.
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People First – Final decision-making should vest with humans, not AI models; human safety, awareness, and interests must be protected during AI-customer interactions.
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Innovation over Restraint – Responsible innovation should be prioritized over cautionary restraint.
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Fairness and Equity – AI models should act in an unbiased and non-discriminatory manner.
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Accountability – Entities deploying AI are accountable for the actions of such AI models, irrespective of the autonomy permitted.
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Understandable by Design – AI models should be transparent, with decisions traceable to comprehensible, human logic.
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Safety, Resilience and Sustainability – AI models should be sustainable and resilient to physical, infrastructural, and cyber risks.
The framework is structured around six strategic pillars that treat innovation enablement and risk mitigation as complementary forces . Under innovation enablement, the focus is on Infrastructure, Policy and Capacity; for risk mitigation, the focus is on Governance, Protection and Assurance . The report outlines 26 specific recommendations, including the establishment of shared infrastructure to democratise access to data and compute, the creation of an AI Innovation Sandbox, the development of indigenous financial sector-specific AI models, institutional capacity building, and a more tolerant approach to compliance for low-risk AI solutions .
From Principles to Practice: Mapping AI Applications to Sutras
The true test of any governance framework lies in its application. The FREE-AI sutras provide a lens through which to evaluate specific AI applications in the financial sector .
AI-driven lending answers above all to Fairness and Equity . The danger is not merely a bad loan but a discriminatory one – bias laundered through a training set and reproduced at scale . When an algorithm decides who gets credit and who does not, the consequences can entrench existing inequalities. The model risk management guidance issued by the RBI on 24 June 2026 addresses this directly, requiring regulated entities to adopt board-approved frameworks with explicit controls for explainability, bias testing, hallucination detection, and data drift monitoring .
Algorithmic and AI-assisted trading answers to Understandable by Design . A strategy no one can explain is a strategy no one can supervise . SEBI’s circular of 4 February 2025 requires every algorithmic strategy to be registered with the exchange and tagged with a unique Algo ID before it goes live, mandatory from 1 April 2026 . The framework splits algorithms into disclosed “white box” and opaque “black box” categories, pushing the latter’s providers towards registration and documentation . Explainability, here, is not an ethical nicety; it is the precondition of supervision . SEBI’s new norms, effective from 1 April 2026, mandate brokers to maintain detailed records of all algo trades, including time, price, quantity, and order IDs to ensure auditability, and require two-factor authentication for API access .
AI-generated ESG ratings turn on Accountability . When a score moves capital, someone must own the judgement the machine appears to have made . Yet ESG ratings carry a double opacity – corporate data that is often self-reported and unverified, run through a weighting model that is itself proprietary – so that greenwashing can enter at the input layer and again at the scoring layer . SEBI brought ESG-rating providers under a registration framework in 2023 and, in February 2026, constituted a working group to review it .
AI-assisted audit commentary engages Accountability and Understandability at once . The auditor who leans on a model still signs the opinion . As machine tools move into working papers, and with revised auditing standards set to take effect for Indian audits from April 2026, the profession has not yet fixed the documentation a machine-assisted judgement demands . A model can flag an anomaly; it cannot decide whether the anomaly is fraud or a legitimate change in the business . The signature at the foot of the report is still a human one .
The Cost of Getting It Wrong: Enforcement in Action
The cost of getting AI governance wrong is not hypothetical . In an interim order of July 2025, SEBI impounded Rs 4,843.57 crore in alleged unlawful gains from a US-based trading group accused of manipulating the Bank Nifty on derivative-expiry days – buying index constituents through the morning to lift the index, then reversing in the afternoon to profit from far larger options positions . The case vindicated the traceability architecture the regulator had already built .
The risk is not marginal. The RBI’s Financial Stability Report of June 2026, surveying thirty-three scheduled commercial banks and ten large non-bank lenders, found AI-enabled cyber threats ranked as the single most significant risk institutions expected over the coming year, ahead of ransomware and phishing . This is a board-level exposure, not a technology-department one, and it lands squarely on the audit committee’s desk .
The RBI’s Model Risk Management Guidance: Building the Bhashya
The transition from sutra to working standard – from principle to method – is now underway. On 24 June 2026, the RBI released draft ‘Guidance on Regulatory Principles for Model Risk Management’, open for comment until 24 July 2026 .
The draft guidance represents a comprehensive framework covering all models used by regulated entities – whether built in-house, bought from a vendor, or a combination – with explicit controls for explainability, bias, hallucination and data drift, and a “kill switch” for models that misbehave . Its decisive move is to make accountability non-transferable: outsourcing a model to a fintech vendor does not outsource the liability for what it decides .
Key provisions of the draft guidance include :
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Board-approved Model Risk Management Framework (MRMF): Every regulated entity must adopt a comprehensive framework covering the entire model lifecycle – selection and development, validation, approval, deployment, monitoring, change management, business continuity, and decommissioning.
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Risk-based model tiering: Models must be classified based on materiality, complexity, and other relevant factors. Models with ‘high’ or equivalent risk require approval from the Risk Management Committee of the Board.
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Independent model validation: A function independent of model development, ownership, and use must validate all models to ascertain fitness, efficiency, and alignment with intended purpose.
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Three lines of defence: Model owners as the first line, an independent model risk management and validation function as the second line, and internal audit as the third line.
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Third-party model governance: Enhanced controls for models sourced from vendors, including mandatory documentation of model cards, bias-test results, and explainability documentation as conditions of contract.
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AI/ML-specific requirements: Explicit controls for explainability, bias testing, hallucination detection, and data drift monitoring.
The Accountability Principle: You May Deploy the Model, But You May Not Outsource the Responsibility
The same principle already binds the securities markets. SEBI’s Regulation 16C, in force from 10 February 2025, makes the intermediary the single point of accountability for every AI system it deploys, and its consultation paper of 20 June 2025 rests on six pillars – ethics, accountability, transparency, auditability, data privacy and fairness . You may deploy the model, but you may not outsource the responsibility .
This principle of non-transferable liability is a critical safeguard. It ensures that financial institutions cannot evade accountability by blaming their technology vendors. It forces them to conduct proper due diligence on their AI providers, to understand how their models work, and to maintain the documentation and oversight necessary to defend their decisions.
The Frontier Ahead: From Principle to Method
What the profession now lacks is not principle but method – the bhāṣya that turns a sutra into a working standard . Two are worth proposing concretely.
The first is an assurance framework for AI-assisted disclosures under Ind AS, where a model may draft a note to the accounts, an expected-credit-loss estimate under Ind AS 109, an impairment test under Ind AS 36, or a fair-value measurement under Ind AS 113 . Before relying on such output, the auditor should independently test three things: the provenance of the training data, documented and evidenced rather than asserted; the monitoring of model drift between reporting dates; and a complete human-override log, showing where a person changed the machine’s output and why . Where the model is a vendor’s, the same evidence – model cards, bias-test results, explainability documentation – should be a condition of the contract, not an afterthought .
The second is a control framework for machine-learning fraud detection: disclosure of the model’s own false-positive and false-negative rates, revalidation on a fixed cadence rather than at installation alone, and explainability documentation adequate to defend every automated flag that ripens into a Suspicious Transaction Report filed with the Financial Intelligence Unit – in language a regulator, and if need be a court, can read .
Conclusion: The Commentary is Now Being Written
None of this waits on a new statute; all of it can be built now . For four decades the financial professions have read the terse language of statute and standard and supplied the working meaning that lets others act on it. The AI sutras ask nothing different of them, only sooner and at higher stakes . A sutra, the grammarians knew, is inert without its commentator. India’s financial professionals are now that commentary .
The framework for AI governance in India is not being built from scratch. It is being layered onto existing regulatory architecture – the IT Act, the DPDP Act, the Consumer Protection Act, and sector-specific frameworks issued by the RBI, SEBI, IRDAI, and TRAI . The FREE-AI report and the Model Risk Management guidance represent the first comprehensive attempt to operationalize AI governance in the financial sector. The challenge ahead is to ensure that these principles are translated into effective practice – that the sutras are given their bhāṣya – and that India’s financial institutions remain accountable, transparent, and fair as they embrace the transformative power of artificial intelligence.
Q&A Section
1. What is the FREE-AI report and when was it released?
The FREE-AI (Framework for Responsible and Ethical Enablement of Artificial Intelligence) report was released by the Reserve Bank of India on August 13, 2025. It was prepared by a committee chaired by Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya of IIT Bombay, with a mandate to assess AI adoption in financial services, review global regulatory approaches, identify risks, and recommend a governance framework for responsible AI adoption in the financial sector .
2. What are the seven guiding principles or “Sutras” proposed in the FREE-AI report?
The seven Sutras are: (1) Trust is the Foundation, (2) People First, (3) Innovation over Restraint, (4) Fairness and Equity, (5) Accountability, (6) Understandable by Design, and (7) Safety, Resilience and Sustainability . These principles guide the development, deployment, and governance of AI systems in the financial sector.
3. What is the RBI’s draft Guidance on Regulatory Principles for Model Risk Management?
The draft guidance, released on June 24, 2026, is a comprehensive framework applicable to all models used by regulated entities – whether built in-house, bought from a vendor, or a combination. It requires board-approved Model Risk Management Frameworks, independent model validation, risk-based model tiering, and explicit controls for explainability, bias testing, hallucination detection, and data drift monitoring. The guidance also includes a “kill switch” for models that misbehave .
4. What is SEBI’s framework for regulating algorithmic trading?
SEBI’s circular of 4 February 2025 requires every algorithmic strategy to be registered with the exchange and tagged with a unique Algo ID before it goes live, mandatory from 1 April 2026. The framework splits algorithms into “white box” (transparent) and “black box” (opaque) categories, with differentiated compliance requirements. It mandates brokers to maintain detailed records of all algo trades, implement two-factor authentication for API access, and maintain audit trails .
5. What is the principle of non-transferable accountability in AI governance?
The principle, established by both the RBI and SEBI, holds that outsourcing a model to a fintech vendor does not outsource the liability for what it decides. SEBI’s Regulation 16C makes the intermediary the single point of accountability for every AI system it deploys. This ensures that financial institutions cannot evade accountability by blaming their technology vendors .
Energy Crossroads: India at the Centre of the US-Russia Sanctions Dilemma
By Aditi Nayar
New Delhi, July 20
Trade policy has often been used as an instrument of strategic pressure, but when it collides with global energy markets, the consequences rarely remain confined to the intended targets. A proposed US move to impose 100 per cent tariffs on the world’s largest buyers of Russian crude reflects an attempt to tighten economic pressure on Moscow. Yet it also exposes the difficult balance between geopolitical objectives and the realities of international energy security. India finds itself at the centre of this dilemma. Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, discounted Russian crude has evolved from being an opportunistic purchase into a cornerstone of India’s energy strategy. For a country that imports more than four-fifths of its crude oil requirements, affordability and supply stability are not commercial preferences; they are national imperatives [citation:original text]. Access to cheaper Russian oil has helped moderate import costs, supported refinery operations and reduced the inflationary pressures that higher global crude prices inevitably transmit to consumers [citation:original text].
Any measure that seeks to disrupt these flows must therefore answer a fundamental question: where will equivalent volumes come from? The global oil market is not characterised by abundant spare capacity. Producers outside Russia cannot effortlessly replace millions of barrels a day without driving prices higher [citation:original text]. The continuing fragility of maritime routes in West Asia only reinforces this uncertainty. A policy intended to isolate Russia could inadvertently tighten global supplies, making oil more expensive for allies and adversaries alike [citation:original text].
That is why the latest proposal appears more calibrated than earlier, more sweeping versions. The dilution of the punitive measures suggests an acknowledgement in Washington that economic coercion has practical limits. Excessive sanctions risk undermining the very economies they seek to protect by fuelling inflation, increasing transport costs and unsettling financial markets. In an interconnected world, energy cannot be weaponised without collateral consequences [citation:original text].
The Sanctions Bill: From 500% to 100%
The proposed legislation, introduced in the US Senate on July 14 with the backing of over 60 lawmakers, is named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch supporter of US military intervention . The bill would empower the US President to impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on imports from the world’s five largest buyers of Russian oil and natural gas, a group that includes India and China .
The latest version is significantly softer than the earlier proposal introduced in April 2025, which envisaged 500 per cent tariffs on countries buying Russian energy . The reduction from 500% to 100% reflects a recognition that overly aggressive sanctions could destabilise global oil markets and hurt the US economy itself .
However, India has taken strong note of what it sees as double standards in the legislation. While targeting India and China for buying Russian oil, the bill exempts the European Union’s imports of Russian LNG and the United States’ purchases of Russian uranium for nuclear reactors and medical isotopes . As one source noted, this reflects a policy of “double standards” .
The Energy Reality: Russian Crude as India’s Hedge
For India, the challenge is not diplomatic abstraction but energy necessity. In June 2026, India imported a record 2.6 million barrels per day of Russian crude, accounting for more than half of the country’s total crude imports . Preliminary July arrivals are tracking at around 2.5 million barrels per day, keeping Russia’s share close to 50 per cent .
“From India’s perspective, Russian crude has become its strongest energy-security hedge, particularly since the Strait of Hormuz disruptions,” said Sumit Ritolia, an analyst at Kpler . The Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of global oil supply flows, has been effectively closed for months due to the escalation of the West Asia conflict . Iran has severely restricted transit through the strait, disrupting shipments from key Gulf producers .
The impact on India has been particularly severe on Iraqi crude. Iraq, India’s second-largest source of crude in previous years, has seen shipments drop to negligible levels for nearly four months . Broader imports from West Asia have also fallen sharply, although Saudi Arabia and the UAE have managed to maintain limited exports by using pipeline infrastructure that bypasses the strait .
In this context, Russian crude has effectively filled the gap, becoming the backbone of India’s import slate . Discounted Russian barrels have enabled Indian refiners to maintain high utilisation rates, ensure uninterrupted domestic fuel supplies and avoid feedstock constraints experienced elsewhere in Asia .
The Geopolitical Trade-off: Strategic Autonomy vs. Access to US Markets
India’s choice involves responding to what the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) calls a “geoeconomic trilemma”: balancing economic security and growth, access to the US (India’s most significant export destination), and strategic autonomy in oil sourcing .
CSEP’s recent research uses a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to estimate the impact of compliance versus defiance on India’s economy . The findings are instructive:
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Impact on GDP: Defying US sanctions allows India to maintain access to cheaper energy, allowing industries to operate at relatively low cost, so the macroeconomic impact is seemingly less severe .
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Impact on Households: However, during a period of higher oil prices, defying the US reduces India’s national welfare by US$31.5 billion, equivalent to around 0.87% of GDP. With higher US tariffs at the border, Indian exports become less competitive, forcing India to export larger quantities at lower prices to maintain the same level of global imports .
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Impact on Industries: The US has exempted certain strategic sectors—most notably pharmaceuticals and petroleum products—from base and punitive tariffs. In the defiance scenario, India would be able to import Russian crude, process it, and export refined petroleum to the US. Similarly, given the exemption, pharmaceutical exports would rise by 9.9% . However, exports of textiles to the US would collapse by 76%, machinery by 61%, and electronics by 36% . The demand for unskilled labour shrinks by 0.65% in the defiance scenario .
The CSEP analysis suggests that under baseline conditions, compliance protects manufacturing jobs. However, during a period of high oil prices, defiance becomes the more strategic choice, as accessing Russian oil buffers the country from inflationary shocks and better stabilises GDP .
The Path Forward: Diversification, Reserves, and Strategic Clarity
For India, the challenge extends beyond energy procurement. It must preserve its strategic partnership with the United States while safeguarding an energy relationship with Russia that has become economically indispensable. New Delhi has consistently defended its purchases by pointing to the developmental needs of a large emerging economy and by emphasising that Europe itself continued importing Russian energy for a considerable period after the conflict began. That argument remains difficult to dismiss.
The episode underlines a broader truth about the changing international order. Strategic autonomy is no longer an abstract diplomatic principle but an operational necessity [citation:original text].
Nations with growing energy demands cannot afford dependence on a single supplier, nor can they allow geopolitical rivalries to dictate domestic economic stability. Diversification of suppliers, accelerated investment in renewable energy, expansion of strategic petroleum reserves and deeper engagement with multiple partners remain the most credible long-term safeguards [citation:original text].
India’s crude import basket is now substantially more diversified, with refiners sourcing oil from Russia, Venezuela, West Africa, and Latin America . Volumes are also improving from Saudi Arabia and the UAE as oil is being routed through bypass pipeline infrastructure that reduces reliance on the Strait of Hormuz . However, experts caution that diversification does not shield India from higher prices. Russian crude remains linked to global benchmarks and exposed to tanker availability, insurance costs, sanctions, payment challenges and longer shipping distances .
The Vulnerabilities: LPG and LNG
While crude supplies appear resilient, experts say LPG and LNG remain India’s biggest vulnerabilities if the Strait of Hormuz faces another prolonged disruption . LPG imports remain around 50 per cent below pre-conflict levels, and with Middle Eastern supplies constrained, the US has become the largest alternative supplier . However, longer voyage times, higher freight costs and infrastructure constraints would limit the ability of US supplies to permanently replace Gulf supplies .
The combination of logistics bottlenecks, supply shortages and depleting reserves could contract regional manufacturing if disruptions persist. Rising freight and insurance costs, shipping diversions adding 10-15 days to transit times, and congestion at maritime hubs across South and Southeast Asia threaten wider instability across regional and global shipping networks .
Ultimately, any sanctions regime that disregards market realities is unlikely to achieve durable success. Energy security, economic stability and geopolitical influence are too deeply intertwined for simplistic solutions. Sustainable diplomacy requires recognising that lasting pressure on one nation cannot come at the cost of destabilising the global economy itself [citation:original text].
Q&A Section
1. What is the proposed US sanctions bill targeting buyers of Russian oil?
The proposed US legislation, introduced on July 14, 2026, with the backing of over 60 senators, seeks to impose tariffs of up to 100% on imports from the world’s five largest buyers of Russian oil and gas, a list that includes India and China. The bill is named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham .
2. How has India’s import of Russian crude changed recently?
India’s imports of Russian crude reached a record high in June 2026, averaging 2.6 million barrels per day, accounting for more than half of the country’s total crude imports. This represents a significant increase driven by the disruption of Gulf supplies through the Strait of Hormuz and the competitive pricing of Russian barrels .
3. Why is Russian crude so important for India’s energy security?
Russian crude has become India’s “strongest energy-security hedge,” particularly since the Strait of Hormuz disruptions effectively closed one of the world’s most critical oil transit chokepoints. With Iraqi and other Gulf supplies severely disrupted, Russian barrels have filled the gap, enabling Indian refiners to maintain high utilisation rates and avoid feedstock constraints .
4. What is the “geoeconomic trilemma” India faces?
The Centre for Social and Economic Progress describes India’s challenge as a “geoeconomic trilemma”: balancing economic security and growth, access to the US market (India’s most significant export destination), and strategic autonomy in oil sourcing. India must choose between complying with US sanctions to protect manufacturing exports or defying them to maintain access to cheaper energy, with significant trade-offs in both scenarios .
5. What are India’s key vulnerabilities in the energy crisis beyond crude oil?
While India’s crude position is relatively resilient due to diversification, LPG and LNG remain significant vulnerabilities. LPG imports are around 50% below pre-conflict levels, and the country depends heavily on Gulf supplies passing through the Strait of Hormuz for both products. Any renewed prolonged disruption could quickly affect household cooking gas availability and natural gas costs .
India’s Power Problem is No Longer “How Much.” It’s “When.”
By Pravin Kaushal
New Delhi, July 20
India’s clean power just set a record. According to grid data tracked by CEEW, at 11:46 on the morning of 6 July 2026, more than half of the country’s electricity came from clean sources for the first time ever, even as system demand climbed to 221 gigawatts . It is a genuine milestone, and a real signal of where the grid is headed. But look again at the timestamp. The record fell at 11:46 in the morning, the one hour of the day when such a feat is easiest to achieve, with the sun directly overhead. By nightfall, that clean share would slide back toward a fifth .
A triumph at noon that quietly evaporates after dark: that single arc is the story of India’s power sector today. For most of its history, the central anxiety of that sector was whether the country could generate enough. India has answered that question emphatically. It added capacity at remarkable speed, built a solar fleet of over 157 GW, and clean energy now makes up more than half of the nation’s installed capacity . Yet on an average day those same sources supply only about a quarter of the electricity actually consumed . That gap, between what India can build and what it can deliver at any given moment, is the new problem. The binding question is no longer how much electricity India can produce. It is when it can produce it, and how fast it can change what it produces .
The Shape of Demand: The Duck and the Camel
Consider the other record India set this year. On 21 May 2026, peak demand touched 270.8 gigawatts, higher than any single moment in the country’s history . But the peak was not the real story. The real story was the speed. At 8 a.m., demand sat at 224 GW. In under eight hours, the grid absorbed an additional 47 GW, more than the entire British grid drew at its highest point in all of last year . India’s appetite for power is now not merely large; it is violently volatile within the span of a single day.
Grid operators have a name for the new shape of demand. In summer, solar curves a deep midday trough into the load that conventional plants must serve, followed by a steep evening climb as the sun withdraws: the “duck curve.” India now runs a pronounced duck. In winter, with a weaker sun and two separate demand peaks, the same grid traces a “double humped camel” . Across three summers, the belly of the duck has barely moved. Solar now supplies almost all of the extra midday demand. Yet the evening ramp that thermal and hydro plants must climb has doubled, from about 36 GW to 74 GW . The grid is being asked to swing harder and faster every year. The clean energy peak of 6 July is simply the brightest point on that curve, the top of the duck’s back, and it says nothing about the hours when the duck’s neck rises after sunset.
The Price of Time: Decoupling Peak Demand and Peak Price
The price of electricity told the same story, only sharper. On the Indian Energy Exchange’s day ahead market, a unit of power scheduled for delivery at 1 p.m. cleared at Rs 1.56. The same unit at 6.30 p.m. hit Rs 10, the market’s ceiling . Six times the price for identical electricity, a few hours apart. And note the twist: the demand record at 3.45 p.m. was not the costliest hour, because the sun was still up. Prices spiked only once solar faded. Peak demand and peak price have decoupled, and the widening gap between them is now a defining feature of the Indian grid .
Three signals confirm that the stress is real, and that it lives after dark. Prices: the intraday spread in May has widened to a peak-to-trough ratio approaching nine. Curtailment: On an average May day, around 24 GW of clean solar power was simply thrown away because the grid could not absorb it at noon, enough to power more than a quarter of Delhi for a full day . Shortage: Across April and May, the grid fell short of demand on 36 of 61 days at the night time peak, but on only six days during solar hours . India is not running short of electricity in the middle of the day. It is running short when the sun is not shining.
The AI Collision: Data Centres and the Need for Firm Power
Here is where the conversation usually ends, in a technical debate about batteries and tariffs. It should not. Because this problem collides directly with India’s most ambitious economic bet: artificial intelligence. Every discussion of the AI race fixates on semiconductors, frontier models and engineering talent. Almost none of it reckons with the physical substrate beneath them: electricity, and specifically firm power around the clock . India’s clean energy record was set at 11.46 a.m. An AI data centre draws just as hard at 11.46 p.m., when that clean share has collapsed and the grid leans back on coal. It needs uninterrupted, high-quality power at every hour of day and night, which is the capability India is shortest on .
The numbers are converging ominously. India’s data centre capacity is projected to grow from roughly 1.4 GW today to around 9 GW by 2030, requiring an additional 40 to 45 terawatt hours of electricity . In the first quarter of 2026, India lost some 300 GW of already generated renewable power because the transmission network could not deliver it where it was needed . The country is, in the same breadth, wasting clean power at midday and straining to serve firm demand at night. AI sits squarely in the second category.
This makes energy adequacy a question of sovereignty, not merely engineering. If India cannot supply firm, affordable power for AI at scale, that computing will migrate to data centres abroad, most of them owned and operated by entities outside India. Data governance, national security, and the very terms on which Indian institutions access AI would follow the electrons offshore . The uncomfortable truth is that India’s path to AI leadership runs not through its chip design labs but through its power grid, and more precisely through the hours after sunset.
The Remedy: Storage, Markets, and Coordination
The remedy is conceptually simple: store energy when it is abundant and release it when it is scarce, and use time-of-day tariffs and demand response to nudge load into the solar hours. California, where the term “duck curve” was coined, now runs a battery fleet large enough to convert an evening swing of nearly 28 GW into about 10 GW . India’s fleet is nowhere close. Halving the evening ramp on a single summer day would require roughly 130 GW of storage discharge; the country’s entire pumped hydro and battery fleet discharges under 24 GW a day . The shortfall is overwhelmingly a battery shortfall.
Encouragingly, the regulatory foundation is being rebuilt. The draft Electricity (Amendment) Bill, 2025, read with the draft Electricity (Rights of Consumers) Amendment Rules, 2026, would for the first time write energy storage into law, empower the regulator to deepen power markets through instruments such as contracts for difference, convert the obligation to buy renewable power into a broader clean energy mandate backed by penalties, introduce demand response, set firm deadlines for time of day tariffs, and even enlist rooftop “prosumers” to bank their midday surplus for the evening . The direction is right, and it deserves support. But it carries a caution that cannot be repeated often enough: more solar without commensurate storage does not ease the grid’s stress. It deepens it.
Conclusion: The Real Failure is One of Coordination
Which brings us to the real failure, one of coordination. The Draft National Electricity Plan, which will shape the sector to 2047, contains no dedicated assessment of AI-driven electricity demand. The India AI Mission and the Ministry of Power are, in effect, planning the country’s compute future and its power future in separate rooms . Yet the reforms that would smooth the duck and the camel, namely storage, flexible markets, demand response and time-of-day pricing, are the very same reforms that would underwrite firm power for AI. They are not two problems. They are one.
India spent a decade proving it could generate enough electricity. The next decade will test something harder: whether it can deliver the right power at the right hour. The headlines will rightly celebrate the day clean power first crossed half. The more important question is what happens at 11.46 p.m. Get it wrong, and the country will keep spilling sunshine at noon while its data centres, and its AI ambitions, go looking for electrons elsewhere. Get it right, and the same grid that meets the evening peak will quietly power the country’s climb up the AI ladder. The question is no longer how much. It is when .
Q&A Section
1. What milestone did India’s power grid achieve on July 6, 2026, and what is its significance?
On July 6, 2026, at 11:46 AM, clean energy sources met over 50% of India’s electricity demand for the first time, reaching a peak of 50.02% of a 221.5 GW demand . While this is a genuine milestone showcasing the grid’s growing ability to integrate renewable energy, it is notable for occurring during peak solar hours, when meeting such a target is easiest. By nightfall, the clean energy share falls back to around a fifth, revealing the grid’s core challenge .
2. What is the “duck curve” and how is it affecting India’s power grid?
The “duck curve” describes the daily pattern of net electricity demand. Solar power creates a deep “belly” (midday trough) in the demand that conventional power plants must meet, followed by a steep “neck” (evening ramp) as the sun sets and solar output falls. Across three summers in India, the evening ramp that thermal and hydro plants must climb has doubled from about 36 GW to 74 GW, indicating that the grid is being asked to swing harder and faster to manage the variability of solar power .
3. How is the rise of AI and data centres colliding with India’s power grid challenges?
India’s data centre capacity is projected to grow from 1.4 GW to 9 GW by 2030, requiring an additional 40-45 TWh of electricity . Unlike the solar peak at 11:46 AM, AI data centres need uninterrupted, high-quality power 24/7, and their demand is heaviest at night when India’s clean energy share has collapsed and the grid relies on coal . This mismatch means India risks its AI computing migrating abroad if it cannot supply firm, affordable power, making energy adequacy a matter of sovereignty and economic security .
4. What are the key policy reforms proposed to address the “when” problem in India’s power sector?
The draft Electricity (Amendment) Bill, 2025, and the draft Electricity (Rights of Consumers) Amendment Rules, 2026, propose several reforms. These include legally recognising energy storage as part of the power system, strengthening non-fossil purchase obligations, introducing penalties for non-compliance, promoting demand response mechanisms, and mandating time-of-day tariffs to encourage electricity consumption during solar hours . These reforms are also critical for providing the firm power needed for AI infrastructure.
5. What is India’s battery storage gap, and why does it matter?
Halving India’s summer evening ramp would require roughly 130 GW of storage discharge, but the country’s entire pumped hydro and battery fleet discharges under 24 GW a day—a massive shortfall . In May 2026, the grid curtailed an average of 24 GWh of solar energy per day because it could not absorb the midday surplus . While India is experiencing a battery storage boom (adding 4.6 GWh in Q1 2026 alone), the scale of the required storage is far larger, and more solar capacity without corresponding storage will only deepen the grid’s stress .
Echoes from 1926: A Look Back at India’s Formative Year
By Aditi Nayar
New Delhi, July 20
In the annals of history, the year 1926 often appears as a quiet prelude to the stormy decades that would follow. Yet, a closer examination of this single year reveals a nation simmering with contradictions and charting a difficult course toward modernity. It was a year of nascent political awakening, fraught communal tensions, and significant, albeit limited, social progress. The news items and observations of the time captured a moment of profound transition, grappling with questions of representation, identity, and governance that continue to resonate today.
The weight of 1926 is perhaps best encapsulated in the dry but telling observation from the provided text: “we believe it will be a long time before Indian women enter the Councils, except by the door of nomination” [citation:original text]. This single sentence reveals a deep-seated skepticism about the ability of women to navigate the rough-and-tumble world of electoral politics in India. The author argued that an election in India was not merely a contest of ideas but a test of “strenuous physical activity” and personal connections, domains from which women were effectively excluded [citation:original text].
This was the year that would prove that sentiment both right and wrong. In April 1926, the Government of India took a landmark step, granting women the right to sit in provincial legislative councils . This monumental shift was the culmination of a five-year campaign that began when the Government of India Act of 1919, which had devolved significant power to Indian legislatures, remained silent on the question of women as legislators . Lobbying by the Women’s Indian Association, founded by Annie Besant and Margaret Cousins, and other reformers like Herabai Tata, finally bore fruit in 1926 .
However, the immediate impact was underwhelming. While the right to stand for election existed, the number of women who actually ran was minuscule. In the 1926 elections, no women stood in Bombay, and only two were unsuccessful candidates in Madras . As the provided text cynically noted, the “door of nomination” was where women were expected to enter. For now, this proved largely accurate. In Madras, the government nominated Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, the first Indian woman to sit in a legislature, rather than a victory through the ballot box . Even in Bombay, the first woman member, Ida Dickinson, was a nominee . This “through the door of nomination” trend was a compromise that allowed for token representation without truly challenging the patriarchal power structures that dominated Indian politics. The fight for women’s political rights was, however, far from over. Later in the year, the foundation of the All India Women’s Conference at Poona on November 20th provided a powerful new platform to carry the cause forward .
If the advance of women’s rights was a tentative step forward, the state of Hindu-Muslim relations was a stark and dangerous step backward. By the summer of 1926, India was in the grip of severe communal violence. The communal cauldron boiled over in Calcutta, where clashes between religious groups became alarmingly frequent . The inability of Indians to resolve their internal differences remained a potent argument for the continuation of British rule, a point not lost on the British administration . On July 17, 1926, Lord Irwin, the newly appointed Viceroy, delivered a speech at Simla that directly addressed the issue, making an “eloquent appeal” for the two communities to “put away these feelings of hatred and intolerance” . His speech was met with general satisfaction in Bengal, where many hoped his intervention would lead to a solution for what was aptly called the “dominant” issue in India [citation:original text].
Leaders like Sir Abdur Rahim endorsed the Viceroy’s call, while others like Sir P. C. Mitter diagnosed the root cause as a “struggle for political power,” pessimistically predicting that “better relations would not be established until the elections were over” [citation:original text]. While the Viceroy appealed to hearts and minds, the government also took concrete executive action, strengthening laws against the distribution of inflammatory pamphlets and arming local officers with special powers to remove dangerous characters, particularly in Calcutta . This was the dual nature of British governance: working to keep the peace, yet often perceived as benefiting from the divisions that prevented a united Indian challenge to their rule.
Across the world, the repercussions of labor unrest were being felt. In Britain, the aftermath of the failed General Strike in May had devastated the finances of the trade union movement. The annual report of Britain’s Transport and General Workers’ Union in July revealed a staggering reality: the union had spent half a million pounds sterling on the coal miners’ dispute, a sum that had been entirely exhausted [citation:original text]. This staggering figure underscored the immense economic cost of the class conflict that had shaken Britain, a conflict that had been closely watched across the Empire. The British government had also just passed the Trade Disputes Act of 1927 in response, which severely curtailed union powers, including making all sympathetic strikes illegal . This was the reality of global labor politics in the 1920s, where the power of organized labor was both immense and, in the face of a determined state, fragile.
International intrigue and the remnants of a world still scarred by war also colored the news in 1926. The extraordinary tale of King Boris III of Bulgaria offered a human story of loneliness and survival. In July, a report stated that the King, who had left Italy for Switzerland a week prior, had simply vanished. There had been “no trace of him since he entered a train at Milan” [citation:original text]. This sparked intense speculation, fueled by reports of internal troubles and political intrigue in Bulgaria . The mystery of his disappearance, and his perennially fruitless search for a bride, painted him as a figure of fascination, a “lonely monarch” in a troubled kingdom. It was, however, a piece of palace intrigue that was not to last; 17 years later, King Boris would die under mysterious circumstances, a victim of the very pressures that likely led to his strange disappearance in the summer of 1926 .
Meanwhile, in the French Mandate of Syria, the brutal realities of colonial military justice were playing out. A court-martial in Damascus sentenced four members of the French Foreign Legion to severe terms of penal servitude for deserting their posts in the face of enemy action. Among them were two Americans and one British subject, named Harvey [citation:original text]. The cases of the Americans, one of whom was initially reported to be under threat of execution, drew diplomatic intervention from the United States . This incident highlighted not only the harshness of French colonial justice but also the peculiar status of men from neutral powers who had joined the service of a foreign empire, only to find themselves on the wrong side of its laws . The British government also confirmed it was monitoring the case of John Harvey, ensuring its subject’s interests were safeguarded . The names of these soldiers, Doty, Harvey, and Clare, were caught in a geopolitical crossfire far from their homelands, a poignant reminder of the personal costs hidden beneath the grand narratives of the colonial world.
In essence, 1926 was not a year of grand, singular events but of layered and intertwined narratives. It was a year where the foundations for future progress were laid, as women secured their legal right to enter politics, only to find the “door of nomination” an immediate, if partial, consolation prize [citation:original text]. It was a year where the deep fissures in Indian society were on full display, threatening to tear the fabric of the nation apart. And it was a year where the imperial project, despite its claims of order, was entangled in its own contradictions, demonstrated by the labor strife in Britain and the military brutalities on its colonial frontiers. 1926 was a snapshot of a world in transition, a world of progress and regression, of hope and despair, struggling to define the terms of a new century.
Q&A Section
1. What was the significance of the year 1926 for women’s political rights in India?
In April 1926, the Government of India granted women the right to sit in the provincial legislative councils . This was a landmark victory following years of lobbying by organizations like the Women’s Indian Association . However, the immediate impact was minimal. The 1926 elections saw almost no women candidates in Bombay and only two unsuccessful ones in Madras, confirming the contemporary skepticism that women would only enter politics “by the door of nomination” [citation:original text].
2. What was the nature of the communal strife in India in 1926?
1926 was marked by severe communal violence, particularly in Calcutta . The conflict was deeply rooted in the “struggle for political power” [citation:original text]. The new Viceroy, Lord Irwin, made an “eloquent appeal” for peace and Hindu-Muslim unity . While he appealed for conciliation, the government also took executive action, strengthening laws and deploying police and military forces to curb the violence .
3. How did the 1926 General Strike in Britain impact the labour movement?
The aftermath of the General Strike was financially devastating for trade unions. The Transport and General Workers’ Union’s report for 1926 showed that it had spent half a million pounds (sterling) supporting the striking coal miners, and its assets were completely exhausted [citation:original text]. This financial strain, combined with the political fallout, led to the 1927 Trade Disputes Act, which severely limited the power of unions .
4. What was the “mystery” surrounding King Boris III of Bulgaria in 1926?
In July 1926, King Boris III of Bulgaria disappeared under mysterious circumstances after boarding a train in Milan. His whereabouts were unknown for some time, leading to speculation about internal political troubles, abdication, and even that he might have been in Geneva [citation:original text]. He was eventually found, but the incident highlighted the political instability and “lonely” nature of his reign . He would later die in 1943 under similarly mysterious circumstances .
5. What was the fate of the British and American deserters from the French Foreign Legion in Syria in 1926?
The court-martial sentenced the men to between five and eight years of penal servitude for desertion [citation:original text]. The cases of the American deserters, especially one named Gilbert Clare, attracted international attention as his sentence was initially reported to be death, which was later commuted to eight years after diplomatic intervention . The British government also officially confirmed it was monitoring the case of its subject, John Harvey, “to see that the man’s interests are looked after” .
Britain at a Crossroads: The Battle for the Conservative Soul as Labour Shifts Left
By Aditi Nayar
London, July 20
The British political landscape is in the throes of a dramatic realignment. As Andy Burnham prepares to officially become the country’s eighth prime minister in a decade, the Conservative Party is engaged in a bitter internal conflict that will define its future for a generation. At the heart of this struggle is the very identity of the Conservative Party, a battle that has manifested in the public ostracism of a centrist peer and a broader “purge” of those deemed insufficiently loyal to the party’s new, hard-right direction.
The Fall of a “Wet”: The Barwell Affair
The flashpoint for this internal war came last Monday, when news broke that Gavin Barwell, a former Downing Street chief of staff under Theresa May and a working peer in the House of Lords, would no longer be permitted to hold the party whip. The Daily Mail’s reporting of what was immediately dubbed a “purge of the Tory ‘wets'” meant Barwell learned of his political exile not from party officials, but from friends forwarding him the article.
His crime, as the Conservative leadership saw it, was a public criticism of Kemi Badenoch’s new, stringent litmus tests for parliamentary candidates. In a move that has cemented her reputation as a leader determined to “reinstate the Conservatives’ foundational values,” Badenoch announced that candidates must now unequivocally support two policies: a withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the abandonment of the UK’s legally-binding net zero emissions target.
Barwell’s offending tweet was a direct rebuttal of this strategy. He wrote: “Blocking people who support targets to reduce carbon emissions wrong on multiple levels. Intolerant – party has always been broad church. Bad politics – out of touch with Conservative voters. And in midst of latest record heatwave on wrong side of history”. He was preparing to resume his duties as a working peer, which required the chief whip, Baroness Williams, to formally restore the whip to him. Williams declined to do so, citing “repeated public attacks on the party”.
Barwell, however, maintains he never received a letter outlining these complaints and that the decision was a clear act of vengeance for his criticism of Badenoch’s “purity tests”. He has argued that “none of the other Tory leaders I served under, from John Major to Theresa May, would have taken such a decision,” and that “the best leaders are those who welcome different voices”.
The Return of the “Wets”: A Thatcherite Ghost
The term “wet” itself is a relic of the Thatcher era. Margaret Thatcher coined the usage in 1979-80, applying the label—meaning “feeble, lacking hardness”—to senior members of her government who opposed her strict monetarist policies and cuts to public spending. In retaliation, Thatcher’s supporters became known as the “dries”. The term has resurfaced under Badenoch, who is actively emulating Thatcher in her quest to “vanquish the ‘wet’ (centrist) elements of her party”.
Badenoch’s two “red lines”—on net zero and the ECHR—have been framed by her supporters as essential questions of national sovereignty and economic credibility. A legal review she commissioned concluded that the ECHR “undermined, among other things, the country’s ability to impose harsher prison sentences and to deport illegal immigrants,” leading her to commit fully to leaving the convention. She argues that proponents of net zero are “not serious” and that abandoning it will protect industry from high energy costs. For Badenoch, these are not technical policy disagreements but “issues that go to the heart of what a Conservative government is supposed to look like”. A party that cannot agree on them, she argues, is “two parties sharing office space”.
This hardline stance has led to the creation of groups like Prosper, a centrist grouping of liberal Tory elder statesmen including Ruth Davidson and Andy Street, which argues that a “selection process built around a single test… risks producing a narrower party that can actually win an election”. Prosper points to the 23% of 2019 Tory voters who defected to Labour, the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens, while Badenoch’s team highlights the 23% who voted Reform UK. Badenoch is betting she can recreate the Boris Johnson coalition of 2019 by winning back Reform voters, while centrists argue that coalition was a one-off, driven by hostility to Jeremy Corbyn.
Labour’s “Coronation”: Burnham’s Leftward Shift
As the Conservatives retreat to their right flank, Labour is simultaneously vacating the centre. Tomorrow, Andy Burnham will be officially installed as prime minister at a “coronation” of sorts, having replaced Keir Starmer without a general election contest. He will become the seventh British prime minister in a decade, a testament to the “turmoil that began with the Brexit vote in 2016”.
Burnham’s ascent marks a clear shift to the left for the Labour Party. His allies have indicated he will take “a bolder and more ambitious” approach than Starmer, including a “more pragmatic” stance on North Sea oil and gas, which has been welcomed by President Trump. The BBC has reported that Burnham is expected to announce new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea, while also taking water and energy companies into public control and initiating a new council house-building programme. As the Observer notes, “Burnham may be light on policy, but it is clear that he will shift his party to the left”.
This leftward lurch by Labour presents a “rare opportunity” for the Conservatives to occupy the centre ground. The traditional Labour voter who was “appalled” by Starmer’s leadership and the “coronation” of Burnham without a mandate is, in theory, up for grabs by a moderate Tory party. By appealing to these “floating voters,” the Conservatives could rebuild a coalition of the centre-right that has been fractured by Brexit and the rise of populism.
The Strategic Gamble: A Fight for the Future
Badenoch’s purge of the “wets” represents a calculated, high-risk gamble. Her supporters argue that by imposing “discipline amid rebellion,” she is demonstrating “strength” and decisively ending the “Lib Dems in all but name” element of the party. However, critics argue that by driving out the centrists and telling them their “interests are better represented by Ed Davey,” she is telling their former voters the same thing.
The timing of this internal conflict could not be more perilous. With Labour presenting a fresh, left-leaning government under Burnham, the Conservatives have chosen this moment to engage in ideological warfare. Badenoch may be overestimating the appeal of a party that tolerates no dissent. As one commentator noted, “If she keeps on telling her own former MPs that their interests are better represented by Ed Davey, chances are that her former voters will hear the same message too”. The battle for the Conservative Party’s soul is now a fight for its very survival.
Q&A Section
1. What is the significance of the term “wet” in the context of the current Conservative Party conflict?
The term “wet” originated in the 1980s during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, where it was used as a derogatory label by Thatcherites to describe moderate, centrist members of the party who opposed her hardline policies. Under Kemi Badenoch, the term has been revived as she seeks to purge centrist voices from the party, particularly those who support net zero climate targets and remaining in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). For Badenoch, these are not just policy disagreements but fundamental issues of identity for the Conservative Party.
2. Why was Gavin Barwell’s party whip removed?
The official reason given by the Conservative chief whip was that Barwell had made “repeated public attacks on the party” and had refused to engage constructively with its internal processes. However, Barwell and outside observers believe the true catalyst was his public criticism of Kemi Badenoch’s new “purity tests” for candidates, particularly his tweet condemning the party’s ban on candidates who support net zero targets as “intolerant” and “bad politics”. He had been planning to return to the House of Lords, requiring the whip to be restored, but it was instead removed.
3. What are the two “red line” policies that Kemi Badenoch has imposed on parliamentary candidates?
Badenoch has mandated that any aspiring Conservative candidate must support: (1) a British withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which she argues undermines the UK’s ability to deport illegal immigrants and impose harsher sentences; and (2) the abandonment of the UK government’s legally-binding target of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which she believes is “impossible” and damaging to the economy. Candidates who fail to meet these tests will be blocked from standing for the party.
4. How is the Labour Party shifting under incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham?
Andy Burnham is shifting the Labour Party to the left. He has promised a “bolder and more ambitious” approach than Keir Starmer, including a “more pragmatic” stance on North Sea oil and gas, which effectively means allowing new drilling. He is expected to announce plans to take water and energy companies under public control, a new council house-building programme, and has already scrapped a digital ID scheme planned by Starmer. His approach has been described as “left-ish” compared to the more centrist Starmer.
5. What is the strategic dilemma facing the Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch?
Badenoch faces a strategic choice between two groups of voters who abandoned the Conservatives in the 2024 election. She is appealing to the 23% of 2019 Tory voters who defected to Reform UK by adopting a hard-right stance on immigration and sovereignty. This risks alienating the 23% who defected to Labour, the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens, who are likely turned off by her “purge” of centrists and her opposition to ECHR membership and net zero targets. Critics argue that by purging the “wets,” Badenoch is narrowing the party’s appeal at the very moment Labour is vacating the centre ground, potentially ceding these voters to other parties.
