In April 2026, an Indian Forest Service officer in Haldwani, Uttarakhand, sent Chief Justice of India Surya Kant a complaint of some 486 pages, sworn on affidavit, about the conduct of judges across four High Courts. Nobody acknowledged it. He sent a reminder in July and heard nothing. In August he filed an application under the Right to Information Act asking a simple question: what had happened to his complaint? On 15 September the Supreme Court’s information officer replied in a few lines. The complaint had been received on 21 April, placed before “the Competent Authority”, and “stood filed as per verbal directions”, which in the language of government files means it was closed. Then came the sentence that explains everything that follows: “Since the aforesaid letter-petition has been filed on verbal directions, no noting exists therefore.” In plain terms, his complaint was closed on a spoken instruction, nobody wrote down who gave it or why, and so there was nothing to give him.

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The IFS officer is whistleblower Sanjiv Chaturvedi. For thirteen years he has been putting questions to India’s courts, and the questions are not complicated. Will somebody investigate the corruption he exposed in Haryana, as a central inquiry, the CBI and the Central Vigilance Commission all recommended? Why did a Union Health Minister sign off on a zero in the only bad appraisal of a 23-year career? Why did the Prime Minister’s appointments committee refuse to empanel him as Joint Secretary when every other appraisal he had was “Outstanding”, and may he at least see the file? May he read the Intelligence Bureau’s report on threats to his own life? What did the CBI and the Prime Minister’s Office do with the corruption complaints he sent them? And why have seventeen judges, tribunal members and magistrates declined to hear him? He has had answers to almost none of these.

Between 2013 and 2026, seventeen judges, tribunal members and magistrates declined to hear cases involving Sanjiv Chaturvedi. The two Supreme Court judges among them, Ranjan Gogoi and Uday Umesh Lalit, both went on to become Chief Justice of India; each recused from his petition for a CBI investigation into the Haryana cases, Gogoi in 2013 and Lalit in 2016, and the petition is still pending. Four judges of the Uttarakhand High Court are on the list, one of whom has since resigned and another of whom, Justice Manoj Kumar Tiwari, became the court’s Acting Chief Justice this month. So is the then Chairman of the Central Administrative Tribunal, Justice L. Narasimha Reddy, a former Chief Justice of the Patna High Court, along with eight more tribunal members and two magistrates.

Five of these recusals came in the first nine years. Twelve came in the three and a half years since May 2023. The Probe has examined the record of all seventeen. Nine give no reason. Gogoi's bench recorded only that the matter was "not to be placed before a bench of which Hon'ble Justice Ranjan Gogoi is a member", and Lalit's that it be listed "before a Bench wherein one of us (Uday Umesh Lalit) is not a member".

Five give a reason. The chairman of the tribunal stepped aside in 2019 because Chaturvedi had filed a contempt case against him personally in the High Court. A tribunal member in Delhi stepped aside after Chaturvedi's lawyer said the member had earlier appeared against Chaturvedi in another case; the member said he had not, but that lawyers from his own family, practising from his chamber, had represented the other side, and that he might have appeared with them. A magistrate in Nainital stepped aside because she is related to the tribunal member who had started contempt proceedings against Chaturvedi, and he visits her home. Another tribunal member stepped aside because Chaturvedi had told the bench, in the hearing, that he did not trust it to be fair. And when Chaturvedi named a tribunal member in a High Court petition alleging bias, and the High Court issued him notice, the tribunal's registry recorded in July 2024 that "it would not be appropriate to list the cases of Shri Chaturvedi" before him, and asked the chairman to set up a special bench for Chaturvedi's cases alone.

Three do not fit either column. In 2018 a magistrate in Shimla, hearing a criminal defamation complaint brought against Chaturvedi by the IAS officer he had investigated at AIIMS, wrote that he did “not want to adjudicate the present matter for some personal reasons, which are being sent to the Ld. Chief Judicial Magistrate, Shimla in separate envelope”. What was in the envelope is not on the record.

And in November 2023 two tribunal members at Nainital, asked by Chaturvedi to step aside, would not say yes or no. He had argued that the bench had passed a detailed order without considering his written submissions, and that an earlier order carried remarks about his conduct which he wanted removed. They wrote eleven pages, most of them quoting a 1994 American judgment, on why a judge “has an obligation to sit on any case allocated to him or her”, said they had “no personal interest or otherwise to hear matters pertaining to present applicant”, and, because he had already gone to the High Court against one of their orders, declined to rule on his request at all. They then directed the registry to put all his cases before the tribunal’s chairman to decide who should hear them. His cases left their court. That is what a recusal is. A judge recuses by stepping away from a case, not by saying the word. Most of the seventeen orders do not use the word “recuse”, and neither Supreme Court order does. What they all have in common is that the judge who had been hearing Sanjiv Chaturvedi stopped, and his case went to someone else. The Nainital bench did exactly that.

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The Whistleblower the State Says It Wants

Who Sanjiv Chaturvedi is cannot be separated from why judges walk away from him. As a young officer in Haryana he pursued illegal construction, poaching and the diversion of forest land, and the state government pursued him back with transfers, departmental charges and criminal cases. Four times the President of India set aside orders Haryana had passed against him. A central inquiry, endorsed by the CBI and the Central Vigilance Commission, found he had been harassed for doing his job.

At AIIMS in Delhi, as Chief Vigilance Officer, he opened investigations that reached senior doctors and administrators. J.P. Nadda, then a Rajya Sabha member and later Union Health Minister, wrote four letters between January 2013 and June 2014 seeking the removal of Sanjiv Chaturvedi. In August 2014 the ministry removed him. In 2015, aged 40, he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for his work against corruption. The same year the ministry gave him the zero appraisal. 

He is the whistleblower the Indian state says it wants but cannot afford. The Whistle Blowers Protection Act was passed by Parliament in 2014 and has never been brought into force. Without it, the courts are the only protection a whistleblower has. And it is in the same courts that Sanjiv Chaturvedi has found the doors closing, one at a time.

Doors That Do Not Reopen

Some of those doors have been locked, not closed. Four of the seventeen recusals apply to every case Sanjiv Chaturvedi will ever file. In February 2024 Justice Tiwari directed the registry “not to list the cases of Mr. Sanjiv Chaturvedi” before him. In January 2025 a tribunal member did the same. In February 2025 the two members hearing his appraisal case ordered that none of his cases be listed before either of them “in future”. The order sheet that records that direction also records how many times the case had been adjourned by then: 36.

Over the years, the pace has quickened. Six of the seventeen recusals came in 2025 alone. By March that year the Uttarakhand High Court had written itself a rule for what to do when its judges keep stepping aside. An office memorandum of 12 March lays down that a case one bench declines goes to the next bench in order of seniority; if that bench “recuses the same on being listed”, it goes to the next, “and so on”; and when the most junior bench is reached, the list starts again from the top.

What the cases have in common, Sanjiv Chaturvedi’s complaint to the Chief Justice says, is who stands on the other side of them: the “Appointment Committee of Cabinet (ACC), PMO, Union Health Minister, Chief Minister office, the Chief Secretary of a State, the Chairman and Members of CAT, and the Intelligence Bureau.” His point is a simple one. The same courts that would not decide his cases decided those of other officers against the same departments, and the difference, he argues, is who he had taken on. A recusal, in his argument, is one way of not deciding a case against the powerful.

Also Read: Mussoorie Forest Scam: HC Notices Expose a Crisis of Governance

What Waiting Costs

Every recusal sends a case back to the registry to start again before a new bench, and for a whistleblower the delay is paid for in leave, money and years. Sanjiv Chaturvedi argues most of his cases himself these days. A Division Bench of the Uttarakhand High Court gave him permission to do so in 2021, recording, in his complaint’s words, “his difficult circumstances as a whistleblower, the persecution of counsels representing him, and his acknowledged legal competence”. He has been posted in Haldwani for most of this litigation, and his cases have been heard in Nainital, Delhi, Allahabad, Shimla and Chandigarh. Of the Chandigarh hearings he wrote that there was “no direct Train connectivity because of which considerable time and energy was wasted on each such hearing”.

In 2018 a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court fined him Rs 50,000 for not filing a reply he had in fact filed fourteen months earlier, and ordered the money paid to the Haryana Forest Department, the very body whose conduct towards him was before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court set the order aside twelve days later, at the first hearing.

The money he has won he has given away. The Magsaysay prize money went to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund. An arbitration fee paid to him by the Chandigarh Housing Board went to the families of the Pulwama dead. Costs awarded to him by the Uttarakhand High Court went back to the Prime Minister's relief fund. In April 2026 he donated all the money payable to him as allowances to the Uttarakhand Chief Minister’s Relief Fund. After 23 years in service he owns no property.

The year 2025 shows what the waiting costs. Between July 2025 and January 2026 his eighteen cases were listed fifteen times before the Chief Justice of the Uttarakhand High Court and argued on eight of those dates. “Not a single interim, interlocutory, or final order was passed on merit in any of the remaining matters over six months, despite lengthy arguments,” he wrote. “All casual leaves of the Applicant of year 2025, were exhausted in attending aforesaid hearings and he was compelled to avail earned leave.” He called it “very distressing and emotionally shattering” to find “that even after hours of arguments, none of the cases could be finally adjudicated on merit nor even a single effective order could be passed”. Every adverse order he must appeal, he wrote, puts "pressure on this Applicant’s already over stretched resources", because an appeal "requires considerable time, energy and financial resources".

“He Will Be Cut Down to Size”

Recusals are only part of what Sanjiv Chaturvedi put before the Chief Justice. A second strand of his complaint is about what he says judges have said to him, about him, in open court. The Probe sets these out as he recorded them, on affidavit. None appears in any court order, and they remain his allegations, which The Probe has not been able to independently verify.

The most recent concerns a judge of the Uttarakhand High Court. On 10 December 2025, Chaturvedi says, he joined a hearing online to ask to be made a party to a petition by a subordinate he had charge-sheeted over the felling of 6,673 sal trees, so that he could answer the subordinate’s allegations against him of forgery and conspiracy. He says the judge called him a “habitual litigant”, “in a very rude, and offensive manner”, and when he objected, “ordered the Court staff to mute the complainant”. He says his presence that day was left out of the order sheet.

The next day, he says, his lawyer appeared for him and the judge, addressing the lawyer, said in Hindi “usko samjha do ki garmi zyada khakar koi fayda nahi hoga”, which translates roughly as “tell him that getting too hot-headed will do him no good”, and then: “He will be cut down to size.” His application was dismissed the same day. Chaturvedi wrote to the Chief Justice of India about this on 29 December 2025 and asked that the court’s recording of the hearing be preserved. The same judge had, in February 2024, directed the registry not to list Chaturvedi’s cases before him.

The complaint records other exchanges. Chaturvedi says that in September 2023 another judge of the same court “tried to unduly intimidate” him in open court by questioning his right to argue his own case, and that when Chaturvedi produced the Division Bench order permitting it, the judge rewrote what that order said in his own order sheet.

He says a third judge “made several disparaging personal remarks” against him in December 2023 while dismissing a contempt petition. He says a member of the Central Administrative Tribunal used “highly defamatory and disparaging remarks” against him in open court on 16 October 2023; Chaturvedi filed a criminal defamation complaint over it, and the tribunal then opened contempt proceedings against him on the strength of a newspaper report, without issuing notice to the newspaper. And he says that in Shimla in 2018 a judge of the Himachal Pradesh High Court “made sarcastic and disparaging personal remarks” and advised his lawyers to have him apologise to the Chief Secretary who had brought the defamation case against him. The Supreme Court set that judge’s order aside at the first hearing.

What this has done to him, he wrote, is to leave him “under constant pressure / apprehension, during his each and every Court appearances, whether Applicant may be further injured / humiliated, by way of lacerating observations by Hon’ble Judges in open Court proceedings”. He asked the Chief Justice for an inquiry, for benches that would decide his cases, and for audio-visual recording of every hearing in his cases, with a certified copy to him afterwards, “as a safeguard against misrepresentation of proceedings”. His appeal against the RTI reply argues that a complaint of 486 pages against judges which generates not one line of paper is itself a breach of a law that obliges public authorities to keep records and give reasons. The appeal is pending. 

The Law That Is Not There

Why can a judge in India step away from a case without a word? Because nothing says otherwise. There is no statute on recusal, no rule of court, no code with teeth. The Restatement of Values of Judicial Life, adopted by the Supreme Court in 1997, says a judge should not hear a matter in which a family member is “concerned”, and leaves the word undefined. The In-House Procedure, under which Sanjiv Chaturvedi’s complaint was “filed”, lets the Chief Justice close a complaint without telling the complainant why.

The Supreme Court considered the question at length in the 2015 judgment striking down the National Judicial Appointments Commission. Justice Kurian Joseph took it up in his separate opinion. A judge, he wrote, is under "the constitutional duty, as reflected in one’s oath, to be transparent and accountable, and hence, a judge is required to indicate reasons for his recusal from a particular case", at least broadly. Justice Madan Lokur, who did not go so far on reasons, wrote that "it is time that some procedural and substantive rules are framed in this regard". Eleven years on, none exist. In April, a Delhi High Court judge, refusing to recuse from the liquor policy case, wrote that recusal "has to stem from law and not narrative". For a whistleblower, there is no law for it to stem from.

Other countries have chosen differently. In the United States, federal law since 1974 has required a judge to step aside in any proceeding “in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned”, and lists the circumstances; when the Supreme Court adopted its first written code of conduct in 2023, it said justices may explain their recusals, and within months Justice Elena Kagan did so in writing.

In England, the House of Lords set aside its own Pinochet judgment in 1998 after one law lord’s undisclosed link to a party emerged. The Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct, endorsed by the United Nations, require a judge to step aside where “it may appear to a reasonable observer” that he cannot decide impartially, and their official commentary warns against recusing without a proper basis.

Where a written standard exists, the starting point is the same as India's, the judge's own conscience. The difference is what comes after it: a test the public can hold the judge to. Without one, recusal becomes what Sanjiv Chaturvedi's complaint calls it, "unexplained and tactical", and nobody can prove or disprove the charge, because nobody wrote anything down.

The Public Has a Right to the Reason

This is not about one officer. Whistleblowers are rare because the cost is high, and the courts are where that cost is supposed to be capped. When a whistleblower’s petition for a CBI investigation into a Chief Minister has waited since 2012, the message to the next whistleblower is plain. The system will not punish you. It will simply never get round to you.

A recusal order without reasons asks the litigant to trust. Sanjiv Chaturvedi has trusted seventeen times. His complaint says he has “neither any financial / family relation with any of the above mentioned Judges” and never “approached any of these judges in any manner”. If that is true, most of the seventeen stepped away from him for reasons he has never been told. If it is not, the record should say so. In either case the remedy is the same. A judge who steps aside should write down why and sign it.

The Supreme Court's reply to his RTI closed with a helpful suggestion. He could, "if so advised", read the In-House Procedure on the court's website. He had read it. It was the procedure he had used to file his complaint. It was also, by the reply’s own wording, the procedure under which the court had closed his complaint without telling him why.

Central Bank of India RTGS Glitch: Three Versions From One Bank

At 9:56 on the night of Monday, 19 October, Central Bank of India’s Company Secretary and Compliance Officer, Chandrakant Bhagwat, digitally signed a letter to the National Stock Exchange and the BSE. It was brief. “A technical glitch was observed in RTGS outward system of the Bank during period from 15th October to 17th October 2026,” it said. The bank had taken “necessary steps to investigate and respond to the incident, including shutting down and isolating affected systems,” was “working with leading experts,” and confirmed “that no customer has suffered any financial loss on account of the incident.” The BSE logged it at 10:08 PM. It was the first the exchanges heard of the Central Bank of India RTGS incident.

Three days later, on 22 October, the bank’s General Manager for Treasury filed a complaint with the Additional Director General of Police, Maharashtra Cyber. The complaint, as reported, alleges that unknown persons gained unauthorised access to the central server of the Structured Financial Messaging System, which is run by IFTAS, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of India, through the bank’s own SFMS server, and used it to move ₹13.97 crore out of the bank’s settlement account with the RBI in 187 transfers to 36 bank accounts. Maharashtra’s Nodal Cyber Police registered a case against unknown persons for cheating by personation.

On 24 October, IFTAS put a statement on its website. "We clarify that the Central SFMS System (Structured Financial Messaging System) managed by IFTAS and used by RTGS and NEFT payment systems is safe and secure and there is no compromise on any of the systems managed by IFTAS," it said. "Further investigation into the reported incident is ongoing at the concerned bank's end."

On 26 October, at 5:32 PM, the bank filed a second letter with the exchanges, “in continuation to” the first. The Central Bank of India RTGS outward system had been restored. “During the course of investigation, a technical issue was observed in the interface environment of localised RTGS server maintained at Bank’s end,” it said. Remedial measures had been taken. No customer had suffered a loss.

In one week, Central Bank of India has given three accounts of the same event. The stock exchanges were told of a glitch, and then of a technical issue at the bank’s end. The police were told of an intrusion into a server run by the RBI’s own subsidiary. The subsidiary says that did not happen. The ₹13.97 crore appears in the version given to the police. It appears in neither of the two filings to the stock exchanges.

Also Read:  Central Bank of India Fraud: Was the RBI’s Payment Backbone Breached?

The Board Approved the Results While the Third Day of Transfers Was Running

The bank’s own filings, read against the dates in its police complaint, show what its leadership was doing while the Central Bank of India RTGS transfers were running.

Six transfers left the settlement account on Thursday, 15 October, and 88 on Friday, 16 October. On the 19 October earnings call, the managing director, Kalyan Kumar, told analysts that “during last two days October 15, 2026 and October 16, 2026 we have mid-term strategy meet with our all general managers and regional heads,” at which they “brainstormed regarding revisiting our strategies towards focus areas.” Every general manager and regional head of Central Bank of India was in that meeting while 94 unauthorised transfers went out.

On Saturday, 17 October, 93 more transfers went out. That morning the board of directors met from 11:45 AM to 1:00 PM and approved the bank’s results for the quarter ended 30 September. The outcome of the board meeting reached the BSE at 1:24 PM, the results at 1:28 PM, the investor presentation at 1:37 PM, and a press release at 2:00 PM. The release, carrying the bank’s “Year of Business Excellence 2026-27” banner, reported net profit up 21.10% to ₹1,469 crore and gross NPA down to 2.39%. The results run to 36 pages, with notes to accounts, a limited review by four audit firms, and a certificate signed by the managing director and the chief financial officer.

None of them mentions the banking incident or any contingent loss. The quarter they cover closed two weeks before the transfers began, so no rule required a mention. But the board of Central Bank of India sat and signed the bank’s accounts on the day the last 93 unauthorised transfers were leaving its settlement account, and nothing in the record suggests anyone in the room knew.

On Sunday, 18 October, the results were advertised in the Indian Express, Financial Express, Jansatta and Loksatta.

On the morning of Monday, 19 October, the managing director, three executive directors and the chief financial officer held the earnings call. The transcript, filed with the exchanges on 23 October, is fifteen pages long. The Central Bank of India RTGS incident or any type of fraud is not mentioned in it. In his opening remarks the managing director thanked the bank’s stakeholders, “including our customers, regulators, governments.” An analyst asked about the bank’s investment in technology and was told about mobile app journeys and a new department. A General Manager for Treasury, Dr G. Bhaskar, took a question on provisions for security receipts.

At 3:23 that afternoon, the bank filed the audio recording of the call as letter number 187. At 9:56 that night, it filed the technical glitch disclosure as letter number 188. There is no letter between them. The disclosure says the bank acted ‘immediately upon becoming aware of the incident’. Either it was aware when its managing director spoke to investors that morning and the subject was not raised, or it became aware only that evening, two days after the transfers stopped. The bank has not said which.

“Only Information Available in Public Domain Was Discussed”

In the week after the 19 October Central Bank of India glitch disclosure, the bank’s management met investors three times. After each meeting, as the listing rules require, it filed a note with the exchanges recording who it met, and each note carried the same line: ‘Only information available in public domain was discussed in the meeting’. 

On 21 October, the managing director gave an interview to a business television channel on the quarter’s results: margins, cost of funds, slippages, recovery and treasury yields. He said the bank saw no stress signals anywhere in its book. The same day, the management held a virtual one-on-one meeting with Arihant Capital Markets. The filing recording that meeting, signed at 5:44 PM, carries a standard line: “Only information available in public domain was discussed in the meeting.”

On 22 October, management met Mytemple Capital Advisors in person. The filing, signed at 2:26 PM, carries the same line. At that point the only information in the public domain about the Central Bank of India RTGS incident was the word ‘glitch.’ On the same day, the General Manager for Treasury filed the police complaint alleging that ₹13.97 crore had been taken through the central messaging server run by the RBI’s subsidiary.

On 26 October, management held a virtual one-on-one with Tata Mutual Fund. The filing, signed at 4:57 PM, carries the same line again. Thirty-five minutes later, at 5:32 PM, the bank filed its second disclosure on the incident, which told the exchanges for the first time that the problem lay in a server 'maintained at Bank's end'.

Three investor meetings, two exchange filings, one earnings call and one television interview. In none of them has Central Bank of India said that money left its account. The only document in which the bank has written down ₹13.97 crore is a complaint at a police station.

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The Bank’s Complaint Now Contradicts the Bank

The three accounts of the Central Bank of India RTGS glitch do not merely differ in tone. They locate the failure in different places.

The 19 October filing puts the glitch in the “RTGS outward system of the Bank.” The 22 October complaint puts the intrusion in IFTAS’s central SFMS server, reached through the bank’s server. The 26 October filing puts the issue in the “interface environment of localised RTGS server maintained at Bank’s end.” IFTAS, on 24 October, said its systems were not compromised and that the investigation was ongoing “at the concerned bank’s end.”

If IFTAS and the bank’s second filing are right, the bank’s own SFMS endpoint generated 187 payment messages that the central system accepted as genuine, that the bank’s core banking system never recorded, over three working days, with no one at Central Bank of India noticing. That is a failure of the bank’s controls, and the bank now appears to accept as much. But its police complaint alleges something different: that the central server of the payment messaging system run by the RBI’s subsidiary was accessed. The RBI’s subsidiary says it was not. The bank has not explained which of its two versions it stands by, or why it told the police one thing and the exchanges another four days later.

Nor has it told its shareholders anything about the money. In the September quarter results, the bank reported seven frauds totalling ₹35.53 crore and “Digital Frauds: 00.” The October incident will have to appear in the next quarter results.  

Set against the ₹17,809 crore the bank held in cash and balances with the RBI at the end of September, ₹13.97 crore is a small sum. Set against the line the bank attaches to every investor meeting filing, that only public information was discussed, it is the sum that was never made public.

The Probe has asked Central Bank of India whether it stands by the description of the incident as a technical glitch, how its police complaint squares with its 26 October filing, whether the complaint has been amended, and whether any of the ₹13.97 crore has been recovered. It has asked IFTAS whether it has examined the central SFMS server and shared findings with the bank, and the RBI whether it has advised other banks to check their SFMS endpoints. This story will be updated when they respond.

Over three days in the middle of October, money moved out of an account that Central Bank of India holds with the Reserve Bank of India, in 187 separate transfers that the bank says it never authorised. On 15 October, six transfers went out. On 16 October, 88 more. On 17 October, another 93. By the time it stopped, ₹13.97 crore had gone, according to the bank’s complaint to the police. 

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The account in question is not a customer account. Every bank in India keeps a settlement account with the RBI, which is the pool of money it uses to pay other banks when customers send money across the system through RTGS or NEFT. When a customer of one bank transfers money to a customer of another, the banks settle the difference between themselves through these accounts at the RBI. It is, in effect, the bank’s own money, held at the central bank, to keep the payment system running. That is the account the money left.

Central Bank of India has not said how or when it noticed. The transfers came to light during the bank’s internal examination, which in plain terms means someone checking the bank’s records against what the RBI’s records showed found that money had gone out without a matching instruction from the bank. Banks are expected to carry out this kind of check every day. Why 187 transfers over three days were not caught on the first day is the first question about the Central Bank of India fraud that the bank has not answered.

The RBI’s Own Subsidiary Runs the System the Bank Says Was Breached

To understand what the bank is alleging, two names need explaining.

SFMS, the Structured Financial Messaging System, is the messaging network that Indian banks use to send each other payment instructions for RTGS and NEFT. It does for payments within India roughly what SWIFT does for payments between countries: it carries the message that says “move this much money from here to there”. The money itself moves through the RBI’s settlement accounts; SFMS carries the instruction. Every bank has its own SFMS server connected to its core banking system, and all of them connect to a central SFMS server.

IFTAS, the Indian Financial Technology and Allied Services, is the company that runs that central server. It took over SFMS in 2016 and has been wholly owned by the RBI since 2019. In short, the messaging backbone of India’s bank-to-bank payments is run by a subsidiary of the central bank.

The bank’s complaint alleges that unknown persons got into IFTAS’s central SFMS server through Central Bank of India’s own SFMS server, the one attached to its core banking system. Once there, the complaint says, they generated 187 payment messages that moved money from the bank’s settlement account at the RBI to 36 bank accounts. The payer accounts named in those messages did not belong to Central Bank of India at all. The messages did not pass through any branch, any internet or mobile banking channel, or the bank’s core banking system. They simply appeared on the messaging network, and the money moved.

So the money in the Central Bank of India fraud was lost by the bank, not by customers, and it landed in 36 accounts across the banking system. Whether those accounts have been frozen, who holds them, and whether any of the ₹13.97 crore has been recovered, the bank and the police have not said.

No customer has lost a rupee. But the bank’s money is ultimately depositors’ money, and the sum is not the point. If the complaint is accurate, somebody was able to insert payment instructions into the system that every Indian bank relies on, from inside one bank’s connection to it, without leaving a trace in that bank’s own records. SFMS carries the instructions behind lakhs of crores of transfers every day. The question the Central Bank of India fraud raises is not what happened to roughly ₹14 crore. It is whether the same thing could be done from any other bank’s server.

Also Read:  Inside the HDFC Bank Scandal That Triggered a Market Crash

187 Transfers, and the Bank’s Own Records Show None of Them

After the transfers surfaced, the bank’s internal team went looking for them. It checked branch records, internet banking, mobile banking and every other customer channel. It checked its core banking system. It checked its RTGS settlement records. It checked its own SFMS server. It found none of the 187 transactions in any of them.

The only traces were partial: entries for 10 of the transactions turned up in the SFMS database logs, but the transaction IDs on those entries did not match anything in the bank’s records. The bank’s own systems, in other words, have no record of instructing these payments, yet the payments were made.

Once the transfers came to notice, the bank says it informed the RBI, IFTAS, the RBI’s Daksh portal for reporting incidents, the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre and CERT-In. On 22 October, five days after the last transfer, the bank’s General Manager for Treasury filed a complaint with the Additional Director General of Police, Maharashtra Cyber. He later appeared before the police to record a statement.

Maharashtra’s Nodal Cyber Police have registered a First Information Report against unknown persons for cheating by personation. Police are examining the suspected unauthorised access to the messaging system, how the funds moved, and the 36 beneficiary accounts. A police officer told reporters that so little is known about how the transactions were generated that tracing the money is proving very difficult. That is a striking admission in a case where the entire trail should exist in a central server operated by the RBI’s own company.

The bank has made no public statement about the police complaint or the amount involved. The RBI has said nothing. IFTAS has said nothing.

Bangladesh Bank Lost $81 Million the Same Way. Union Bank Caught It in a Day

The shape of the Central Bank of India fraud is familiar to anyone who follows payment security. In February 2016, attackers used forged SWIFT messages to move $81 million out of Bangladesh Bank’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The central bank’s own account was drained through the messaging system, exactly the pattern alleged here.

In July 2016, Union Bank of India came close to losing about $171 million the same way, after an employee opened an email that appeared to come from the RBI and carried malware that gave the attackers access to the bank’s SWIFT connection. The bank caught the discrepancy when it reconciled its accounts the next morning, and recovered almost all of the money. In February 2018, City Union Bank lost about $2 million through three fraudulent SWIFT transfers.

After those cases, and the Punjab National Bank fraud of February 2018 in which SWIFT messages were sent without entries in the core banking system, the RBI required banks to integrate SWIFT with their core banking systems and reconcile them daily. SFMS is the domestic equivalent of SWIFT. The Central Bank of India fraud appears to be the first reported case of it being used the same way.

Union Bank caught its breach at the next morning’s reconciliation. Central Bank of India let six transfers go out on 15 October, 88 on 16 October and 93 on 17 October before anything stopped. A settlement account at the RBI is meant to be reconciled daily. Either the reconciliation did not happen, or it happened and the transfers did not show up in the bank’s records, which is what the bank now says. If the second is true, the bank’s records and the RBI’s records disagreed for three days without anyone noticing, which is its own failure.

One Bank’s Server or the Whole System: Only the RBI Can Say

Almost everything the public knows about the Central Bank of India fraud comes from the bank’s complaint, and the bank is also the party whose controls failed. Its complaint says the intruders entered the central server through its own server. There are two possibilities, and they are very different.

If the attackers compromised only Central Bank of India’s SFMS server and used it to send messages that the central system accepted as genuine, the failure is at one bank, and the fix is at one bank. If the attackers reached the central IFTAS server itself, then every bank on RTGS and NEFT is exposed, and the RBI’s silence is not just a matter of communication. Nothing said so far settles which of these it is.

When exactly did Central Bank of India discover the transfers, and how? Who holds the 36 accounts that received the money, and has any of it been recovered? Has the RBI told other banks to check their SFMS servers? And has anything like this happened on SFMS before without being made public?

Until the RBI or IFTAS answers, the question that matters is not what happened to ₹14 crore, but whether the system that carries India’s bank-to-bank payments can be trusted.

Why EPFO Numbers Cannot Prove India’s Formal Jobs Boom

The Indian government claims that the formal job market in the country is booming. It cites as proof the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) payroll data. 

EPF is a mandatory government-backed retirement savings scheme in India for salaried workers. The question, however, is: does a rising EPFO count really amount to more good jobs?

The official story goes as follows. The Economic Survey 2023–24 reported that net EPFO payroll additions more than doubled, from 6.11 million in FY2018–19 to 13.15 million, and called it “healthy growth in formal employment”. The Union Labour Ministry hailed it promptly as a “growing formal employment landscape".

Also Read:  Unemployment on the Rise: India's Youth Hit Hardest

The government has now gone further and linked formalisation of employment directly to “quality jobs”. In August 2026, it promoted the PM Viksit Bharat Rozgar Yojana as a scheme to expand formal employment, designed to encourage first-time employment and to reward employers for creating new formal jobs through EPFO.

Formalisation is valuable. A worker brought under EPF coverage gains access to an institutional mechanism for retirement savings and social security. An enterprise complying with labour regulations represents progress over one that does not. 

However, these claims ignore reality. An EPFO “net subscriber addition” is not a net new job. It can include a person moving from one EPFO-covered employer to another; an existing worker newly brought into EPFO coverage; a worker previously outside formal coverage becoming covered; workers rejoining after an employment break; changes resulting from EPFO administrative coverage; and, importantly, formalisation of an already existing informal job.

The sectoral data make the point. September 2026 EPFO data show contributors in 12 traditionally labour-intensive sectors (garments, textiles, leather, jute, beedi, tea, brick-making, cashew, coir, cotton ginning, diamond cutting and others) fell 1.3%, from 5.536 million in 2023-24 to 5.464 million in 2025-26. These are precisely the sectors India must expand to absorb workers leaving agriculture.

Also Read:  A 16-Year Search, 72 Freed From Bonded Labour, and Justice on Hold

There is a further fundamental statistical problem. 

It is an argument against asking EPFO data to answer a question it was not designed to answer. EPFO payroll statistics measure movements into and out of the EPF system. The monthly payroll series records first-time subscribers, members exiting coverage and earlier members who rejoin. The government itself cautions that the numbers are provisional because employee records are continuously updated. 

The Economic Survey 2025–26 carried the government’s claims further: organised manufacturing added 5.7 million jobs. This is potentially more interesting because it is not based on EPFO figures. 

The National Sample Survey or NSS Survey uses Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) data and says organised manufacturing employment increased by more than 5.7 million between FY15 and FY24; grew at about 4% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR); and increased by more than one million in FY24 alone, a 6% year-on-year increase. 

This is probably the strongest official evidence currently being cited, for actual employment expansion in the organised sector, rather than simply formalisation. But there is a major definitional qualification: ASI’s “persons engaged” category includes working proprietors, family members and unpaid workers, as well as employees. So, it is not synonymous with regular wage/salaried formal jobs. 

The government is also pointing to the rise in regular salaried employment. Regular wage/salaried employment increased from 22.4% of workers in 2024 to 23.6% in 2025. That is a meaningful movement toward wage employment, although it is still very far from the claim that most new employment is formal.

In fact, what takes the wind out of the government’s claims, is that the increase in organised manufacturing has been accompanied by growing contractualisation. According to ASI, contract workers accounted for only about 13% of the formal manufacturing workforce in 1993-94. However, this share rose sharply to 20% by 1999-2000 and further to 37.8% in 2018-19. As per the latest ASI data (2022-23), it has reached 40.7%. Thus, so much for the claim of formalisation – the ILO defines it as work with social security, and contract work does not offer that. .

The percentage share of contract labour in capital-intensive industries has increased from 19.5% in 1999-2000 to 46% in 2018-2019, whereas it has increased from 22% in 1999-2000 to 33% in 2018-2019 in labour-intensive enterprises. 

As though that is not enough, if EPFO was really creating so many new jobs, how is it that the PLFS continues to show that India’s share of informal workers (without social insurance, i.e. pensions, death/disability insurance, maternity benefit) was 90% in 2004-5, 90% in 2017-18, and still 90% in 2024?

Job quality also matters: duration, earnings, working conditions, social protection, security of tenure and prospects for advancement. India’s employment challenge has historically been not only unemployment but also underemployment, low productivity and poor-quality work.

The latest PLFS data illustrate this complexity. Even after the increase in regular wage employment, 56.2% of workers in 2025 remained self-employed (mostly own-account and unpaid family labour) and another 20.20% were casual wage labourers. Agriculture still accounted for 43% of employment in 2025 (42% in 2019). The largest addition to the workforce since 2020 has been in agriculture (rising from 200 million to 280 million in 2024). 

This matters most for the young. A graduate in a low-paid, insecure job is technically employed but not upwardly mobile. As we estimate in our new book, India Out of Work, real wages for casual and regular workers, and for the 53% of workers who are self-employed, have stagnated for 12 years. If non-farm jobs have grown at half the required rate (12 million a year) for a dozen years the government has been in power, leaving youth unemployment double its 2012 level, from 6% to 12% in 2024, how can real wages rise, however loudly the government touts its low inflation?

The real test of India’s labour market is not how many names enter an EPFO database but whether the economy creates enough stable, productive and decently paid jobs. If it did, the youth (15-29 years) not in education, employment and training, would not have jumped from 50 million in 2012 to 100 million in 2024. Clearly, many became “discouraged workers” who stopped looking for work. 

Santosh Mehrotra is Visiting Professor at Higher School of Economics, Moscow, and former professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Kingshuk Sarkar is professor, Goa Institute of Management, Goa.

Originally published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 by 360info™.

A PHP Security Vulnerability Hid for a Decade Until AI Dug It Out

Governments and organisations around the world began scrambling on Oct. 21, 2026, to fix a PHP security vulnerability in software that runs their websites, a bug that could give hackers access to data and control of websites. The flaw in PHP, the programming language that powers much of today’s web, prompted urgent warnings from the U.S. National Security Agency, cybersecurity agencies and software vendors.

A researcher at Calif, a security research firm, found the flaw in August 2026 using an advanced artificial intelligence model from OpenAI. The firm alerted the nonprofit that manages PHP. However, word of the flaw leaked before the PHP organisation released patches for its software, and according to Amazon Web Services officials, hackers began “broadly” attempting to exploit it.

The PHP security vulnerability has implications far beyond a single company or platform, because PHP is a key piece of software that helps run millions of websites. So, what is PHP, what role did AI play in uncovering the vulnerability, and should the average user worry?

Also Read:  SBI Data Breach: State Bank of India Customers Have No DPDP Act Remedy

PHP: The Foundation of the Web

PHP is a programming language that powers most websites. For a modern website to provide dynamic content, visual elements and searchable features, a program must run on the web server and take user input, whether that is entering a web address or clicking links and buttons. Estimates suggest that around 70% of websites run on PHP.

PHP operates on a web server in two main parts: the core PHP system – the engine and runtime libraries – and the individual PHP scripts, which are the custom programs that actually implement a website. When you interact with a website, PHP scripts run, take user input and produce the output your web browser displays.

The PHP Security Vulnerability

The current security issue sits directly in the core PHP system and the libraries it uses. When a vulnerability exists at this deep level, it can allow an adversary to exploit the system. In this case, they can run unauthorised commands on the computer hosting the website, which allows attackers to access data and gain full control of the website.

This PHP security vulnerability is not a mistake in an individual website’s code. The issue lies in the core PHP system, making every unpatched system running PHP vulnerable. Since websites are accessible to anyone on the internet, adversaries can easily find PHP-based websites using automated tools. From there, they can run an exploit program that takes advantage of the vulnerability.

This exploit code is called PHP2Shell. This name comes from the fact that the exploit gives the attacker “shell access,” a cybersecurity term for direct command-line control of the computer running the website. Shell access bypasses the website interface, giving adversaries a window to enter commands and access all the website’s data. 

Also Read:  Nobel Prize in Medicine 2026: Why a Light Switch for the Brain Matters

AI: A Double-Edged Sword

What makes the PHP security vulnerability particularly interesting is how it was discovered. This exploit came to light through a process known as coordinated disclosure, in which cybersecurity researchers report the flaw to PHP developers before publicising it.

This discovery shows the power of Artificial Intelligence in cybersecurity. For decades, finding subtle software flaws required large teams of specialists manually reviewing code. Today’s AI systems can examine vast codebases and identify unusual patterns in hours or days. These models can analyse millions of lines of code in seconds, spotting subtle memory management bugs that human auditors might miss over decades of software development. The PHP security vulnerability has existed in the core PHP code for over a decade, and AI helped researchers find it.

However, this also shows that attackers can use these same tools to locate and exploit vulnerabilities. The same reasoning capabilities that help security researchers find flaws first can also let attackers rapidly scan the web for vulnerable targets and automate the creation of tools to exploit the vulnerabilities.

This illustrates why it is so critical for security teams to use AI to find vulnerabilities and report them safely and actively. AI can also help release patches that mitigate these vulnerabilities.

Should You Worry?

Many government agencies, universities, hospitals and businesses rely on PHP-based systems. While individual internet users are unlikely to be directly affected, organisations that delay patching could expose sensitive data, risk having their operations disrupted or give attackers a foothold into larger networks.

PHP runs entirely on remote web servers. If you are an everyday internet user visiting websites, you do not need to download a patch or fix your personal computer.

However, if you manage a website, blog or server, even a small site built on popular content management systems such as WordPress, you should check your server administration panel or web host immediately to ensure your PHP software is updated to the latest patched version. If a third party hosts your website, check with them to see whether they have patched for these vulnerabilities.

The PHP2Shell discovery illustrates a new reality for cybersecurity. In our interconnected world, keeping web infrastructure secure is a continuous race. As AI tools become standard for both cyber defenders and online adversaries, maintaining fast patching habits remains our most essential defense.

Doug Jacobson is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University and currently holds the rank of University Professor. Dr. Jacobson joined the faculty in 1985. Dr. Jacobson’s current funded research is targeted at developing robust countermeasures for network-based security exploits and large scale attack simulation environments. He is director of the Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment (ISEAGE) test bed project. Dr. Jacobson has given over 150 presentations in the area of computer security and has testified in front of the U.S. Senate committee of the Judiciary on security issues associated with peer-to-peer networking.

This article was originally published in The Conversation. 

State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest lender, has confirmed that personal details of 3,897 customers were found on the dark web. The SBI data breach, disclosed to the stock exchanges on 21 October 2026, is one of the most significant cyber incidents at an Indian public sector bank this year. It has also exposed a gap in the law. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which was meant to give Indians a legal right to be told when their data is compromised, does not yet apply to breaches. Its key provisions take effect only on 13 May 2027.

Also Read:  Inside the HDFC Bank Scandal That Triggered a Market Crash

For the customers caught up in the State Bank of India leak, that means there is no statutory requirement for the bank to inform them, no Data Protection Board to complain to, and no penalty under the data protection law that can be imposed on the bank.

What SBI Disclosed and When

According to SBI’s disclosure to the BSE and NSE under SEBI’s Listing Regulations, the bank received alerts on 16 October 2026 from its threat intelligence service provider, the Defence Cyber Agency and CERT-In, the government’s cyber emergency response team. The alerts concerned customer data that had surfaced on the dark web.

A preliminary review of approximately 375,000 records identified 3,897 customer records containing personally identifiable information. The exposed fields included names, registered mobile numbers, dates of birth, gender, email addresses, residential addresses, branch and customer identification (CIF) numbers, lead IDs and related metadata. SBI said the metadata was tied to loan or lead records.

SBI said it had activated its cyber incident response and containment protocols and engaged an independent CERT-In-empanelled cybersecurity agency to investigate “the nature and extent” of the exposure. The bank said “a detailed assessment is currently underway and appropriate remedial and preventive measures are being implemented as required.” It added that the incident had no material impact on its core operations, financial performance or business continuity.

On 23 October, SBI said in another update that it had individually informed customers whose data was identified as involved, by email and WhatsApp. It said customer balances and funds remained safe and urged customers not to share OTPs, PINs or passwords.

Also Read:  IDFC First Bank Fraud: Inside the ₹590 Crore Shock

The Five Days Before Disclosure

The timeline of the SBI data breach matters. The alerts arrived on 16 October. The same day, a cyber threat monitoring account on X reported that a threat actor calling itself “Siriusim” claimed to have released 375,000 rows of data and 2,722 PDF documents linked to SBI. The claimed dataset reportedly included loan applications, supporting documents and account opening forms. The bank’s exchange filing came on 21 October.

SBI’s filing does not mention the 2,722 documents. The bank has not said what they contain, whether they are genuine, or whether they include copies of identity documents such as Aadhaar, PAN or passports. The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital rights group, has written to SBI’s Chairman, with copies to the RBI Governor and the Director General of CERT-In, asking the bank to disclose this and to confirm that affected customers will be protected under the RBI’s customer liability rules if they lose money.

Congress MP Pawan Khera also questioned the bank’s handling of the State Bank of India leak, noting that SBI “did not even detect the breach itself” and saying the bank “owes its customers answers”.

What the Data Protection Law Says

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 was passed by Parliament in August 2023. Section 8(5) requires every data fiduciary, which includes banks, to take reasonable security safeguards to prevent a personal data breach. Section 8(6) requires a data fiduciary, in the event of a breach, to inform the Data Protection Board of India and each affected individual. Section 33, read with the Schedule to the Act, allows penalties of up to Rs 250 crore for failure to implement reasonable security safeguards.

On paper, these provisions describe exactly what customers affected by the SBI data breach would need. In practice, none of them is in force.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025 were notified on 13 November 2025. They bring the Act into effect in three phases. The first phase, which started on notification, covers definitions and the machinery for setting up the Data Protection Board. The second phase, starting on 13 November 2026, covers the registration of consent managers. The third phase, starting on 13 May 2027, 18 months after notification, covers the substantive obligations: notice to users, security safeguards, breach intimation, data retention, the rights of individuals and the duties of significant data fiduciaries.

Rule 7 of the DPDP Rules, which sets out how and when a breach must be reported, including the 72-hour window for a detailed report to the Board, falls in the third phase. So does the security safeguards rule. Until May 2027, no breach reporting duty under the DPDP Act applies to any company, including SBI.

Even after that date, it is unlikely the Act could be applied to an incident identified in October 2026. Indian law generally does not impose new penalties retrospectively. For the customers affected by the State Bank of India leak, the DPDP Act is therefore not a remedy at all.

Also Read:  Reserve Bank of India Bans Dark Patterns: A Confession Dressed as a Circular

The Rules That Apply Today

What applies instead are rules written for regulators, not for customers.

Under the directions issued by CERT-In on 28 April 2022 under Section 70B of the IT Act, covered organisations must report specified cyber incidents, including data breaches and data leaks, to CERT-In within six hours of noticing them or being informed of them. The RBI’s Cyber Security Framework in Banks, issued in 2016, and its 2023 Master Direction on IT Governance, Risk, Controls and Assurance Practices require banks to report incidents to the RBI within two to six hours and to maintain incident response capabilities.

In the SBI data breach, CERT-In was among the agencies that alerted the bank, so the regulator already knew. The question of whether SBI met its reporting timelines to the RBI is one only the RBI can answer. The RBI has not commented publicly on the incident.

None of these rules requires a bank to tell affected customers. IFF has pointed to an RBI advisory on customer data protection issued in March 2026, which it says recommends that banks notify affected customers through multiple channels. The advisory is not binding.

Customers who suffer loss have some other routes. Section 43A of the IT Act allows compensation where a company handling sensitive personal data fails to maintain reasonable security practices and causes wrongful loss. The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 allows a complaint where a failure to protect data amounts to a deficiency in service. Both require the customer to prove negligence, and a leak by itself does not establish it. The RBI’s framework on limiting customer liability in unauthorised electronic transactions covers losses from fraud, but not the exposure of personal data as such.

A Proposal That Has Not Moved

The government has acknowledged that 18 months is a long wait. On 17 November 2025, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said: ‘We are in discussions with the industry to further compress the timeline required for compliance.’ In January 2026, MeitY discussed with industry stakeholders a proposal to shorten the timeline for significant data fiduciaries, a category expected to include large banks, from 18 months to 12 months.

No amendment to that effect has been notified. Had the 12-month timeline been adopted, and had SBI been designated a significant data fiduciary, the breach notification and security safeguard provisions would have applied from 13 November 2026, roughly three weeks after SBI’s disclosure. The SBI data breach would still have fallen outside the law, but only just.

A Pattern Across Indian Banks

The State Bank of India leak is not an isolated event. In July 2026, Bank of Baroda disclosed a business email compromise after an employee’s email account was accessed without authorisation, and began a forensic investigation. In April 2024, a technical fault at ICICI Bank mapped about 17,000 newly issued credit cards to the wrong customers on its mobile app, exposing full card numbers and CVVs. In July 2024, a ransomware attack on C-Edge Technologies, a banking technology provider, disrupted payment services at nearly 300 cooperative and regional rural banks. In May 2025, the RBI fined ICICI Bank Rs 97.80 lakh for non-compliance with directions including those on cybersecurity.

In each case, the regulatory response, where there was one, came under banking supervision rules. In none of them did affected customers have a statutory right to be notified.

What Remains Unanswered

The SBI data breach leaves several questions open. The bank has not said how the data left its systems, or whether a vendor, a loan agent or an internal account was involved.

The presence of lead IDs and loan metadata in the exposed fields suggests the data may have come from the loan origination process rather than core banking systems, though SBI has not confirmed this. The bank has not said what the 2,722 documents claimed by the threat actor contain, or whether the remaining records in the 375,000-row dataset relate to its customers.

For now, the 3,897 customers of the State Bank of India leak must rely on the bank’s own assurances and on fraud reporting through the national cybercrime helpline, 1930, if they are targeted. The law that was written to protect them will arrive in May 2027, seven months too late.

At about 3.30 on the afternoon of Monday, 12 October, a senior official of the National Dental Commission walked into the Administration Section on the fourth floor of the Commission’s headquarters in R.K. Puram in Delhi and found a stranger at a colleague’s desk.

Update, 23 October 2026: The Chairperson of the NDC has responded to The Probe. He confirms that the Commission has a data digitisation tender and says a committee is examining the identity of the man and “the authority, if any” under which he was given access. Click to read the follow-up.

The computer was labelled “RAM Admin”. It belongs to Ram Gahan Prajapati, an Assistant Secretary of the Commission. The man sitting at it was not an employee of the National Dental Commission. On the screen was a document laid out as a table. The official who confronted him says it was a price list.

The official began recording on his phone. Three clips, just under three minutes in all, have been reviewed by The Probe. They are the core of this report.

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What the Man Said on Camera

Asked who he was, the man said he had come from “Quick Trader”. Asked whether he had an official entry, he said no. He had come, he said, to help “Ram Gahan ji”, the officer whose desk he was using, “a little with the tender”.

Which tender? “This is data digitisation tender.” Had it been floated? “It is already floated.”

And what was he doing with it? “I’m analysing who has how much marks and what is high.”

In government procurement, that is the language of bid evaluation: the stage at which competing bidders are scored against technical criteria and the ranking that decides the contract takes shape. It is work reserved for the buying organisation’s own evaluation committee.

The senior official of the NDC asked who had told him to do this. “Secretary sir,” the man replied. Asked for the name: “Modak sir.”

Arindam Modak is the Secretary of the National Dental Commission, the officer appointed by the Central Government to head its Secretariat.

The man said he had come from Kolkata, that his own work was “going on here”, and that it was “in Policybazaar”, in “insurance and data digitisation”. He said the Secretary “told me you look after this also and help”.

The recording ends with the official turning to colleagues. “Who allowed him here?” he asks, his voice rising. “Who allowed this man in this office?”

Two Hours Inside

The Probe has established, from a second member of staff who was at the reception desk that afternoon, that the man had signed the visitor register between 1 pm and 1.40 pm. He entered his name as Abhijeet Singh and the purpose of his visit was mentioned as “official”.

By the time he was challenged, he had been in the building for about two hours.

The computers at the National Dental Commission are password-protected. A visitor cannot use one without an officer’s login. According to staff present, the man had a document open on screen and a set of documents on the desk.

The official who recorded the footage went to report what he had seen to the presidents of the Commission’s three statutory boards. By the time he returned, the man had left. Nobody had taken his details or detained him. The Probe has not been able to independently verify his identity or reach him.

Also Read:  Artemis Lite Refunds Patient, Case Finally Disposed | The Probe Impact

A Complaint, Then an Order

On 13 October, the day after the incident, a written complaint went by email to the Chairperson of the National Dental Commission and the presidents of its three boards, with the video clips attached. It asked that the matter be referred to the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, that the computer be forensically examined, and that CCTV footage, computer logs, the visitor register and the tender file be preserved. It sought an Action Taken Report within 15 days.

Two days later, on 15 October, the Commission issued Office Order M-2705, signed by Ritu, Under Secretary, “with the approval of the Competent Authority”. Its title: “Measures to Prevent Unauthorized Access to Official Records and Computer Systems and to Ensure Proper Maintenance and Security of Records”.

The order directs that “no outsider, visitor or unauthorized person shall be permitted to enter the workstation areas or access official records and computer systems without prior permission from the competent authority”, that any authorised visitor “shall be appropriately monitored or accompanied by the concerned official”, that employees “shall lock their computer screens” whenever leaving their desks, and that “passwords shall not be shared with unauthorized persons”. It was copied to the notice board and the guard file.

The order does not mention the events of 12 October. But when The Probe asked the Under Secretary on Monday whether it had been issued because of them, she was direct.

“That is why we took out that order,” Ritu said. “15th ko jo order nikala woh isi liye nikala, kyunki yeh bahut serious issue hai.” The order of the 15th was issued for this very reason, because this is a very serious issue.

Was an investigation under way? “Yes.”

Who was the Competent Authority whose approval the order cites? “Chairperson. Chairperson, NDC.”

Asked who the private individual was, she declined. “Main phone pe koi baat nahi karna chahti.” She asked for official questions by email and invited The Probe to the office.

Also Read:  Nulife Hospital Medical Negligence Case: Court Summons Doctor | Impact

“If I Know That He Came, It Means I Called Him”

The Probe spoke to NDC Secretary Arindam Modak by telephone on Monday. He was on leave in Kolkata and said he would return on Sunday.

His first response was that the entry was “not unauthorised” and that the matter was “being misrepresented”. Asked about the video, in which the man says “Secretary sir, Modak sir” sent him, Modak said: “Yes. Yes. That is why I said. This is not unauthorised.”

Asked whether he had authorised the man to use the Assistant Secretary’s computer, he said: “System was not used. System was not used. System is a different issue altogether.”

Asked again whether the man was unauthorised, he said: “I know that he came. If I know that he came, then it means I called him.”

Minutes later he qualified that. “Dekhiye, main generally kisi ko bulata nahin. But I am aware of that, he will come.” I generally don’t call anyone, but I was aware he would come.

Was the man allowed to use a computer? “No. No. No. Not allowed to use a computer.” He added, in Hindi, that the man had suddenly done so, and that “how much he did, that is the question.”

Did he know the man? “Main jaanta tha.” I knew him. The name? “Abhishek ya Abhijeet. Donon mein se kuch hai.” One of the two.

Asked whether the man was lying about being sent by him, Modak said: “Yeh jhoot sach ka baat nahin hai.” This is not a matter of truth or lies.

He would not say what the man does or how he knows him. Nor, despite his remark that knowing the man had come “means I called him”, would he say whether he had in fact called him on 12 October. “These are too internal questions,” he said. He described the complaint as “fabricated in a malafide way” and said it had been raised by a member of staff whose “background has several issues”. He asked The Probe to wait for a face-to-face meeting after his leave. When we told him that the report would be published on Monday and that his responses would be used, he said: “Definitely.”

The Tender That Isn’t Public

The man on the video said the data digitisation tender had “already been floated”. The Probe could not find it.

Tenders floated by central bodies such as the National Dental Commission are normally run as bids on the Government e-Marketplace, the portal on which the Commission’s account still carries its old name, Dental Council of India. A search of GeM’s open bids on Sunday showed none from the Commission. Its contracts on the portal since June include no digitisation work and none awarded through a bid. The Commission’s website has no tenders page, and nothing on digitisation appears among its public notices. Government financial rules require any purchase on GeM above a modest threshold to go through the portal’s bidding process. The Probe could find no record of a data digitisation tender in any of these places.

If a tender was floated, The Probe could not find where. If bids were being scored on 12 October, the question is whose bids, obtained how, and evaluated by whom.

Ram Gahan Prajapati, the Assistant Secretary whose computer was used, returned The Probe’s calls on Monday afternoon. When told he was speaking to a journalist and asked whether he had authorised the man to use his system, he ended the call. 

The Chairperson of the National Dental Commission, Dr Sanjay Tewari, responded to The Probe’s questions by email on 22 October. The complaint of 13 October, he said, “has been received and taken cognisance of” and “is being examined by a committee”. The examination “covers all relevant facts, including the identity of the individual concerned, the circumstances in which he was present in the Administration Section, and the authority, if any, under which access to official premises and systems was provided.” “Necessary steps have been taken,” the response said, without saying what they were.

The response confirmed that the Commission has a tender for data digitisation. Procurement by the Commission, “including the tender for data digitisation”, is governed by the General Financial Rules, it said, “under which bids are evaluated only by duly constituted committees. Any deviation from the prescribed procedure, if established, will be dealt with in accordance with the rules.” 

Dr Tewari declined to comment on “specific allegations or on the role of any individual officer” while the examination was under way, saying this “could prejudice the process”. Further action, “including reference to the appropriate authorities”, would be decided on the facts established, he said, and the Commission would keep the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare informed. The Commission, the response said, “remains committed to taking all necessary action on the basis of established facts, while ensuring that no individual is prejudged.”

Why This Matters

For over 7 decades, dentistry in India was regulated by the Dental Council of India, a body of elected dentists set up under the Dentists Act of 1948. It decided which dental colleges could open, how many students they could admit, what they taught, and who could practise. Over the years it drew repeated allegations of opaque decision-making, and in 2023 Parliament passed the National Dental Commission Act to replace it.

The National Dental Commission came into being on 19 March 2026. Its members are appointed, not elected. Three autonomous boards work under it: one for undergraduate and postgraduate dental education, one for assessing and rating dental colleges, and one for ethics and the register of dentists. Its Secretary, appointed by the Central Government for a fixed four-year term, runs the Secretariat, its staff, its files and its purchasing.

The government presented the change as a move from an elected body accused of opacity to an appointed one built for transparency and accountability. The NDC is seven months old. It regulates every dental college and every registered dentist in the country, and it spends public money.

An outsider sitting at an Assistant Secretary’s desk, scoring bids by his own account in a “data digitisation tender” that the Commission confirms exists but that appears in no public record, and saying on camera that the Secretary sent him, is a test of that promise. The Secretary, for his part, says he knew the man and knew he was coming. The Commission’s own order of 15 October treats the risk as real. Its Under Secretary says the matter is serious and under investigation, and its Chairperson says a committee is examining it.

What the Commission has not said is who the man is; how a private individual came to be sitting at an official computer in the Administration Section for the better part of an afternoon; what work he was doing there, and when and where the tender he spoke of was published; whether the Secretary, who says he knew the man was coming, or the Assistant Secretary, whose password-protected computer he was using, had any part in it; who sits on the committee examining the matter, and when it will report; and what, if anything, it has found.

The National Dental Commission has confirmed that it has a tender for data digitisation, and has said that a committee is examining who the man found at an official computer in its Delhi headquarters on 12 October was, and “the authority, if any” under which he was given access to its premises and systems.

The confirmation came in a written response from the Chairperson of the NDC, Dr Sanjay Tewari, to questions The Probe had sent him. It is the Commission’s first statement on the record about the incident, and the first time its head has addressed it.

The Probe reported on 19 October that a man who was not an employee of the NDC had been found sitting at a computer in the Commission’s Administration Section. On video, he said he was “analysing who has how much marks” in a “data digitisation tender” that was “already floated”, and that he had been told to do so by “Secretary sir... Modak sir”. The Probe could find no trace of such a tender in any public record. The Secretary of the Commission, Arindam Modak, told The Probe the visit was “not unauthorised” and that he knew the man.

The Chairperson’s response says the committee’s examination covers “the identity of the individual concerned, the circumstances in which he was present in the Administration Section, and the authority, if any, under which access to official premises and systems was provided.”

Also Read:  Outsider Caught Scoring Bids Inside National Dental Commission Office

What the Chairperson Said

The response, received on 22 October, running to seven paragraphs states that the NDC “remains committed to upholding the highest standards of integrity, transparency and accountability in all its functions, including the conduct of procurement and the security of its official records and information systems.”

It then turns to the incident. “The complaint dated 13 October 2026 regarding the incident at the Commission’s headquarters on 12 October 2026 has been received and taken cognisance of. The matter is being examined by a committee in accordance with the applicable rules, prescribed procedures and the provisions governing the conduct of officers and staff of the Commission.”

The examination, it says, “covers all relevant facts, including the identity of the individual concerned, the circumstances in which he was present in the Administration Section, and the authority, if any, under which access to official premises and systems was provided. Necessary steps have been taken.” It does not say what those steps are.

On procurement: “It is important to note that procurement by the Commission, including the tender for data digitisation, is governed by the General Financial Rules and the applicable guidelines of the Government of India, under which bids are evaluated only by duly constituted committees. Any deviation from the prescribed procedure, if established, will be dealt with in accordance with the rules.”

The Chairperson declined to go further. “As the matter is presently under examination, it would not be appropriate to comment on specific allegations or on the role of any individual officer at this stage, as this could prejudice the process. Further action, including reference to the appropriate authorities, will be decided on the basis of the facts established and in accordance with law.”

The Commission, the response adds, “will keep the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, its administrative Ministry, appropriately informed”, and “remains committed to taking all necessary action on the basis of established facts, while ensuring that no individual is prejudged.”

Also Read:  National Medical Commission Defies Own Rule, Rejects Patient Appeal

Two Accounts From One Commission

Read beside what the Secretary told The Probe three days earlier, the response is notable for what it leaves open.

Modak, reached by telephone on 19 October while on leave in Kolkata, said the entry was “not unauthorised” and that the matter was “being misrepresented”. Asked again whether the man was unauthorised, he said: “I know that he came. If I know that he came, then it means I called him.” Minutes later he qualified that: “Dekhiye, main generally kisi ko bulata nahin. But I am aware of that, he will come.” He said he knew the man, that his name was “Abhishek ya Abhijeet”, and that the man was “not allowed to use a computer”. He described the complaint as “fabricated in a malafide way”.

The Chairperson’s response treats the man’s identity, and the authority under which he was given access, as matters for the committee to establish. If the Secretary knows who the man is and knew he was coming, the NDC’s examination begins with two questions its own Secretary has told The Probe he can answer. The response does not mention the Secretary. It says the role of “any individual officer” will not be commented on while the examination is under way.

A Tender Confirmed, Still Not Public

The second development is the tender itself.

Before publishing on 19 October, The Probe searched the Government e-Marketplace, the portal on which the NDC’s account still carries its old name, Dental Council of India. Its open bids showed none from the Commission. Its contracts since June included no digitisation work and none awarded through a bid. The Commission’s website has no tenders page, and nothing on digitisation appears among its public notices.

The Chairperson’s response puts the existence of the tender beyond doubt. It does not say when the tender was floated, where it was published, what it is worth, or what stage it had reached on 12 October.

What the response does set out is the rule. Under the General Financial Rules, it says, “bids are evaluated only by duly constituted committees.”

The man on the tape, by his own account, was doing that work. Asked what he was doing with the tender, he said: “I’m analysing who has how much marks and what is high.” Asked who had told him to, he said: “Secretary sir.” Asked for the name: “Modak sir.” He said his own work was “in Policybazaar”, in “insurance and data digitisation”, and that the Secretary “told me you look after this also and help”. He said he had come from “Quick Trader” and that he did not have an official entry.

By the Commission’s own statement of the rule, an outsider scoring bids would be a deviation from the prescribed procedure. The Chairperson’s response says that any deviation, “if established, will be dealt with in accordance with the rules.”

Also Read:  Outsider at NDC: "Secretary Sent Me"

What Happened on 12 October

At about 3.30 pm on 12 October, a senior official of the NDC walked into the Administration Section on the fourth floor of the Commission’s headquarters in R.K. Puram and found the man at a computer labelled “RAM Admin”. The computer belongs to Ram Gahan Prajapati, an Assistant Secretary of the Commission. The computers at the NDC are password-protected; a visitor cannot use one without an officer’s login. The official recorded three clips, just under three minutes in all, which The Probe has reviewed. According to a member of staff who saw the visitor register, the man had signed in about two hours earlier as Abhijeet Singh, giving the purpose of his visit as “official”. By the time the official returned from reporting the matter to the presidents of the Commission’s three boards, the man had left.

A written complaint went to the Commission on 13 October. On 15 October, the NDC issued an office order signed by Ritu, Under Secretary, “with the approval of the Competent Authority”, barring outsiders from workstation areas and computer systems without prior permission.

The order does not mention the incident, but the Under Secretary told The Probe it was issued because of it, that an investigation was under way, and that the Competent Authority was the Chairman of the NDC. Prajapati, whose computer was used, returned The Probe’s calls on 19 October and ended the call when asked whether he had authorised the man to use his system.

What Remains Unanswered

The Chairperson’s response confirms that a complaint has been received, that a committee is examining it, and that the tender exists. It leaves open everything else.

The National Dental Commission has not said who the man is, although its Secretary has told The Probe he knows him. It has not said who gave him access to the Administration Section, or who logged him into a password-protected computer. It has not said when the committee was constituted, who sits on it, or when it will report. It has not said when and where the data digitisation tender was published, what it is worth, or whether bids were under evaluation on 12 October. And it has not said whether the Secretary, who told The Probe he knew the man was coming, has stepped aside from the tender while the examination runs.

The Probe has written to the Chairperson again, asking when the committee was constituted, who heads it, whether there is a timeline for its findings, whether the man has been identified, and whether the computer has been examined. His reply will be reported when it is received.

The National Dental Commission came into being on 19 March 2026 under the National Dental Commission Act, 2023, replacing the Dental Council of India, which had regulated the profession since 1948. It decides which dental colleges may operate, how many students they may admit and who may practise as a dentist in India. Its Secretary is appointed by the Central Government for a four-year term and runs its Secretariat, including its purchasing. When the Commission was constituted, the government described the change as a shift towards a “transparent, quality-focused and accountable” regulatory framework.

The NDC is seven months old. Its Chairperson has now said, in writing, that a committee will establish who was at that computer and on whose authority. Its Secretary has told The Probe he knows the answer to the first question. The answer to the second is the one the Commission has not yet given.

In August 2026, letters from the National Medical Commission reached Arka Chakraborty at his home in Hooghly, West Bengal. They returned his appeals against the Karnataka Medical Council’s decisions in his brother’s death, along with the demand drafts he had paid as fees. Both appeals, the Commission said, were “not maintainable.”

Arka’s younger brother, Arnab, died in Bengaluru on 27 April 2022, aged 23, less than five months after open-heart surgery. For nearly four years, Arka pursued complaints against doctors at two Bengaluru hospitals before the Karnataka Medical Council (KMC). On 16 May 2026, the KMC dismissed both. When he turned to the country’s apex medical regulator, he was told he had no right to be heard.

Also Read:  A 23-Year-Old Heart Patient's Death Still Haunts His Family

The reason the National Medical Commission (NMC) gave him sits uneasily with its own record. In 2023, the Commission brought back the rules that give patients and their families the right to appeal. In 2024, it told the Supreme Court those rules were in force. The replies sent to Arka mention neither.

“I am deeply disheartened that the NMC has rejected my appeal,” Arka told The Probe. “Where do patients who don’t get justice go, if not to the NMC?”

How Arka’s Complaints Were Dismissed

Arnab was born with Tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect that reduces the oxygen reaching the body. On 6 December 2021, he underwent corrective open-heart surgery at Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bengaluru. Days later his condition deteriorated, and subsequent MRI scans recorded hypoxic brain injury. In February 2022, he was moved to Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain Hospital for neuro-rehabilitation. He died there on 27 April 2022, a day after surgery to remove his sternal wires. His death certificate recorded multi-organ failure due to septicaemia in shock.

On 18 August 2022, Arka filed complaints against doctors at both hospitals. According to the KMC’s own order, his complaint against the Narayana Hrudayalaya doctors was also forwarded to the state council by the Principal Secretary of Karnataka’s Health Department and by the Secretary of the National Medical Commission. The NMC, in other words, sent his complaint into the system.

The doctors denied any negligence before the council. On 16 May 2026, the KMC dismissed both complaints, holding that Arka had failed to establish medical negligence or professional misconduct. The council recorded that Arka’s cross-examination of the doctors was marked “Nil” because of his absence, and that he filed no written arguments. In the Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain case, it added that he had produced no expert opinion. The council had earlier rejected an application by Dr Kunal Saha, President of the patient rights group People for Better Treatment, to represent Arka in the proceedings.

On 29 July 2026, Arka appealed against both orders to the National Medical Commission. Both appeals were returned.

Also Read:  National Medical Commission: How It Lied and Misled the Supreme Court

What the NMC Told Arka

The replies from the NMC’s Ethics and Medical Registration Board (EMRB) to both appeals were on the same lines. The letter of 13 August 2026, concerning the Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain case and issued “with the approval of the Director (Ethics)”, rests on two grounds.

The first is Section 30(3) of the National Medical Commission Act, 2019, which reads: “A medical practitioner or professional who is aggrieved by any action taken by a State Medical Council under sub-section (2) may prefer an appeal to the Ethics and Medical Registration Board against such action.”

The second is a meeting of the Commission on 6 October 2021, which, according to the letter, reiterated that only medical practitioners are entitled to appeal. On that basis, the letter states, all appeals filed by non-medical practitioners since 25 September 2020 “shall be returned.”

The letter is signed by a Section Officer. It does not say whether any member of the Board considered the appeal.

The Rule the NMC Brought Back

What the replies leave out is a decision the National Medical Commission itself took in August 2023.

On 2 August 2023, the Commission notified the National Medical Commission Registered Medical Practitioner (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 2023. Regulation 44 confined the right of appeal to doctors. Three weeks later, on 23 August 2023, the EMRB issued Notification No. R-12013/01/2022/Ethics. It held the 2023 regulations in abeyance “with immediate effect” and adopted the Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002, “as if the same have been made by the Commission” under the NMC Act.

Regulation 8.8 of those 2002 Regulations leaves little room for doubt: “Any person aggrieved by the decision of the State Medical Council on any complaint against a delinquent physician, shall have the right to file an appeal to the MCI within a period of 60 days from the date of receipt of the order passed by the said Medical Council.”

The provision was added to the ethics code in 2004, following directions from the Supreme Court to give patients a remedy against erring doctors.

On 14 August 2024, during the hearing of a petition filed by Uttam Chand Meena before a Supreme Court bench headed by then Chief Justice DY Chandrachud, counsel for the NMC and the Union Government told the court that the 2023 regulations had been withdrawn and the 2002 Regulations reinstated. The Probe reported this in October 2024, along with documents showing that the Commission continued to return patients’ appeals in the weeks that followed, including in communications dated 3 September and 14 October 2024.

Arka filed his appeals nearly three years after the 2023 notification. The National Medical Commission returned them by relying on a decision taken in 2021, before that notification existed.

Also Read:  NMC and its Headless Ethics Board: Shielding Negligent Doctors

Does the Law Bar Patients?

Section 30(3) of the National Medical Commission Act, 2019 sets out what a doctor may do. Dr Kunal Saha argues that nothing in it takes away the right of patients.

“If you read the section, it says aggrieved doctors can appeal. It never says victims cannot appeal. The NMC’s reliance on Section 30(3) is wrong,” Saha told The Probe.

He also points to the Commission’s own notification. “The NMC itself has put the 2023 regulations on hold. We have the 2023 gazette notification saying the 2002 Regulations are reinstated. What are they even talking about? On one hand, they say they have reinstated the 2002 Regulations, and on the other, they keep rejecting patients’ appeals.”

Saha sought to represent Arka before the state council. “I tried to represent Arka before the Karnataka Medical Council because we were convinced it was a botched investigation, but I was refused,” he said.

Arka’s case is far from the only one, he said. “I have at least 20 cases like this where the NMC has rejected patients’ appeals. We will very soon file a PIL in the Supreme Court.”

A Door That Opens Only One Way

The effect is an appeals system that works for one side. A doctor penalised by a State Medical Council can appeal to the EMRB and then to the Commission. A family that loses a loved one, and then loses before the same council, has no route of appeal within the National Medical Commission. What remains are the courts and consumer commissions, where cases can run for years. Arka has also approached the District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission in Hooghly.

State medical councils are made up largely of doctors. Families usually argue their cases using the hospital's own records, often without an independent expert. A right of appeal to a national regulator was meant to be a safeguard against that imbalance. Arka travelled from Kolkata to Bengaluru for hearing after hearing over four years, only for the KMC to dismiss his complaints. When he appealed, the NMC told him it could not even entertain his appeals.

Also Read:  Arnab's Family Gears Up For Protracted Legal Battle, Alleges Medical Negligence

Questions the NMC Must Answer

Arka’s case raises questions that go to the heart of how the National Medical Commission functions.

If the 2002 Regulations are in force, as the Commission’s own notification states and as it told the Supreme Court, on what legal basis are appeals by patients under Regulation 8.8 being returned? And who within the EMRB decided that a man who lost his brother had no right to be heard?

The Probe has sent a detailed questionnaire to the National Medical Commission seeking its response on these issues. This story will be updated as and when a response is received.

Air Pollution in India Kills 2 Million a Year. Climate Plan Ignores It

Every winter, millions of Indians wake up to grey skies, stinging eyes and coughing children. Air pollution in India is a mass killer, claiming about 2 million lives a year. Yet when India wrote its most important climate promise to the world this year, the poisoned air its people breathe did not get a single mention.

That is the finding of a global scorecard released on 14 October in Geneva by the Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA), a coalition of more than 300 health professional and health civil society organisations from around the world. The group studied 117 national climate plans covering 132 countries and scored each one on how well it protects people's health. India got 2 points out of a possible 32.

Only one plan on the entire list, that of the Holy See, scored lower.

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No Mention of Air Pollution in India’s UN Pledge

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, every country must file a national climate plan with the United Nations. These plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions, set out what each country will do over the next decade. India submitted its latest plan, covering 2031 to 2035, on 24 April 2026, among the last of the G20 nations to do so.

The plan makes three headline promises for 2035. India will cut its greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP by 47% from 2005 levels. It will get 60% of its power capacity from non-fossil sources. And it will grow forests and tree cover that absorb an extra 3.5 to 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

A close reading of the document India filed with the UN shows that the words “air pollution” and “air quality” do not appear anywhere in it. Neither do "heatwave" or "coal", even though India relies heavily on coal for its electricity. Health shows up only in passing: in a list of sectors vulnerable to climate change, and as one of nine missions under India's National Action Plan on Climate Change. The only other nod is a pledge to promote healthy, sustainable lifestyles through the government's LiFE campaign.

The document also explains how it was written. Ten inter-ministerial working groups drafted it, covering the economy, power, industry, buildings, transport, agriculture, climate finance, critical minerals, the social side of the energy transition, and policy synthesis. None of the ten dealt with health.

At one point, the UN's standard form asks countries to describe the added benefits of their adaptation and economic plans. India's answer was two words: "Not Applicable".

GCHA's assessment matches what the document shows. Its India scorecard says the plan does not meaningfully address the health impacts of climate change or the health benefits of acting on it. It also notes that India's plan does not mention air pollutants at all, which it calls notable given the country's high death rate from dirty air.

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The Deadly Cost of Air Pollution in India

The silence in India's climate plan stands against some of the grimmest health numbers anywhere in the world.

The State of Global Air 2025 report, by the US-based Health Effects Institute and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, found that air pollution in India was linked to about 2 million deaths in 2023, a 43% rise since 2000. That works out to 186 deaths for every 1 lakh people, more than ten times the rate in high-income countries, where it is 17.

The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, released in October 2025 with the backing of the World Health Organization (WHO), put the toll from human-caused fine particle pollution at over 17 lakh Indian deaths in 2022, up 38% since 2010. Fossil fuels were behind 44% of those deaths. Coal alone caused 3.94 lakh deaths, mostly from power plants, and petrol used in road transport another 2.69 lakh. The premature deaths from outdoor air pollution cost India $339.4 billion that year, equal to 9.5% of its GDP.

The WHO's own health and environment scorecard for India says fine particle levels in the country are about ten times the WHO's safe guideline. It estimates that 39% of deaths from stroke and heart disease in India are caused by air pollution.

No Indian escapes it. A 2024 study in The Lancet Planetary Health found that the entire population of India lives in areas where fine particle levels exceed WHO guidelines. It linked long-term exposure to about 15 lakh extra deaths every year. India's own national limit for these particles is 40 micrograms per cubic metre, eight times weaker than the WHO guideline of 5.

The United Nations has been raising the alarm on air pollution in India too. In November 2025, the head of the UN Environment Programme's office in India warned in an interview with UN News that the country's air pollution was nearing the level of a disaster. A report released this year by UNEP and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition found that South Asia carries the heaviest economic burden from air pollution of any region, equal to about 10% of its GDP. The same report estimated that cleaner air and climate measures could return about $21 for every $1 spent in the region.

The government's own position has drawn criticism. In December 2025, the Union Health Ministry told the Rajya Sabha there was "no conclusive data available in the country to establish direct correlation" of death or disease exclusively due to air pollution. In the same reply, the ministry pointed to its climate and health programme and its health adaptation plan for air pollution. India's Health Ministry has had a national action plan on climate change and human health since 2018. Beyond a passing reference to the health mission, that work is absent from the climate promise India made to the world.

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India's Neighbours Did Better, and the Clock Is Ticking

India shares its score of 2 with Japan and New Zealand, two wealthy nations that GCHA also faulted for failing to adequately consider health. The difference is what is at stake. GCHA singles out India as carrying a high burden of deaths from air pollution, yet its plan does not even mention the problem. When a rich country leaves health out of its climate plan, it is a missed opportunity. When India does the same, it leaves out a crisis that kills about 2 million of its people every year.

India's neighbours, many of them poorer and facing the same smog and heat, did far better. Nepal and Sri Lanka each scored 19. Bangladesh, which has an even higher air pollution death rate than India, scored 13. Pakistan scored 12 and Bhutan 10. Worldwide, the average score was 11.8.

At the top, Colombia scored 29, Nigeria 25 and Cambodia 24. Nineteen of the top 20 scores went to low- and middle-income countries. GCHA also found that plans which say the health ministry was consulted in drafting them scored far higher, averaging 17.8 points against 11.8 overall.

"The human face of climate change has never been more obvious," said Dr Nova Tebbe, the GCHA researcher who led the study. 

There are caveats. GCHA scored only what is written in each climate plan, and the group itself acknowledges that it did not assess what governments actually do on the ground. India has a clean air programme, heat action plans in many states and its climate and health programme. India's plan also makes a strong case on fairness. It points out that India is home to about 17% of the world's population but accounts for less than 4% of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It says its targets depend on receiving its due share of international climate finance, and may be modified to match the support made available.

GCHA agrees that rich countries must pay. Its policy lead, Jess Beagley, said that a large share of the money developing countries need to carry out their plans must come from developed nations under the Paris Agreement.

But none of that explains why one of the biggest threats to Indian lives is missing from the document. Much of the air pollution in India and the gases heating the planet come from the same source: burning coal, oil and gas. Cutting one helps cut the other. GCHA argues that leaving health out of climate plans wastes money, costs lives and weakens public support for climate action.

The timing makes the gap harder to ignore. World leaders meet in Antalya, Türkiye, from 9 to 20 November for the COP31 climate summit, and India will arrive with a climate plan that says nothing about air pollution.

As smog returns to north India this winter, the gap is likely to come up at COP31, where health will be discussed formally for the first time.

Two leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party were sent to Tihar Jail on Wednesday. A Special Executive Magistrate remanded Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka to five days of judicial custody after police accused them of trespassing into Jantar Mantar, violating prohibitory orders, obstructing public servants and breaching the one-year peace bonds they had signed only days earlier. A third leader, Ajinkya Shinde, was released after signing a fresh bond.

Their lawyer argued that an executive magistrate had no power to order judicial custody at all, a question that goes to the centre of this story. The jailing comes while the larger question raised by the Delhi Police detentions of October 9 to 11 remains unanswered. The government’s explanation to the Supreme Court was due on Tuesday, but the hearing was put off to Thursday, October 15, after a member of the bench was unwell, and the Solicitor General was given more time to file an affidavit he said was ready. Under what law were thousands of citizens held? No one has yet said.

Also Read:  Delhi Protest: Why the State’s Response Should Concern Every Voter

A Law That Never Defines Detention

The backdrop to the October 10 protest against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar was a prohibitory order under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023, barring assemblies of five or more, processions, dharnas, slogans and placards without written permission. What made the scale possible lies in the law itself. The BNSS offers no general statutory definition of detention. A person can be held for hours, released, and told no arrest took place, and the safeguards attached to an arrest quietly fall away.

The BNSS, in force since July 1, 2024, also contains a power the old code never had. Section 172 of the BNSS obliges every person to obey the lawful directions of a police officer acting under its chapter on preventive action, and lets the officer detain or remove anyone who resists, refuses, ignores or disregards them. The person must be taken before a magistrate or, in petty cases, released within 24 hours.

Petitioners before the Supreme Court say people were detained far outside the area covered by prohibitory orders, picked up before disobeying any direction, denied grounds and lawyers, and that journalists and senior advocates were among those held. They say the Delhi Police detentions continued after the Court intervened. At a special sitting on October 11, the Court directed that no one be detained except by procedure established by law, particularly people assembling peacefully outside the areas where Section 163 applied, and ordered that internet services remain undisturbed and Metro and rail services run normally.

An Order Nobody Has Seen in Full

In the days before the protest, Delhi Police said Section 163 was in force in New Delhi and that no gathering would be permitted, at Jantar Mantar or anywhere else. The order itself, with its boundaries, duration and the facts it rests on, has not been made public, though the law requires it to be written and to state those facts. The Supreme Court Bar Association has asked the Court to obtain the scope, conditions and reasons of these orders.

As described by the police, the order barred assemblies of five or more, demonstrations, picketing, slogans and speeches without written permission, and the carrying of firearms, banners, placards, lathis, swords, sticks and brickbats. In practice, the Delhi Police detentions reached far beyond it. On October 11, Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal told the Court the restrictions applied within a four-kilometre zone, yet police were taking people off trains and outside that radius. Other senior counsel said people were detained as far away as Gurugram and Noida without having committed any offence.

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How Police Held Protesters Before the BNSS

Until July 2024, police had no general national power to hold someone for disobeying an instruction. The common tool, Section 151 of the CrPC, let an officer who knew of a design to commit a cognisable offence arrest without warrant, only if it could not otherwise be prevented, and for no more than 24 hours. The Supreme Court upheld it in Ahmed Noormohmed Bhatti v State of Gujarat (2005) because those limits sat in its text. In Rajender Singh Pathania v State (NCT of Delhi) (2011), it held that a bare apprehension of a breach of peace cannot justify arrest.

Section 151 survives almost word for word as Section 170 of the BNSS. Delhi Police invoked it, with Section 126, against CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and two colleagues, detained aboard their flight after it landed. An intention to join a protest is no design to commit a cognisable offence, and the police must say what offence passengers on an aircraft were planning.

Section 172 and the Missing Safeguards

The CrPC never bound citizens to obey police directions, nor let police detain those who refused. Section 172 borrows the idea from state laws such as Section 65 of the Delhi Police Act, 1978, which lets police remove people who defy reasonable directions, then lifts it into the national code, adds the power to detain, and reaches anyone who merely ignores an instruction. The original Bill set no time limit at all, and the 24-hour cap came only after a parliamentary committee asked for one.

The safeguards did not travel with this power. Ignoring a direction can describe purely passive conduct, such as standing still when told to move. The BNSS protections around arrest, including an attested memo, being told the grounds, informing a relative and the right under Section 38 to meet an advocate, are written for arrest, and Section 172 nowhere extends them. A petty case is undefined, so the officer alone decides whether to release someone without a magistrate, and if release comes within 24 hours, no judge examines it. Nothing requires police to record or publish such detentions, and an overbroad Section 163 order taints every direction issued under it.

No Supreme Court ruling has yet tested the provision, but that may now change. On October 12, the Court agreed to hear a writ petition that challenges both the Section 163 order and the constitutionality of Section 172 itself. The petition argues that the phrase “lawful directions” is void for vagueness and violates Articles 14, 19 and 21, and asks the Court to stop the Delhi Police Commissioner from using Section 172 for mass detention. It is one of at least 18 petitions now before the Court arising from the protests.

Why Delhi Police Detentions Stop Short of 24 Hours

An arrest without a serious cognisable offence invites hard judicial scrutiny, while a few hours’ detention ending in release leaves a court almost nothing to examine. On October 11, senior counsel told the bench that authorities were holding people just under 24 hours before releasing them, to sidestep procedural requirements. If so, the Delhi Police detentions work the law’s gaps by design, with custody timed to end just before accountability begins.

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The Constitution Looks Past the Label

Constitutional rights turn on the substance of custody, whatever the police call it. Article 22 requires that anyone arrested be told the grounds, allowed a lawyer and produced before a magistrate within 24 hours.

D.K. Basu v State of West Bengal (1997) set requirements for all arrests and detentions, including name tags for officers, an attested memo and informing the family. Joginder Kumar v State of Uttar Pradesh (1994) held that the power to arrest does not by itself justify using it. In Pankaj Bansal (2023), Prabir Purkayastha (2024) and Vihaan Kumar (2025), the Court required grounds of arrest to be communicated, holding in the last that failure renders an arrest illegal.

Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(b) guarantee free speech and the right to assemble peaceably and without arms. Judging whether that line was crossed requires knowing how many were held, yet the state has placed no official figure before the Court. Media counts for October 10 alone range from more than 2,000 to close to 7,000.

No One Was Spared

The Delhi Police detentions reached the very people whose work is to hold power to account. Reporters were held on both days, many after showing press cards, and some had phones seized. One senior advocate told the bench he was thrown into a moving bus. Another set out the test the police skipped: necessity first, proportionality after, and no necessity at all to detain, beat or kick unarmed students and children moving peacefully.

Press freedom groups, rights organisations and the UN human rights office called for the release of those held and an inquiry into reported abuse. The Ministry of External Affairs rejected the UN’s concern as unwarranted interference.

On Tuesday, after Senior Advocate Indira Jaising mentioned a petition by the Network of Women in Media, India, the Chief Justice directed that a senior Delhi Police officer be present in court on Thursday to explain allegations that women journalists were assaulted while covering the protests. The police will have to answer for that in person.

A Protest Site Struck Off the Map

The state’s answer to the protests has since moved from the street to the rulebook. On October 11, Delhi Police Commissioner Anurag Kumar issued a standing order de-notifying Jantar Mantar as a protest venue on the recommendation of a Home Ministry committee. Demonstrations are now allowed, subject to permission, at Ramlila Maidan, Burari Ground and CBD Ground in Shahdara.

Before the Delhi High Court on Tuesday, the police said they had acted on the Supreme Court’s directions. The Court’s October 9 order is narrower than that. It observed that it was high time other places with amenities for peaceful protesters were identified, and asked the competent authority to consider the suggestion and decide. It did not direct that Jantar Mantar be closed, and in 2018 the Court had held that protests there could not be banned outright. The High Court has issued notice on a Youth Congress petition over the refusal of permission to protest and listed it for November 17, while other pleas on the closure and the October 10 assaults remain pending.

On October 12, thousands joined an opposition march from Barakhamba Road towards the Supreme Court, which halted at police barricades. Opposition leaders said their petition reached the Court though not in person, and police registered FIRs for violating the Section 163 order. The same day, Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi and ten other opposition leaders moved the Court against the electoral roll revision. On Tuesday morning, about 20 CJP volunteers who climbed over barricades into Jantar Mantar were detained. A day later, two of them were in Tihar, and the peace bonds signed on October 11 to secure their release had become the means of jailing them.

Also Read:  BNS Rape Law: What If the Victim Isn't a Woman?

What the Supreme Court Has Said So Far

The Court has moved quickly, though it has yet to rule any detention unlawful. On October 9, a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant said Metro and train services could be regulated and must not be stopped altogether, warning against using a hammer to kill a fly.

On October 11, with 45 Metro stations still shut, it issued notice to the Centre and the Delhi Police on a contempt petition. On October 12, it agreed to hear the Bar Association’s petition on lawyers, with the Chief Justice observing that members of the Bar may join peaceful protests at identified locations. All of it now waits for Thursday.

The Questions Delhi Police Detentions Leave Unanswered

The police have a case. The protest application came three days before the event, against a ten-day rule, and twenty FIRs were filed over the weekend, including for assault on personnel. None of this explains the rest. Refusing a protest at Jantar Mantar does not authorise detaining people on trains or in neighbouring cities. Section 172 needs a disobeyed direction and Section 170 a planned offence, and neither fits passengers held in their seats. The detentions at Connaught Place on October 11 came after the Supreme Court had spoken.

When the Court sits on Thursday, the force will have to say under which law thousands were held, publish its Section 163 orders, explain why grounds were withheld, and account for what happened to the journalists. For a force that answers to the Union Home Ministry and guards the seat of government, the Delhi Police detentions have been a loss of face. They have shown how easily a gap in the law becomes a method, and how little stands between a citizen and a police van once the word arrest goes unspoken. Closing Jantar Mantar, and jailing those who walked back into it, does nothing to close that gap. Whether the law that allowed it survives is now a question for the Court.

India is called the world’s largest democracy for a simple reason. It has the largest electorate in the world, over 99 crore registered voters by the Election Commission’s own count in January 2025, and every government in this country has drawn its legitimacy from them. So what are these citizens to do when the vote itself begins to slip out of their hands? Do they have the right to protest? The thousands who tried to reach Jantar Mantar for the Delhi protest on October 10 were asking for nothing more than what is already theirs. They were protesting to protect their right to vote, which flows from Article 326 of the Constitution and is given effect by the Representation of the People Act. When that right is being taken away, how else are people in a democracy to make themselves heard, if not peacefully, at a site the state itself has set aside for dissent?

Also Read:  Election Commission Press Note Fixes What It Said Wasn't Broken

When the Living Are Declared Dead

The reasons given for striking citizens off the rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) are hard to believe, and they are what brought people out for the protest in Delhi. Living people have been marked dead. In some parts, voters were listed as deceased on the strength of death certificates that matched their names but carried different parents, spouses and addresses. Elsewhere, citizens were flagged because a mother and child were less than 15 years apart in age, because siblings were born less than nine months apart, because twins shared a date of birth, or because their name was spelt differently from their father’s.

In some cases, a household with a large family was struck off because it seemed suspicious, as did a woman whose father’s name appeared on one document and her husband’s on another, which describes almost every married woman in India. Many were removed simply because their names could not be traced to a roll prepared in 2002. An analysis of the Commission’s own state-wise draft rolls shows more than 13 crore names left out across 30 states and Union Territories. Former Chief Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi, who has put the deletions at 13 to 14 crore, has called them illogical, unreasonable, arbitrary and mischievous, questioned whether so many people could really have migrated, and said that removing even one valid voter is unconstitutional.

Since Gandhi Jayanti, a date that recalls the power of peaceful protest, citizens have been making their way to Jantar Mantar again and again, and again and again they have been detained. Students, opposition parties across the spectrum and ordinary voters have taken up the same demand in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. What unites them is a simple conviction that the institution entrusted with their vote owes them an answer.

The Cockroach Janta Party called the Delhi protest on October 10 to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, whom the protesters hold responsible for the way the revision has been carried out. What we are seeing on the streets has its roots inside the Election Commission. When it emerged that Gyanesh Kumar had been taking decisions on the revision largely on his own, overriding the repeated objections of his two fellow commissioners, the crisis of trust stopped being a matter of opposition politics. If those within the Commission could not get a hearing, ordinary voters had every reason to fear they would not either. Saturday's Delhi protest was a chance for the state to listen. It chose to silence them instead.

Also Read:  Najeeb Jung Asks CEC Gyanesh Kumar to Step Down Gracefully

Detained Before the First Slogan

What the Delhi Police did on the day of the protest should trouble every Indian, whatever their politics. A democracy is tested by how it treats those who disagree with it, and on Saturday the state treated dissenters as a problem to be removed before they could speak. Abhijeet Dipke and his colleagues were detained inside their aircraft before they could step off it. Dhruv Rathee was picked up at his family’s home. Four former chief ministers, Arvind Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee, Pinarayi Vijayan and Manik Sarkar, were taken away before they could reach Jantar Mantar, and Kejriwal was carried bodily to a police bus. By evening, more than 7,000 people had been detained, most of them before they ever reached the protest site. To hold citizens for what they intend to do peacefully is to punish them for an intention the Constitution protects, and it strikes at the personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21.

Just as troubling was what the state was willing to do to everyone else. To keep protesters away from one designated site, it closed 45 Metro stations, cancelled dozens of trains, cut mobile internet across the heart of the capital for 24 hours, and reportedly had passengers taken off a train in Madhya Pradesh on the suspicion that they might be heading to Delhi. Commuters, students and families who had nothing to do with the protest paid for the state’s anxiety. A government confident of its case would not need to bring its own capital to a standstill to avoid hearing it.

Our Constitution anticipated exactly this tension. It guarantees the freedom of speech and the right to assemble peaceably and without arms, and it allows the state to restrict these freedoms only when the restriction is reasonable and genuinely tied to public order. Fear of what might happen is not enough to forbid a peaceful protest outright. Yet on the day of the Delhi protest, more than 30,000 police and paramilitary personnel turned the heart of the capital into a fortress, and Jantar Mantar, the one place meant for dissent, stood empty. That empty square says a great deal about what the state considers a reasonable restriction.

Most worrying of all is how lightly the Supreme Court’s word was treated. A day before the protest, the Court told the Centre it could regulate movement but must not stop Metro and train services altogether, observing that one should not use a hammer to kill a fly. The government’s own law officer assured the Court that the curbs would be reconsidered. What followed was a trim from 57 closed stations to 45, and trains that still did not run. A contempt petition is now before the Court. 

The treatment of journalists cannot pass without comment. Reporters from Newslaundry and Scroll, along with several other journalists covering the Delhi protest, were detained despite showing their press cards, and Newslaundry’s official phones were seized. The law allows preventive detention only when the police know of a plan to commit a cognisable offence that cannot otherwise be prevented. The Delhi Police owe the public an answer on what offence these reporters were about to commit. Reporting is their job, and when the state takes away their phones, it takes away the public’s right to know what was done in its name.

Where Else Can Citizens Go?

If citizens cannot protest peacefully at Jantar Mantar, where in India may they protest at all? The Delhi protest was planned at the very place the capital sets aside for dissent, and the Supreme Court held in 2018, in Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v Union of India, that protests there cannot be banned outright. Refusing permission at that site and then sealing it off with barricades sits uneasily with that ruling. A democracy that leaves its citizens nowhere to gather is telling them their grievances have nowhere to go.

At the heart of the Delhi protest is a question this country must answer honestly: do the people of a nation that calls itself the mother of democracy still have the right to dissent? The courts have answered it more than once. In 1973, the Supreme Court held that the state cannot use its power over public spaces to deny citizens the right to assemble. In 2012, after the Ramlila Maidan crackdown, it called the right to protest a fundamental feature of a vibrant democracy. In 2020, it held that prohibitory orders cannot be used to suppress the legitimate expression of grievance. The principle running through all of them is simple: the state must make room for dissent, because dissent is how a democracy corrects itself. On October 10, the state chose to leave no room at all. It was a black day for the world's largest democracy, and one its voters will not forget soon.

Neeraj Thakur's twin sons voted in the 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha elections without anyone questioning their place on Delhi's voter list. This year, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has asked them to prove it all over again, because they were born on the same day.

They are among the twins across Delhi who have received notices under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. The ECI software that checks voter records treats any two siblings born less than nine months apart as a possible error, and it has no provision for twins. Families who did everything asked of them have submitted documents, attended hearings and waited. A month after the notices arrived, they still do not know whether their children will make it to the final electoral roll, due on December 4.

Also Read:  CEC Gyanesh Kumar Row: Ex-Officers Say ECs Risk Cover-Up Charge

Cleared at the Door, Flagged by the System

Neeraj Thakur's family is originally from Himachal Pradesh. His twin sons, Shourya Singh Thakur and Shubhang Singh Thakur, were born on November 17, 2000, and grew up in Delhi. The family lives in IP Extension in East Delhi. Shubhang is a journalist in Delhi, and Shourya is an actor in Mumbai.

The brothers turned 18 in 2018. They have voted in both the 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha elections, and in Delhi elections as well.

When the SIR began in Delhi on June 30, a booth level officer (BLO) visited the family during the house-to-house enumeration. The family told the BLO that the boys were twins and handed over their documents. The BLO checked everything and cleared them. When Delhi's draft electoral roll was published on August 31, both brothers were on it.

Then a BLO returned to the house, this time with notices. Shourya's notice, issued for the Vishwas Nagar Assembly constituency, ticks a single reason: "The age gap between you and another progeny linked with the same parent in last SIR, is less than 9 months." It summoned him for a hearing on September 28 with his original documents, and warned that they would be "sent for verification of their authenticity."

"Our family was shocked to receive this notice. During the Delhi SIR exercise, the local BLO came to our house, and my sons clearly told the BLO that they are twins. The BLO went through all our documents, verified them and cleared everything. After that, my sons' names appeared on the Delhi voter list and there was no problem at all. Then, out of nowhere, this notice arrived," said Neeraj Thakur.

The family has since submitted fresh documents to the Election Commission. Weeks later, they have had no decision.

"It is basic common sense that two children born on the same date are twins. Some people even have triplets. How can the ECI's software fail to account for something so simple? What is the point of a BLO visiting our home, of us explaining everything and the BLO clearing it, if the software can simply override the BLO's decision? This is absurd," Thakur said.

Born Four Minutes Apart, Still a Discrepancy

In Mayur Vihar Phase 3, also in East Delhi, the Soman family is in the same position. Asvath Soman was born on July 6, 1998, at 4.40 am, and his brother Akshan followed four minutes later, at 4.44 am. The family, originally from Alappuzha in Kerala, votes in the Kondli Assembly constituency, and the twins have voted in past elections.

Both brothers were on the August 31 draft roll. Then the ECI software flagged them, and both received notices from the Electoral Registration Officer of Kondli with the same box ticked: a sibling age gap of less than nine months. They were asked to appear for a hearing on September 16.

The family submitted all their documents, and the BLO uploaded them. Soman, the twins' father, explained to the BLO that his sons are twins.

"We told the BLO that our sons are twins. He understood, but said he could do nothing because it is a system-generated notice. The system has no provision to recognise twins. We have submitted every document, and the BLO has uploaded all of it. Now we are simply waiting for the final list," said Soman.

They are not alone. The Probe has learnt that many more twins in Delhi have faced similar issues and are all waiting for the final list.

Also Read:  SIR and Citizenship: 'You Are a Foreigner Until Proven Otherwise'

How the ECI Software Turns Twins Into Suspects

The trouble begins with how the SIR checks voters. Every voter is matched against the roll from the last intensive revision, which in Delhi's case dates to 2002. Young voters who were not on that roll, like these twins, are linked through a parent who was. The ECI software then groups every voter linked to the same parent as siblings and runs a set of automated checks for "logical discrepancies."

One of these checks flags any two siblings born less than nine months apart, since separately born siblings cannot be that close in age. The rule is meant to catch fake or wrongly linked entries. Twins have an age gap of zero, so the ECI software flags every pair of them, every time.

"Logical discrepancy" is not a term found in election law. In this phase of the SIR, the ECI has reportedly widened it to as many as 11 categories, and Delhi's notices are reported to be issued under 11 types of mismatch. The Commission has not officially published the list. Besides the sibling rule, the categories reported so far include a parent-child age gap under 15 years or over 50 years, a grandparent-grandchild gap under 40 years, more than six children linked to one parent, and mismatches in a voter's own name or a parent's name.

The Delhi Chief Electoral Officer has described the notices as system-generated. Once the software flags a voter, the BLO who verified the family at their door cannot overrule it. Only an electoral registration officer or an assistant electoral registration officer can clear the case, after examining the documents. And no document in India certifies that two people are twins. Families can only offer separate birth certificates showing the same date and parents, and hope an officer accepts them.

The Election Commission's Silence on Twins

The ECI has not issued a single public statement on twins, in Delhi or anywhere else. The only official acknowledgement has come from Karnataka, where election officials said twins can create a logical discrepancy because of identical birth dates, and that such cases are examined individually with supporting documents.

The ECI's public responses have been general. On September 20, it said a notice does not mean a voter's name will be deleted. It has not said why the ECI software was built without an exception for twins, how many twins it has flagged, or when their cases will be decided. The process has also been opaque. The notice numbers on the Soman twins' notices carry the date September 6, and Shourya Thakur's September 7.

On September 17, petitioners told the Supreme Court that no definition or criteria for logical discrepancies had been placed on the Delhi CEO's website. Only on September 19 did the CEO's office say the list of voters issued notices had been uploaded. By then, the Somans had already been summoned for their hearing.

On September 22, a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant observed that notices were going out "almost mechanically," and said the basis for identifying a logical discrepancy needed clarification. Four days later, the ECI ordered a review of its ECINET platform by a committee that includes an independent expert from an IIT or IIIT. It has not said whether that review will fix the rule that flags twins.

Also Read:  Election Commission Press Note Fixes What It Said Wasn't Broken

One Software, Lakhs of Notices

The twins are a small part of a much larger upheaval. Before the SIR, Delhi had 1,45,10,299 registered voters. The draft roll published on August 31 carried 97,53,577 names, leaving out 47,56,722 people, or 32.78 per cent of the electorate. That was the highest deletion rate of any state or Union Territory where the SIR has been held. Of those left out, 43.32 lakh were marked as permanently shifted or absent, 2.82 lakh as dead and 1.41 lakh as duplicates.

Even voters who made it onto the draft roll were not safe. The ECI software flagged 33.13 lakh of them for notices, about one in three. Of these, 19.33 lakh were flagged for logical discrepancies and 13.79 lakh because they could not be mapped to the 2002 roll.

The net has been wide. Even Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta received a notice over an age discrepancy involving her parents. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, former Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and former deputy prime minister L K Advani were flagged as unmapped. Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, a member of the Commission running the exercise, received a notice over a mismatch in his own name.

Other states have seen the same pattern. In West Bengal, where the logical discrepancy category first appeared, the Supreme Court questioned why a parent-child age gap of 15 years or less was treated as suspicious. For ordinary families, every notice means gathering papers, taking time off work and waiting. As of late September, about 2.98 lakh hearings had been held in Delhi, a fraction of the 33 lakh people flagged.

Waiting for December 4

Under a revised schedule the ECI issued on September 26, Delhi voters can file claims and objections until October 30, and election officials must decide all notices by November 30. The final electoral roll will be published on December 4.

Until then, the Thakur and Soman families can only wait. Both sets of twins have voted before. Both families told their BLOs the truth, handed over every document and responded when summoned. What stands between them and the final roll is a rule in the ECI software that cannot account for two children born on the same day.

Why should voters who have already voted, and who were verified at their own doorsteps, carry the burden of proving their eligibility again? The ECI has yet to answer several questions:

• Why was the ECI software built without an exception for twins and triplets?

• How many twins in Delhi have received notices, and how many cases are still pending?

• Why can a system-generated flag override a BLO's verification at the door?

• Why have the 11 logical discrepancy categories not been officially published?

• Will the ECINET review fix the nine-month rule before the final roll?

For four young men in East Delhi, and an unknown number of twins across the city, the answer will come on December 4.

Former Delhi Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung has called on Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to resign, alleging that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has left crores of Indians without a vote and damaged the Constitution that civil servants swear to uphold.

Speaking alongside a group of retired civil servants, Najeeb Jung said they had come with a petition asking the CEC to step down so the next election could be conducted fairly. "He should step down gracefully," he said.

"Our Constitution Has Been Torn Apart"

Jung, a former IAS officer, assumed charge as Delhi's 20th Lieutenant Governor on 9 July 2013 and resigned on 22 December 2016. He said he and his colleagues had served the government for four decades after taking an oath on the Constitution. 

"What pains us today is that our Constitution, which we regard as our Bible, our Gita, our Quran, has been torn apart by one person," Najeeb Jung said. "Our complaint is not against the government."

He pointed out that Gyanesh Kumar is 15 years his junior in service. Kumar is a retired 1988-batch IAS officer of the Kerala cadre and took charge as CEC on 19 February 2025. "It makes us even more ashamed that a colleague from our own service is behaving in this manner," Jung said. 

He alleged that the SIR had been carried out by the Election Commission of India with dishonest intent, and claimed that around 13 crore people have lost their vote as a result. He acknowledged that some of these names may belong to people who have died or moved, but said that even if the real figure were 10 or 12 crore, it would still be intolerable. "There are many countries in the world whose population is less than 13 crore," he said. 

Jung added that the Supreme Court had also said no individual could be deprived of the right to vote. "Not a single person can be deprived of their right to vote. Not even one," he said.

A Veteran of Six or Seven Elections

Drawing on his own experience, Najeeb Jung said he had conducted six or seven elections as an SDM, as a Collector, and later as Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, when two elections were held, without any complaints.

He described the painstaking work behind a fair poll: house-to-house surveys to prepare detailed voter lists, training polling staff, and sending them in the rain and cold, by bullock cart and truck, to distant villages so that no voter was left out. Polling material, he said, was then locked and guarded in treasuries to prevent any tampering. "For us, it is a very serious matter that so many people have been disenfranchised," he said.

Jung stressed that the members of the group were retired officers who had never broken the law. "We are civilised people, we are not activists, we do not create chaos on the streets," he said. They had given prior notice that they wished to hand over a petition, he said, and could not understand why they were stopped by the Delhi Police.

He pointed to former Union Home Secretary G.K Pillai, who had once been responsible for law and order in the country, and said he had been held at police quarters. "We never imagined, when we joined the service, that we would have to see this day," Jung said.

He also spoke of the country's youth. "Our young people want jobs, they want to study and rise to good positions. We do not want to take to the streets. I have children, they have children," he said.

Najeeb Jung ended with an appeal. "Our intention is clear. Fix India's election system. Correct the voter list and conduct the next election so that all the people are happy and not a single person is left without a vote."

Ninety-eight former civil servants have accused Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of turning the Election Commission of India (ECI) into "an instrument of State power". Their open letter came out on Wednesday as opposition parties in Delhi pressed their demand for his resignation.

The Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG) is a collective of retired officers from the All India and Central Services. It said the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls under CEC Gyanesh Kumar was designed "to exclude and disenfranchise millions of genuine voters for brazenly unconstitutional, partisan and political ends".

Also Read:  Former Judges to Probe SIR Voter List Deletions, Hold Public Hearings

The letter also warns the two Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi. It says that by ratifying the CEC's decisions at a meeting on 26 September, they have made themselves "liable to the charge of participating in a cover up".

The signatories include, amongst others, Ashok Lavasa, former Election Commissioner; G.K. Pillai, former Union Home Secretary; Najeeb Jung, former Lieutenant Governor of Delhi; Julio Ribeiro, former Director General of Police, Punjab; Wajahat Habibullah, former Chief Information Commissioner; Meeran Borwankar, former Director General of the Bureau of Police Research and Development; K. Sujatha Rao, former Union Health Secretary; Meena Gupta, former Union Environment Secretary; Harsh Mander, former IAS officer; and Ashish Joshi, former Principal Controller of Communications Accounts, North Zone.

What the Letter Says About CEC Gyanesh Kumar

The group describes the conduct of the ECI as "the most glaring example of wilful disregard of constitutional ethics". It notes that the commission is currently made up entirely of former IAS officers.

According to the letter, the SIR turned a routine administrative procedure into an exercise with "no precedent, no clear basis in law, and no verified necessity". It says the commission shifted the burden onto citizens to prove they were eligible to vote, overturned "the natural presumption of citizenship" in their favour, and introduced "lineage as the basis of voting rights". Many people were asked for documents they did not have, even when they were already on the rolls.

The former officers say the stated aim of "purification" of the rolls "created panic and fear in large sections of the Indian population". They argue the exercise risks creating "a class of stateless residents".

"This has been a particularly egregious example of political partisanship perhaps unparalleled in the history of independent India," the letter says. It adds that the officers responsible "have damaged the very foundations of our electoral democracy".

Also Read:  Election Commission Press Note Fixes What It Said Wasn't Broken

Internal Dissent at the Commission

The letter cites recent reporting by the Indian Express on the "unilateral manner of functioning" of CEC Gyanesh Kumar and a group of his lieutenants. The paper reported on 23 September that Mr Sandhu and Mr Joshi had raised objections at least 14 times over 10 months. Their objections concerned decisions on deletions, restorations and appeals that were reportedly issued without their knowledge.

According to the Indian Express, Mr Joshi warned in May against changing Form 6, the voter enrolment form, without amending the rules. Mr Sandhu later called an added question about an applicant's presence on earlier rolls "unauthorised and illegal".

After the report, the three commissioners met on 26 September. The commission then said the original SIR order of 24 June 2025 had been approved unanimously. It announced a committee, including an independent IIT or IIIT expert, to review access to its electoral database. It also said future meeting agendas would be circulated in advance.

The CCG letter says the two commissioners "acquiesced for months" even though the law, as the majority of the commission, allowed them to insist that their view prevail.

Supreme Court Scrutiny of CEC Gyanesh Kumar

The questions have now reached the Supreme Court. On 5 October, a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant issued notices to the Election Commission and the Centre on a petition. The petition seeks a declaration that the CEC exercised his powers unlawfully without the approval of his fellow commissioners.

The court declined to suspend him, citing possible disruption to election work. It did contradict the commission's claim that the courts had upheld the changed form. "Any modified Form 6 has not been approved by us. Let us be clear. When the record is produced, we would like to see who has modified," the Chief Justice said.

The Election Commission has maintained that the SIR is needed to remove duplicate and ineligible entries from the rolls.

Protests in Delhi

The letter arrives at a tense moment. On Tuesday, police briefly detained opposition MPs, including the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, during a march towards the commission's headquarters. Delhi Police have since registered an FIR against Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi for allegedly entering Akashvani Bhawan without authorisation. "The election commission is a puppet in the hands of the government," the Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said.

On Wednesday, Mr Kharge hosted opposition MPs at a lunch meeting to plan their next steps. Saurav Das, leader of the Cockroach Janta Party, the youth movement behind the summer's education protests, told reporters that his group would not leave the streets "until Gyanesh Kumar resigns". The group has announced a demonstration at Jantar Mantar on 10 October.

Earlier this week, another group of signatories, including former bureaucrats, wrote to the CEC urging him to resign. In April, the Rajya Sabha Chairman and the Lok Sabha Speaker rejected an opposition notice seeking his removal.

Also Read:  Gyanesh Kumar Impeachment Call: Ex-Bureaucrats Serve 'People's Notice'

Wider Charges Against the Bureaucracy

The CCG letter goes beyond the ECI. It criticises the Delhi Police's handling of the youth protest at Jantar Mantar and the attempted march to Parliament on 20 July. It says some officers "showed excessive enthusiasm in the use of force", including lathi charges, tear gas and pellet guns. The protests, over the NEET paper leak, ended with the resignation of the Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, on 25 July.

It also accuses officers in the Enforcement Directorate, CBI, Income Tax department and Narcotics Control Bureau of being "complicit in the unnecessary harassment" of the government's perceived opponents. In such cases, it says, "the process of justice itself" becomes the punishment.

The group criticises officials in one state for showering flower petals on Kanwar yatris while forcing Muslim-owned meat shops to close. It also cites the continued demolition of minority-owned properties despite Supreme Court orders.

On the environment, the letter says nearly 98% of submitted projects receive environmental clearance. It says clearances rose from 577 in 2018 to over 12,000 in a single year by 2022, which "would not have been possible without the active participation" of IAS and Indian Forest Service officers.

An Appeal to Serving Officers

The letter is addressed to serving officers. It quotes Sardar Patel's 1949 warning: "If you do not give your honest opinion for fear that it will displease your minister, please then you had better go."

The signatories accept that today's officers work in an environment "far less accommodative and broadminded" than theirs. They say institutions such as the judiciary and the media can no longer be relied on as a fallback. Even so, they ask officers to follow the law where it conflicts with orders, "even where it causes personal inconvenience".

"As your seniors in service, we will always support you in these endeavours," the letter concludes.

Nobel Prize in Medicine 2026: How Pond Algae Rewired Brain Science

In a freshwater pond, a single green cell far thinner than a human hair swims toward the sun. It has no brain and no eyes, only an orange eyespot and two whip-like tails. On Monday, October 5, 2026, that humble alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, found its way to Stockholm. The Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for the discoveries that turned the alga's light-sensing trick into optogenetics, a way to switch individual brain cells on and off with flashes of light.

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet honoured the trio "for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics." Deisseroth, 54, is an American psychiatrist and bioengineer at Stanford University. Hegemann, 71, is a biophysicist at Humboldt University of Berlin, and Nagel, 73, is a professor at the University of Würzburg. The three will share 12 million Swedish kronor, roughly $1.2 million.

Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel Assembly, said the method "makes it possible to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain." Committee chair Per Svenningsson said it lets scientists map the brain in ways they once could only dream of.

That precision is why this prize matters. With optogenetics, scientists can wake or silence one type of brain cell at a time and watch what changes, which is how they are now tracing the circuits behind memory, fear, addiction and mental illness. The tool has also reached patients. In results published in 2021, a French-led team showed it could restore partial sight to a person blinded by an inherited eye disease, the first proof that optogenetics could work against a human disease.

What Is Optogenetics?

Optogenetics is a technique in which scientists give chosen brain cells a gene borrowed from algae, so that those cells respond to light. When light reaches the modified cells, usually through a thin optical fibre, a tiny channel in each cell opens, charged particles rush in and the cell fires an electrical signal. Other light-sensitive proteins can do the reverse and silence cells.

Deisseroth put it simply on the day of the award. Light is usually a tool for looking at things, he told the radio show Here & Now. Optogenetics uses light to make things happen deep inside a living, behaving brain, and only in the cells that carry the algal gene.

Why the Brain Needed a Light Switch

For most of the last century, neuroscientists studied the brain the way you might study an orchestra from outside the concert hall. They could record the music, and with electrodes they could jolt a region into action. An electric pulse, though, spreads and hits every cell nearby. Nobody could ask one type of neuron, buried among billions of others, to play its note while the rest stayed quiet.

Francis Crick, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the structure of DNA, saw the problem clearly. He argued that neuroscience needed a way to turn one kind of brain cell on or off while leaving its neighbours untouched, and he guessed that light would be the ideal signal. He admitted the idea sounded far-fetched. Decades later, the answer came from the bottom of a pond.

A Green Alga With a Secret

Peter Hegemann began chasing Chlamydomonas in the 1980s. He wanted to know how a cell with no nervous system could steer toward or away from light. His group recorded tiny electrical currents in the alga that appeared almost the instant light struck it. That speed suggested something unusual: the light sensor and the gate that lets charged particles into the cell might be the same protein.

For years the protein refused to be caught. It was scarce, unstable and hard to purify. The breakthrough came in 2001, when Suneel Kateriya, a researcher in Hegemann's group, spotted DNA sequences for large rhodopsin-like proteins in a library of Chlamydomonas genes held at a Japanese research centre. Rhodopsins are light-catching proteins, a name they share with the pigment in our own eyes.

The Frog Egg Experiment

Hegemann sent the sequences to Georg Nagel, a biophysicist then working at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt with Ernst Bamberg. Nagel slipped the genes into the eggs of the African clawed frog, cells large enough to measure with ease. When he shone light on them, current flowed.

In 2002 the team reported in Science that the first protein, channelrhodopsin-1, was a light-gated channel. A year later, in the journal PNAS, they described channelrhodopsin-2. It opened in blue light and let a broad stream of positively charged ions pour in, both in frog eggs and in mammalian cells.

This was the finding the Nobel Prize in Medicine now celebrates. Channelrhodopsin-2 was a single protein that acted as both the light sensor and the ion channel. The light receptors in animal eyes need a relay of several molecules to turn light into a signal. Channelrhodopsin-2 needed only itself and retinal, a light-absorbing molecule that animal tissue already makes from vitamin A. Hegemann and Nagel recognised early on that this made it a powerful tool for research.

A Psychiatrist's Frustration

At Stanford, Karl Deisseroth was training as a psychiatrist and growing frustrated. He could treat patients with depression and other illnesses, but he could not tell them what was going wrong inside their brains. Psychiatry, he told Here & Now, is probably the field of medicine most in need of that kind of explanation, because the brain is so intricate and fragile to study.

In the summer of 2004, working with Ed Boyden, then a graduate student, and later with Feng Zhang, Deisseroth put Nagel's channelrhodopsin-2 gene into rat neurons growing in a dish and pulsed them with blue light. The cells fired. Their 2005 paper in Nature Neuroscience showed that light could trigger nerve signals with millisecond precision, matching the brain's own speed. By 2007 his lab had made the switch work in the brains of living mice.

The method became known as optogenetics: genetics decides which cells receive the light-sensitive protein, and optics decides when they fire. In 2005, Nagel and Alexander Gottschalk also used it to control the behaviour of tiny roundworms, one of the first uses of the tool in an intact animal.

Why This Nobel Prize in Medicine Matters

Optogenetics gave neuroscience a precise tool for testing cause and effect. Researchers can now ask a sharp question: if this group of cells goes dark, what changes? Labs have used it to study learning, fear, addiction and movement. They have traced the cells that flip an animal between sleep and wakefulness and hunted for engrams, the physical traces that individual memories leave in the brain.

The spread was fast because Deisseroth's lab shared its tools freely and trained thousands of scientists to use them. Perlmann noted that the method is now used in laboratories around the world. That reach is the reason this Nobel Prize in Medicine honours a method, one that keeps producing discoveries every week.

From Lab Mice to a Blind Patient's Eyes

The first human results came in 2021. A team led by José-Alain Sahel and Botond Roska treated a patient blinded by retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease that destroys the light-sensing cells of the retina. They used a harmless virus to deliver a light-sensitive protein to surviving retinal cells and paired the treatment with engineered goggles. Seven months later, the patient began reporting improvements, and brain recordings showed activity linked to a visual object. Roska called it the first proof of concept for optogenetics in any human disease.

Hearing may be next. Electrical cochlear implants help more than a million people worldwide, but current spreads inside the inner ear and blurs sound. Light can be focused far more tightly. Tobias Moser's team in Göttingen is building an optical cochlear implant and is preparing its first clinical trial.

Deisseroth is careful about timelines. For now, he argues, the biggest gain for patients lies in what optogenetics reveals. Once scientists know which cells matter in an illness, they can design medicines that target exactly those cells.

The Delhi Thread in the Nobel Prize

For Indian readers, the Nobel Prize carries a quiet connection to Delhi. Suneel Kateriya, who found the channelrhodopsin sequences in 2001, is a co-author of both founding papers, the 2002 Science report and the 2003 PNAS study.

Today Kateriya is a professor at the School of Biotechnology at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where his lab still studies rhodopsins. In 2021 his group and colleagues at the Nagoya Institute of Technology reported a channelrhodopsin from a land-dwelling alga that responds to indigo-blue light, the shortest wavelength found in the family at the time.

The Names Left Off the Stage

Optogenetics had more than three parents, and the Nobel Prize in Medicine can be shared by three people at most. Ernst Bamberg co-wrote the founding channelrhodopsin papers with Nagel and Hegemann. Ed Boyden was first author on the landmark 2005 paper. Gero Miesenböck at Oxford made neurons respond to light even earlier, using proteins from fruit flies, a system that worked but proved hard to use.

All six shared the 2013 Brain Prize, then the world's richest award for brain research. Hegemann, Deisseroth and Miesenböck also shared the 2022 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize. The three-person cap remains a sore point in modern science, where breakthroughs increasingly grow out of teams.

What Comes Next

The Nobel Assembly said optogenetics brings new discoveries every day in the long effort to understand how the brain works. The three laureates will receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death. Perlmann said that when he reached them, all three said the same thing: they were delighted to share the prize with two people they call friends.

Deisseroth, a self-described night owl, had just gone to bed when the call came, and for a moment he was unsure whether he was dreaming. For a pond alga that has spent millions of years chasing sunlight, it is a fitting end to the story. Its light switch has already returned a glimmer of sight to a blind patient, and it may yet explain the illnesses of the mind.

Gyanesh Kumar Impeachment Call: Why Ex-Civil Servants Say the CEC Must Go

On Monday, a group of retired senior civil servants and activists set out for Nirvachan Sadan in central Delhi with a four-page document addressed to the man who runs India's elections. They never reached his office.

The delegation, which included former Delhi lieutenant governor Najeeb Jung, former Union home secretary GK Pillai and political activist Yogendra Yadav, had sought a 4pm appointment with Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. According to Yadav, Delhi Police barricaded every route to the Election Commission of India, so the group moved its proceedings to the Press Club and held a press conference at 5pm instead. Yadav later wrote on X that the notice had been served, and that its message was that "constitutional authority demands constitutional accountability". 

Also Read:  Former Judges to Probe SIR Voter List Deletions, Hold Public Hearings

The document is titled "Chargesheet and Notice of Impeachment" and asks Gyanesh Kumar to "resign and avoid any further disgrace". If he refuses, "We, the People of India" demand his removal from office. The notice carries no legal force. Even so, the Gyanesh Kumar impeachment demand it sets out comes as the Supreme Court, the opposition and protesters in several cities are pressing the same questions about how India's election watchdog is being run.

The Names Behind the Notice

Seven of the signatories are former public servants. Najeeb Jung is a former lieutenant governor of Delhi, GK Pillai a former Union home secretary and Amitabha Pandey a former secretary to the Government of India. The others are retired IAS officer Jayashree Mukherjee, former ambassador Ashok Sharma, former civil servant Ashish Joshi, and former Intelligence Bureau special director and central information commissioner Yashovardhan Azad. They are joined by activists and citizens including Yogendra Yadav, transparency campaigners Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri, Aishe Ghosh, N Sai Balaji, Dinesh Srirangarajan and Sandeep Yadav.

At the press conference, Jung said the group had no quarrel with the government. It had acted, he said, because it found the Election Commission's functioning and the scale of alleged disenfranchisement during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) unacceptable. Pillai said the exercise had shifted the burden of proving eligibility on to ordinary voters. "You are asking 99.9 per cent Indians to prove for potential 0.1 per cent illegals," he said.

Six Charges Against the Chief Election Commissioner

The notice invokes Article 324(5) of the Constitution, which protects the Chief Election Commissioner from removal except for "proved misbehaviour or incapacity". The signatories say their complaint concerns "a sustained pattern of wilful disregard of law and constitutional duty", and they set out six charges.

The first charge accuses Kumar of exercising the commission's powers without placing matters before the full three-member body. It says the SIR was launched without adequate deliberation or recorded proceedings, and it cites reports that the two other election commissioners objected to decisions taken without their knowledge. The commission's recent announcement that agendas would now be circulated and minutes kept is, the signatories argue, "compelling evidence of a grave departure" from collective functioning.

The second concerns Form 6, the form used to enrol voters. The notice says a modified version was used despite internal objections that it was "unauthorised and illegal", and that its later withdrawal shows the change lacked lawful authority. It also argues that voters wrongly struck off the rolls must declare they are applying for the first time, under a warning of criminal punishment for false statements. Gyanesh Kumar, it says, is guilty of "forcing crores of citizens to make a false declaration".

The third charge concerns ECINET, the commission's digital platform. The signatories say it displaced the statutory role of Electoral Registration Officers. The commission said on September 26 that it would set up a committee to review how ECINET functions. The notice calls that decision "an extraordinary admission". 

The fourth is the gravest. It says the SIR has already produced 13.3 crore deletions from pre-SIR rolls, and that by the end of the exercise the gap between India's adult population and its electorate "would be 15 crores or more". These deletions, it says, have fallen hardest on women, the poor, migrants, minorities and the elderly. It also quotes an RTI reply in which the commission said it had "so far not taken any decision" on a nationwide SIR in 2025, which the signatories say raises questions about where the decision really came from.

The fifth charge accuses Kumar of conduct that creates "a reasonable and substantial apprehension of political partisanship". "You can no longer be a referee in a game where you are widely perceived to be aligned with a player," it reads. The sixth cites Section 32(1) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, which makes it an offence for an election official to breach official duty in preparing electoral rolls.

Also Read:  Election Commission Press Note Fixes What It Said Wasn't Broken

What the Election Commission Says

The commission has defended the revision. It says the SIR is meant to clear duplicate, dead and ineligible names and protect the integrity of the rolls. Last Friday it instructed officials to enrol eligible voters who had been left out by mistake.

On Form 6, it denies the form was altered, saying a declaration was attached to it during the Bihar SIR and later removed from its online portals. It has also said its orders and decisions carry full legal sanction and follow procedures laid down in the 2023 law governing the commission. 

Gyanesh Kumar himself had not publicly addressed the calls for his resignation or the protests as of the weekend. The BJP has dismissed the campaign. Union minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan summed up the party's view: "If they win, democracy zindabad; if they lose, Election Commission murdabad." 

What a People's Notice Can and Cannot Do

Under the Constitution, the power to remove a chief election commissioner rests with Parliament alone. Under Article 324(5), the CEC can be removed only in the same way, and on the same grounds, as a Supreme Court judge. That means a notice signed by at least 100 Lok Sabha MPs or 50 Rajya Sabha MPs, which the Speaker or Chairman may then admit or reject. If an inquiry panel finds misconduct, Parliament votes, and a two-thirds majority is needed before the President is advised to remove him. Azad himself acknowledged that the initiative had no legal sanctity, but said it reflected rising concern among citizens about how the poll panel is functioning. 

There are three reasons it still carries weight. The first is that the parliamentary route has so far gone nowhere. The opposition filed notices in both Houses in March, signed by 130 Lok Sabha MPs and 63 Rajya Sabha MPs, and both were rejected on April 6. A fresh notice with 73 signatures followed on April 24, setting out nine charges. It is still pending, and seven of those 73 MPs have reportedly since changed sides. With the formal Gyanesh Kumar impeachment process stalled, the people's notice puts a detailed charge sheet on the public record. 

The second lies in the authorship. A former home secretary, a former Intelligence Bureau special director and a former secretary to the Union government have spent decades working the machinery they now accuse the commission of bypassing. Their charges rest on administrative procedure, statutory forms and the role of registration officers, the same terms the commission uses to defend itself.

The third is accountability. Section 16 of the 2023 Act bars courts from hearing civil or criminal proceedings against the CEC for official acts, a provision the Supreme Court agreed on January 13 this year to examine. The appointment process is also contested. The notice says Kumar's appointment was made by "subverting the safeguards" set by the Supreme Court. In the 2023 Anoop Baranwal judgment, the court proposed a selection panel of the prime minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India, pending legislation. Parliament's 2023 law then replaced the chief justice with a Union minister chosen by the prime minister. Rahul Gandhi submitted a dissent note when Kumar was selected. 

That concern has now reached the bench. Speaking in Rajkot on October 4, former Supreme Court judge Rohinton Fali Nariman warned that the right to vote was in grave danger and urged the court to step in. He cited figures of about 90 lakh voters allegedly excluded in West Bengal, of whom roughly 22 lakh had appealed. Around one lakh appeals had been decided, with about 93 per cent going in voters' favour. 

Supreme Court Hearing Adds Weight to Gyanesh Kumar Impeachment Calls

On the same day the notice was released, the Supreme Court issued notices to the Centre and the commission on petitions alleging that the CEC had taken decisions without the approval of the other two commissioners. The court said it would examine those decisions and strike down any found to be unlawful. On Form 6, Chief Justice Surya Kant was direct: "Any modification to Form 6 has not been approved by us." He added that the court wanted to see the records to find out who had made the change. 

The hearing speaks directly to the first two charges in the notice. The underlying material comes from a series of Indian Express reports that commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had objected to, or complained about being kept uninformed on, a range of decisions, including several on the SIR. The commission has not explicitly denied those reports. 

Protests Spread From Mumbai to Delhi

Outside Parliament and the courts, the campaign has taken a more direct form. Protesters who have taken to the streets since Friday want Kumar to resign rather than wait for the Gyanesh Kumar impeachment process to run its course. On Sunday, thousands marched in Mumbai behind Raj Thackeray and Uddhav Thackeray, while in Delhi, police detained dozens over successive days and registered cases against some protesters for defying a ban on gatherings in the city centre. 

The Cockroach Janta Party, a youth movement, is driving much of the energy. It has called a major rally in Delhi on October 10, and its founder Abhijeet Dipke told supporters it was "now or never". 

The INDIA bloc has its own timetable. After a meeting of 19 parties, it announced "Save Democracy" marches from October 2 to 8, a march by opposition MPs to the Election Commission on October 6, a meeting with President Droupadi Murmu in the second week of October and a large rally in Delhi on November 1. Rahul Gandhi has said it is beyond doubt that Kumar changed Form 6 illegally and unilaterally. The demand has also drawn support from outside the bloc. The Biju Janata Dal's Naveen Patnaik has called for Gyanesh Kumar to resign and be removed.

What Happens Next

Any vote on a Gyanesh Kumar impeachment motion depends on the presiding officers of Parliament, who have so far declined to admit one. The April notice remains pending, the Supreme Court is examining how the commission reached its decisions, and the streets of Delhi will be tested again on October 10.

The people's notice ends by saying Kumar has "forfeited the moral and constitutional authority" to remain in office. Its signatories have no means of enforcing that verdict. Their notice nonetheless sets out the Gyanesh Kumar impeachment demand in detail, at a time when the commission's conduct is under scrutiny in court and on the streets.

A five-member commission of retired Supreme Court and High Court judges will examine the Election Commission of India's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, including whether eligible citizens were wrongly removed from the SIR voter list. The Lawyers' Association for Constitution (LAFC) announced the Independent Commission of Former Judges on the Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls in a press release on October 2, 2026.

LAFC said the commission was set up in response to growing concerns raised by citizens about the design, implementation and consequences of the exercise, and that it will function with complete autonomy. It will examine the constitutional and statutory validity of the SIR, its methodology, and its overall impact on eligible voters.

Also watch:  Justice Madan Lokur: 'Passport Reduced to a Bus Ticket' | Citizenship, SIR & Supreme Court Explained

Who Will Lead the Inquiry

The commission is chaired by Justice Madan B. Lokur, former judge of the Supreme Court. Its other members are Justice A.K. Patnaik, former Supreme Court judge; Justice Badar Durrez Ahmad, former Chief Justice of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court; Justice Rekha Sharma, former judge of the Delhi High Court; and Justice Anjana Prakash, former judge of the Patna High Court.

The central question before the panel is whether the exercise retained every eligible citizen on the SIR voter list while properly excluding ineligible entries. To answer it, full and regional benches will travel across the country to hear testimony from affected citizens, civil society groups and experts. A Research Wing will collate and analyse data on additions to and deletions from the SIR voter list nationwide, and a Legal Support Team will review the relevant laws, notifications and verification processes for compliance with constitutional safeguards.

Senior advocates Kapil Sibal, Prashant Bhushan, Chander Uday Singh, Prashanto Chandra Sen, Raju Ramachandran, Rebecca Mammen John, Warisha Farasat and Vrinda Grover, among others, will provide legal advice.

A coordination team and secretariat will be housed at LAFC. The release states that the judges alone are responsible for the findings, and that neither the sponsoring organisations nor the supporting committees will influence their conclusions. The commission aims to release its final report to the public by December 2026.

Also Read:  Election Commission Press Note Fixes What It Said Wasn't Broken

Why a Probe Into the SIR Voter List Matters

The inquiry comes four months after the Supreme Court upheld the SIR. On May 27, 2026, a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant ruled that the Election Commission acted within its powers, and held that it may conduct a limited inquiry into citizenship while revising electoral rolls, though it cannot finally determine citizenship. The exercise began in Bihar in June 2025 and has since been extended to other states in phases.

The commission has no statutory powers. It cannot summon officials, compel the Election Commission to share records, or order that any name be restored to the SIR voter list, and its findings will not bind the government or the poll body.

Even so, the inquiry could matter in several ways. A panel that includes two former Supreme Court judges carries credibility that is hard to dismiss. Public hearings across states can build a documented, on-the-record account of individual voters removed from the SIR voter list, the kind of ground-level evidence that rarely surfaces in courtroom arguments.

When the Supreme Court upheld the exercise, it found the process proportionate and backed by procedural safeguards. The commission's hearings and data could show whether those safeguards actually protected voters on the ground. That record could inform future litigation, parliamentary debate and public scrutiny of how the country's voter rolls are revised.

On September 5, 2024, a day after Amrutavarshiny Senthil Kumar was found dead in her hostel at NLU Delhi, The Probe published the first of a series of reports on her death and on the campus she had lived on. She was 20, a third-year BA LLB (Honours) student from Chennai and an IDIA scholar. Students and faculty told us about harassment complaints that had not been properly addressed, caste-based lists circulating among students, and the treatment of those who had backed the "Seven Angry Women" movement against harassment, which she supported.

Also Read:  NLU Delhi Student Death Exposes Shocking Details

On September 7, we reported that the NLU Delhi Alumni Association's governing body had sought an urgent meeting with Vice Chancellor Prof G.S. Bajpai and put ten questions to the administration. On September 22, 2024, first-year student Shah Khushil Vishal died. The next day, we reported on an email he had sent to all BA LLB batches on August 4, which faculty and the administration knew about. The email, with the subject line "Lost will to survive", was an open plea for help sent seven weeks before he died, and it raised a question NLU Delhi has yet to answer: what did the university do once it knew?

On September 24, with her parents' consent, we published an essay Amrutavarshiny had written about being neurodivergent in law school. On September 30, we reported the death of first-year student Shreyashi Chandra, the third in a single month.

The Questions We Raised

Those reports raised questions that NLU Delhi has yet to answer convincingly. What did the administration do after Khushil's email? Why did complaints of harassment and caste discrimination not lead to visible action? What mental health support existed on a residential campus where three students died in under four weeks? We sought responses from the Vice Chancellor and Registrar Prof Ruhi Paul at the time.

In November 2024, the Delhi High Court closed a separate public interest litigation seeking an independent probe, after NLU Delhi said its inquiries had found "no direct nexus" between the deaths and the university or its curriculum, and that its Governing Council had agreed on preventive measures. The court said adequate steps had been taken "for the present".

Amrutavarshiny's parents, V. Sangeetha and K. Senthil Kumar, filed their own petition in May 2025. After 17 hearings, the court has now asked the university and the government to answer it.

What the Court Did

On September 28, 2026, a division bench of the Delhi High Court issued notice in V Sangeetha & Anr v National Law University Delhi & Ors, W.P.(C) 6294/2025. Notice has gone to NLU Delhi, the University Grants Commission, the Government of NCT of Delhi and the Union of India, which must now file replies.

The petition was first listed on May 13, 2025. On January 8, 2026, Justice Jasmeet Singh observed that it had large-scale ramifications and the character of a public interest litigation, and sent it to a division bench. On July 20, 2026, the division bench recorded NLU Delhi's undertaking to file an affidavit on its compliance with Supreme Court directions on student mental health. Notice was issued at the 17th listing.

The parents are represented by advocate Sushant Inderjeet Singh. Senior Advocate Raj Shekhar Rao has also appeared in the matter.

Also Read:  NLU Delhi: Another Student Death and an Explosive Email Trail

The Lawyer Behind the Case

Sushant Inderjeet Singh is himself an NLU Delhi graduate, with an LLM from London, and enrolled as an advocate in 2017. In September 2024, he sat on the alumni association's governing body and, as The Probe reported, wrote a strongly worded email to the NLU Delhi administration after Amrutavarshiny's death. By October 2024, her father had written to his office.

"I am very happy that the case is finally going to move forward," Singh told The Probe. "Our main prayer is to know what happened to Amrutavarshiny Senthil Kumar, in what circumstances she died, what support the university gave her and what the lapses were. These details are important to make sure that this does not happen again."

A Father Asks for His Daughter's Email

On October 14, 2024, forty days after her death, Senthil Kumar wrote to the Vice Chancellor's office. "This is senthil Kumar, amrutavarshiny's (3rd year BA LLB(honors) father from Chennai)," he wrote, giving her university email address. "I don't know the password. So kindly arrange to send me the same on immediate basis." He followed up the next day.

The Vice Chancellor's office forwarded his email to the Registrar. On October 18, Prof Ruhi Paul replied. "Passwords of students are confidential information. We do not keep a copy of student/user passwords," she wrote, and directed him to Google's process for the accounts of deceased users, which requires a death certificate and identity proof.

In court, the parents have asked that NLU Delhi be directed to give them access to their daughter's official email, academic records and institutional data. The petition says that although the post-mortem was carried out on September 5, 2024, they had still not received the report when they filed it. 

'I Really, Really Need Help'

Some of what the family knows came from Amrutavarshiny's personal email account. Records seen by The Probe show two emails she had written months earlier were forwarded from it to her father weeks after her death. He sent both to Singh's office on October 13, 2024.

The first was sent on November 16, 2023, nearly 10 months before she died, to Tangent MHI, which offered pay-what-you-can therapy. "I come from a very volatile and weak financial environment," she wrote. "I got into law school through scholarships and financial aid, and it is the only reason I am able to afford a college education. I cannot, in good conscience, ask my parents to spend on my mental health." Further on, she wrote: "Recently, some incidents at college have been unbearable... I am really struggling, and I need help."

The email does not say what those incidents were. That is the question at the centre of her parents' case: what happened to their daughter at NLU Delhi?

On December 19, 2023, about eight and a half months before her death, she wrote to the counselling service of Mann Talks. "There have been other challenges at college, both academically and socially, instances of harassment at campus," she wrote. "My college is intensely academically rigorous and competitive, and CGPAs determine everything, including the quality of life one has at campus." The emails also describe personal difficulties, which The Probe has chosen not to publish. We do not know whether either organisation replied.

Here was a student who knew she needed help and looked for it outside her university twice in five weeks. Did NLU Delhi have a counsellor she could reach, and did she know about it? Was the harassment she described ever reported or recorded? Did the university have any way of noticing that a scholarship student was struggling?

Also Read:  NLU Delhi: A Heartfelt Piece by a Student Who Died Far Too Soon

What the Petition Says

The petition sets Amrutavarshiny's death within what it calls an "alarming pattern" of four alleged student suicides at NLU Delhi in 2024. It names Rohan Khanna, a fourth-year student, who it says died around July 2024; Amrutavarshiny on September 4; Shah Khushil Vishal on September 22; and Shreyashi Chandra on September 29. It says Khushil's email of August 4, sent at 4:48 pm with the subject line "Lost will to survive", went to every batch and was seen by faculty and the administration, yet "no adequate response or intervention" was recorded. Shreyashi, it says, wrote to all batches and faculty on the day she died. The petition also cites a suicide attempt by a Dalit student in 2018 and complaints by SC and ST students in 2019 of institutional discrimination.

It argues that the university, as a state-funded public institution, failed its duty under Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution. It says all marks at NLU Delhi are awarded internally by faculty with no external moderation, that there is no academic appeals body, and that the university has not implemented UGC guidelines and the National Mental Health Policy. It says no independent fact-finding followed the deaths.

Amrutavarshiny, the petition says, was the only child of a schoolteacher who is the family's sole earner. She scored 95.8% in Class 10 and joined NLU Delhi through the All India Law Entrance Test (AILET) 2022 in the OBC category. She had already booked her train home to Chennai for Diwali. Seeking an urgent hearing, her parents warned of "a strong likelihood of recurrence of such incidents".

They seek national guidelines on campus mental health; an independent fact-finding committee, supervised by a retired or serving High Court or Supreme Court judge, into all the deaths, attempted suicides and self-harm at the university; reforms to its mental health and anti-harassment systems, including a counsellor from the Dalit-Bahujan community; and compensation of Rs 10 crore.

In July 2025, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta held in Sukdeb Saha v State of Andhra Pradesh that mental health is part of the right to life under Article 21. The court's 15 guidelines, binding on all educational institutions including universities, require those with 100 or more students to have at least one qualified counsellor, psychologist or social worker, and every institution to publish an annually reviewed mental health policy.

However, the Supreme Court's guidelines have not ended the crisis on law campuses. On February 24, 2026, an LLM student at Chanakya National Law University in Patna died by suicide in his hostel while mid-semester examinations were under way on campus. In late September 2026, a third-year student at Himachal Pradesh National Law University in Shimla attempted suicide after recording a video in which he said he was being harassed by batchmates and that the university had not acted on his complaints. The university said an inquiry into ragging complaints in the case was still under way and that no conclusions had been reached.

The Questions That Remain

NLU Delhi must now answer in court. What did its inquiries into the four deaths find, and will the families see those findings? What did it do after Khushil's email of August 4, 2024? What happened to Amrutavarshiny on campus in the months before her death? Has NLU Delhi complied with the Supreme Court's guidelines, how many counsellors serve its students, and is its mental health policy public? Will NLU Delhi give her parents access to their daughter's email and academic records?

Her parents have waited more than two years to learn how their only child died. For the first time, NLU Delhi will have to formally answer them in court.

If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. Call Tele-MANAS, the Union Health Ministry's free 24x7 mental health helpline, on 14416 or 1-800-891-4416.

Tonight at 7 pm IST, The Probe's editorial team goes live with our members for our quarterly session. We'll take you behind the stories we've reported this quarter, from Indian sailors missing in the Black Sea to a family's eight-year fight for justice after their loved one's death at a Delhi hospital, among others, and share what changed because of them. We also hope to have some of the people at the heart of these stories join us, so you can hear from them directly and communicate with them.

Become a Member to Join the Inner Circle

These sessions are open only to members of The Probe Inner Circle, the readers whose support keeps our journalism independent and free of corporate and political pressure. Members can ask questions, share feedback, and tell us which issues they want us to investigate next.

If you'd like to join tonight, sign up by 6:30 pm IST and we'll email you the joining link before the session begins.

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World Heart Day: Born With a Heart Defect, Dead at 23, and a Brother Who Has Lost Hope

Every year on 29 September, World Heart Day brings a flood of advice: walk more, eat less salt, know the signs of a heart attack. Hospitals run screening camps and cardiologists appear on television. Far less is said about what a family can do when heart treatment itself ends in tragedy. In India, a family alleging medical negligence usually starts at a state medical council, a body made up largely of doctors. It must prove its case using the hospital's own records, often without an independent expert on its side. If it loses, the National Medical Commission (NMC) says the family has no right to appeal.

Arka Chakraborty has been through every step of that process. His younger brother Arnab, born with congenital heart disease, died in Bengaluru on 27 April 2022, aged 23, less than five months after open-heart surgery. 

"On World Heart Day, my struggle and my fight continue to get justice for my brother," Arka told The Probe. "The system is not designed to support patients or their families. There should also be awareness about the systemic problems heart patients face."

Also Watch:  Arnab's Family Gears Up For Protracted Legal Battle, Alleges Medical Negligence

World Heart Day and the Global Report on Congenital Heart Disease

This year's World Heart Day follows the World Heart Federation's (WHF) annual World Heart Report 2026, which is devoted to congenital heart disease. The WHF leads the global observance. The report estimates that 2.3 million children were born with the condition in 2023, and that 16 million people worldwide were living with it.

Several of its findings could mirror what happened with Arnab. The report notes that in low- and middle-income countries, many patients reach adulthood with heart defects that were never repaired, or were repaired late. It says late presentation, sepsis and limited intensive care capacity sharply raise the risk of death. It argues that the quality of care now drives excess deaths more than access alone, and calls for regular reviews of deaths and complications to build "a culture of learning and accountability." One of its six recommendations is to amplify the voices of patients and their families.

Arnab's family says it has spent four years trying to be heard.

A Lifetime With Congenital Heart Disease

Arnab was born with Tetralogy of Fallot, a form of congenital heart disease that reduces the oxygen reaching the body. In 1999, in infancy, he underwent a shunt operation, which improves blood flow to the lungs without correcting the defect. His family says he went on to lead a normal life.

In November 2021, Arka took his brother to Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bengaluru, one of India's best-known cardiac hospitals, for evaluation. According to the family's complaint to the Karnataka Medical Council (KMC), Arnab had no neurological problems at the time. On 10 November, cardiac surgeon Dr Sudesh Prabhu advised immediate surgery. The family alleges it was not adequately told of the risks or the alternatives. A second consultation on 19 November reaffirmed the need for surgery, and the family, relying on the doctors' assurances, agreed. Arnab was admitted on 26 November and underwent open-heart surgery on 6 December 2021.

Dr Prabhu disputes the family's account. He told the KMC that Arnab arrived coughing up blood, with a failing shunt and severely low oxygen levels, and that the risks were explained in detail. His handwritten prescription, dated 10 November 2021 and filed by the family itself, records a 20 per cent risk to life. He also says the family delayed admission to seek a second opinion.

Also Read:  Indraprastha Apollo Hospital: A Daughter’s 15-Year-Long Fight

From Heart Surgery to Brain Injury

The family says the doctors declared the surgery a success. Arnab regained consciousness and was moved to the general ward on 11 December. On 14 December, heavy bleeding was noticed from his surgical wound during dressing. He was taken back to the ICU for pericardial drainage, a procedure to remove fluid from around the heart. Arka says his brother was conscious and stable for the next two days.

On 17 December, Arka found Arnab drowsy and unable to respond properly during an ICU visit. He alleges he alerted the duty doctor, but no timely action was taken. Arnab then suffered multiple seizures and was put on a ventilator, and the family alleges the hospital did not promptly tell them how serious his condition was. After an MRI on 18 December, Arka says, doctors assured him there was no serious issue and that his brother would recover. An MRI on 23 December showed bleeding around the brain. When attempts to wean Arnab off the ventilator failed, doctors performed a tracheostomy on 27 December. Another MRI, on 10 January 2022, confirmed severe hypoxic brain injury, damage caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain. The family says it was never given a satisfactory explanation of how such a catastrophic injury followed a surgery declared successful.

The hospital's account differs. Dr Prabhu told the KMC that the fluid around the heart was picked up on a routine echocardiogram before discharge and was drained according to protocol. The ICU chart cited by the KMC records Arnab's first seizure at 10 am on 18 December, and Dr Prabhu contended that the family had wrongly placed it on the 17th. He also said an MRI showed older damage to the brain that predated the surgery, and that the family was kept informed at every stage.

The Second Hospital and the Final Surgery

After nearly three months at Narayana Hrudayalaya, which the family says brought no visible improvement, Arnab was discharged on 23 February 2022 and moved to Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain Hospital for neuro-rehabilitation. There, the family says, he began to recover. According to Arka's affidavit, his brother was responding reasonably well to therapy despite occasional seizures, and doctors planned to remove his tubes and discharge him within weeks.

In mid-March, swelling appeared at his chest wound. The family says it was told that removing the sternal wires, which hold the breastbone together after heart surgery, would be a minor, low-risk procedure, and alleges it was pressured to consent and to pay deposits in advance. The surgery took place on the morning of 26 April. By that evening, Arnab's blood pressure was falling. By night, he could no longer open his eyes or respond. He died at 9.27 am the next day. His death certificate recorded the cause as multi-organ failure due to septicaemia in shock.

The hospitals see it differently. Narayana Hrudayalaya recorded Arnab's transfer as a discharge against medical advice. Cardiothoracic surgeon Dr Satish Kini told the KMC that when Arnab was referred to him on 21 March, he was in an extremely poor condition, with sepsis, bed sores and neurological unresponsiveness. Dr Kini said he recommended the procedure repeatedly from March, that the family initially refused, and that he operated as a life-saving measure once the infection worsened.

Arka rejects both hospitals' accounts. "How could they perform a major open-heart surgery without checking vital organs like the brain?" he said. He also alleges that on 13 April 2022, Arnav was given a sedative meant for someone else. "At Mahaveer Jain Hospital, my brother was given a Lorazepam injection that had been prescribed for another patient in the same ward," he said.

What the Karnataka Medical Council Decided

Arka filed complaints against doctors at both hospitals on 18 August 2022. In March 2023, the KMC registered them as prima facie cases of medical negligence.

On 16 May 2026, nearly four years after he first complained, the KMC dismissed both. The council held that Arka had failed to establish medical negligence or professional misconduct against any of the doctors.

"I am very sorry to tell you that I have completely lost hope," Arka told The Probe. "I was harassed so much by KMC. There were about 12 to 13 hearings. For all the hearings I travelled from Kolkata to Karnataka, and then finally what did they do? They dismissed my case."

In the Narayana Hrudayalaya case, the council framed the central question as whether Arnab's seizures and brain injury resulted from a procedural breach, or were "a consequence of prolonged untreated cyanotic congenital heart disease." It ruled in Dr Prabhu's favour. The council held that a brain lesion seen on the 18 December MRI was "more than six weeks old and therefore pre-existing," and noted that Arnab's haemoglobin of 23.8 g/dl, far above the normal range, pointed to a defect left untreated for years.

In the Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain case, the council found no deviation in the sternal wire procedure. It rejected the family's claim that consent was given under pressure, noting there was "ample time" between the advice and the surgery.

Both orders turn on one further point. The KMC recorded that Arka's cross-examination of the doctors was marked "Nil" because of his "continued absence", and that he filed no written arguments, so the doctors' evidence went unchallenged. In the Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain case, it added that he had produced no expert opinion. On 21 March 2025, the council had rejected an application from Dr Kunal Saha of People for Better Treatment, a patient rights group, to represent Arka in the proceedings.

A Cardiac Arrest Missing From the Records

The orders leave one question unresolved. Both doctors at Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain Hospital told the KMC that Arnab had suffered a cardiac arrest in the ICU at Narayana Hrudayalaya a few days after his surgery. Dr Kini described an "intra-ICU cardiac arrest leading to severe hypoxic brain damage and coma." The council recorded that Dr Sharan Srinivasan, who oversaw Arnab's rehabilitation, gave the same account.

The council did not examine the claim further. It observed only that the records the doctors themselves filed, including a discharge summary and their hospital's initial assessment of Arnab, make no mention of such an arrest. The order in the Narayana Hrudayalaya case, which attributes Arnab's brain injury to pre-existing disease, does not refer to a cardiac arrest.

If Arnab's heart did stop in the ICU after surgery, it would bear directly on the question the council set out to answer: what caused his brain injury. Neither order resolves it.

An Appeal the NMC Would Not Hear

On 29 July 2026, Arka appealed the KMC's decision to the National Medical Commission (NMC). On 13 August, the NMC's Ethics and Medical Registration Board returned the appeal, along with his demand draft, "as not maintainable." Its letter states that under Section 30(3) of the NMC Act, 2019, only medical practitioners may appeal a state council's decision. The Probe has reported on this provision before, and on how it leaves families alleging medical negligence with no route of appeal. The Probe has examined this provision in detail here.

"See how unjust the system is," Arka said.

In June 2024, Arka filed a complaint before the District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission in Hooghly, West Bengal.

This World Heart Day, the World Heart Federation is asking the world not to miss the warning signs of heart disease. Arka says he saw them in December 2021, standing beside his brother's ICU bed, when Arnab could barely respond to him. Nearly five years, two dismissals and one returned appeal later, he says he is still waiting for someone to explain what went wrong after a surgery that was meant to give his brother a longer life.

The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Union government to explain on affidavit the legal basis for its decision to levy a charge on UPI payments above ₹2,000 made to merchants, a levy that kicks in on 15 October. A bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V Mohana issued notice to the Centre, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and the UPI & Services Steering Committee on a public interest petition filed by Delhi advocate Anjan Datta, and gave them four weeks to reply. 

Also Read:  UPI MDR Starts 15 October. So Why Is the Rate in No Gazette?

Appearing for the Centre, Additional Solicitor General N Venkataraman told the bench that 96 percent of UPI payments would escape the charge and that essential services had been capped at ₹5. "It is neither a tax nor a fee," he said, adding that the government would not take a single rupee from the collections. He described it as a settlement fee between payment aggregators and banks, arguing that banks bear a real cost for processing electronic transactions, that card payments already carry such charges, and that the levy was needed to keep the ecosystem running. The Chief Justice wanted it in writing. "We need these facts on affidavit. It's more of a technical issue," he said.

Justice Bagchi went to the root of the matter. "Is it tax or a fee? If not a fee, what is the executive basis for making this expropriation? What is the service?" he asked. When the ASG denied it was an expropriation, the judge turned to Section 269SU of the Income Tax Act, which obliges merchants above a turnover threshold to offer electronic payment, and asked who actually receives the money in a UPI transaction and what the source of its legal incidence was. The petitioner's counsel sought a stay, warning that the charge would fuel black money transactions. The bench declined.

Speaking to The Probe after the hearing, Datta said the court had zeroed in on the central weakness of the levy. "The Supreme Court has specifically questioned the statutory source and executive scope of the MDR levy on UPI, which rests on a press release dated 15 September 2026, when the government itself says it is neither a fee, a tax nor a commercial charge," he said. "The court has also asked the Union to respond to the issues raised in the petition, on whether the levy amounts to an executive expropriation or taxable income in the context of Section 269SU of the Income Tax Act. The court has assured us that it will examine the validity of the impugned notification once the Union and the other respondents file their reply affidavits."

The Question The Probe Asked First

Justice Bagchi's question, where does the legal authority for this charge come from, is the one The Probe raised on 17 September. Our report found that the 0.4 percent rate on UPI payments above ₹2,000, which will bind every merchant outside the small-merchant exemption, appears in no gazette notification. It lives in a Press Information Bureau release and an NPCI circular. On Monday, that gap was argued before the country's top court, and the government now has to answer it on affidavit.

Six Years of Zero MDR

A merchant discount rate, or MDR, is the fee a business pays its bank for accepting a digital payment. On cards it bites: RBI allows up to 0.9 percent on debit cards, and credit card fees typically run as high as 2.5 percent. On UPI payments, since the start of 2020, the fee has been zero by law, so the shopkeeper kept every rupee and the bank recovered nothing from the transaction. The design goal was simple: make digital acceptance costless and therefore universal.

The policy arrived in stages. In the July 2019 Union Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that businesses with a turnover above ₹50 crore must offer digital payment options, with no MDR borne by them or passed on to customers. From 1 January 2020, that became law through Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, which barred banks and payment system providers from charging on UPI and RuPay debit cards. The protection held for almost six years.

Also Read:  Fake Citations, Real Verdicts: India's AI Wake-Up Call

What Changes From 15 October

The new arrangement is a hybrid. Person-to-person transfers stay free at any amount. Payments to merchants up to ₹2,000 stay free. Small merchants receiving up to ₹1 lakh a month through UPI QR codes stay free, and so do recurring payments through UPI AutoPay and mandates. Most other person-to-merchant UPI payments above ₹2,000 now carry a price.

A general person-to-merchant payment above ₹2,000 will attract 0.4 percent, capped at ₹300 for payments of ₹75,000 and above. Railways, telecom, insurance, fuel and farm inputs pay a flat ₹5 per transaction above ₹2,000. Capital market payments attract 0.02 percent, also capped at ₹300. Merchants have been told not to pass the charge on to customers, UPI apps are barred from adding platform fees, and 5 percent of collections is to go into a fund for small merchants.

A Subsidy the Government Chose to End

The government's case is that UPI has grown too expensive to run for free. The figure behind that argument is an industry estimate of about ₹20,700 crore a year, cited in a parliamentary committee report. 

The claim that free UPI payments cannot survive without a charge also runs into the government's own record. For years it paid to keep UPI free through an incentive to banks and payment apps, and it kept raising that support: ₹1,389 crore in 2021-22, ₹2,210 crore the following year and ₹3,631 crore the year after. It then cut the payout to ₹1,046 crore in 2024-25. It could have continued. It chose to wind the subsidy down and shift the cost onto merchants, a policy decision that was never argued openly as one.

The assurance that 96 percent of payments are untouched sidesteps the harder question. Merchants in the remaining slice will pay, and a direction not to pass the cost on is a single sentence with no audit, penalty or refund mechanism behind it. Businesses told to absorb a cost tend to find other ways to recover it.

A Gazette That Names No Rate

At the centre of Datta's challenge is Gazette Notification S.O. 5067(E), dated 14 September. Read closely, it does very little. It protects two payment modes from charges: RuPay debit cards with no ceiling, and UPI transactions up to ₹2,000. It fixes no rate. The figure of 0.4 percent appears nowhere in it.

What the notification effectively does is lift UPI payments above ₹2,000 out of the protection they had enjoyed since 2020, leaving them open to a charge the gazette never names. The actual rates came the next day, 15 September, in a PIB release, and in an NPCI circular issued after deliberations of the UPI & Services Steering Committee, an NPCI-headed body which, the petition argues, holds no rule-making power under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act.

Also Read:  RBI Bans Dark Patterns: A Confession Dressed as a Circular

From Bolt to Dial: The Section 10A Rewrite

Datta's deeper objection is to the machinery that produced the charge. Until this year, Section 10A worked like a bolt. The protected payment modes were those listed under Section 269SU of the income tax law, which covered all UPI payments and RuPay debit card payments, so no minister could remove that shelter at will. Only Parliament could.

The 2026 amendment, folded into the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Act that the Lok Sabha passed on 6 August, replaced the bolt with a dial. The law now lets the Central Government decide by notification which electronic modes stay free of charge. On 8 August, as public unease grew, the Finance Ministry called it a mere enabling provision, promised that consumers and person-to-person payments would stay free, and cited cybersecurity, fraud prevention and infrastructure as the purpose. Five weeks later, the enabling clause had become a detailed four-band levy.

The petition argues that Parliament handed the executive this power with no policy, formula, ceiling or test attached. Lawyers call this excessive delegation. If Section 10A falls, the notification and the entire framework built on it fall with it.

What the Petition Wants

Datta filed the petition under Article 32 on 16 September, arguing that a change hitting merchants, consumers and the digital payments economy at once could not be fought piecemeal across multiple High Courts. He asks the court to quash the notification, compel the government to produce the full record behind the decision, and declare that no MDR can be imposed on the strength of a press release and a set of FAQs.

The petition puts several questions to the court. Did Parliament grant an unguided power that breaches the rights to equality and to carry on trade under Articles 14 and 19(1)(g)? Can a nationwide compulsory charge be switched on without publishing the binding instrument and the reasons behind it? Do the unexplained thresholds of ₹2,000 a payment, ₹1 lakh a month and ₹75,000 for the cap treat similarly situated merchants differently with no disclosed logic? And can a compulsory collection shared among banks and payment firms be anything other than a charge requiring the authority of law? The petition also records that there was no consultation, no draft rates and no hearing for the hundreds of millions affected.

A Nation Nudged Onto UPI

For merchants, the grievance is practical. The state put QR codes on every counter, pushed formalisation, and repeatedly promised that everyday UPI payments would stay free. During the pandemic, when cash felt dangerous, UPI became a lifeline for rich and poor alike, and households and small businesses rebuilt their routines around it. By NPCI's own count, UPI carried 2,451 crore transactions worth about ₹29.82 lakh crore in August 2026 alone, a scale reached precisely because it cost nothing.

The manner of the reversal deepens the grievance. UPI is regulated by the RBI and run by NPCI, a not-for-profit company owned by the same banks that will collect the new charge. The rate was fixed by a committee which, the petition argues, Parliament never empowered, announced through a press office, and published with none of the usual safeguards: no prior notice, no window for objections, no laying before Parliament.

What Happens Next

On Monday the Centre insisted the charge is neither a tax nor a fee and that the government earns nothing from it. The bench wants that explanation on affidavit, along with an answer to Justice Bagchi's question about the legal source of the levy. Unless the court steps in, most UPI payments above ₹2,000 to merchants will carry the new charge from 15 October, and the question The Probe first asked remains open: on what published legal authority does a nationwide levy rest when its rate appears in no gazette?

Election Commission Press Note Reads Like a Confession

On September 23, the Election Commission of India said there was nothing unusual about the objections two of its three members had put on record. Its press note that day described written notes and observations as routine practice. It said the Commissioners' suggestions were only meant to improve the electoral process, and that every decision of the past year had been taken unanimously by the full Commission.

Three days later, the story had changed. On Saturday afternoon, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar sat down at Nirvachan Sadan with Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi. By evening, the Commission had released a second press note, along with a photograph of the three men together. It was meant to end talk of a rift. Read next to the first, it does something else. It fixes, one by one, the very problems the Commission had said did not exist.

Also Read:  Outvoted in His Own Commission: Can CEC Gyanesh Kumar Lead the ECI?

The Fixes Tell the Story

The Indian Express reported on September 23 that Sandhu and Joshi had formally objected at least 14 times in ten months to decisions taken without their knowledge. One of Joshi's complaints, recorded on April 16, was that for more than a year he had received no agenda before Commission meetings and no minutes after them. On Saturday, the Commission decided that agendas would now be circulated in advance and minutes issued. An institution does not promise to start keeping minutes unless it had stopped keeping them.

Joshi had also objected, the same day, to officers travelling abroad without the Commission's approval. The new press note says such approval will now be taken. Sandhu had complained that he learnt about new IT modules and portals from the media. The Commission now says every new IT module and portal will first go to a Committee of Officers and then to the Commission for approval. The note also promises that officers' annual appraisal reports will be completed within the existing December 31 deadline, without saying why that needed to be said.

Then there is the line that says the most. The Commission resolved that all directions issued by the Commissioners to its officers "shall be meticulously complied with". As former Punjab Special Chief Secretary KBS Sidhu has pointed out, the word is Commissioners, in the plural. A constitutional body does not need to announce that its own members will be obeyed unless they were not being obeyed.

None of these decisions is wrong. Most are overdue. But most of them match a complaint on record, and together they contradict the claim, made just three days earlier, that the objections were routine suggestions.

The Officer Two Commissioners Had to Stop

The most telling part of the Election Commission press note concerns the letters Sandhu and Joshi wrote separately to the Cabinet Secretary in July. The Commission says those letters had nothing to do with policy and were about the working of an officer on deputation to the Commission.

In the same passage, however, the Commission confirms three things. The officer issued orders redistributing work. Those orders touched the oversight of the Commission's IT division, which runs the systems holding the country's voter rolls. And they were not implemented after the two Commissioners issued their own orders. The note adds that the Deputy Election Commissioner's oversight of the IT division was never actually withdrawn.

Put simply, an officer tried to change who supervises the software behind India's electoral rolls, and two of the three Commissioners had to step in to stop it. When they did, they were acting as a majority of the Commission, which is how the law expects disagreements to be settled. The first press note made no mention of any such disagreement. The second does not name the officer, and it does not say whether anyone authorised those orders.

Also Read:  SIR and Citizenship: 'You Are a Foreigner Until Proven Otherwise'

Relief for Voters, and a Quiet Admission

The note also brings real relief to ordinary voters, and that deserves credit. People who received notices during the ongoing SIR, because their names could not be matched with older rolls or because the software flagged a "logical discrepancy", will no longer have to appear in person for a hearing. Booth Level Officers will visit their homes, collect documents and upload them for the Electoral Registration Officer to decide. Any adult family member can attend on a voter's behalf where a hearing is still needed. District officials are to set up help desks and camps for the homeless, labourers and the poor. In Delhi, where Sidhu estimates more than 30 lakh notices have been issued, the deadline for claims and objections has been extended to October 30.

The Commission also says that anyone left out during the SIR, or since, can apply for inclusion, and that state officials will launch a special enrolment drive. That is welcome. It is also an acknowledgement that many people were left out.

Goa shows the pattern clearly. After a Supreme Court order in January, the state's Electoral Registration Officers heard the cases of flagged voters and found 97 of them eligible. The software gave them no way to restore those names. According to the Express, the office of the state's Chief Electoral Officer wrote eight times in February asking the Commission to enable a fix, and got no answer. The press note now says Goa's Chief Electoral Officer has sent booth-level officers to these voters, and that 81 of the 97 have filed Form 6. It does not explain why people already found eligible must apply again, or why eight letters went unanswered.

What the Commission's Defenders Say

The Commission's supporters have taken three points from the note. BJP president Nitin Nabin said the Commission had made clear that every SIR decision was taken unanimously by the full Commission, and accused the Congress of building its allegations on "a manufactured lie". The note does say that the SIR order of June 24, 2025, and the schedules issued on October 27, 2025 and May 14, 2026, had the unanimous approval of the Commission.

The second point is the Supreme Court. The note says the court upheld the SIR order on May 27, 2026, and that the declaration attached to Form 6 during the SIR has also been upheld. The third is that the letters to the Cabinet Secretary concerned one officer, not policy.

On their face, these points suggest the controversy was an internal administrative matter inflated for political gain. They do not survive a closer look.

Also Read:  ONOE: The Reform That Cheapens Your Vote and Cuts Your Mandate

Why That Defence Falls Short

Neither Sandhu nor Joshi is reported to have objected to launching the SIR. Their objections were about how it was being run: changes to Form 6, appeals filed in the Commission's name in West Bengal, access to the voter database, and letters issued without the Commission's approval. The note offers no evidence of unanimous approval for any of these. It is also hard to prove unanimity for a period in which, by the Commission's own new decision, there were no minutes.

The Supreme Court defence is narrower than it sounds. The court may well have upheld the declaration used during the SIR. What the two Commissioners objected to was something else. According to the Express, in July, after the court's May 27 order, a question about whether the applicant, a parent or a grandparent appeared on the last SIR roll was built into the Form 6 that every new voter fills, and applicants could not submit the form without answering it. Joshi had warned in May that the form could not be changed without the Central Government amending the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. The press note now says that outside the SIR period, the forms prescribed under those Rules will be used. That is a partial concession of Joshi's point. The Congress's Pawan Khera has asked what that concession is worth if, as he says, no special summary revision has taken place since January 2024. The Supreme Court is also still hearing matters arising from the SIR in West Bengal.

As for the Cabinet Secretary, describing the dispute as being about one officer does not make it smaller. It raises a harder question: why did two constitutional office-holders have to write to the government's top bureaucrat to rein in a subordinate, and why did the Commission's own processes not stop that officer first?

The Questions Still Waiting

What the note leaves out matters as much as what it says. It is silent on the 16.10 lakh appeals filed before tribunals in West Bengal seeking to delete voters whom judicial officers had included in the rolls. Sandhu asked in August who authorised those appeals in the Commission's name, and there is still no public answer. It says nothing directly about the objection first recorded in October 2025, that letters and orders were going out in the Commission's name without its approval. It does not say how many voters outside Goa may have been kept off the rolls because the software would not let officers correct their records.

The review of ECINET, the Commission's new digital platform, raises its own doubts. It will be led by a Senior Deputy Election Commissioner, an officer from inside the Commission, with one outside expert from an IIT or IIIT. Its brief is to check whether the system follows the law. Joshi had asked for something more specific in May: an audit to confirm that no one except the officers the law empowers can change voter records. Sidhu has also noted that the tests used to flag "logical discrepancies" have never been published.

The Opposition has called the Election Commission of India's press release a damage control exercise. The Congress's Jairam Ramesh described it as "wishy-washy", and INDIA bloc parties are due to meet on September 30. The Commission's own words, though, make the stronger case. In three days it went from calling the objections routine to acting on many of them. It deserves credit for meeting as a full Commission and for easing the burden on voters. But it cannot correct a failure while denying that the failure happened.

Brother's 16-Year Search Freed 72 From Bonded Labour. Accused on Bail, Survivors Unpaid

Trigger warning: Mention of injury and trauma

For 16 years, Govind* had every reason to believe his sister was dead. But a stubborn voice in his head refused to accept it.

Soon after her wedding, he recalls, she left their village in Mokhada, Palghar, with her husband in search of work. The family never heard from her again.

Sixteen years is a long time to hold on to hope. Govind held on anyway. In May last year, that hope led him to a stone-cutting site in Sangamner, where he found his sister sitting on a pile of dirt. He lifted her in his arms and walked her out. That day, 72 people were freed from bonded labour in one of the largest rescues Maharashtra has seen in recent years.

More than a year later, the reunion remains the only part of this story with a happy ending. The men accused of holding these families are out on bail. The police complaint against them left out the gravest charge the facts supported. And every one of the 72 survivors is still waiting for the compensation the law promised them, a promise designed precisely so that people like them do not fall back into rebondage.

Also Read:  Human Trafficking: Indian Workers Trapped in Bonded Labour in Malaysia

A Whisper From the Stone Quarries

The breakthrough came at the start of 2025, from an unlikely messenger.

Vasant*, an acquaintance from Govind's village, had just returned home from his 'job' at a stone-cutting unit in Sangamner, in Ahilyanagar district, around 150 km away. He told Govind he had seen a woman at the site who looked like his lost sister. But he cautioned him that bringing her home would be tough. The contractor wouldn't be pleased.

Vasant knew this better than anyone. He had worked at the site for five years. He had tried to run away but never had the money to. Then he found a reason the contractor would find hard to dismiss: he said he needed to go home to sign the papers for the Gharkul Yojana, the government housing scheme that provides financial aid to economically weaker sections to build permanent homes.

The contractor said no. So Vasant offered the only collateral he had, his own sister, who was also working at the site. He promised he would sign the papers and come back. He had to, or his sister would bear the consequences.

"He (the contractor) gave me Rs 1000, put me on a bus to Nashik, and I came home," Vasant shares.

Once home, he told Govind about the woman he had seen. Govind turned to a local NGO, Shree Amrutvahini Gramvikas Mandal, which helped him approach the Tahsil Office in Sangamner.

Also Read:  Ghaziabad Bonded Labour Survivor Gets Release Certificate — The Probe Impact

Three Sites, One Morning

Dilip Gunjal, founder of Amrutvahini, says the operation was kept tightly under wraps. "We made the plan in the Sangamner Tahsil Office. Only we, Govind, the informants, the Tahsildar, the SDM and the Labour Department knew of what we were about to do."

On the morning of 15 May 2025, three teams of revenue officials, labour officials, police and an Amrutvahini representative set out at 7 am. Tahsildar Dhiraj Manjare says the scale of what they found took them by surprise. "When we reached the site, we got to know that there were two other locations too where stone cutting was happening," he shares. The sites, at Shendewadi, Pimpalgaon Depa and Taskarwadi in Sakur, lay 10 to 15 km apart, so the officials split up and carried out parallel rescues.

It was only when they reached the site that Gunjal understood why escape had never been an option. "There was no village nearby," he explains, adding, "when we reached, we saw the conditions in which they were living: some were breaking stones, others were sitting around, the children were sleeping in the sun. When the officials from the Labour Department asked the people about how they were living, they said they did not have proper food to eat. They had to cook their own food but were not given groceries. There were no rooms, just tents spread out."

Also Read:  Saharanpur Bonded Labour Crisis: Children Expose Exploitation

Plastic Sheds, Half a Bhakar and No Medicine

The adults cut stone. The children were sent out to graze sheep.

Govind describes a life stripped of the most basic dignity. "They used to be paid Rs 500 for seven days. The children were put to graze the animals. The condition was very bad. The children would be fed half a bhakar (flatbread made of sorghum) a day."

Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, he says, there was no respite. "They were never given medicines. They are human. Of course they will fall sick."

SDO Manik Aher, who held additional charge of Sangamner at the time, confirms what the officials saw. "There were no toilets. They were living in small plastic sheds. The children hadn't bathed in months. When we questioned the contractor about this, he said that this wasn't his responsibility and that the people should have seen to it."

Trapped by Rs 15,000

Most of those rescued belong to the Katkari tribe, one of Maharashtra's Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups. Most Katkari families own no land and survive on labour, migrating for work usually found in brick kilns and on construction sites. That poverty makes a cash advance almost impossible to refuse, and that is how the trap was set.

According to Gunjal, the contractor handed workers advances of Rs 15,000 each. Once they took the money, they could not leave until it was repaid. Even when they managed to repay it, the contractor refused to acknowledge it, often quoting inflated amounts such as "a lakh," Gunjal says.

This is debt bondage in its simplest and cruellest form: a small loan that becomes a life sentence, and eventually a family inheritance. Children are born into it and put to work inside it. It is also far from rare. India has at least 11 million people living in modern slavery, more than any other country, according to Walk Free's Global Slavery Index 2023.

Also Read:  Moga Bonded Labour Scandal: Officials Shield Slave Masters

The Illusion of a Job

What makes bonded labour so hard to break is that many of its victims do not see themselves as captives.

When officials questioned the labourers, Aher says, some even had "positive things" to say about the contractor. "They said he gave them money and they got employment. We asked them if they were ready to go home, and they said if they got a chance they would, but if not, they would continue living there."

The illusion of opportunity ran parallel to the reality of bondage. The contractor, for his part, had his version ready. "The contractor said he was just running some construction work and that the people here were cutting stones and being paid," Manjare shares, based on the enquiry conducted during the rescue.

Sixteen Years, Then a Pile of Dirt

A social worker who has worked closely with Govind, and who asked not to be named, says he found his sister "in a very distraught state." The grinding work, she says, had pushed many at the site into drinking, his sister among them.

When they were reunited, he learnt she now had three little children. "I was so happy to see her. I thought that finally I would be able to celebrate Raksha Bandhan. She is my only sister," he says.

Asked if he feels angry about the years she lost, he goes quiet. His silence says enough.

A Damning FIR, Diluted Charges

The case against the accused rests on FIR No. 158 of 2025, registered at Ghargaon police station at 10.09 pm on the night of the rescue, with a government labour officer as the complainant. On paper, it is a damning document.

It records that the workers had gone to Nashik for daily wage work about a decade earlier, and that two men, Subhash Rathod and Madhukar Dalvi, brought them to Sangamner to break stones. It says the two exploited the workers' poverty and lack of awareness for about 10 years, paid them between Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 a week, subjected them to physical and mental exploitation, and did not let them go home even when they wanted to. It notes that the accused knew the workers were Katkari, a Scheduled Tribe. It also records that five children, the youngest just seven, were made to graze sheep for four other men: Sopan Chitalkar, Vitthal Bichkule, Manik Hande and Baban Karande. The children's wages, Rs 10,000 each and Rs 50,000 in all, were taken and kept by Dalvi, according to the FIR.

Yet the charges that follow are strikingly light for crimes this grave. The main charge under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita is Section 146, unlawful compulsory labour, which carries a maximum sentence of one year. The three sections of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act carry up to three years and a fine of just Rs 2,000, and are bailable. The heaviest charges, under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and the Juvenile Justice Act, carry up to five years.

What the FIR leaves out is more telling than what it includes. It describes people recruited from one district, moved to another and held in forced labour for years, which is the textbook pattern of trafficking. Debt bondage is recognised as a practice similar to slavery, and trafficking under Section 143 of the BNS is meant to punish exactly that. When it involves more than one person or a child, trafficking is non-bailable and carries 10 years to life. It does not appear in the FIR. Neither does wrongful confinement, although the FIR itself says the workers were not allowed to leave. There is no charge for the assault and intimidation it records, and none for cheating over the children's wages Dalvi allegedly pocketed.

Also Read:  Bonded Labour: Over 50 Victims, Including Children, Trapped in Moga

Out on Bail

Soon after the rescue, Deputy Superintendent of Police Kunal Sonawane of Sangamner told reporters that three of the six accused had been arrested and efforts were on to trace the others. Today, according to everyone interviewed for this story, even those arrested are out on bail. Attempts to reach the accused for comment were unsuccessful.

With charges this light, bail was almost a formality. The one charge that would have made it difficult, trafficking, was never filed. So a woman who lost 16 years of her life, and scores of others who lost a decade or more of theirs, must now watch the men accused of holding them go about their lives, while their own lives remain on hold.

A Law With Deadlines, a System Without Urgency

The law is not silent on what the survivors are owed, or on how quickly they should get it. Its timelines are tight for a reason. Families like these walk out of bondage with nothing: no land, no savings, no work. Without prompt help, the next advance from the next contractor becomes impossible to refuse. Human rights activists warn that the first few weeks after a rescue are critical in keeping freed workers from slipping back into bondage.

Under the Centre's rehabilitation scheme for bonded labourers, revised in 2021, every rescued person is entitled to Rs 1 lakh if an adult man, Rs 2 lakh if a woman or child, and Rs 3 lakh in cases of extreme deprivation, with up to Rs 30,000 paid by the district administration as immediate cash assistance. Beyond cash, the district administration is meant to help survivors rebuild their lives, from ration and MGNREGA cards to land pattas and health insurance.

The legal process is meant to move just as fast. The Labour Ministry's standard operating procedure says the summary trial in a bonded labour case should begin within 24 hours of a rescue and be completed within three months. By that measure, this case should have been decided by August last year.

Measured against those deadlines, the survivors of Sangamner have been failed at almost every step. All 72 have received their release certificates, the Labour Department in Palghar confirms. But an official at the Palghar Labour Office told The Probe this week that only 57 of the 62 survivors from Palghar have received even the Rs 30,000. The rest, including the 10 from Nashik, appear to be waiting still. None of the 72 has received the full rehabilitation amount, and it is not clear whether a chargesheet has been filed.

Officials in this case explain the wait by pointing to the courts. The full rehabilitation amount, they say, can be paid only after the accused are convicted, because the scheme ties it to conviction. It is exactly this delay that the National Human Rights Commission warned against in 2021, when it advised that rehabilitation be delinked from conviction, on the principle that once a person is freed from bondage, they should be compensated without waiting on a verdict. But even setting the courts aside, the excuse does not hold. Because the FIR invokes the SC/ST Act for forcing tribal workers into bonded labour, each victim is owed a further Rs 1 lakh as relief: 25 percent at the FIR stage, 50 percent once the chargesheet reaches court and the rest on conviction. The rules require the district administration to provide relief within seven days, and the police to file a chargesheet within 60 days. Yet the survivors have not received even the first instalment due at the FIR stage.

The same district has shown it can do better. In a 2023 case, 39 people rescued from bonded labour in Ahilyanagar, many of them Katkari and 14 of them children, received their full compensation of between ₹1 lakh and ₹3 lakh each by late 2024. The money was released only after the Maharashtra State Human Rights Commission took suo motu cognisance of media reports and directed the state government to pay. That case was handled by the same NGO, Amrutvahini, that helped rescue the Sangamner survivors, and officials called it a first for the state. Sixteen months after the Sangamner rescue, its 72 survivors are still waiting for a similar push.

Freed, but Not Yet Free

Govind has his sister back. He can celebrate Raksha Bandhan with her again. That is the victory in this story, and it belongs to him, to Vasant, who risked his own sister to get the word out, and to the officials and activists who acted on it.

But a rescue is meant to be the beginning of justice, not the end of it. The men accused of stealing a decade of these families' lives are out on bail, while the charge that could have kept them in jail was never filed. The survivors, meanwhile, are back in the same villages and the same poverty that pushed them into bondage in the first place, holding certificates that say they are free and waiting for money the law says was due long ago. Every month that passes without a trial or compensation makes the next contractor's advance a little harder to refuse. Until the system moves as quickly as the law demands, Govind's sister, and the 71 others freed with her, remain only half rescued.

*Names of survivors have been changed to protect their identities.

For more than a year, the Election Commission of India has answered every question about the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in the same way: the process is lawful, decentralised and beyond politics. On Wednesday, that answer was contradicted from inside the Commission itself.

An investigation by Ritika Chopra in The Indian Express found that two of the Commission's three members, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, formally objected on record at least 14 times over ten months to decisions and orders they say were issued without their knowledge. Four of those objections were made on a single day. Several were copied to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, and two went outside the Commission altogether, to the Cabinet Secretary.

Within hours, much of the national press and a wide range of digital outlets had followed the story, and the Opposition had turned it into a demand. Leaders of the Congress, CPI(M), Trinamool Congress, RJD, DMK and AAP called for the CEC's removal. Trinamool's Derek O'Brien urged Parliament to take up a removal notice that more than 60 Rajya Sabha MPs had submitted earlier this year.

Calls for Gyanesh Kumar to step aside are growing. What sets this moment apart from earlier controversies is where the challenge comes from: this time it is being made from within the Commission, in writing, by the two people who sit beside him.

Also Read: Election Commission of India Says No Information on Returning Officers

What the Files Show

The SIR began in Bihar in June 2025 and has since removed more than 13 crore names from draft electoral rolls across 30 states and Union Territories. The objections raised by Sandhu and Joshi go to the core of that exercise: who can register as a new voter, how names are deleted and restored, who files appeals in the Commission's name, and who controls the electoral roll itself.

Take Form 6, the form every citizen fills to enrol as a voter. In May, Joshi warned on file that it could not be changed without the government amending the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, and Sandhu agreed. In July the form was changed anyway, adding a question on whether the applicant, a parent or a grandparent appeared on the roll of the "last SIR". In August, Sandhu recorded that the change was "unauthorised and illegal" and should be withdrawn immediately. According to the Express, the question was still on the form until Monday morning.

In West Bengal, the Commission told the Supreme Court last week that 38 lakh appeals were pending before tribunals of retired High Court judges. Of these, 16.10 lakh sought the deletion of voters whom judicial officers had included in the rolls. The Commission did not say who filed them. In August, Sandhu asked the same question in writing, and recorded that neither he, nor Joshi, nor the state's Chief Electoral Officer had been told how or why the appeals were filed.

There are also notes about how the Commission itself is run. Joshi recorded that for over a year he had received no agenda before Commission meetings and no minutes afterwards. The Express reports that the CEC and both Election Commissioners met in full on September 9, their first such meeting in four months.

Also Read:  West Bengal Voter Deletion: How Elections Are Won Before Polling Day

The Question of Control

The most consequential thread in the story concerns the software on which India's voter lists are kept. For decades, the ECI's defence against allegations of roll manipulation has rested on decentralisation. Each constituency's roll is prepared and controlled by its Electoral Registration Officer, a statutory authority on the ground, usually the Sub-Divisional Magistrate. No one in Delhi, the argument goes, can quietly alter a constituency's list.

The two Commissioners say that safeguard is being eroded. In May, Joshi warned of the "gradual centralisation" of the electoral roll database and proposed an audit to certify that only statutory authorities held the credentials to change voter records. In August, Sandhu recorded that state officials said they lacked full access to ERONet, and that the Commission's Director General of IT, Seema Khanna, had no legal authority to restrict the access the law gives statutory officers. The Representation of the People Act, 1950 gives the power to prepare and revise rolls to Electoral Registration Officers, not to the Commission's IT division.

Goa shows what this means in practice. After the Supreme Court ordered on January 29 that voters flagged for "logical discrepancies" be heard, Goa's EROs examined the cases and found 97 voters eligible. The software offered no way to record that decision. Between February 11 and 17, the state CEO's office wrote eight times to Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Gyanesh Bharti, copying Khanna each time, seeking a rollback option. It was not enabled in time, and the 97 were left off the final roll. The number is small; the principle is not. A lawful decision, taken in compliance with a Supreme Court order, was overridden by a system controlled from Delhi.

Neither Khanna nor Bharti has commented publicly, and nothing in the record shows on whose instructions either acted. The two Election Commissioners say it was not on theirs. That leaves one person who can answer the question: the CEC.

A Constitutional Problem, Not an Administrative One

Article 324 of the Constitution vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls, and of elections, in the Election Commission, not in the Chief Election Commissioner alone. When the government made the Commission a permanent multi-member body in 1993, T.N. Seshan challenged the change. In 1995, the Supreme Court upheld it and observed that no one can be above the institution he is supposed to serve. The CEC is first among equals. He does not decide on his colleagues' behalf.

If orders affecting the voting rights of crores of citizens were issued without the Commission's approval, their legal footing is uncertain. That has consequences well beyond the Commission's internal workings. It opens SIR decisions to challenge, and it bears directly on the right to vote under Article 326. An institution whose authority rests on public trust cannot afford doubt over whether its own orders were validly made.

Also Read:  SIR and Citizenship: 'You Are a Foreigner Until Proven Otherwise'

What Section 18 Says

The law on this point is plain. Section 18 of the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023 says the Commission's business shall, as far as possible, be transacted unanimously. Where the CEC and the Election Commissioners differ, the majority view prevails. The same section allows the Commission to settle its procedure and the division of its work, but only by unanimous decision.

Measured against that standard, the record is difficult to reconcile. On Form 6, two of three members objected before the change was made, and it went ahead. The reallocation of IT work in July, which the two Commissioners say removed a layer of oversight over the roll's technical backbone, was made without their knowledge, although the Act allows changes to the division of work only by unanimous decision. Sandhu and Joshi struck it down on July 30. In April, Sandhu wrote to senior officers citing the 2023 Act, and Joshi followed eight days later citing Article 324 as well. Both reminded the officers that communications issued in the ECI's name require the Commission's approval.

A fair reading must also note what the two Commissioners have not done. As former IAS officer KBS Sidhu has pointed out, a majority can move resolutions and publish the vote, and there is no public record that they have done so. The reason may lie in the Constitution itself: under Article 324(5), an Election Commissioner can be removed only on the recommendation of the Chief Election Commissioner. The members recording dissent are the ones with the least protection. Even so, the central point stands. On the questions they raised, Gyanesh Kumar did not command a majority of his own Commission.

What the Commission's Response Leaves Out

The ECI replied the same day with a press note. It describes the objections as routine: written notes, suggestions and "internal checks-and-balances" raised at "draft stages". It says all decisions were the "unanimous decisions of the full Commission" in the past year, and that every officer of the Commission is entitled to offer suggestions.

The record does not support this. Sandhu's August objection to Form 6 came after the change was already live, so it was not a draft-stage suggestion. The July 30 order striking down the IT reallocation was the Commission's majority reversing an action already taken. A claim of full-Commission unanimity is hard to sustain when one Commissioner says he received no agenda or minutes for more than a year, and when the three members did not meet in full for four months. Placing two constitutional office-holders alongside "every officer" misreads Article 324.

The note says EROs function as per their statutory powers. In Goa, they did, and the software set their decision aside. The note does not say who filed the Bengal appeals, does not explain why Form 6 stayed unchanged for weeks after being called illegal, and does not mention the letters to the Cabinet Secretary. Most notably, it does not deny that any of the 14 objections were made.

The Appointment Question Returns to Court

The episode also lands in the middle of a wider dispute over how the Commission is chosen. In March 2023, a Constitution Bench in Anoop Baranwal directed that, until Parliament legislated, the CEC and Election Commissioners be selected by a panel of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India. Parliament then passed the 2023 Act, which replaced the Chief Justice with a Union Cabinet minister nominated by the Prime Minister. Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury recorded his dissent when Gyanesh Kumar and Sandhu were appointed in 2024, and Rahul Gandhi did the same when Kumar was elevated and Joshi appointed in 2025.

On the same day as the Express report, a two-judge Supreme Court bench split on the Centre's plea to refer the challenge to the Act to a larger bench. Justice Dipankar Datta held that the Centre's demand for a larger-bench reference was unwarranted and questioned, prima facie, whether the Act ensures an independent appointment process. Justice Satish Chandra Sharma held that the reference was justified. In view of the split, the bench directed that the matter be placed before the Chief Justice of India for the constitution of a Constitution Bench. All three Commissioners were chosen under the process now in question, and two of them say they were bypassed. The court's question about independence is no longer abstract.

What Must Come Next

Gyanesh Kumar has not been found to have broken the law, and the ECI denies any irregularity. But the office of CEC depends on credibility as much as on legality. At a minimum, the Commission should publish the 14 notes and the decisions they concern, and release the minutes of its meetings. It should withdraw the Form 6 change, disclose who authorised the Bengal appeals, and commission the independent audit of roll access that Joshi proposed in May. Parliament, too, has a duty to examine the record rather than leave it to press notes.

If Gyanesh Kumar cannot show that the Commission's majority stood behind the decisions taken in its name, the case for him to remain as CEC will be difficult to sustain. An election body can withstand criticism from political parties. It is far harder to withstand the objections of its own members.

India's most influential body of editors has trained its lens on how the country's newsrooms handled the biggest youth uprising in years, and its verdict on mainstream television is damning. The Editors Guild of India's new State of the Media Report finds that TV channels first under-reported and then actively delegitimised the NEET protest, even as print newspapers and independent digital platforms became the spaces where student voices were heard and validated.

The report studies coverage of the June to July 2026 agitation that grew out of the NEET paper leak and wider anger over corruption in the education system. Its conclusion is blunt: while television struggled to hold public trust, independent digital voices and print journalism carried the story of the NEET protest.

Also Read:  Jantar Mantar Protest: Questions Without Answers

What the Editors Guild Report Set Out to Examine

The report, researched by Megha Sharma and Rishab Gaur, monitors how the NEET protest was framed across mainstream television, Hindi channels such as Aaj Tak, ABP News, TV9 Bharatvarsh and India TV, independent digital outlets, international media, and the major print dailies. It anchors its timeline to activist Sonam Wangchuk's hunger strike, which the Editors Guild describes as the turning point that drew national sympathy and cornered the government.

The study frames four questions: whether the protest was under-covered in its early growth phase, what dominant frames outlets used once they did cover it, how TV narratives differed from independent and social media narratives, and how attacks on journalists and framing choices affected public trust. The movement, led by the Cockroach Janta Party, escalated into the "Chalo Sansad" march on 20 July, which met heavy police resistance, and ended with the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on 25 July.

How Television Covered the NEET Protest

The Editors Guild report is sharpest on television. Between 6 and 15 June, it says, mainstream TV gave the movement minimal airtime, filling its hours with unrelated controversies while the story built elsewhere. When channels did turn to the NEET protest, the report finds, much of the coverage was hostile.

According to the Guild's framing analysis, Republic TV and Times Now reached for language like "anti-national," "paid" and "goondas," casting the agitation as conspiracy or a security threat rather than a student grievance. The Hindi channels reinforced official narratives in their own ways. The report says Aaj Tak focused on clashes and a law-and-order breakdown, ABP News framed the opposition as opportunistic and cast students as political pawns, TV9 Bharatvarsh highlighted overnight protests and the anger of youth, and India TV tied the demonstrations to Uttar Pradesh politics and electoral strategy.

A coding table in the report drives the point home. It records that in Republic TV and Times Now coverage, student voices were largely absent, with visuals dominated by clashes and lathi-charges. The finding is stark: mainstream TV leaned toward hostile and conspiratorial framing, while independent and international outlets emphasised education failure and the voices of the young.

Also Read:  Jantar Mantar Protests: A Generation Demands to Be Heard

The NEET Paper Leak and Print's Accountability Frame

If television is cast as the villain, print journalism is its counterweight. The Editors Guild finds that the major newspapers legitimised the NEET protest by documenting it as a serious accountability crisis rooted in the NEET paper leak, rather than dismissing it as fringe.

The report says The Indian Express described the Cockroach Janta Party as a "youth pressure group" even before its Jantar Mantar demonstrations, and built a narrative arc from satirical online origins to mobilisation, confrontation and finally Pradhan's resignation. The Hindu, it finds, framed the issue around examination governance and accountability rather than personalities, keeping the focus on NEET irregularities. The Times of India tracked the NEET protest chronologically, marking it by day counts, while Dainik Bhaskar moved from treating the movement as a novelty to dramatic, event-driven headlines once Pradhan responded.

The report also notes how coverage shifted as the NEET paper leak story grew. Hindustan's Delhi edition, it points out, carried no identifiable coverage on 13 June but gave the protest front-page prominence by 31 July, framing it as a sustained confrontation between students and the government. The core distinction the Editors Guild draws is this: the TV narrative was one of disorder and conspiracy, while the print narrative was one of accountability, chronology and the legitimacy of youth mobilisation over the NEET paper leak.

Independent and International Media Told a Different Story

Away from the studios, the report finds a very different register. It credits independent digital outlets such as The News Minute and Scroll.in with highlighting the exam leaks and the student suicides from early on, when much of television had looked away. Independent YouTubers, the Editors Guild notes, amplified student voices and helped sustain attention through the weeks of agitation.

International coverage followed a similar path. The report says the BBC, The New York Times and Al Jazeera framed the movement as a generational challenge. Its coding places the BBC's emphasis on shrinking space for dissent, Al Jazeera's on the exam leaks and emotional testimonies from the ground, and Reuters in a broadly neutral position focused on exam reforms. Across these outlets, the report records, student voices were consistently present, the opposite of the near-absence it maps in the most combative TV coverage of the NEET protest.

Also Read:  How Gen Z Dismantled Godi Media's Decade of Distortion

Attacks on Journalists and the Godi Media Chants

Beyond framing, the Editors Guild report documents the physical risks reporters faced and the erosion of trust between the public and mainstream TV. It records that a Times Now reporter was assaulted in Delhi, a Zee News team was heckled in Patna, and chants against "godi media" rang out at protest sites in Mumbai and Bengaluru.

The Guild connects these two threads into what it calls a dual crisis of safety and credibility. Its own statement of 23 July, cited in the report, condemned both the attacks on journalists and the collapse of trust facing the profession. The report argues that young protesters increasingly treated mainstream television as an adversary, a mistrust captured in the anti-media chants, while print and digital outlets became the channels through which the public followed the story.

A Credibility Gap the Editors Guild Cannot Ignore

The report places the NEET protest coverage in a longer arc of Indian media history, comparing it to the JNU agitation of 2016 but on a far larger scale, and describing it as one of the biggest youth challenges to the Modi government since 2014. What emerges, the Editors Guild says, is a clear credibility gap: television lost public trust at the very moment the story mattered most, and independent digital platforms and newspapers filled the vacuum.

For a report signed by the Guild's office-bearers, President Sanjay Kapoor, General Secretary Raghavan Srinivasan and Treasurer Teresa Rehman, the weight lies in the source. This is not an outside critic but the country's editors acknowledging that mainstream television failed a defining test during the NEET protest. In the note opening the report, MxMIndia founder Pradyuman Maheshwari, a member of the Guild's State of the Media Committee, frames the episode as a reflection of how young Indians are reshaping democratic discourse, and how the media's choices can either silence or amplify them.

The Editors Guild grounds its verdict in the coverage record, from the early under-reporting to the resignation of a Union minister over the NEET paper leak. Its central message is one the industry may find hard to hear: during the NEET protest, the outlets with the largest reach did the least to earn the public's trust.

Saroj Hospital Medical Negligence Case: Key Questions Raised

On 29th March 2018, Gargi Meena walked into Saroj Super Speciality Hospital in Rohini, Delhi. Gargi had mild stomach pain, but within 48 hours she was dead.

Since Gargi's death, for the last eight years, Uttam Chand Meena has been fighting to get justice for his wife. He went to court, he filed several RTI petitions, dug out documents related to the hospital, and eventually he found out that over 100 unregistered nurses were working in the hospital at the time of his wife's admission. Meena has alleged that his wife died due to medical negligence.

On 15th July 2026, he got a favourable order from the Delhi Nursing Council, which has decided to initiate criminal action against the hospital's management. Here are the transcripts of the conversation between The Probe's Editor-in-Chief Prema Sridevi and Uttam Chand Meena.

Also Read:  Medical Negligence in Delhi Hospital Claimed My Wife’s Life - Husband

How Gargi Meena Went to the Hospital

Prema Sridevi: Meena ji, thank you for joining me. The Delhi Nursing Council order is a very significant one. But before we come to that, for those who don't know your case, tell us what happened to your wife, Gargi Meena, in 2018.

Uttam Chand Meena: Let me give you the background. On 29 March 2018 we were due to travel to Pushkar and Ajmer Sharif. That morning she woke up with her period and mild pain. I said, Saroj Hospital is close by, go and get some medicine. If she had the medicine with her, then on a long road journey she could take it whenever the pain came. You don't find a doctor on the highway. That was the only thought behind it. She went to the hospital on her own.

She reported at casualty, at emergency. They managed her pain there. She called me again at around 9:00, 9:15. I told her, your pain has settled, but get the medicine prescribed as well, that was the whole purpose. The moment she asked the emergency doctor for a prescription, he said no, it is OPD time now, go to the OPD.

So she was sent from emergency to the OPD. The gynaecologist on duty that day was Dr Nisha Jain. She saw her at about 10:20 in the morning. My wife explained the problem and asked for medicine. Instead of prescribing anything, the doctor told her to get tests done. One of them was a trans-vaginal scan. On the basis of that she said, you have a cyst, and this bleeding will not stop, you will have to undergo surgery. But that bleeding was menstrual bleeding.

And note this. When she pushed her towards surgery, she had already written out the pre-surgical tests at the very start. It is not that she added them after seeing the TVS report. They were written earlier. After the TVS she said, now get these further tests done too. By 3 p.m. the doctor had prepared her for surgery.

Why Was Surgery Recommended?

Prema Sridevi: Meena ji, you are saying there was no need for that surgery, that for mild stomach pain she only needed medicine. When you raised this with the doctor, when you asked why surgery was necessary, what were you told?

Uttam Chand Meena: Before meeting the doctor I spoke at length with my CMO. He told me that doctors avoid surgery during menstruation, because the body is unstable anyway. So he said, ask them to plan it for after the period.

With that in mind I went to the labour management room. My wife was sitting up in bed. I told the doctor: I have no problem giving consent, but for now give her conservative treatment and manage the pain. We will go to the village and come back, and you can operate then.

The doctor flared up. She said, "You don't understand. She will die if you don't do the surgery." The HOD of the hospital, saying that to an ordinary man like me. I knew nothing about any of this at the time. I gave consent under pressure.

The Surgery and What Happened Afterwards

Prema Sridevi: We have seen photographs of her from before she went to the hospital. She looked cheerful and healthy. Then suddenly, at the time of surgery, what happened?

Uttam Chand Meena: They performed a total laparoscopic hysterectomy — a TLH. And they did it because it pays more. The same hysterectomy could have been done vaginally, but that earns less. That is why they pushed for a TLH. I was told she would be discharged on the third day. A small keyhole operation, barely any stitches, the patient recovers by the third day and walks about.

All of that was in my head. But when she said "she will simply die", I had no option left. I gave consent blindly.

She was taken to the OT at around 5:30. We waited. We had been told the surgery would take an hour and a half, two hours. It went on until 7:45. That is the time written in the records, but we were only taken in to see her at 8:45. 

She was in so much pain that I could not make sense of it. When she was being wheeled in for surgery she had looked at me briefly. I said only one thing to her. I said, you have delivered three children; this is a small surgery, removing the uterus, it will be done, you will come back, why are you worrying? I did not know she would not come back.

Prema Sridevi: What happened after the surgery?

Uttam Chand Meena: She was in severe pain. Terrible pain and this is immediately after surgery, when the anaesthesia is still working on the body. Even with that dose in her, she was in agony. And in that pain she whispered to me that she could not pass urine.

I went and called Dr Nisha Jain. I said, she is having trouble passing urine. She pulled back the sheet and said, look, the catheter is in place. At that point, there were other patients in the room. The doctor just pulled off the bedsheet and exposed my wife to everyone. She was nude. It was a very embarrassing and shocking moment for us. Why would a doctor who is a caregiver be so angry and ruthless?

Prema Sridevi: So in front of the other patients beside her, and their families, she pulled off the sheet?

Uttam Chand Meena: It was the labour room, and we had been called in specially to see her. The other patients were all around. And at that moment she pulled the sheet away. I could not react at that time. I was under pressure because my wife was in so much pain.

But understand what followed. In the post-operative period we simply kept waiting. It was 11:30 at night and they still had not shifted her to a room. They kept the patient lying there in the post-operative labour room. It turned 12:00, 12:30, and I thought, forget it, they won't move her now. In the morning our daughter, who had stayed there all night, called me: "Papa, they are shifting her to the ICU." I asked what had happened. They said her blood sugar had gone to 358. This was the morning of the 30th, around 7:30.

Now that I am fighting the case, I have learnt that there were no nurses available that night to manage her. The nurse simply did not bother to check that her sugar had to be monitored post-operatively. All her post-operative vitals should have been charted as routine. No such record was ever given to me.

And the biggest thing. They had spoken about transfusing blood, first the blood management, they said. If a patient's haemoglobin is 7.6 and you are operating, you must stabilise her first, bring the Hb up to at least 10. Instead, they started one unit and wheeled her into the OT. And at night, until about 11:30 or 12:30, they were still giving the three units they had decided on in the post-operative period. What is the sense in that?

On the one hand they say there was bleeding. But once you have removed the cause of the bleeding, the bleeding stops. So why keep transfusing blood afterwards? It means something inside the abdomen had been damaged, something had been cut during the surgery, and they had to get through the night on transfusions.

Also Read:  Saroj Hospital Medical Negligence: NMC Takes Action - The Probe Impact

What the Operation Recording Revealed

Prema Sridevi: Over these eight years you have done a great deal of investigation yourself, and the authorities have also examined the case. Looking back now, in 2026, what are the things that happened in that hospital that make you say this is medical negligence?

Uttam Chand Meena: The All India Federation of Laparoscopic Surgery is a federation based in Bombay. On the strength of a letter from them, Saroj Hospital had been made a centre for laparoscopy training, and the person delivering that training was Nisha Jain. Yet on the day of the surgery, the operative record does not even carry Nisha Jain's signature to show that she attended the patient. There is another assistant, Dr Priyanka Gupta. So the way I read it, Priyanka Gupta probably performed laparoscopic surgery.

Prema Sridevi: That is what you believe?

Uttam Chand Meena: Yes. If Nisha Jain's signature is not in my documents, that is what I will believe.

Prema Sridevi: But the National Medical Commission took action against Nisha Jain. On what basis did the NMC act against her, if she had not even seen the patient?

Uttam Chand Meena: Ma'am, it is a convention of the medical fraternity that the senior doctor under whom the patient is being treated carries the blame. It does not fall on the junior. That is our misfortune.

Prema Sridevi: So the first reason you call this negligence is that you believe Dr Nisha Jain did not perform the surgery. What else do you think happened in that hospital that day?

Uttam Chand Meena: After a great deal of effort we had the CD of the operation released through the court, and we watched it very closely. It shows that a cut was made. And while the ovaries and so on were being removed, a serious injury occurred. It is all on the CD. I am not the one saying this. The CD the hospital itself handed over says it.

Prema Sridevi: Could you identify the doctors in it, or is it only the computerised imaging?

Uttam Chand Meena: It is the imaging, ma'am. In laparoscopic surgery you only see the screen. 

Prema Sridevi: So what did you see on that CD?

Uttam Chand Meena: I saw that she was bleeding internally. We saw the bleeding. There was bleeding, and after that they did not control it. That is why they kept transfusing blood post-operatively.

Take it on principle. The doctors say she was bleeding because of a cyst inside the uterus. You removed the uterus. The bleeding should have stopped, and no transfusion should have been needed at all. The post-operative blood settles it: there was massive bleeding during surgery, which they kept clearing, kept suctioning out and this was caught on the CD.

Their target was to finish in about an hour and a half; that is roughly what it takes. It took far longer. So the anaesthesia dose has to be increased too. The dose given at the start covers a fixed duration, so that management also has to be extended. Finally within 48 hours of my wife stepping inside that hospital, she was declared dead.

How the RTI Investigation Found Nursing Records

Prema Sridevi: Over these eight years of fighting, how did you come to know that unregistered nurses were involved at the time of admission?

Uttam Chand Meena: In the documents Saroj Hospital gave me, a nurse's number appeared at the bottom of the sheets. I wanted to identify the nurse by name — which nurse did what for the patient, and in which shift. I was struggling with that. So I asked Saroj Hospital for the data of every nurse connected with my patient. They gave it to me.

When I analysed it, I asked them for the DNC numbers. What they had given me as DNC numbers were actually Saroj's own employee codes. Once I realised that, I filed an RTI with the DNC to verify it: tell me whether this nurse, by this name, is registered with you or not. For some of them the answer came back: she is not registered with us.

Once "not registered" was on record, I kept at it through RTI after RTI. Through that process I even obtained the DNC's approval to go into Saroj and take their complete record. I took the entire Excel sheet of nurses and then showed how many were unregistered. Multiple RTIs — I cannot even tell you how many. And the result is that things were gradually filtered out, and today we are sitting here with this favourable order from the DNC.

Prema Sridevi: One major outcome of your eight-year fight is that the National Medical Commission acted against Saroj Hospital's doctors, and the Delhi Medical Council also accepted that there was negligence by the doctors in this case. But whenever medical negligence is discussed, only the doctors' role is scrutinised. The role of nurses is hardly ever examined. In your view, in cases like this, what is a nurse's responsibility, and what is her role?

Uttam Chand Meena: Ma'am, think about it practically, exactly as an ordinary person would. Doctors come on their round, write a note on the chart and leave. Once that note is written, who administers the medicine according to it? The nurse. 

If she gives the wrong drug, or the wrong dose — or if the doctor has written that an injection is to be given after a certain interval and she does not understand what that means, and an unqualified woman pushes that injection into your IV line — what could the consequences be? 

Doctors barely give you five minutes. They come on rounds for a minute or two per patient. For the remaining 24 hours, whether the patient is in the ICU or a general ward, the person who provides the actual care — like a mother — is the nurse.

Also Read:  Delhi High Court Flags Regulatory Failures at Saroj Hospital | Impact

What the Delhi Nursing Council Order Says

Prema Sridevi: Meena ji, I am looking at the Delhi Nursing Council order you received, dated 15 July 2026. It is a shocking order. The Council accepts that of 245 nursing staff, 114 nurses were registered with the Delhi Nursing Council. 120 nurses were not registered with the Council, which is against the rule of law.

More importantly, six nurses — in fact the order does not even call them nurses, it says six individuals — were completely unregistered with any state nursing council in India, posing a direct threat to patient safety in critical care. Those are the Delhi Nursing Council's own words. These six had no registration anywhere, so we do not even know what their qualifications were or what they were doing in that hospital.

And there is the misclassification. Five more individuals had been shown as nurses, and the order says they were "mistakenly rostered as nursing staff." What is this?

Uttam Chand Meena: There is a story behind those five that people don't know. Every hospital, according to its bed strength, must maintain the nurse numbers laid down in the Delhi nursing rules — how many beds means how many nurses, and how much OT staff if there is an OT. It is all defined. So to make up their headcount, hospitals sometimes fold in the OT staff. That is exactly what happened here: the nurses were falling short, so they included these people too. Technicians, assistants — they show all of them as nurses.

Prema Sridevi: To make the numbers add up on paper.

Uttam Chand Meena: Exactly. And notice point 102, which you read out, on "interstate registration default". There the DNC says the interstate registration is in default — that these people did not take an NOC from their home state and migrate properly. But alongside that it also says their documents were never verified.

Prema Sridevi: So among those 120, part of the responsibility may lie with the DNC itself.

Uttam Chand Meena: Exactly. 

Prema Sridevi: At The Probe we cover a great many medical negligence cases. We are probably the only news organisation focused on covering medical negligence and public health accountability. It is a major campaign for us.

Since we began, a great many victims email us and call us, asking us to cover their stories. The first thing I tell them is: register your case, go to your state medical council, do everything that is required — and we will look at the documents and cover the story. And what most of them say is that justice in medical negligence cases is impossible. That the doctors' mafia, the hospital mafia, are wired into the system, that they will waste their time and never get justice.

Your case is an inspiration to many families, because in eight years you have won a series of favourable orders — from the Delhi High Court, the Delhi Medical Council, the National Medical Commission, and now the Delhi Nursing Council. So to the people who say justice in medical negligence is impossible, what would you say? What is your message?

Uttam Chand Meena: What you have said is the reality. Let me explain what lies behind it. If my parents had not educated me, I would not be qualified. I am a graduate engineer, and I studied further after that. Could I otherwise have picked up a medical textbook and read it? I have brought the books with me — I even brought Harrison, and the book I found on laparoscopy, I studied it.

Now tell me, after all that: will an ordinary person concentrate on earning a living, or read medical textbooks and then consider himself fit to walk into the DMC and argue with doctors? At the DMC they do not let your lawyer in, nor any doctor. The NMC is the same: you cannot take legal support, you may bring a companion with a medical background but not a relative. In that kind of setting, how is an ordinary man to make those doctors understand what was done to him? It is very difficult, ma'am.

Prema Sridevi: So what message would you give them? 

Uttam Chand Meena: My message is this. Many NGOs are working, but I would ask that some good NGO enter this field as well — one that can help an unlettered person who arrives with documents, that can support the average, middle-income person, the poor man who cannot spend money.

And I would ask the government to do everything in its power to bring such NGOs onto the ground. Because just as a government does not function well without a good opposition, in exactly the same way, if there is nobody to spot the flaws in how the medical fraternity works, then whatever the fraternity does is accepted as correct. We treat the white coat as another form of God.

Prema Sridevi: Is this issue of unregistered nurses confined to Saroj Hospital, or do you think it is a far broader problem affecting many more hospitals in this country?

Uttam Chand Meena: Pull up the records of any nursing home and you will find the nurses' certificates and qualifications on file — and that nurse is not even working there. It is not as though I only looked at Saroj. There are plenty of other small hospitals and nursing homes where, when a minor accident happens, someone takes the injured person to the nearest roadside hospital. He has no idea whether the staff at the place he is taking an accident case to for first aid can even handle his patient.

A stranger passing through comes across an accident victim and takes him to the nearest hospital. It is neither the patient's fault nor his. Often you are told outright, this patient is not ours — meaning we do not provide this kind of care — but they will still enter the hospital's name on the record. And when the word "hospital" comes to mind, nobody stops to ask whether treatment for this particular condition is available there.

So I consider it a very big failure of the Delhi Nursing Home Cell that it grants hospital status to anyone at all, whether the place stands on 250 square yards or on four acres. The four-acre one does only one extra thing: it writes "Multi-Speciality Hospital" underneath. And now even the small nursing homes have picked up the habit — they write "Super Speciality Hospital" too. A great many deaths happen because of this, and nobody pays them any attention.

Gargi Meena: Her Life and Her Dreams

Prema Sridevi: Meena ji, the most important person in this entire conversation is Gargi Meena ji. We want to know about her. What kind of person was she? What were her dreams?

Uttam Chand Meena: My wife had done her JBT. She gave up her MCD teaching job for the children. And the dream we had, let me tell you, was to go back to the village and open a small school — to give tuition to children who cannot afford tuition. That was our dream: that if in that rural area, that countryside where people cannot manage a proper meal, we could move even a few children's lives forward, then the two of us having come to this earth would have been worthwhile. 

Prema Sridevi: So what happens next in this case?

Uttam Chand Meena: My next stage is to take the DHS to court over Saroj, and to take the Quality Council of India to court. Whatever the licensing authority is, whatever the accreditation body is, a strong message should go to all of them. 

Prema Sridevi: Thank you, Meena ji. Wish you all the best in your fight. We truly hope that you get justice. 

Uttam Chand Meena: Thank you. 

On 15 October, a fee arrives on UPI payments above ₹2,000. The government says it is small and merchant-only. A petition in the Supreme Court, read against the paperwork the state has published and the paperwork it has withheld, tells a harder story. This is what the UPI MDR really is, how it was made, and why it is being fought.

For six years, using UPI cost nothing, and that was not a courtesy. It was the law. From 15 October, for a slice of payments, it stops being free, and the way that change was engineered is at least as troubling as the charge itself.

What Zero MDR Meant, and Why It Was Suddenly Undone

A merchant discount rate, or MDR, is the fee a business pays its bank for accepting a digital payment. On the cards in your wallet it is real money, close to 0.9 percent on a debit card and as much as 2.5 percent on credit. On UPI, since the start of 2020, it has been zero. Zero MDR meant the shopkeeper kept every rupee and the bank recovered nothing from the transaction. That was the entire point, to make digital acceptance costless and therefore universal.

The policy came in three moves. In the July 2019 Union Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that businesses with turnover above ₹50 crore must offer digital payment options, with no MDR absorbed by them or passed to customers. From 1 January 2020 it hardened into law, written into Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, which forced banks and processors to waive fees on UPI and RuPay debit cards. There it stood for almost six years, until September 2026, when the Ministry of Finance announced the amendment that unwinds it.

The revised arrangement is a hybrid. From 15 October 2026, the absolute zero-MDR rule survives only in parts. Person-to-person transfers stay free. Payments under ₹2,000 stay free. Small merchants receiving up to ₹1 lakh a month stay free. But a person-to-merchant payment above ₹2,000 will now carry a 0.4 percent charge that the merchant must absorb. This is the new UPI MDR.

Why now, and why like this? The government's case for the UPI MDR is that the network is now too costly to keep running for free and must be allowed to fund itself. That case has two holes. The cost figure the industry cites, around ₹20,000 crore a year, has never been published with any working to show how it was reached, so the public is asked to accept the premise on trust. And the claim that UPI cannot survive without a charge does not hold, because for years the government simply paid to keep it free, through a subsidy to banks and payment apps that it kept increasing, from ₹1,389 crore in 2021-22 to ₹2,210 crore the next year and ₹3,631 crore the year after. It could have continued. It chose instead to wind the subsidy down and move the cost onto merchants, which is a policy decision rather than an economic necessity, and one never argued openly as such.

The related reassurance, that 96 percent of payments are untouched and consumers will not pay, sidesteps the real question. The merchants in the remaining slice do pay, and a direction not to pass the cost to customers is only a sentence, and merchants who are told not to pass the cost on will find their own ways to recover it.

The Petition, the Petitioner, and a Gazette That Sets No Price

Here the story turns from policy to power. On 16 September, a Delhi advocate named Anjan Datta filed a public interest petition in the Supreme Court under Article 32 of the Constitution. His reason for going straight to the top court is that the change strikes merchants, consumers and the entire digital-payments economy at once, and the small traders who feel it most cannot each fight a nationwide framework across a dozen High Courts.

The document at the centre of his challenge is Gazette Notification S.O. 5067(E), dated 14 September, and it rewards a slow reading. What it says is narrow. It protects exactly two payment modes from charges, RuPay debit cards with no ceiling, and UPI transactions up to ₹2,000, and it forbids banks from levying on those. What it does not say is the heart of the matter. It fixes no rate. The figure 0.4 percent is nowhere in it. All the notification really does is lift UPI payments above ₹2,000 out of the protection they had held since 2020, leaving them open to a charge the gazette itself never names. Datta's petition asks the court to quash that notification, to compel the government to produce the full record behind the decision, and to declare that no UPI MDR can be imposed on the strength of a press release and a set of FAQs.

The Real Target: A Law Rewritten Into a Blank Cheque

Datta's more serious objection is not to the number at all. It is to the machinery that produced it. Until this year, Section 10A worked like a bolt. The protected payment modes were named in the statute itself, so no minister could remove UPI's shelter at will. Only Parliament could. The 2026 amendment drew that bolt and left a dial. The law no longer states what is protected. It now says the Central Government may decide, by notification, which electronic modes stay free of charge, and by extension which do not.

The petition's charge is that Parliament, through an amendment the government drafted and pushed through, handed over that power with no rules attached: no policy, no formula, no ceiling, no test the government must meet. In effect the legislature wrote the executive a blank cheque to choose which payment systems are shielded and which are charged, and to withdraw a benefit hundreds of millions had built their lives around, without answering to any standard at all. Lawyers call this excessive delegation. In plainer words, the petition says the rule-maker gave itself permission to invent the rules later. If Section 10A falls, the notification and the entire UPI MDR built upon it fall with it.

Five Weeks, Three Documents, and No Gazetted Rate

The chronology is where the unease turns concrete. Parliament amended Section 10A during the monsoon session that closed on 13 August, folding the change into the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Act, 2026, which received the President's assent that month. The old Section 10A had flatly barred any MDR on the payment modes listed under Section 269SU of the income-tax law, a list that covered all UPI and RuPay. The amendment swept that blanket protection away and replaced it with a power for the government to pick modes one at a time.

Then came the reassurance. On 8 August, with public disquiet rising, the Finance Ministry described the amendment as a mere enabling provision, promised that consumers and all person-to-person payments would remain free, and cast the purpose as raising resources for cybersecurity, fraud prevention and infrastructure. Five weeks later, on 14 September, the gazette stripped UPI above ₹2,000 of its protection. The very next day, 15 September, a Press Information Bureau release unveiled the full UPI MDR framework: 0.4 percent on general person-to-merchant payments above ₹2,000, capped at ₹300 above ₹75,000; a flat ₹5 in railways, telecom, insurance, fuel and farm inputs; 0.02 percent on capital-market payments; exemptions for P2P and small merchants; a direction that merchants must not pass the cost to customers; and 5 percent of collections set aside for a small-merchant fund.

The UPI MDR that lands on 15 October appears in no gazette. It lives in that press release and an NPCI circular, produced after deliberations of the UPI and Services Steering Committee. The cautious enabling provision of August had become a detailed, four-band levy by September, the opposite of limited. A charge binding on a whole country was fixed by a committee Parliament never empowered to fix it, announced through a press office, and never published as law. Whatever the merits of 0.4 percent, a compulsory national levy conjured this way is wrong at the root, because the power to impose it was never properly granted, guided or published.

Stabbed in the Back: A Nation Nudged Onto UPI, Then Charged

For millions of merchants, the grievance is not academic. UPI became the spine of everyday commerce because the state built it that way and told them to trust it. Governments put QR codes on every counter, pushed formalisation, celebrated the cashless economy, and said over and over that ordinary digital payments would stay free. When the pandemic made cash feel dangerous, and people watched lives lost and feared touching even their own, UPI was a lifeline that did not care whether you were rich or poor. Households and small businesses restructured around a promise. By the National Payments Corporation's own count, UPI carried roughly 2,451 crore transactions worth about ₹29.82 lakh crore in August 2026 alone, a scale reached precisely because it was free.

To reverse that by press release feels, to those affected, like a door closing quietly behind people who were ushered through it. The manner deepens the wound. UPI is regulated by the Reserve Bank of India and operated by NPCI, a not-for-profit company owned by the very banks that stand to collect the UPI MDR now being introduced. The rate was set by an NPCI-chaired committee that holds no rule-making power under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, published in no gazette, and protected by none of the safeguards that normally surround a measure of this reach, no prior notice, no publication for objection, no laying before Parliament. A levy this large, arriving without those protections, is on Datta's petition's argument unlawful before anyone even reaches the question of whether the rate is fair.

The Questions Now Before the Supreme Court

Stripped to plain language, the petition puts the court a set of questions the country deserves to see answered. Did Parliament give the executive an unguided power to decide which payment systems are protected, breaching the guarantees of equality and free trade under Articles 14 and 19(1)(g)?

Can a nationwide compulsory charge be switched on without publishing the binding instrument, the source of the power and the reasons behind it?

Can executive FAQs and a press release stand in for a proper, reasoned, published order?

Do the unexplained lines, ₹2,000 a payment, ₹1 lakh a month, the ₹75,000 cap, sort near-identical merchants into winners and losers with no disclosed logic?

Can a compulsory collection shared among banks and payment firms be anything other than a charge that needs the authority of law?

And can a direction not to pass the cost to customers mean anything without audits, penalties or a way to reclaim money wrongly taken? The petition also records what did not happen before any of this: no consultation, no draft rates, no hearing for the hundreds of millions affected.

The petition has been filed, but it is yet to be listed for hearing, and the government maintains it will not reconsider the policy. With the 15 October deadline approaching, whether the Supreme Court agrees to hear the challenge - and what it ultimately rules - will decide far more than a 0.4 percent fee. It will determine whether a public good, built on public funds and public trust, can be repriced through press releases while keeping the legal rationale off the official record.

For Five Years, A Father Did Not Miss A Hearing. Then His Chair Went Empty

When The Probe first walked into a Gurugram apartment to report on the death of 17-year-old Manav Singh, his father Manoj Kumar was still counting the days. He counted them out loud, in court, on social media, to anyone who would listen. The Probe followed his fight from the start, reported it when almost no one else would, and watched that reporting push the National Human Rights Commission to intervene and hand the cyberbullying case to the CB-CID. Manoj thanked us then. He said justice was still a long way off, but that at least someone was watching. In December 2025, of a sudden cause, Manoj died. And when we returned to the court file, we found something that stopped us cold: the case he built now drifts with no one to carry it, and the court does not even seem to know the man fighting it is gone.

Who Manav Was

Manav Singh was a Class 12 student in Gurugram, his parents' only child, a cheerful boy who wanted to study abroad. On the night of 4 May 2020, he had dinner with his family, ordered burgers, and went to his room. Soon he was dead, having jumped from the eleventh floor of the family's apartment. His parents told The Probe they had left him smiling only minutes earlier. "I saw Manav's head split open like a watermelon and I saw my son die on the spot," his father said. "This is not a simple case of suicide. This is cyber murder."

Also Read:  Gurugram Parents Allege Cyber Murder of Son, Await Justice

What happened in those final forty-five minutes was, his parents said, a coordinated cyberbullying assault. After a defamatory post appeared against him on Instagram, they told The Probe, some twenty to thirty people descended on him online, calling and messaging without pause. "They were jumping on to Manav on the internet like wolves," his father said. Just before he died, Manav sent his parents a message saying goodbye. The Probe reported all of this at a time when the story was going untold, and accessed the electronic evidence that showed the trolling in the minutes before his death.

How The Case Was Botched

The family's account of the police response was damning, and The Probe documented it. Gurugram police took ten days to register the FIR. When the parents went to the police as victims, they said, they were treated like the accused. The first chargesheet, they pointed out, was filed against unknown persons, without invoking the cyberbullying provisions of the IT Act that they believed the case demanded.

The delays were not just the family's complaint; the court itself said so. A Gurugram magistrate, reviewing the sluggish probe, recorded that the investigating officers were "working at a low pace in the present matter for reasons best known to them," and ordered the police to file a status report every fifteen days. The parents said the social media platforms were no help either. Crucial digital records from Instagram and Snapchat, the material that could have shown exactly who did what that night, were not obtained or produced in time. It was this collapse of the cyberbullying probe, evidence left ungathered, deadlines ignored, that finally forced the NHRC to step in.

Also Read:  Gurugram cyber bullying case transferred to CB-CID by NHRC for reinvestigation: The Probe impact

The Fight That Would Not Stop, And The NHRC Impact

Through all of it, Manoj Kumar refused to let go. He moved from pillar to post, filed the applications, kept the case alive in court, and kept telling his son's story publicly long after the news cycle had moved on. The Probe stayed with him. Our continued reporting on the Gurugram case kept the pressure on, and it produced a result: the NHRC examined the record, found the investigation "nothing but a vitiated investigation which cannot rise to a valid chargesheet," and transferred the matter to the CB-CID for reinvestigation.

"When no media was reporting on this issue, The Probe had taken it up even before its launch," Manoj said at the time. "I really am grateful to NHRC and The Probe for their support, but justice still is a long way."

What The CB-CID Was Meant To Do

The transfer to the CB-CID was the single biggest win of Manoj's long fight. The NHRC had been blunt about why it was needed: no arrests reflected in the enquiry report, mobile phones not sent for forensics in time, a final report filed without the phone, Instagram and Snapchat data that the case turned on. The Commission directed Haryana's home department to have the matter reinvestigated properly and to report back.

But a transfer on paper is not the same as an investigation on the ground. The court record shows the CB-CID's action taken report being chased hearing after hearing, adjournment after adjournment, the report simply not arriving. At one point the court noted the notice to the station house officer had not even been issued by its own staff, and ordered a show cause notice. The report that Manoj had fought years to obtain was finally placed on record only in August 2025, a few short months before he died.

Also Read:  Cyberbullying: Two years on, Justice Evades Gurugram Parents

The Court That Does Not Know He Is Gone

In the months after Manoj's death, the case he had carried on his own shoulders kept getting called, and no one came. "None for complainant," the orders say, again and again. On one date the case was called several times through the morning; the magistrate waited until noon, and still no one appeared for the man who had never once stopped appearing. The court, "in the interest of justice", declined to pass any adverse order and simply issued another notice to the complainant and his counsel.

The complainant is dead. The notices are going out to a man who cannot receive them. His lawyer Amish Aggarwala, who once gave interviews and led the campaign, was unavailable for a comment when we reached out to him. The file was summoned by an appellate court and sent back. Fresh dates were fixed, then fixed again, the next stretching into 2027.

The Gurugram cyberbullying case that a father spent five years dragging toward justice now moves entirely on its own momentum, which is to say it barely moves at all, past a chair in the courtroom that will stay empty.

What Remains

Manoj Singh buried his only son and then gave whatever he had left to a fight he did not live to finish. He wanted one thing: for a court to look honestly at how his boy was hounded to death, and to say so. He did not get it. His wife has since relocated from Gurugram to another city. The case carries on in name, in a courtroom, under a father's name that no longer belongs to anyone who will walk through the door. That, in the end, is what a cyberbullying death cost one family: a boy, then his father, and a fight that outlived them both and still points at nothing.

Every summit communique is an exercise in choosing words, but the New Delhi Declaration is unusually revealing in what it chooses to name and what it leaves in shadow. Adopted by consensus on 12 September 2026 by all members of the expanded bloc, the document runs to 140 numbered paragraphs and touches almost every subject in global affairs, from the Security Council to submarine cables. Yet its real meaning lies in a single pattern. On some conflicts it speaks plainly and names names. On others it retreats into the passive voice. And on one major war it says nothing at all. Read through that lens, the New Delhi Declaration is the clearest map yet of how far this bloc, and its host India, will actually go.

What the New Delhi Declaration Said Plainly

Where BRICS felt safe, it was specific. On Gaza the language is direct and forceful. The Declaration condemns "the use of starvation as a method of warfare" and attacks on hospitals and civilian infrastructure, demands unhindered humanitarian access, and opposes "the forced displacement, temporary or permanent, under any pretext, of any of the Palestinian population" from Gaza.

It goes beyond rhetoric, noting the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice "in the legal proceedings instituted by South Africa against Israel," and restating Israel's obligation to let aid into Gaza. It backs a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and full UN membership for Palestine. On Lebanon it names Israel again, calling on it "to withdraw its occupying forces from all of the Lebanese territories".

India's own priority was named too. It condemns "in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 22 April 2025, during which 26 people were killed," the Pahalgam attack, and carries the language India has long pushed on the cross-border movement of terrorists, terror financing, safe havens, and a rejection of "double standards in countering terrorism." For New Delhi, getting a document signed by China, Russia, Iran and eight others to name an attack on Indian soil was a genuine diplomatic win, and one worth reading closely for what it does not do.

Also Read:  Modi, Xi, Putin: The Biggest Challenges Before BRICS in Delhi

What the Declaration Would Only Whisper

The moment the subject turned toward the West's most powerful state, the plain speech vanished. On the strikes against Iran, the Declaration expresses "serious concern over deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities under full safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency". Every reader knows this describes the American and Israeli bombing of Iran's nuclear sites, yet the attackers are never named, and even the victim is identified only as the owner of "peaceful nuclear facilities." The paragraph before it urges all sides to show "maximum restraint" while "recalling our respective national positions", the diplomatic phrase that lets members who fundamentally disagree paper over the gap and sign the same page.

The same hush falls over economic grievances. The New Delhi Declaration voices "serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures which distort trade and are inconsistent with WTO rules", condemns "unilateral economic sanctions and secondary sanctions" and calls for their elimination, and demands an end to the "unilateral blockade measures" against Cuba. Each of these is a complaint aimed squarely at Washington. Not one of them says so.

The War the New Delhi Declaration Ignored

Then there is the silence. For all its length, the Declaration makes no mention of the war in Ukraine, the largest active conflict involving a BRICS member. The peace and security section moves methodically through West Asia, Iran, Gaza, Jerusalem, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria and Cuba, but the war Russia is waging simply does not appear. Where earlier BRICS texts at least gestured at it through members' "national positions," this one omits it altogether. That absence is not an accident of drafting. It is the price of Russian membership and of India's refusal to be drawn into criticising Moscow, and it marks, as clearly as any paragraph that is present, where the bloc's convenience lies.

The Country the Declaration Never Names

Put those threads together and one fact stands out above the rest. The United States is not named once in the entire Declaration. Not in the tariff paragraph, not on sanctions, not over the strikes on Iran, not on the Cuban embargo. The document assembles a comprehensive indictment of American economic and military conduct and then declines, everywhere, to write the word.

The contrast with how the New Delhi Declaration treats its own members is telling. It is perfectly willing to name China and Russia when the mention flatters: it credits them for supporting India and Brazil at the UN, praises China for extending "zero-tariff treatment to cover 53 African countries" and for its contribution to the Kunming biodiversity fund. The bloc will name friends in praise but not adversaries in protest. That is the signature of a group that wants the posture of defiance without paying the price of confrontation.

Where the New Delhi Declaration Stands on Dedollarisation

Nowhere is that caution clearer than on the dollar. For all the noise about BRICS building an alternative to the greenback, the Declaration is studiously modest. It acknowledges the work of the BRICS Payment Task Force on cross-border payments and notes "discussions on promoting trade settlements and investments using BRICS local currencies," but immediately hedges that there is "no one-size-fits-all approach" and that national priorities come first.

There is no common BRICS currency, no timetable to displace the dollar, and, once again, no mention of the United States. This is the toned-down dedollarisation India has argued for all along, now set into the outcome document. Even the New Development Bank is urged only to "expand local currency financing", an incremental nudge rather than a rupture. For a summit that the world watched for signs of a currency war, the declaration reads like a decision not to start one.

Also Read:  Modi BRICS Speech: The Global South's Case, Carefully Framed

Multilateralism and the Reform the Declaration Demands

If the declaration is timid on confrontation, it is expansive on reform, and this is the ground on which BRICS is most comfortable. The New Delhi Declaration devotes its opening pages to it, calling for a "more just, equitable ... representative, legitimate, democratic and accountable" international order for greater representation of developing countries in the UN and its Secretariat, and for a comprehensive reform of the Security Council. But even here the ambition is carefully fenced.

China and Russia "reiterate their support to the aspirations of Brazil and India to play a greater role in the UN, including its Security Council", a formula that blesses a vague "greater role" while stopping short of endorsing a permanent seat, leaving India's core demand exactly where it has languished for two decades. On the economic front the Declaration presses for reform of the IMF and World Bank so that voting power reflects "countries' relative positions in the global economy", supports WTO reform and the accession bids of Ethiopia and Iran, and quietly defends South Africa's seat at the G20 against any change not agreed "based on consensus of all members", a subtle rebuke to the pressure coming out of Washington on that forum. The demands are ambitious. The mechanism to force them remains, as always, absent.

Where India Gained, and Where It Fell Short

For India the New Delhi Declaration is at once a showcase and a ceiling. The gains are real. New Delhi steered a consensus text through the sharp Iran-UAE divide over West Asia, secured the naming of the Pahalgam attack, kept the currency language cautious, and stamped the document with its own initiatives: a BRICS Grain Exchange, a Risk Lab at GIFT City in Gujarat, the New Investment Platform, an India Centre for BRICS Industrial Competencies, the chairship of the Kimberley Process on diamonds, and an India-led International Big Cats Alliance. It also anchored a commitment to "implement the BRICS Leaders' Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence" and won a nod to its AI Impact Summit of February 2026.

The shortfalls are just as real, and the same document records them. The Pahalgam attack is condemned, but Pakistan is never named, so India got the incident without the accusation. The Security Council language flatters India while advancing its seat not at all. And the sweeping reforms the New Delhi Declaration demands remain, as they have for years, aspirations rather than accomplishments. India left with the words it wanted. The substance stayed beyond reach.

What the Summit Achieved, and What It Did Not

The honest verdict on the New Delhi Declaration sits somewhere between triumph and theatre. Its first achievement is simply that it exists. An eleven-member bloc containing states on opposite sides of active wars produced a single consensus document, and for a group this fractured that is not nothing. It let India project real convening power, handed the Global South a long charter of shared demands on governance, trade, health and development, and logged dozens of working groups, task forces and centres of excellence that could, over time, harden into something durable.

What it did not do is act. The Declaration is a document of 140 paragraphs built on "we welcome," "we note" and "we acknowledge," abundant in intent and thin in binding commitment. It named no adversary, resolved no contradiction, and moved no institution from words to obligation. Its very length is not a measure of ambition but of consensus: the more members at the table and the more topics on the agenda, the more diffuse the text has to become for everyone to sign it. It is, in the end, the declaration of a bloc that can agree on what it dislikes far more easily than on what it will do.

What Comes Next

The real test of the New Delhi Declaration begins now, with the summit lights switched off. In his concluding remarks on Sunday, Narendra Modi seemed to concede as much, telling leaders that BRICS "must translate all outcomes into time-bound actions that deliver last-mile impact," an admission that the declaration is only intent until someone acts on it. He has proposed a Continuity and Implementation Mechanism to stop each year's promises from quietly evaporating, and the declaration itself is studded with study groups and roadmaps that will either mature into working institutions or lapse into footnotes.

With the chairship now passing to China for 2027, the burden of turning this text into action moves on with it. Three things are worth watching in the year ahead: whether the payment and local-currency plumbing is actually built or merely discussed, whether the reform demands survive contact with a Security Council and a Bretton Woods system that have no intention of reforming themselves, and whether an ever-expanding BRICS can keep finding language that eleven, and soon perhaps more, governments will all sign.

The likeliest future is neither the triumph its champions proclaim nor the irrelevance its critics predict. It is a bloc that keeps meeting, keeps issuing careful declarations, and keeps making Western dominance a little harder to exercise without ever openly challenging it. The New Delhi Declaration, loud where it was safe, coded where it was not, silent on the war it could not touch, and careful never to name the one power it most wants to constrain, is a faithful portrait of that middle path. India hosted it with skill. What even a skilled host could not do was make a divided bloc braver than the sum of its interests.

Reading the Modi BRICS Speech: Reform Up Front, the Hard Fights in the Fine Print

A leader's summit address is as much about what it withholds as what it declares, and the Modi BRICS speech delivered to the closed session of the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi is a near-perfect example. On the surface it was an ambitious, reform-minded call to remake global institutions. Read against everything else unfolding at BRICS Summit 2026, it was also a careful act of avoidance, steering clear of every flashpoint that could cost India something with Washington. The speech and its silences together are the clearest statement yet of how India means to lead this bloc.

Also Read:  Modi, Xi, Putin: The Biggest Challenges Before BRICS in Delhi

What Modi Said: A Bloc That Has "Come of Age"

Modi framed his remarks around a milestone, the 20th anniversary of BRICS, reaching for the image of a young adult stepping into responsibility. BRICS, he said, stands at a "coming of age" moment. He was careful to define the group by what it is not, telling the room that it moves ahead "with an approach that is not against anyone but instead seeks to take everyone along." That was a framing Putin used almost identically the same day, and it was the diplomatic spine of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BRICS speech, a message pitched as much at the United States as at the leaders gathered for the BRICS Summit.

The Core Argument: A "Pyramid of Privilege" That Must Change

From there Modi built his central case, that the architecture of global power is broken and tilted against the developing world. The present system, he said, "resembles a pyramid," with power concentrated at the top and the countries most affected by decisions given the least say in shaping them. His sharpest line, and the one most quoted from the summit, was this: "The Global South is today in the front row of global crises, but in the back row of decision-making." The task, he argued, is to convert that "pyramid of privilege" into a "platform of partnership."

He offered structure rather than slogans. Modi proposed that BRICS draw up ten proposals for global governance reform and turn them into a "BRICS Reform Roadmap" by the next summit, built on three principles he labelled "Representation, Responsiveness, and Rule-making." On the first he was blunt, warning that "reform of the UN Security Council can no longer be delayed" and demanding that negotiations be tied to a clear timeline and concrete outcomes. He extended the same logic to the IMF and the World Bank, arguing that voting power, leadership positions and policy priorities "should reflect today's economic realities." On the third principle he made his most forward-looking pitch, that in the age of AI, cyberspace, outer space and biotechnology, the Global South must move "from rule-takers into rule-shapers."

Also Read:  BRICS In Delhi: Make Or Break For India, Caught Between Two Boats

The Deliverables in the Modi BRICS Speech

Alongside the vision came the kind of process proposals that are hard to argue with and easy to sign. Modi called for a "BRICS Continuity and Implementation Mechanism," run through the Troika and backed by a secure digital repository to record, for every decision, "the nodal point, timeline, and implementation status," so that the annually rotating chairship does not keep resetting the group's momentum.

In its most human touch, the speech proposed a "Seafarers Emergency Support Network" to link maritime authorities across member states for distress alerts, medical help and evacuation. He closed on a couplet built for quotation: "From voice to impact. From privilege to partnership."

It is a substantial address. What makes it revealing, though, is what it leaves out.

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What the Modi BRICS Speech Left Unsaid: The Dollar

Most striking is the silence on the dollar. Dedollarisation was the single most watched storyline of BRICS Summit 2026, the subject of Donald Trump's threat to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on any BRICS state that moves against the greenback, and the theme Xi Jinping pressed hardest. Modi did not touch it. The words dollar, currency and de-dollarisation do not appear in his remarks at all. That omission is a position, not an oversight.

The declaration his summit adopted hours later went further than he did, encouraging the BRICS Payment Task Force to build faster, cheaper cross-border payment channels and backing greater use of local currencies. India let the collective document carry that message. 

The Countries Modi Never Named

Just as telling, Modi named no one. There is no United States in the speech, no Trump, no Israel, no Iran, no China. He made no mention of the war in West Asia or the strikes on Iran, even with the Iranian president seated in the same session having pushed for exactly such language. He said nothing about Gaza, and nothing about Ukraine. The contrast with the declaration is instructive. That document, negotiated down to the final morning to bridge the gap between Iran and the UAE, deplored "unprovoked aggression" in general terms while refusing to name any country, and it addressed Gaza through the familiar language of humanitarian access and a two-state solution. The collective text absorbed the controversy; his own remarks kept clear of it.

The same held on trade. The declaration voiced clear opposition to unilateral tariffs, protectionist measures and coercive sanctions, the diplomatic shorthand for grievances against Washington, without naming the source. Modi, in his own words, did not go even that far. Even on counter-terrorism, a subject India almost always foregrounds and one it wrote into the declaration, his speech stayed silent, keeping his personal message trained on reform rather than on any adversary.

Why the Silences Define the Modi BRICS Speech

The context that explains all of this is the thread running through India's whole foreign policy right now: it will not be drafted into any camp. Modi used his platform to be the convener and the reformer, the voice of a Global South seeking fairer institutions, a role that offends no one and flatters India's own leadership ambitions.

The divisive questions, the dollar, the wars, the direct criticism of the West, he left to a negotiated document where the language is deliberately diffuse and no single leader owns it. With live trade talks under way and a prickly relationship with the second Trump administration, that division of labour at BRICS Summit 2026 was not accidental. It was the strategy.

Which is why the measure of the Modi BRICS speech is its omissions as much as its proposals. Modi delivered a confident, quotable case for reshaping the global order and empowering the developing world, and he did it without saying a single thing Washington could hold against him. "If our future is shared," he told the room, "then the right to shape that future must also be shared." It was a fitting line for a leader determined to shape outcomes while sharing the risk, and to let a collective declaration say the things he would rather leave unsaid.

Modi, Xi and Putin, and the Fault Lines Beneath the BRICS Summit in Delhi

When Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin step onto the same stage at Bharat Mandapam, the photograph will carry further than anything written in the final communique. Xi's presence alone makes this summit unusual, since it is his first visit to India in roughly seven years, the two leaders not having met on Indian soil since their informal talks in 2019. And it comes at a raw moment for the world.

The war in Ukraine has ground into its fifth year, the contest between Washington and Beijing has become the organising rivalry of global politics, and West Asia is still smouldering after the strikes on Iran. India has seated inside the same hall both Iran and the United Arab Emirates, two members who stand on opposing sides of that conflict. A picture of Modi, Xi and Putin together will be read as a show of solidarity. The tensions running beneath it tell a different and more honest story, and those tensions are what the 18th BRICS summit is really about.

BRICS was a label before it was an institution, an acronym an economist coined in 2001 to flag the emerging economies worth watching. Brazil, Russia, India and China held their first leaders' summit only in 2009, and South Africa joined a year later to round out the original five. For more than a decade the club stayed exactly that size. Then it swung its doors open. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE entered as full members at the start of 2024, Indonesia followed in 2025, and Saudi Arabia was invited as well, taking the group to eleven members on paper.

The bloc now reaches across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Gulf, and its members together account for close to 40 percent of the global economy and nearly half the world's population. Saturday's session was held behind closed doors, with the leaders talking about reforming global governance and defending multilateralism.

On Sunday the room expands to take in partner states and invited guests before the leaders issue the New Delhi Declaration. That text matters more than any handshake, because in a bloc this large and this fractured, the language eleven governments can actually agree to put their names to is the truest measure of what BRICS has become, and of the limits it keeps running into.

Also Read:  BRICS In Delhi: Make Or Break For India, Caught Between Two Boats

Why Washington Is Watching Modi, Xi and Putin So Closely

No capital is studying this summit more closely than Washington. India is in the middle of trade negotiations with the United States, and the relationship with the second Trump administration has been anything but smooth, snagging repeatedly on tariffs and hard bargaining. That friction is exactly why New Delhi has been widening its options elsewhere.

A couple of years ago, Indian officials were said to be uneasy about belonging to China-dominated groupings like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, even as the country leaned towards the West. Yet at the SCO summit in Bishkek at the start of September, Modi stood alongside Xi and Putin and put India's signature to the Bishkek Declaration, which condemned the military strikes on Iranian territory and pushed back against Western sanctions. That was a notable turn, given that India had earlier declined to join in condemning those strikes. But New Delhi also knows the outer edge of this game. Lean too far towards Moscow and Beijing, and it risks handing Washington a reason to retaliate. Every gesture at a BRICS table is therefore calibrated.

The word for what India is doing is hedging, and it is the key to reading its foreign policy right now. Strategic hedging, put simply, is the refusal to lock into any single great-power camp. Rather than bet the house on one partner, a hedging state cultivates ties with several powers at once, including rivals, so that it always keeps its choices open and never becomes hostage to the goodwill of one capital.

For India this is less a doctrine than a daily tightrope walk. It buys discounted Russian oil while deepening defence and technology ties with the United States, courts a cautious thaw with China while quietly guarding its northern border, and speaks for the Global South without letting any partner conscript it into a bloc. The balance is delicate, and a single misstep in either direction carries a real cost.

What India wants out of Delhi is to bank as much as it can without setting Washington against it, and it is trying to do that in a room where Modi, Xi and Putin each arrive with a different wish list. Putin wants the summit to broadcast that Russia is neither isolated nor cornered, and he wants BRICS to keep expanding trade in national currencies so that sanctions bite less; India, for its part, has fixed a target of 100 billion dollars in annual trade with Russia by 2030, floated on cheap oil. Xi wants to press the case for loosening the world's dependence on the dollar and to cast China as the natural leader of the developing world, all of it staged just before his own meeting with Donald Trump later this month.

Modi wants something quieter and harder to photograph: a substantive chairship with real deliverables in agriculture, digital public infrastructure and health, a louder voice for the Global South, and a summit that advances the India-China reset without being swallowed by it. 

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Dedollarisation, the Fault Line India Would Rather Manage Than Fight

Nothing exposes those competing agendas like the argument over the dollar. India's dilemma is genuine. Russia, cut off from Western financial plumbing, and China, eager to build an alternative to it, both have strong reasons to chip away at dollar dominance, and the two now settle the overwhelming share of their bilateral trade in roubles and yuan. 

Trump has made his own position brutally clear, threatening tariffs of up to 100 percent on any BRICS country that moves to sideline the dollar. India has read that threat and softened its language accordingly, framing its own efforts as local-currency settlement and cheaper cross-border payments rather than any assault on the greenback. But several of the leaders now in Delhi carry a far heavier grievance against the United States than India does. Russia and Iran both live under sweeping American sanctions, and for them building payment channels outside the dollar is not a talking point but a matter of economic survival. That asymmetry, between members who want to manage the dollar and members who want to escape it, runs straight through the summit.

The most ambitious version of that project, a single BRICS currency to rival the dollar, has quietly been shelved, and the politics of why are instructive. India has been the most consistent sceptic, its ministers saying flatly that the country does not support a shared currency and that the very idea of one bound together with China is unworkable given the trust deficit between them. Even Brazil, whose president once mused aloud about a common trading currency, has since disowned any such proposal, its officials insisting there is nothing on the table.

What survives is far more modest: local-currency trade, linked payment systems and experiments with digital currencies, gathered under initiatives such as BRICS Pay. The reserve data explains the retreat. The dollar still makes up close to 58 percent of global reserves and features in the vast majority of foreign-exchange transactions, while the Chinese renminbi sits below 2 percent. Dedollarisation, in other words, is real as plumbing and mostly rhetoric as revolution.

Can Eleven Rival Nations Agree? The Real Test of Multilateralism

A photograph of Modi, Xi and Putin can make BRICS look like a single body with a single will. The harder question is whether genuine multilateralism is even possible among eleven governments this mismatched. India and China are wary neighbours whose trade relationship is lopsided, with India running a deficit of more than 112 billion dollars and an unresolved border still between them.

Iran and the UAE sit on opposite sides of the West Asia conflict. Egypt, Ethiopia and others bring their own regional quarrels and dependencies to the table. Getting all of them to sign a declaration that says something meaningful, rather than a string of pleasant generalities, is an enormous undertaking, and the more members the bloc admits, the thinner the consensus it can reach. A watered-down communique would not be an accident of drafting. It would be the truest possible portrait of the group.

The sharpest test will be the final communique's treatment of the war. Will the New Delhi Declaration say anything at all about the American and Israeli action against Iran, or will it look away? Iran, a full member now, will press for pointed language, and its president is in Delhi to make that case. The SCO went there only days ago, its Bishkek Declaration condemning the strikes on Iranian soil and calling for a diplomatic settlement. If BRICS, with the UAE inside the tent, cannot bring itself to say something comparable, Tehran will feel let down and India will be accused by many of hiding behind its balancing act instead of taking a stand. If it says too much, it angers a Washington that India cannot afford to alienate. There is no comfortable landing here, and the drafting of a single paragraph on West Asia may prove the hardest diplomacy of the weekend.

Also Read:  Iran Demands Oil Tariffs in Chinese Yuan, Threatening Dollar Dominance

Trump, for his part, can afford a certain calm, because he understands the arithmetic. For as long as the members of BRICS carry conflicting interests and chase their own national advantage, the bloc cannot cohere into a genuine challenge to American power. The point is visible even among the four founding economies. When a crisis moves energy markets, Russia and Brazil, both major exporters, want prices high, while China and India, both enormous importers, want them low. The same fault line repeats across the wider group on issue after issue. A coalition whose members profit from opposite outcomes can protest Western dominance in unison, but it struggles to act in unison, and that is the difference between a lobby and a power.

The bloc's own guest list deepens the problem. Several of its members are close partners, and in some cases near-allies, of the very country BRICS is meant to counterbalance. The UAE holds deep security and commercial ties with Washington, Indonesia guards its relationships across the Western world, and Saudi Arabia, though listed among the members, has still not formally completed its accession, precisely because it does not want to jeopardise its dealings with the United States. These are not states with any appetite to turn BRICS into an anti-Western front. Their presence works as a built-in brake, ensuring the group's rhetoric of defiance rarely hardens into anything that would force them to pick a side.

Underneath all of it sits the grievance that gives BRICS its real reason to exist: the architecture of global power. The United Nations Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were built in another century and still carry its imprint, with the United States and its allies holding outsized sway over institutions that govern the whole world. From the vantage point of the Global South, those bodies too often behave as instruments of Western preference rather than neutral referees. This is the one ambition on which BRICS members broadly agree, a demand for a fairer distribution of voice and votes, and it is why the bloc keeps building its own scaffolding, from the New Development Bank to alternative payment rails. A BRICS that could speak with one voice on reform would be a genuine check on that imbalance. The bloc's misfortune is that the same internal divisions that dull its other ambitions also blunt this one.

What Twenty Years of BRICS Should Be Measured Against, for Modi, Xi and Putin

As BRICS marks two decades since its foundation, the temptation is to grade it against the wrong exam. The question is not whether the club fronted in Delhi by Modi, Xi and Putin has become a wrecking ball aimed at the United States, because it has not, and on the evidence of this summit it will not. The fairer test is subtler and more revealing. Can eleven nations that disagree on trade, on currency, on war and on the shape of the world order still keep showing up at the same table, still find the handful of things they can say together, and in doing so make the exercise of Western dominance a little more effortful and a little less automatic?

By that measure the summit need not deliver a thunderclap to matter. If BRICS can hold itself together and chip, patiently, at the assumption that the rules of the world are Washington's alone to write, that is not nothing. It may, in the end, be the most this magnificently contradictory bloc was ever going to be.

The Human Trafficking Cartel Turning Indian Workers Into Bonded Labour

In the first week of September, Babbar came back home to Asilpur village in Uttar Pradesh's Meerut district with nothing. No wages, no savings. He is now back in the sugarcane fields where he started, tying cane for a daily wage. "Today is my third day going to work," he told The Probe. His two eldest daughters, 16 and 15, have stopped going to school because he cannot pay the fees. "I don't even have money to buy a packet of salt," he said. 

Six months earlier, Babbar had left along with three other Indian workers for what he was told was a well-paid packing job in Malaysia. He became a victim of a human trafficking racket instead. He was sent on a tourist visa, walked across an international border on foot, stripped of his passport, and sold from one company to another as bonded labour. He was one of at least five men from two Uttar Pradesh districts moved through the same pipeline by the same network. One of the others, Sameer, left Delhi on the same day as Babbar. He is still in a Malaysian jail. His family has not heard from him since his arrest on 20 July.

This is the story of how poor Indian workers from western Uttar Pradesh are falling prey to human trafficking and being sold into bonded labour in Malaysia, and of the police and officials who, the families say, did almost nothing to stop it.

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To Go to Malaysia, He Sold the Only Asset He Had: a Buffalo

Babbar was working as a daily-wage labourer, earning ₹200 to ₹300 a day, when a man named Isha approached him. Isha, the man at the centre of this human trafficking cartel who has sent scores of Indian workers to Malaysia, was from his own village but lived on its edges; Babbar says he barely knew him. "One day he came to me and said, 'Your brother Billu knows me. The whole village knows me, but you don't know me,'" Babbar recalled. The pitch was simple. "He said, 'Brother, you earn ₹200, ₹250, ₹300 here. I will send you to Malaysia. You will get a salary of ₹60,000 to ₹70,000 for a packing related job.'"

Babbar has five children, the two eldest are daughters. "My daughters are grown up," he said. "I thought if he was offering ₹60,000 to ₹70,000, I would go for a year or two, maybe four, and earn enough to marry off one or two of them."

The price Isha demanded was ₹1,60,000. To raise it, Babbar sold the only asset his family owned. "I had a buffalo. I sold it for ₹90,000. I borrowed the rest from my brothers, and also took money on interest from someone in the neighbourhood," he said. "I put together ₹1,60,000 and gave it to Isha." He paid the money in cash and got nothing in return, no receipt, no document. 

The Route: Delhi, Mumbai, Thailand, and a Border Crossed on Foot

Nirmal Gorana, convener of the National Campaign Committee for the Eradication of Bonded Labour, has handled cases like this for years. He describes Isha's method as textbook. "This is a textbook case of human trafficking. First he identifies the poor people. Then he goes to them and gives them false promises," Gorana said. "He tells them, 'I will send you to Malaysia and you will get 80,000 to 90,000 rupees.' Then he asks them to give money for ticket and visa. These poor people sell their land or borrow money or take loans and then they pay. But what Isha does is he only makes a tourist visa. There is no work permit, nothing. I know of many Indian workers who have been trafficked to Malaysia by the same man, Isha."

In Babbar's case, he was called by Isha to Delhi at a day's notice. "He called me in the morning and said, 'Come quickly. There are three more Indian workers like you in Delhi wanting to go to Malaysia for better prospects. The tickets and everything are ready,'" Babbar said. At Nizamuddin railway station he met the men he would travel with, among them Sameer, the man now jailed in Malaysia. 

Isha travelled with them by train from Delhi to Mumbai but did not show them their tickets until they were at the airport. "Five minutes before entering the airport, he gave us the tickets," Babbar said. "We went inside and saw that the ticket said Thailand. We asked him, 'Brother, what is this?' He said, 'Don't worry. You go to Thailand. A man of mine will meet you there.'"

In Thailand, the group was taken by bus and put up in a hotel. "The next day, the agent there took three or four of us at a time across the border into Malaysia," Babbar said. "We crossed on foot." At the crossing, he said, uniformed officials sat watching, "they had three or four stars on their uniforms," but the group was waved through. To Babbar, it looked less like a lapse than a system: the officials, he believed, knew exactly what was happening. Once inside Malaysia, the men were put on a train, then a bus, then a Grab taxi to the room of an agent named Shameem. Only later did Babbar grasp that he had been trafficked to Malaysia on a tourist visa, with no legal right to work. "We didn't know any of this at the time," he said.

The first thing Shameem did was take their passports. "I asked, 'Why do you need these?' He said, 'I need them, so give them to me.'"

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"This isn't your father's house. You have to work"

Babbar was put in a room with 17 or 18 other men, two fans between them, workers from Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Bihar. He was suspicious within days, after watching what happened to another Indian worker, Ramzan, who said he had a fever and could not work. "Aman slapped him so hard that he hit the wall," Babbar said. The agent's words, he recalled, were: "You people come from India and then you expect things to be free. Electricity isn't free here, water isn't free."

Then it happened to him. Babbar was made to work at a company he identified as GNT, loading and unloading sacks weighing 30 to 55 kilos on a conveyor. "It was not work we could manage," he said. Promised nine or ten hours, he worked twelve. He was paid nothing. When he fell ill, he said, he was kicked awake. "They would say, 'Get up. This isn't your father's house. You have to go to work.'" A vegetarian, he says he was forced to eat meat he could not identify. "They forced me to eat it. I don't know what kind of meat it was." During this period he was not paid any wages.

From the first company, Babbar was sold to another agent, Ali, and moved to a firm he named as VK Vege in Johor Bahru, cutting and packing vegetables. There, the hours turned brutal. "Instead of 12 hours, they made us work 15, 16, 17, even 18 hours," he said. He worked there unpaid for nearly three months before being sold into bonded labour to a third company. It was another Indian worker, a foreman from Bareilly, who finally explained the scam to him: the company was paying wages, but the agents were pocketing the wages of the Indian workers. "The company has paid the salary; your agents have taken the money," the foreman told him. It was exactly what Gorana had described, that in this racket, the Malaysian employer pays the worker's wages straight to the trafficker.

There were days, Babbar said, when he simply did not eat. "Sometimes I went two days without food. Sometimes three," he said.

"No Help At All": The Embassy That Never Came

As his situation worsened, Babbar and the other men contacted Gorana in India, who wrote to the Indian mission in Malaysia about the human trafficking racket. Babbar says embassy officials called, took his location, and then did nothing for weeks. "They kept saying, 'We are coming today, we are coming tomorrow.' They kept us waiting for about 20 days. Nobody came to us," he said. At one point, he says, officials told the penniless men to make their own way to a bus station. "I said, 'We haven't received our salaries. We don't have any money. How can we travel?'"

"No help at all," Babbar said of the mission. "You can ask them yourself."

In the end, Babbar says, it was a sympathetic Indian foreman inside the company, who paid for his taxi, along with pressure from Nirmal Gorana back in India. Babbar flew back on a ticket dated 30 August and landed at Kolkata airport on 1 September. His documents bear out the journey: an Emergency Certificate issued by the High Commission of India in Kuala Lumpur, and a Malaysian exit stamp dated 30 August. Asked who had helped him most, Babbar did not hesitate. "The person who helped me the most was Nirmal sir."

Also Read:  Saharanpur Bonded Labour Crisis: Children Expose Exploitation

Two Months Late: The FIR That Left Out the Crime

Babbar's family had been trying to get the police to act since the start of July. Billu, his brother, filed a written complaint at Kithore police station in Meerut. "On 2 July we gave a complaint to the police and asked them to register a case, but the police refused," Billu said. The FIR was registered only on 1 September, the very day Babbar returned.

When the FIR was finally lodged, it was, in Gorana's words, gutted. "They have diluted the entire FIR," he said. "They have not used bonded labour or human trafficking sections. They have made it a mere cheating case." The document bears this out. FIR No. 0359, registered at PS Kithore on 1 September 2026, invokes only Sections 318(4) (cheating) and 61(2) (criminal conspiracy) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, not the human trafficking or forced-labour provisions the complaint describes.

Babbar says that when he tried to register the case, police demanded proof of a cash payment no trafficker ever documents. "The police officer said, 'Do you have any proof? When did you give the money? Do you have any documents?' But we don't have anything in writing." He says that even while he was trapped in Malaysia, an Indian police officer had brushed him off: "His direct response was, 'I don't know anyone in Malaysia. Whatever you have to discuss, discuss it with your agent.'"

Both Babbar and Gorana say the police leaned on Babbar to settle the matter with Isha rather than pursue the case. Gorana puts it bluntly: "Police is asking Babbar to compromise with the trafficker." Babbar's own account is of officers who told him he had no proof related to bonded labour or human trafficking and therefore he had no chance in court. "They said things like, 'This is not like that. You don't have any proof. What can you do in court?'" he said. He came to believe the police were protecting Isha: two months on, he said, "they had neither picked up Isha nor made him speak face-to-face with me."

The Probe put these allegations to the officer in charge of Kithore police station, SHO Subodh Kumar Saxena. He denied them, calling the claim that police sought a compromise "baseless allegations". On the two-month delay, he said the police had to investigate before registering the FIR. Asked why the main accused, Isha, had not been arrested, he said the FIR had been lodged and the investigation was continuing, and that action would follow "as soon as evidence is found." Isha, he noted, was not in Meerut but in Muzaffarnagar. Of the recruiters, he said there were many such "agents" sending people abroad for work. A chargesheet, he said, would be filed once the investigation was complete. He gave no date.

Sameer, Trafficked by the Same Cartel, Is Now in a Malaysian Jail

Sameer, son of Vakeel, is from Nasirpur village in Muzaffarnagar. He was recruited by the same network, and left Delhi with Babbar. "They both went together on 9 March," his wife, Shehnaz, told The Probe.

His family paid more, ₹2,00,000, and went into debt to do it. "We gave it all in cash," Shehnaz said. "We took a loan." The loan is documented: a ₹2,00,000 advance from Ujjivan Small Finance Bank in Vakeel's name, with Sameer as co-borrower.

Sameer went for the same reason Babbar did. His elder brother, Sohail, explained: "There are three unmarried sisters who are grown up, and he has a son. We had to get the girls married. That is why we sent Sameer there."

The traffickers from the Indian side who belonged to the cartel, Shehnaz said, were "Isha, Nadeem, Talib, Tayyab and Dilshad", the same names figure in the family's written complaint to the Muzaffarnagar authorities, all from Sikhreda and Nasirpur, two villages in Muzaffarnagar district. When the family grew suspicious during Sameer's long stay in Thailand and asked for him to be brought home, they were refused. "Isha and Nadeem said, 'He will not come back now. He will work there. We will make him cross the border into Malaysia,'" Shehnaz said. 

In Malaysia, Sameer's story mirrored Babbar's. Promised an eight-hour day, he was made to work 17 to 18 hours. His passport was taken. He was not paid and forced into bonded labour. "He kept telling us, 'Bring me back. They are troubling me a lot. They are making me do terrible work,'" Shehnaz said. "But they neither gave him his passport nor any salary." The only money that ever reached the family was two early remittances, ₹38,000 and ₹20,000, sent from Sameer's own wages before they stopped entirely. 

Shehnaz told The Probe that her husband spoke of many other Indian workers who had fallen prey to this human trafficking racket and, like Sameer, had also been forced into bonded labour.

Then, on 20 July, came the call the family had dreaded. "The day he was arrested, I spoke to him for a few minutes," Shehnaz said. "He said, 'The immigration authorities in Malaysia have picked me up.' After that, I have not spoken to him." Sameer had been detained for overstaying, arrested for the very tourist-visa status his traffickers had imposed on him. He told his wife a fine would have to be paid, and that Isha would have to pay it. Isha never did. "As of today, Isha is not even answering our phone," Shehnaz said.

Gorana confirmed the cruel logic of the arrest. "His tourist visa was over and he was overstaying," he said. "They asked him, 'Why are you here?' He said, 'I'm here to work.' They said, 'You don't have a work permit, then how are you working?' These poor people don't know anything about work permits. They just trusted the trafficker completely."

Also Read:  Moga Bonded Labour Scandal: Officials Shield Slave Masters

The Bail Document That Wasn't Even Sameer's

There is one piece of paper the family clung to. Isha handed it to them, Gorana said, claiming it was proof that Sameer had been granted bail and was on his way out. It was a document in Malay, a language the family cannot read, any more than they can read English. Gorana obtained it and had it examined. It had nothing to do with Sameer. The paper was a Malaysian police bail bond for a man named Tiew Chin Hong, the owner of a house that had been raided, on information from Sameer, and found full of bonded labourers. It was the house owner who had been granted bail. Sameer remained in jail. In other words, Isha had taken a stranger's bail document and passed it off to a desperate family as evidence that their own son was free. "This is how the trafficker Isha has been fooling people," Gorana said.

Three Complaints, No FIR, and No Acknowledgement

While Babbar's case at least produced a diluted FIR, Sameer's has produced nothing. As of publication, no FIR has been registered, despite complaints stretching back to July.

Sohail, Sameer's brother, and the activist Nirmal Gorana say the family began seeking help almost immediately after Sameer's arrest by the Malaysian police in July. They first approached the Gandhi Colony police check-post, where officers stalled, gave them no acknowledgement of their complaint, and told them not to go to any other station, that they would handle it themselves. The family then approached the Station House Officer at Nai Mandi police station in Muzaffarnagar, and got no further. They filed again in the first week of September. Again, they say, they were given no acknowledgement.

Then came the round of offices Shehnaz describes, tossed from one authority to the next. "We went to the District Collector," she said. "He said, 'Now go to the SSP.' Then we went to the SSP. He sent us to Nai Mandi police station." At every office, she says, she asked for a receiving, an acknowledgement that her complaint had been accepted, which is her right. "They said there is no such system here."

The Probe attempted to reach the officers involved. Repeated calls to the Gandhi Colony police check-post, where the family had first gone, went unanswered. At Nai Mandi police station, Sub-Inspector Hariom Singh said he had no knowledge of Sameer's case and would need to speak to the SHO before he could say anything, including why no FIR had been registered. The office of the Muzaffarnagar SSP, Sanjay Kumar Verma, was no better informed: his public relations officer, Karan, said the SSP was in a meeting, that he himself had no details of the case, and that he too would need to obtain them from the SHO of Nai Mandi. On the question of why the family had received no acknowledgement of their complaints, he again said he needed to contact the SHO. The SHO, however, has not been available for comment.

A Human Trafficking Network Hiding in Plain Sight

What happened to Babbar and Sameer is not, on the evidence, the work of a lone fixer. It is an organised operation with a fixed method: identify the poorest, promise ₹70,000-a-month jobs, extract ₹2 to ₹3 lakhs, issue tourist visas rather than work permits, route the men through Thailand and across a land border into Malaysia, confiscate their passports, and sell them from company to company for little or no pay while their wages are siphoned to the traffickers. The same names, Isha, Nadeem, Talib, Tayyab, Dilshad, recur across the complaints of families in two different districts.

The network also takes advantage of a gap in the very system meant to protect workers like these. Malaysia is one of 18 countries India lists as "Emigration Check Required." In simple terms, this means a worker with little formal schooling cannot legally be sent there for a job unless the government's Protector of Emigrants clears it first, and unless the job comes through a licensed recruiting agent and a registered employer. None of the men accused here is a licensed agent. By sending the Indian workers out as tourists, through Thailand and across a land border on foot, the traffickers skip that check completely. No such clearance was ever sought for Sameer or the others.

Babbar believes the scale is far larger than his own case. He describes a room of 18 men in Malaysia and a steady stream of Indian workers passing through it. Gorana calls it what the documents suggest it is: "a huge international case of human trafficking and international bonded labour."

The Unanswered Questions

Two men left Delhi on the same day, sold the same lie by the same man. One made it home, only to find nothing waiting but debt, a house with no food in it, and two daughters pulled out of school, and now spends his days tying sugarcane for the same daily wage he left to escape. The other has been in a Malaysian jail for nearly two months; his family does not know how he is, and has not heard his voice since the day he called to say he had been taken. In neither case has the trafficker, Isha, named in police complaints in two districts, been arrested. He is, in Sohail's words, still roaming free. "I don't understand how he could do this with so many people and still be roaming freely," Sohail said.

The families' demand is simple. "These people who trap others like this should be put in jail," Shehnaz said. "And my husband should be released and brought home. He is not a criminal, he is a victim. When will the authorities on both sides understand that?"

That leaves the questions the authorities have still not answered. Why, nearly two months after Sameer's arrest and after complaints to four different offices, has no FIR been registered in his case? Why, in Babbar's case, was the FIR delayed by two months, then filed without any human trafficking or bonded labour charges? Why, in either district, has the main accused not been arrested, when his address is known? Why did the Indian mission in Malaysia, by the returned victim's own account, do nothing? And why were two families, their men trafficked abroad, repeatedly denied even an acknowledgement of their complaints, and told there was "no such system"?

Every week those questions go unanswered, the families and Gorana warn, is another week in which men like Isha send more Indian workers abroad. Babbar knows the scale first-hand: he saw hundreds of trapped Indian workers during his months in Malaysia. Thousands more, he believes, are being trafficked to Malaysia the same way he was, and Isha is only one of many running the trade. "There are thousands like me out there," he said, "and many more like Isha." Isha is only the tip of the cartel, the part the police can see, and still have not touched.

The Probe will update this report as soon as we get more details from the Meerut and Muzaffarnagar police. Sameer remains in a jail in Malaysia.

Why the Next UN Secretary-General Matters More Than You Think

When António Guterres steps down as United Nations secretary-general at the end of 2026, he will leave his successor with plenty to do.

Many challenges will remain, including the animosity among members and myriad global challenges, from ongoing wars and economic shocks to the worsening effects of climate change. But the next U.N. chief faces the additional woes of an international body starved of cash and at odds with its most powerful member: the United States. The second Donald Trump administration has proved itself no fan of multilateralism and sees the U.N. as a bloated organization doing little to serve U.S. interests. In fact, skepticism toward the U.N. is now on the rise in many countries.

For good reason, voices as respected as Graça Machel, the deputy chair of The Elders – the body created by Nelson Mandela to bring ethical guidance to global governance – have called the selection of the next U.N. secretary-general “one of the most consequential decisions the international community will make this decade.”

No doubt the U.N. needs – and is worth – saving. But as someone who once worked in the body’s executive office of the secretary-general, I know the process for selecting a new chief does not lend itself to finding a savior at the best of times. And in the current geopolitical climate, the prospects are next to nil. Moreover, any U.N. secretary-general is bound by the political and bureaucratic constraints under which they operate.

Yet even if asking the occupier of the office to restore the U.N. to relevance single-handedly is expecting too much, a secretary-general can wield substantial influence if they understand the potential and the limits of the role.

Next UN Secretary-General: Who calls the shots?

According to the U.N. Charter, the secretary-general “shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”

While the General Assembly – all member states of the organization – has ultimate authority, it is the Security Council that makes the decision. And because the five permanent members of the Council – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the US – have veto power over who gets “recommended,” it is those countries, known by the shorthand P5, that call the shots. Until 2016, there was little campaigning for the job. Rather, the winner emerged through much backroom dealmaking among the P5 itself and between those nations and potential candidates.

Since then, however, pressure from civil society groups and the 188 U.N. members that do not have a permanent seat on the Security Council opened up the process. Candidates are now expected to issue vision statements and participate in General Assembly-convened “interactive dialogues” in which all states and NGOs can participate, as well as informal meetings with Security Council members.

This more open process was meant to reduce some of the P5 dominance and, arguably, it did with the election of Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal who has served as U.N. chief since 2017. Guterres leaves behind a mixed record, having notched notable successes with the Pact for the Future and putting AI governance on the U.N. agenda, but seen as too passive as a mediator of conflicts by some diplomats and former U.N. officials.

The risk to an open selection process this time around is that two of the most powerful leaders of P5 countries – Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin – appear not to care much about process, or about the reputational costs associated with circumventing it.

Moreover, they seemingly care little about how the selection might reflect on the legitimacy of the U.N. as a whole.

As of early September, eight candidates are still in the race, each of whom has gone through the more open process, as well as several straw polls among the 15 members of the Security Council designed to whittle down the number.

Yet one or more of the P5 could inject new names at the last minute, once again leaving the decision to behind-the-scenes bargaining among a few powerful states.

So, what kind of secretary-general is the U.N. likely to get?

At the risk of oversimplification, the P5 – the U.S. and Russia especially – want an “administrator” they can control. Most of the rest of the membership want an independent and proactive secretary-general that the P5 cannot control.

Given the stranglehold the five have on the selection process, we are not likely to get the second. Both the U.S. and Russia have made it clear they want a “secretary” not a “general.” Even if they did want a global leader, it would be hard for the P5 to agree on the issue areas where leadership is needed.

But many governments outside the P5 will have trouble accepting a passive bureaucrat who simply follows orders. They believe the future of the U.N. requires more. And even if they did want an apparatchik, they know it is not possible for an organization of 193 countries to give clear orders, so the officeholder will necessarily have to exercise some independent judgment.

Knowing who gets picked will not necessarily tell us how they will lead. Sometimes secretaries-general can surprise, as my former boss Kofi Annan did. Having risen through the U.N. bureaucracy, he was expected to be a dutiful functionary but served more as the world’s top diplomat and moral voice.

What the job entails

The U.N. Charter says little about the job of secretary-general, and yet it has been interpreted over the years to encompass many roles.

I would cluster them into three: global diplomat, normative leader and manager of a sprawling bureaucracy.

The key challenge for a secretary-general is to figure out what is achievable in each of the three roles.

As a global diplomat, the chief cannot resolve conflicts between the great powers, but can work at the interstices of those tensions, finding the political space to broker agreements such as the Black Sea grain deal between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, which reopened the maritime routes from Ukrainian ports that Russia had blockaded.

As a normative leader, the U.N. chief cannot impose binding obligations on countries, but can promote powerful ideas such as the responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocities or foster human development.

As chief administrative officer, the secretary-general cannot fix the Security Council or eliminate inefficiency. But they can set a reform agenda, as Guterres has done with the UN80 Initiative, and cajole coalitions of states into driving that agenda forward.

To heaven or hell?

The main source of a secretary-general’s influence is not the authority that comes with the office, nor is it their own charisma. Rather, it is the ability to gauge the political winds, listening to the voices of key stakeholders and identifying opportunities to make a difference.

On some matters – conflict resolution, for example – those voices may be the conflict parties and a handful of neighboring states or global powers, and the listening may mean spending countless hours on the telephone.

On other matters – climate change, for example – the relevant voices are 193 governments and civil society organizations speaking for “we the peoples,” and the listening may mean sitting through endless meetings.

Only then can a secretary-general identify where the opportunities lie and choose the moment and method for stepping in. Is it through quiet diplomacy or public naming and shaming? Standing on principle or being pragmatic? Charting a new path, or doubling down on the path already chosen?

It is a mistake to assume success is measured only by dramatic breakthroughs for which a secretary-general can claim sole credit. More often than not, the U.N. chief is but one actor in a complex global political process involving many and often more powerful actors.

If he or she is able to change the dynamics and move the needle in the direction of peace, justice or prosperity, that is enough.

To paraphrase one former holder of the office, Dag Hammarskjöld, a secretary-general can’t bring the U.N. to heaven but can help to save it from hell.

Author Ian Johnstone has served in the United Nations’ Executive Office of the Secretary-General. His most recent books include "The Oxford Handbook on International Organizations" (Co-editor, Oxford University Press, 2016); "Law and Practice of the United Nations, 2nd edition" (co-author, Oxford University Press, 2016); and "The Power of Deliberation: International Law, Politics and Organizations" (Oxford University Press, 2011).

This story originally appeared in The Conversation.

Delhi Building Collapse: An Arrest, Five Suspensions, and No One Yet Answerable for Satya Niketan

Students in Hostel Daze were going about an ordinary Sunday. Many were indoors precisely because it was a Sunday, resting, studying, or sleeping off the week. At approximately 1:16 pm on Sunday, 6 September 2026, the multi-storey building they lived in came crashing down. The structure, a five-storey (ground plus four) boys' paying guest accommodation known locally as Hostel Daze, stood on a plot of roughly 55 square yards in the congested student quarter of Satya Niketan, near Delhi University's South Campus.

The Delhi building collapsed while repair work was under way. Witnesses said it felt "like an earthquake," and described cries of "save us" rising from the rubble. A PCR call reached the South Campus police station at 1:34 pm. By Monday, police put the toll at seven dead, with twelve people pulled out alive and several injured admitted to hospital, figures that were still being revised as the last of the debris was being cleared.

In the first minutes, it was neighbours, not agencies, who began pulling people from the rubble. Some of those trapped were able to reach the outside world from beneath the concrete: local representatives and rescuers said survivors made phone and even video calls from inside the collapsed structure, and that teams stayed in contact with them as the operation went on.

Through the afternoon, the National Disaster Response Force, Delhi Fire Service, Delhi Police and the Delhi Disaster Management Authority mounted a large operation in a lane too narrow for heavy vehicles to enter easily. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Trauma Centre became the focal point. AIIMS said that of the patients brought in, five were declared dead on arrival and one more died after admission, while others were being treated, one requiring limb surgery. Outside, dozens of Delhi University students gathered with photographs of missing friends. An adjoining building, which housed a women's PG, was evacuated and later sealed over fears of a second collapse.

An Arrest and Suspensions, but No Accountability Yet

Delhi Police registered an FIR at the South Campus police station against the building's owner, named as Hariram, "and others," under sections 105 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 290 (negligence in the construction, repair or demolition of buildings) and 125(a) (an act endangering the life or personal safety of others) of the BNS. 

The owner did not present himself. After the Delhi building collapsed, Hariram left his Gurugram residence and went underground. Delhi Police issued a Look Out Circular and deployed around ten teams across Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. He was traced roughly a day later and taken into custody in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan, on Monday, 7 September, and is being questioned on the structural work, the alleged unauthorised construction and the deaths. Chief Minister Rekha Gupta ordered a magisterial inquiry. The manhunt closed one gap, but the flight itself is telling: the first instinct of the person most directly answerable was to disappear, and the state's machinery had to be mobilised across three states to prevent it.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) moved against its own. Its Vigilance Department, on the Commissioner's orders, suspended five South Zone officials with immediate effect: Deputy Commissioner Rakesh Kumar, Superintending Engineer Ranvir Singh, Executive Engineer Lalit Kumar Goel, Assistant Engineer Sunil Chauhan and Junior Engineer Ashish Kumar. South Zone is the jurisdiction that covers Satya Niketan.

Suspension, however, is a reversible administrative measure, not a finding of guilt, and officials suspended in the glare of a disaster are frequently reinstated once public attention moves on. The action also runs in one direction only, downward, from a deputy commissioner to a junior engineer, all field staff. It reaches the people who were meant to inspect, and stops short of the policy and supervisory layers that set enforcement priorities.

Visiting the building collapse site, the Chief Minister said initial findings pointed to water accumulation in the basement combined with repair work on the ageing structure. She ordered the immediate sealing of unauthorised fifth floors across Delhi and announced a policy requiring structural audits and safety certification for all public-use buildings, from PGs to nursing homes and schools. The obvious question is why they needed a disaster to arrive. Sealing unauthorised floors is not a new idea conjured by this collapse; it is an existing statutory duty. That it is being announced as fresh policy, in the aftermath of seven deaths, is itself an admission that the duty was not being discharged before.

Delhi Building Collapse: Who Owns the Building, and What the Records Show

As per reports, the property is owned by three Gurugram-based brothers: Hariram Bansal, Anand Bansal and Azad Bansal, with Hariram named as the primary accused and arrested in Bhiwadi. The building was an old structure on a tiny plot, carrying additional floors, operating as a dense paying-guest facility, with repair work under way in the basement and, residents alleged, no proper second exit. A clause reported to appear in the PG's rent agreement, stating that the management would not be responsible for any casualties or risk to the tenant, also raises concerns about prior knowledge on the part of the building owner about the condition of the building.

Indian law does not permit a party to contract out of liability for death or injury caused by its own negligence, and criminal liability of the kind the FIR invokes cannot be waived by private agreement. If anything, a clause that anticipates "casualties or risk" suggests awareness that the premises were dangerous, which is evidence against an owner, not protection for one.

Pressed on oversight, MCD Commissioner Sanjeev Khirwar offered numbers: in the previous three months, he said, the civic body had carried out 960 demolitions, sealed 407 buildings and served notices on 1,500 more. The figures are meant to demonstrate diligence. They do the opposite. If 407 buildings were sealed in a single quarter, the population of unauthorised and unsafe structures they are drawn from must run not into hundreds but into the tens of thousands, and by the government's own reckoning Delhi contains more than 1,700 unauthorised colonies housing several million residents.

MCD drives since June 2026 had already logged hundreds of demolitions and seals before this collapse. Against a problem of that scale, a few hundred actions a quarter is not a crackdown; it is triage. And the more pointed question is not how many buildings were touched, but why this one was not. A five-storey PG on a narrow lane, close to which residents say an MCD office itself stood, did not slip beneath notice. It stood in plain sight for years.

There is a further, structural reason enforcement so rarely bites. Successive Delhi Laws (Special Provisions) statutes, renewed repeatedly since 2006, have shielded large categories of unauthorised construction from sealing and demolition, effectively freezing action and normalising illegality. In practice, a notice is often where enforcement ends in many cases. The historical record is stark: in one earlier accounting from an east Delhi civic body, thousands of illegal properties were booked over a period, yet only a tiny fraction were ever fully demolished, the rest surviving on partial action, penalties or simple inertia. Where owners can compound a violation with a fee, or wait out a drive, or rely on the next round of regularisation, the incentive to build the extra floor is overwhelming and the risk is negligible. Who, in the end, is ever held to account for knowingly raising an unsafe storey over other people's heads? The answer, on the evidence of a decade of collapses, is almost no one.

The Question of Who Is Responsible

Responsibility, as it stands and still to be tested by the magisterial inquiry and the structural findings, sits in layers. The owner faces the gravest exposure, for allegedly carrying out basement and repair work on an old, overloaded structure. The contractor who executed that work may share it. The MCD carries the institutional failure of oversight, which its own suspensions concede. Beneath all of them lies a systemic culprit that no single arrest addresses: an unregulated PG economy that has grown vertically around Delhi University to fill a chronic shortage of student housing, pushing young people into the cheapest available rooms in buildings no one certified as safe.

One student who lived on the fifth floor of Hostel Daze had, friends said, been urged repeatedly to move out because the building was visibly deteriorating, and had stayed because at Rs 15,000 for room and food it was all he could afford. That economics, not a single pillar, is the deeper structure that failed.

Delhi Building Collapse: The Anatomy of Government Neglect

The failures reported are not exotic. They are the standard signature of these disasters: additional floors built without permission, repair and excavation in a basement that weakened the frame, an absent second exit, and years of unchecked vertical growth of PGs on small plots in a student district. Policing exactly this is the MCD's core function, and it did not. The suspensions are the institution's own acknowledgement that monitoring failed.

What makes this failure harder to excuse is that it has happened before, in the same lane and across the same city. In 2022, a three-storey house at Satya Niketan, building number 173, collapsed during renovation being carried out to convert it into a PG, killing two labourers. The cause was near-identical, the neighbourhood the same, the interval barely four years.

In July 2024, three civil service aspirants drowned in the illegally used basement of a coaching institute in Old Rajinder Nagar, a disaster then under an AAP government, which underlines that the rot spans parties rather than one particular party like the BJP in the current case. 

In 2025, a residential collapse in the Mustafabad area of northeast Delhi killed around eleven people. In July 2025, a four-storey building came down in Seelampur, killing six. Beyond Delhi, Lucknow lost eight in a collapse in September 2024, and Kalyan near Mumbai lost six in 2025. The longer record is grimmer still, from older Delhi tragedies to the 2010 Lalita Park collapse that killed sixty-seven. Nationally, structural collapses killed roughly 8,756 people between 2018 and 2022, about five every day, with Delhi recording the highest such toll among the union territories. Each event produced the same sequence of arrest, inquiry and promise. The buildings kept falling.

The questions that remain are the ones that matter most. Did the MCD ever serve a single notice on this building before it fell, and if it did, why was that notice never enforced? If the civic body can seal four hundred buildings in a quarter, why not the one with an MCD office beside it? Who signs off on the extra floor, and who has ever gone to prison for it? How many more of Delhi's estimated tens of thousands of unsafe structures are, at this moment, full of people who cannot afford anywhere safer? 

Nine Hours, No Notice, Family Kept in the Dark: The Questions Delhi Police Haven't Answered on Ashish Joshi

On the morning of September 2, former bureaucrat Ashish Joshi left his home for a walk in Delhi's Nehru Park. He would not return for the better part of the day. At around 8:45 am, near the park gate, plainclothes personnel of the Delhi Police were waiting for him. By the time he was dropped back home that evening, Ashish Joshi had been questioned for close to nine hours, had been refused a copy of the FIR against him, and had spent most of the day unable to inform his wife of his whereabouts. 

Speaking to The Probe, Ashish Joshi laid out the sequence. "I left home for a walk in Nehru Park. A friend was with me, and at around 8:45, near the gate, the police were waiting for me," he said. "I asked them for their ID cards and they showed them. They said this was based on an FIR under Section 192 of the BNS." He was taken to the Counter Intelligence unit of the Delhi Police Special Cell in New Friends Colony, where he says he was brought around 10:30 am and held until close to 7 pm.

Ashish Joshi is a 1992-batch officer of the Indian Post and Telecommunication Accounts and Finance Service who retired on March 31, 2026, at additional secretary rank in the Union government. He has long used his voice to defend constitutional values and hold institutions to their obligations. He was suspended from service in 2019 after he wrote to the Delhi Police Commissioner seeking action against BJP leader Kapil Mishra over an allegedly incendiary video.

Also Read:  Delhi Police Blunder: Journalists Harassed Over Name Mix-Up

The tweet behind the Delhi Police case

The case against Ashish Joshi was registered under Section 192 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), the provision that deals with "wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot." According to Joshi, the FIR cites a post he made on August 26 calling for a "Nuremberg-style trial" of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. When he asked who had complained, he says he was told the Delhi Police had taken cognisance of the post on their own.

A retired officer's tweet demanding accountability from the Election Commission of India is an unusual foundation for a riot provocation case. Section 192 is aimed at conduct that is likely to set off actual public disorder. Whether a social media post criticising a constitutional authority clears that bar is the sort of question a court, and not a nine-hour interrogation, is meant to settle.

Ashish Joshi himself has pointed to the gap. In a post on X on September 4, he shared a video put out by the ruling party and asked the Delhi Police whether Section 192 would be applied to that content too, arguing that "a fair application of the law must be consistent." His point was blunt. If provocation is the test, it should be applied evenly, and not selectively against a government critic.

What the interrogation was really about

Joshi's account is that the FIR and the interrogation did not match. Although the case was booked over the Election Commission post, he says his questioners were focused on an entirely different tweet, one from the previous month about an alleged confrontation between Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Home Secretary Govind Mohan. That post was later withheld in India by X, which said it was acting on a legal demand.

"It is clear that the police were under pressure from the Home Minister's office. Probably they wanted to teach me a lesson," Joshi told The Probe. "They wanted to know where I got the information that there was a showdown between the Home Minister and the Home Secretary. They asked me for the source of the information. They took a list of all the people I had spoken to and why I spoke to each of them. I said it would be unethical and intellectually dishonest to disclose the source, and I would not reveal the source."

If Joshi's account is accurate, it points to an interrogation that used a riot provocation FIR as the entry point to press a citizen on the sourcing of an unrelated political post. The Delhi Police have not publicly explained the discrepancy.

Also Read:  Delhi Police Inaction Leads to Rape Survivor's Repeated Rape

Where the Delhi Police appear to have crossed the line

This is the heart of it. Section 192 of the BNS is a minor offence, punishable at the lower end of the scale. For offences of this kind, the law does not contemplate plainclothes officers picking a person up on the street. Under Section 35 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, the successor to Section 41A of the old Criminal Procedure Code, the police are ordinarily required to issue a written notice directing a person to appear, rather than detaining them, where the offence carries a sentence below seven years. In Arnesh Kumar versus State of Bihar (2014), the Supreme Court made this restraint mandatory precisely to stop the reflexive use of custody in low-level cases. Ashish Joshi says he was served no such notice. He was simply intercepted on his walk.

The denial of the FIR copy compounds the problem. Joshi has said he repeatedly asked for the document during his detention and was refused, and that he has since submitted written representations to the Commissioner of Delhi Police and the DCP of the Special Cell seeking it. A person has a right to know the specific basis on which the state has taken away his liberty. Being told an FIR exists, being questioned on its strength for nine hours, and being denied sight of it is difficult to square with that right.

Then there is the matter of his family. For most of the day, Ashish Joshi was not allowed to tell his wife where he was. "Anyone would be distraught. Consider the plight of my family," he told The Probe. "If a husband steps out for a walk and then does not return home, how distraught will his wife be. I told them to just allow me to inform my wife, but they did not allow it." By his account, he was permitted to make a call only at about 6.30 pm.

On this point the law is unambiguous. In D K Basu versus State of West Bengal (1997), the Supreme Court laid down binding safeguards for anyone taken into custody, including the right to have a friend or relative informed of the detention as soon as possible. Joshi has called the conduct of the Delhi Police a "blatant violation" of that judgment and noted that informing a family member is a constitutional safeguard flowing from Article 22(1). "Informing an individual's family during interrogation or detention is a legal mandate, not an optional courtesy," he wrote, urging Commissioner Anurag Kumar to instruct all units accordingly.

The DK Basu guidelines apply to detention, not just formal arrest, so the choice of label does not remove the protections. On Joshi's account, he was held through the day and prevented from informing his wife until the evening. If that account is accurate, the safeguards the Supreme Court treats as mandatory were not observed.

In the evening, a crowd gathered outside the Special Cell office. Police sources said a senior officer decided to have Ashish Joshi dropped home in a police vehicle. "In the evening they told me they would drop me home. I said my vehicle was still there, and they said, no, we have been asked to drop you home," Joshi recalled. At around 7:30 pm he posted on X: "Just got back home. Delhi Special Cell dropped me home. Details later."

A pattern in the same week: the 4PM journalists

The questions around the Delhi Police did not end with Ashish Joshi. A day later, on September 3, two women journalists, Shaheen Khan of 4PM News Network and freelancer Nafisa Khan, alleged that Delhi Police personnel detained and assaulted them while they were covering an event at a private hospital in Saket attended by Amit Shah and Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta. 

Shaheen Khan alleged that the assault grew more severe after officers learnt she was Muslim, and the two said they were on their way to AIIMS for medico-legal certificates. Press bodies including the Press Club of India, the Indian Women's Press Corps and the Delhi Union of Journalists condemned the incident and demanded action against the personnel involved.

The Delhi Police have rejected that account. DCP (South) Anant Mittal said the claims were "totally false, misleading and baseless," stating that the two had parked their scooter on a designated VVIP route, obstructed it, and refused repeated requests to move before being taken to the station for enquiry. The allegations of assault and of religious targeting have not been independently verified, and 4PM has asked that CCTV footage from the venue and the police station be preserved and examined. Taken alongside the treatment of Ashish Joshi, the two episodes placed the conduct of the Delhi Police toward citizens and journalists who question authority under close scrutiny within a single week.

The questions that remain

The Delhi Police have not publicly answered the questions that matter. Why was a person picked up off the street, without notice, in a case the law says should ordinarily begin with a summons? Why was Ashish Joshi refused a copy of his own FIR? Why was his family kept uninformed for nearly a full day, in the face of a Supreme Court judgment that requires otherwise? And if his account holds, why did a case registered over one tweet become an interrogation about another? So far, the Delhi Police have offered no explanation.

On 2 September 2026, the Bombay High Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the death of Disha Salian, the young celebrity manager who died in Mumbai in June 2020. For her father, Satish Salian, the order was the end of a six-year wait. Standing outside court, he told reporters he had not shed a single tear in all those years, not even on the day his daughter died, and that only now the tears had come. 

The Mumbai Police had closed the Disha Salian case long ago as a case of suicide. If the official version was right, why did it take six years and a High Court order to have it investigated properly? And when you go through how the case was handled, why does so much of it fail to add up? 

Also Read: Chandni Lamba’s Suicide: Note Alleges Betrayal, No Arrest in 8 Months

Who Was Disha Salian, and the Night That Raised Questions

Disha Salian was twenty-eight. She worked as a celebrity talent manager in Mumbai, handling the schedules, contracts and public lives of well-known names, and had worked with the actor Sushant Singh Rajput, the comedian Bharti Singh and the actor Varun Sharma, among others. People who knew her described her as focused and good at her job. She was engaged and about to be married.

On the night of 8 June 2020, she was at a flat in a residential building in Malad, in Mumbai's western suburbs, with her fiancé and friends. At some point that night she fell from a high floor and died. The Mumbai Police registered an Accidental Death Report, which is a file that is opened when a death is not yet a criminal case. Over time the police leaned towards suicide.

The first questions surface right there. An ambulance driver named Pankaj, who has spoken publicly, says he was called to the building by the Mumbai police at around 1.45 am and reached within ten minutes, only to be told the body had already been taken away in a private vehicle and that he was no longer needed. When someone dies falling from a building, the scene is secured and the body is moved through proper channels. His account, if accurate, suggests the very first handling of Disha's death did not follow that process.

There are questions too about where that private car went. According to reports, it moved from Evershine Nursing Home to Tunga Hospital and only then to Shatabdi Hospital, where Disha was declared dead. The police have an answer. In an affidavit before the High Court they said private hospitals had refused to admit her, which is why she was taken from one to the next before reaching a government hospital, and that this was June 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when many hospitals were turning patients away. The route can be read as the chaos of a difficult night, or as a delay that still needs explaining. Either way, it is exactly the kind of question a proper investigation should have settled years ago.

A Case That Was Closed, but Never Investigated

The paperwork is where the pattern becomes hard to ignore. Disha died in the early hours of 8 to 9 June, but the post-mortem was conducted only on 11 June, a gap of roughly two days when such an autopsy is usually done within twenty-four hours. No clear public explanation for the delay has ever been given. The report recorded a serious head injury and multiple injuries, attributed the death to the fall, and did not record torture or sexual assault. So on paper the forensic finding supported a fall. Yet Disha Salian's own father says the police did not hand him a copy of that post-mortem report for about five years, releasing it only after he went to the High Court to demand it.

The inquiry itself never cleanly ended. According to the state's submissions, the Accidental Death Report was closed in October 2020, and a closure report in early 2021 described Disha as having been under stress for personal reasons. But the matter kept going. In December 2023 the state set up a Special Investigation Team, which never made its findings public. A further report was submitted in April 2026 and accepted in May, and still did not change the original conclusion. At no point in all those years did the police register an FIR. Across several hearings, judges of the Bombay High Court asked why, after so long, this remained only an accidental-death inquiry, noting that all that needed establishing was whether the death was suicide or culpable homicide, and that the case papers had not reached the family even five years on.

The court's own order records forensic discrepancies that deepen the unease. The post-mortem said vaginal and anal swabs were taken, but the forensic laboratory found only smears on slides, a weaker kind of sample. The medical officer later explained that only smears had been taken and that the word "swab" was written by mistake. The laboratory reported that no male DNA was found on those slides. In a case built around allegations of sexual assault, the difference between a swab and a smear, and how those samples were handled, is not a mere technicality. The judges also questioned the prosecutor about the panchnama, the on-scene record, which stated that Disha Salian's body had no clothes on it, a point her family says does not match photographs of her. These are contradictions in the official record that a judge felt the need to raise in open court.

Also Read:  Post Mortem Horror: Noida Facility Brims with Rotting Dead Bodies

The Politics, the Sushant Link, and What the CBI Must Now Answer

The loudest part of the Disha Salian case is also the part where it is easiest to be misled. In 2025, Satish Salian filed a fresh petition and a police complaint alleging that his daughter had not died by suicide but had been gangraped and murdered, followed by a cover-up. His complaint named several people, including the Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray, along with figures from the film industry and the police. These are allegations, unproven in any court. Those named have denied any involvement, and Thackeray has called the matter politically motivated and said he will answer it in court. When it ordered the probe, the High Court itself cautioned that no one is to be treated as an accused unless the investigation finds material against them.

The politics are unavoidable, because the case has shifted with power. Disha died under one government in Maharashtra and the case was revived loudly after a rival government took charge, and it has since been used as a weapon between parties. There is also a part that often gets left out. In 2020, it was Disha's own parents who pushed back against the murder rumours, publicly calling it a suicide and asking politicians to stop exploiting their daughter's death. Only in 2025 did Satish Salian reverse his position. However, a father changing his mind does not, by itself, explain a body moved in a private car, a two-day delay before the autopsy, a report withheld for five years, or an inquiry that ran for years and produced nothing.

Underneath all of it is the reason the case never stayed small. Six days after Disha died, Sushant Singh Rajput, the actor she had once worked for, was found dead at his Bandra home. Two deaths, linked by work and days apart, turned a local case into a national one and fed years of theories. It is worth stating plainly that the CBI, which investigated Sushant's death, concluded it was suicide and found no foul play, so the connection is one of timing and public suspicion, not proven fact. But the proximity was enough to make people ask whether the Disha Salian case had ever been examined carefully, and on the record, the answer was that it had not.

That is what makes the 2 September 2026 order matter. In Satish Salian versus State of Maharashtra, Writ Petition 1612 of 2025, the Bombay High Court handed the case to the CBI, directing it to register an FIR, appoint a senior officer, record the father's statement and take over all records from the local police. If it finds a crime, it files charges. If it does not, it must say so formally, and the family may challenge that. The court did not hold that Disha was killed. What it decided was that the questions, and the way the case was handled, were serious enough that the original conclusion could not simply be left to stand.

So the truth of what happened to Disha Salian is still not established. What is clear is that for six years the case was never properly investigated, and that has now changed, at least on paper. Whether the CBI gets to the truth is another matter. It is an agency often accused of bending to the politics of the day, and this case has changed shape each time the government has.

How new US tariffs could sink the India-US trade deal

US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor recently claimed that the India-US trade deal is on the verge of finalisation and that “almost everything” about the agreement was done “in principle”. 

However, even as Ambassador Gor was exuding confidence regarding the deal, two initiatives taken in Washington in just over a month have brought yet another round of tariff war at India’s doorstep. These initiatives have the potential of increasing friction between the two countries, and could even torpedo the deal. 

How the Graham Sanctions Bill Threatens the India-US Trade Deal

The most egregious of these developments is the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, a bipartisan bill tabled in the US Senate, which has the backing of the US President. 

This Act proposes imposition of tariffs of up to 100 percent on all goods from three sets of countries: the five largest importers of Russian crude oil; the five largest importers of Russian natural gas; and countries facilitating Russian oil sanctions evasion. 

India, the second largest buyer of Russian crude oil, is an obvious target of the proposed excessive tariffs. This is a continuation of the actions successive US administrations have taken against the Russian Federation since its war against Ukraine. 

The second development is Donald Trump’s proposal to impose 100 percent tariffs on generic medicines from 2028, unless the firms exporting these medicines do not reshore their operations to the US. This proposal could significantly affect India’s pharmaceutical industry since the US is its largest export market.

The bipartisan Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, named after the Republican Senator, who was the bill’s strongest proponent, was overwhelmingly voted by the Senate (86-11) in early August. The House of Representatives would take up the bill for consideration after it reconvenes in early September, and could push for its early adoption.

India's Russian Oil Dependence Tests the Trade Pact

The primary objective of the bill is to tighten the economic sanctions on Russia for its continued war on Ukraine. The bill proposes 500 percent tariffs on all goods imported into the US from Russia. It also proposes 100 percent tariffs on all goods imported into the US from the five largest importers of crude oil or natural gas, by total volume, originating in the Russian Federation. As one of the largest importers of Russian-origin crude oil, India also faces penal tariffs for facilitating Russia’s sanctions evasion.

Market analysts put India as the second-largest buyer of Russian crude oil in July 2026, valued at over USD $7.3 billion, or about 37 percent of Russia’s global exports.  

According to Indian government data, India’s dependence on Russian crude oil increased from 30 percent to nearly 43 percent of its total imports between January and June 2026. In February 2026, after the US and India reached a framework for an Interim Agreement as a step towards finalising the India-US trade deal, President Trump announced that the 25 percent tariffs imposed on India in August 2025 for importing Russian crude oil was withdrawn. 

India, according to Trump, had “committed to stop directly or indirectly importing Russian Federation oil, has represented that it will purchase United States energy products from the United States”.  

However, after the conflict in West Asia, India’s dependence on Russian crude increased to record levels, and simultaneously, its imports from the US dropped from 13 percent in April 2025 to three percent in June 2026. Trump would surely have viewed this development as a trigger for action against India.

Generic Medicine Tariffs Deepen the India-US Trade Deal Standoff

India’s generic pharmaceutical industry faces uncertain times following President Trump’s post on Truth Social announcing his decision to impose a 100 percent tariff on all generic medicines from 2028, and increased to 200 percent a year by 2029. The objective of this proposed increase in tariffs is to “Reshore Generic Pharmaceutical Production into America, with a penalty to those Companies that decide not to build Plant and Equipment within the stated period of time given to them”. 

This announcement followed an earlier decision of the US President to impose a 100 percent tariff on patented pharmaceuticals and associated pharmaceutical ingredients from July 31, 2026, if the companies exporting them do not declare plans to start producing in the US. Thus, Trump has put in place an expansive plan to control the global pharmaceutical industry. 

Pharmaceuticals are the second largest products in India’s export basket to the US, accounting for about 13 percent of total exports in 2025-26. More importantly, the US is the largest export market for all major Indian pharmaceutical companies. 

The US accounted for about a third of the total sales of most companies, but two Indian pharma companies — Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories and Zydus Life Sciences — are considerably more dependent on the US market: their shares of sales to the US were close to  50 percent in 2023-24. 

Besides, all the top Indian companies have invested in production capacities in the US through their subsidiaries, with the largest company, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries having 21 subsidiaries in 2025-26. 

Trump’s insistence that the generic pharmaceutical companies must invest in the US to escape 100 percent tariff in 2028 has had its desired effect as  Indian companies, including pharmaceutical companies have already announced their plans to invest over  $19.1 billion to increase their production capacities in the US. 

Only time will tell whether these investments will result in diversion of India’s domestic pharmaceutical production to the US, and the implication this could have on the availability of medicines in India.

Biswajit Dhar is Honorary Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi. Earlier, he was Director General, Research and Information System for Developing Countries and  a Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

A sitting judge of the Supreme Court has mounted a forceful defence of dissent at a moment when the country is fiercely debating "dimagi naxals", dissent and the health of its democracy, telling a hall of graduating law students that the state cannot punish a citizen for the act of asking a question.

Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, delivering the convocation address at the 13th convocation of the postgraduate programmes of National Law University (NLU), Delhi, on Sunday, framed the freedom to question and to disagree as a constitutional entitlement, not a privilege that those in authority may withdraw at will.

"When students express a different point of view, when students ask questions, they cannot be threatened with punitive action," he said. "That is unconstitutional. That is misuse of power and office."

The words carried unmistakable weight, arriving in the middle of a national argument over how far student protests may go and how the institutions of the state should respond when young people challenge those in power.

Read More:  NLU Delhi: A Heartfelt Piece by a Student Who Died Far Too Soon

'The right to question is not an act of defiance'

At the core of Justice Ujjal Bhuyan's address lay a single proposition: that a democracy is measured not by the sameness of its citizens but by its capacity to hold disagreement without punishing it. Dissent, in his telling, is not a disturbance to be managed but a feature of freedom that the Constitution actively protects.

"In a democracy, the right to question is not an act of defiance," he said. "It is an essential expression of citizenship, liberty and constitutional responsibility."

A democratic society, he argued, "cannot be built on the edifice that everyone will think alike," and differences must be "accommodated within the broader constitutional framework." The space for dissent, he suggested, is precisely what gives every other freedom its meaning; the liberty to speak or to take part in public life rings hollow if disagreement invites retribution.

"A democracy becomes meaningful not when everyone speaks the same language of thought but when different voices can co-exist, be heard and be treated with dignity," he said.

He was careful to add that asking a question is only a beginning. What matters as much, he said, is the willingness to sit with an answer that unsettles you. A healthy academic culture does not demand that everyone arrive at the same conclusion; it allows views to be expressed, examined and debated. It is better, he observed, borrowing from the essayist Joseph Joubert, to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without a debate.

For a graduating class about to enter the legal profession, the charge was direct. The most valuable thing a legal education can offer, he said, is not the ability to memorise the law but the courage to question established assumptions and to ask whether the law, in a given application, has genuinely served the cause of justice. Tolerating dissent, on this reading, is the beginning of good lawyering, not a threat to it.

The student protests that frame his words

Justice Bhuyan named no institution and no individual. Yet his address followed, by only days, one of the sharpest recent confrontations between law students and the legal establishment.

Earlier this month, more than 450 students of the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) in Hyderabad objected to a proposal to invite the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, as chief guest at their convocation, pointing to his remarks in court on the Delhi student protests. The Bar Council of India (BCI), the statutory regulator of the legal profession, responded by directing state bar councils not to enrol NALSAR's 2026 graduating batch as advocates until the university identified who had organised the campaign.

The order effectively threatened to shut an entire cohort out of the profession over an act of protest, and the backlash was immediate. Within hours the BCI modified its direction, conceding that the "vast majority" of the students were innocent.

Tellingly, it was a Supreme Court bench led by CJI Surya Kant himself that rebuked the regulator, affirming that students have a right to protest and directing that no punitive action be taken against the students or faculty. "It's a dialogue between students and me. Who are they to interfere? This is totally uncalled for," the Chief Justice said.

That flashpoint belongs to a wider season of student protests. Since June, demonstrations have spread across the country over a series of examination paper leaks, with the online collective Cockroach Janta Party calling on people to mobilise and protesters demanding the resignation of the then Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. A march towards Parliament on 20 July ended in violent clashes between the police and the protesters at Jantar Mantar with the police being blamed for the excessive use of lathi charge, tear gas and pellet guns. It is against this backdrop of student protests, institutional pushback and hard questions about the state's response that Justice Ujjal Bhuyan chose to speak about dissent.

Intolerance as 'a form of violence'

If the defence of dissent formed the spine of the speech, its most arresting line was a warning about intolerance.

India, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan said, is "the land of Buddha and Gandhi," a country of peace and tolerance with "no place for violence." An intolerant mind, he cautioned, is "at odds with the spirit of the Constitution" and amounts to "a manifestation of another form of violence."

He then drew a straight line from intolerance to the silencing of dissent. "Our constitution protects the freedom to speak, to think, and to believe differently," he said. "Intolerance begins to undermine that framework when disagreement or dissent is no longer treated as a legitimate difference of opinion but as something that must be silenced, rejected or punished."

Tolerance, he insisted, is not a question of manners but a constitutional value. To press the point he reached back four decades to Justice O. Chinnappa Reddy's judgment in the 1986 Bijoe Emmanuel case, quoting: "Our tradition teaches tolerance, our philosophy preaches tolerance, our Constitution practices tolerance; let us not dilute it." He added that words relevant then were "even more relevant today."

The maturity of a democracy, he said, is revealed not in how it treats opinions that carry the majoritarian approval but in how it responds to those that are "difficult, unpopular or sometimes very inconvenient."

Also Read:  NLU Delhi Student Death: Exposes Shocking Details

Why a judge's words matter now

Coming from within the judiciary, the intervention carries weight. Justice Ujjal Bhuyan has become one of the more independent voices on the Supreme Court. He has spoken out against extra-legal "bulldozer" demolitions as incompatible with the rule of law, and has publicly questioned the opacity of collegium resolutions that record no reasons for judicial appointments. There is, too, a pointed resonance in his choice of subject: as Chief Justice of the Telangana High Court, he served until his elevation as Chancellor of NALSAR, the very university now at the centre of the enrolment dispute.

Justice Ujjal Bhuyan's remarks reinforce, from the bench, the principle the Supreme Court had already asserted in the NALSAR matter, that peaceful protest and disagreement cannot invite professional or institutional punishment. But they also make plain that the judiciary is not of one mind about how student protests and dissent should be handled, and that senior judges are prepared to say so in public, even when the dissent runs close to their own institution.

The intervention also speaks to a broader unease about academic freedom. Universities have increasingly become the places where the state's appetite for disagreement is tested, from campus demonstrations to disputes over who may be invited to speak and who may not. By locating the defence of dissent inside the university itself, and insisting that the habit of thinking freely "has to begin from the universities," Justice Bhuyan tied an abstract constitutional principle to the concrete institutions where young Indians first learn to argue, to organise and to object.

An entire mountainside of ice and rock fell into the Lhende Khola river on the Tibet-Nepal border, on the morning of August 26, triggering an earthquake and a flood that rose nine metres, killing hundreds, sweeping away at least six dams and hydropower stations, over a dozen crucial bridges, homes, roads and even a herd of elephants all the way downriver to India.

There was no rain, just the excessive heat caused by climate change that loosened the ice from the side of the 7,245-metre-high Langtang Lirung peak, till the entire mountainside, including a glacier clinging to it, collapsed into the river flowing some 3,000 metres below. There was no time for any “early” warning as the resultant wall of water, boulders and mud swept away within a minute the large three-storeyed Chinese government building that used to house the border land port at Jilong, facing Rasuwagadhi on the Nepal side.

A similar hillside collapse had triggered a devastating flood in the Chamoli region of Uttarakhand in February 2021.

And the danger is not over. A day later, debris was still blocking a part of the Lhende Khola, and water was accumulating behind the impromptu dam. More water, and that blockage is likely to give way, leading to a second flood. Authorities have already warned of fresh risk of flooding.

Why the Nepal Disaster Demands a Regional Strategy

Glaciologists have known for decades that a warming world is leading to faster glacier melting, formation of ever-larger lakes at their snouts, then the lakes bursting out of their unstable moraine bonds and flooding downstream in what is called a glacier lake outburst flood (GLOF). They have been emphasising the need to monitor these lakes, drain them slowly if possible and install early warning systems for people downstream. But the Nepal disaster was not a GLOF at all.

So what can one do if the flash flood is not due to a GLOF but due to this kind of huge mountainside collapse that threatens to become more frequent in the Himalayas as global warming gathers more pace? The Nepal disaster is exactly this harder-to-predict kind of event.

"The pace of change is so rapid that current efforts are struggling to keep up," said Mohammed Farooq Azam, senior cryosphere specialist at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). "Today's disaster in the Lhende Khola underscores the need for stronger regional collaboration, with governments taking coordinated action to respond to cross-border hazards."

Just a few months before the Nepal disaster, researchers from ICIMOD and other organisations had presented a regional cryosphere strategy that would involve all countries sharing the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH) – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan – in four activities: Consolidating and institutionalising standardised monitoring of glaciers, snow, and permafrost; building sustained capacity through specialised regional capacity-building activities;  establishing a Regional HKH CryoHub to ensure usable and policy-relevant data and knowledge services; and prioritising operational decision support services on seasonal snow watch for water and energy planning, hazard monitoring and early warning systems, and basin-scale assessments that link cryosphere trends to risks for people and infrastructure.

The strategy notes, “A basin-representative, quality-assured, and interoperable cryosphere observation and services system can strengthen regional resilience, reduce risks, and amplify the HKH voice in global climate dialogues. This institutional and technical architecture is designed to convert heterogeneous observations into policy-ready knowledge.”

Refining Predictions to Prevent Another Disaster

No early warning system would have helped those close downstream of the August 26 mountainside collapse. The flood came too fast. One way to manage this risk is to be able to predict such a disaster with a credible probability level, so that governments can take protective action before a disaster. This would need countries to comprehensively map all icebound slopes above a certain gradient.

This would be a huge task, far tougher than monitoring the expansion of glacial lakes. But that monitoring has improved in recent years due to widespread use of satellite imagery. It is far from an ideal solution. Glaciers should be monitored on the ground to get the actual mass balance and to see if they are losing more ice than they are gaining. But it is better than nothing. A monitoring of steep mountain slopes can be started through satellite imagery.

All of this assumes that countries sharing the Hindu Kush Himalayas will be willing to coordinate their cryosphere research efforts and seamlessly share data. Almost all joint research and policy work in the HKH has failed due to the absence of such cooperation. But the Nepal disaster of August 26 has once again underlined that there is no alternative to cooperation.

This story originally appeared in Mongabay. 

Why Nepal Flash Floods Are Deadlier the Second Time Around

Major flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border have destroyed homes, roads, bridges and local hydropower projects. The flooding of the Bhote Koshi river is affecting 50,000 residents. More than 100 people are dead, with hundreds more, including international tourists, missing.

This region of the Himalayas had not yet recovered from the Bhote Koshi flooding in 2025 that killed nine people as it washed away a “friendship bridge” linking Nepal and China, disrupting trade and transport for months.

In Sri Lanka, recent floods and landslides struck affected communities that were still recovering from Cyclone Ditwah, which had caused widespread damage only nine months earlier. With little time to recover from the cyclone, communities had no protection from further flooding. More than 15,000 people have been directly affected and 6,800 people were displaced this August.

Disaster risk usually considers how severe the next flood, wildfire, cyclone or drought will be. But the Nepal flash floods and Sri Lanka examples show another dimension that is often overlooked: how quickly can a community recover and will it do so before the next disaster arrives?

Nepal Flash Floods and the Communities That Never Rebuilt

A disaster rarely leaves a place exactly as it found it. Roads and bridges may remain damaged. Families may have spent their savings. Businesses may still be struggling. Governments can still be financing reconstruction, while hospitals and other public services remain under pressure.

If another hazard arrives before these systems have recovered, it does not encounter the same community that existed before the first disaster. It encounters a place with less resilience and a weakened infrastructure.

A useful way to understand this is through the recovery gap: the relationship between how long recovery takes and how much time is available before another damaging disaster occurs.

Imagine two communities experiencing similar floods. In one, the previous major disaster occurred ten years earlier. Homes have been rebuilt, infrastructure repaired and emergency resources replenished. In the other, another disaster happened only six months ago. Roads remain under repair, families are still displaced or in debt, and public authorities are still paying for reconstruction. The new flood may be physically similar in both places. Its consequences may not be.

Incomplete recovery can substantially increase long-term losses. A 2025 study of recurrent flooding in the Philippines that losses increased by 40% between 2000 and 2018 because of incomplete recover. This suggests that repeated disaster losses are not always simply additive. The first disaster can change the conditions under which the next one occurs and the effects of subsequent disasters can be much more severe.

Recovery has many clocks

Recovery is often described as if a community is either recovered or not, a simplistic binary. It’s more of a sliding scale. Electricity and freshwater supplies may return within days. A damaged road may take months to repair. Rebuilding homes can take years. Businesses may reopen while still carrying substantial debt. Household finances, ecosystems and mental wellbeing can recover on entirely different timescales.

A place can therefore look recovered according to one indicator while remaining highly vulnerable according to another.

It took more than a decade for New Orleans in the US to achieve substantial physical and structural recovery following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. While basic emergency operations and power restoration took weeks to months, full neighbourhood rebuilding, population stabilisation and major flood protection system upgrades spanned 15 years or more. And this was in one of the richest countries in the world.

Recovery is also unequal. Wealthier households may have insurance, savings and access to credit. Poorer households often have fewer resources to repair homes, replace belongings or absorb lost income. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, many poorer households who had hurricane insurance were refused payouts as the damage was deemed to be flood-related because of the burst levees and not by the hurricane. So, it is not only the time between disasters that matters. It is also how much recovery can happen during that time.

This issue becomes increasingly important where climate change alters the frequency or severity of weather extremes. If reconstruction requires five years but another damaging event occurs after two, the interval between disasters starts competing with the time needed to recover. That should change how we manage disaster risk.

Measure recovery, not only damage

Governments are generally good at recording immediate losses: damaged buildings, displaced people, destroyed infrastructure and financial costs. But they also need to know what remains unrepaired months or years later. Recovery monitoring needs to include housing, infrastructure functionality, business activity, household finances, public services and displacement. The question should not stop at “how much did we lose?” It should continue with “how much vulnerability remains?”

Disasters are not isolated occurrences. Floods, wildfires, droughts and storms are often assessed separately. These assessments are essential, but communities experience these hazards through the same infrastructure, economy and population.

The road damaged by one event may be needed for evacuation during the next. An electricity system weakened today may be supporting hospitals or water services tomorrow. Risk assessments should therefore consider plausible hazard sequences and the condition critical systems may be in when another disaster hits. This does not mean predicting the exact order of future disasters. It means abandoning the assumption that every new disaster meets a fully recovered system.

Recovery should not be seen only as the final stage of the disaster that just happened. It is also preparation for whatever comes next. Restoring infrastructure, supporting households and reopening essential services quickly can reduce the vulnerability carried into the next event.

But simply rebuilding the same vulnerable systems recreates the same risks. Recovery should therefore combine speed with adaptation: stronger infrastructure, better redundancy, improved emergency planning and greater support for communities that would otherwise take the longest to recover. Recent research shows that the government plays a critical role in ensuring rapid, efficient and effective recovery.

While asking “how severe could the next disaster be?”, we should also ask “how recovered will we be when it arrives?” Because the next disaster does not start from zero. It inherits what the last one left behind.

This story originally appeared in The Conversation.

News from Moscow and Beijing for New Delhi is not so comforting. It is reliably learnt that the two powers will not pull any punches when they converge in Delhi for the BRICS Summit on September 12–13, 2026. Along with Brazil, both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are of the strong belief that India, which is hosting the BRICS Summit, will oppose any move against the US.

Hence, they believe there would be no dedollarisation that allows trade in national currencies, nor would there be any attempt to criticise Israel over the war in Gaza or a demand for reform of the UN, all issues that are critical for India and other developing countries.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that India, despite the support it may receive from a new BRICS member, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which holds a similar worldview to the US and Israel, may find it difficult even to craft a joint resolution that is agreeable to all.

That will be a setback for India, as the big BRICS nations are determined to push New Delhi into a corner. Insiders even go to the extent of predicting a make-or-break situation for BRICS and possibly putting the host country in the dock. Now, sources claim, India will find it difficult to ride on two boats.

Also Read:  Asim Munir Is Betting on a Playbook That Failed Musharraf

The Iran–UAE Rift Inside BRICS

Ever since New Delhi was chosen to host the BRICS Summit, the global reality has become more complex, with the US and Israel attacking Iran and the West Asian nation retaliating against the US by bombing its bases across the Gulf countries located in its neighbourhood.

This means that, for the first time, we have a situation where two members of BRICS, Iran and the UAE, would be at war with each other. What has aggravated the relationship is that US President Donald Trump and his Finance Secretary, Scott Bessent, reportedly called UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ) to sever trade ties with Iran.

This single move is likely to hurt Iran far more than all the damage Tomahawk missiles may have inflicted on the West Asian nation. Iran fears that its main trading partner, the UAE, will stop buying its oil. Last month, it earned US$5.7 billion from oil exports through the UAE.

Now, the Iranians will not be able to swap or buy essential goods from the Emirati country. Iran fears that its unemployment problem will soar and essential items will disappear from its shelves. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has also expressed fears about the economic catastrophe facing the country.

If the UAE stops trading with Iran altogether, then either there will be a new war between the US and Iran, or worse, Iran could devastate the wealthy Gulf country. Conversely, there could be a possibility of Iranians advocating peace, as the tiny nation of Oman, a stakeholder in the strategically important Strait of Hormuz, has also been threatened with war by the US.

Trump's Claim Over The Strait Of Hormuz

Iran's problems have multiplied with US President Donald Trump declaring the Strait of Hormuz as US territory. The Strait has traditionally been controlled by Iran, but during the recent war, it came under renewed attention from the US President, who offered Tehran the possibility of imposing tolls on ships passing through it.

Some 130 ships laden with oil and cargo pass through this critical strait. Now, the US blockade, accompanied by claims from Tehran that it is also blocking the waterway, has confused the picture, compelling many countries to either wait for the US to triumph and take control of the controversial strait or hope for a return to the pre-war situation.

As this is unlikely to happen any time soon, until one of the countries claims a decisive victory, many countries are looking for alternative routes.

Also Read:  Strait of Hormuz: Iran's Long War Trap for a Reluctant US

Russia And China Seek A Route Around Hormuz

BRICS nations such as Russia and China are looking for viable routes to escape the Hormuz trap. They no longer want to be mired in a war related to, or prompted by, radicalism inspired by religion when they could instead be engaged in trade.

The Chinese are looking to leverage their close ties with Russia and the new Arctic sea passage, colourfully called the "Ice Silk Route", which begins from Ningbo in China, cuts through Russia's Northern Sea Route and, after cruising through the North Sea, culminates in Felixstowe in England.

In this way, ships will reduce journey times by half while also avoiding the turbulent Strait of Hormuz or Bab-el-Mandeb in the Red Sea. Ideally, China and Russia would also like to rely more on the Siberian trade route and avoid dependence on the Suez Canal or the Strait of Hormuz altogether.

This is also intended to change the way the world conducts business and reduce dependence on the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). Similarly, the Indian government is exploring an offer from the Russian government for a maritime route connecting Chennai to Vladivostok.

IMEC And The Timing Of The Hamas Attack

Whatever the reasons behind the US-Iran conflict, there is a need to remember the timing of the Hamas attack. This was a fact reiterated by former US President Joe Biden after he returned from Delhi's G20 event.

It was on the sidelines of the G20 that the announcement was made, along with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, about the coming of a new corridor, IMEC, that would link South Asia with the Middle East and Europe and finally connect with the US.

It was an ambitious project that would sideline countries hostile towards the US while bringing nations such as Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia into a tighter embrace.

A month after the announcement of IMEC, Hamas attacked Israel. The subsequent war in Gaza and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's determination to take out Iran, which he believed was the last country standing against Israel, further complicated the geopolitical landscape.

As reports in the US media indicate, Israel managed to sell a lemon to US President Donald Trump by convincing him that Tehran would be easy to defeat and would wilt like Venezuela when attacked by US special forces.

Iran weathered the attack even though it lost its Supreme Leader and the country was badly savaged. Though the country is still standing up to the global hegemon, there is a rethink within its political leadership that it needs to revive the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed in Geneva.

Former President Mohammad Khatami has been among the most vocal in demanding a return to diplomacy.

US President Donald Trump, in his usual erratic manner, is claiming ownership of the Strait of Hormuz and threatening war against Iran if it does not budge from its claim over the strait's waters.

It is a tricky situation, one that could come to a head during the BRICS Summit in Delhi on September 12–13, 2026, where the Indian government will have to search for answers that go beyond its claim of strategic autonomy, a policy that has, over the years, meant different things to different countries.

This article originally appeared in Hardnews magazine. 

Asim Munir Reaches for a Playbook That Rarely Saves Generals

Pakistan is not resolving its crises so much as containing them. On the economic front, the state is spending its scarcest resource, which is time, on servicing a debt mountain rather than dismantling it. On the security front, its western districts are absorbing the heaviest militant violence in more than a decade. On the political front, a jailed former Prime Minister still commands the street while the judiciary fractures under pressure. Presiding over all of it is Field Marshal Asim Munir, the most powerful army chief in Pakistan's history, and the strategy he has adopted to stay there is one his predecessors would recognise.

The Playbook Every Cornered General Reaches For

When a Pakistani general's grip loosens, the response tends to follow a familiar sequence. Power is consolidated at home through constitutional or legal engineering. Dissent is contained through pressure on courts, parties and the press.

Abroad, the general reaches for geopolitical theatre, positioning Pakistan as an indispensable partner to whichever power is willing to pay for the service, whether in aid, investment or strategic cover. Religion and national security are invoked to hold the base together.

The playbook can buy time. What the record shows is that it does not reliably buy survival, because it treats symptoms while the underlying crises of economy, security and legitimacy keep advancing. Two of Pakistan's most powerful generals ran this same play, and neither ended on his own terms.

Zia and Musharraf: Two Endings, One Lesson

General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in a 1977 coup and ruled through Islamisation and martial law. By the late 1980s his authority was fraying. He had installed Muhammad Khan Junejo as Prime Minister expecting deference, but Junejo asserted himself, signing the 1988 Geneva Accords on the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan against Zia's wishes.

The rupture deepened after the Ojhri Camp disaster of April 1988, when an ammunition depot near Rawalpindi exploded and rained munitions across the twin cities. The official toll was put at around thirty, though independent estimates ran far higher. When Junejo pressed for accountability, Zia dismissed his government in May 1988.

Zia leaned hard on the external playbook. He had already staged his cricket diplomacy, flying to Jaipur in 1987 to watch an India-Pakistan match and defuse a military standoff while quietly signalling nuclear resolve. He kept the Afghan pipeline open to secure American aid, and wrapped himself in Islamic solidarity to hold the hardliners. Yet it is important to be precise about how Zia's story ended. He was not toppled by the crises closing in on him. He died in a C-130 crash near Bahawalpur in August 1988, still in office. The lesson from Zia is not that the playbook fails cleanly. It is that it papers over decay without arresting it.

Pervez Musharraf is the sharper cautionary tale. His authority unravelled after he moved to suspend the chief justice in 2007, triggering a lawyers' movement that fused civil society and the opposition against military rule. The siege of Lal Masjid the same year became a rallying point for militants, and the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan coalesced soon after, opening the bloodiest phase of Pakistan's internal war.

Musharraf answered weakness with the familiar moves. He declared an emergency in November 2007, suspended the constitution, jailed judges and detained opponents. He toured European capitals after Benazir Bhutto's assassination that December, and pressed Washington with the argument that his removal would put Pakistan's nuclear arsenal at risk, a bid for indispensability. None of it held. His party lost the February 2008 election, and facing impeachment he resigned that August, with the army under his successor declining to shield him.

Where Asim Munir's Gamble Runs Out

Asim Munir faces a different Pakistan, but he is answering it with a familiar script. On consolidation, the 27th Constitutional Amendment, passed in November 2025, made Asim Munir Chief of Defence Forces with command over all three services and granted him lifelong legal immunity, while curbing the Supreme Court and creating a new Federal Constitutional Court. Two Supreme Court judges and a Lahore High Court judge resigned in protest. It was the most far-reaching entrenchment of military power in decades, and it placed Asim Munir at the constitutional centre of the state.

On the external front, Asim Munir has been the driving force behind a burst of geopolitical theatre. Pakistan signed a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia in September 2025, committing each state to treat an attack on one as an attack on both, and followed it with a trilateral defence pact alongside Saudi Arabia and Turkiye in August 2026. Islamabad also positioned itself as a venue for contacts between the United States and Iran earlier in the year. Each move offers Asim Munir a measure of economic ballast and strategic relevance, much as the Afghan pipeline once did for Zia.

The trouble is that the underlying crises are not slowing. Pakistan's total debt and liabilities approached Rs100 trillion by the middle of 2026, with debt servicing the single largest line in the national budget. On security, Pakistan topped the 2026 Global Terrorism Index as the country worst affected by terrorism, and July 2026 was among its deadliest months, with more than six hundred deaths recorded.

Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa bear the brunt, where the Balochistan Liberation Army and the TTP have escalated coordinated assaults on security forces even as the army runs large counter-insurgency operations. The provincial politics of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where support for Imran Khan's party runs deep, remain at odds with the establishment.

Politically, the pressure point has a name. Imran Khan, jailed since 2023, still moves the street. The Supreme Court's August 2026 order to shift him to hospital for medical treatment was narrow in scope, and the government moved swiftly to challenge it, but it was a reminder that Asim Munir's chief rival remains a live force that the courts and the public have not forgotten.

Even the external picture carries a warning. When the United States ambassador to India, Sergio Gor, visited Srinagar in August 2026 and described Jammu and Kashmir as an important part of India, it underlined how narrow Pakistan's strategic leverage with Washington has become.

None of this means Asim Munir is finished. By the letter of the constitution he is more secure than any general before him. But the playbook he is running is the same one that could not save Musharraf and only outlasted Zia by an accident of fate.

If Pakistan's economic, security and political crises keep converging, the question is not whether Asim Munir holds power today. It is whether the sources of that power can withstand the pressures the playbook was never designed to fix.

Imagine a man walks into a police station because he has been raped. He asks the officer to register an FIR. And the officer tells him there is nothing he can do, because the BNS has no provision to register the rape of a man. Now imagine the same thing happening to a transgender person. The answer is the same. Under the law as it stands today, they have no recourse at all.

This is not a hypothetical. It is the reality created by the way the BNS defines the crime of rape. In our new explainer, we break down how India ended up here, what the law actually says, the petitions now before the Delhi High Court, and why, in 2026, the country still does not have a gender-neutral rape law.

Also Read:  India's Rape Law Says Only A Woman Can Be A Victim

What the BNS Rape Law Actually Says

The heart of the problem lies in Section 63 of the BNS, the provision that defines rape. It replaced the old Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, and it lists the specific acts, penetration, insertion, manipulation and oral contact, that amount to rape. But it describes every one of those acts as something a man does to a woman.

The consequence is stark. The BNS rape law sees only a man as the perpetrator and only a woman as the victim. It does not recognise a woman, or any other gender, as a possible offender, and it does not recognise a man, a transgender person, or anyone else as a possible victim. So when the crime happens to anyone other than a woman, the rape law simply has no place for them.

To understand how a brand new code ended up this way, you have to go back. India's Indian Penal Code was enacted in 1860 and came into force in 1862, which is why it is called a colonial-era law. When the BNS replaced it on July 1, 2024, it was celebrated as a historic, modern reform. And that raises the obvious question. If the BNS is the modern law, why is its rape law narrower, in one crucial way, than the colonial code it replaced?

The answer lies in Section 377. That section has a dark reputation, because it was used for decades to criminalise homosexuality, until the Supreme Court rightly read it down in 2018. But Section 377 was doing two jobs. Alongside the part that was struck down, it carried a protective function: it was the one provision that could reach non-consensual acts against men and transgender persons. When the BNS dropped Section 377 entirely and put nothing in its place, that protection vanished, and the BNS rape law was left covering only women.

Also Read:  Delhi HC to Examine Why the BNS Rape Law Sees Only Women | Impact

The Petitions Before the Delhi High Court

Our explainer walks through the petitions now challenging this gap, because each one approaches it differently.

The first, by Dr Chandresh Jain, speaks for transgender persons. He argues that the BNS rape law is unconstitutional because it leaves transgender persons entirely outside its protection, framing rape and most sexual offences around a female victim.

The second, by Barkha Nagar, argues that Section 63 itself is unconstitutional for recognising only a man as the offender and a woman as the victim, leaving men, transgender and non-binary victims unprotected. But her petition carries a flaw we explain in the video: while her synopsis talks about corrective measures, her actual prayer asks only for Section 63 to be struck down, without saying what should replace it. Strike down the rape law with nothing in its place, and you create a different crisis.

The third petition is the comprehensive one, filed by Shubhi Srivastava, S.K. Srivastava and others. It does not speak for one group alone. It challenges fourteen sexual-offence provisions of the BNS and seeks to cover everyone the rape law forgets, men, women, transgender persons and even animals. The petitioners say they were moved to act after police officers themselves told them that men and transgender persons come to file rape complaints and simply cannot, because the BNS has no provision. We spoke to the lawyer who filed it, who described those conversations with a station house officer directly.

An earlier version of this comprehensive petition was dismissed, with the court noting it could not direct Parliament to legislate. But the petitioners persisted and filed a fresh, wider petition, and this one goes further still, raising even the question of necrophilia, the sexual violation of the dead, for which India currently has no clear provision. The petition notes that the UK criminalised it in 2003, and that even Pakistan amended its penal code in 2024.

Why India Needs a Gender-Neutral Rape Law

On August 12, this case came up before the Delhi High Court, which will now hear it on October 7. The court tagged the comprehensive petition with a related one filed by Gantavya Gulati, and the Gulati story is the most revealing part of the whole saga.

Gulati first approached the court in 2024, seeking to restore protection for individuals left exposed by the gap, particularly those from the LGBTQIA community. The government did not defend the gap. Instead, it asked that his petition be treated as a representation, promising to consult stakeholders and decide. The court agreed. But two years later, no decision has come. When Gulati returned, the government said only that the matter was sensitive and needed more time. The court, unpersuaded, held that a year and a half was reasonable time and revived his petition.

And this gap was not an accident. When the BNS was being drafted, Parliament's own Standing Committee on Home Affairs, headed by Brij Lal, warned in writing that dropping Section 377 would leave men, transgender persons and bestiality unpunished, and recommended keeping that protection. The government did not accept it.

The court is now in a genuine bind. It cannot write a law, that is Parliament's job. But it is equally bound to protect citizens' rights, and the government's two years of inaction give it room to press for answers. At most, on October 7, the court can demand the government explain its delay and set out how it will fix the BNS rape law.

The rest of the world offers a clear contrast. Canada made its rape law gender-neutral in 1983. The UK's Sexual Offences Act of 2003 protects victims of either sex. Australia and South Africa have done the same.

The question our explainer leaves you with is simple. If a woman is raped, it is a crime. If a man or a transgender person is raped, the BNS rape law does not even call it rape. That cannot be right. Rape is rape, and a law that protects some victims while abandoning others is not just incomplete. It is unjust.

When The Probe first reported that India's new criminal code recognises only a woman as a victim of rape, it set out a gap that had quietly left men, transgender persons and others with no law to turn to. That reporting has now found an echo in court. The Delhi High Court has agreed to hear a public interest petition challenging the rape law provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), and has listed the matter for 7 October 2026. Rather than turning the challenge away, as the bench had at one point indicated it might, the Court chose to keep it alive and hear it alongside related petitions that raise the same question about who the law is willing to protect.

The petition has been filed through advocate Yogendra Kumar and argued before the Court by advocate S.K. Srivastava. The petitioners are advocates Shubhi Srivastava, Ajay Kumar Singh, Prince Kumar, N.Z. Lotha and Garima Singh, along with Ashok Kumar Singh, IRS (Retd.). All of them are advocates or retired government officers who describe themselves as officers of the court assisting on a systemic deficiency they encounter in practice. Its path to a hearing has not been straightforward. An earlier version, filed in 2025, was dismissed in October that year, with liberty to seek intervention in a connected matter. The Probe reported this story on August 5, setting out how the BNS rape law had come to exclude every victim except a woman. S.K. Srivastava meanwhile pressed on, and in August 2026 the High Court permitted the petitioners to file a comprehensive petition covering all the affected groups. That fresh petition is the one now listed for 7 October.

Also Read:  India's Rape Law Says Only A Woman Can Be A Victim

What the BNS Rape Law Leaves Out

At the heart of the petition is Section 63 of the BNS, the provision that defines rape. Read from beginning to end, it describes rape only as an act committed by a man against a woman. The code then defines a man and a woman as separate categories, with the result that, in the eyes of the rape law, only a woman can be a victim and only a man can be an offender. The petition argues that this makes the law discriminatory under Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution, because the same act of sexual violence is an offence when the victim is a woman and no offence at all when the victim is a man, a transgender person or, in the petition's framing, an animal. The petitioners set out eighteen combinations of offender and victim, and argue that the rape law addresses only one of them, leaving the other seventeen without any offence.

Article 14 guarantees not only equality before the law but also the equal protection of the laws. The petitioners argue that the protection the BNS rightly gives a woman against sexual violence must, on that principle, be extended to everyone else the law currently leaves out.

The petition traces the gap to the repeal of Section 377 of the old Indian Penal Code. After the Supreme Court's judgment in Navtej Singh Johar, Section 377 continued to cover non-consensual acts against men, transgender persons and animals, even though consensual acts between adults had been decriminalised. When the BNS replaced the Indian Penal Code and dropped Section 377, that residual protection vanished. 

The petition goes further than most, asking the Court to also consider sexual violence against the dead. It raises necrophilia as an offence now left entirely unaddressed, noting that the United Kingdom criminalised the sexual penetration of a corpse through Section 70 of its Sexual Offences Act, 2003. The petition also states that Pakistan, which still retains Section 377, amended its penal code in 2024 to punish the violation of dead bodies. On this reasoning, it submits that the BNS has created a vacuum that no other provision fills.

Srivastava's is not the only petition before the Delhi High Court on this question. Two others are pending, and each approaches the gap from a narrower angle. The first, filed by advocate Dr Chandresh Jain, is confined to transgender persons. It argues that the BNS does not recognise a transgender person as someone who can be raped at all, and that the one law meant to protect them, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2019, caps the punishment for any offence against a transgender person, however grave, at a maximum of two years.

The second, filed by advocate Barkha Nagar, goes directly at the definition itself. It contends that the rape law is unconstitutional because it recognises only women as victims, and asks the Court to strike down the defining provision. That prayer carries a risk. If the Court were to grant only what is formally sought, it could remove the definition of rape without putting anything in its place.

What sets these two apart from S.K. Srivastava's petition is their limited scope. The Chandresh Jain petition speaks for transgender persons alone, and the Barkha Nagar petition trains its fire on the definition without offering the Court a way to cure the gap for everyone the rape law leaves out. Srivastava's petition, by contrast, seeks to cover the full range of affected persons in a single challenge.

The Probe has reported consistently on the absence of gender-neutral protection in Indian criminal law, and has followed the BNS rape law gap since the new code came into force. In its earlier report, The Probe set out plainly what the statute does and does not say, showing that a man who is raped, or a transgender person who is assaulted, finds no offence under which the police can register the case. The question is not one for any single community, but one of equal protection, that the law should see every victim of sexual violence rather than only some.

Also Read:  Licence to Rape: Doctor's Rs 5,000 Fine for Assaulting Schoolgirl

Two Years of Government Delay

On 12 August 2026, when the petition came up, the Delhi High Court tagged it with one filed by Gantavya Gulati and cancelled the separate date that the Gulati matter had been given, so that the two would be heard together on 7 October.

Speaking to The Probe, S.K. Srivastava said the decision was a significant step. "I am glad the Court has agreed to hear this case. It shows the Bench sees merit in the question we have raised. The Probe too has reported on this same gap. The fact is this, the law cannot recognise only one kind of victim of sexual violence and remain silent about the rest. By tagging our petition with the Gulati matter, the Court has brought the full scope of the issue onto a single hearing, and we now look forward to being heard on 7 October."

Gulati, appearing in person, had approached the Court in August 2024, asking that a Section 377-equivalent protection against non-consensual sexual acts be restored for the safety and dignity of individuals, particularly those from the LGBTQIA+ community, following the gap left by the BNS.

When Gulati first came to court in 2024, the government did not defend the gap. Instead, its lawyers asked the Court to treat his petition as a formal complaint to the government, rather than something the Court itself should decide. They told the Court that the government was already collecting views from various groups on the new criminal laws, and would take a considered decision after hearing everyone. On that assurance, the Court agreed. It directed the government to decide the matter quickly, and gave Gulati the right to bring his petition back to court if the government dragged its feet.

That delay is precisely what followed. By March 2026, more than one and a half years had passed and no decision had been taken. When Gulati returned to Court, the government repeated that the subject was sensitive and that consultations were still under way. The Court was unpersuaded, recording that a year and a half was reasonable time to decide and that the decision was nowhere in sight, and it restored his petition to its original number. It directed the Union to file an affidavit setting out what steps it had actually taken. Read together, the orders describe a government that has held the same position for about two years without acting on it.

The union government promised in August 2024 to take a holistic view on the representation before it. About two years have passed since, with no decision on record. That is exactly the inordinate delay the 2024 order had guarded against, and it strengthens the argument that the representation route has failed. Those challenging the BNS rape law say the matter is no longer one for further consultation but is ripe for a substantive direction from the Court.

The Court is in a difficult position of its own. It cannot direct Parliament to make a law, that much is settled, and defining an offence remains the legislature's domain. But it is equally conscious of its duty to protect the fundamental rights of citizens. With the government having failed to act for two years, the Court is left to weigh how far it can go, declaring the deficiency and pressing for a time-bound decision, without stepping into the law-making role that is not its own.

There is also a record that cuts against the government's position. When the BNS Bill was examined by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs, chaired by Brij Lal, the committee expressly recorded that omitting Section 377 would mean not penalising non-consensual sexual offences against men, transgender persons and bestiality, and it recommended that these provisions be retained in the new code. The recommendation was not accepted.

The Supreme Court, in Navtej Singh Johar, had itself preserved Section 377 for non-consensual acts even as it decriminalised consensual ones. Taken together, this suggests that the gap in the BNS rape law is a recognised deficiency that Parliament's own committee had flagged, rather than a considered policy choice. It is a deficiency the Court can declare, and on which it can direct a time-bound decision, without itself creating any offence, which remains the domain of Parliament.

Why a Gender-Neutral Law Matters

A gender-neutral framework would not dilute the protection that women already have under the BNS. It would extend the same protection to everyone the present law forgets.

The larger question is why a country that has rewritten its entire criminal code still holds to a rape law that sees only one kind of victim. The government was given two years to answer it and let the time run out. Now the Court must decide whether the law will go on seeing only one victim, or finally see them all.