Merit or Money? The Privatisation of Higher Education in India and the Death of Equal Opportunity

In The Tyranny of Merit, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel observes that even the most egalitarian education system cannot neutralise the vast differences between a child born into privilege and a child born into deprivation. The former grows up surrounded by resources, networks, personalised attention, and cultural capital; the latter must fight simply to reach the starting line. "Even the best, most inclusive educational system would be hard pressed to equip students from poor backgrounds to compete on equal terms with children from families that bestow copious amounts of attention, resources, and connections," he writes.

At a time when India boasts of becoming the world's third-largest economy, a technology hub, and a global education market, the privatisation of higher education in India is quietly restructuring the very foundation of its knowledge ecosystem in favour of a narrow elite.

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Wealth inequality and the cost of private coaching

The roots of elite capture lie in the economic and caste structure of the country, and they shape every downstream stage of the privatisation of higher education in India. Data from the World Inequality Database and the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) show that caste and religious groups in India have sharply different economic positions.

Among religious groups, Muslims earn about 7% below the national average — broadly comparable to OBC households — while non-Hindu, non-Muslim groups outside the SC/ST/OBC categories earn well above the national average.

Under Article 21A, inserted by the 86th Constitutional Amendment in 2002, the Constitution of India guarantees the right to free and compulsory education for children aged 6 to 14. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, which came into force on 1 April 2010, gives effect to this right and lays down the responsibilities of the State and local authorities in providing free elementary education. However, this principle has been consistently undermined by successive governments through sustained withdrawal from public investment in school education. As a result, rising private school fees and declining investment in government schools have meant that children from historically marginalised communities start their educational trajectory in a structurally disadvantaged position.

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Evidence from the All India Survey on Higher Education 2021–22 shows that the national GER in higher education stands at 28.4%; for SCs it is 25.9% and for STs only 21.2%. While GER figures for OBCs remain underreported, available data indicate that their enrolment levels are also well below the national average, reflecting similar patterns of structural exclusion.

Layered atop this structural inequality is an exploding private education market that thrives on the desperation of aspirational families. The latest World Inequality Report highlights India as among the world's most unequal societies, a pattern that shows little sign of improvement. The report shows that in India the top 10% earn about 58% of the national income, while the bottom 50% receive only around 15%.

Inequality in wealth is even sharper, with the richest 10% owning roughly 65% of total wealth and the top 1% alone holding about 40%. This is the backdrop against which higher education is being commodified. As incomes stagnate, the cost of private schooling, coaching and college fees rises relentlessly, creating an ever-widening gap between those who can afford to compete and those who cannot.

In cities like Kota, the cost of National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) or JEE coaching and living expenses ranges from ₹1.5 lakh to ₹3 lakh per year, far beyond what most rural or marginalised households can afford. The impact of private coaching is felt most strongly in medical education, after the Union government rolled out NEET across the country.

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According to Justice A.K. Rajan Committee report, in Tamil Nadu — which had once abolished entrance exams to protect socially marginalised students — NEET has spawned a ₹5,750-crore coaching industry, with over 400 coaching centres mushrooming since 2016.

As per Tamil Nadu's 2023 medical counselling data, around 69% of candidates eligible for the state's government-quota seats were NEET repeaters, almost always supported by expensive coaching classes. NEET was sold as a neutral, egalitarian, centrally controlled test that would eliminate capitation fees and standardise merit. Instead, it has simply replaced school education with a nationwide coaching economy and entrenched the privatisation of higher education in India at the entry point itself. The entrance exam has become less a measure of aptitude and more a measure of a family's capacity to spend lakhs on coaching, mock tests, residential programmes and "drop years".

Implementation of reservation and judicial views

The contradiction becomes even sharper when we observe the developments in super-speciality medical education. Beginning with the Constitution Bench ruling in Dr. Preeti Srivastava v. State of Madhya Pradesh (1999), the Supreme Court has consistently held that "merit, and merit alone" should be the basis for admission at the super-speciality level, and that reservation has no real place at this stage. As a result, some of the most exclusive and expensive medical seats in the country are entirely unreserved.

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When the ability to pay becomes the primary qualification for medical education, the public loses twice — first through the exclusion of talented but poor students, and again in the future when doctors who are unlikely to serve in rural areas enter the system.

The issue is not limited to medical admissions. Inconsistencies in the implementation of OBC reservation, combined with conflicting judicial views, continue to shape admissions at the National Law Universities (NLUs), and this is particularly consequential given the central role NLUs play in training future lawyers and judges.

Gender inequality

Despite many girls topping CBSE and state board exams, fewer girls clear centralised entrance tests held for STEM courses. The number of girls who take JEE Main and later qualify for JEE Advanced, for instance, is much lower than the number of boys.

According to the National Testing Agency (NTA), 22.5 lakh students registered for JEE Main 2023, and only about 30% were girls. The advent of national entrance exams has affected not just professional courses; their impact is now being felt in science and humanities admissions at Union government-controlled central universities as well. The introduction of the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) has already reduced the enrolment of women in central universities. Data from Delhi University shows that after CUET was introduced in 2022, the number of women admitted to undergraduate programmes dropped sharply from 54,818 in 2021 to just 34,120 in 2022 — and despite a modest recovery (36,039 in 2023 and 38,096 in 2024), figures remain well below pre-CUET levels — indicating that centralised entrance tests place women at a disadvantage.

Lack of government funding

The rise of the private coaching-industrial complex is only one half of the problem. The other half is the creeping privatisation of higher education in India, disguised as "reform" or "efficiency." The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 was launched with the ambitious goal of increasing India's GER in higher education to 50% by 2035, a target that would require a near doubling of capacity from the existing 1,168 universities (per AISHE 2021–22). However, five years since its rollout, progress has been sluggish.

The number of Union or state government-funded universities has barely grown, and Union government funding for higher education has not seen any meaningful improvement. Instead of increased public investment, institutions are facing shrinking grants and growing reliance on loan-based funding mechanisms such as the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA).

Investigations show that institutions like IIT Delhi and others are diverting substantial portions of their income toward debt servicing, while their research and teaching budgets stagnate. This loan-based model, meant to accelerate infrastructure development, is now squeezing central universities and IITs, many of which lack strong revenue streams. Instead of reducing dependence on public funds, HEFA has effectively commercialised public education, pushing institutions to operate like debt-laden enterprises and eroding the very principle of higher education as a public good.

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Despite adverse feedback on HEFA from the heads, faculty, and students of central institutions, NITI Aayog has called for the creation of a HEFA-like financing agency to support state public universities. The proposal raises critical questions about whether the path to educational reform should lie in debt-based funding or in a renewed commitment to sustained public investment. As regular grants from the Ministry of Education and the UGC continue to shrink, financially weaker state universities, where the majority of India's students are enrolled, are finding themselves trapped in a funding crisis that threatens both their academic autonomy and the affordability of higher education. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education (2023) has also highlighted the stagnation of allocations to both the UGC and RUSA for state universities in recent years.

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Earlier, in 2023, the previous government had already split the 85% state quota under G.O. Ms. No. 107 and 108, converting a significant share of low-cost government seats into Self-Financing (Category-B) and NRI (Category-C) quota seats with annual fees rising to ₹12 lakh and ₹20 lakh respectively in newly sanctioned government colleges, while NRI fees in private colleges have climbed to nearly ₹39.6 lakh per year. The new administration has retained this fee structure.

All these trends point to a predictable logic: underfund public institutions, push them into debt, allow private players to fill the gap, convert affordable seats into high-fee seats, and normalise private coaching as a prerequisite. Over time, the system becomes hostile to the poor, the marginalised, and the rural. This elite capture is not just unfair; it is profoundly damaging to India's long-term development.

Increase in education loans

Rising tuition fees, especially in private colleges and professional courses, are pushing more Indian students to rely heavily on education loans. Education loans have expanded rapidly, growing from around ₹83,000 crore in 2022 to over ₹1.2 lakh crore in 2024, yet they now carry the highest NPA rate in the personal loan segment at 3.6% as per the RBI's Financial Stability Report (June 2024) — well above credit cards (1.8%), auto loans (1.3%) and housing loans (1.1%) — showing how repayment capacity has not kept pace with borrowing.

Throughout modern Indian history, higher education has been one of the few ladders of mobility available to the marginalised. Today, that ladder is being sawed off from the bottom. The silent coup in Indian higher education has been allowed to proceed for so long because it hides behind the language of reform, efficiency, global standards and meritocracy. But as Sandel warns, meritocracy becomes toxic when it blinds the successful to the platform that enabled their rise.

And as Markovits reminds us, elite reproduction is not natural — it is engineered. If higher education in India continues down the path of privatisation and exclusion, it will cease to be a public good and become a hereditary privilege. But if the country recommits to public investment, equitable access, reservation, scientific temper and strengthened state universities, it can still reverse course.

The state's withdrawal, the explosion of private institutions, the normalisation of exorbitant fees, the spread of coaching factories and the conversion of professional education into a market commodity together amount to a silent coup. The takeover has been subtle, incremental, policy-driven and shockingly effective.

Democracy cannot survive when knowledge is monopolised by a small group. The question is whether India chooses to defend the republic of knowledge or surrender it to the republic of privilege.

Dr. Magilan Karthikeyan is currently working as an Assistant Professor in a Private University. His interests include science, politics, history and culture.

Old vs New Tax Regime: Why April 2026 Is Not the Clean Break It Looks Like

What arrived on 1 April 2026 was not merely a fresh coat of legislative paint. The Income-tax Act, 2025 formally replaced the 1961 Act for tax years beginning on or after that date, while the old law continues to govern tax years that began before 1 April 2026. That single fact is the starting point for all sensible advice, because it means we are not living through a clean overnight rupture but through a carefully staged transition.

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The first thing a prudent reader must grasp is that the new law is both important and, in another sense, less revolutionary than its political packaging suggests. The CBDT's own material describes the 2025 Act as a simplification-and-modernisation exercise meant to consolidate, renumber, streamline, and reduce interpretational clutter.

In many areas, the architecture survives; the numbering changes, the drafting becomes cleaner, and some targeted amendments are layered on through the Finance Act, 2026. So the real story is not "everything has changed." The real story is subtler and, for taxpayers, more dangerous: enough has changed in language, forms, filing pathways, transition rules, and a few key incentives to trip up the inattentive, while enough has remained the same to lull them into false comfort.

Old vs New Tax Regime Slabs Under the Income Tax Act 2025

That is why the old-versus-new regime debate remains alive even after the statutory switchover. For individuals, the new regime under section 202 of the 2025 Act continues the concessional slab structure already familiar from section 115BAC(1A) of the 1961 Act: nil up to ₹4 lakh, and thereafter 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, and 30% across the rising slab bands, with the rebate framework making tax liability nil up to ₹12 lakh of total income in the new regime.

Old vs New Tax Regime: The Belated Return Myth Taxpayers Must Ignore

That does not mean missing the due date is harmless. It can still trigger late-fee consequences, cash-flow disruption, and avoidable interest exposure. But it does mean advisers should not frighten taxpayers with a rule that the official transition guidance, at least as now published, does not support.

The broader background, then, is this: post-April 2026 tax planning is no longer just a tax-rate exercise. It is a transition-management exercise. Taxpayers must now keep three clocks in their heads at once.

The first clock is the old-law return cycle for FY 2025–26.

The second is the new-law advance-tax and compliance cycle for TY 2026–27 onward.

The third is the payroll-and-proof cycle inside the employer system, where TDS, declarations, salary structuring, and evidence submission can diverge from the eventual ITR position.

Old vs New Tax Regime for Salaried Taxpayers: Who Actually Wins

For salaried taxpayers, the contest between the old and the new regime remains intensely factual. The new regime rewards simplicity, lighter compliance, and taxpayers with thin deduction profiles. The old regime still has teeth for those who genuinely use the deduction-and-exemption ecosystem: HRA, section 80C instruments, health insurance, housing-loan interest, and related reliefs.

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A clean professional with no home loan, no major rent claim, and little appetite for tax-saving products will usually find the new regime elegant and often superior. But a metropolitan salaried person with significant HRA, employer-recognised rent payments, section 80C commitments, medical cover, and housing interest can still find the old regime alive, muscular, and in many cases economically superior. The fatal mistake is not choosing new or choosing old; the fatal mistake is choosing by slogan.

The HRA Shift for Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad

On this front, one genuinely important post-April 2026 change deserves attention. HRA itself has not been abolished, and the formulaic structure survives: actual HRA, rent minus 10% of salary, and the salary-percentage cap. But the notified rules now place Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Bengaluru in the 50% salary category, with other places at 40%. That is not a cosmetic change. It can materially shift the arithmetic for employees in the newly elevated cities.

Here again, though, the benefit exists only in the regime that allows the exemption; it is not a universal windfall. Taxpayers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, and Ahmedabad who had lazily assumed that nothing important had changed in salary taxation may discover that the ground has moved under their feet in exactly the place where it hurts or helps most: take-home pay.

Why Form 124 Is Not a Regime-Lock Document

On the New Pension Scheme (NPS) point, under the 2025 Act, employer contribution to a notified pension scheme is dealt with in section 124, and where the total income is chargeable under section 202(1), the deduction ceiling for non-government employers rises to 14% of salary. That makes employer NPS structuring one of the most underused advantages of the new regime.

It is attractive precisely because it does not always require fresh personal cash outgo; it can arise from intelligent salary design. But the catch is that it works only where the employer's Cost to Company (CTC) architecture permits it and where the employee understands the trade-offs. It is a tax lever, not a miracle.

Business and professional taxpayers inhabit a harsher landscape. For them, regime choice is not the playful annual toggle available to most pure salary earners. The statutory design continues the asymmetry: where a person has business or professional income, the option once exercised generally applies to subsequent years, may be withdrawn only once, and after withdrawal the person is ordinarily shut out from exercising it again, unless the person ceases to have business or professional income in the manner contemplated by the law.

That means the self-employed consultant, doctor, freelancer, trader, or proprietor who chooses casually in 2026–27 may not merely lose money for one year; he may mortgage flexibility for years. Here, the prudent course is projection, not impulse. One must examine expected profits, the depreciation profile, eligible deductions, capital expenditure plans, and whether the business is moving toward or away from the simplified regime's logic.

Old vs New Tax Regime for Business and Professional Taxpayers: A One-Way Door

Foreign companies and cross-border groups must treat the new Act as a recodification with selected refinements, not as a signal to relax. The broad charging rules, treaty interplay, and international-tax architecture remain recognisably continuous. The CBDT's own transition FAQ says that there is no substantive or procedural change in the advance-ruling framework merely because of the 2025 Act, and that pre-2026 proceedings continue under the old law by virtue of the saving clause.

At the same time, the Finance Bill 2026 FAQ records a significant Advance Pricing Agreement (APA)-related rationalisation: section 169 has been amended so that the associated enterprise of the taxpayer who entered into the APA can also furnish a modified return for covered tax years, reducing the risk of double taxation. That is a serious, practical change. It tells multinational groups that the government wants the new Act to look cleaner without abandoning the certainty tools that matter in real cross-border commerce.

Old vs New Tax Regime and Capital Gains: Why the Old Act Still Governs

There is also a more positive story in the sector-promotion provisions. The 2026 changes have not merely tidied the text; they have selectively used the new Act to steer policy. The Finance Bill 2026 FAQ explains that the list of critical minerals in Schedule XII has been expanded so that prospecting, extraction, and related activities can benefit from the special deduction under section 51.

Similarly, IFSC and offshore banking unit incentives have been lengthened substantially, with the deduction window extended and the post-deduction business income rate for such units fixed at 15%. That tells us something politically important: the 2025 Act is not merely a codification project; it is also a platform for targeted industrial signalling. Taxpayers operating in priority sectors should therefore not ask only, "Old or new regime?" They must ask, "Has my sector been silently moved into a more favourable corridor?"

Non-profit organisations and charitable or religious institutions should resist the temptation to treat the 2025 Act as an event that concerns only salary earners and companies. The new law recasts the compliance vocabulary around the "registered non-profit organisation," and the forms regime shows that registrations, approvals, and their operative status continue to matter keenly.

What a Prudent Taxpayer Should Actually Do Now

What, then, should a prudent taxpayer actually do? The answer differs by category, but the governing principle is the same: compute before you choose, document before you claim, and separate payroll decisions from legal conclusions. Salaried taxpayers should run both regimes with actual rent, actual home-loan interest, real insurance premiums, and the updated HRA city rules, rather than with hypothetical guesswork.

Those near the new-regime rebate threshold should remember that even a modest variation in taxable income can flip the outcome. Employees whose organisations permit salary redesign should evaluate employer NPS contribution early, not in panic at year-end. And nobody should rely on office gossip or viral calculators in a transition year.

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Old vs New Tax Regime: Why the Debate Has Sharpened, Not Ended

The larger critical conclusion is that April 2026 did not settle the regime debate; it sharpened it. The Income-tax Act, 2025 has made the law cleaner on paper but not necessarily easier in practice for the inattentive. The simplification of statutory language does not simplify human behaviour. Indeed, transition years are when taxpayers are most vulnerable to three kinds of nonsense: overconfident advisers who say "nothing has changed," alarmist commentators who say "everything has changed," and software users who think the portal is the law. It is not. The law still lies in the Act, the rules, the saving clause, the forms, and the practical alignment of payroll, proof, and return. That is where the taxpayer's battle will be won or lost in 2026–27.

The resignation of Atanu Chakraborty as the part-time Chairman of HDFC Bank is not merely an individual decision—it is a systemic signal. When placed against his nearly five-year tenure, his RBI-approved extension till 2027, the post-merger integration phase of HDFC Bank with HDFC Ltd, and contemporaneous reports of internal tensions and alleged bond-related irregularities, the episode raises deeper questions about timing, accountability, and institutional transparency.

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To understand why Atanu Chakraborty finally broke his silence, it helps to know what the Dubai issue actually involved. HDFC Bank operates in the UAE, where it was selling a category of financial instruments called Additional Tier-1 (AT-1) bonds to Non-Resident Indian (NRI) clients. These are high-risk instruments — the kind that can be completely written off if a bank runs into serious trouble — and they are emphatically not the sort of product one should sell to ordinary depositors looking for safe returns.

The Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) took note: in September 2025, it restricted HDFC Bank's Dubai branch from onboarding any new clients — a serious regulatory sanction, not a minor administrative hiccup. The bank dismissed this internally as a "technical lapse." That framing, Chakraborty said in a recent interview, was precisely what troubled him. "These practices are not rooted in values," he said, adding that describing the episode as merely technical "doesn't really add to the standards of ethics."

Critically, he also revealed that the delay in addressing this misconduct stretched back eight years — meaning warning signs had existed long before regulators were forced to act. He also clarified that the Dubai matter was not the sole cause of his exit. "It was not issue-based," signalling that what drove him out was not one incident but a cumulative pattern — a governing culture he found increasingly incompatible with his own values.

Atanu Chakraborty Had More Than a Year Left at HDFC Bank — So Why Did He Walk Out When He Did?

The resignation of Chakraborty becomes far more troubling when one places it against the timeline of his own tenure. He was first approved by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as part-time Chairman in April 2021 for a three-year term beginning May 5, 2021, and then reappointed in May 2024 for a further three-year term running until May 4, 2027. He did not, therefore, quit at the natural end of his mandate. He resigned on March 18, 2026, after serving for nearly five years, and notably after having already secured a fresh three-year continuation from the regulator less than two years earlier.

That single fact immediately weakens one easy explanation — that he was simply nearing the end of his term and chose to leave before non-renewal. On the presently available record, he was not in a lame-duck phase at all; he had an RBI-approved term still running for more than a year.

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The bank later said he had not specified the alleged happenings and practices to the board, and Reuters reported that SEBI had begun reviewing whether there were governance breaches, including whether material information had been withheld from minority investors. That does not prove wrongdoing either by the bank or by Atanu Chakraborty. But it does create an uncomfortable possibility that the system was left carrying a loaded ambiguity: either the concerns were serious enough to justify a dramatic ethical exit, in which case they required prompt specificity and escalation, or they were too vague to be dropped into the market in a way that erased billions in value and unsettled depositors and shareholders.

If that account is accurate, then the resignation may not have been triggered by a single compliance lapse or transactional irregularity alone, but by a broader conflict over authority, succession, board influence, and the practical role of a non-executive Chairman in a bank whose executive centre of gravity clearly lay with its CEO.

One concrete example of this friction has since emerged: according to Business Standard, Chakraborty opposed Jagdishan's plan to sell a minority stake in HDB Financial Services — the bank's non-banking finance subsidiary — to Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group in 2024. The proposal did not go through, and the company was eventually listed instead. It is a small but telling detail: a Chairman and a CEO on opposite sides of a significant strategic call. That kind of recurring friction over consequential decisions is precisely the texture that ethical resignation letters compress into a single opaque sentence.

It may sometimes mean not merely "I discovered misconduct," but also "I found the governance climate, decision-making style, or concentration of power unacceptable." That remains an inference, not a proven fact, but it is a grounded one given the contemporaneous reporting.

Atanu Chakraborty's Exit from HDFC Bank Forced the RBI to Do Something It Almost Never Does

The controversy over the bank's bond-selling practices adds another combustible layer. HDFC Bank dismissed three employees, including senior executives, after an internal investigation into the alleged mis-selling of Credit Suisse Additional Tier-1 bonds to NRI clients through its UAE operations.

Earlier reporting had already noted that at least two senior executives were placed on leave amid a probe into alleged mis-selling of those high-risk perpetual bonds, and separate reports said NRI customers had accused bank officials of misuse of deposits to fund those purchases.

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That is precisely why the argument that Atanu Chakraborty should simply be allowed to walk away without rigorous questioning does not sit comfortably with the scale of public interest involved. HDFC Bank is not a boutique private company. The resignation wiped approximately $21 billion from the bank's market value as the sell-off deepened over successive sessions — while the bank itself remains one of India's largest private lenders with enormous retail and shareholder exposure, serving over 12 crore customers.

In such a setting, a non-executive Chairman cannot be treated as a decorative figure who may speak cryptically on exit and then retire into measured silence. If he had genuine and serious misgivings, then regulators such as SEBI and, where relevant, the RBI have a compelling basis to ask him exactly what he saw, when he saw it, whom he informed, what corrective steps he sought, and why the issue crystallised only at that late stage.

If he had been aware of unacceptable practices for a prolonged period and did not escalate them effectively, that too becomes a matter of public importance. And if the letter overstated or ambiguously framed matters without substantiated specifics, that also raises a governance problem of a different kind. Either way, questioning him is not a vendetta; it is a duty owed to depositors, investors, and the integrity of the market.

The institutional response to the resignation is itself worth examining — and it was swifter and more revealing than is typical. Within twenty-four hours, the RBI approved the appointment of Keki Mistry as interim part-time Chairman for a three-month period starting March 19.

HDFC Bank itself moved quickly. On March 24, it announced the appointment of three external law firms — two domestic, Trilegal and Wadia Ghandy & Co, and one US-based — to independently review the concerns raised in the resignation letter. Chakraborty, for his part, dismissed the exercise as a mere compliance formality. That gap between the bank's framing of the review as a governance commitment and the former Chairman's dismissal of it as box-ticking is itself a signal that the two sides remain far apart on what actually needs to be examined.

The concern for minority shareholders is legitimate, but it cannot become a reason to foreclose inquiry into whether those same shareholders were kept in the dark about material governance failures in the first place.

The merger angle cannot be ignored either. HDFC Bank formally completed its merger with HDFC Ltd effective July 1, 2023 — an event the bank described as defining, bringing together systems, processes, employees, and business models from two large institutions.

On paper, it was a synergy story. In practice, any merger of that scale is also a collision of cultures, hierarchies, risk appetites, decision-making traditions, and informal power structures. HDFC Ltd had grown as a housing finance institution with its own legacy, leadership ethos, and operating discipline, while HDFC Bank had evolved under a high-performance banking model with a different managerial tempo and internal command structure.

Reuters noted that Atanu Chakraborty played a pivotal role in that roughly $40 billion merger. It is therefore entirely plausible that some of the unease he later captured in ethical language may have flowed not from one spectacular act, but from prolonged friction in post-merger integration — questions of control, role dilution, operational style, compliance boundaries, or the treatment of inherited practices.

There is no public proof yet that this is what he meant. But as a matter of reasoned analysis, the merger is one of the most serious candidate contexts for understanding why tensions might have ripened over "the last two years" — which is exactly the period his resignation letter referenced.

In the end, the most troubling feature of this episode is not merely that a Chairman resigned. Chairmen do resign. It is that he resigned after a long tenure, after a regulator-approved extension, after helping steer a transformational merger, and after allegedly observing troubling practices over an extended period — yet without publicly specifying the precise trigger until pressed in subsequent interviews.

That leaves three deeply uncomfortable possibilities. Either he saw something serious and waited too long. Or he escalated concerns internally and was unable to prevail in a power structure that reduced the non-executive Chairman's authority to symbolism. Or he chose to compress a complex struggle over governance, culture, and control into a morally charged but factually sparse exit line. None of these possibilities flatters the system. And none justifies treating the matter as closed merely because the resignation has been filed and the chairman has gone home.

From Exit to Accountability: What Must Change After the HDFC Bank-Atanu Chakraborty Episode

The pressure for accountability is not coming from regulators alone. The All India Bank Employees' Association (AIBEA) has written to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman demanding a comprehensive enquiry into the issues raised by Chakraborty. In its letter, the association called the explicit mention of ethical incongruence by an independent Director "highly unusual" and warned that the lack of clarity could erode public confidence in the banking system.

Given that HDFC Bank is designated a Domestic Systemically Important Bank — meaning its failure or instability would have consequences far beyond its own balance sheet — the AIBEA's intervention is not merely symbolic. It reflects a legitimate anxiety that when the Chairman of a bank of this size resigns citing values and ethics, the public deserves more than a legal review commissioned by the very institution under scrutiny.

That anxiety points directly to the structural reforms this episode has made unavoidable.

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The current position — where a Chairman can cite ethical incongruence, decline to elaborate, and exit without consequence or compulsion — is not a feature of a mature governance system. It is a loophole dressed up as discretion.

Equally critical is the need to institutionalise automatic review mechanisms. Any resignation by an independent Director or non-executive Chairman citing ethical concerns — explicitly or implicitly — should mandatorily trigger a limited-scope forensic or governance audit. This must not depend on market pressure or media scrutiny to happen. It should be embedded into regulatory protocol as a matter of course, especially for banks and other systemically important entities.

The appointment architecture must also be revisited. As long as companies appoint their own independent directors and auditors, independence will remain conditional at best and theatrical at worst. A regulator-driven or centrally curated pool for independent directors, under SEBI supervision, would begin to break the network-driven selection bias that currently makes truly adversarial oversight structurally unlikely.

Similarly, Auditor appointment mechanisms must be progressively delinked from direct company control and brought under a more arms-length institutional framework overseen by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs or a strengthened audit regulator.

Post-merger governance audits must also become standard practice. Large integrations such as the HDFC–HDFC Bank merger are not merely financial events — they are governance stress tests. Cultural integration, control structures, and risk management frameworks should be independently assessed within a defined period after completion, rather than assumed to align automatically because the balance sheets have been consolidated.

The fact that Chakraborty's "last two years" of discomfort map almost precisely onto the post-merger period is not a coincidence to be noted and forgotten. It is an argument for making post-merger governance review a regulatory requirement, not an optional exercise.

Finally, disclosure norms must evolve from form to substance. A resignation citing ethical concerns without specificity should no longer suffice as a complete regulatory disclosure. Either the concerns must be articulated with reasonable clarity in the public filing, or regulators must compel confidential disclosure directly to them.

In essence, India must move from a system where resignation absorbs institutional shock to one where it amplifies institutional inquiry. The HDFC Bank episode has revealed, with unusual clarity, a governance architecture that is procedurally compliant, reputationally sensitive, and structurally reluctant to confront its own discomfort.

A Chairman saw something over many years in the making, sat with it for two, and compressed it into a single opaque sentence on his way out. The system accepted that sentence, filed it, and moved to contain the fallout. Until the system is redesigned to refuse that bargain — to insist instead on specificity, escalation, and accountability — the next episode is not a possibility. It is a certainty.

P. Sesh Kumar is a retired 1982-batch officer of the Indian Audit and Accounts Service (IA&AS) who served under the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. Over a distinguished career, he contributed extensively to public sector auditing, financial oversight, and governance reforms across multiple sectors of government. He is the author of several books on public accountability and institutional governance, including CAG: Ensuring Accountability Amidst Controversies—An Inside View and CAG: What It Ought to Be Auditing. His later works broaden the canvas to issues such as financial accountability, India’s MSME and startup ecosystem, medical education reforms, and spiritual reflections on music and Nada Brahma.

West Bengal Voter Deletion: The Voters Who Voted in 2024 But Cannot Vote Today

On April 23, 2026 — polling day in West Bengal — lakhs of Indian citizens are being away from booths. Not because they died. Not because they moved. Not because they did anything wrong. Their names are simply not on the list anymore. The West Bengal voter deletion controversy is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is the story of how elections can be won before a single vote is cast.

Also Read: Donald Trump and Epstein Files: The Scandal Behind the Iran Conflict

Ninety-one lakh people in West Bengal who were on the voter rolls during India's 2024 general elections cannot vote in today's state assembly elections. Every single one of them was accepted as a legitimate Indian voter by the same Election Commission of India just months ago. In less than two years, their names have disappeared from the list. The Election Commission has not released a single number showing how many actual illegal immigrants were detected and removed as a result. Not one name. Not one press release.

This is not just a West Bengal story. This is an India story.

What Is SIR — And Why Was It Revived After 21 Years?

Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is when the Election Commission sends government officials to every household in a state, asks residents to fill a form, and requires them to prove their eligibility to vote.

The exercise is built on one foundation — the 2002 voter roll. The Election Commission decided this list is the benchmark. If your name or your parent's name appears on the 2002 roll, you are presumed to be an Indian citizen. If you cannot be traced back to that roll, you must submit documents proving your citizenship — birth certificates, parent's birth certificates, records going back decades. Many ordinary Indians — migrants, daily wage workers, women who changed their names after marriage, people who moved between states — simply do not have documents linking them to a 23-year-old list. Not because they are foreigners. But because India's record-keeping has never been that precise.

Also Read: General Elections 2024: Explosive Footage Reveals Troubling Reality

Bihar and Assam: The Double Standard That Exposes Everything

Bihar went through SIR in June 2025. The state had nearly 7.89 crore voters when the exercise was announced. Around 47 lakh net voters were subsequently removed — the voter base shrank by nearly 6%. The stated reason was to remove illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. After removing tens of lakhs of people, the Election Commission found and reported zero illegal immigrants.

Assam — which shares a long border with Bangladesh and has been at the centre of the illegal immigration debate for decades — was not subjected to SIR. It received a far softer exercise with no document verification and no 2002 roll linkage. The reason given was Assam's ongoing NRC process. But when the NRC was completed in 2019, it found that more Hindus overall were excluded than Muslims — not the result the BJP had anticipated. The NRC was never formally notified and sits in legal limbo to this day.

Running a full SIR in Assam would have produced the same outcome — flagging large numbers of Hindu people who cannot trace their names to 2002 records. So Assam received a softer exercise. West Bengal — governed by the opposition — received the harshest voter revision exercise in Indian electoral history. Same country. Same election cycle. Same stated justification. Strikingly different treatment.

How the ERONET Algorithm Swallowed 1.67 Crore Voters

The West Bengal voter deletion unfolded in waves, each more alarming than the last. Between November and December 2025, government officers went door to door across the state. By February 28, 2026, when the final voter list was published, 63.66 lakh names had been removed.

Also Read: ECI videos of EVM-Strong Rooms Allegedly Show Fudging: Explosive

The triggers were staggering in their arbitrariness. A spelling variation in a father's name between 2002 and 2025 — Mohammed written as Muhammad — was enough to flag a voter. More than six people mapped to the same grandparent was treated as suspicious. A large joint family was flagged as potential fraud. An age gap between parent and child that the algorithm considered statistically unusual was treated as evidence of falsification.

The Supreme Court itself told the Election Commission that this software was "too restrictive." Together with 31 lakh flagged as unmapped, nearly 1.67 crore people were pulled into this dragnet. Around 60 lakh cases were placed before formal judicial officers — 700 of them brought in from West Bengal, Odisha and Jharkhand, each handling over 1,000 documents a day.

The Names That Should Have Never Been Flagged

If any doubt remains about what this West Bengal voter deletion exercise actually was, consider who was caught in it.

Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winner and one of the most celebrated economists in human history, was flagged because the algorithm calculated the age difference between him and his mother was less than 15 years. He was summoned for a hearing.

Suprabuddha Sen, 88 years old and the grandson of Nandalal Bose — the artist who drew the illustrations in India's Constitution — submitted his passport, pension records, employment documents and matriculation certificate. His name was still deleted.

Mohammad Daud Ali, a Kargil war veteran who submitted his army service records and passport, had his name removed along with his entire family's. He said: "I am a former Indian Army personnel. Today, with deep pain, I have to say that the very country for which I shed blood is questioning my citizenship."

Wing Commander Md Shamim Akhtar, a retired Indian Air Force officer with 17 years of service and a diplomatic passport, was not even called for a hearing — his name was simply deleted.

Former Calcutta High Court Judge Sahidullah Munshi had his name deleted, his wife placed under review, and his son forced to apply as a new voter.

Richa Ghosh, a World Cup winning cricketer, was in Australia on tour with Team India when she discovered her name was under adjudication.

Nandini Chakraborty, the first woman to hold the Chief Secretary's post in West Bengal, had her voting status suspended by the algorithm. 

And Mohammad Shafiul Alam — a Booth Level Officer, one of the very government officials the ECI deployed door to door to verify other people's voter status — had his own name deleted while conducting the exercise.

A Nobel laureate. A Kargil war veteran. A World Cup cricketer. A former High Court judge. A former Chief Secretary. The officer conducting the SIR itself. If the algorithm could not identify these people as legitimate Indian voters — what exactly was this algorithm designed to find?

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

A Democracy's Doors Closed, One by One

After the West Bengal voter deletion, those affected did everything right. They showed up. They produced documents. They faced the system. Every door was shut in their face.

The Supreme Court, when approached, called petitions "premature" and directed people back to the same tribunals that had already proven they could not function. Then, on April 13 — ten days before the first phase of polling — the Supreme Court ruled that anyone whose tribunal appeal was still pending could not vote.

The Court did offer a 'narrow window'—stating that voters cleared by tribunals by April 21st or 27th, will be able to vote in the assembly elections. But with over 34 lakh appeals pending, the math tells a different story. This 'narrow window' is mathematically impossible to fulfill meaningfully. It creates the illusion of opportunity while maintaining the reality of exclusion.

The Supreme Court of India described the right to vote as a "sentimental right." Justice Bagchi said — the right to vote in the country you were born in, is not just constitutional. It is sentimental. It is about being part of a democracy. It is about helping elect your government.

Dr B.R. Ambedkar, when he designed the Election Commission of India, said that no eligible person should be excluded from the voter roll due to — "the prejudice of a local government, or the whim of an officer." What we have witnessed in the West Bengal voter deletion is the Election Commission becoming the whim. And an algorithm becoming the prejudice.

Donald Trump and the Epstein Files: The Scandal Behind the Iran Conflict

Have you noticed how a war happening thousands of kilometers away can suddenly affect life in India? That is exactly what is happening now. The attack on Iran by the US and Israel has caused massive destruction. Over 2,000 people have lost their lives worldwide, more than 15,000 have been injured, and hundreds of thousands of families have been forced to leave their homes.

Also Read: LPG Shortage Risk Grows as Strait of Hormuz Crisis Threatens India

The Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint through which nearly 20 percent of the world’s oil passes, is now unstable. Oil prices have begun rising globally. In India, investor wealth on the Bombay Stock Exchange has dropped by nearly ₹31 lakh crore. The Indian rupee is touching record lows, LPG prices have increased, and there are growing fears that petrol and diesel prices could rise further.

In short, a war far away is affecting the everyday lives of Indians. Economists warn that this conflict could trigger a wave of global inflation.

So why is this happening? Why is the world being pushed toward instability? Looking closely at the available evidence, one clear factor emerges: history can pivot not because of many leaders, but because of the ambitions of a single man — Donald Trump. His pursuit of power is shaking global stability and creating consequences that reverberate far beyond his own interests.

Political observers suggest that the current escalation may be linked to the Epstein files. Donald Trump has long known that the Epstein files contain potentially damaging information against him. He knew that the files could trigger a major political crisis in the United States, potentially leading to impeachment proceedings.

The latest in the series of the Epstein files released by the US Department of Justice contain interviews from 2019 with a woman alleging sexual assault by Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Three previously withheld FBI interview summaries specifically mention Trump. According to these summaries, Epstein took the woman to an island when she was between 13 and 15, where she was introduced to Trump. She alleges that Trump asked everyone to leave the room and then subjected her to sexual abuse. She also recounts that Trump pulled her hair and punched her on the side of her head during the alleged assault. The woman also claims during the FBI interview that Trump and Epstein used terms like “fresh meat,” “untainted,” and “not jaded” while referring to girls.

Also Read: Strait of Hormuz Crisis Shows Insurance, Not Warships, Controls Oil

Given the breadth and gravity of the revelations in the Epstein files, the stakes for Donald Trump extend far beyond personal scrutiny. The implications for his presidency are significant. The U.S. Department of Justice has a long-standing rule: a sitting President cannot be criminally charged while in office. This rule comes from two internal memos written by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. They argue that putting a President on trial would make it impossible for them to do their job. These memos aren’t laws but federal prosecutors follow them.

The US Constitution says a President can be impeached for: “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The Department of Justice has been accused of initially withholding or mismanaging the release of the FBI summaries detailing allegations against Trump. If it is proven that the files were deliberately concealed, it could be considered obstruction of justice — a charge Congress could pursue under impeachment rules.

The House of Representatives would then investigate, draft articles of impeachment, and vote. A simple majority is enough to impeach. The matter would then move to the Senate, which requires a two-thirds majority to remove a president. While removal is challenging, impeachment is not impossible. 

The current Iran conflict may therefore serve as a strategic distraction. Escalating tensions abroad shifts focus from the scandal in the Epstein files, from potential obstruction, and from personal misconduct to national security and wartime leadership.

The war in Iran is not just a geopolitical crisis; it is intertwined with domestic scandals surrounding Donald Trump. The Epstein files may be the scandal behind the bombs, shaping both global events and political narratives. Understanding the link between Trump and the Epstein files is essential to understanding why this conflict is escalating at this particular moment.

For further analysis, watch the full video on this story on the News with Prema Sridevi, where we unpack the connections between the Iran conflict, Donald Trump, and the Epstein files in detail.

A year ago today, gunmen emerged from the forests fringing the Baisaran Valley near Pahalgam and opened fire on a group of tourists, killing 26 people in what became the deadliest terrorist attack on Indian civilians since the 2008 Mumbai massacre. The April 22, 2025 Pahalgam attacks — carried out by operatives of The Resistance Front (TRF), a proxy outfit of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba — was not merely an act of mass violence. It was a systemic stress test: of intelligence networks, of forward deployment doctrine, and of the assumptions underlying Jammu and Kashmir's counter-terrorism architecture. Twelve months on, some hard lessons have been absorbed. But the harder work — building a counter-terror grid capable of getting ahead of a threat that is evolving faster than the institutions designed to contain it — remains unfinished.

Also Read: Pahalgam Terror: A Chilling Indicator of Kashmir’s Fragile Stability

What the Pahalgam Attacks Changed: Three Shifts in J&K's Security Thinking

The first is strategic visibility. Forces are now positioned with greater deliberateness, and the establishment of temporary forward operating bases — notably in the upper reaches of Dachigam and adjoining forest belts during Operation Mahadev — reflects a recognition that static deployment cannot cover terrain where battle-hardened militants move through dense forest over hundreds of kilometres.

The second shift is in operational response. Operation Mahadev itself, the 93-day pursuit that ended on July 28, 2025 with the killing of the three LeT operatives responsible for the Pahalgam attacks, demonstrated something that reactive counter-terror rarely does: sustained, intelligence-fused pressure until the job is done.

The third shift is doctrinal. In February 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs released PRAHAAR — India's first formally codified National Counter-Terrorism Policy — a seven-pillar framework built around prevention, swift response, inter-agency coordination, and the attenuation of radicalisation.Yet for every visible gain, there is a corresponding gap.

More telling still: a key figure in the module, Dr Muzaffar Ahmad Rather, a paediatrician and a resident of South Kashmir, had left India for Afghanistan approximately two and a half months before the blast — reportedly to liaise between the Kashmir cell and Afghan-based jihadists for training in bomb-making and assault techniques. His departure went undetected in real time. He has since been declared a proclaimed offender, with an Interpol Red Corner Notice in process.

The intelligence miss was real, and it exposes a persistent gap: the recognition of changing terror patterns has not yet translated into the pre-emptive detection architecture that PRAHAAR's framework demands.

After the Pahalgam Attacks, a Familiar Problem: Why Terror Networks Outlast the Strategies Designed to Stop Them

The first is the safe haven and porous border advantage. Physical sanctuary — in ungoverned or state-protected territory — allows groups to train, recruit, and plan beyond the reach of designation regimes. After 9/11, Al-Qaeda relocated to Pakistan's tribal belt to evade US military pressure.

After the December 2001 attack on India's Parliament, LeT reorganised under the cover of Jamaat-ud-Dawa — a charitable front operating schools, hospitals, and social services across Pakistan — allowing it to sustain operations under ISI protection while presenting a civilian face to the world. When the 2008 Mumbai attacks brought renewed international pressure, that cover was already in place. TRF follows the same logic today.

Also Read: Red Fort Blast: Bomber Calls It Martyrdom Operation, Not Suicide Bombing

The second is decentralised operations. Cell-based structures insulate organisations from leadership strikes and legal sanctions by distributing operational capacity across semi-autonomous units.

The third is alternative financing. Groups with access to hawala networks, charitable fronts, and diaspora donors can route funds through channels that international banking sanctions cannot easily reach.

Al-Qaeda drew on Gulf-based donors and informal transfer networks to finance its operations, including the September 11 attacks. LeT has sustained itself for decades through Jamaat-ud-Dawa, its charitable front that operates schools, hospitals, and social services across Pakistan under ISI protection — allowing it to fund militancy behind a veneer of welfare work.

Umar Nabi, a doctor employed at Al-Falah University in Faridabad, drove the explosive-laden car that detonated near the Red Fort metro station, killing at least 12 people in what investigators believe was a panicked, premature detonation rather than a planned attack.

The module was not a collection of self-radicalised lone wolves — it was a structured cell, radicalised over years by a Shopian-based cleric, connected to external handlers in Afghanistan, and linked to JeM network. The Pahalgam attacks marked a rupture in Kashmir's security landscape; the Red Fort case suggests the rupture extends well beyond it.

Beyond Reactive Strikes — What a Real Counter-Terror Grid for J&K Must Look Like

The dismantlement of the Indian Mujahideen offers the clearest proof of what a coordinated, intelligence-led counter-terror strategy can achieve. A combination of targeted operations, network mapping, financial disruption, and persistent human intelligence ground down IM's operational capacity over several years, culminating in its effective collapse between 2013 and 2017.

That model — patient, multi-layered, and anchored in understanding an organisation's structure rather than simply reacting to its attacks — is precisely what is needed against TRF today. It is also, as the evidence makes clear, what is still missing.

The key difference is trajectory. IM was an aggressive, high-visibility organisation that announced itself through mass-casualty bombings. TRF is its more disciplined successor: covert, selective, and focused on high-symbolic-value targets designed to generate maximum psychological impact from minimum operational exposure.

The Pahalgam attacks — tourists singled out by religion, killed in a meadow accessible only by foot or horseback, with no security presence — were a case study in this doctrine.

Three structural gaps prevent India's counter-terror architecture from getting ahead of this. First, network-centric operations have not yet penetrated TRF's tightly compartmentalised cells — a failure that reflects the persistent weakness of ground-level human intelligence in rural and forested J&K.

Second, TRF's recruitment of recently radicalised individuals with no prior security footprint makes early detection extremely difficult; these are not people on watchlists.

Third, TRF's tactical adaptability — using hit-and-run patterns to exhaust and disperse security forces, documenting operations for propaganda, and continuously upgrading its communications architecture — means the organisation is not merely sustaining itself. It is improving.

Closing these gaps requires more than operational tempo. It demands a genuine intelligence fusion architecture — combining HUMINT, signals intelligence, drone surveillance, cyber forensics, and satellite imaging into a unified real-time picture — embedded within a broader counter-terror strategy that simultaneously targets TRF's operational cells, financial pathways, and overground support networks.

PRAHAAR provides the doctrinal framework. What remains is the harder, less visible work of building the ground-level capability to make it real. A year after the Pahalgam attacks, that work is urgently unfinished.

To reach developed nation status, India's GDP, currently under 4 trillion dollars, would need to expand to at least 20–21 trillion dollars, given current population levels. Equally important is inclusive growth: the income of even the poorest citizens must rise significantly, from an estimated 200–300 dollars annually to at least 3,000 dollars. Achieving these targets requires sustained and rapid economic growth.

Also Read: Atanu Chakraborty Exit Exposes Gaps Inside HDFC Bank

Why India's Governance Model Needs Structural Reform

However, insufficient attention has been paid to the administrative architecture required to support such growth. India's governance framework continues to be heavily influenced by structures established during colonial rule. While these systems served a purpose in the past, they now require substantial, even structural, reform to attain the goal of a developed nation.

A key reform would be the devolution of power. Social welfare schemes, development programs, and even regulatory functions currently administered by central and state governments should be transferred to local bodies. In countries like the United States, local governments exercise significant autonomy. Recently, during the mayoral elections in New York City in the United States, one statement by a candidate who later became mayor was striking and caught my attention. He said that if the Prime Minister of Israel came to the city, he would have him arrested. This implies that even the city police in New York are under the control of the elected mayor, and he alone appoints the city police chief. This is not only the case in the US — all democratically governed developed economies follow a similar system. Beyond law and order, local governments in developed countries are responsible for planning and implementing all social welfare programs.

This decentralisation contributes to higher efficiency and responsiveness and is one of the factors behind high per capita incomes exceeding 82,000 dollars in the United States. No comparable system exists in India.

Also Read: Strait of Hormuz Crisis Shows Insurance, Not Warships, Controls Oil

Decentralisation: The Key to India's 2047 Developed Nation Goal

This model is not unique to the United States; most developed nations operate with strong, autonomous local governments. Such decentralisation works because local elected representatives better understand regional conditions, challenges, and community needs. They would know most families personally. Their proximity fosters accountability and ensures that development efforts are real and tangible.

Capacity concerns, once a valid argument against decentralisation, are far less relevant today. With rising literacy and human capital, most districts now have capable individuals who can manage governance responsibilities effectively. Just as one cannot learn to swim without entering the water, local institutions cannot develop without being entrusted with real authority. Genuine attempts are also needed to ensure that the required talent of an area gets the opportunity to use their talent to develop their own area.

Devolving Power to Local Bodies — The Way Forward

Local governments must statutorily have the freedom to decide methods, allocate human resources, design infrastructure, and implement programs. The role of central and state governments should shift to that of facilitators, providing technical support, research, and coordination when needed.

Furthermore, several ministries at the national level — such as those dealing with social justice, women and child development, tribal affairs, rural development, panchayati raj, and minority affairs — should be closed or significantly pruned to avoid duplication and inefficiency.

Finally, the relevance of the All India Services, rooted in colonial administrative needs, must be reconsidered. While they played a crucial role in the early decades after independence, they may now be constraining the growth of local administrative capacity and therefore need to be discontinued. Greater emphasis should be placed on developing localized governance systems.

If India is to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation by 2047, it must fundamentally rethink its governance model. Empowering local bodies with real authority, resources, and accountability will be central to driving inclusive and sustainable development.

Dr. Narendra Gupta is a community health physician, co-founder of Prayas (Rajasthan), and a national organiser of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA), with over four decades of work with marginalised communities on health, education, and governance. He played a key role in designing the National Rural Health Mission framework and has been a leading voice in India's public health policy debates.

A group of over 260 academics, lawyers, retired civil servants, journalists, filmmakers, and civil society activists — including some of India's most respected public intellectuals — has issued a sharp statement demanding that the government make public the text of three bills it plans to table during a special three-day session of Parliament scheduled from April 16 to 18, 2026.

Three Bills, Three Days, Zero Public Consultation

On paper, the government's pitch is straightforward: implement 33% women's reservation from the 2029 Lok Sabha elections by amending the 2023 Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, and simultaneously conduct a delimitation exercise that would expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to 816 seats. A third bill would extend the women's quota to Union Territories. Both the reservation amendment and the Delimitation Bill require passage as constitutional amendments — changes that, under normal circumstances, demand the highest level of democratic deliberation. What is happening instead is a three-day sprint.

Also Read: Corbett Tiger Poaching: CBI Names Officers, State Says Nothing Happened

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has written to floor leaders of both Houses urging all parties to unite behind the amendments. Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju has also written to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, arguing the government has already consulted numerous opposition parties.

But neither consultation with some parties nor a letter from the Prime Minister addresses what the statement's 260-plus signatories, and a growing number of constitutional experts, are flagging: that the actual text of these bills is still not in the public domain, that no formal pre-legislative consultation process was followed, and that what India's citizens know about legislation that will reshape their democracy has come from unnamed sources.

The Delimitation Time Bomb: How Seat-Expansion Punishes the South

Of all the controversies swirling around these bills, the one with the most long-term structural danger is delimitation. The proposed 50% expansion of seats — taking the Lok Sabha from 543 to 816 seats and total assembly seats from 4,123 to 6,186 — is not just a numbers exercise. It is a fundamental rebalancing of political power between Indian states, and southern states stand to lose.

Also Read: Atanu Chakraborty Exit Exposes Gaps Inside HDFC Bank

Data modelling by analysts suggests that even if the Lok Sabha stays at its current 543 seats and is simply reapportioned by population, Uttar Pradesh would gain approximately 17 seats alone — more than the combined projected losses of three southern states. Under the government's actual proposal to expand the house to 816 seats, UP's gains would be far larger, with estimates ranging from 40 to 63 additional seats. Either way, the proportional shift is the same: northern states with higher population growth gain political weight, southern states lose it. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin has warned the delimitation exercise could push south India's collective share of Lok Sabha seats to around 24 per cent, describing it as "reengineering power."

The civil society statement does not dwell at length on this north-south dimension, but it sits squarely within it. A delimitation exercise of this magnitude, conducted using 15-year-old data, without public methodology, without state consultations, and rammed through in three parliamentary sittings, is precisely the kind of process that makes it impossible for affected communities, state governments, and ordinary citizens to understand or challenge what is being done to their representation.

The OBC Question: Whose Women Get Reserved?

One fault line that cuts across party lines and the women's rights discourse — but has been almost entirely missing from the government's framing — is the question of which women will actually benefit from women's reservation.

Critics allege this is not incidental. The timing — pushing delimitation and women's reservation before the OBC data is available — ensures that the beneficiaries of women's reservation will skew heavily toward upper-caste and dominant-caste women who already have social capital to contest elections. This is a long-standing critique of the women's reservation framework in India: reservation without sub-categorisation effectively reserves seats for women who are already relatively privileged. 

Democracy in the Dark: The Process That Was Skipped

The legal and democratic case against the process being followed rests on a specific, concrete policy commitment the government made to itself: the Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy adopted by the Union Government in 2014.

This policy mandates that draft legislation be placed in the public domain for at least 30 days before being sent for Cabinet approval, with public comments invited and a summary of feedback published on the ministry's website. Wide publicity through print and electronic media is also required.

Also Read: Is the Indian Navy Ready for Underwater Warfare?

None of this has happened with the Women's Reservation amendment or the Delimitation Bill. As of the date the civil society statement was issued — April 13, 2026, three days before Parliament was to convene — the draft text of these bills had not been made public. The government's own 2014 framework treats this as non-negotiable for legislation with "far-reaching" effects on citizens. Few bills in recent memory have more far-reaching effects than these two.

The statement carries the signatures of 262 individuals. They span the country geographically and represent a wide cross-section of Indian public life. Economist Jayati Ghosh lends her name alongside political scientist and Professor Emerita Zoya Hasan of JNU. Rights activist Teesta Setalvad of Citizens for Justice and Peace has signed, as has filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, transparency activist Anjali Bhardwaj, and former National Federation of Indian Women general secretary Annie Raja.

Retired civil servant and former IAS officer Ashish Joshi is among the signatories, as is former Telangana IAS officer K Sujatha Rao, former Ambassador Madhu Bhaduri, IAS officer MG Devasahayam from Karnataka, and former Chief Secretary of Madhya Pradesh Sharad Behar. The presence of so many former civil servants is significant: these are people who have seen governance from the inside and are flagging that the process being followed is not normal. Nivedita Menon, retired professor from Delhi, Harsh Mander of Karwan e Mohabbat, Nikhil Dey of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, and Apar Gupta, one of India's most prominent digital rights advocates, are also signatories.

What Happens Next

India's 2026 Transgender Amendment Bill Is Transphobia Dressed Up As Protection

Over the past few weeks, the painful truth of the Transgender (Protection) Amendment Bill 2026 has haunted many a trans life. It has led to anxiety, anger, disbelief and at times, an absolute desire to leave India and seek asylum, as some say, in a nation that protects trans lives and is open to welcoming Indian transgender persons.

Also Read: Blood Donation Barriers: Santa Khurai’s Long SC Fight for Trans Rights

The Bill has troubled me as well, as some of the most beautiful people I have gotten to know over the past decade or so, have been transwomen, transmen and non-binary folks.

Even if I didn't know them, I'd be appalled, shocked and infuriated by the bill.

The fact is that every person knows their gender; they know if they fit in or not in the body they were assigned at birth. They know if they are transgender, non-binary, male or female. Some people know this within years of their birth; some take longer, going through long periods of gender dysphoria.

Also Read: Transgender Board Member in UP Accused of Abusing Trans Persons

The thing is, and most people don't realise this, sex is assigned at birth, whereas gender is an internal aspect of the self; it is how you feel, perceive and see yourself. There is no construct to what gender is. Therefore, there are no boxes to fit in and it is harmful for a government, a judiciary, medical body, a family or a society, to put anyone into a box, and deny an individual their rights to self-determine who they are and how they feel.

Also Read: How Does India Treat Members Of LGBTQIA Community? | Fight Transphobia

The law, which is now part of the gazette, having been signed off by the President of India, would actually permit such acts even if the notification doesn't explicitly allow for the kind of atrocity meted out to Grace and others in the past.

Why, you may ask.

The fact is, hate built around societal morality of who is good or bad coupled with 'established' hierarchies of power, 'allows' those in 'authority' and in the majority to abuse minorities. This 'allowance', normalised over the years, often ensures that the oppressor is forgiven or given a mild rap on their knuckles.

To be more explicit, these acts of violence are no different to how rapists of women belonging to 'lower castes' and religious minorities, find a way to wriggle out of any culpability. At times these rapists are celebrated by law enforcers, politicians and society. In many ways, it is much like how women continue to fight to have marital rape criminalised while those against it – mostly men and in 'power' – suggest that marriage effectively allows husbands to 'own' the body of their wives, even if it is unconstitutional and a violation of fundamental rights. So, this violation of a woman's dignity that is common to many homes, is considered permissible, mundane and unquestionable.

Also Read: Shock Treatment, Black Magic, Violence: Ban Conversion Therapy on LGBTQIA+ Community | Fight Transphobia

In a somewhat similar manner, even if the law doesn't allow any such violence against the queer and transgender communities, it is acceptable to many in the majority.

In short, all these forms of hate and abuse, become atmospheric, an eco-system that nurtures the trivialisation of the lives of marginalised people, people who are disempowered in some manner or the other.

The government, as it were, insists that the new law is aimed at protecting 'genuine' transgender persons, ensuring that welfare schemes are not misused. This contention is most certainly odd, if not out of place, when you look at government data itself on what amounts have been spent on the community.

While it is a separate matter that the whole process to apply for an ID card is tedious, traumatic and riddled with obstacles, government expense on welfare schemes is abysmal. According to the welfare budget of 2022-23, just 0.4 per cent of the allocated Rs 30 crore, was used. That is as little as Rs 12 lakh. Additionally, every state in India is expected to have a welfare board as per the 2019 law but as many as 19 states are still to set up one.

Also Read: Delhi Government Scores a Zero on Transgender Welfare | by Dr Aqsa Shaikh

The new law, of course, ensures that the government will spend even less. First, the definition of who is a transgender person has shrunk as the law erases the existence of transmen, transwomen, non-binary people and many who don't belong to the four socio-cultural groups of Aravani, Kinner, Hijra and Jogta. Then, the shameful process of 'proving' one's gender will deter many of those who 'qualify' as per the current law from obtaining ID card and so, will not be in a position to avail of welfare schemes.

The question, therefore, is: while the government keeps reiterating it wants to identify 'genuine' transgender persons and 'protect' the community, is their intent 'genuine' at all? Is it protection or destruction? Is it care or transphobia?

As I said above, the 2026 Act is nearly a clause-by-clause replication of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, meaning an invocation of the British Raj mindset of hate and transphobia. If one adds to this fact that government functionaries defending its law, refer and share unscientific transphobic articles from the USA, it seems obvious that the government has decided to ally with the transphobic lobby in the West, and in doing so, regress rather than progress.

Also Read: Transgender persons reveal shocking stories of bullying and workplace harassment

So, as one can see, the government has not just abandoned its own law of 2019 and disregarded the 2014 NALSA verdict; it has also walked miles away from the 'Indian roots' it has always claimed to be proud of. Those 'roots' include the fact that transgender people existed in Hindu mythology, literature and real life and that no one had to provide evidence for being who they were.

Which means, if there is anything being 'protected' in this law, it is a bias rooted in transphobia and exclusion of an already marginalised community!

Bipartisan calls for President Donald Trump’s removal from office increased on April 7, 2026, after he issued threats to destroy “a whole civilization” if Iran refuses to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Also Read: Donald Trump and Epstein Files: The Scandal Behind the Iran Conflict

Also Read: Strait of Hormuz Crisis Shows Insurance, Not Warships, Controls Oil

The 25th Amendment provides detailed procedures on what happens if a President resigns, dies in office, has a temporary disability or is no longer fit for office.

This article was originally published in The Conversation.

Corbett Tiger Poaching: The Tigers That Died Twice in Uttarakhand

In the forests of Uttarakhand, tigers were skinned, their bones seized, their death records falsified by the very officials meant to protect them, and at least 40 of them died in just two and a half years — a figure so alarming it shocked a High Court bench into calling in the Central Bureau of Investigation.

But this is not just a story about dead tigers. It is a story of how institutions meant to protect India’s wildlife—the forest department, the state government and the courts—looked away, closed files, transferred officers, or filed affidavits saying all was well. It is a story that strikes at the heart of Project Tiger, India's most celebrated conservation programme, launched in 1973 at Corbett itself — the very reserve at the centre of this scandal.

Project Tiger has been held up for decades as proof that India can save its wildlife. The numbers have been cited triumphantly: 178 tigers in Uttarakhand in 2006, growing to 560 by 2022. The State of Uttarakhand quotes these very figures in its April 2026 Supreme Court filing as evidence of conservation success. What those numbers do not say is this — that while the count was rising, tigers were allegedly being skinned in the Haridwar range, their bones seized by a Special Task Force, their death records backdated on the directions of forest officials, their bodies burned without following the National Tiger Conservation Authority's own mandatory protocols, and the one agency that began to uncover all of this was stopped from investigating the case within 26 days.

India has spent decades and thousands of crores telling the world it is saving the tiger. In the forests of Uttarakhand, if the CBI’s findings are to be believed, tiger poaching killed the animal twice—once by the poacher and once by the paperwork.

Also Read: Tiger Reserves in India Depend On Undertrained Workers, Home Guards

The Rarest of Rare Case — And the Stay That Buried It

The story, as far as the courts are concerned, begins in 2018 — though the tiger poaching and deaths had been happening for years before. That year, a startling claim was placed before the Uttarakhand High Court: that in just two and a half years, 40 tigers and 272 leopards had died in the state. The claim came through an intervention application filed by the Gram Panchayat of Dhikuli — a village sitting at the edge of the Corbett landscape — whose lawyer placed before the court the names of active poachers operating in the state, including individuals from the Bawariya criminal tribe of Haryana.

The High Court bench of Acting Chief Justice Rajiv Sharma and Justice Lok Pal Singh were alarmed. The state's own affidavits, the court noted, were "sketchy, evasive and least to say misleading at times."

On 4 September 2018, the High Court passed a landmark order — one that would set in motion a chain of events. Calling the matter "the rarest of rare cases where the expertise of the CBI is solicited," the court directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to hold a preliminary enquiry into all cases of poaching in Uttarakhand in the last five years, find the complicity of serving forest officials, and submit a sealed report within three months.

Within ten days, that order was challenged. D.S. Khati — the retired Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) and Chief Wildlife Warden of Uttarakhand, the most senior wildlife official the state had at the time of the alleged cover-ups — filed a Special Leave Petition before the Supreme Court on 14 September 2018 arguing that the CBI should not investigate the case.

Khati was not a bystander in this story. He was the officer who had presided over Uttarakhand's forest department — including the Corbett Tiger Reserve — during the years the tiger poaching and deaths allegedly occurred. And now he was the officer rushing to the Supreme Court to stop the investigation. His argument, in essence, was this: the High Court had acted improperly, the CBI had no business investigating, and the High Court order should be stayed.

26 Days of Truth, Eight Years of Silence

But before that stay landed, the CBI had already begun. On 26 September 2018, the agency registered a Preliminary Enquiry — formally launching its investigation into unknown officers and officials of the Forest Department of Uttarakhand. The CBI's wildlife crime unit along with officers from the Economic Offences divisions formed multiple teams and fanned out across the state's forest divisions: Haridwar, Almora, Chidiyapur, Gohari and others — the same divisions where Corbett tigers had allegedly been poached, skinned and their deaths buried in falsified paperwork. What they found was deeply disturbing. But even before the investigation could be completed, the Supreme Court froze the CBI's probe.

The CBI later filed an application before the Supreme Court in July 2023 seeking to vacate the stay, warning that evidence was at risk of being destroyed and that the inquiry remained critically incomplete.

The agency had examined 179 persons and scrutinised thousands of pages of documents in just 26 days — and said it had found enough to know that more lay buried. The Supreme Court did not decide the application.

Then, in April 2026 — eight years after the stay was granted — the State of Uttarakhand walked into court with fresh papers arguing that the CBI inquiry was unwarranted, that it would "undermine the morale of field staff" and, most remarkably, that it would create "unnecessary mental and social stress for retired officers." The tigers, presumably, could wait.

Also Read: Uttarakhand Eco Tourism Scam | The Probe Impact: Govt Transfers Bhargav

What the CBI Found in 26 Days

What the CBI found in 26 days should have been enough to keep investigators busy for years. Across multiple forest divisions in Uttarakhand, the agency examined 179 persons — forest officials, police officials, private persons and accused poachers — and scrutinised thousands of pages of documents.

What emerged was not the picture of isolated, accidental tiger deaths that the forest department had been presenting to the courts. It was something far more deliberate. In case after case, the CBI found that the machinery designed to record, investigate and prevent tiger poaching had been systematically subverted from within.

The most explosive finding concerned the official death records themselves.

Then there was the case of the female tiger found dead in Shyampur, Haridwar Range in May 2018 — Range Case RC-17. A complaint had reached the Forest Minister of Uttarakhand directly, reporting the poaching of not one but two tigers in the area. The Minister forwarded the complaint to the concerned Divisional Forest Officer for verification.

What the DFO sent back, the CBI found, was a false report — one that concealed the death of the second tiger entirely. The CBI's finding was unambiguous: there had been a deliberate attempt by forest officials to cover up the death of another tiger. The crucial facts on record had not been explored. The Corbett Tiger Reserve landscape was losing tigers, and the officials entrusted with their protection were, according to the CBI, ensuring those deaths disappeared from the record.

A third case — Range Case RC-44, registered in Chidiyapur in February 2017 — told a similar story. A tiger body had been found during routine patrolling at Koshwali Beat in Haridwar. The forest department investigated, found nothing, and closed the case. When the CBI looked at the same case, it found that necessary documentation had simply not been done. The incineration panchnama — the official record of the burning of the tiger's body, a mandatory step under National Tiger Conservation Authority guidelines designed specifically to prevent the pilferage of tiger skins — did not contain even the basic details of when the incineration took place.

Running through all of these cases was a single, devastating thread — the complete and systematic violation of the National Tiger Conservation Authority's own protocols for handling tiger and leopard deaths. These protocols exist for one reason: to ensure that when a tiger dies, its skin cannot be harvested and sold. They require incineration in the presence of senior officials, photography, video recording, preservation of viscera and its dispatch to the Wildlife Institute of India for examination.

The CBI found that across the Corbett region and beyond — in Haridwar, Almora, Chidiyapur — these protocols had been ignored case after case, year after year. The conclusion the CBI drew was stark: had proper investigation been conducted in these cases, it would have led to tracking the role of bigger players involved in the tiger poaching network. Instead, the lack of sincere and effective investigation, in the CBI's own words, "might have caused injustice."

Also Read: Bandhavgarh Elephant Deaths: A Tragic Failure in Wildlife Management

The State Defends Corbett. The Documents Tell Another Story.

When the State of Uttarakhand filed its counter affidavit before the Supreme Court in April 2026, it arrived with a confident central argument: that Corbett Tiger Reserve and the broader Uttarakhand landscape represent one of India's greatest conservation achievements. The State told the court that tiger numbers rose from 178 in 2006 to 560 in 2022, making it the third largest population in India, as per the National Tiger Conservation Authority.

The CBI's own preliminary findings — drawn from range cases registered during the very years the State cites as its conservation triumph — found tiger skins and bones seized in Haridwar, death records falsified, and a tiger death concealed from the Forest Minister himself. Using rising tiger numbers to claim there was no poaching is misleading, as the court had earlier said about the State’s affidavits.

The State also leans on a geographical argument. It quotes an NTCA affidavit filed before the High Court stating that the 2016 tiger poaching incident occurred "at the border of the Lansdowne Forest Division and the Corbett Tiger Reserve" — not within Corbett Tiger Reserve's territorial limits per se — and that the tigers involved were dispersing individuals. This is presented as a defence of Corbett's management. But the NTCA's own statement confirms that tiger poaching did occur — it merely disputes the exact location.

The State then tells the court that since 2019, no cases of tiger poaching have been reported in Corbett or Rajaji Tiger Reserve — evidence, it argues, that its strengthened protection measures, new chowkis, drones, e-surveillance towers and a Special Operations Group, have worked. What this argument cannot answer is the CBI's central finding: that the forest department's own system for recording tiger deaths had been compromised.

The H-2 proforma — the foundational document through which tiger deaths are reported — was found falsified on the directions of officials who were named by the CBI. If the recording system was deliberately corrupted, the absence of reported tiger poaching cases proves nothing. The State cannot simultaneously argue that its record-keeping is reliable enough to prove tiger poaching has stopped, while the CBI has found that the same record-keeping was intentionally falsified.

The State also attacks the credibility of Rajiv Mehta — the NGO head whose complaints helped bring the matter to court — revealing that his organisation received ₹1.34 crore from foreign donors for conservation work in the Corbett-Rajaji landscape without the required permission from the Chief Wildlife Warden, and failed to furnish utilisation details despite repeated notices.

His complaints, the State argues, are therefore "motivated, retaliatory, and lack credibility." But this argument has a structural flaw the State appears not to notice. Even if every allegation against Mehta were true, it would have no bearing on what the CBI found independently.

Perhaps the most remarkable passage in the April 2026 filing is its closing argument. The State tells the Supreme Court that allowing the CBI to resume its inquiry would "undermine the morale of field staff working in harsh conditions," create "unnecessary mental and social stress for retired officers," and produce a false narrative about the failure of wildlife conservation in Uttarakhand.

It is, in essence, an argument that the feelings of forest officials should be weighed against accountability for Corbett tiger poaching. The CBI found prima facie connivance of forest officials with poachers, falsified tiger death records, a cover-up that reached the Forest Minister's office, and systematic violation of NTCA protocols across multiple forest divisions over multiple years.

The State's answer to all of this, filed eight years after the inquiry was frozen, is that completing the investigation would be stressful for retired officers.

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

Eight Years of Silence. The Poachers Are Still Out There.

The CBI's own preliminary findings pointed to bigger players behind the tiger poaching network — the kind of organised wildlife crime mafia that state agencies, however well-intentioned, are structurally ill-equipped to dismantle alone.

If poachers do not fear the CBI, they will not fear the state forest department, the Special Task Force or the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. The eight-year freeze has not just delayed justice — it has actively emboldened those who profit from India's most protected animal.

The responsibility for what has happened in Uttarakhand's forests does not rest with one officer or one department alone. India's tiger conservation architecture involves some of its most powerful institutions — the National Tiger Conservation Authority, which sets the protocols that were allegedly violated; the Wildlife Institute of India, whose forensic science confirmed the seized skins were tiger skins; the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, whose mandate is precisely the kind of organised poaching network the CBI was beginning to unravel; and the Supreme Court of India itself, whose stay order has functioned for eight years as an institutional shield for the accused.

Each of these bodies has a founding purpose rooted in the protection of the tiger — an animal that India has spent fifty years and thousands of crores of public money trying to save.

Delhi High Court Intervention Puts Saroj Hospital and Nursing Regulation Under the Lens

On February 3, 2026, the Delhi High Court once again turned its attention to a case that has lingered for nearly eight years, raising uncomfortable questions about medical oversight, regulatory enforcement and patient safety in the national capital. At the centre of the proceedings is Saroj Super Speciality Hospital, where Gargi Meena died in March 2018 after being admitted for what her family describes as mild menstrual pain.

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

This is a story that has unfolded slowly—through courtrooms, regulatory offices and painstaking scrutiny of official records. It is also a story shaped by sustained public-interest reporting that has kept attention on a case many believed had been quietly buried.

From a routine hospital visit to a death inside Saroj Hospital

On March 29, 2018, Gargi Meena walked into Saroj Hospital in Delhi. According to her family, she was experiencing mild abdominal pain associated with menstruation—discomfort they believed could be treated with medication. Within hours of her admission, doctors at Saroj Hospital recommended surgery, warning the family that failure to act could prove fatal.

Two days later, on March 31, 2018, Gargi Meena was declared dead.

We are able to report stories like this only because of public support. Even a small contribution helps us uncover unreported stories and stand with families seeking justice. Support our work here: TRUTH BRIGADE

Also Read: Jaslok Hospital: "Punctured Lungs, Trial Drug & Errors Killed My Wife"

Uttam Chand Meena, her husband, has consistently alleged that the care provided inside Saroj Hospital amounted to gross medical negligence. He has described a series of decisions that, in his account, were made under pressure and fear.

Inside the operation theatre and the ICU

According to Meena, Gargi entered the operation theatre smiling. “She was absolutely fine,” he said. “She was joyful. How could anyone say she would bleed to death in a few hours?”

Gargi Meena in Saroj Super Specialty Hospital, Delhi | Photo Courtesy: Family

After surgery, he alleges, her pain intensified. He described confusion over basic post-operative care and a lack of clear communication from hospital staff. By the following morning, he was informed that Gargi’s blood sugar levels had spiked dangerously and that she was being moved to the intensive care unit.

“At around 11 am, they took another high-risk consent,” Meena said. “I was helpless.”

Later that evening, he claims, the hospital raised concerns about payment and demanded medicines before continuing treatment, despite his eligibility for cashless government medical facilities.

In the early hours of March 31, Gargi was placed on a ventilator. At 4.12 am, Saroj Hospital declared her dead.

Also Read: Yashoda Hospital Under Scrutiny After Hernia Surgery Turns Fatal

The slow turn to records, RTI replies and the Delhi High Court

For several years after Gargi’s death, the case moved haltingly through complaints, representations and appeals. A critical shift came when Meena began filing applications under the Right to Information Act, seeking details about the staff employed at Saroj Hospital at the time of his wife’s admission.

What emerged from those RTI replies would eventually bring the Delhi High Court back into the picture.

Documents suggested that many nurses working at Saroj Hospital in March 2018 may not have been registered with the Delhi Nursing Council, a statutory requirement under the Delhi Nursing Council Act.

Armed with these findings, Meena approached the Delhi High Court, seeking accountability not only from the hospital but also from regulators tasked with ensuring compliance.

What the Delhi Nursing Council told the court

In its submission to the Delhi High Court, the Delhi Nursing Council reported that of 245 nurses working at Saroj Hospital during Gargi Meena’s admission and death, only 113 were registered with the council.

Also Read: Yashoda Hospital: Senior Citizen Alleges Medical Negligence Claimed Wife’s Life

The implications of these finding were difficult to ignore. Nurses, unlike doctors, often provide round-the-clock patient care—administering medication, monitoring vitals and responding to emergencies.

Delhi Nursing Council report | Courtesy: Special arrangement

“When you remove the few minutes a doctor spends with a patient, the remaining 23+ hours are with the nurse,” Meena said. “If that nurse is unqualified or unregistered, what happens to the patient?”

The law, the gaps and the unanswered questions

Prashant Vaxish, counsel for Uttam Chand Meena, told The Probe that the law is unambiguous. “Section 17 of the Delhi Nursing Council Act mandates that every individual practising nursing within Delhi must be registered with the Delhi Nursing Council,” Vaxish said. “There is no exception to this.”

He also pointed to the role of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), which oversees hospital licensing under the Nursing Homes Registration Act.

“At the time of licence renewal, hospitals are required to submit a list of registered nurses to the DGHS,” Vaxish said. “The question is how these records were examined if such large-scale non-registration went unnoticed.”

“The reality,” he added, “is that laws are being kept only in the books while citizens suffer.”

The Delhi High Court’s February 2026 order

On February 3, 2026, the Delhi High Court held that Uttam Chand Meena’s grievance was genuine and could not be brushed aside. The court directed the Delhi Nursing Council to conduct a comprehensive examination of records and pass an order within six months.

The court’s language was measured but firm, signalling that earlier approaches—relying largely on documents submitted by the hospital—were insufficient.

This was not the first time the Delhi High Court had intervened in the case. In 2021, it had ordered physical verification of records as they stood on March 31, 2018. In 2023, dissatisfied with the work of Delhi Nursing Council, the court stepped in again, seeking greater clarity.

The February 2026 order marks yet another chapter in the court’s prolonged engagement with the case.

A pattern revealed through sustained reporting

The renewed judicial scrutiny did not emerge in isolation. Over the past two years, a series of investigative reports examined Gargi Meena’s death, the conduct of Saroj Hospital, and the role of regulators tasked with oversight.

From the first detailed investigation published in June 2024 to subsequent regulatory action, The Probe's reporting traced how warnings were issued, ignored or inadequately addressed.

Meena has maintained that these actions do not reflect the gravity of what occurred. His petition seeking stricter punishment remains pending before the Delhi High Court.

Nursing regulation and the larger public interest

Beyond individual accountability, the case of the Saroj Hospital has drawn attention to the structure—and weaknesses—of nursing regulation in Delhi.

On April 1, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the nation in a prime-time speech about Operation Epic Fury — the month-old American military campaign against Iran. He spoke of overwhelming victory, obliterated enemies, and a United States now fully free of Middle East oil dependency. He claimed he never sought regime change — even as he took credit for wiping out Iran's entire leadership. He described a violent military takeover of Venezuela as a "joint venture."

Also Read: Trump Signals Iran War Exit as NATO Fractures and AI Warfare Rises

'Iran's Military Is Obliterated' — So Why Is the War Escalating?

Trump opened his speech with a sweeping declaration: Iran's navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders are dead. "Never in the history of warfare," he said, "has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks."

If Iran's army, navy, and air force are truly obliterated — why is the United States preparing to hit them 'extremely hard' for the next two to three weeks?

U.S. intelligence assessments obtained by American media told a different story from Trump's victory lap. The National Intelligence Director's own testimony to lawmakers on March 18 stated that the Iranian regime remains "intact but largely degraded" — not obliterated, not collapsed, not finished.

Most damning of all: in the same speech where Trump declared Iran's military gone, he also promised the United States would hit Iran "extremely hard over the next two to three weeks" and threatened to bomb every one of their electricity-generating plants "simultaneously." You do not need to pound a destroyed military. The contradiction is self-defeating.

The 'Stone Ages' Threat vs. The Peace Narrative

Throughout his address, Trump tried to walk a fine line — presenting himself simultaneously as a decisive commander who had won the war and a pragmatic leader open to negotiation. The line collapsed almost immediately.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian published a lengthy open letter to American citizens hours before Trump's speech, noting that Iran had been engaged in good-faith negotiations before the United States walked away from the table. "Exactly which of the American people's interests are truly being served by this war?" he asked.

The answer from Trump's speech appeared to be: none he could clearly name. He offered no exit plan, no diplomatic roadmap, and no definition of what victory would actually look like. He said operations were "nearing completion" — the same phrase he has used repeatedly for over three weeks.

Also Read: Donald Trump and Epstein Files: The Scandal Behind the Iran Conflict

The Strait of Hormuz Oil Lie — And Why It Matters for Every American

One of the most consequential falsehoods in Trump's April 1 speech was his claim that the United States "imports almost no oil through the Strait of Hormuz" and is therefore immune to the disruption his own war has caused.

This is false, and the numbers prove it.

But the deeper point Trump is either unwilling or unable to acknowledge is this: oil is a global commodity. Even if American imports through Hormuz were zero, a supply disruption of this magnitude pushes global crude prices upward — and American consumers at the pump pay those prices regardless of where the barrel originated. Brent crude has risen more than 40 percent since the war began. Gas prices are climbing. Americans are feeling it.

Trump blamed this directly on Iran, claiming Tehran targeted commercial tankers and caused the fuel crisis. What he did not say: it was his decision to strike Iran — in the middle of active negotiations — that triggered the closure of the Strait in the first place. His war created the disruption his own citizens are now paying for.

Venezuela: A Military Invasion Rebranded as a 'Joint Venture'

In what may be the most surreal passage of the entire speech, Trump paused his Iran war update to celebrate the takeover of Venezuela — describing it in terms that would be at home in a corporate merger announcement.

He called it 'lethal' and 'violent' — then, in the next breath, a 'joint venture.' This is not spin. This is a fundamental rewriting of reality.

The United States has effectively seized control of Venezuela's oil exports — the second-largest reserves in the world — through military force. In the same speech, Trump cited this as evidence of American energy independence and as justification for why the Strait of Hormuz crisis does not matter. The logic only works if you ignore that a sovereign nation was taken by force and is now being exploited for its natural resources.

Also Read: Strait of Hormuz Crisis Shows Insurance, Not Warships, Controls Oil

The Regime Change Lie: Denied, Then Claimed in the Same Breath

Perhaps the most audacious contradiction in Trump's entire address came near its close, when he addressed the question of regime change in Iran.

"Regime change was not our goal," Trump said. "We never said regime change."

He then, in the same passage, took full credit for the fact that Iran's entire original leadership is now dead and a new, supposedly more moderate group is in place.

Western intelligence officials and Iran experts have also pushed back on the claim that Iran's new leadership is more moderate. Multiple assessments suggest the officials who have replaced the killed leaders are equally hardline — in some cases, more so.

The World Is Watching — But Not in Admiration

Trump closed his April 1 address with a characteristic flourish, describing a world watching in awe at American military brilliance. "They leave it to your imagination," he said, "but they can't believe what they're seeing."

Trump's speech on April 1, 2026 was not a war update. It was a performance — one designed to project strength to a domestic audience increasingly alarmed by rising prices and a war that was never put to a public vote. The polls have consistently shown majority opposition to U.S. military action in Iran. The speech did nothing to address that reality.

Humanity Prepares to Return to Deep Space

For the first time in over five decades, humans are preparing to venture beyond Earth’s orbit, marking a historic shift in space exploration. The NASA Artemis II mission is set to become the first crewed journey to deep space since 1972, when the Apollo era came to a close.

Unlike previous missions confined to low Earth orbit, Artemis II aims to re-establish humanity’s presence in deep space, orbiting the Moon and paving the way for a long-term return.

Also Read: New Planet Discovered 146 Light-Years Away Raises Habitability Hopes

A 50-Year Gap Since Apollo

Artemis II represents a decisive break from that pattern. It is not merely a symbolic return but a foundational step toward sustained lunar exploration and eventual missions to Mars.

Artemis: From Race to Collaboration

The Apollo program was driven by geopolitical competition, culminating in the first Moon landing. In contrast, Artemis is built on international collaboration, involving multiple space agencies and partners.

The goal has evolved—from simply reaching the Moon to building a long-term human presence there. Artemis II serves as a critical bridge between past achievements and future ambitions.

Also Read: Deepfakes Leveled Up in 2025 — Here’s What’s Coming Next

Inside the Artemis II Mission Plan

Scheduled for launch on 1 April 2026, Artemis II will carry four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft, powered by the Space Launch System (SLS)—one of the most powerful rockets ever developed.

The mission will last approximately 10 days and follow a carefully designed trajectory:

• Launch from Kennedy Space Center
• Earth orbit phase to test onboard systems
• Three-day journey toward the Moon
• Flyby of the Moon’s far side
• Return trajectory leading to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean

A key element of the mission is the “free return trajectory,” an orbital path that uses the Moon’s gravity to guide the spacecraft back to Earth, ensuring crew safety even in the event of system failure.

Testing Technology—and Human Limits

At its core, Artemis II is a test flight designed to answer critical questions about deep space travel:

Can life support systems sustain astronauts far from Earth?

How will navigation and communication systems perform at such distances?

What are the effects of deep space radiation on the human body?

These insights are essential for the success of future missions, particularly Artemis III, which aims to land astronauts on the Moon.

A Mission Driven by Purpose

The four-member crew—comprising a commander, pilot, and two mission specialists—will focus on testing the spacecraft’s systems and performance ahead of future lunar landing missions.

Why Artemis II Matters

Artemis II is more than a single mission—it is a turning point. It marks humanity’s transition from short-term exploration to long-term presence beyond Earth.

By validating technologies and strategies, the mission will enable:

• Permanent lunar exploration infrastructure
• Scientific research on the Moon
• Preparation for human missions to Mars

The mission is expected to provide clarity on timelines, risks, and readiness for the next phase of lunar exploration. Decisions taken after Artemis II will likely determine how quickly crewed landings and long-duration missions can move forward.

For space agencies involved, the outcome will not just shape the Artemis program, but set the direction of human spaceflight for the coming decades.

The World Order Changes Rapidly

If one goes by the Wall Street Journal, US President Donald Trump is willing to end the war without really concerning himself with the status of the Strait of Hormuz. Their plan, Trump asserts, is to degrade Iran’s naval and military prowess and move out. This sudden turnaround would likely not find agreement with his partner in this horrendous conflict, Netanyahu, who has waged a bloody war against Iran and targeted their Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

Also Read: Strait of Hormuz Crisis Shows Insurance, Not Warships, Controls Oil

Contrary to this, the valour displayed by the Iranian people against the illegal US attacks—following their intense June confrontation when Washington claimed it had destroyed Iran’s nuclear facility in Isfahan using bunker busters—has been significant. President Donald Trump did not adequately explain the intent behind the US attack. The only explanation came from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said that if the US had not joined Israel’s air strikes, Iran would have attacked US assets in the region. Compared to Trump’s arrogance, the Secretary’s statement was a lazy attempt to provide moral justification for US military actions in the West Asian region.

Donald Trump has promised to address the nation tonight (US time) at 9:30 pm. His decision has triggered intense speculation. Some claim that he is likely to withdraw from this war and allow European powers, including the UK, to fend for themselves. UK Prime Minister Starmer, criticised for his ambivalence, has addressed his nation, as has Australian PM Albanese. It is unusual for three world leaders to address their nations on the same day, suggesting that this war has disrupted established global arrangements. In other words, the UK and NATO seem to have severed their links with the US. This is a significant development, highlighting the potential collapse of the Atlantic alliance forged after the Second World War.

Also Read: Is the Indian Navy Ready for Underwater Warfare?

In other words, the US attack on Iran has had multiple repercussions. It marks not just the potential end of multilateralism but also challenges globalisation as we know it. Although President Trump began his second term attempting to undermine BRICS and the dedollarisation movement, this month-long war has produced unexpected outcomes.

India is treading carefully, aiming not to antagonise the US or Israel while preserving its relationships with Iran and other nations. Thanks to support from Russia and Iran, India continues to maintain energy supplies, even amid global shortages. While discounted oil from Moscow may not be available as before, access to reasonably priced oil is critical. For now, India has avoided an LPG crisis, though risks remain if the US and Israel target Kharg Island, where 90 percent of Iran’s oil is located.

This has been a bloody conflict, possibly the first Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted war the world has seen. Before the US and Israel bombed Iran, President Trump attempted to persuade AI firm Anthropic to share its flagship AI, Claude, with the US defense forces. Despite initial resistance from its founder, Trump and his aides prevailed.

The speed of US air strikes, guided by Claude analysing past data, was unprecedented. However, a tragic mistake occurred when a girls’ school was bombed, killing 168 children. Many historical sites and residential areas in Isfahan have also suffered under the guise of targeting nuclear capabilities. Media coverage has been heavily skewed to favour Israeli and US narratives.

More details will emerge tomorrow.

The Probe Impact: Administrative Action Begins

In April 2025, during our investigation into Uttar Pradesh’s bonded labour crisis, we met several rescued families of bonded labourers. such meeting took place in Banhera Khas village in Saharanpur district. Among them was Gulfan, a bonded labourer who had been rescued from a brick kiln in Ghaziabad..

In an interview with The Probe in 2025, Gulfan said he had travelled to Loni in Ghaziabad to work at a brick kiln, a move that resulted in months of confinement and exploitation for him and his family.

Also Read: Saharanpur Bonded Labour Crisis: Children Expose Exploitation

What Gulfan endured inside the Ghaziabad brick kiln

For the next six months, Gulfan said, the family worked without wages. The ₹5,000 advance was used to justify continuous unpaid labour, and he told us he did not receive a single rupee during this period. His wife, who was pregnant with their third child at the time, continued to work under these conditions. When she went into labour and had to be taken to hospital, Gulfan said he was not permitted to accompany her. The kiln staff, including a man he identified as Ramesh, managed her hospital visit while restricting his movement.

According to Gulfan, the kiln in Ghaziabad was closely guarded, with nearly a dozen security personnel stationed at the site. Workers were not allowed to leave the premises, and surveillance systems, including CCTV cameras, were in place. Movement was monitored, and any attempt to step outside was prevented. Gulfan and his family remained in these conditions until April 2023, when they were rescued following efforts by the National Campaign Committee for Eradication of Bonded Labour (NCCEBL). The rescue took place after action by the District Magistrate of Ghaziabad and the Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Loni.

Also Read: Baghpat Bonded Labourer Breaks Silence

District administration acts in Ghaziabad Bonded Labour case

Official records reviewed by The Probe indicate that the Ghaziabad district administration has initiated action in Gulfan’s case. In submissions made by District Magistrate Ravindra Kumar Mandar before the Allahabad High Court, it is stated that Gulfan, his wife, and their children were identified as victims of bonded labour at the time of their rescue. The communication also acknowledges delays in the administrative response.

The District Magistrate further recorded that on 3 November 2025, a summary trial was initiated by a Labour Enforcement Officer in the court of the Sub-Divisional Magistrate in Loni. As the brick kiln owner failed to produce employment records, prosecution was initiated under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1961, in the court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Ghaziabad.

Gaps between official records and ground reality

He further added, “I recently spoke to Gulfan, and he said he has not received a release order, release certificate, interim relief, or compensation. The release order is the first formal recognition by the district administration that a person was a bonded labourer. Only after that can a release certificate be issued, which then enables access to rehabilitation under central schemes. Without these steps, the entire process remains incomplete. On paper, everything may appear compliant in Ghaziabad, but the ground reality tells a different story.”

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

On 9 December 2025, the NCCEBL wrote to the District Magistrate of Baghpat seeking rehabilitation measures for Gulfan and his family under the Central Sector Scheme for Rehabilitation of Bonded Labour, 2021. The request outlined entitlements including ration cards, housing assistance, allocation of agricultural land, school admissions for children, skill development support, minimum wages, and other financial and non-financial benefits. A reminder was sent on 2 January 2026, underscoring the urgency of these measures. However, according to Gorana, no substantive relief or response has been provided by the authorities.

The Probe attempted to contact Gulfan, but he was not reachable on his previously available phone numbers. Queries were also sent to the offices of the District Magistrates of both Ghaziabad and Baghpat, seeking clarity on the implementation of the stated actions and the current status of the case. Both offices indicated that details would be shared soon. This report will be updated upon receipt of their responses.

When Watchdogs Are Watched — SEBI’s Double Signal to Boardrooms and Itself

In a rare moment of regulatory introspection, India’s market watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), has delivered a twin message that could redefine corporate governance.

These two developments, arising almost simultaneously, are not isolated corrections; they represent a structural shift in India’s corporate governance philosophy—from symbolic compliance to documented accountability. 

The Moment of Reckoning: Two Signals, One Message

Every regulatory regime has its defining moment—when it stops managing perception and begins confronting reality. For India’s corporate governance framework, that moment appears to have arrived.

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SEBI’s response, articulated by its chairman, Tuhin Kanta Pandey, cut through the ambiguity. Independent directors, he made clear, must act responsibly—and responsibility includes ensuring that concerns are formally recorded within the board’s institutional processes. Governance cannot be conducted through hints.

The second signal, less dramatic but more profound, came from within SEBI itself. The regulator’s board approved sweeping changes to disclosure and conflict-of-interest norms for its own senior officials—covering the chairperson, whole-time members, and key officers. These include mandatory disclosures of assets and liabilities, tighter scrutiny of financial interests, restrictions on trading, and structured recusal mechanisms.

The two developments, when read together, reveal a deeper shift: SEBI is no longer content policing governance—it is attempting to embody it.

The Provocation: Crisis of Credibility, Not Just Compliance

Regulatory change rarely emerges in a vacuum. It is almost always provoked.

In India’s case, the provocation has been twofold.

First, the credibility deficit in boardroom conduct. Independent directors have too often been caught in a paradox. When they stay silent, they are accused of complicity. When they resign, they often do so in language that creates more confusion than clarity. The result is a governance vacuum where neither accountability nor transparency is achieved.

Second, the credibility challenge within the regulator itself. The controversy surrounding allegations against former SEBI leadership—whether ultimately substantiated or not—raised uncomfortable questions. Could a regulator enforce the highest standards on listed entities while operating under comparatively softer internal norms? The answer, increasingly, was seen as unsatisfactory.

The High-Level Committee on conflict of interest, constituted by SEBI in 2025, was a direct response to this discomfort. Its recommendations—now partly translated into regulatory action—seek to eliminate not just actual conflicts, but the perception of conflict.

Because, in financial markets, perception is not a side issue. It is the market.

Let us now examine the implications of the two developments referred to above.

The HDFC Bank Episode: When Silence Moves Markets

HDFC Bank’s governance episode in 2026 did not involve a fraud, nor a regulatory breach. Yet it unsettled markets. The trigger was the resignation of its chairman, who cited differences relating to “values and ethics.”

What followed was revealing. The market reacted not to facts, but to the absence of them. The RBI had to step in to reassure stakeholders about the bank’s stability. The board initiated an external review of governance processes. The regulator, SEBI, publicly emphasised that independent directors must act responsibly and avoid ambiguity.

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

ICICI Bank & Chanda Kochhar: When Oversight Failed the Test

The controversy involving ICICI Bank and its former CEO, Chanda Kochhar, remains one of India’s most instructive governance failures.

For a considerable period, the board publicly expressed confidence in the CEO, even as questions mounted. Only after sustained scrutiny did the bank commission an independent inquiry, which eventually found violations of internal codes of conduct.

The case exposed a structural weakness: independent directors often lack either the information, the assertiveness, or the institutional support to challenge powerful executive management in real time. The result is delayed accountability.

The ICICI episode demonstrates that independence without vigilance is ineffective—and vigilance delayed is vigilance denied.

SEBI & Madhabi Puri Buch: When the Regulator Faces Scrutiny

The controversy surrounding Madhabi Puri Buch marked a rare moment when the spotlight shifted from the regulated to the regulator.

Allegations—strongly denied—relating to potential conflicts of interest triggered intense debate about SEBI’s internal governance standards. While no conclusive wrongdoing was established in the public domain, the episode raised a deeper question: are the regulator’s own conflict-of-interest norms sufficiently robust and transparent?

The answer, implicitly, was no.

A regulator that demands transparency must itself be transparently governed. Otherwise, its authority risks erosion—not through legal challenge, but through loss of trust.

LEEL Electricals: When Audit Committees Miss the Smoke

The case of LEEL Electricals Ltd., culminating in a SEBI enforcement order in 2024, highlights the consequences of weak board oversight.

The company was found to have engaged in fund diversion and misstatements of financials, with transactions routed through related entities. What drew regulatory attention was not merely the misconduct, but the apparent failure of the audit committee—dominated by independent directors—to detect or act upon red flags.

SEBI’s order emphasised that independent directors cannot claim ignorance where due diligence was expected. Audit committees are not ceremonial—they are designed to function as the first line of defence against financial irregularities.

The LEEL case reinforces a hard truth: where systems of oversight exist but are not exercised, responsibility does not disappear—it accumulates.

Enron: The Global Benchmark of Governance Collapse

The collapse of Enron in 2001 remains the defining global example of governance failure.

Despite having a board filled with distinguished independent directors, Enron engaged in complex off-balance-sheet transactions to hide debt and inflate profits. The audit committee, despite its credentials, failed to fully understand—or challenge—the financial engineering at play.

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The aftermath led to sweeping reforms in the United States, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which dramatically strengthened audit committee responsibilities, internal controls, and executive accountability.

Enron’s enduring lesson is stark: formal independence is meaningless without financial literacy, scepticism, and the courage to question management narratives.

Wirecard: When Regulators and Boards Both Failed

The collapse of Wirecard in 2020 exposed failures not only of corporate governance but also of regulatory oversight.

The company falsely reported billions of euros in cash that did not exist. For years, auditors, independent directors, and regulators failed to uncover the fraud. In fact, whistleblowers and journalists who raised concerns were initially dismissed or investigated.

The scandal forced Germany to overhaul its financial regulatory architecture, strengthening audit oversight and enforcement mechanisms.

Wirecard demonstrates that governance failures can be systemic. When boards, auditors, and regulators all fail simultaneously, the cost is not just financial—it is reputational at a national level.

These case studies, when read together, reveal a pattern that is impossible to ignore.

In HDFC Bank, the failure was not fraud but ambiguity.

In ICICI Bank, it was delayed oversight.

In LEEL Electricals, it was ineffective audit committee vigilance.

In the SEBI episode, it was the regulator confronting its own credibility gap.

In Enron and Wirecard, it was systemic collapse despite formal structures.

The common thread is clear: governance fails not because rules are absent, but because they are not exercised with rigour, clarity, and accountability.

This is precisely what SEBI’s twin interventions seek to address.

By insisting that independent directors document concerns, the regulator is attacking ambiguity.

By tightening its own disclosure norms, it is addressing credibility.

Together, these moves attempt to close the loop between oversight and trust.

The integration of these cases into India’s evolving governance framework offers a powerful insight.

India is now at such a moment.

SEBI’s message—both to corporate boards and to itself—is that governance cannot remain a matter of posture. It must become a matter of record.

Because, in the final analysis, markets do not punish failure alone.

They punish uncertainty about failure.

The Rationale: From Ambiguity to Evidence

At its core, SEBI’s twin intervention rests on a simple but powerful principle: governance must leave an audit trail.

For independent directors, this means moving away from personality-driven dissent to process-driven accountability. If there are concerns, they must be raised in board meetings, recorded in minutes, escalated through committees, and, where necessary, reflected in disclosures. The age of dignified ambiguity is over.

For SEBI officials, the same logic applies. Financial interests, potential conflicts, and recusal decisions must not be matters of internal discretion alone. They must be structured, disclosed, and, where appropriate, publicly visible.

This convergence is not accidental. It reflects a deeper recognition that credibility in regulation flows from symmetry. The standards applied to the market must also apply to the regulator.

Global Mirrors: How Other Markets Enforce Accountability

India’s evolving approach fits into a broader global pattern—though with its own pace and peculiarities.

In the United States, the governance system is built on enforceable rules backed by litigation risk. Audit committees must be fully independent, financially literate, and empowered under SEC Rule 10A-3. At the same time, public officials operate under strict financial disclosure regimes, with detailed reporting of assets, interests, and conflicts.

The United Kingdom offers a more nuanced model. Its Corporate Governance Code does not merely expect independence; it expects documentation. Directors are required to ensure that unresolved concerns are recorded in board minutes. A resigning director must provide a written statement explaining such concerns. This eliminates the ambiguity that Indian markets still struggle with.

The European Union focuses heavily on structural safeguards—especially in related-party transactions—ensuring that conflicts are addressed before they distort outcomes.

Singapore tackles a subtler problem: the erosion of independence over time. Its two-tier voting system for long-serving independent directors ensures that minority shareholders retain a decisive voice.

Hong Kong reinforces independence numerically and through tenure discipline, while Japan has elevated independent directors as part of a broader effort to strengthen corporate oversight and strategic governance.

Across these jurisdictions, the lesson is consistent: independence is not a declaration—it is a system of incentives, disclosures, and checks.

Adequacy of India’s Response: Strong Intent, Uneven Execution

India’s current framework is not weak. SEBI’s LODR regulations already provide for independent-majority audit committees, vigil mechanisms, and defined fiduciary responsibilities.

What has been missing is behavioural enforcement.

The recent developments attempt to fill that gap. By calling out ambiguous resignations and tightening internal disclosures, SEBI is nudging both corporate boards and its own machinery toward greater discipline.

Yet adequacy remains a question of execution. Rules can mandate disclosure, but they cannot guarantee candour. They can require recusal, but they cannot ensure integrity. These depend on institutional culture.

Expected Impact: Discipline Across the Ecosystem

If sustained, SEBI’s twin approach could reshape behaviour across multiple layers.

Promoters may find it harder to treat independent directors as symbolic appointees. Managements will face more structured scrutiny, particularly in areas like related-party transactions and financial reporting.

Independent directors themselves will undergo the most significant transformation. Their role will shift from passive endorsement to active interrogation, from attendance to accountability.

Within SEBI, the tightening of disclosure norms could enhance institutional credibility, particularly at a time when regulators worldwide are under increasing public scrutiny.

For investors, especially minority shareholders, the benefit lies in clearer signals. Markets function best when uncertainty is reduced—not eliminated, but reduced through credible information.

The Unfinished Agenda

Despite the progress, several gaps remain.

India still lacks a formalised framework requiring detailed disclosure of unresolved boardroom concerns, akin to the UK model. Without this, the risk of “resignation theatre” persists.

The process of appointing independent directors remains influenced by promoters, raising questions about true independence.

On the regulatory side, disclosure norms must be backed by independent oversight and enforcement. Otherwise, they risk becoming compliance exercises rather than credibility tools.

Most importantly, governance in India still struggles with a cultural constraint—the reluctance to record dissent. Until dissent becomes institutional rather than personal, reform will remain incomplete.

Way Forward: Building a Culture of Recorded Integrity

The next phase of reform must move beyond rules to rituals of governance.

Boardrooms must normalise detailed minutes, structured dissent, and transparent escalation. Independent directors must be trained not just in law, but in the practice of questioning and documenting.

SEBI must ensure that its own disclosure framework is not merely robust on paper but visible in practice—through periodic reporting, audit, and enforcement.

India must also explore global best practices on tenure limits, minority approval mechanisms, and independence criteria to reduce promoter influence.

Ultimately, governance is not about preventing every failure. It is about ensuring that when failures occur, they are neither hidden nor misunderstood.

From Optics to Trust

SEBI’s twin signals—to independent directors and to itself—mark a rare moment of alignment between regulation and self-regulation.

If pursued with consistency, they could shift India’s corporate governance from a culture of optics to a culture of evidence.

Because, in the end, markets do not reward declarations of integrity. They reward proof.

About the Author

P. Sesh Kumar is a retired 1982-batch officer of the Indian Audit and Accounts Service (IA&AS) who served under the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. Over a distinguished career, he contributed extensively to public sector auditing, financial oversight, and governance reforms across multiple sectors of government. He is the author of several books on public accountability and institutional governance, including CAG: Ensuring Accountability Amidst Controversies—An Inside View and CAG: What It Ought to Be Auditing. His later works broaden the canvas to issues such as financial accountability, India’s MSME and startup ecosystem, medical education reforms, and spiritual reflections on music and Nada Brahma.

Patent Filings in India Are Rising Fast—but Are Universities Cutting Corners?

India today looks, on paper, like a country in the middle of an intellectual property renaissance. Patent filings in India are rising, universities are boasting of innovation, and private institutions, in particular, are flaunting filing numbers that would make even older public institutions pause. Yet, the closer one looks, the more this glitter begins to peel.

The latest parliamentary data has exposed a deeply uncomfortable truth: private universities patents are being filed in astonishing volumes, but their record in actually securing patent grants remains distressingly poor. That mismatch between filing and grant is not a minor procedural curiosity. It opens up troubling questions about the quality of research, the misuse of policy incentives, the distortions created by university ranking systems, and the wider tendency in India to confuse statistical activity with genuine innovation.

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Patent Filings in India vs Grants: The Hidden Reality Behind University Patents

In FY 2024–25, according to data tabled in Parliament and widely reported on 17 March 2026, the top 50 private institutions filed 19,540 patent applications, while the top 50 government institutions filed only 615. At first glance, that sounds like a revolution in private sector innovation. It suggests an educational landscape in which private universities are bursting with invention while government institutions are plodding along. But the glamour vanishes the moment one turns to actual grants.

The same data showed that private institutions received 399 patents, while government institutions received 193. The filing ratio was roughly thirty-two to one; the grant ratio was barely two to one. That is not merely a gap. That is a collapse. It means that the enormous lead in applications is not translating into anything remotely similar in legally validated intellectual property. On the implied figures, the private cohort’s grant rate was about 2 percent, while the government cohort’s rate was roughly 31 percent. That comparison alone is enough to puncture the inflated rhetoric that usually surrounds university patent counts in India.

Patent Filings in India | The Hidden Reality Behind University Patents | Graph: The Probe Team

This is where the debate becomes more serious than a mere comparison of statistics. A low grant rate does not automatically prove wrongdoing. Patent examination is technical, time-consuming, and necessarily selective. Applications may be pending, objections may be unresolved, and grants in a given year may relate to filings from much earlier years.

The roots of this boom lie in policies that were, in their original conception, sensible and even progressive.

In September 2021, the Government of India extended to educational institutions an 80 percent reduction in patent filing and prosecution fees. The logic was sound: if universities and research institutions are expected to contribute to a knowledge economy, they should not be deterred by high filing costs. The reform was sold as a way to encourage greater participation of academia in the patent ecosystem, and in principle, it was hard to quarrel with that objective. The state wanted to lower barriers and spread awareness. It also expanded policy support through awareness drives such as the National Intellectual Property Awareness Mission. On paper, it looked like a classic reform in the service of Atmanirbhar Bharat and a knowledge-based economy.

But reforms, particularly in India, do not operate in a vacuum. They collide with rankings, vanity metrics, institutional competition, faculty career incentives, state reimbursement schemes, internal appraisal systems, and aggressive publicity departments.

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Patent Filings in India: How University Patents Became a Ranking Game

The National Institutional Ranking Framework has played no small part in this distortion. Under the NIRF framework, patent filings in India are not measured only through grants. Patents published also carry weight. The overall framework allocates marks for “Patents Published & Granted,” and the innovation framework goes even further by separately emphasising patents and technology transfer. In plain language, this means an institution can gain reputational benefit not only from inventions that the patent office has found worthy of protection, but also from applications that have merely entered the publication pipeline.

That is why the present controversy should not be reduced to one sensational institutional example, even though the Galgotias episode gave it a human face. When public attention turned to Galgotias University after the embarrassing robotic-dog controversy at the India AI Impact Summit, scrutiny naturally expanded to its patent record. There, too, the numbers were startling: thousands of filings, but only a tiny proportion resulting in grants. Critics pointed out that some of the patents being filed appeared to be weak, poorly grounded, or unlikely to survive serious examination.

The point is not to single out one institution for public flogging. The larger problem is that Galgotias became a symbol of a structural reality: when the incentives reward the accumulation of applications rather than the production of durable inventions, outliers are bound to emerge.

The second reason is internal incentives. Faculty members in some institutions are nudged, coaxed, rewarded, or even pressured to generate patent applications because these become measurable outputs for appraisal systems, promotional dossiers, and annual reports. The third is ranking arithmetic. A university that can boost its patent publication numbers may gain ground in perception and evaluation, regardless of how many of those filings are later abandoned, refused, or quietly forgotten. The fourth is low cost. When official filing fees are heavily subsidised, the marginal cost of speculative filing falls sharply. The result is predictable: more people file weak applications because the downside is smaller and the visible upside is larger.

One must, however, proceed carefully when the conversation turns to “misuse of government grants.” That phrase can mean several different things. If it means whether there is conclusive evidence that private universities are illegally siphoning direct state funds merely by filing frivolous patents, the answer is: the public evidence is not yet sufficient to sustain such a sweeping accusation across the board.

The parliamentary response cited by the report did not confirm systematic misuse in those terms. It instead pointed to substantive examination safeguards and governance structures in publicly supported research programmes. That matters. One should not turn suspicion into accusation without hard evidence.

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Patent Filings in India: Why Government University Patents Perform Better

What explains the much better performance of government institutions? The answer lies partly in research culture and partly in selection discipline. Institutions such as the IITs, IISc, and leading public research centres are far from flawless, but they generally file fewer applications and tend to do so in a more selective manner. Their research pipelines are often linked to stronger laboratories, longer research traditions, external peer engagement, and better-developed faculty ecosystems. Their patent applications are more likely to emerge from sustained research rather than annual target-chasing. That does not mean every government-filed patent is commercially significant, but it does mean the filing decision is often more filtered.

Public institutions, in other words, are more likely to treat patents as one result of research. Many private institutions seem, by contrast, to treat patents as a research substitute—or at least as a publicly marketable surrogate for it.

From Patents to Products: Lessons from Global Innovation Leaders

This is where international comparisons become extraordinarily useful, because they show that the real strength of advanced innovation ecosystems lies not in filing, but in what follows filing. In the United States, the Bayh-Dole system transformed university technology transfer by allowing universities to retain title in federally funded inventions. But Bayh-Dole was never a magic wand. What made the American system formidable was the institutional machinery surrounding it: invention disclosure systems, technology transfer offices, licensing professionals, venture capital linkages, proof-of-concept funds, incubators, and startup pathways.

U.S. data cited by the National Science Board show that universities execute thousands of licenses and options and continue to produce a large stream of startups from academic research. AUTM’s licensing surveys likewise track disclosures, licenses, startup formation, and products on the market, not merely patents filed. The American lesson is not that patents automatically generate wealth. It is that patents are treated as one step in a commercial pipeline, not as the end of the journey.

Europe, too, has steadily moved toward the concept of valorisation—the translation of research into social and economic value. European policy work on the management and commercialisation of intellectual property in universities emphasises proof-of-concept support, portfolio management, specialised technology transfer capacity, local industrial partnerships, and measurable exploitation of university inventions.

Reports supported by the European Commission note that a meaningful proportion of university inventions are commercially exploited, often with SMEs as important partners. That is a world away from the Indian spectacle of celebrating raw application counts without even a clear national dashboard showing how many university patents were ultimately licensed or revenue-generating.

Japan’s model is particularly instructive because of the seriousness with which it tracks technology transfer outcomes. The University Network for Innovation and Technology Transfer maintains surveys on disclosures, patent applications, licenses, TT office staffing, and related indicators. This reflects a discipline that India lacks.

Once a system begins measuring invention disclosures, license agreements, office capacity, and commercialisation outputs, the seduction of vanity filing becomes harder to sustain. Japan’s approach recognises that innovation is an institutional chain. Break the chain at the transfer stage, and the patent becomes an archive item.

Singapore’s approach is even more tightly engineered. Rather than assuming that patents will somehow walk out of laboratories and into factories by themselves, Singapore has built national platforms to connect university research with entrepreneurial teams, investors, and commercialisation support. Its GRIP-style model treats startup creation, translational mentoring, and market validation as integral to the innovation process. There is a clarity here that India would do well to study. Filing is not the climax. Filing is the beginning of a hard, uncertain, capital-intensive journey.

China offers perhaps the most cautionary and relevant comparison for India because it, too, passed through a period of patent number obsession. For years, Chinese institutions were criticised for chasing volume. But Chinese policy discourse increasingly shifted toward “high-value patents,” transfers, licensing, and industrialisation. Official CNIPA material now places significant emphasis on commercialisation and technology transaction outcomes. China recognised that a mountain of low-value patents may create statistical bravado, but not technological power. India today appears to be lingering in the very stage China has been trying to move beyond.

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This is why India fares badly not merely in grant rates, but also in the more consequential matter of innovation conversion. The country is producing a swelling tide of applications, but there is still little sign that university-origin IP is becoming a powerful engine of industrial or startup growth at scale. That is the uncomfortable truth hiding behind the filing boom. The problem is not simply that many private universities are filing weak patents. The problem is that the entire national conversation is still too mesmerised by filing data to ask what happens next.

From Patent Counts to Real Innovation: What India Must Fix

Transparency is equally critical. Every university that claims innovation leadership should be required to disclose, in a standardised public format, how many patents it filed, how many were published, how many were examined, how many received first examination reports, how many were abandoned, how many were refused, how many were granted, how many were opposed, how many were licensed, how many generated revenue, and how many resulted in startup formation or industrial deployment. Only then can Parliament, parents, policymakers, and the public distinguish between meaningful inventive activity and patent theatre.

India also needs a national technology transfer architecture, not just a patent encouragement architecture. Universities cannot be expected to commercialise inventions on goodwill and annual speeches. They need professionally run technology transfer offices, shared regional support structures for smaller institutions, proof-of-concept funds, legal and licensing expertise, incubator linkages, and sector-specific commercialisation networks. They need people who understand how to move from invention disclosure to market contact, from lab validation to prototype, from prototype to pilot, and from pilot to license or spin-off. Without this machinery, India will continue producing patents that impress ranking tables but rarely enter the bloodstream of the real economy.

The debate on misuse of public support also requires sharper policy design. Fee reductions for educational institutions need not be withdrawn; they serve a legitimate purpose. But larger incentives, reimbursements, or grant-linked recognitions should be tied increasingly to outcomes beyond filing. A staggered support model would make more sense: modest support at filing, stronger support for applications that survive examination, and far greater rewards for patents that are granted, licensed, or demonstrably commercialised. Such a model would reduce the incentive to flood the system with weak applications while still protecting genuine inventors from cost barriers.

That is the question private universities in India now force us to confront. Their filing boom has not merely raised eyebrows. It has exposed the fragility of our metrics, the softness of our incentives, and the hollowness of too much institutional boasting. The problem is not that private universities are active. Activity is welcome. The problem is that India has too often confused motion with progress. Filing is motion. Grant is validation. Commercialisation is impact. And impact, not paperwork, is the real test of innovation.

If India continues on the present path, it may soon become a world champion in generating patent statistics and a mediocre performer in generating patent value. That would be a tragic outcome for a country that genuinely has scientific talent, entrepreneurial energy, and a pressing developmental need for applied innovation. But if the present controversy triggers reform—if it forces a shift from quantity to quality, from filing to transfer, from publication to monetisation—then this moment of embarrassment may yet become a moment of institutional maturity. The choice is stark. India can keep applauding patent fireworks, or it can start building an innovation economy that actually burns bright.

The way forward lies not in scorning patents, but in restoring seriousness to them. India must stop rewarding universities merely for adding to the pile of published applications and begin rewarding them for producing patents that survive scrutiny and create value.

Ranking systems should sharply privilege granted and commercialised patents over published ones. Universities must be required to disclose patent lifecycle and commercialisation outcomes in a transparent, auditable format. Public support should move from filing-based encouragement to milestone-based support tied to examination survival, grant, licensing, and transfer.

Dedicated technology transfer capacity must be built, particularly for institutions that lack the size to create robust in-house offices.

Proof-of-concept financing, translational research support, and university-industry matchmaking should become national priorities. Most importantly, India must begin judging university innovation not by how many patent applications were pushed into the portal, but by how many ideas actually crossed the distance from paper to production. Only then will the country move from patent fever to genuine innovation strength.

NIA Arrest of US National in Myanmar Drone Case: Security Concerns for India

The NIA arrest of a US national in the Myanmar drone case, along with six nationals from Ukraine, has intensified concerns over possible foreign covert activity along the Indo-Myanmar border. The case gains significance amid Myanmar’s evolving post-election situation and China’s growing push for the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC).

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US’s Stance on Myanmar

In 2022, the US passed the BURMA Act, which authorises targeted sanctions against Myanmar’s military regime while also providing humanitarian assistance to civilians. The legislation focuses on aid delivery and support for civil society organisations, reflecting a broader US strategy to maintain influence in Myanmar during a period of instability. This also aligns with Washington’s long-standing interest in monitoring regional developments, particularly China’s expanding footprint.

This is not the first instance of US efforts to expand covert capabilities in the region. The Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division (SAD), now known as the Special Activities Centre (SAC), has historically been linked to covert operations in and around Myanmar dating back to the Cold War, particularly in efforts aimed at countering Chinese influence.

From a strategic standpoint, such a second front was seen as a way to stretch China’s military bandwidth. However, the effort to reorganise and deploy KMT forces from Myanmar faced significant operational and political challenges.

The CIA subsequently backed efforts to fund and train these nationalist forces and facilitated linkages between KMT remnants and local ethnic groups, including the Karen and Shan. The broader objective was to build an anti-communist front capable of exerting pressure on China from its southwestern flank.

However, these efforts failed to achieve their intended objectives.

Over time, both KMT remnants and associated ethnic groups became more deeply involved in controlling opium trade networks rather than pursuing anti-communist military campaigns. The operation suffered a major setback when Burmese authorities uncovered the activities. In 1961, the Burmese Army intercepted communications and captured an aircraft involved in supply operations to KMT forces.

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The Burmese government viewed these developments as a violation of its sovereignty, prompting a shift in its strategic posture. In response, Myanmar moved closer to Communist China in search of security assurances.

At the height of the Cold War, US intelligence presence in the region continued in more limited forms. This included monitoring activity across the Golden Triangle, a region notorious for narcotics production, while also maintaining capabilities to track regional insurgencies and intercept Chinese military communications.

US Intelligence Concerns in Myanmar

Against this historical backdrop, concerns within sections of the US strategic and intelligence community appear to be intensifying, particularly in light of the recent NIA arrest of the US national. The Myanmar drone case involves the US national Matthew Aaron VanDyke allegedly providing sophisticated training in drone operations, assembly, and signal jamming to ethnic armed groups (EAGs) in Myanmar.

This development has led to speculation that any potential reactivation of covert capabilities in the region may be driven by two key factors. First, China’s expanding strategic and economic footprint in Myanmar, especially in the context of post-election dynamics and the accelerated development of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC).

Second, a possible attempt to destabilise Myanmar’s military leadership by encouraging internal fractures, thereby weakening China’s influence, particularly as the junta has struggled to reduce its dependence on Beijing.

At a broader level, these concerns are also shaped by perceptions of increasing Chinese activity in regions traditionally influenced by the United States, including the Middle East. China’s efforts to position itself as an alternative strategic power have added to these anxieties. In this context, statements attributed to senior US intelligence leadership have pointed to concerns about China’s expanding geopolitical engagements, including its relationships with countries such as Iran.

For Washington, a contested Myanmar could present a long-term strategic space to counterbalance China’s influence, particularly if instability allows for the emergence of competing power centres. However, any such covert or indirect contestation carries significant regional implications, especially for neighbouring countries like India.

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India’s Security and Strategic Calculus

For India, the implications of such developments are immediate and complex. The NIA arrest of the US national in the Myanmar drone case, along with allegations of training, and the covert movement of funds, weapons, and personnel, pose serious risks to the already sensitive security environment in the Northeast, particularly in states such as Manipur.

India’s Strategic Options

For India, the evolving situation demands a more calibrated and assertive approach. Rather than operating within a fragmented framework, New Delhi may need to adopt a sharper strategic balance—one that enhances its bargaining power while retaining flexibility in engagement.

At the same time, India may seek to maintain working relations with Myanmar’s military leadership through continued intelligence cooperation, particularly on issues such as Rohingya-linked militant networks, along with calibrated security assistance. As Myanmar’s generals move toward political consolidation through electoral processes, New Delhi could find itself engaging both state and non-state actors simultaneously to protect its strategic interests.

Such a dual-track approach would require moving beyond conventional restraint toward a more pragmatic and, at times, risk-tolerant posture. Strengthening negotiating leverage across multiple fronts—diplomatic, economic, and security—may become essential, particularly as China is expected to deepen its footprint in Myanmar in the coming years.

In this context, India’s strategic calculus may increasingly require keeping all options open, including the potential use of hard power, to safeguard its regional influence and internal security interests.

Father Alleges Missed ROP Screening Could Have Saved Child in Bardhaman

In this episode of Unbreak The News with Prema Sridevi, we revisit the case of alleged medical negligence at Sharanya Multispeciality Hospital in Bardhaman, West Bengal. A father claims that missed ROP screening in a Level 3 NICU led to permanent vision loss in his child. With similar allegations in another child’s case, serious questions are being raised about hospital protocols, accountability, and systemic lapses. Here are the transcripts from the interview:

Prema Sridevi: Today on Unbreak the News, we revisit the case of two premature babies from Bardhaman in West Bengal whose parents allege that the failure to conduct ROP screenings at Sharanya Multispeciality Hospital in West Bengal led to loss of eyesight of their children.

The matter is currently being heard before the District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission in Bardhaman and the West Bengal Medical Council. In the latest development, the District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission has directed the hospital’s Medical Administrator to personally appear before the commission along with the registration documents of the nurses working in the hospital.

In the earlier hearing, the hospital did not produce the registration details of the nurses…. Hitesh Choudhury is joining me today — he is the father of Mivaan.

Hitesh ji, before we get into the legal details, for the benefit of viewers—please tell us what happened with your son Mivaan and give us the background of this case.

Also Read: Medical Negligence Alleged: Vision Loss in Two Babies

Hitesh Choudhary: A criminal and terrible medical negligence happened with my child. Even after being admitted to a Level 3 NICU, no ROP (Retinopathy of Prematurity) screening was conducted.

In a Level 3 NICU, it is mandatory that any premature baby undergoes ROP screening within 4 weeks of birth. However, even after my son turned 43 days old, no ROP screening was done—even after we repeatedly requested it.

In the discharge summary, we were told that ROP screening has to be done 15 days after discharge.

That means we were advised to do the screening after 58 days.

Because of this delay, aggressive ROP developed in his eyes, and it progressed to Stage 5.

We ultimately got surgery done on his left eye, but the retina got detached. Unfortunately, he is not able to see from his left eye now.

Prema Sridevi: This happened not only with you but also with Manoj ji’s daughter Adrita, who faced a similar issue. Can you tell us more about that case?

Hitesh Choudhary: This very same incident had already happened with Manoj ji’s daughter earlier. He guided me and told me that this had happened with his child, and I should inform the concerned doctor so that the same problem does not happen with my child.

Even after repeatedly informing the doctor, the doctor told me that my child’s case is different and their case is different.

He told me not to get into this and said that my child does not have any such problem.

Prema Sridevi: How important is ROP screening? Is it mandatory? If the hospital had done it on time, could this have been prevented?

Also Read: Bardhaman Medical Negligence: WBMC Seeks Report | The Probe Impact

Hitesh Choudhary: ROP screening is extremely important—it is like a polio vaccine.

If a child has ROP and it is detected early, then injections are given in the eyes, and a minor laser procedure is done. Because of this, vision can be preserved, and the retina does not completely detach.

But the key is that it must be detected as early as possible.

Prema Sridevi: The Consumer Commission had asked the hospital to appear with nurse registration details, but they failed to provide them earlier. Now the medical administrator has been asked to appear personally. How difficult is it for a hospital to provide such documents? Why do you think they are delaying it?

Hitesh Choudhary: Madam, actually, they do not have these documents at all. None of the nurses working there are registered with the West Bengal Nursing Council.

They do not have any such details. They are just taking dates in court again and again.

For the last two or three hearings, they have not submitted the nurse registration certificates.

This time, the court has rejected their request for more time and has ordered their administrator to appear.

Also Read: Bardhaman Medical Negligence: Doctors Summoned by Medical Council

Prema Sridevi: From the time your wife was admitted to this hospital in Bardhaman, till discharge and even afterwards—what negligence do you think took place? Can you explain point by point?

Hitesh Choudhury: First of all, my wife’s delivery was not supposed to happen there. It was a forced delivery.

She delivered our child on 24 June 2023.

She was given injections and the delivery was conducted forcefully.

After that, my son was kept in the NICU for 43 days.

No proper treatment was given. He was given high doses of antibiotics without doing blood culture and without doing a brain scan.

Whatever is mandatory in the case of a premature baby—none of it was done.

He was given high doses of antibiotics and drugs.

There is also something called surfactant, which must be given within 24 hours of birth for premature babies because it is very important—but that was also not given within 24 hours.

Prema Sridevi: According to rules, when should ROP screening be done? In your case, it was not done—did the hospital ever inform you about it, or did you ask them?

Hitesh Choudhary: The hospital never informed me about ROP at all.

I came to know about it from Manoj Kumar Ghosh. He told me that something called ROP exists and his child had suffered from it.

He advised me to immediately tell the doctor so that my child does not face the same issue.

After that, I told the doctor about it but he did not take any action.

He told me to focus on my child and said that there is no such problem.

He said that if there is any problem, he will take care of it and I should not worry.

Also Read: Bardhaman Commission Orders Hospital to Produce Nurses’ Records

Prema Sridevi: We have been continuously reporting on both Mivaan and Adrita’s cases for the last two years.

Recently, we reported another case where, in a hospital in Delhi, more than 100 nurses were not registered—they did not have the required registration under the Delhi Nursing Council.

This is the case of Uttam Chand Meena, in which his wife, Gargi Meena, died at Saroj Hospital in Delhi. The Delhi High Court had also raised serious concerns over this matter.

What do you think—do you see the same pattern being repeated in your case as well?

Where a hospital is not even able to submit basic details like nurse registrations—does this indicate that the problem is not limited to just one hospital, but is systemic?

Hitesh Choudhary: Madam, this problem is already happening across the country.

In this hospital, it is questionable whether the nurses are even qualified or not.

This is a basic KYC requirement—just like Aadhaar or PAN, hospitals must have nursing council registration certificates. It is mandatory.

Without it, they cannot hire nurses.

But in a Level 3 NICU, they have hired nurses who are not even registered. It feels like they have just placed untrained helpers in place of nurses.

Prema Sridevi: What is the update from the West Bengal Medical Council?

Hitesh Choudhary: I am in regular touch with the West Bengal Medical Council and following up continuously.

I had emailed them also asking for the status of the hearing.

They told me over the phone that a chargesheet has been filed against the doctor.

However, the registered copy has not yet been issued, so they have not been able to send it by post.

Once I receive it, I will share it.

Prema Sridevi: How is Mivaan today? What difficulties is he facing? How has life changed for both children?

Hitesh Choudhary: Sometimes, while walking, he suddenly bumps into walls. He cannot see clearly.

He has minus 11 power in his right eye.

He has to wear thick glasses all the time.

Every day is a challenge.

Prema Sridevi: How many surgeries has Mivaan undergone?

Hitesh Choudhary: Initially, when ROP was detected, he received injections in both eyes.

After that, repeated laser surgeries were done in both eyes.

Eventually, a major surgery was done in the left eye, which lasted around 4 to 5 hours.

Prema Sridevi: What is Adrita’s condition now?

Hitesh Choudhary: Her surgery was successful. She has vision but with some power.

But in Mivaan’s case, the retina remained detached and could not be restored. His surgery was not successful.

Prema Sridevi: What are your main demands in this case? Do you want compensation or are you demanding action against the hospital and its doctors?

Hitesh Choudhary: I want the hospital to be shut down.

The doctor should be suspended, and his medical license should be cancelled.

He is not fit to treat any child.

The hospital hires such doctors because they are cheap and lack proper qualifications.

At that time, the doctor treating my child was actually a government bond posting doctor.

He was not even eligible to act as the main doctor, but he treated my child as if he were one—which is not possible as per rules.

Prema Sridevi: Earlier, you mentioned there was pressure for out-of-court settlement. Is that still happening?

Hitesh Chodhary: No. Right now, I am not in contact with any outsiders regarding this matter.

I do not want any settlement.

I only want justice for my child—nothing else.

Prema Sridevi: On a personal level, how difficult has this fight for justice been for you and your family?

Hitesh Choudhary: Since this incident happened, my life has completely changed—180 degrees—you can say that.

My entire routine and everything in life is almost finished.

But I will not step back until I get justice.

I will keep fighting.

I want to ensure that what happened to my child does not happen to any other child because of this hospital or any other hospital.

US-Iran War: Why Wars Are First Lost in the Minds of Leaders

Wars are rarely lost first on the battlefield. They are lost in leaders’ minds − when leaders misread what they and their adversaries can do, when their confidence substitutes for comprehension, and when the last war is mistaken for the next one.

CAG Audits and the Limits of Proving Corruption

In India’s charged discourse on corruption, public auditors like the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) are often lionized—or vilified—as if they were detective agencies unearthing criminal conspiracies. This article attempts to critically examine that perception through the lens of a 2023 G-20 document on auditing and corruption in India. It argues that Supreme Audit Institution (SAI) reports are not designed as forensic investigations or sting operations, but as tools of financial accountability.

Indeed, assigning undue weight to audit findings as definitive proof of corruption is misguided, given the constitutional limits on the CAG’s mandate. Unless an audit body is structured as a quasi-judicial “Cour des Comptes” with enforcement powers, expecting it to prove and punish corruption is beyond its remit. 

Also Read: CAG: Allegations of Corruption, Cronyism, and Cover-Up

When Auditors Became Anti-Corruption Heroes

A hulking figure looms over India’s recent anti-corruption drama: the Comptroller and Auditor General. Over the past decade, CAG audit reports have repeatedly grabbed headlines and galvanised public anger, thanks in no small measure to 24×7 vigilant and aggressive media coverage. Terms like the “2G scam,” “Coalgate,” and the Commonwealth Games scandal have become part of India’s political lexicon, largely due to explosive CAG findings that implied massive losses to the exchequer.

The G-20 compendium document under review confronts this very misperception. It insists that while the CAG and other Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) are guardians of accountability, they are not armed with handcuffs or magic wands to unravel conspiracies.

Audits vs. Investigations: Different Animals

The first fundamental argument is a definitional one: SAI audits are not forensic audits or criminal investigations. An auditor’s mission is to follow the money and check compliance, not to establish ‘mens rea’ (criminal intent) or build prosecutable cases.

The CAG of India, by constitutional design, conducts financial, compliance, and performance audits—examining whether public funds were spent legally and effectively. It operates ex post facto (after the fact), relying mainly on documents and accounting records, not subpoenaed testimony or raid-and-seizure of evidence.

The CAG’s own procedures reflect this: audits are conducted with due notice to departments, and findings are communicated to the executive for feedback before finalisation. There is no element of surprise interrogation or undercover work, as would be typical in a criminal investigation.

Moreover, the CAG has no police powers—it cannot compel private citizens to testify or search private premises, powers which investigative agencies have. It is telling that the CAG itself has emphasised its limitations: “the Indian SAI is a watchdog of public accountability… It is not an investigative agency, nor does it have powers of investigation.” Simply put, auditors examine paperwork and systems for lapses; detectives hunt for evidence of crimes. The distinction is crucial. Blurring the two leads to unrealistic expectations and institutional strain.

This nuance is sometimes lost in public discourse. As the document notes, India’s public debates often treat audit findings as if they were findings of guilt. But legally and procedurally, an audit is a civil exercise.

This understanding aligns with global best practices. International standards caution that SAIs contribute to anti-corruption primarily by deterring and detecting red flags, not by prosecuting. Many countries explicitly bar their auditors from overstepping into investigative roles to preserve objectivity and avoid turf wars. India is no exception; the CAG answers to Parliament, not to a prosecutor’s office.

Also Read: CAG: Stalled Audits, Alleged Political Bias Shake Constitutional Body

The “Scam” That Shook a Nation – And Then Vanished

If audits are not meant to be criminal investigations, how did CAG reports come to be seen as conclusive proof of gargantuan scams? The answer lies in a series of blockbuster audit reports in the early 2010s and the political maelstrom they unleashed.

The CAG’s high-profile reports were amplified in public discourse as definitive evidence of corruption, yet they failed to produce commensurate convictions in court due to the absence of proven criminal intent or conspiracy.

In December 2017, a special CBI court acquitted all the accused, including the former telecom minister, unequivocally stating that no substantive evidence of corruption was presented despite years of trial. The judge, O.P. Saini, lamented that “for the last about seven years … I religiously sat … awaiting someone with legally admissible evidence … but all in vain.” He noted that “rumour, gossip and speculation” had created a public perception of massive wrongdoing, but “this has no place in judicial proceedings.”

A similar trajectory played out with the coal block allocation audit of 2012. The CAG initially estimated an eye-popping ₹10.7 lakh crore ‘windfall gains’ due to coal mining licenses given away without competitive bidding, later pruning the figure to ₹1.86 lakh crore in the final report. The media dubbed it “Coalgate,” and it further cemented the narrative of a corrupt government.

However, the nuance, as noted in retrospective analyses, was that the CAG never explicitly alleged corruption in its coal report—it highlighted inefficient, non-transparent allocation that could facilitate mala fide dealings. Indeed, after the audit findings, it was the Central Vigilance Commission and the CBI that stepped in to investigate specific charges of corruption, such as companies misrepresenting facts to obtain coal blocks.

What followed were numerous FIRs and trials targeting politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen. Some cases did result in convictions—for instance, a former Coal Secretary and others were convicted in a particular coal block case for abuse of office. They were also acquitted on appeal. But many other cases languished or ended inconclusively. Crucially, there was no blanket criminal conspiracy proved that matched the breadth of the alleged “₹1.86 lakh crore scam.”

The 2010 Commonwealth Games (CWG) audit story reinforces this pattern. The CAG report on the Delhi Games exposed widespread cost overruns, procedural misdeeds, and possible favouritism in contracts, fuelling a “CWG scam” uproar. High-profile organisers, including the games chief, were arrested, and investigative agencies pursued multiple cases under corruption and money-laundering laws. Yet, over a decade later, the marquee prosecutions have largely unravelled.

By 2025, a Delhi court formally accepted a closure report by the ED in a key CWG case, effectively exonerating the games chief and others of money-laundering charges. The court noted that the CBI had earlier closed the predicate corruption case itself for lack of evidence, after finding that allegations could not be substantiated against the accused.

Also Read: CAG Officer Suspended: The Probe Impact

The “massive irregularities” the CAG reported certainly indicated something was rotten—for example, one highlight was how certain contracts were awarded at inexplicably high rates, implying possible kickbacks. But again, suspicion and circumstantial anomalies did not translate into proof of a criminal conspiracy in court.

The final tally of convictions in the CWG affair ended up thin, mostly limited to lower-level officials in peripheral cases (such as a street lighting contract scam where a few municipal officers were convicted of causing a ₹1.4 crore loss). The big fish slipped away, echoing a cynical quip circulating in India’s press: “the scam that wasn’t.” Critics of the CAG refuse, even to this date, to accept that these reports were indefensible and that their repercussions had led to policy paralysis in government. One cannot, however, overlook the fact that the process of investigation based essentially on CAG reports was itself a punishment for the indicted officials.

The public (and political opponents) often conflated the CAG’s “presumptive loss” as “presumptive loot,” but legally, one can have a huge loss to the state without an iota of illicit gain to any individual—it could simply be policy error or mismanagement. The G-20 document effectively cautions against this overenthusiastic leap from audit findings to cries of “corruption!” Such amplification, while drawing necessary attention to governance failures, also carries the risk of politicising the auditor’s work and raising expectations that the auditor will “deliver” scalps of the corrupt.

When those expectations are inevitably unfulfilled (as trials acquit the accused), public trust can boomerang into disillusionment—people either conclude, wrongly, that the auditors cried wolf, or that the system let the culprits escape. Neither conclusion is healthy.

As one Reddit commentator wryly observed in hindsight, “CAG report is never a sureshot sign of corruption,” noting that in both 2G and CWG cases, judges waited years for evidence that never came. This is not to undermine the CAG’s work—indeed, without those audits, the underlying irregularities might never have been exposed or corrected. But it reinforces that an audit’s diagnosis of error is not a judicial conviction of crime, and treating it as such can distort due process.

The CAG as a Supporting Actor, Not the Hero Detective

What then is the proper role of SAIs like the CAG in combating corruption? The G-20 document’s third argument provides a measured answer: SAIs can play a supportive role in corruption investigations—providing audit-based material or expert testimony, and collaborating with investigative agencies—but they are not meant to replace those agencies.

The CAG’s reports are public documents that prosecutors can use to bolster a case: they contain official findings of fact about procedural violations or losses which can support charges of negligence or misconduct. Additionally, audit officials can serve as witnesses to explain how they uncovered those facts. This underscores that the auditors’ expertise—their ability to parse records and spot irregularities—can directly assist judicial processes. The auditors can testify on the stand about what their audit revealed, e.g., “X company was ineligible but got a license; Y procedure was bypassed, causing revenue loss.” Such testimony can be a crucial puzzle piece in a larger investigation led by agencies with teeth.

However, the key is that the auditors assist, and the investigators lead. The CAG does not decide whom to charge or what penalties to seek—that remains the province of law enforcement and the judiciary. The supportive role can be formalised through institutional cooperation.

In some countries, SAIs have protocols to share findings with anti-corruption commissions or public prosecutors if they encounter likely fraud. India’s CAG, too, has internal guidelines on communicating signs of fraud to vigilance bodies. The G-20 document likely points out that a healthy ecosystem requires this synergy: auditors identify and report; investigators probe deeper using their statutory powers.

Also Read: CAG Officer Exonerated Amid Concerns Over Accountability

The G-20 document makes clear that whenever the CAG’s audit uncovers something fishy, the next step is to hand the matter over to the likes of the CBI, vigilance departments, Lokpal, or other probe agencies who are empowered to interrogate suspects, conduct searches, and file charges in court.

Occasionally, CAG officers themselves might be embedded into investigative teams for their expertise in unravelling complex financial transactions. And certainly, auditors often become witnesses in trials (to authenticate documents or explain how a fraud was perpetrated). All these are supportive functions.

What would be problematic—and what the document warns against—is expecting the Comptroller and Auditor General's office to be the tip of the spear that single-handedly busts corruption rackets. That is neither its training nor its legal authority.

Overextending the Auditor: Risks of Unrealistic Expectations

The fourth argument builds on the above: it is problematic to assign greater-than-warranted importance to SAI audits in unearthing or proving corruption, especially when they are not constitutionally designed or empowered to do so. This is a gentle way of saying: don’t make the CAG a scapegoat or a silver bullet.

Indeed, by constitutional design, the CAG’s reports are meant to be scrutinised by Parliament’s PAC—a mechanism to ensure executive accountability. The PAC, often headed by an opposition MP, can summon officials, demand corrective actions, and issue recommendations, but even the PAC is not a court of law. It cannot convict or penalise corrupt officials; at best, it can expose and censure, and refer matters to investigative bodies.

So when we heap too much expectation on audits, we risk not only public disappointment (when audits don’t directly send someone to jail) but also potential damage to the auditor’s credibility. If the CAG is seen as a political battering ram, its impartial image suffers. Every time a sensational audit is later followed by acquittals, critics seize on that to claim the CAG overreached or erred—when in truth the CAG never claimed to prove criminality, only to flag lapses.

Another risk of over-reliance on audits is the complacency it might breed in other institutions. If the political class or civil society starts thinking “the CAG will take care of corruption exposure,” there is danger that investigative agencies may shirk proactive detection, or that internal departmental controls become lax, awaiting the external auditor. The G-20 document’s thrust is that auditing is just one pillar of integrity, and overburdening it undermines the entire anti-corruption architecture.

SAIs are watchdogs, not bloodhounds. If we expect a watchdog to also chase down and maul an intruder, we’ll be disappointed and might end up with neither proper auditing nor proper investigation. The Indian system wisely separates these duties: the CAG’s bark (its reports) alerts the handlers (Parliament, vigilance, etc.), who must then unleash the hounds (CBI, police) if needed.

Furthermore, from a constitutional perspective, trying to use CAG audits as de facto corruption verdicts strains due process. No matter how incriminating an audit finding sounds, an accused in our justice system has the right to a full trial, to question the evidence, and to present a defence. An auditor’s estimate of “loss” might evaporate under evidentiary scrutiny or alternate explanations.

Also Read: CAG Appointment: SC Issues Notice to Centre, The Probe Impact

There is anecdotal evidence that after the high-voltage CAG reports, some bureaucrats became risk-averse, slowing decision-making lest they be accused by auditors of causing “losses.” Overestimation of the CAG’s role thus can chill governance, an unintended consequence flagged by many analysts.

The G-20 document implicitly urges a recalibration: celebrate and act on audit revelations, yes, but don’t mythologise them. As one governance expert quipped, the CAG points to the barn door left open; it does not catch the thief or recover the horse. The responsibilities are complementary—and conflating them only weakens accountability in the long run.

Red Flags vs. Red-Handed: What SAIs Can (and Can’t) Do

The G-20 document’s final key argument brings a comparative perspective: SAIs may indicate red flags like collusion, lack of transparency, or abuse of discretion, but their primary responsibility remains financial accountability to the legislature, unless they are specifically designed as a “Cour des Comptes”-style judicial audit institution. This is a crucial caveat.

In those Cour des Comptes systems, the auditor isn’t just reporting to lawmakers; it can legally adjudicate certain types of financial misconduct by bureaucrats, often leading to fines or surcharges for losses caused. The French Cour des Comptes, for instance, can hold public accountants personally liable for losses and order recovery of funds. As a collegiate body of magistrates, it blurs the line between audit and judiciary. Such SAIs are, by design, empowered to do more than what India’s CAG can.

If the public expects an SAI to directly nail corrupt officials, then essentially they are imagining a Cour des Comptes model—which India explicitly does not have. The G20 document highlights this to show that India’s constitutional framework intentionally kept the CAG as an auditor and adviser, not a prosecutor or judge.

Also Read: Delhi Excise Ruling: Arvind Kejriwal, Audit Findings and a Failed Case

The CAG’s findings are meant to spur legislative oversight—through committees like the PAC and through public transparency—thereby indirectly pressuring the executive to act right or face political consequences. But if actual malfeasance is to be punished, the hand-off must occur to enforcement bodies.

The reference to “unless designed as a Cour des Comptes-style institution” is both a comparison and a subtle suggestion. It implies that one shouldn’t demand the CAG do what only a judicial SAI could do. Of course, India could choose to reform its system to grant the CAG more teeth—for example, some have suggested giving the CAG quasi-judicial powers to adjudicate certain financial offences by officials.

In fact, there have been reform ideas like converting the CAG into a multi-member commission or establishing special tribunals for public money accountability. But until such changes happen (if ever), the CAG remains constitutionally tethered to its audit role.

The CAG can, through its reports, embarrass governments and prompt course corrections—a powerful moral weapon. But it cannot indict or arrest. 

Even within its red-flag role, the CAG must exercise circumspection. It can highlight suspicious patterns—say, a tender consistently awarded to one company, or projects where costs balloon without explanation—which might hint at collusion or fraud. But it typically stops short of declaring “X person colluded,” since that veers into allegation without trial.

The CAG’s language, by convention, remains in the realm of “irregularities” and “procedural lapses,” leaving the insinuation of corruption between the lines. It is then for investigative bodies to read those lines and launch a probe if warranted.

The SAI’s primary responsibility is toward Parliament. This also underscores accountability rather than culpability. The CAG’s duty is fulfilled when it reports faithfully to the legislature that “money was wasted here, rules were violated there, objectives were not met somewhere else.” It then falls on elected representatives to question the executive and demand answers, or on anti-corruption agencies to dig further if crimes are suspected. Unless India one day amends its Constitution to transform the CAG into an investigative auditor with adjudicatory clout (akin to the Cour des Comptes model), this is how it must be.

Leaked Audio and the February 28 US–Israel Strikes: What the Claims on Mojtaba Khamenei Suggest

The UK-based newspaper The Telegraph has drawn international attention after publishing what it describes as a audio recording linked to the February 28 US–Israel strikes on Iran. According to the publication, the leaked audio offers a detailed account of events inside the compound of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, including claims about how he was killed and how his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, narrowly avoided being caught in the attack.

Also Read: The Murder of Ali Khamenei and the Questions the World Refuses to Ask

Inside the Leaked Audio: Claims Around Mojtaba Khamenei and the US–Israel Strikes

In its reporting, The Telegraph states that the voice in the leaked audio is believed to be that of Mazaher Hosseini, identified as a senior official responsible for protocol in Ali Khamenei’s office, addressing clerics and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The publication describes the recording as the first purported insider account of what unfolded during the US–Israel strikes on the compound. According to the claims attributed to the speaker, Mojtaba Khamenei sustained a leg injury, while other members of his family were killed in the strike. These assertions remain unverified and should be treated with caution.

Also Read: Donald Trump and Epstein Files: The Scandal Behind the Iran Conflict

The recording alleges that he was killed during the US–Israel strikes, in what is described as a highly destructive attack. These details, like others in the audio, have not been independently confirmed.

If the leaked audio were to be substantiated, it would offer a rare and direct account of the human impact of the February 28 US–Israel strikes — particularly at the highest levels of Iran’s political and military leadership. For now, however, it remains one version of events, shaped by a source whose credibility has yet to be established.

Also Read: Strait of Hormuz Crisis Shows Insurance, Not Warships, Controls Oil

Even so, the episode highlights the broader consequences of the US–Israel strikes and the conflict that has followed. The developments since February 28 have widened the arc of instability, with effects extending beyond immediate military outcomes to economic pressures and regional security concerns. In conflicts of this scale, the consequences rarely remain contained, and the implications continue to unfold well beyond the initial point of impact.

Iran's Next Leader After Khamenei: What Happens Now?

After months of regulatory evasion, legal battles and sustained reporting by The Probe, justice has finally been delivered in the Artemis Lite Hospital case. On January 9, 2026, the District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission (DCDRC) recorded that the matter between the complainant, Sanjeev Kumar, and Artemis Lite Hospital had been settled. In compliance with the order, the hospital has now paid ₹59,337 to the complainant, bringing formal closure to a case that brought to light serious questions about hospital licensing, regulatory accountability and patient rights in Delhi. The case came up for hearing again on January 16, 2026, where it was disposed of, marking the end of a long and arduous struggle for the patient and her family.

Also Read: Artemis Hospital Licensing: DGHS Under Fire

Seeking clarity, Sanjeev Kumar filed a Right to Information (RTI) application with the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), the statutory authority responsible for licensing and monitoring private hospitals in Delhi. The RTI sought a simple answer: did Artemis Lite Hospital possess a valid licence when Shikha Aggarwal was admitted in April 2023? The DGHS initially replied in the affirmative and enclosed a registration certificate. However, the document was dated August 1, 2023—nearly four months after the treatment in question. This discrepancy raised a disturbing possibility: that perhaps Artemis Lite Hospital had been operating without a valid licence during the period when the patient was treated.

Instead of addressing this contradiction, the DGHS repeatedly deflected responsibility. It forwarded letters from Artemis Lite Hospital claiming that, as a private entity, it was outside the purview of the RTI Act. The DGHS neither clarified the licensing gap nor took action against the hospital. Forced to escalate the matter, Sanjeev Kumar approached the Central Information Commission (CIC), represented by RTI activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal. The CIC would later confirm that the DGHS had provided misleading information and had failed in its statutory duty as a regulator.

Also Read: CIC Imposes Penalty on DGHS in Artemis Hospital Case, The Probe Impact 

The Probe first reported this issue in August 2024, placing Artemis Lite Hospital and the DGHS under the spotlight. The report questioned how a reputed private hospital could function without a licence and how the regulator tasked with safeguarding patient safety could allow such a lapse. Subsequent stories tracked the case as it moved through the appellate and quasi-judicial system. In January 2025, The Probe reported a major breakthrough when the CIC imposed a penalty on the DGHS, ordered compensation of ₹45,000 to the RTI applicant and penalised the Public Information Officer for violating the RTI Act. The reporting revealed not just administrative negligence but a systemic failure that appeared to favour private hospitals over patients.

The final settlement before the DCDRC is therefore not just about ₹59,337 being refunded to Shikha Aggarwal. It marks the resolution of a prolonged legal process that held the hospital accountable. The case shows that patients have avenues, such as consumer forums, to seek redress when there are disputes over hospital charges or compliance with licensing requirements. The settlement highlights the importance of these mechanisms in ensuring that healthcare providers adhere to their obligations and respond appropriately to patient grievances.

Also Read: Artemis Lite Hospital Case: NHRC Steps In | The Probe Impact

More importantly, the Artemis Lite Hospital case sets a powerful precedent. It establishes that hospitals cannot hide behind regulatory silence, post-dated licences or technical arguments about jurisdiction. It affirms that regulators like the DGHS are duty-bound to maintain accurate records and cannot mislead citizens to shield private entities. The CIC’s observations on the misuse of the RTI Act, its call for public hearings during licence renewals and its warning against ex post facto approvals strike at the heart of how healthcare regulation is currently practised in Delhi

rtemis lite hospital case:

Assembly Elections 2026: Election Commission Announces Poll Schedule

The Assembly Elections 2026 process formally began after the Election Commission of India announced the schedule for the elections to the legislative assemblies of Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Puducherry. The announcement was made on Sunday, March 15, 2026. Under the plan released by the Commission, West Bengal will vote in two phases, while Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry will go to the polls in a single phase. 

Also Read: Donald Trump and Epstein Files: The Scandal Behind the Iran Conflict

Assembly Elections 2026: Model Code of Conduct Comes Into Effect

Alongside the Assembly Elections 2026 schedule, the ECI also announced by-elections to eight assembly constituencies across six states — Goa, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Nagaland and Tripura. Polling in the constituencies located in Goa, Karnataka, Nagaland and Tripura will take place on April 9, while Gujarat and Maharashtra will vote on April 23. The Commission said the counting of votes for these bypolls will also be held on May 4, the same day results of the Assembly Elections 2026 are scheduled to be declared.

Also Read: LPG Shortage Risk Grows as Strait of Hormuz Crisis Threatens India

The announcement of the Assembly Elections 2026 also unfolded against a political backdrop involving the office of the Chief Election Commissioner. During the press conference, Gyanesh Kumar chose not to respond to questions related to an opposition initiative in Parliament seeking to move a motion for his removal.

Under constitutional provisions, a Chief Election Commissioner can be removed only through a parliamentary process, while other Election Commissioners may be removed based on a recommendation from the CEC to the President. Opposition parties have argued that certain recent decisions of the Commission, including those linked to the revision of electoral rolls, reflected bias. 

LPG Shortage Risk as Hormuz Crisis Tests India’s Energy Security

Energy geopolitics is often discussed in terms of crude oil, naval fleets, and global diplomacy, but its most immediate impact is often felt in far quieter places—in the kitchens of ordinary households. The escalating confrontation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran has suddenly brought this reality into focus for India. At the centre of this unfolding drama lies the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow maritime corridor through which a large portion of the world’s oil, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), and liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows. India’s dependence on this passage is particularly significant because a majority of its LPG imports originate in the Gulf and travel through this strategic chokepoint.

This narrative examines the structural vulnerability in India’s LPG supply system, the potential economic and social consequences of disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, and the policy choices that India must confront to safeguard its energy security and the welfare of millions of households.

Also Read: Strait of Hormuz Crisis Shows Insurance, Not Warships, Controls Oil

Strait of Hormuz: The Strait that Powers Asia’s Kitchens

Few waterways in the world carry the geopolitical weight of the Strait of Hormuz. Nestled between Iran and Oman, barely forty kilometres wide at its narrowest point, the strait functions as one of the most critical energy corridors on the planet. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, nearly one-fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption—oil, LPG, and other hydrocarbons—passes through this narrow maritime artery every day.

Yet history has repeatedly shown that this corridor is also one of the world’s most sensitive geopolitical flashpoints. During periods of conflict or tension in the Middle East, even the hint of disruption in the Strait of Hormuz can send shockwaves through global energy markets.

The present confrontation involving Iran and Israel–US has revived fears that the strait could become a theatre of strategic confrontation. Iranian officials have repeatedly warned that if hostilities escalate, the country could restrict or disrupt tanker movement through the strait. Even without a formal closure, military activity, naval escorts, drone attacks, or missile threats could cause shipping companies to avoid the region, insurers to impose steep war-risk premiums, and cargo schedules to become erratic.

Energy markets react quickly to such uncertainty. Often it is not the disruption itself but the fear of disruption that triggers price spikes and fuels concerns about a potential LPG shortage.

For countries such as ours, which rely heavily on Gulf energy imports, this fear translates into immediate economic vulnerability.

India’s LPG Revolution: A Social Achievement with Strategic Exposure

Over the last decade, we have witnessed a dramatic transformation in household cooking energy. For generations, millions of Indian families relied on firewood, dung cakes, agricultural residue, or coal for cooking. These fuels were cheap and locally available but came with heavy health and environmental costs. Indoor air pollution from traditional fuels has long been associated with respiratory illnesses, eye disorders, and premature deaths.

By the mid-2020s, government claims indicated that more than 33 crore households had been connected to LPG, including over 10 crore beneficiaries under the Ujjwala programme. The expansion of LPG access has transformed daily life for millions of families, particularly women, who no longer have to spend hours collecting firewood or cooking in smoke-filled kitchens.

This remarkable social transformation, however, rests on a supply chain that remains heavily dependent on imports.

India’s domestic refineries produce roughly 12–13 million tonnes of LPG annually, while national consumption exceeds 30 million tonnes. In effect, around sixty percent of India’s LPG requirement must be imported, primarily from Gulf producers such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.

Also Read: Is the Indian Navy Ready for Underwater Warfare?

The geographic proximity of these producers has historically made Gulf imports economical and reliable. Yet this dependence also creates strategic vulnerability because most of these shipments travel through the Strait of Hormuz.

Industry estimates suggest that more than eighty percent of India’s LPG imports pass through the strait before reaching Indian ports. This concentration of supply sources and shipping routes means that geopolitical instability in the Gulf can quickly translate into supply stress in India’s LPG distribution network and cause LPG shortage.

LPG Shortage and the Hidden Fragility of India’s Supply Chain

At first glance, our LPG distribution system appears remarkably resilient. Tankers unload gas at coastal terminals, the fuel is transferred into storage tanks, filled into cylinders at bottling plants, and transported by trucks and rail wagons to distribution centres across the country.

This vast logistical network supplies cooking gas to hundreds of millions of households every month.

Yet beneath this operational efficiency lies a structural fragility: limited strategic storage.

Under normal conditions, this system works well because cargoes arrive regularly and the distribution cycle functions like a finely tuned machine. But the system resembles a “just-in-time” logistics model rather than a strategic reserve system.

Industry assessments suggest that India’s LPG inventories typically cover only two to three weeks of national consumption. If tanker arrivals are delayed due to geopolitical disruptions, the effects can cascade quickly through the supply chain and result in massive LPG shortage.

In such scenarios, bottling plants quickly experience LPG shortage, cylinder deliveries start slowing, and local distributors begin rationing supplies. Even temporary disruption in tanker schedules can produce visible stress in the market.

The Immediate Economic Shock

The earliest signal of such stress is usually seen in prices.

Following the recent escalation of tensions in West Asia, domestic LPG prices in India began rising. Within weeks, the price of a household cylinder increased by roughly ₹60, while commercial LPG cylinders—used extensively by restaurants and food businesses—rose even more sharply.

The LPG price increases reflect several underlying factors.

Together, these factors inflate the landed cost of LPG imports and in turn at the ground level consumers experience LPG shortage.

Restaurants and small food businesses have been among the first sectors to feel the pressure. Industry associations have warned that prolonged supply disruptions could force some establishments to shut temporarily if cooking gas becomes scarce or prohibitively expensive.

At the same time, petrochemical companies that normally use propane and butane as feedstock may find these inputs diverted toward household LPG production in order to protect domestic consumption.

Also Read: Attack in the Indian Ocean: Why India’s Silence Is So Troubling

Such emergency adjustments may stabilise supply for households but create disruptions in other segments of the industrial economy.

Household Affordability and the Risk of Fuel Reversion

For wealthier households, rising LPG prices represent inconvenience rather than a crisis. But for poorer families—especially those living close to subsistence levels—the cost of refilling a cylinder can represent a substantial share of monthly expenditure.

Indoor air pollution from biomass fuels remains one of the leading environmental health risks in developing countries. The transition to LPG was meant not only to improve convenience but also to protect public health.

If the affordability of LPG deteriorates, some of the gains achieved through the Ujjwala programme could be reversed.

Thus, the economic consequences of LPG price increases extend far beyond household budgets. They also affect environmental outcomes, public health indicators, and gender equity in rural communities.

Inflationary Ripples across the Economy

Energy price shocks rarely remain confined to the energy sector.

Cooking gas is a basic input for the food industry. When LPG prices rise, the costs faced by restaurants, street vendors, bakeries, and food processing units also increase. These costs eventually translate into higher food prices for consumers.

In urban areas, LPG is also used in several service industries, including catering, hospitality, and small manufacturing. Rising fuel costs therefore ripple through the broader service economy.

Another macroeconomic channel operates through the current account deficit.

Financial markets tend to react quickly to such developments. Investors often anticipate margin pressure on oil marketing companies when international energy prices surge, leading to volatility in energy sector stocks.

Thus, a geopolitical shock thousands of kilometres away can transmit quickly through the arteries of the domestic economy.

The Impact on PNG, CNG, and Urban Gas Networks

The ripple effects of the Strait ofHormuz crisis extend beyond LPG cylinders.

India’s rapidly expanding city gas distribution networks supply piped natural gas (PNG) to households and compressed natural gas (CNG) to vehicles in major urban centres such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Ahmedabad.

India imports nearly half of its natural gas consumption as liquefied natural gas (LNG), with Qatar among the largest suppliers. LNG cargoes from the Gulf also pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

If tanker traffic slows or shipping costs rise, LNG deliveries may become more expensive or delayed. This, in turn, could raise input costs for city gas distributors.

Higher LNG prices may translate into increased tariffs for PNG households and higher CNG prices for vehicles, thereby affecting urban transportation costs as well.

Thus, the consequences of disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz could ripple far beyond LPG into multiple segments of India’s energy ecosystem.

Fiscal Pressures and the Subsidy Dilemma

One of the most delicate policy challenges arising from rising LPG prices concerns government subsidies.

India currently provides targeted LPG subsidies to poorer households through the Direct Benefit Transfer for LPG (DBTL) system. Beneficiaries receive a subsidy amount directly in their bank accounts when they purchase cylinders.

If there is LPG shortage and the international LPG prices rise sharply, the government faces a difficult choice.

Allowing full price transmission would protect public finances but impose hardship on vulnerable households. Expanding subsidies would shield consumers but increase fiscal expenditure.

The scale of the fiscal exposure can be significant.

Even if subsidies are limited to about 10 crore Ujjwala beneficiaries, the additional fiscal burden could still reach ₹12,000 crore annually.

These numbers illustrate the delicate balance policymakers must strike between fiscal discipline and social protection.

Historical Echoes: Lessons from Past Energy Crises

The current tensions evoke memories of earlier energy crises.

The 1973 oil shock, triggered by the Arab oil embargo, sent crude prices soaring and forced many countries to rethink their energy strategies. The 1990 Gulf War similarly disrupted oil supplies and pushed global energy markets into turmoil.

India, heavily dependent on imported energy even then, experienced severe pressure on its balance of payments during these crises.

Yet the present situation has a new dimension: the centrality of LPG to household welfare. Unlike earlier decades, when cooking fuels were largely local and traditional, modern India relies heavily on a globally traded energy commodity to sustain daily cooking.

This shift means that geopolitical events in distant regions now directly affect the everyday lives of ordinary households.

A Way Forward

The unfolding tensions in the Gulf underscore the need for a comprehensive strategy to strengthen India’s cooking fuel security.

1. The first step must be diversification of supply sources. While Gulf imports will remain important, India should expand long-term LPG supply contracts with producers in the United States, Africa, and Australia to reduce dependence on a single region.
2. Second, India should seriously consider building dedicated strategic LPG reserves, similar to its crude oil reserves. Even a few weeks of additional storage capacity could provide valuable breathing space during geopolitical disruptions.
3. Third, domestic refining capacity should continue to expand LPG recovery from crude processing streams, while petrochemical integration can improve efficiency in propane and butane utilisation.
4. Fourth, the country must accelerate the development of alternative cooking technologies, including induction cooking, bio-CNG, and solar cooking solutions. Over time, such diversification can reduce reliance on imported hydrocarbons.
5. Finally, transparent communication from the government regarding stock levels, supply arrangements, and subsidy policies can help maintain public confidence and prevent panic buying during periods of uncertainty.

The Strait of Hormuz may lie thousands of kilometres away from India’s cities and villages, yet its stability determines whether millions of Indian kitchens remain lit.

The current crisis illustrates how deeply global geopolitics is intertwined with everyday life. A disruption in a distant maritime corridor can influence household budgets, national inflation, fiscal policy, and energy security.

India’s remarkable success in expanding LPG access has transformed the lives of millions of households. Safeguarding this achievement now requires strengthening the resilience of the supply chain on which it depends.

Ensuring that this cylinder continues to arrive reliably in every household may well become one of the most important tests of India’s strategic preparedness in an increasingly uncertain world.

Indian Navy and the Underwater Warfare Deficit

The recent submarine action by the US against a vessel from Iran in the Indian Ocean has once again drawn attention to the strategic importance of subsurface capabilities in modern naval warfare. The incident highlights the growing relevance of underwater strike capabilities and covert maritime operations.

For India, whose primary maritime theatre lies in the Indian Ocean, the development of such capabilities is increasingly central to strengthening deterrence and maintaining credible counter-strike options. In this context, the preparedness and long-term planning of the Indian Navy assume particular importance as the character of naval competition continues to evolve beneath the surface.

Also Read: Strait of Hormuz Crisis Shows Insurance, Not Warships, Controls Oil

To execute the mission, a specially modified submarine, the USS Halibut, covertly entered Soviet waters. Divers deployed from the submarine installed an advanced wiretapping device around the underwater communications cable. The device recorded Soviet naval communications, enabling the United States to collect extensive intelligence on submarine deployments, naval movements and missile tests. The operation continued successfully for nearly a decade before it was compromised in 1981.

The episode remains a massive illustration of how underwater operations can shape strategic outcomes without direct confrontation. As India and Germany move closer to finalising one of India’s largest defence procurement agreements—estimated at nearly $8 billion—to advance the Project 75I and construct six next-generation conventional submarines, the broader strategic lesson is clear. Beyond fleet expansion, the evolving maritime environment demands sustained attention to underwater warfare capabilities, an area that will increasingly influence the operational effectiveness of the Indian Navy in the years ahead.

The Changing Nature of Underwater Warfare

Three major developments underline the growing importance of underwater warfare capabilities.

First, China’s expanding submarine fleet presents a significant strategic challenge. Beijing has steadily invested in next-generation underwater platforms, including the development of advanced ballistic missile submarines such as the Type 096. These platforms are expected to be quieter and more difficult to detect, improving China’s ability to operate covertly in contested waters. According to assessments by the United States Department of Defense, China’s submarine fleet could reach approximately 65 vessels by 2025 and potentially expand to around 80 by 2030. Such growth would position China among the world’s largest submarine powers and greatly strengthen its maritime deterrence posture.

Also Read: Attack in the Indian Ocean: Why India’s Silence Is So Troubling

Second, the broader maritime geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific are shifting. Regional naval forces remain unevenly prepared to counter China’s expanding underwater capabilities. Subsurface platforms can enable area-denial strategies that complicate the operational freedom of rival navies, including those of the United States and its regional partners. In the longer term, this capability could also affect the strategic environment of the Indian Ocean. As Chinese naval deployments in the region gradually expand, the ability of the Indian Navy to monitor and respond to subsurface activity will become an increasingly important element of India’s maritime security architecture.

Third, underwater infrastructure has emerged as a critical vulnerability. The global economy relies heavily on an extensive network of subsea fibre-optic cables that carry the overwhelming majority of international data traffic, financial transactions and communications. Disruption to these cables—whether by unmanned underwater vehicles, specialised naval platforms or other covert means—could have severe consequences for national communications and economic stability.

Energy infrastructure located on the seabed, including offshore pipelines, faces similar risks. The explosions that damaged the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022 highlighted the strategic implications of attacks on underwater energy networks and demonstrated how subsurface operations can have far-reaching geopolitical consequences.

Although Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions continue to dominate underwater operations, the broader evolution of subsurface warfare suggests a more complex strategic landscape. Large surface vessels alone may not be sufficient to counter these emerging challenges. Strengthening underwater capabilities, therefore, will remain a critical priority for the Indian Navy as it prepares to operate in an increasingly contested maritime environment.

Capability Gaps Beneath the Surface

In the conventional maritime domain, the Indian Navy has made measurable progress in expanding its fleet and modernising its operational capabilities. Current plans envision the induction of roughly 175–200 ships by 2035, alongside a greater emphasis on indigenous shipbuilding and technological self-reliance. However, this progress at the surface level contrasts with more serious challenges in the underwater domain, where capability gaps continue to persist.

The absence of an operational nuclear-powered attack submarine presents an additional concern. Nuclear attack submarines play a central role in modern naval operations by tracking adversary submarines, targeting surface vessels and providing covert protection to carrier groups and other high-value assets. Their key advantage lies in their endurance and operational range. Unlike conventional submarines, they can remain submerged for extended periods, enabling sustained Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance missions as well as offensive operations without the need to surface frequently.

The modernisation of the submarine arm is therefore closely tied to the progress of Project 75I. The programme aims to construct six advanced conventional submarines equipped with Air Independent Propulsion systems that would allow longer underwater endurance and improved operational flexibility. Yet the project has experienced repeated delays since its conceptualisation in the late 1990s, remaining in various stages of negotiation for more than two decades. The eventual execution of this programme will be crucial for restoring balance within the submarine fleet.

Declining Mine Countermeasure Capability

Another area that warrants attention is mine warfare. Naval mines remain one of the most cost-effective tools for establishing maritime denial and controlling strategic choke points. Mines and countermeasure vessels can influence sea control by restricting an adversary’s access to critical sea lanes or ports. Equally important are mine countermeasure platforms that enable navies to detect and neutralise such threats.

Strategic Implications

Also Read: The Murder of Ali Khamenei and the Questions the World Refuses to Ask

While ongoing indigenous programmes will gradually strengthen the fleet, the broader challenge also involves adapting naval doctrine to the realities of modern maritime competition. Traditional naval thinking has focused largely on the visible projection of maritime power. However, contemporary conflicts increasingly involve covert operations, grey-zone tactics and the strategic use of subsurface platforms.

In this context, the Indian Navy may need to place greater emphasis on underwater deterrence, covert maritime operations and the ability to deny adversaries freedom of manoeuvre beneath the surface. These elements form an important part of modern naval strategy and align with classical concepts of sea power articulated by the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who emphasised the decisive role of naval strength in securing control of the seas.

Preparing for the Next Phase of Maritime Competition

More than five decades after its decisive role in the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, the Indian Navy now faces a markedly different strategic environment. The evolving dynamics of maritime competition in the Indo-Pacific suggest that future conflicts may increasingly extend into the underwater domain.

Strengthening subsurface capabilities, modernising the submarine fleet and developing effective underwater deterrence will therefore be essential if India is to maintain credible maritime influence and respond effectively to emerging challenges in the region.

Strait of Hormuz Crisis Exposes Hidden Power of Shipping Insurance

There is a central claim doing rounds in social media which is startling but not silly: the Strait of Hormuz is not paralysed merely because missiles fly, drones strike and navies posture, but because the commercial machinery that makes shipping legally and financially possible has seized up. The claim’s real insight is that modern sea power is no longer just about who controls the water; it is also about who underwrites the voyage. In that sense, the Trump administration’s $20 billion DFC reinsurance programme is a remarkable admission that military deterrence alone cannot restart commerce if insurers, ports, lenders, charterers and shipowners refuse to play.

Yet the claim may also be stretching the point too far in places. The underlying market has not disappeared altogether, and the precise arithmetic of the “$332 billion shortfall” should be treated as an analytical claim, not as holy scripture. Even so, the broad warning is serious and deserves to be taken seriously by us in India, perhaps more than by almost any other major economy, because India’s crude, LPG, LNG, freight exposure and inflation sensitivity make Strait of Hormuz not a distant war story but a domestic economic pressure point.

Also Read: Attack in the Indian Ocean: Why India’s Silence Is So Troubling

The reason is that ships must carry insurance, especially Protection and Indemnity (P&I) war-risk insurance, to operate legally in international trade. Without this insurance, ships cannot meet the requirements of banks that financed them, cannot enter many ports, and cannot fulfill their charter contracts.

It is reported that seven major marine insurance clubs have withdrawn war-risk coverage for ships in the region. Once that happened, many ships effectively became unable to sail through the Strait of Hormuz, regardless of how strong the naval protection was.

However, one could argue that the scale of the program is too small. Estimates suggest that the total value of ships and cargo exposed to war risk in the Gulf could be around $352 billion, meaning the U.S. program covers only a small portion of the total risk.

The broader point is that modern global trade depends not only on military security but also on financial confidence. Even if navies protect shipping lanes, tankers will not sail unless insurers, lenders, and traders are willing to accept the risk.

Strait of Hormuz Disruption Shows Why Insurance Rules the Seas

The first great strength of this view is that it sees through the theatre. Aircraft carriers are terrifying instruments of force, but they do not sign bills of lading, satisfy port-entry insurance covenants, restore financing eligibility, or persuade a shipowner to risk a vessel, a cargo, and a crew in waters where the legal and insurance architecture has started to crack.

The official DFC announcement itself gives the game away. Washington is not merely sending more steel into the sea; it is building a state-backed reinsurance bridge because commerce had stopped trusting the ordinary private bridge. That is not a footnote to the crisis. That is the crisis in its most modern form. The United States, in effect, has admitted that freedom of navigation in the twenty-first century depends as much on a risk committee and an underwriter’s signature as on a destroyer’s radar screen.

Also Read: The Murder of Ali Khamenei and the Questions the World Refuses to Ask

Its treatment of insurance and P&I cover is where the argument becomes both sharp and slippery. It is factually grounded that leading maritime insurers and clubs issued cancellations affecting war-risk cover in Iranian and surrounding Gulf waters, with March 5 becoming the effective turning point in many notices.

Reuters reported that major insurers such as Gard, Skuld, and others cancelled war-risk cover in the region, while official club notices confirm cancellations triggered by reinsurers’ notices. So it may be correct to state that insurance suddenly became central to whether ships could legally and commercially proceed. A vessel can have fuel in its tanks and a navy off its bow and still be unable to move if financing agreements, charter party terms, or destination-port rules demand cover that no longer exists on acceptable terms.

There could be a striking numerical assertion in the comparison between the DFC’s $20 billion facility and a JPMorgan estimate of roughly $352 billion in aggregate war-risk exposure for Gulf maritime commerce. Public reporting does support the existence of that broad JPMorgan estimate, and it also supports the argument that $20 billion is small relative to the total insured value exposed in the region. So the argument is directionally persuasive when it says the programme covers only a sliver of the risk universe.

Yet one must be careful here. Insurance exposure is not the same thing as immediate claim exhaustion; not every ship sails at once, not every loss is total, not all risk is insured through one facility, and the DFC’s plan is described as a rolling facility rather than a one-shot cheque. The argument’s arithmetic works brilliantly as rhetoric, but less neatly as a full operational model.

Also Read: Attack in the Indian Ocean: Why India’s Silence Is So Troubling

The weakness of the argument lies in the absolutism of its framing. It implies a world where private reinsurance has “formally and contractually withdrawn” in a total sense and where the programme exists but “the ships have not moved,” as though the absence of instant recovery proves the futility of the effort. That would be going too far.

There are already reports of some cargos continuing to move from ports in Iran, and the official U.S. programme is explicitly designed to apply on a revolving basis and initially to hull, machinery, and cargo. Markets do not switch from panic to normality in one presidential announcement. The hesitation of owners after an announcement does not mean the announcement is meaningless; it means trust has to be rebuilt the hard way, voyage by voyage, premium by premium, claim by claim. The argument captures the first half of the truth brilliantly and the second half impatiently.

The crude-oil effect on India is not merely about the headline Brent price. That is only the loudest part of the problem. The quieter damage arrives through freight, war-risk premiums, rerouting, cargo substitution, tighter supply windows, and the possibility of refiners having to re-optimise for grades they did not plan to run.

Reuters has reported that Asian refiners are struggling to replace Middle East oil and may face output cuts, while analysts have warned that oil could surge above $100 per barrel if flows do not recover. Even if India finds replacement barrels from Russia, West Africa, or the United States, those barrels do not arrive by magic; they come with longer haul distances, higher freight bills, and greater timing uncertainty. The result is not just expensive oil but messy oil.

LNG adds yet another layer of strain. Reuters has reported that Indian industries are already facing LNG supply cuts because of disruptions to Gulf shipments, with Petronet LNG invoking force majeure because of vessel constraints and downstream industrial users in Gujarat feeling the squeeze. Fertilizer producers, gas distributors, and industrial consumers are all part of this chain. So the Strait of Hormuz crisis does not hit India in one neat compartment. It hits cooking fuel, transport fuel, industrial gas, fertilizer economics, trade balances, and inflation expectations all at once. When one chokepoint squeezes multiple fuels simultaneously, the result is not a sectoral shock but a systemic shock.

Also Read: Iran's Next Leader After Khamenei: How He Is Chosen

There is also the less glamorous but very real challenge of dangerous sea routes and trading uncertainty. The post rightly points to the gap between a government announcement and the first confident insured transit. That gap is where chartering desks become nervous, lenders become legalistic, and traders begin pricing fear instead of fundamentals. GPS and AIS interference affecting more than 1,100 vessels in a day is not a cinematic side note; it is a compliance nightmare, a navigation hazard, and a recipe for disputes over routing, timing, and liability.

Add the attacks on vessels, the anchoring of large numbers of ships outside Hormuz, and the surge in war-risk premiums, and one gets a shipping market in which time itself becomes unreliable. Traders can absorb cost more easily than uncertainty. The post is most intelligent when it captures that distinction.

So the argument deserves both applause and correction. It deserves applause because it identifies the most underappreciated truth in the crisis: the decisive battlefield is not only the sea lane but the insurability of the sea lane. It deserves correction because it turns a complex market freeze into an almost total insurance apocalypse and treats the DFC facility as though its modest scale automatically makes it meaningless.

The reality is harsher and more interesting. The programme may indeed be too small to restore confidence on its own, but it is still a significant signal that sovereign balance sheets are being pulled in to restart a market that private capital currently fears. That is not failure alone. It is also escalation into a new domain of statecraft.

Way Forward

The sensible way forward is not to sneer either at aircraft carriers or at insurance desks, but to recognise that both now operate in the same strategic sentence. For the United States and its partners, any plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz must combine credible naval protection, scalable war-risk support, transparent claims mechanisms, and enough legal certainty to persuade shipowners that one voyage will not become one bankruptcy.

For insurers and reinsurers, abrupt withdrawal may be commercially rational in the moment, but the industry needs pre-designed crisis frameworks for chokepoints whose paralysis can shake the global economy.

Attack in the Indian Ocean: Why India Cannot Stay Silent

The expanding conflict between the United States and Iran has now reached the Indian Ocean, a maritime space that India has long described as central to its strategic vision. Yet as the crisis unfolded, India appeared largely a silent spectator.

Attack in the Indian Ocean and the Questions It Raises

The events that led to the attack began with two high-profile maritime gatherings hosted by the Indian Navy. The Iranian frigate had travelled to India to participate in Exercise MILAN 2026, a large multinational naval exercise involving dozens of countries, and the International Fleet Review 2026, a ceremonial gathering of warships conducted on behalf of the President of India. Both events were held in Visakhapatnam and brought naval forces from across the world into the Indian Ocean. After completing these engagements, the IRIS Dena began its return journey to Iran.

Also Read: The Murder of Ali Khamenei and the Questions the World Refuses to Ask

On 4 March 2026, while sailing in the Indian Ocean roughly 40 nautical miles south of Galle, Sri Lanka, the Iranian warship was struck by a torpedo fired from a U.S. Navy submarine.

The attack was devastating. Around 180 crew members were believed to be on board. Sri Lankan rescuers recovered 87 bodies and about 32 sailors were rescued, while more than 60 remain missing.

India’s official response focused on the humanitarian dimension. The Indian Navy said it received a distress signal from the vessel and joined Sri Lanka in search-and-rescue operations.

Why India cannot rely on the “not our waters” argument

Indian officials have suggested that the attack did not take place in India’s territorial waters and therefore did not fall directly under India’s responsibility. Legally, the strike occurred in international waters near Sri Lanka. But the broader strategic context makes the issue more complicated.

India also faces a second argument it cannot easily dismiss. The ship that was attacked had been invited to India only days earlier. The IRIS Dena participated in naval events organised by the Indian Navy itself. From a diplomatic perspective, that fact creates at least a moral responsibility toward a visiting vessel that had just taken part in exercises hosted by India in the Indian Ocean.

Also Read: Iran's Next Leader After Khamenei: How He Is Chosen

A third factor is geography. The attack occurred close to Sri Lanka, a country that India regularly describes as part of its immediate maritime neighbourhood. The waters south of Sri Lanka are among the busiest shipping routes in the Indian Ocean and fall squarely within the regional security environment monitored by the Indian Navy.

Iran Openly Says India’s Guest Was attacked

Iran itself has framed the incident in terms that place India at the centre of the story.

Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi wrote on X:

“The U.S. has perpetrated an atrocity at sea, 2,000 miles away from Iran's shores.

Frigate Dena, a guest of India's Navy carrying almost 130 sailors, was struck in international waters without warning.

Mark my words: The U.S. will come to bitterly regret precedent it has set.”

Notably, Araghchi did not emphasise Sri Lanka’s proximity or the precise location of the attack in the Indian Ocean. Instead, he highlighted the fact that the vessel had been a guest of the Indian Navy.

In that sense, the sinking of the vessel has also exposed the limits of India’s influence in the Indian Ocean — not through military weakness, but through diplomatic hesitation.

India’s Handling of the Distress Call Has Also Come Under Scrutiny

Just weeks before the tragedy, the Indian Navy publicly highlighted its growing cooperation with Iran. In a social-media post on 19 February, the Navy said its chief Admiral Dinesh K Tripathi had interacted with Admiral Shahram Irani, the commander of the Iranian Navy. The discussion focused on expanding operational cooperation and maritime engagement in the Indian Ocean.

The Indian Navy noted in that message:

“The presence of IRIS Dena underscored Iran’s active engagement at IFR 2026.”

According to official statements, India responded after receiving information about the distress signal from the Iranian vessel. The alert was reportedly received by rescue authorities early on 4 March, after which India deployed maritime patrol aircraft and later dispatched a naval vessel to assist search operations.

The Indian Navy has said it joined the rescue effort coordinated by Sri Lanka.

However, independent reports suggest that several hours passed between the distress call and the arrival of assistance at the scene. Sri Lanka’s navy appears to have been the first responder in the rescue effort. The key question is whether faster assistance could have been provided, particularly given the proximity of major naval deployments in the Indian Ocean.

India Avoided Political Leadership in the Crisis

Beyond operational questions, the larger issue concerns political leadership. In a crisis involving the sinking of a warship in the Indian Ocean, regional leadership could have taken several forms. A country in India’s position might issue a clear public statement, call for restraint, or encourage diplomatic dialogue between the parties involved.

Also Read: US Unlikely to Back Off on Iran After Operation Against Maduro

Political leadership could also involve coordinating regional responses with countries such as Sri Lanka, or raising the matter in international forums such as the United Nations.

How Deadly the Attack in the Indian Ocean Was

The Iranian frigate was struck by a Mark-48 torpedo fired from a U.S. fast-attack submarine while sailing through the Indian Ocean after completing naval engagements in India. Defence officials in the US have released only a partial timeline, but the sequence that has emerged suggests that the vessel was transiting the region when the torpedo was launched in the early hours of 4 March. At approximately 5:08 a.m., the ship transmitted a distress signal reporting a powerful explosion. Soon after, the vessel appears to have suffered catastrophic structural damage and sank before nearby rescue units could reach the scene.

The Mark-48 torpedo, often written as Mk-48, is the primary heavy torpedo used by the U.S. Navy. It is designed specifically to destroy large ships and submarines.

Unlike missiles that strike from above, a torpedo travels underwater at high speed after being launched from a submarine. Modern torpedoes such as the Mk-48 are designed to detonate beneath a ship rather than against its side.

When the explosion occurs under the hull, it creates a massive bubble of gas that lifts the vessel upward. As the bubble collapses, the structure of the ship can snap or break in the middle. This process — known in naval warfare as a keel-breaking explosion — is among the most destructive methods of sinking a large vessel.

The Strategic Choice Now Facing India

Warships that participate in multinational naval exercises are typically present as symbols of cooperation rather than active combat forces. Their presence in the Indian Ocean is meant to reflect dialogue and partnership among navies.

It would be utterly irresponsible to claim, without evidence, that the sinking of the Iranian ship, India’s silence, and the U.S. issuing a waiver for India to purchase Russian oil are all connected. But the familiar logic of diplomacy — the mixture of incentives and pressure often described as a carrot-and-stick approach — which the U.S. has lately been imposing on India cannot be ignored.

India now faces a difficult strategic choice. If it wishes to lead the Indian Ocean, it must decide whether silence can remain part of that leadership.

Ali Khamenei, Sovereignty and the Collapse of Global Restraint

Also Read: US Unlikely to Back Off on Iran After Operation Against Maduro

The operation, justified in democratic language, appears instead to challenge foundational principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and the prohibition on the unilateral use of force — norms that modern democracies themselves helped construct after the Second World War. If democracies abandon those standards, they risk becoming examples not of governance to emulate, but of power unconstrained by law.

Why the U.S. and Israel Attacked Iran — and Why the Argument Fails

US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified the operation that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a necessary step to eliminate what they described as an “existential” and “imminent” threat. Their central argument rested on preventing Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold — the point at which a state moves from possessing nuclear knowledge to holding deployable nuclear weapons.

Trump argued Iran was rebuilding nuclear capabilities and was approaching weaponisation despite earlier military pressure. Crossing this threshold, in strategic doctrine, signifies the ability not merely to research nuclear technology but to assemble and deploy an operational device.

Nuclear-armed states pose immediate destructive danger because weapons already exist and can be deployed. Yet paradoxically, such states often behave within predictable deterrence frameworks. Mutual vulnerability produces restraint — a condition strategists describe as nuclear deterrence stability.

Threshold states generate a different form of anxiety. If Iran remained a threshold power at the time of the killing of Ali Khamenei, uncertainty itself becomes the perceived threat. Opponents cannot determine when weaponisation might occur, creating pressure for preventive military action. This strategic paradox lies at the centre of nuclear politics: once a country fully crosses the nuclear threshold, war may become less likely but infinitely more catastrophic if it occurs. The debate surrounding Ali Khamenei’s killing therefore reflects not only Iranian policy but enduring global disagreement over whether uncertainty or capability constitutes the real or greater danger.

The controversy surrounding the killing of Ali Khamenei reflects this imbalance. States already possessing nuclear weapons are rarely subjected to military prevention precisely because retaliation risks are intolerable. Countries perceived as approaching capability, however, become targets of coercive enforcement. Critics argue Iran has repeatedly faced disproportionate scrutiny within this unequal framework, reinforcing perceptions that nuclear legitimacy depends less on law than geopolitical alignment.

Also Read: Venezuela Today, Iran Tomorrow: Can Iran Survive A Second Trump Term?

Trump and Netanyahu further cited Iran’s ballistic missile programme as evidence of imminent danger, describing the strike as pre-emptive defence. Yet possession or advancement of missile technology has never, under established international norms, constituted lawful grounds for attack.

The Persistent Aggression Argument Also Fails

Washington justified military action on Iran partly by citing Iran’s support for regional proxy groups and decades of hostility toward American interests. Historical references included the 1979 hostage crisis and attacks linked to Iranian-aligned actors. Yet evaluating persistent aggression requires examining conduct across all actors.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States, launched on claims of weapons of mass destruction later proven unfounded, destabilised an entire region. NATO’s Libya intervention produced regime collapse and prolonged conflict, while two decades of war in Afghanistan resulted in extensive civilian casualties.

The strikes inside Iranian territory that killed Ali Khamenei raise serious legal concerns under international law. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force against another state’s sovereignty absent Security Council authorisation or lawful self-defence. No verified evidence of an ongoing armed attack meeting Article 51 standards has been publicly established.

Targeted killing of a sitting head of state outside a declared war zone would constitute an extrajudicial assassination and potentially an act of aggression under international humanitarian law principles governing proportionality, distinction and political immunity.

The Trump administration not only breached international law in its actions against Iran but also bypassed U.S. domestic legal requirements for authorising military force. Donald Trump maintained that its actions fell within presidential authority. Yet the United States Constitution assigns Congress exclusive power to declare war, while presidential military authority is limited to responding to immediate threats and large-scale offensive operations typically require congressional authorisation. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 further requires consultation with Congress before hostilities begin and formal reporting within forty-eight hours.

Also Read: Trump’s Tariffs Fuel Confusion and Frustration Worldwide

In this instance, no Congressional authorisation or Authorisation for Use of Military Force was reportedly secured prior to operations connected to the killing of Ali Khamenei. Limited leadership notification reportedly occurred without broader legislative approval. Without demonstrable imminence, constitutional justification for unilateral executive action remains legally contested within U.S. domestic law itself.

Israeli Supreme Court jurisprudence further requires targeted killings to address immediate threats where arrest is impossible. Eliminating a political and religious leader rather than an active battlefield commander challenges those standards and raises questions about procedural compliance and democratic oversight.

Ali Khamenei May Have Been a Flawed Leader — But Law Still Matters

Even before his killing, Ali Khamenei remained deeply controversial within Iran. His leadership was widely criticised for repression of dissent, economic stagnation and political centralisation. Crackdowns on protests, restrictions on civil liberties and resistance to reform alienated large segments of Iran’s young population. Economic hardship intensified under sanctions and domestic policy decisions, while regional proxy strategies drew criticism for prioritising geopolitical influence over internal welfare.

If the international community remains silent following actions surrounding the murder of Ali Khamenei, silence risks becoming complicity. Normalising preventive war weakens the post-1945 rules-based order and encourages nuclear proliferation as vulnerable states seek survival through deterrence. The consequences may include escalating arms races, erosion of diplomacy and heightened risk of confrontation among nuclear powers.

Accountability mechanisms still exist — independent investigations, international legal proceedings, diplomatic pressure and multilateral restraint. The issue is not punishment alone but preservation of global order. When force replaces law as the organising principle of international politics, instability becomes permanent. Silence, in such moments, is not neutrality. Silence becomes participation in the crime.

Delhi Excise Case: Liquor, Law and the Limits of Conspiracy

IDFC First Bank Fraud: Anatomy of a Control Breakdown

On February 22, 2026, IDFC First Bank disclosed a suspected ₹590-crore fraud at a single branch in Chandigarh, allegedly involving employee collusion and forged physical instruments tied to Haryana government–linked accounts.

What looks like a sudden market accident is actually the final scene of a slow governance drift. The trigger was the disclosure by IDFC First Bank: “unauthorised and fraudulent activities” at its Chandigarh branch, allegedly by certain individuals employed there, “potentially in collusion” with others. The bank’s own public narrative later underlined an uncomfortable irony: it wasn’t a sophisticated cyber breach but an “oldest kind of fraud… cheques… forged,” meaning the modern obsession with digital risk did not protect the basic plumbing of branch operations.

Also Read: Fake Loan Apps Thrive As Authorities Fail To Crackdown, Leaving Consumers Vulnerable

The market did what markets do when trust is punctured: it repriced the bank’s credibility first and asked questions later. Reuters reported shares fell as much as 20% after disclosure of the suspected ₹5.9 billion fraud, and that the discrepancy surfaced when account closures were sought and balances didn’t match what records suggested. The Economic Times similarly described the fall as the worst crash since March 2020, tied directly to the fraud disclosure and the bank’s move to appoint KPMG for a forensic audit.

The “₹1,100 Crore Government Loss” and “₹340 Crore LIC Loss”: The Headline Is True — and Also Misleading

But here’s why the framing still matters: even if the “loss” is not realised, it is a public governance wound. The Government of India and LIC are not anonymous traders; they are public fiduciaries. When a bank they own meaningfully gets hit by a branch-level fraud, the real damage is the credibility haircut: shareholders start pricing in “What else isn’t visible?” and depositors and counterparties start watching more closely.

What Went Wrong: This Wasn’t One Failure. This Was a Failure Chain

On February 24, 2026, Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini informed the State Assembly that approximately ₹556 crore of the principal amount had been recovered from IDFC First Bank. With nearly ₹22 crore added as interest, around ₹578 crore was credited back to government accounts within 24 hours. Later the same day, the bank updated its disclosure to state that it had paid a net total of ₹583 crore—covering 100% of the principal and interest claimed by the affected Haryana government department.

At the centre is a classic triad: (1) operational control weakness at the branch, (2) reconciliation failure over time, and (3) governance oversight that did not catch the build-up early. We shall come (a little later) to possible governance failures vis-à-vis Government of Haryana and by extension what could have been or should at least now be, the role of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG). This is because the Government of Haryana had asked for closure of some of its affected accounts.

First, the fraud mechanism appears to have exploited “physical” banking weaknesses-instruments, authorisations, custody, maker-checker, and exception monitoring. The bank’s own conference call transcript explicitly frames it as forged cheques and a non-digital transaction. That is practically an admission that core controls that should be boringly reliable-signature verification discipline, instrument-level scrutiny, dual authorisation, non-routine transaction escalation, and audit trail integrity-were not reliable enough.

Also Read: CAG: Allegations of Corruption, Cronyism, and Cover-Up

Second, reconciliation did not bite early enough. Reuters notes the discrepancy was noticed after the Haryana government requested closure of some accounts, revealing mismatches. That detail is devastating because it suggests the “moment of discovery” came from an external administrative action, not from the bank’s own continuous control monitoring.

Third, there is a parallel governance problem on the government side-how public funds were placed, monitored, and reconciled. Haryana’s response has been sharp: reports indicate de-empanelment of IDFC First Bank for government business and instructions to move funds/close accounts, along with tighter finance department control over opening accounts in private banks. If government departments were parking large balances outside stronger treasury discipline and not reconciling frequently, the fraud risk multiplies. And if the bank’s branch staff knew reconciliation was weak or delayed, the fraud window widens.

Whose Failure Was It?

If we want one villain, we won’t get one. But we can still allocate accountability.

The primary failure is the bank’s-because internal control is not a shared hobby; it is the product. IDFC First Bank itself described “collusion between employees and external parties” and limited the issue to certain government-linked accounts in that branch. The bank also moved to appoint KPMG for a forensic audit and disclosed provisioning actions and the expected impact on profitability. Those are remedial steps; they do not erase the fact that preventive controls failed.

If a single branch can host a ₹590 crore discrepancy, the committee must answer: what did internal audit report about that branch and that portfolio earlier, what red flags existed (or were missed), and why did “continuous auditing” not detect anomalies faster?

The third failure is the public funds governance ecosystem. Where government accounts exist, there should be relentless reconciliation discipline, clear authority matrices, and treasury-aligned controls. The post-incident tightening by Haryana—the finance nod requirement, closure of accounts, and mandated reconciliations—implicitly concedes that the earlier regime allowed avoidable discretion and weak monitoring.

Also Read: CAG: Stalled Audits, Alleged Political Bias Shake Constitutional Body

Could This Have Been Avoided?

Yes-because nothing in this story required a genius criminal. It required gaps.

It could likely have been avoided—or at least detected much earlier—had three “unsexy” systems been uncompromising: real-time exception analytics for high-value government-linked transactions; reconciliation SLAs that trigger automatic escalation if not completed within the cycle; and branch-level controls that treat physical instruments as high-risk events rather than routine paperwork.

How the Audit Committee Should Have Done Better

An audit committee cannot prevent fraud through slogans. It does so by compelling management to demonstrate that controls work in the messy places—branches, exceptions, overrides, and government accounts.

In a bank that manages large, reputation-sensitive deposit relationships, the Audit Committee should demand a living dashboard of control exceptions: manual overrides, unusual instrument patterns, deviations from maker-checker protocols, repeated reconciliation delays, and any branch exhibiting an abnormal concentration of operational anomalies. It should also require periodic deep dives into the internal audit function—not merely the number of audits completed, but what was uncovered, what was remediated, and whether repeat findings persist. In fraud-prone domains, repeat findings are not administrative inconveniences; they are early warnings.

Most critically, the committee must treat government-linked accounts as a special risk class: higher scrutiny, tighter authorisation matrices, and mandated reconciliation frequency. When public money is involved, the reputational blast radius is always larger than the rupee number.

What Statutory Auditors Could Have Done Better

Auditors are required to maintain professional scepticism and respond to fraud risks; they also have explicit duties around fraud considerations in an audit. In practical terms, auditors could have strengthened their approach in at least three ways.

First, risk assessment: government-linked balances concentrated in specific branches should trigger enhanced fraud risk procedures-because the incentive, access, and camouflage potential are higher.

Second, testing of controls vs. testing of outcomes: if the audit strategy relied heavily on control testing, then the control failure suggests either the controls were not designed effectively, not operating effectively, or not tested deeply enough in the right location. A “branch that matters” should never be treated as statistically ordinary.

Third, journal entries, manual instruments, and overrides: forged instruments and collusion typically leave patterns-abnormal sequences, repeated override users, unusual timing, suspicious beneficiary clusters. Even if statutory audit is not forensic, it can still apply sharper procedures in high-risk pockets to either detect anomalies or force earlier remediation.

Why RBI’s “No Systemic Risk” Line Is Not a Clean Bill of Health

RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra stated RBI was monitoring developments and saw “no systemic issue/risk.” That is important to calm depositors and prevent contagion. But “no systemic risk” does not mean “no governance lesson.” It simply means the banking system is not expected to wobble because of this single event. For the bank, the real punishment is different: higher scrutiny, trust deficit, and a market premium on uncertainty.

Because make no mistake- this was not a fraud in a random retail savings account. These were government-linked funds, parked, operated and reconciled (or rather, not reconciled) under the stewardship of the Government of Haryana.

And that changes everything.

In any well-run public finance system, government bank accounts are not treated like personal wallets. They sit inside a disciplined treasury framework with strict authorisation, daily or weekly reconciliation, segregation of duties, audit trails, and periodic supervisory checks. The very reason governments centralise cash management is to prevent precisely this kind of slow-burn leakage.

Yet here, the fraud appears to have grown quietly- so quietly that it surfaced only when account closures were sought and balances didn’t add up. That single fact is devastating. It suggests reconciliation wasn’t continuous, oversight wasn’t tight, and alarm bells weren’t wired to ring early.

This does not automatically mean Haryana officials were complicit.

But it does strongly suggest administrative negligence, weak financial controls, and a dangerously casual approach to public funds.

And when public money is involved, negligence is not a minor lapse-it is a governance failure.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room.

If a state government’s control environment allowed such exposure, how can this be merely a “bank fraud story”?

It is equally a public financial management breakdown.

And that is precisely where the CAG is supposed to step in.

The CAG’s constitutional mandate is not merely to count vouchers; it is to examine whether government systems safeguard public money economically, efficiently, and effectively. When hundreds of crores sit in weakly monitored banking arrangements and disappear through forged instruments, this falls squarely within classic audit territory. The questions are straightforward: Were treasury rules followed?

Were reconciliations timely and independently reviewed?

Were account openings properly authorised and risk-assessed?

Were exception reports acted upon?

Did internal controls exist only on paper?

If CAG limits itself to watching the bank clean up and the police file FIRs, it would miss the larger governance failure entirely.

Because even if every rupee was eventually recovered, the control collapse remains–and that collapse could exist across dozens of other accounts, banks and departments.

In fact, this is exactly the kind of episode where a rapid performance-cum-systems audit should kick in: not years later in a routine report, but immediately—while records are fresh, officials are accountable, and lessons can actually prevent the next fraud.

If reconciliation was delayed, that is a failure of treasury control.

If oversight was weak, that is a failure of financial governance.

If approvals were casual, that is a failure of administrative discipline.

All squarely within CAG’s audit universe. The argument that the bank is a private bank and hence outside the ambit of CAG’s scrutiny would not hold water.

And here lies the deeper discomfort: if a fraud of this magnitude involving public funds does not trigger urgent audit scrutiny of government controls, what will?

Because banking frauds happen everywhere.

But public money quietly sitting in poorly governed systems is where scandals keep repeating.

So yes—Haryana may not have forged cheques.

But Haryana almost certainly provided the environment in which forged cheques could thrive undetected.

And yes—the bank failed spectacularly.

But if CAG does not now dissect the government’s role with equal intensity, it would be another missed opportunity to fix the real disease rather than merely treating the symptom.

This episode is not just about a rogue branch of IDFC First Bank.

It is about how loosely public money was being watched—and whether India’s accountability institutions will chase the deeper governance truth or stop at the easy headline of “bank fraud.”

If handled boldly, this could become a turning point in tightening state-level treasury discipline across India.

If handled timidly, it will quietly join the long list of scandals where money vanished, arrests were made, and systems remained just as fragile as before.

And markets, auditors, and taxpayers will keep paying the price.

Lessons Learnt

The first lesson is that India’s governance failures often come from the boring layer, not the glamorous layer. A country can talk AI, cyber resilience, and fintech all day—and still bleed from forged cheques and weak reconciliations.

The second lesson is that public money without tight treasury discipline is an invitation to leakage. If departmental accounts can sit with weak oversight, delayed reconciliations, and ambiguous accountability, fraud does not need brilliance—only patience.

The third lesson is that Audit Committees must audit the exceptions, not applaud the averages. Fraud does not grow in policy manuals; it grows in overrides, delays, and “branch-level understandings.”

The fourth lesson is that statutory audit has to be more forensic in spirit where the risk is structurally higher—not by becoming investigators, but by designing audit responses that treat high-risk concentrations as special, not routine.

P. Sesh Kumar is a retired Indian Audit and Accounts Service (IA&AS) officer of the 1982 batch who served in senior audit roles under the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, including as Director General of Audit. He has made significant contributions to public sector auditing, governance, and financial accountability, and is the author of several books on public audit and governance, including CAG: Ensuring Accountability Amidst Controversies—An Inside View.

Kogilu After Bulldozers Flatten 400 Homes in Winter

On the morning of December 20, 2025, bulldozers rolled into Waseem Colony and Fakir Colony in Kogilu Layout, north Bengaluru, flattening homes in their path. By dawn, more than 400 families had lost their homes. Residents say they were not given prior notice. 

The settlements in Kogilu, located at the foothills of a stone quarry, had existed for over 25 years. The land has been identified by authorities for a waste processing plant. I visited the site in Kogilu on December 31, eleven days after the bulldozers tore through the neighbourhood. I did not go there as part of a breaking news cycle. By then, the headlines had moved on, and the images of bulldozers had faded from television screens. I went because I could not ignore the disquiet that followed reports of families being evicted in winter, just days before Christmas and New Year. I wanted to see what remained after the machines had left. What I found was not chaos. It was the aftermath.

The debris had settled into uneven mounds of brick, tin sheets and splintered wood. People walked carefully across what had once been narrow internal lanes. 

Many were holding documents. Aadhaar cards bearing addresses that no longer existed. Electricity bills retrieved from rubble. Plastic folders containing photocopies of land-related papers. Some residents showed me printouts of Google Earth images with the location of their former homes circled in pen. Homes had disappeared. The paperwork had not.

Karnataka state government officials were present, seated at temporary desks. They were documenting names and details, listening to residents, and assuring them that their cases would be reviewed. People queued quietly, submitting whatever proof of residence they had managed to salvage.

The contrast was difficult to ignore. Not far from the demolished colonies, high-rise apartment complexes were drilling deeper into rock, preparing foundations. Here, one settlement had been flattened in the name of development. There, another was rising.

Public discourse around demolitions often uses administrative language: “clearance,” “encroachment,” “relocation.” Standing amid the rubble, those terms felt insufficient.

For many families in Kogilu, displacement was not only the loss of shelter after the bulldozers moved in. It was the loss of address, neighbourhood networks, school proximity, workplace access, and a sense of civic anchoring. When a government-issued identity card still allows you to vote from an address that bulldozers have reduced to rubble, the meaning of belonging becomes complicated.

Some residents in Kogilu Layout accompanied me for a while, pointing out where homes once stood. Others offered water. One person brought an umbrella to shield me from the sun while I adjusted my camera. When I showed some people the first infrared image-dominated by deep reds and pale tones-some asked, “Why is it all red?” I told them briefly that infrared images can be more impactful. One man responded, “Yes. We need impact.”

Does repeated exposure to images rendered in ‘normal’ light normalise eviction, helplessness, homelessness and suffering? Does the realistic legitimacy of what is visually documented make what is seen credible but not necessarily felt, at times? Has the visible light we revel in, with our ability to distinguish as many as ten million colours, induced more blindness within us? This is where I find the relevance of infrared photography that I hope will disrupt this visual complacency.

Eviction does not end in the moment bulldozers withdraw. It continues-in paperwork disputes, temporary shelter, uncertainty about schooling, and the search for stability. Conventional photojournalism often seeks what is called a “decisive moment.” But displacement is not decisive. It is ongoing.

It is easy to treat demolitions as isolated administrative events. A date. A number of houses. A statement from authorities. Then the cycle moves on. But bearing witness requires remaining with the site long enough to recognise that what happened is not self-contained. It enters the future of those affected.

Several residents told me they had lived in the colonies for more than two decades. Children had grown up there. Weddings had been held. Votes had been cast. The place existed not only as an address but as a social ecosystem. When that ecosystem is erased, the loss extends beyond physical structures.

In Kogilu Layout, where bulldozers ruptured lives overnight, families are still struggling to rebuild. The colour once held within their homes now survives mostly in memory; what remains on the ground is broken rubble, rendered in infrared tones that heighten the starkness of their loss.

My last memory of Kogilu Layout that day was her smile. Days after bulldozers tore through the settlement, that smile endured-a quiet assertion of dignity and warmth in the face of loss.

Photo courtesy: Ajai Narendran, with immense gratitude to the people of Kogilu Layout who graciously welcomed Ajai and shared their stories.

Artemis Lite Hospital Under Scrutiny as NHRC Directs Delhi Health Department to File ATR

In a major escalation in the ongoing Artemis Lite Hospital accountability saga, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has formally intervened and sought an Action Taken Report (ATR) from the Health Department of the Government of NCT of Delhi. Acting on a complaint filed by noted RTI activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal, the NHRC has directed the Delhi Health Secretary to conduct an inquiry into allegations of corruption, collusion and human rights violations involving Artemis Lite Hospital and a senior DGHS official.

This intervention by the NHRC is significant not only because it places Artemis Lite Hospital in New Friends Colony in Delhi under renewed scrutiny, but also because it is unusual for the Commission to step into a case dealing with lapses in licensing, hospital governance and administrative failure—areas typically left to regulatory bodies. The Commission’s decision highlights that public health failures, especially those involving misleading conduct and denial of lawful dues to a patient’s family, amount to human rights violations. It also indicates that when a case involves a vulnerable citizen dealing with powerful hospital entities, as in the Artemis Lite Hospital matter, the NHRC views its mandate as extending to ensuring fairness, accountability and transparency.

Also Read: CIC Imposes Penalty on DGHS in Artemis Hospital Case, The Probe Impact

CIC Penalty Deepens Scrutiny Over DGHS and Artemis Hospital

The CIC’s earlier order had marked a turning point in the case. The Commission found that the DGHS had provided false information in response to an RTI regarding whether Artemis Lite Hospital possessed a valid licence during the treatment of Shikha Aggarwal in April 2023. Despite documentary evidence showing that the hospital’s licence was issued only on August 1, 2023, months after the treatment, the DGHS had incorrectly claimed that a valid licence existed during the hospitalisation period.

The CIC consequently directed the DGHS to compensate Sanjeev Kumar with ₹45,000 for the harassment and inconvenience caused due to the misleading RTI response. The directive also required the department to file a compliance report promptly. This was accompanied by another strong measure: the imposition of a ₹15,000 penalty on Dr. Sandeep Kumar Agarwal, Medical Superintendent and then PIO, for failing to comply with the RTI Act. The penalty was ordered to be deducted directly from his salary, highlighting the seriousness with which the CIC viewed the violation. 

These findings had also brought renewed attention to the licensing lapses concerning the hospital. The DGHS itself admitted during proceedings that the premises now occupied by Artemis Lite Hospital were earlier licensed to Bansal Hospital until March 31, 2023. Since Artemis Hospital obtained its licence only on August 1, 2023, a critical question remained unanswered: how did the hospital operate uninterrupted for four months without regulatory approval? This gap, exposed through RTI documents and later echoed in the CIC’s findings, raised disturbing concerns about the DGHS’s oversight and its possible leniency towards private hospitals.

Also Read: Artemis Hospital Licensing: DGHS Under Fire

Background: How Artemis Hospital Came Under the Scanner

The controversy can be traced back to a series of systemic failures within the DGHS that came to light following a tragic fire at Baby Care New Born Hospital in May 2024, which killed eight infants. Investigations revealed that the hospital was operating with an expired licence, prompting serious questions about the DGHS’s monitoring systems. This case set the backdrop against which the Artemis Lite Hospital’s story unfolded, raising concerns about whether similar regulatory lapses were widespread.

Also Read: Delhi Hospital Fire: Eight Babies Burnt to Death, No Justice in Sight

Following a first appeal, the DGHS admitted receiving two letters from Artemis Lite Hospital—one stating information was being collected, and another claiming exemption from the RTI Act as a private entity. Instead of verifying license details already available in its own records, the DGHS forwarded these explanations to the applicant, effectively shielding the hospital from scrutiny. This raised troubling questions about whether the regulatory body was protecting Artemis Lite Hospital rather than ensuring legal compliance.

The DGHS also confirmed during the proceedings that Bansal Hospital had held the licence for the premises until March 31, 2023, and that Artemis Lite Hospital only received its licence on August 1, 2023. This meant that the hospital was operating without a valid licence during the period when Shikha Aggarwal underwent surgery—a fact now central to both the CIC and NHRC interventions. The revelations have triggered questions about how many more hospitals in Delhi may be operating without licences, and the wider implications of DGHS oversight failures.

Bardhaman Consumer Commission Seeks Nurses’ Records

The Bardhaman District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission has directed the Medical Administrator of Sharanya Multispeciality Hospital in West Bengal to appear before it with documents relating to the registration certificates of the nurses employed at the facility. The order was passed in connection with two complaints filed by Manoj Kumar Ghosh and Hitesh Choudhary.

In their petitions before the Commission, the parents have alleged that their children suffered vision impairment following birth due to negligence on the part of the hospital. Among their claims is a serious allegation that the members of the hospital’s nursing staff at the time of the birth of the children were not registered with the West Bengal Nursing Council. 

Also Read: Medical Negligence Alleged: Vision Loss in Two Babies

For observers of the case, this development marks an important moment. Over the past year and a half, The Probe has reported extensively on the Bardhaman case involving the two children, Mivaan and Adrita. The Commission’s insistence on documentary compliance suggests that the matter has entered a more exacting phase of scrutiny.

Bardhaman Medical Negligence Case: From NICU Lapses to Medical Council Inquiry

In October 2024, The Probe first reported on the Bardhaman case involving Manoj Ghosh’s daughter Adrita and Hitesh Choudhary’s son Mivaan. Both children were born prematurely at Sharanya Multispeciality Hospital in Bardhaman, West Bengal, in 2023. Because of their premature birth, they were admitted to the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), a specialised facility designed to provide continuous monitoring and advanced medical support to critically ill or preterm newborns.

Medical guidelines in India, including those endorsed by national neonatal and ophthalmology bodies, recommend that preterm infants meeting specific criteria undergo ROP screening within four weeks of birth. The screening is particularly advised for infants with a birth weight below 1500 grams or a gestational age under 32 weeks.

Also Read: Medical Negligence: Who Killed Simran?

Hitesh Choudhary has alleged that despite his son Mivaan’s prolonged 43-day stay in the Bardhaman hospital, no ROP screening was conducted. He further claims that upon discharge, the family was advised to wait another 15 days before seeking the test elsewhere. Manoj Ghosh has made a similar allegation regarding his daughter Adrita, who remained in the hospital for 48 days but did not undergo ROP screening during that period. According to him, he too was advised to wait an additional 15 days before pursuing the test at another facility. The parents argue that these delays proved consequential.

In 2024, when The Probe reached out to the hospital seeking clarification, Dr. Soumendra Saha Sikdar, the Proprietor of Sharanya Multispeciality Hospital, acknowledged that ROP screening had not been conducted at the time due to a lack of necessary facilities. The admission was notable. It raised questions about whether a hospital providing NICU services in Bardhaman should have either ensured in-house screening capability or arranged timely referral to a centre equipped to perform the procedure. In neonatal care, where timelines are clinically significant, the absence of screening infrastructure can have irreversible consequences.

The case did not remain confined to the consumer forum. In April 2025, The Probe reported that the West Bengal Medical Council (WBMC) had sought a report from Sharanya Multispeciality Hospital in connection with allegations of medical negligence leading to vision loss in the two infants.

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

In July 2025, The Probe reported further developments. The WBMC formally initiated an inquiry into the allegations of negligence at the Bardhaman hospital. The Council requested a detailed explanation from the institution concerning the failure to conduct timely ROP screenings and other alleged lapses in neonatal care. In a subsequent move, the Council summoned four doctors associated with the hospital—Dr. Balaram Ghosh, Dr. Mir Tahmid Zaman, Dr. Nibedita Samanta and Dr. SK Sahabuddin—to appear before its Penal and Ethical Cases Committee. 

In August 2025, The Probe reported on a meeting held on 30 July 2025 at the West Bengal Medical Council in relation to the Bardhaman case. During the hearing, the parents of Mivaan and Adrita were asked to submit detailed written complaints outlining their allegations against each of the four doctors and the hospital. The doctors appeared before the Council’s Penal and Ethical Cases Committee, and their statements were recorded. 

Mivaan and Adrita, today, continue to live with vision impairment. The proceedings in Bardhaman before the Consumer Commission and the West Bengal Medical Council are ongoing. The outcome will depend on how the institutions involved examine the records, assess responsibility and apply the law. For the two families, the focus remains unchanged: clarity on what happened and accountability where it is due.

Transforming India’s Democracy: From Quantitative to Qualitative Through Poll Reforms

Wide-ranging poll reforms are essential to transform India’s quantitative democracy into a truly qualitative system-one that could serve as a model for other nations. It is concerning that highly educated officers from the IAS and allied services are sometimes directed by political leaders with limited education. Even more troubling is that invalid votes still appear in elections for the President and Vice President, where only MPs and MLAs are eligible to vote.

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Fixing Elections: Urgent Reforms for a Stronger Democracy

Additional wide-ranging poll reforms must be urgently implemented without waiting for the often-elusive political consensus. Consider the case of George Fernandes, who was elected to the Rajya Sabha despite severe health issues that impaired his memory. This reveals the need for medical fitness certificates and stricter eligibility criteria before candidates are allowed to contest elections. An RTI response even revealed that his oath as a Rajya Sabha member was read aloud by a party colleague-a clear indication that current systems fail to safeguard democratic norms.

Ideally, elections to the Lok Sabha, state assemblies, and municipal bodies should be held simultaneously in a three-tier system. Similarly, elections for the President and Vice President should also be synchronised, conducted by all MPs and MLAs through EVMs with VVPAT, and with nominations supported by at least 34% of MPs to ensure direct legitimacy.

In cases of vacancies, the Vice President could serve as interim President, or MPs could elect an interim Vice President. If both offices are vacant, fresh simultaneous elections should be conducted immediately, rather than waiting for the five-year cycle. Such poll reforms would strengthen the efficiency, fairness, and credibility of India’s democracy.

Ensuring Accountability and Integrity in Elections

Furthermore, no person should be allowed to contest from more than one constituency or simultaneously for both Parliament and a state assembly. A sitting MP or MLA must resign from their existing seat before filing nomination for another. Membership should be automatically terminated if a Parliamentarian takes oath as a state minister or Chief Minister, and vice versa. This prevents situations like the fall of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government due to a single controversial vote from the then Odisha Chief Minister, who did not resign from the Lok Sabha after being sworn in as Chief Minister. 

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Nominated Rajya Sabha members should only include those who have never contested an election. No MP or MLA should hold any other party or social post. Ministerial strength should be limited to 10% of the lower House, and the post of Parliamentary Secretaries should be abolished. Such poll reforms would enhance efficiency, accountability, and integrity in democracy.

Individuals who lose security clearance should be barred from contesting elections for six years. The ‘None-of-the-Above’ (NOTA) option should be made meaningful, with candidates receiving fewer votes than NOTA disqualified from future elections, even if the next candidate is declared elected for that term.

Fixing Political Malpractices to Strengthen Democracy

Parliamentarians should be required to provide full details in their bio-data, including assets, spouse(s), and other personal information, to be publicly available on Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha websites. Transparency of this kind can prevent malpractices, such as hiding additional spouses, as in the case of Dharmendra, who did not disclose Hema Malini as his wife.

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All government dues-such as water, electricity, telephone, rent, or any other charges-should be deducted from salaries, perks, or pensions. Pensions should be withheld until former Parliamentarians or ministers vacate government accommodations. Defaulters should be barred from contesting elections until all dues are cleared and accommodations are surrendered. Even Prime Ministers who have defaulted on using Indian Air Force aircraft for non-official purposes should deposit advance funds for such use, or the sponsoring political party must do so.

Political parties must comply with CIC directives and RTI provisions. All direct and indirect government funding, including tax exemptions, subsidised land, free voters’ lists, and free media access, should be abolished.

Parties that have not contested elections in the last five years should be de-recognised. Sections 13A, 80GGB, and 80GGC of the Income Tax Act should be removed to prevent black money laundering. Mega-budgeted rallies and roadshows should be replaced with live TV debates between prominent leaders and Prime Ministerial or Chief Ministerial candidates.

To prevent delays in implementing poll reforms, the Election Commission should be empowered to act independently. Any reform it proposes should automatically take effect after a one-year notice to Parliament unless expressly disapproved. This would allow poll reforms to strengthen the credibility of elections and reinforce India’s democracy.

Author Subhash Chandra Agrawal is a prominent Indian RTI activist and holds the Guinness World Record for writing the most published letters to newspaper editors, a distinction earned through decades of engaging public discourse. His numerous RTI applications have helped bring greater transparency to government processes and have influenced key rulings, including bringing offices and decisions under public scrutiny. Agrawal continues to champion democratic accountability and electoral reform from his base in Delhi.

Trump’s Tariffs and a Test of Authority

President Donald Trump’s latest decision to reimpose tariffs worldwide is as much a political signal as it is an economic policy. In the face of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down large portions of his earlier emergency tariff actions, Trump moved swiftly to assert control. He has long characterised duties as central to his trade strategy, famously describing the word tariff as the most beautiful word in the english dictionary. The repeated imposition, adjustment and expansion of these levies has made Trump’s tariffs a defining, and divisive, element of his second‑term economic posture.

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Legal Reset After the Supreme Court Ruling

What the White House Said and Did

In a statement following the Supreme Court’s ruling, the White House framed its actions as necessary to address fundamental imbalances in the U.S. economy. The administration invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, an authority rarely used by any US President, to impose a temporary import duty on a wide range of goods. According to the proclamation, the move was designed to help rebalance trade relationships to benefit American workers, farmers, and manufacturers and to address what the administration described as a serious balance‑of‑payments deficit.

Under this authority, the U.S. initially set a 10 % tariff on most imports from all trading partners effective 24 February 2026 at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. This levy was scheduled to remain in place for up to 150 days unless extended with congressional approval.

From 10% to 15% — Legal Maximum Invoked

Shortly after imposing the 10 % baseline, the administration announced that the rate would be raised to 15 %, the maximum allowed under Section 122. This sudden move followed the Supreme Court’s decision with the explicit aim of maintaining broad import duties despite the legal setback.

Section 122 — A Rarely Used Authority

Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 allows the President to impose temporary tariffs up to 15 % for 150 days to address sudden and serious balance‑of‑payments issues, but it has never been used in modern history until now. Historians and trade lawyers point out that since its enactment, no President had invoked this provision to levy broad tariffs on most imports.

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The statute was originally drafted in an era when the U.S. economy operated under very different global financial conditions. Critics note that whether the current economic situation satisfies the legal prerequisites of Section 122 is a subject of debate, and further legal challenges may arise.

Global Confusion Over Who Pays What

Despite official statements, there remains great uncertainty about the exact reach and application of Trump’s tariffs. While the 15 % surcharge is described as global in scope, overlapping trade rules and exemptions have created a murky environment. For instance: Certain categories of imports — such as critical minerals, energy products, pharmaceuticals and some electronics — are exempted from the Section 122 levy.

Imports already subject to sector‑specific duties (e.g., under other U.S. trade laws) do not face the Section 122 surcharge on top of those levies.

These overlapping provisions have left trade officials, analysts and exporters scrambling to interpret which imports will be taxed and at what rates. Governments from Europe to Asia are seeking clarity, while businesses find planning difficult amid the shifting tariff landscape.

Trump’s Tariffs and the U.S. Deficit Argument

In practice, tariffs raise the cost of foreign goods, which can feed into higher prices domestically and reduce purchasing power. Some sectors of the American economy that depend on global supply chains report higher input costs and logistical pressures. These outcomes raise questions about the effectiveness of Trump’s tariffs as a tool for sustainable economic growth.

Tariffs Hurting America Too

The impacts of Trump’s tariffs are not confined to foreign exporters. Domestic American producers who rely on imported components face increased costs, slowing investment decisions and complicating production plans. Retailers report that higher tariffs feed through to consumer prices, eroding demand in a fragile economic climate.

Financial markets have reacted with caution, as businesses reassess long‑term plans in light of uncertain tariff outlooks. Analysts warn that tariff volatility could reduce capital expenditure and dampen broader economic confidence illustrating that the policy designed to protect American interests may also create economic headwinds at home.

India Angle: Postponed Talks and Uncertainty

Impact on India‑U.S. Trade Negotiations

The reverberations of Trump’s tariffs have also hit India hard. India and the United States postponed a planned three‑day meeting of trade negotiators that was scheduled to begin in late February, primarily due to uncertainty surrounding the tariff regime following the Supreme Court’s ruling and the subsequent reimposition of duties. Officials from both countries indicated that they would reconvene after fully assessing the developments.

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For Indian exporters, especially in textiles, leather goods and engineering products, the sudden shift in tariff structure creates cost uncertainties and complicates planning. 

Broader Criticism of Trump’s Tariffs

Internationally and within the United States, Trump’s tariffs have drawn wide criticism for their unpredictability and the perception that tariff policy is being employed not as a consistent economic tool but as a blunt instrument subject to political impulses. Critics argue that a global economic leader cannot govern external economic relations on a whim, as the ripple effects extend far beyond immediate political headlines.

While tariffs are a legitimate policy tool, the manner in which Trump’s tariffs have been deployed in recent weeks — from legal reset to rapid escalation — has showed the limitations and risks of ad‑hoc trade policy. The global economy, and partners such as India, now face a period of recalibration and uncertainty that will demand patience, clarity and renewed diplomatic engagement.

AI Summit Spotlight: Big Declarations, Zero Chipmaking Power

The narrative around the India AI Impact Summit 2026 and its celebrated New Delhi Declaration reads like a triumphal march of the Global South into the commanding heights of artificial intelligence. Framed as the world’s largest AI gathering and wrapped in soaring civilisational language, the AI Summit is projected as a geopolitical turning point where India emerges as a moral and institutional architect of the AI age. Yet a closer, harder look reveals a widening gap between diplomatic theatre and technological reality.

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AI Summit: Moral Posturing, Missing Muscle

The narrative portrays the Summit almost as a civilisational awakening, claiming a “recalibration in the global geography of artificial intelligence governance” after 88 nations endorsed the New Delhi Declaration. It celebrates India as a bridge between technological superpowers and developing nations, projecting convening power as though it were technological leadership itself. The language is grand, confident, and glowing — but dangerously light on substance.

The seven thematic “chakras” of cooperation, access, trust, infrastructure, human capital, and sustainability sound spiritually harmonious, but they are conceptually recycled from every global AI forum of the last five years — the OECD AI Principles, G20 AI frameworks, UNESCO’s AI ethics recommendations, and the UK’s AI Safety Summit declarations. What is missing is anything operational: funding commitments, shared compute facilities, joint research programmes, or enforceable standards. Without money, chips, models, and deployment pipelines, chakras remain slogans. In defence, it can, however, be said that Declarations are only that — pious intentions — and nothing beyond.

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The narrative then pivots dramatically into philosophy through the MANAV framing, presented as India’s unique human-centric AI doctrine rooted in “Sarvajan Hitaya, Sarvajan Sukhaya” and articulated by the PM. It is rhetorically elegant and politically attractive — but policy history is littered with beautiful visions that collapsed without institutional muscle. Ethical AI does not emerge from cultural metaphors; it emerges from rigorous datasets, bias audits, accountable algorithms, safety research budgets, and independent regulators. None of these were concretely anchored in the Declaration.

Yet the uncomfortable reality is this: India currently manufactures almost zero advanced AI chips, relies heavily on imported GPUs, and remains years away from meaningful semiconductor fabrication at scale. Announcing convergence without controlling compute is like declaring naval supremacy without ships.

Where the narrative becomes most misleading is in its quiet avoidance of the central paradox of India’s AI story.

AI Summit Raises Big Questions About India’s AI Core

We are one of the world’s largest consumers of AI. Millions use ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot, recommendation algorithms, translation tools, facial recognition systems, fintech risk engines, and health diagnostics every day. India’s startups enthusiastically integrate foreign AI APIs into apps for education, agriculture, HR, lending, and customer service.

• But where are India’s foundational AI platforms?
• Where is India’s large language model competing with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, or Baidu?
• Where is India’s globally adopted AI cloud stack?
• Where is India’s breakthrough vision model, speech engine, or medical AI system at scale?

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Even government-backed efforts like AIRAWAT (India’s public AI compute cloud) remain modest compared to US and Chinese infrastructure. India’s total AI research spending is a fraction of what single US tech giants invest annually. The Stanford AI Index consistently shows the US and China dominating model development, patents, compute power, and private investment — with India largely absent from the frontier layer.

In simple terms: India is an AI marketplace, not yet an AI engine.

The laudatory post acknowledges “modest research expenditure” and “limited high-performance compute” almost as passing footnotes — when in truth these are the entire game. AI leadership today is about three brutal realities: massive data, massive compute, and massive capital. Declarations do not train trillion-parameter models. Diplomacy does not manufacture GPUs. Philosophy does not replace cloud clusters.

There is also a deeper risk. By celebrating symbolism too early, India may lull itself into believing it is already an AI leader rather than a late but promising entrant. The danger of hype is complacency. China became an AI powerhouse not through conferences but through relentless state investment in chips, research labs, defence-linked AI programmes, massive data pipelines, and industrial deployment. The US dominates through venture capital, hyperscale compute, and world-class universities tightly linked to industry.

India, by contrast, is still debating frameworks while renting foreign compute.

The way forward is not more summits — it is brutal, expensive, and unglamorous execution.

If we can marry our vast user base with real technological depth, we can indeed shape inclusive AI for the developing world. But until then, the Delhi Declaration remains what it currently is: a beautifully worded diplomatic milestone floating over a thin technological foundation.

The AI Summit was not meaningless. It strengthened India’s soft power, elevated Global South voices, and framed AI as a development tool rather than just a profit engine. But calling it a turning point in global AI leadership is premature.

Right now, India is the world’s fastest-growing AI consumer — not its builder.

And no amount of declarations can compute a future.

P. Sesh Kumar is a retired Indian Audit and Accounts Service (IA&AS) officer of the 1982 batch who served in senior audit functions under the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), including as Director General of Audit in the CAG’s office. He is also an author of books and commentary on public sector auditing, accountability, and governance, drawing on his extensive experience in financial oversight and institutional reform.

Amid the clamour surrounding the death of Ajit Pawar in a plane crash and the swearing-in of Sunetra Pawar as Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, a larger political question has moved to the centre of the state’s discourse: whether the two factions of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) will finally reunite, and if they do, which side stands to gain the most from an NCP merger. The moment is politically charged, not only because of the sudden leadership vacuum created by Ajit Pawar’s death, but also because it forces a reassessment of the balance of power between the Ajit Pawar‑aligned NCP and the Sharad Pawar faction of the NCP.

History and Rise of the NCP: Formation, Alliances, and Factional Split

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In the years following its formation, the NCP quickly established itself as a political force both in Maharashtra and at the national level. In the state, it entered into a long-running alliance with the Congress that delivered stable governments from 1999 through 2014. At the Centre, the party became a key partner in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance after the 2004 general election. Sharad Pawar served as Union agriculture minister for the full ten-year tenure of the UPA governments between 2004 and 2014, a period that firmly embedded the NCP in national coalition politics.

At the state level, the NCP’s influence has been most evident during two distinct phases. From 1999 to 2014, the Congress–NCP alliance governed Maharashtra for three consecutive terms, with Congress chief ministers and senior NCP leaders controlling important portfolios. After a spell in opposition, the party returned to power in 2019 as part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), formed with the Congress and the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena. This post-poll alliance was explicitly non-BJP and reaffirmed the NCP’s role as a central pillar of opposition politics in Maharashtra.

The internal split that now defines the party occurred in July 2023, when Ajit Pawar led a group of NCP legislators into the BJP-led Mahayuti government in Maharashtra and took oath as deputy chief minister. Sharad Pawar rejected the move and retained his faction’s position within the opposition MVA. In early 2024, the Election Commission recognised Ajit Pawar’s group as the official NCP, awarding it the party name and symbol, while Sharad Pawar’s faction came to be known as NCP (Sharad Pawar). This division reshaped Maharashtra’s political landscape and altered coalition arithmetic.

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NCP Merger Talks: Reconciling Factions and Planning Leadership

Talk of an NCP merger, however, predates Ajit Pawar’s death. Senior leaders from both factions have acknowledged that discussions on reunification were underway months earlier. The two groups even coordinated during the civic elections in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad, signalling a tentative political rapprochement. By several accounts, Ajit Pawar himself had been actively involved in pushing for unity, engaging with his uncle Sharad Pawar and other senior leaders as negotiations progressed.

Following Ajit Pawar’s death, speculation has intensified that a formal announcement on an NCP merger could come in the second week of February, after the conclusion of local body elections. Alongside Sharad Pawar, names such as Supriya Sule and Praful Patel are widely seen as potential leaders of a reunited party. Sunetra Pawar’s elevation as Deputy Chief Minister has added a new dimension to these calculations, though her long-term organisational role within a merged NCP remains an open question.

Who Stands to Gain from an NCP Merger?

The critical issue, however, is not simply whether reunification will occur, but who stands to benefit most from it. Many political observers argue that an NCP merger would disproportionately help the Sharad Pawar faction. Since the split, NCP (Sharad Pawar) has operated without the party name and symbol, weakening its organisational identity. Reunification would restore both, allowing Sharad Pawar to reassert his authority over the party’s historic base and networks.

Alliance politics further complicate the merger calculus. At present, NCP (Sharad Pawar) is part of the MVA with the Congress and Shiv Sena (UBT), while Ajit Pawar’s faction has been aligned with the BJP-led Mahayuti since 2023. A merger would not automatically force the united party to exit the MVA or remain within the Mahayuti. Coalition membership in India is a political decision rather than a legal requirement, leaving the reunited NCP free to reaffirm, renegotiate or rethink its alliances.

Ajit Pawar’s faction would also gain from reunification, though less dramatically. It already controls the party name, symbol and enjoys recent institutional advantages. Unity would provide organisational cohesion at a moment of leadership transition following Ajit Pawar’s death. At the same time, a merger would dilute the faction’s distinct identity built around its BJP alignment, reducing the leverage it once derived from operating as a separate political force.

On February 20, 2026, the US Supreme Court delivered a consequential decision on Trump’s tariffs, ruling 6–3 that most of the broad global tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump were unlawful because he lacked the legal authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The Court held that the administration had exceeded the statutory limits of IEEPA, which had historically been used for targeted sanctions rather than sweeping import duties. In doing so, the US Supreme Court found that Trump violated federal law by unilaterally imposing duties across a wide range of U.S. trading partners without clear congressional authorisation.

Despite the weight of the US Supreme Court’s decision, President Trump responded with criticism rather than concession. He denounced the ruling as a “disgrace” during a White House breakfast, framing it as an affront to national interests and asserting that he has a “backup plan.” 

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Central Legal Question in the Case

At the heart of the US Supreme Court’s deliberation was a fundamental constitutional and statutory question: can the President use emergency powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose sweeping global tariffs, or does that authority belong exclusively to Congress? This question cut to the core of how trade policy is made in the United States. The government argued that the broad language of IEEPA empowered the President to respond quickly to economic threats, but challengers and, ultimately, the Court disagreed.

However, opponents countered that IEEPA does not explicitly authorise the imposition of tariffs. The statute allows the President to block transactions and freeze assets but contains no language about taxing imports or imposing duties. Under the Constitution’s Article I, only Congress has clear authority to levy taxes and tariffs, a power that cannot be delegated implicitly. Allowing such a broad interpretation of IEEPA, challengers argued, would effectively grant the executive unchecked power to reshape economic policy without legislative oversight—a result at odds with constitutional design.

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The US Supreme Court focused its analysis on statutory interpretation and constitutional structure. Justices examined whether Congress had clearly authorised tariff powers in IEEPA and whether the Court could infer such authority where the statute was silent. The majority concluded that IEEPA did not clearly grant the President tariff-setting authority and, under principles of separation of powers, could not be read to do so.

What Options Trump Has Now

Even after this US Supreme Court ruling limiting tariff authority under IEEPA, other legal avenues remain. One possibility is for the President to rely on different statutory authorities that explicitly allow tariffs. Notably, Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 permits tariffs on national security grounds, and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 authorises duties in response to unfair trade practices. Both statutes have been used in prior administrations to impose targeted tariffs and were not invalidated by the Court’s decision.

Another option is for the administration to seek explicit tariff authority from the United States Congress. If lawmakers were to draft and pass legislation that clearly grants broader tariff powers, this would address the constitutional concerns identified by the US Supreme Court. Such an approach would bring trade policy back into the legislative arena and could provide a more stable and predictable framework for future actions.

The ruling also leaves room for more narrowly tailored emergency actions. While sweeping global tariffs under IEEPA are no longer permissible, future measures might still be possible if they are focused, directly tied to a well-defined emergency, and supported by specific statutory language, reducing the judicial resistance encountered in this case.

What This Means for the World

The US Supreme Court’s decision does not mean that all of Trump's tariffs will automatically be withdrawn. Its scope is limited to tariffs enacted under the emergency powers of IEEPA. Other duties imposed under separate statutes, including Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs, remain unaffected and continue to apply until they are independently challenged or revoked. The ruling therefore reshapes only a portion of the complex framework governing U.S. trade policy.

In the immediate aftermath, countries previously subject to emergency-based tariffs are likely to benefit most. Major trading partners including China, Canada, Mexico, members of the European Union, and emerging economies like India could see tariff burdens lifted or refunded where they derived solely from IEEPA authority. Export-driven sectors supplying steel, manufactured goods, agricultural products, and components to the U.S. market may find improved access and pricing competitiveness, contingent on how and whether those tariffs are formally withdrawn.

What This Means for India

The ruling also contributes to greater trade policy stability. By clarifying that future presidents cannot impose broad global tariffs under emergency powers without congressional authorisation, the decision reduces the risk of sudden trade shocks—an outcome that Indian businesses generally value when planning long-term investments and export strategies.

In the context of India–U.S. trade negotiations, the constraint on executive tariff authority may encourage more structured, predictable engagements. With unilateral tariff threats curtailed, negotiations are more likely to progress through formal diplomatic and legislative channels, potentially yielding more reliable outcomes for bilateral cooperation.

The US Supreme Court’s decision on Trump’s tariffs does not transform India–U.S. trade overnight, but it does signal a shift toward greater legal constraints on executive economic power and a reaffirmation of congressional primacy in tariff policy. For an export-oriented and rapidly growing economy like India, enhanced predictability in trade relations with the United States is a meaningful development, even as other trade laws continue to shape the broader landscape.

Andrew's Arrest Revives Echoes of Charles I and Tests the Modern Monarchy

When a royal faces scrutiny, it can feel like a rupture with tradition. Yet across the ages, British royals have repeatedly fallen under suspicion. What makes the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor so striking is that we have to reach back to the 17th century to find anything comparable.

When the Crown Fell

(In a recent phone call, sports writer Rohit Brijnath and I discussed the shuttering of the The Washington Post’s sports desk and, more broadly, what it means to lose the sports page. Rohit’s piece, which you should read, is here. What follows are out-takes from our chat, expanded into essay-length.)

On the long flight home from Los Angeles in July 1999, Liu Ying would have sought in vain for distraction, for something that could replace the voice in her head telling her she had screwed up in full public view.

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1–1. Then 2–2.

Liu Ying, a 25-year-old native of Beijing with close-cropped hair and a squat body in a number 13 jersey, stepped forward for China’s third penalty.

One-time basketball star Briana Scurry -- the lone Black player in an otherwise all-White starting lineup -- guarded the American goal.

Liu kicked. Scurry dived to her left and, while airborne, got her fingertips to the ball and deflected it past the upright.

Liu’s US counterpart nailed her kick.

3-2. Then 4-3.

Minutes later, Brandi Chastain scored. The US had won 5-4.

Chastain’s shirt came off. Her arms rose in triumph. That image travelled around the world.

No camera sought out Liu, no one gave her a thought. Except one man.

The moment inside the moment

In early May that year, an American warplane had bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade — an error, Washington said, born of outdated maps. Tensions between the two countries ran high. The Chinese team had been given permission to travel only weeks before the tournament began. Now, haunted by the memory of that missed kick, Liu was on a flight back to Beijing.

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That instinct, to follow the losing player beyond the stadium, is as good a definition as any of what the sports page at its best has always done. It has resisted being seduced by celebrations, eschewed hype and hyperbole in favor of the human moment.

Sport is often reduced to spectacle: the goal, the knockout, the lifted trophy, the storm of confetti. But the writing that endures treats these not as the story, but merely as the hinge.

Without the writer, Patterson’s defeat would be a statistic. With Talese mediating it, in an Esquire profile titled The Loser, it became a meditation on public shame and on the peculiar cruelty of performing under lights and being found wanting.

The same was true of Liu Ying. The missed penalty was visible to millions. The plane ride home was not. It required imagination, restraint, and an appetite for interiority. It required a sportswriter who believed the human being mattered as much as the result. And good sportswriters require a home -- a sports page that allows them the space, the opportunity, to explore the human condition through the lens of sport.

I learned writing by reading not political reportage but the greats of sports reporting -- particularly boxing (a function of the era I grew up in, when boxing attracted talents from outside the traditional “sports writer” fraternity. I wrote about finding the magic in sports writing here.)

The sports page is where writers and readers learn empathy. A crucial loss, an unexpected comeback, an athlete fighting an aging body, a career ending, all of these are testing grounds for high-stakes human reporting. A match report filed at midnight had to do more than record the score. It had to choose the decisive moment, locate significance, capture voice. It had to make the ephemeral feel anchored.

Deadline discipline. Clarity, without condescension. A sense of proportion. These were not abstract virtues but daily requirements that had to be met against crippling deadlines, and it was on the sports pages that we learned how to do this.

I was going through my folder of saved sports stories and thinking of the many ways in which sport taught writing beyond the frame. Take sport as political and moral theatre: the best coverage of Muhammed Ali refusing the draft went beyond the boxing ring and into the realms of race, conscience, and the nature and limits of dissent.

Then there is sport as class, as labor, as an exploration of the human body. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights is ostensibly about high-school football, but at a deeper level it is about small-town America, about masculinity, about racial hierarchy and even about economics and stagnation.

Or take Norman Mailer’s The Fight. Ali versus Foreman was merely the entry point; Mailer’s real subjects were ego, mortality, myth-making, and how men perform themselves under pressure.

There’s my friend Rohit Brijnath, whose best columns (the ones I clip and save and revisit) are about the interior life of the elite athlete, about memory, about loss, about wonder. Sport provides Rohit with the occasion and the frame, not the subject.

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It is not accidental that many journalists who began on sports desks went on to other beats and flourished. The ability to see the moment inside the moment, to identify the hinge, was learned on the sports pages and then transferred to the front page. David Remnick is one example of many. His career began in the sports pages of The Washington Post, where he was tasked with covering the football league. Six years later, he became the paper’s Moscow correspondent, a stint that provided material for the book Lenin’s Tomb, which won him a Pulitzer. The craft he learned on The Washington Post’s sports pages transferred seamlessly into the world of politics.

When Sally Jenkins (who wrote a brilliant piece marking mourning the demise of The Washington Post sports desk) writes about an athlete, she is rarely writing about the score. She is writing, instead, about pressure, identity, endurance, collapse. Her writing, in common with that of the best of her peers, erased the false dichotomy between “sports writing” and “serious writing”.

The lawyer Nandan Kamath wrote a book called Boundary Lab, a series of essays that look at the intersection of sport and law. When he asked me to help edit it, I wanted to know what thought had prompted the book — what, as it is called in the trade, its through-line was. He said: Sport is the crucible in which society first tests its attitudes to the pressing issues -- race, gender -- of our time.

In her essay linked above, Jenkins writes of the “swagger” of the sports desk. I first encountered that swagger during my days at the Mid-Day group of publications in the early 90s. Three feisty young women fresh out of college ran our sports coverage: Sharda Ugra, Hemal Asher, Prajwal Hegde. Seven days a week, they produced stories of such brilliance that the rest of us read with envy -- and the loudest laughter, the most fun, was usually centered around the nook they worked in.

Return for a moment to Patterson and Liston. That was a time when boxing attracted the best literary talents of the age. When the fight was announced they all flocked to Chicago, but there was little actual grist for their mill. Patterson was famously inarticulate; Liston, with the taint of Mafia connections emanating off him like sweat, wasn’t speaking to the press. All that the writers got was ten minutes at ringside, to observe the fighters as they trained. No extended interviews. No curated sound bytes.

And yet, from a fight that lasted barely two minutes and change emerged a dozen radically different interpretations. In a piece titled Ten Thousand Words A Minute, Norman Mailer turned the bout into a psychodrama. Talese wrote about the defeated Patterson’s private humiliation. Jimmy Breslin saw a morality play -- the “good Black” versus the “bad Black” -- staged by White America for its delectation. One event, multiple lenses.

During my stint in New York, the head of the English department at New York University made me read those stories. I want you to learn, she told me, that there is more than one way to see an event. Learn to see the obvious, then to look beyond it.

It was one of the most enduring lessons on writing I ever got, and it came to me via the sports page, which knew how to host multiplicity without demanding a single, instant verdict. A sporting event could be political, psychological, aesthetic, sometimes all at once.

That capacity feels increasingly fragile. Today, access to sport is ubiquitous. Major events stream in high definition. Leagues and sports federations distribute curated clips. Athletes speak directly to millions on social media. Highlights circulate within seconds. Sport has been reduced to opinion plus outrage plus celebrity.

We have never had more “content” and less meaning.

There is another function the sports page has quietly served.

It is perhaps the last of the great public squares: a civic space where disparate audiences gather daily in shared fellowship. It may be the last space where the newspaper speaks to the country at large across class, race, across political affiliations. The factory worker, the businessman, the corporate lawyer might disagree about politics, about ideology, but on the sports page they find common ground.

Sport is not lily white. It traffics in nationalism, commercialism, exclusion, abuse. It is susceptible to corruption and excess. But precisely because it is powerful, it requires scrutiny. The sports page charted not only achievement but also excess — the doping scandal, administrative malfeasance, the sexual and financial exploitation of young athletes. And it succeeded, more often than not, in holding institutions to account.

As rights holders consolidate control over images and narratives, and as economic pressures narrow newsroom resources, that capacity is thinning. The risk is not that fans will lack entertainment. It is that fewer reporters will be paid to ask uncomfortable questions, to examine structures rather than celebrate spectacle.

Sport generates myth at warp speed. The winning goal becomes replay, then icon. But myth without context becomes thin, and the great sports writers have always resisted that thinness. They have lingered. They have returned to ask what it meant, not merely what had occurred.

The great Gary Smith (whose stellar storytelling I wrote about here) in the preface to a collection of his best work, spoke of why he did the kind of stories he was known for:

It is within the “furnace of the psyche” that Talese sought the story of Liu Ying’s missed penalty. That act of looking beyond the victor and peering deep into the shadows to seek out the pain that lurks there requires time, space, and editorial will. And it requires a page, an organisation, that believes such attention is worthwhile.

It is ironic, really: we tend to think of sportswriting as escapism, but in the great papers, sport was often the most serious writing across the entire paper.

The Plane Home

Somewhere over the Pacific in July 1999, cabin lights would have dimmed. Passengers would have slept. But not Liu Ying, who had long hours ahead of her before she reached Beijing, where she had long years of obscurity ahead of her.

That image — the athlete alone with consequence — lingers because a writer chose to imagine it, because someone believed the missed kick was not the end of the story.

There is a soccer World Cup coming up in July. There will be penalty shoot outs and stunning field goals; established stars will stumble, unknowns will emerge from obscurity to light up the stage. And the highlights will circulate at ever greater speed.

Sport does not require newspapers to survive. But the newspaper may yet require sport to anchor its humanity.

Without that prism, without the ability to look at the moment within the moment, without the space to see beyond the celebration of the champion and the roar of the crowd, we risk seeing less not only of the game, but of ourselves.

PostScript: Talese pitched the story of Liu Ying to an editor who oversaw the sports coverage in Sports Illustrated, Time and People (all Time Warner publications). He wrote:

“I believe that last week’s single blocked kick of the Chinese World Cup soccer player, Liu Ying, might provide us with a story angle by which we may measure China and the United States well beyond the realm of sports competition.

“There is a photo in today’s New York Times showing President Clinton greeting the triumphant American women in the White House. How did China’s officials greet the Chinese women after their return to their homeland? Who was at the airport?...the story should be told through this young woman, Liu Ying, a step-by step account of how her life has gone since her foot failed her in the Rose Bowl.”

Would you want to read that story? Well, you can’t. It never got written.

Talese got a formulaic response to his pitch. The editor is traveling, the response read. But thanks for sending us the idea, it is interesting. We won’t be using it, but do feel free to keep sending in ideas.

(This anecdote, and the earlier sections about Liu Ying, is paraphrased from Talese’s memoir, A Writer’s Life).

PPS: Recent events prompted me to dust off and delve into an old favorite: The Great American Sports Page, a book I dip into every once in a while to remind myself what great sports writing can be. It is a compilation of a century’s worth of U.S. newspaper columns: written on deadline, at a time when the sports section still had swagger and space. From Ring Lardner and Red Smith to Thomas Boswell, Michael Wilbon and Sally Jenkins, the book reminds me yet again that the daily sports page was once a repository of voice, argument, and literary craft. These writers chronicled Babe Ruth and Muhammed Ali, but they also chronicled the quiet heartbreaks and moral dilemmas that are so central to sport. Re-reading this now, the anthology feels less like a victory lap than an elegy, a record of what newspapers could do when they believed sport was part of the civic conversation.

This article first appeared on Prem Panicker's Substack. Here is the original link to the source. To follow Prem Panicker on Substack, click here.

DPDP Act and RTI Act: When Privacy Overrides Citizen’s Right to Know

For more than two decades, India’s transparency regime rested on the principle that citizens have a right to know how public power is exercised, even when that information concerns individuals in government service. Under the RTI Act, disclosure of official decisions, records of appointments, and declarations of assets could be compelled where there was a legitimate public interest.

That balance is now at the centre of controversy following the enactment of the DPDP Act and its amendments to the RTI Act. Under the revised regime, information that can be characterised as “personal data” may be withheld without the kind of balancing that previously governed requests under the RTI Act. In practical terms this means that a promotion record could be denied on the basis that it contains personal information, even where the public interest in accountability is clear.

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Likewise, declarations of assets by public officials may now be treated as personal data and thus withheld. Beyond questions of official accountability, the DPDP Act also provides broad exemptions allowing government agencies to collect and process data for reasons of crime prevention, sovereignty and security without informing the individual, without a hearing, and without independent review. In some cases, a person might not even know that their data has been collected.

This shift has prompted a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court challenging the amendments, and on 16 February 2026, the court heard preliminary arguments and issued notice to the Union government in the case. The significance of the dispute extends beyond any single statutory provision, as it carries broader implications for transparency, accountability, and democratic participation.

The Constitutional Foundation of the Right to Know

The law mandated proactive disclosures under Section 4(1)(b), confined exemptions under Section 8(1) to specific and limited grounds, placed the burden of justifying denial on the Public Information Officer, and made clear that an applicant’s reasons for seeking information were irrelevant. In both design and philosophy, the RTI Act treated transparency as the rule and secrecy as the exception.

The Amendment and the Emerging Dispute

It is this framework that has now been drawn into dispute. The PIL filed by Venkatesh Nayak, a well-known RTI activist and Director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, contends that the DPDP Act has significantly altered the balance embedded in the RTI Act.

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

Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act, brought into effect on 13 November 2025, amends Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act by substituting the earlier, more detailed exemption clause with a broader formulation covering “information which relates to personal information.” The earlier provision required a determination of whether disclosure would cause an unwarranted invasion of privacy and preserved a public interest override. The petition argues that the revised language expands the scope for withholding information, particularly where the records concern public officials performing public duties. In effect, the DPDP Act introduces a new interpretive centre of gravity into the RTI Act, one that privileges data protection over disclosure.

The Three Checks That Once Governed Disclosure

To understand the depth of the dispute, it is necessary to examine what precisely has changed within the RTI Act. Under the earlier version of Section 8(1)(j), a public authority could not deny information merely by describing it as “personal.” The provision required a structured inquiry.

These three checks created a balancing framework within the RTI Act, ensuring that privacy concerns were addressed without automatically defeating transparency. In practice, this meant that information about public servants acting in their official capacity — promotions, disciplinary records, declarations of assets — could not be withheld without reasoned justification.

The petition challenging the amendment argues that the DPDP Act, by substituting the earlier clause with a broader reference to “personal information,” removes this layered balancing exercise. According to the petitioner, the revised language permits authorities to deny access to any information that can be characterised as personal data, without undertaking the prior structured analysis of public activity, unwarranted invasion, or larger public interest.

Building on this shift in the disclosure framework, the petitioner argues that the amendment introduced through the DPDP Act makes it significantly easier for authorities to withhold information under the RTI Act. The challenge contends that this change unfairly restricts the constitutional right to know, which flows from the guarantee of free speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a).

While the right to privacy has been recognised as part of Article 21, the petitioner maintains that it cannot operate as a blanket ground to override transparency, particularly when invoked by the State. Article 19(2), which sets out the permissible grounds for restricting free speech, does not expressly list privacy as one of them.

The petition further argues that the amendment fails the test of proportionality because it imposes a broad and undifferentiated restriction, treating public officials exercising public power in the same manner as private individuals, and granting officials wide discretion to refuse disclosure. 

When Access Shrinks, Oversight Shrinks

Democracy does not function only through elections; it relies on the steady flow of information between the State and its citizens. Over the years, the RTI Act became one of the principal tools through which ordinary people, journalists and civil society groups examined how decisions were made and resources were allocated. The concern raised in the challenge to the DPDP Act is that this everyday scrutiny may now become more difficult.

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

In that sense, the debate is not only about privacy or procedure; it is about whether the RTI Act will continue to operate as a practical instrument of civic oversight, or whether the amendments introduced by the DPDP Act will gradually narrow the space through which citizens engage with the workings of the State.

Oversight, Exemptions and the Direction of Reform

The challenge to the DPDP Act is not limited to its impact on the RTI Act. It also questions the structure and independence of the Data Protection Board, the body created to enforce the new regime. According to the petition, the process of appointing members of the Board is dominated by the executive, even though the Board performs quasi-judicial functions such as determining breaches and imposing penalties.

Beyond appointments, the petition points to several provisions that it characterises as constitutionally problematic. Certain sections of the DPDP Act allow the government to exempt its own agencies from compliance in specified circumstances. Other provisions permit data collection and processing for reasons such as security or crime prevention, without what the petitioner considers adequate procedural safeguards. There are also concerns about vague standards-for instance, penalties tied to “significant” data breaches without a clear statutory definition of what qualifies as significant.

In addition, the government is empowered in some situations to call for information from the Data Protection Board, again without narrowly defined limits. Taken together, these features are described in the petition as arbitrary and lacking sufficient checks, potentially engaging Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution.

The larger apprehension is that the cumulative effect of these changes could reshape India’s transparency landscape. Over the past twenty years, the RTI Act helped institutionalise a culture in which access to information became a routine aspect of civic engagement. The argument now advanced is that, while the objective of protecting personal data is legitimate, the manner in which the DPDP Act interacts with the RTI Act risks narrowing that culture of openness.

The debate, at its core, is not about rejecting privacy as a constitutional value. It is about whether the balance between privacy and transparency has shifted too far toward non-disclosure. The Supreme Court has, for now, declined to stay the amendment to the RTI Act, while agreeing to examine the constitutional challenge in depth. A bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, along with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M Pancholi, noted that the issues involved are complex and sensitive and require fuller consideration. By issuing notice to the Union government and referring the matter to a larger bench, the Court has signalled that it will undertake a substantive review of the challenged provisions of the DPDP Act and their impact on the RTI Act. The question that now awaits judicial resolution is a fundamental one: how to safeguard personal data in a digital age without eroding the citizen’s right to know.

INC Rules Mandate Registration, Yet Many Private Hospitals Blatantly Flout Them

Under the regulations framed by the Indian Nursing Council (INC), the rules governing registration are unequivocal. Established under the Indian Nursing Council Act, 1947, the INC sets uniform standards of nursing education across India and mandates that only those with recognised qualifications and valid entry in a State Nursing Council register can practise as “Registered Nurse” or “Registered Midwife.”

The INC does not directly license individuals, but it requires that every qualified nurse must be registered with the respective State Nursing Council to lawfully practise. Yet despite this clarity, mounting evidence suggests that several private hospitals are employing unregistered nurses or nurses with lapsed registration — a direct violation of statutory norms.

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

In its observations, the Delhi High Court emphasised that hospitals — including private hospitals — are duty-bound to verify that their staff hold valid registration. Failure to ensure that nurses are properly registered can amount to serious lapses in patient safety compliance. The case raised troubling questions about how unregistered nurses are able to work in clinical settings and whether oversight mechanisms are being meaningfully enforced.

The provisions of the Delhi Nursing Council are equally explicit. The Delhi Nursing Council Act clearly states that no person can practise or represent themselves as a registered nurse unless their name is entered in the State register. The Council regulates registration, renewal, and disciplinary proceedings, and bars unregistered nurses from using protected professional titles. The law leaves little room for interpretation — registration is mandatory, not discretionary.

Bengal Case Puts Nurse Registration Compliance in Focus

Also Read: Medical Negligence Alleged: Vision Loss in Two Babies

Despite repeated directions from the SCDRC seeking documentary proof of nursing registration, the hospital reportedly failed to provide complete records. The Commission, expressing concern over the absence of compliance, directed hospital representatives to personally appear and clarify their position. The matter has now been listed for further hearing in April. The episode has once again brought attention to whether private hospitals are routinely employing unregistered nurses without regulatory consequences.

The issue of unregistered nurses is not a technical irregularity. Registration ensures that a nurse has completed approved education, undergone prescribed clinical training, and remains accountable to a regulatory authority. When private hospitals engage unregistered nurses, they effectively bypass the accountability framework designed to protect patients. If misconduct or negligence occurs, tracing responsibility becomes significantly more difficult.

Also Read: Madan Mohan Malviya Hospital's Medical Negligence Killed My Child: Mother

The consequences are not abstract. Gargi Meena lost her life. Mivaan and Adrita now live with vision impairment that has permanently altered their futures. In hospital settings, nurses spend the most time with patients — monitoring vitals, administering injections, identifying early warning signs, and responding to emergencies. Doctors may conduct periodic rounds, but nurses provide continuous bedside care. If unregistered nurses are deployed in private hospitals without proper verification, the consequences can be fatal or life-altering.

India–EU Trade Boom Could Deepen India’s Environmental crisis

The recent conclusion of negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement between India and the European Union, after nearly two decades of talks, has been welcomed warmly in both New Delhi and Brussels. European leaders have highlighted new access to India’s vast consumer market, while Indian officials have emphasised export growth, job creation and the restoration of preferential access to the EU market that India lost in 2023.

Also Read: India-EU Trade Deal: What Could Go Wrong With the Mother of All Deals

India-EU Trade | Export Growth and Environmental Externalities

India’s largest export gains to the EU are concentrated in textiles and garments, leather and leather products, chemicals, rubber and plastics, base metals, and gems and jewellery. Under the agreement, tariffs on most of these goods will be eliminated entirely over the next five to seven years.

These sectors are labour-intensive, which explains the optimism around employment. They are also among the most environmentally intensive manufacturing activities in the country. Textile dyeing and finishing consume large volumes of water and chemicals. Leather tanning produces chromium-rich effluents that can contaminate soil and groundwater for decades. Chemical and plastics manufacturing generates hazardous waste that is difficult to track and treat.

India-EU Trade | Rivers Bearing the Cost of Growth

Near the Yamuna’s entry point into Delhi, the river’s condition has become a stark illustration of India’s environmental governance challenge. Long stretches of the river now routinely experience severe frothing, toxic contamination and near-zero dissolved oxygen levels, particularly during the winter months when flows are lowest and pollution is most concentrated. Despite repeated clean-up efforts and official claims of improvement, the river remains ecologically stressed and unsafe for most uses.

Also Read: Who is Polluting the Yamuna River?

Much of the industrial pollution enters the Yamuna from upstream towns in Haryana and the National Capital Region (NCR), home to dense clusters producing textiles, chemicals and manufactured goods. Regulatory assessments link industrial discharge in the upper Yamuna basin to repeated breaches of water quality standards, particularly during periods of low river flow.

The Yamuna is not an isolated case. Similar patterns of industrial pollution and regulatory failure are evident along the Ganga around Kanpur, the Jojari near Jodhpur, the Noyyal and Palar rivers in Tamil Nadu, and the Tapi near Surat—each associated with clusters producing leather, textiles, chemicals or dyes.

These industries are not marginal. They sit at the heart of India’s export economy—and many are set to gain from the newly concluded India–EU free trade agreement.

India-EU Trade | Carbon Borders and Regulatory Blind Spots

Supporters of the India-EU trade deal note that it does not weaken Europe’s climate ambitions. Indian exports of steel, aluminium, cement and fertilisers will remain subject to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which prices the carbon emissions embedded in these products.

India-EU Trade | Growth, Governance and a Cautious Conclusion

India’s environmental challenges are well documented, with international assessments consistently ranking the country among the poorest performers on air and water quality. Yet these challenges are not due to a lack of laws. Over time, the country has built an extensive regulatory framework covering air, water and hazardous waste.

The persistent problem lies in implementation.

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Government audits as well as independent international bodies have repeatedly documented gaps in monitoring capacity, enforcement and hazardous waste management across states, particularly in industrial clusters that drive export growth.

None of this negates the long-term economic and strategic gains from deeper EU–India integration. Rather, it is an argument against judging the agreement solely by macroeconomic headlines. India’s most successful integration into global markets so far has occurred through services—software, business processing and digital exports—which delivered growth with relatively modest environmental costs. Manufacturing-led export growth is different: it is more resource-intensive, more pollution-heavy, and far less forgiving of weak governance.

For India, this creates a strategic case for moving early: strengthening enforcement at home and investing in cleaner production is not merely about regulatory compliance, but about securing durable access to a high-value market. In this sense, participation in the EU market can reinforce domestic policy choices, accelerating the adoption of cleaner technologies across export-oriented industries rather than allowing environmental costs to be deferred or externalised.

If India is to pursue this path, pollution control cannot be an afterthought. Stronger monitoring, credible enforcement and sustained investment in treatment infrastructure must move in step with export promotion. Trade can raise welfare, but only if competitiveness does not quietly rest on unpriced environmental damage at home.

Mandar Oak is an Associate Professor in the School of Economics at Adelaide University.

Kanchan Panday is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

As The Washington Post implements sweeping layoffs — reportedly eliminating about 30 % of jobs across the organisation, including more than 300 in the newsroom — all eyes have turned to Jeff Bezos, the newspaper’s billionaire owner. Since acquiring the Post in 2013, Bezos’s stewardship had long been framed as a potential lifeline for the struggling news outlet. Yet, in the midst of this most substantial downsizing of its modern history, employees who once appealed directly to him to avert such cuts feel let down. Despite internal letters urging Jeff Bezos to protect key reporting functions, his visible engagement on the issue has been limited even as the cuts unfold.

Also Read: The Washington Post Layoffs: From Concern to Reality

Leadership Dynamics and Internal Tensions at The Washington Post

Hardly a year into this transition, the fragility of these reforms became evident. In 2024, The Washington Post’s publisher and CEO, William Lewis, delivered a stark assessment of the challenges facing the organisation after the abrupt ouster of Executive Editor Sally Buzbee. According to reporting from within the newsroom, Lewis told staff directly that “we are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around.” He warned that the paper was losing significant revenue, its audience had shrunk sharply, and resistance to change could jeopardise its survival. That blunt message encapsulated the central dilemma confronting Bezos’s efforts: adapting a legacy news institution to a business environment that has all but eroded traditional revenue streams.

Also Read: The Washington Post Staff to Jeff Bezos: We Have So Much Work Left to Do

Criticism of Jeff Bezos has not been limited to newsroom insiders. Public figures, including U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, have publicly rebuked the billionaire owner for the timing and scale of the layoffs. Sanders pointedly juxtaposed Bezos’s personal expenditures — including high‑profile entertainment investments and luxury spending — with the decision to cut newsroom jobs, challenging the notion that financial necessity alone drove these cuts. Such critiques reflect a broader public debate over the role and responsibilities of ultra‑wealthy owners of public‑interest institutions, and whether resources might be deployed differently to preserve journalistic capacity rather than diminish it.

Jeff Bezos and the Controversy Over Editorial Independence at The Post

The debate over Bezos’s influence extends beyond financial stewardship and into editorial decisions. Marty Baron, who led The Washington Post as Editor from 2012 until his retirement five years ago, wrote that the paper’s challenges were “made infinitely worse by ill‑conceived decisions that came from the very top” — actions that he suggested undermined confidence in the Post’s mission. Among these, he cited the controversial killing of a planned presidential endorsement shortly before the 2024 election, and a redesign of the editorial pages that, in Baron’s view, lacked moral clarity. These strategic interventions by ownership, critics argue, alienated longstanding readers and contributed to declining subscriptions, compounding the newsroom’s financial difficulties.

Jeff Bezos’ Stewardship Under Scrutiny Amid Washington Post Layoffs

For many journalists and readers, the central question now is why Jeff Bezos — whose public statements as recently as late 2024 underscored his commitment to The Washington Post’s future — has not marshalled resources or engagement to safeguard jobs and journalistic coverage. In December 2024, at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Bezos portrayed himself as a committed steward, saying that his financial backing would be available when needed and likening himself to a “doting parent” for the institution. Yet, as layoffs have accelerated — following earlier staff buyouts in 2023 and other workforce reductions in 2024 and 2025 — his public voice on the plight of newsroom employees has been largely absent even as staff plead for intervention.

As the industry continues to evolve and financial pressures intensify, the story of the tenure of Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post — from early promise to a situation of deep crisis — will serve as a case study in the complexities of private ownership, journalistic independence, and institutional resilience. Whether Bezos chooses to re‑engage publicly and materially with the future of the paper will be a defining test of his stewardship — and of the values he claims to uphold.

While the Centre has positioned the move as a structural reform aimed at simplification, the absence of slab changes has raised questions about whether the Budget adequately addresses inflationary pressures and stagnant real incomes faced by individual taxpayers.

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New Income Tax Act: Structural Change, Not Financial Relief

The Finance Minister said a comprehensive review of the Income Tax Act, 1961—announced in July 2024—has been completed in record time. The resulting new Income Tax Act, 2025 is intended to simplify language, rules, and compliance processes.

Notably, the reform focuses on process over policy, leaving core issues such as tax burden distribution untouched.

Income Tax Slabs Frozen Amid Cost-of-Living Pressures

Despite expectations of slab rationalisation, the government confirmed that income tax slabs remain unchanged. This effectively means that taxpayers will continue to pay tax at existing thresholds even as inflation pushes nominal incomes higher.

Economists have long flagged this as a form of “silent tax increase,” where individuals move into higher tax brackets without a real increase in purchasing power. Budget 2026 does not address this concern.

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Budget 2026: Selective Relief Measures, Limited Impact

Several income tax-related proposals were announced under the banner of “Ease of Living,” though their impact appears narrow and sector-specific:

Interest awarded by Motor Accident Claims Tribunals will be exempt from income tax, and related TDS will be removed.

TCS on overseas tour packages has been reduced to 2 per cent, regardless of amount—a move likely to benefit higher-income individuals more than middle-income taxpayers.

TCS under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme for education and medical purposes has also been reduced to 2 per cent.

While these changes reduce friction in specific transactions, they do not address broader concerns around income tax rates, exemptions, or deductions.

TDS Tweaks Focus on Administration, Not Burden

Extended Deadlines, But With Fees

The Budget extends the deadline for revising income tax returns from December 31 to March 31, subject to a nominal fee. Filing timelines have also been staggered:

ITR-1 and ITR-2: July 31

Non-audit business cases and trusts: August 31

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Foreign Asset Disclosure Scheme: Amnesty With Conditions

A one-time six-month foreign asset disclosure scheme has been announced for small taxpayers, students, young professionals and relocated NRIs. However, the scheme comes with significant financial costs:

Taxpayers with undisclosed overseas income or assets up to ₹1 crore must pay 60 per cent of value (30 per cent tax plus 30 per cent additional tax) to gain immunity from prosecution. Those who paid tax but failed to disclose assets up to ₹5 crore must pay a ₹1 lakh fee for immunity.

After almost five years, ISIS has carried out a high-intensity terror attack in the subcontinent, targeting a Shia mosque in Pakistan, killing more than 30 people and injuring around 170. The last such major attacks include the 2023 Khar bombings, the deadly Peshawar mosque bombing in 2022 that killed more than 60 people, and the Abbey Gate bombing during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which claimed over 170 lives. After a gap of two years, ISIS-K has again executed a high-intensity suicide bombing, this time during the visit of the President of Uzbekistan to Pakistan. While this may appear to be an episodic act of terror, dismissing it as such would be unwise. A closer examination of the Khorasan branch’s efforts to establish a foothold in the South Asian subcontinent raises serious concerns for regional security.

The Khorasani Struggle

As the Taliban intensified counterinsurgency operations, the Khorasanis shifted to a more clandestine mode of operation, building deep and resilient cells to sustain low-intensity attacks while staying below the radar. Even this strategy gradually collapsed, as the Taliban’s broad crackdown penetrated ISIS-K’s networks and led to sustained raids in Khorasan strongholds such as Nangarhar and Kunar, as well as in a few urban areas where the group was operating in a fragmented manner. As a result, the current pattern of attacks in Afghanistan remains low-intensity, largely confined to targeted killings of ideological and political figures.

The Pakistan Shift

From 2022 onwards, the focus of ISIS-K’s operations shifted from Kabul to Islamabad. The Khorasanis initially carried out low-intensity attacks in Pakistan and, within months, escalated their campaign to a peak with the Peshawar mosque bombing, which killed more than 60 people and injured over 100. Overall, 2022 witnessed a high frequency of ISIS-K–linked internal attacks in Pakistan.

The Khorasani Pattern

ISIS-K has, from time to time, sought to demonstrate its presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan by sustaining its cadre through clandestine recruitment and targeted killings. To amplify its impact, the group looks for opportune moments to deliver high-casualty attacks that generate shock value, a hallmark of ISIS-style violence. The Khorasanis have thus adopted a gap-driven strategy, prioritising lethality over frequency to reassert their power and relevance in the region.

During 2022 and 2023, ISIS-K (ISKP) attacks in Pakistan not only increased but also became significantly more lethal, capitalising on a weakened security environment caused by the resurgence of Baloch militancy and the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement with the TTP in 2022. Similarly, in 2023, as TTP and BLA attacks intensified, the TTP carried out five attacks and bombing incidents in July 2023 alone. In the same month, ISIS-K executed the Khar bombings, exploiting a strained security environment and the distraction of Pakistan’s security establishment.

The core objective of the Khorasanis in the contested Af-Pak border region is to sustain the strength and capability to strike in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, challenge the Taliban regime, and destabilise Islamabad to establish a durable foothold. This strategy is aimed at building organisational capacity for the long-term overthrow of the Taliban while maintaining a transnational strike capability that extends beyond South Asia into Central and Southeast Asia.

The Islamabad Mosque Bombing

The recent Islamabad mosque bombing, carried out by ISIS-K, represents another instance of the group exploiting security vacuums in Pakistan. At the time, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) had launched Operation Herof 2.0 on 31 January, which continued until 8 February. The operation reportedly targeted 12 cities across Pakistan and is said to have killed more than 100 Pakistani security personnel.

Just two days before the BLA officially concluded its operation, the Khorasanis carried out a suicide bombing at a Shia mosque in Islamabad, killing more than 30 people and injuring around 170. However, this attack carried an additional signalling purpose. In January 2026, the United States resumed air strikes against ISIS strongholds in Syria and Africa, renewing its broader offensive against the group.

Pakistan’s Failed Gamble and Threat

According to some reports, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, entered into a clandestine understanding with ISIS in 2017, under which the group would refrain from attacking Pakistan and limit its activities to Afghanistan. However, ISKP later carried out a suicide bombing at a Baloch Awami Party (BAP) political rally in Mustang, Balochistan. While ISKP did not directly target Pakistani establishments until 2020, it has been argued that through covert engagements with ISKP, Pakistan sought to cultivate the group as a proxy against the Taliban and Baloch insurgents.

Allowing—or tolerating—ISKP’s activities in Afghanistan served Pakistan’s dual strategic objectives: first, enabling proxy pressure against the TTP and the BLA; and second, accruing diplomatic leverage through extradition and intelligence-sharing on ISKP operatives, such as the March 2025 arrest and extradition of ISKP commander Mohammad Sharifullah to the United States.

However, this clandestine, dual-benefit engagement with ISKP has generated severe blowback for Pakistan’s security establishment and increasingly appears to be a failed gamble. Even the recent attempt to broker an alliance between Lashkar and ISKP—reportedly aimed at moderating and influencing ISKP—has not materialised as intended. There appear to be two key reasons behind ISKP’s subsequent reversal.

The threat from ISKP is real, and any resurgence in Pakistan would pose risks to the wider region, including India, as the group is actively seeking opportunities to reassert itself beyond its traditional areas of operation. The threat is further complicated by the possibility that Pakistan may attempt to clandestinely renegotiate with ISKP and redirect its activities towards Kashmir by facilitating operations against India. While individual attacks may appear episodic, India must exercise sustained vigilance in assessing ISKP’s footprint, as Pakistan’s internal security instability could create openings for cross-border terrorist movements, leading to the emergence of new and potentially more hardened terror modules targeting India.

CGHS Mumbai Row Puts Thousands of Senior Citizens at Medical Risk

​​A quiet administrative standoff between two Union government agencies is now threatening to shut down a critical public healthcare facility in Mumbai, placing the lives and wellbeing of more than 2,500 senior citizens at risk. The dispute is between the Santacruz Electronics Export Processing Zone (SEEPZ), which functions under the Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and the Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS), which comes under the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. What should have been resolved through routine inter-departmental coordination has instead spiralled into a crisis of governance, with CGHS beneficiaries left bearing the consequences.

At the centre of this conflict is the CGHS Wellness Centre at SEEPZ (Andheri East), Mumbai, a facility that has served government employees, pensioners, and their dependents for more than three decades. The centre, which is scheduled to shut down from 9 February 2026, has operated uninterrupted for over 30 years from premises allotted by SEEPZ authorities. That continuity was broken when SEEPZ issued an eviction notice, citing its own institutional requirements for the building. The matter was referred by the Additional Director, CGHS Mumbai, to the CGHS Directorate in New Delhi for guidance. What followed, however, was not swift problem-solving but prolonged procedural drift.

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Why the CGHS Welness Centre Matters

To understand why this closure matters, one must understand what a CGHS Wellness Centre actually does. CGHS is not a peripheral service; it is the backbone of outpatient healthcare for central government employees and pensioners. A CGHS Wellness Centre provides daily outpatient consultations, medicine dispensation for chronic and acute conditions, referral services to empanelled hospitals, basic diagnostic support, and continuity of treatment for non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, cardiac conditions, respiratory illnesses, and arthritis—conditions disproportionately affecting senior citizens. For many elderly beneficiaries, CGHS is not merely a convenience; it is their primary and sometimes only affordable interface with the healthcare system. Disrupting access, even temporarily, can mean missed medications, delayed diagnoses, and avoidable medical emergencies.

Letter to Union Health Minister

As the crisis escalated, CBWAI wrote to Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda, urging the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to intervene. The association’s appeal was not for a permanent solution overnight, but for a temporary, humane one: to allow the CGHS Wellness Centre to shift on an interim basis to the alternative accommodation offered by SEEPZ, or to a temporary structure, until a suitable long-term facility could be finalised. The letter highlights a basic principle of public administration—that continuity of essential services must take precedence over inter-departmental rigidity.

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Damodaran remains unconvinced by CGHS Mumbai’s stated objections to the alternative premises. He argues that citing procedural requirements and safety compliance, while technically valid, ignores the reality on the ground. Across India, several CGHS dispensaries function from buildings that are far from ideal, often as interim arrangements. For beneficiaries, the perception is that administrative caution is being prioritised over patient welfare. “What worries people,” Damodaran says, “is that this refusal appears less about safety and more about avoiding responsibility for ensuring uninterrupted care.”

Shah’s letter goes further, questioning the practicality of CGHS’s stated plan to shut the wellness centre for “three months” while searching for private premises. Drawing from his own administrative experience, he outlines the multiple stages involved in hiring rented accommodation through government procedures—certification from CPWD and state authorities, internal financial approvals, public advertisements, tendering, rent assessment, and final sanction. To suggest that this could be completed in three months, Shah argues, reflects either a misunderstanding of procedure or a troubling underestimation of its impact on patients. His broader appeal is for officials to move beyond departmental silos and act in the collective interest of the government and its beneficiaries.

As noted by Shah, SEEPZ authorities, for their part, also proposed an alternative open plot where CGHS could erect a temporary structure such as an Instacabin or Portacabin. Such temporary healthcare facilities are not unprecedented in government functioning, particularly during transitions or emergencies. Yet, in her formal response, Dr. Geetha Anandan, Additional Director, CGHS Mumbai, stated that no such proposal had been formally communicated through official channels with adequate details regarding location, utilities, permissions, and safety compliance. She stated in her reply that CGHS could not operate from premises deemed unsafe or non-compliant.

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That assurance, however, offers little comfort to beneficiaries. Speaking to The Probe, Priyesh Shah called the proposed alternative arrangements impractical. He pointed out that the other CGHS centres mentioned are already overcrowded, operate for limited hours, and are located in densely populated areas where access and waiting times are major challenges. Mumbai’s geography and traffic, he noted, make healthcare access as much about distance and time as about availability. Expecting thousands of additional patients—most of them elderly and chronically ill—to absorb into already stretched centres is not a solution; it is a deferral of responsibility.

At its core, this is not merely a dispute over a building. It is a test of whether public healthcare systems can respond humanely when administrative processes collide. Senior citizens dependent on CGHS are not abstractions; they are people managing multiple illnesses, limited mobility, and fixed incomes. Disrupting their access to routine care, even briefly, can have cascading consequences. A government that prides itself on expanding healthcare coverage must also demonstrate the capacity to protect existing services when institutional friction arises.