Rs 5,000 and a Question of Rape: How a Sentence Undercut a Conviction

Three and a half years back, Simran Chhabra walked into a hospital along with her brother for a scratchy throat. She came back in a body bag. I have been representing her family for the past three years, and along the way I have also endured an attempt on my life. After enormous effort, the Magistrate summoned the accused doctor for causing death due to medical negligence, and that should have been the beginning of the trial. Instead, it became the beginning of another battle. The proceedings remained tied up in the High Court for almost two years. Eventually, the summoning order was set aside and the matter was sent back to the Magistrate, to start the process ab initio.

Also Read:  Medical Negligence: Who Killed Simran?

Like Odysseus, thrown back from the shores of Ithaca when the winds rose from the bag of Aeolus, we were carried all the way back to the Magistrate, to begin again. Meanwhile, time passes and justice continues to elude the family.

Must the law protect the accused or the victims?

If the law protects the accused, then it protects every accused — or was this a special case? This was special, as the accused is a doctor and the law is overgenerous towards doctors.

Here is something more worrisome. Article 14 of our Constitution promises equality before the law. Why then do judgments keep creating the impression that a separate, gentler law operates for those who wear a white coat?

When Assault Escapes the Law of Rape Meant to Deter It

Days ago, a seventy-one-year-old doctor was convicted for outraging the modesty of a schoolgirl. Seventeen years back, when she was still a minor, she had gone to his clinic complaining of irregular periods, accompanied by two friends. The doctor took her into his chamber for a check-up.

What happened inside that chamber, as recorded in the judgment of the trial court, was this. He unbuttoned her blouse and groped her breasts. She protested. He reassured her that such contact was not inappropriate. He was, after all, a doctor. He then removed her underwear and attempted to sexually assault her. She raised an alarm. Her friends rescued her.

Read that last line again. A schoolgirl had to be rescued by her friends from her doctor's chamber.

The court rejected the defence that this was part of a routine medical examination. It observed that a doctor examining a patient for irregular periods has no reason to grope her breasts, and that the victim's own consistent testimony was sufficient to establish the offence.

The trial court sentenced him to two years of simple imprisonment with a fine, in accordance with the law. He appealed and the High Court upheld the conviction.

Also Read:  Bardhaman Medical Negligence: "ROP Screening Could Have Saved My Child"

Why I Call This a Licence to Rape

But the sentence? It was reduced to a fine of Rs. 5,000. You read that right — five thousand rupees. I had to read the judgment many times to convince myself that I was reading it correctly. I kept asking myself whether I had missed something. I had not. To be fair to the Court, the reduction was not without legal basis. The incident took place before the Criminal Law Amendment of 2013. Under the unamended Section 354 IPC, a sentence of fine alone was permissible. The Court also took note of the convict's age of seventy-one years.

As a lawyer, I understand that reasoning.

But I also understand this. The law permitted a fine-only sentence, but it did not compel one. Imprisonment remained fully available. The choice to let a man convicted of groping a schoolgirl walk away with Rs. 5,000 was a choice. More importantly, Parliament was compelled to bring the 2013 amendment to the IPC only after the gruesome rape and murder of Nirbhaya. Hence, as a citizen, I have a different perspective too. Every sentence sends a message.

The message here is scary. If you are a doctor, the law appears willing to forgive what it would never forgive in an ordinary man. Why does it appear that when the accused wears a white coat, accountability becomes extraordinarily difficult? Why do victims leave court feeling that professional status has become an invisible defence? If anything, the position should be the reverse. Doctors are highly educated persons placed on a higher pedestal, and a greater duty is cast upon them to uphold the law and morality.

Justice is not judged only by legal principles. It is judged by the confidence it inspires. Today, I fear that confidence is disappearing. That is why I have titled this article "Licence to Rape." Not because any law grants such a licence. But because if judgments continue to create the impression that doctors can escape meaningful consequences for even the gravest offences, then the public will inevitably conclude that such a licence already exists.

And then I realised something.

The irony is almost impossible to ignore. Under the Electricity Act, if a doctor is found tampering with an electricity meter, or illegally using a domestic electricity connection for commercial purposes, a Junior Engineer of the electricity department has sweeping powers. The electricity supply can be disconnected. Assessments can be raised. Criminal proceedings may be initiated. Upon conviction, imprisonment may follow.

In practical terms, an allegation relating to electricity theft may expose a doctor to swifter and more immediate consequences than allegations involving the loss of a patient's life, or misconduct towards a woman.

That is a sobering reflection on our system of enforcement.

So, the next time someone loses a loved one because of alleged medical negligence, or a woman complains of criminal misconduct by a doctor, perhaps the most effective legal strategy is not to engage an advocate at all.

Instead, one might be better advised to inspect the doctor's electricity connection, or hire an electricity inspector and pay him to charge the doctor with tampering with the meter, even falsely. If the meter is found to be tampered with, or if the clinic is running on a domestic connection in violation of the law, the machinery of the State will spring into action with remarkable speed. The doctor may face disconnection of electricity, criminal prosecution, and the prospect of imprisonment. These are consequences that victims of far more serious offences often struggle for years to achieve through the criminal justice system.

Unfortunately, the facts that inspired this piece are not fictional.

Our legal system appears to respond more decisively to the theft of electricity than to allegations involving the loss of human life or violations of bodily dignity.

No civilised society should ever reach a point where the most effective route to accountability for a medical professional runs through the Electricity Act rather than through the criminal law meant to protect life and personal dignity.

DNC Finally Acts, Eight Years After Gargi Meena's Death

The Delhi Nursing Council (DNC) has ordered criminal prosecution against the management of Saroj Super Speciality Hospital, Rohini, in a case that has taken nearly eight years to reach this point. In an order dated July 15, 2026, the DNC found that the hospital had deployed over 100 unregistered nursing staff at the time Gargi Meena was admitted to the hospital for what her family described as mild menstrual pain. Meena died at Saroj Hospital in March 2018. For Gargi Meena's family, it is the outcome of a fight that began the day she did not return home from what was meant to be a routine hospital visit. The Probe has tracked Gargi's case, documenting failures not only at Saroj Hospital but within the regulatory bodies meant to hold the hospital accountable.

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

On March 29, 2018, Gargi Meena walked into Saroj Hospital with mild abdominal pain that her family associated with her menstrual cycle. Within hours, doctors recommended surgery, telling the family that delay could prove fatal. The surgery went ahead the same day. According to her husband, Uttam Chand Meena, Gargi appeared calm and even joyful beforehand, laughing as she removed her jewellery. After the operation, her condition worsened. She was unable to pass urine, and her blood sugar later spiked to a dangerously high level, prompting her transfer to the intensive care unit. In the early hours of March 31, 2018, she was placed on a ventilator. At 4.12 am, Saroj Hospital declared her dead — two days after she had walked in for what was meant to be a precautionary check-up.

Uttam Chand Meena has spent the years since pursuing accountability, both for the medical decisions taken inside Saroj Hospital and for what he alleges was a pattern of institutional evasiveness afterward. His central allegation is that he and his family were pressured into consenting to surgery under threat that Gargi would otherwise die, only for her condition to deteriorate sharply once the procedure was performed.

He has also alleged that hospital staff raised concerns about payment despite his eligibility for cashless treatment under a government scheme, and that he was asked to procure medicines from outside before treatment would continue. It was Meena's decision to file Right to Information applications seeking Saroj Hospital's staffing records that eventually opened up the question that would consume the next several years of litigation: who exactly was caring for his wife in her final hours.

Among Meena's most serious allegations is that the nurses attending to Gargi during her admission may not have been properly qualified or registered to practise in Delhi. He has repeatedly pointed out that while doctors visit a patient for a matter of minutes each day, it is nurses who provide round-the-clock care — administering medication, monitoring vital signs and responding to emergencies through the night. If that care is being delivered by unregistered or unqualified personnel, he has argued, patients are being placed at risk without their knowledge. This allegation, first raised through his RTI applications, formed the basis of the Delhi High Court's repeated interventions and, ultimately, of the Delhi Nursing Council's own inquiry into the hospital's nursing staff.

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

What the DNC Order Says

The Delhi Nursing Council's order followed a fresh, physical audit of Saroj Hospital's employment rolls and registration certificates for the 245 nursing staff on record as of March 31, 2018 — the date of Gargi Meena's death. The audit was conducted in the presence of hospital representatives, including the Additional Medical Superintendent, the Chief Nursing Officer and the head of human resources. The DNC's Review Committee, which confirmed the findings on June 11, 2026, found that only 114 of the 245 nurses held valid DNC registration.

A further 120 nurses, though qualified, were found to be practising without the mandatory registration required of nurses from other states, having failed to secure the necessary no-objection certificates. Six individuals were found to be entirely unregistered with any state nursing council in India. A further five people — four operating theatre technicians and one nursing aide — had been mistakenly classified as nursing staff altogether. The DNC concluded that Saroj Hospital had operated in gross violation of Section 17 of the Delhi Nursing Council Act, 1997, which bars the employment of unregistered individuals as nurses anywhere in Delhi.

The dangers of this kind of gap in oversight are not abstract. Nurses are typically the medical professionals with the most sustained contact with a patient, particularly during and after surgery, when close monitoring can be the difference between a complication being caught early or missed entirely. Gargi Meena's own case involved several of the junctures where such monitoring matters most: a rapid post-operative decline, a catheter-related complaint that her husband alleges was dismissed, and a sudden spike in blood sugar levels that preceded her transfer to intensive care.

Separately, the Delhi Medical Council has already found that the doctors involved in her case fell short of the standard expected of them, with the treating gynaecologist found to have failed to exercise reasonable skill and care, the anaesthetist found lacking in diligent record-keeping, and the attending physician found insufficiently diligent in managing her case. The National Medical Commission subsequently suspended the gynaecologist for three months and issued warnings to the other doctors involved.

The Delhi High Court intervened in this case on three separate occasions — in 2021, 2023 and again in February 2026 — each time expressing dissatisfaction with the pace and thoroughness of the Delhi Nursing Council's response. In its February 2026 order, the court held that Meena's grievance was genuine and could not be brushed aside, directing the DNC to complete a comprehensive fresh examination within six months.

This was not the first warning the regulator had received. As early as 2021, the DNC itself had written to the Directorate General of Health Services, urging the withdrawal of Saroj Hospital's registration over its employment of unregistered nurses. That letter went unanswered. For years, the case moved only through repeated court directions, RTI replies and painstaking verification, with little visible consequence for the hospital.

We spoke to Uttam Chand Meena following the DNC's order. "After 8 years, finally the DNC has acted against the hospital. This is not the end and is only the beginning," he said. "The doctor only comes for visits to the patient, but it is the nurse who cares for the patient throughout, so it is very important that the nurses are qualified and registered. I feel that the nurses' records should also be available on the DNC website, with their photographs and qualifications, so that people do not get hoodwinked. This is a wake-up call. We will also move court to get the licence of Saroj Hospital cancelled."

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

A Long-Delayed Reckoning

The implications of the DNC's order extend beyond the fines and prosecution it has set in motion. For years, both the Delhi Nursing Council and the Directorate General of Health Services were aware, or ought to have been aware, of serious lapses at Saroj Hospital, yet neither acted with any urgency. The DNC's 2021 warning to the DGHS went unanswered. Its own inspection findings in 2023 prompted no decisive regulatory action until the Delhi High Court stepped in again. It has taken three rounds of judicial intervention, a formal Review Committee, and a fresh physical audit of eight-year-old records for the Delhi Nursing Council to arrive at an order that finally recommends criminal prosecution and refers the hospital to the DGHS for punitive action under the Delhi Nursing Homes Cell Act. For Gargi Meena's family, who have spent nearly a decade seeking answers, the order represents the first time a regulatory body has matched its findings with consequences that go beyond warning letters.

Prashant Vaxish, the advocate representing Uttam Chand Meena, framed the case in constitutional terms. "The Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to receive healthcare within the framework of law. Any systemic failure to enforce mandatory statutory requirements in hospitals undermines public confidence and raises grave concerns regarding the protection of patients' fundamental rights," he said. "The findings in this case raise a serious constitutional concern. Permitting patients to be treated by persons who were allegedly not in compliance with the statutory registration framework strikes at the very heart of the fundamental right to life and health guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. This case is not merely about one hospital — it raises a serious question about the effectiveness of regulatory oversight. If over a hundred nursing personnel could allegedly function without mandatory registration, it compels every citizen to ask whether public authorities are conducting timely inspections to safeguard patient lives."

Vaxish added that the case should be read as a broader warning to India's healthcare regulators. "This case is a stark reminder that public authorities exist to protect citizens — not to preside over institutional failures that endanger them. Any breakdown in statutory oversight within the healthcare system strikes at the very foundation of the constitutional guarantee of life and dignity. Hospitals and public authorities have no licence to gamble with human lives. The rule of law demands that every lapse affecting public safety be met with uncompromising accountability," he said.

What happens next will test how far the Delhi Nursing Council's order translates into real consequence. The DNC has given Saroj Hospital and the penalised nurses ten days to respond before proceedings escalate, and it has referred the matter to the DGHS for administrative action under the Nursing Homes Cell Act — a body that has, on this very case, gone unresponsive to the regulator's requests before.

Meena's petition seeking stricter punishment for the doctors involved remains pending before the Delhi High Court, and he has indicated he intends to seek cancellation of Saroj Hospital's operating licence altogether. Gargi Meena did not live to see any of this. Whether the systems meant to protect the next patient who walks into Saroj Hospital, or any hospital in Delhi, will act faster than they did for her, remains an open question.

E20 Petrol Complaints Mask a Deeper Ethanol Policy Debate

The controversy surrounding India’s E20 fuel programme has exposed a deeper tension than a disagreement over automotive technology. Recent proceedings in the Supreme Court and the subsequent clarification issued by the government brought renewed attention to a policy that has quietly transformed India’s fuel landscape.

Petrol blended with 20 percent ethanol is now available across the country, years ahead of the original schedule. Policymakers view the programme as a milestone in India’s energy transition. Many consumers view it with considerably more scepticism.

Complaints about declining mileage after using E20 fuel, uncertainty over vehicle compatibility and the absence of any visible reduction in fuel prices have fuelled a growing public debate. Much of that discussion has been framed as a simple choice between environmental responsibility and consumer convenience.

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

How the US, Brazil and Europe Approach Ethanol Blending

The reality is considerably more complex. Ethanol blending sits at the intersection of energy security, agricultural policy, climate commitments and household economics. Understanding its implications requires moving beyond the immediate concerns of motorists and examining the larger political economy behind the policy.

Globally, ethanol is neither experimental nor unusual. The United States has blended ethanol into petrol for decades, with E10 serving as the standard fuel across much of the country. Higher blends such as E15 and E85 are also available for compatible vehicles.

Brazil operates one of the world’s most extensive biofuel ecosystems, where E27 is the standard petrol blend and pure ethanol remains widely available. Several European countries have adopted E10 as a mainstream fuel. The underlying science is well established.

Ethanol offers genuine environmental advantages. Produced from agricultural feedstocks such as sugarcane, maize and other biomass, it reduces lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional petrol. Ethanol also improves octane ratings and promotes cleaner combustion.

According to estimates frequently cited by policymakers, ethanol derived from sugarcane can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90 percent relative to fossil fuels. At a time when governments across the world are attempting to decarbonise transport systems, biofuels have emerged as an important transitional technology.

The economic rationale is equally compelling.

India imports roughly 85 percent of the crude oil it consumes. Energy dependence has long represented one of the country’s most significant external vulnerabilities. Every increase in global oil prices widens the current account deficit, puts pressure on the rupee and contributes to domestic inflation. Policymakers have therefore searched for ways to reduce exposure to volatile energy markets without compromising growth.

E20 as Economic Insurance: Who Actually Gains From It

Viewed from this perspective, ethanol blending functions as a form of economic insurance.

The programme has enabled India to substitute a portion of imported crude oil with domestically produced fuel. Government estimates suggest that ethanol blending has already displaced millions of tonnes of crude oil imports and generated substantial foreign exchange savings.

These gains rarely feature in public discussions because they appear not at petrol pumps but in macroeconomic indicators. A lower import bill improves the balance of payments, reduces pressure on foreign exchange reserves and strengthens resilience against geopolitical disruptions in global energy markets.

The benefits extend beyond the external sector. Ethanol production has created an additional market for sugarcane and grain producers, directing significant revenue towards rural economies. For a government seeking to strengthen farm incomes while reducing oil dependence, ethanol blending offers an unusually attractive policy instrument. A litre of ethanol represents not only a reduction in fuel imports but also an expansion of domestic value creation.

Yet policies that generate national gains do not always distribute those gains evenly.

This is where much of the current discomfort originates.

Also Read:  India-US Trade Deal Stalls Amid Tariffs, Politics And Legal Hurdles

Why E20 Mileage Loss Hits Older Vehicles Hardest

Consumers encounter ethanol through mileage rather than macroeconomics. E20 fuel contains less energy per litre than conventional petrol. Its energy density is roughly one-third lower than that of pure gasoline. Modern engines designed for higher ethanol blends can compensate for some of this difference through calibration and improved combustion. Older vehicles often cannot. Laboratory tests suggest relatively modest efficiency losses. Real-world driving conditions, particularly in congested urban environments, have produced more mixed experiences.

These concerns become sharper because India has pursued one of the fastest ethanol transitions among major economies. Brazil’s ethanol programme evolved gradually over several decades alongside substantial changes in vehicle technology, fuel infrastructure and consumer behaviour. Manufacturers, fuel retailers and consumers adapted together. The transition became an ecosystem rather than a mandate.

India’s trajectory has been more compressed. Ethanol blending rose from negligible levels a decade ago to 20 percent nationally within a relatively short period. Vehicle manufacturers have increasingly produced E20 compatible models, yet many of the older vehicles remain on Indian roads. The transition has therefore created a gap between national fuel standards and the technical characteristics of a significant share of the existing vehicle fleet.

The challenge extends beyond engineering.

The E20 Paradox: National Gains, Unchanged Petrol Prices

Public acceptance of large-scale transitions often depends on whether citizens perceive a tangible benefit from participating in them. The economics of ethanol blending present a paradox. Imported crude oil is being replaced with a domestically produced fuel. Foreign exchange savings are accumulating. Farmers receive an additional source of demand. Carbon emissions decline. Yet retail fuel prices remain broadly unchanged.

Part of the explanation lies in the economics of ethanol production itself. Ethanol procurement prices are designed to support agricultural producers and distilleries. Feedstock costs have risen. Lower energy content means more fuel is required to travel the same distance. These factors limit the scope for dramatic reductions in retail prices.

The result is a transition whose macroeconomic benefits are visible to the state but less visible to consumers.

This does not diminish the strategic logic of ethanol blending. India cannot indefinitely rely on imported oil to meet its energy needs. Nor can climate objectives be postponed indefinitely. The direction of policy is broadly consistent with global trends. Questions surrounding implementation, however, deserve the same attention as questions surrounding intent.

Brazil’s experience offers a useful lesson. The success of its ethanol programme emerged from patient institution-building rather than blending targets alone. Vehicle technology, fuel markets, pricing structures and consumer incentives evolved together. Policy credibility grew because the transition appeared predictable and manageable.

India’s E20 programme now stands at a similar crossroads. Future debates are likely to focus less on the chemistry of fuel and more on the economics of adaptation. Consumers, manufacturers, farmers and policymakers are participating in the same transition but not necessarily experiencing it in the same way.

Energy transitions inevitably create winners, losers and trade-offs. The durability of such transitions often depends on how those trade-offs are managed. Public trust grows when benefits and burdens appear proportionate. It weakens when costs become concentrated while gains remain diffuse and difficult to observe.

The long-term success of E20 fuel will therefore be measured by more than import savings or blending ratios. Its broader legitimacy will rest on whether citizens come to view the programme as a shared national transition rather than a cost imposed upon them in pursuit of larger objectives.

Deepanshu Mohan is Dean and Professor of Economics at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development and a Visiting Professor at London School of Economics (LSE).

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. 

When AI Enters the Courtroom, Verification Becomes Justice

Every courtroom runs on an assumption that is rarely stated aloud but always relied upon: when a judgment is cited, it exists. Not as description or approximation, but as a real, traceable legal record. That quiet assumption is what gives legal reasoning its authority. When it breaks, even in a single instance, the damage goes beyond one case. It strikes at the credibility of the process itself.

That fragility was on full display on July 2, 2026, when the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment in Pooja Ramesh Singh v. Jammu and Kashmir Bank Ltd. & Anr. While examining an insolvency dispute, a bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe found that the National Company Law Tribunal had relied on judicial precedents that did not exist in any recognised legal record. These were not misread cases or interpretative errors. They were AI fabricated citations, treated as if they were valid law.

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

A Verdict That Named the Problem

The case began as a routine corporate insolvency matter. Jammu and Kashmir Bank had moved the NCLT under Section 7 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code against Essel Infraprojects Ltd., seeking recovery of dues owed by the original borrower, Pan India Utilities Distribution Company Ltd. The NCLT admitted the insolvency application, and the NCLAT upheld that order by relying on a string of what it presented as Supreme Court precedents. When the matter reached the Supreme Court, the appellant, a suspended director of Essel Infraprojects, argued that several of those precedents simply did not exist.

On independent verification, the Court agreed. It found citations such as ICICI Bank Ltd. vs Urban Infrastructure Real Estate Ltd. and Sarbjit Singh vs Union Bank of India, both attributed to the Supreme Court Cases reporter, to be entirely fictitious, while other citations carried paragraphs and quotations that never appeared in the genuine judgments they claimed to come from.

Jammu and Kashmir Bank filed an affidavit clarifying that its own lawyers had never placed these cases on record, and that the tribunal appeared to have generated them through its own research. The Supreme Court held that the source of the error did not lessen the damage done to the rule of law, and it set aside the NCLT and NCLAT orders, sending the insolvency application back for fresh adjudication.

The bench did not mince words about what such material does to judicial reasoning once it enters the system unchecked, comparing its spread to a toxic industrial leak: invisible at first, and catastrophic by the time anyone notices. The Court declared that courts must adopt a zero-tolerance approach to producing, citing, or relying on AI generated precedents without verification, and it went further, holding that a lawyer who cites unverified machine-generated judgments commits professional misconduct, while a judge who relies on such material commits an equally serious lapse. The Court also directed the Bar Council of India to constitute a committee to frame guidelines and consider disciplinary measures for the use of unverified, unchecked machine-generated material in legal work.

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Not India's First Encounter, and Not the World's

India's judiciary has already brushed up against this problem more than once this year. Earlier in 2026, the same bench had dealt with a separate matter in which a trial court had relied on non-existent, AI generated judgments, a recurrence that the Court itself flagged as reason enough to move toward firmer standards.

In April 2026, the Punjab and Haryana High Court went further still, issuing a circular related to AI that bars judicial officers from using generative tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot for legal research or the writing of judgments, citing data-privacy concerns under India's yet-to-be-enforced Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

The problem is neither new nor confined to India. The first widely reported instance came from the United States, in Mata v. Avianca, Inc., decided in the Southern District of New York in 2023. Two lawyers representing a passenger who claimed he was injured by a serving cart on an Avianca flight used ChatGPT to research their opposition to a motion to dismiss. The tool invented six complete judicial opinions, complete with fabricated judge names, docket numbers, and quotations.

When opposing counsel could not locate the cases, one of the lawyers reportedly asked the chatbot to confirm the cases were real, and it did, itself hallucinating a second time. Judge P. Kevin Castel fined the lawyers and their firm 5,000 dollars, not for using AI as such, but for standing behind the fabricated cases even after being warned they might not exist.

The United Kingdom has logged dozens of comparable episodes. In the combined 2025 High Court matters of R (Ayinde) v. Haringey and Al-Haroun v. Qatar National Bank, judicial assistants checking one set of submissions found that eighteen of forty-five cited cases did not exist at all, while several genuine cases were quoted for propositions they never contained.

The presiding judges referred the lawyers involved to their professional regulators and warned that fabricated citations amount to an abuse of the court's process, regardless of whether the person responsible is a qualified lawyer or an unrepresented litigant. A related case, Bandla v. Solicitors Regulation Authority, saw an appeal struck out entirely after a former solicitor kept relying on fake authorities even after being told they were fake.

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The Scale of the Problem, in Numbers

What began as a scattering of isolated incidents has become a measurable pattern. Damien Charlotin, a Paris-based legal researcher affiliated with HEC Paris's Smart Law Hub, maintains the most widely cited public database of court and tribunal decisions in which generative AI produced fabricated legal material. By mid-2026, that database had logged more than 1,400 cases worldwide, more than 1,000 of them in the United States alone, with new entries arriving, in Charlotin's own description, at a pace of roughly ten cases from ten different courts on a single day.

Penalties have escalated alongside the volume: from the original 5,000-dollar fine in the Avianca matter to sanctions exceeding 100,000 dollars in a 2026 case out of Oregon, and to what appears to be the first indefinite licence suspension tied to AI-fabricated citations, handed down by the Nebraska Supreme Court in April 2026.

Most of the cases in Charlotin's tracker involve self-represented litigants rather than practising lawyers, which is its own warning sign: AI tools are now a first stop for people who cannot afford legal counsel, and courts are having to build new safeguards to protect litigants from the very tools meant to help them navigate the system alone. But it is the cases involving licensed advocates that carry the heaviest professional consequences, ranging from wasted-costs orders and referrals to bar regulators, to strike-outs of entire pleadings and, increasingly, suspension from practice.

Courts Are Building Guardrails, Not Banning the Technology

None of this amounts to a rejection of the technology. The Supreme Court's AI Committee released a draft framework, the Regulations for Use of Artificial Intelligence in Courts, 2026, in June, opening it for public comment, with the consultation window extended to July 15, 2026, before the rules are finalised. The draft permits the use of artificial intelligence for legal research, citation verification, drafting assistance, translation, transcription, and court administration, but it draws a hard line: such systems cannot decide cases, assess bail eligibility, evaluate flight risk, predict recidivism, or judge the credibility of a witness or party.

The draft also proposes a mandatory disclosure requirement, meaning any lawyer or litigant who uses such tools to prepare a pleading or submission would have to say so at the time of filing, and it envisages a permanent apex oversight body at the Supreme Court, backed by dedicated technology committees and annual audits of any such system used in Indian courts. Roughly 53.57 crore rupees has separately been earmarked under Phase III of the government's e-Courts Project for future technological advancement, including artificial intelligence and blockchain integration, according to a Lok Sabha reply by the Union Law Minister in December 2025.

This mirrors the direction courts have taken elsewhere. UK judges operate under a formal Guidance for Judicial Office Holders on the use of artificial intelligence, first issued in December 2023, and the Law Society has published its own checklist for practitioners weighing whether and how to use generative tools. 

In the United States, the American Bar Association issued its first formal ethics opinion on lawyers' use of generative tools in July 2024, making clear that the duties of competence, candour to the court, and client confidentiality apply in full regardless of whether a human or a machine drafted the first version of a document.

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The Deeper Fix Starts Earlier Than the Courtroom

The challenge, though, is not confined to courts or regulators. It begins earlier, in legal education itself. Law students already use AI tools widely for summaries, notes, and early-stage research, and that is neither unusual nor inherently a problem. The concern arises when these tools replace verification rather than assist it. Legal training has always rested on one core discipline: nothing is accepted as law unless it can be traced back to an authentic, checkable authority. If that habit weakens early, it rarely returns in full strength later in practice.

Practical guidance is converging on similar advice everywhere this issue has surfaced: never cite a machine-generated case without independently confirming it against an official database such as the Supreme Court's own website, Indian Kanoon, or SCC Online; keep a research log capable of proving due diligence if the citation is ever questioned; and treat any such tool as a starting point for research, never as the final word on whether a precedent is real. What is learned as convenience at the start of a legal career can become genuine professional risk later. Law schools, in India and elsewhere, will have to adjust their approach, not by resisting the technology, but by teaching its limits more deliberately.

The Standard That Doesn't Change

In the end, the responsibility remains where it has always been. Lawyers are officers of the court, and that role carries a continuing duty of accuracy that predates any such technology by centuries. The ease with which information can now be generated does not reduce that obligation; if anything, it raises the bar. And for judges, the standard is identical: what enters judicial reasoning must be verified, even when it arrives with the appearance of unimpeachable authority.

AI will continue to become part of legal practice in India and everywhere else; that much is now beyond dispute, borne out by a Supreme Court judgment, a pending regulatory framework, a High Court circular, and a global tracker already past 1,400 documented failures. What remains uncertain is how responsibly the profession will use it. Because in law, credibility has never been created by speed, fluency, or confidence of language. It is created by proof. Verification was always part of justice. After July 2, 2026, no court, lawyer, or law student in India can credibly claim not to have been told so.

Journalist Samrat Choudhury received his passport today, bringing an end to a prolonged and unexplained citizenship verification process. Speaking to The Probe shortly after, Samrat said he still does not know what triggered the scrutiny of his citizenship in the first place, even though every document he submitted was found to be in order.

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How Samrat Choudhury's Passport Case Unfolded

Samrat's ordeal began not as a routine formality but as a shock. He had held an Indian passport since 1993 — issued from Shillong, Delhi and Bengaluru at different points in his career — with no trouble at any stage. Then, four years after his Tatkal passport was issued in 2022, he received a letter from the Regional Passport Office (RPO) in Kolkata stating that an adverse police report had been received, with "citizenship not established" recorded against his name. 

He was asked to appear at the RPO in Kolkata to submit his passport for police re-verification. He then had to report to his local police station, where he was asked to produce a long list of documents, including his birth certificate, 10th standard certificate, Aadhaar card, voter ID, his own passport, and even his father's and mother's passports. 

The Probe had first reported Samrat's case on July 3. His case is riddled with irony that goes beyond the bureaucratic runaround. Samrat has spent years documenting and writing about the idea of belonging, only to find himself having to prove that he belonged. Adding to that irony, his passport was impounded by the government on Passport Seva Divas — a day observed every year on June 24 to commemorate the enactment of the Passports Act, 1967, meant to celebrate the service of issuing passports.

While media attention around his case began to build, Samrat was simultaneously navigating the re-verification process through official channels. Whether it was that scrutiny that eventually prompted authorities to act, or whether the case would have been resolved regardless, remains unclear. What is certain is that after his documents were verified, his file was sent back to the RPO, and an automated message eventually informed him that it had been cleared. The passport was released and delivered to him today.

Speaking to The Probe, he said that the entire process left him without answers about why his citizenship had come under question at all. "I am still mystified about what happened, what caused this whole thing in the first place. I still don't know," he said.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

Government Sought Far More Than Required, Says Samrat

Samrat raised concerns about the gap between the official passport requirements and what he was actually asked to produce. Under Indian citizenship law, anyone born in India between January 26, 1950 and July 1, 1987 is a citizen by birth, irrespective of the nationality or documentation of their parents — meaning no proof of parental lineage is legally required.

Samrat, who was born before this cut-off, said the process was especially demanding given this, as he had already submitted his birth certificate and 10th standard certificate, both of which record his date of birth and should have settled the matter on their own.

"This is not what the official list of documents says. It basically says you have to provide one document for proof of address and one for proof of identity, the usual thing. It doesn't seem to require your father's passport and your mother's passport and stuff like that," he said.

He was critical of the discretion exercised by officials handling passport and citizenship verification cases, arguing that it adds unnecessary hardship to an already difficult process. "The government officials just seem to want to cover themselves by asking you for things which are not required, just making the process much harder than it needs to be. If two documents are enough, ask me for two documents. Don't ask me for ten," he said.

Echoes of R. Rajagopal's Passport Case

Samrat's case follows a similar citizenship and passport ordeal faced by R. Rajagopal, former editor of The Telegraph, whose story The Probe had reported on June 30. Rajagopal, who had held a valid passport since 2005 and renewed it without incident in 2015, applied for a routine renewal in February 2026 after his passport expired in October 2025. Instead of being processed as usual, his file was quietly diverted to the Security Control Organisation, which functions under the Kolkata Police Special Branch. 

On June 17, the Regional Passport Office informed him in writing that police had submitted an adverse verification report, citing the fact that his name had been deleted from West Bengal's electoral rolls during the state's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise. Rajagopal spent nearly a hundred days tracking down decades-old records of his late parents from Kerala, trying to establish an identity he had never once been asked to prove in over three decades as one of India's best-known editors.

After The Probe's story and renewed media glare on Rajagopal's case drew attention to the delays in restoring his passport, he eventually received his passport — via speed post on July 4. Rajagopal told The Probe that the resolution came after sustained media coverage, along with the intervention of the Editors Guild of India, the Press Club of India and a Chief Minister's intervention, but that he did not see it as a moment to celebrate, since the government had still not clarified whether SIR data could be lawfully used to deny a citizen a passport. 

The Probe's follow-up story reported on the development, along with Rajagopal's call for the government to clarify its position on the SIR process linked to such citizenship checks — a clarification that has still not come from the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Home Affairs, or the West Bengal government.

A Wider Problem Beyond Passport Delays

Both Samrat Choudhury's and R. Rajagopal's cases point to a larger pattern facing citizens caught up in citizenship and passport verification processes across the country, many of whom do not have the visibility or the platform to have their cases resolved. 

Samrat said the state of passport and police verification offices reflects years of underinvestment, leaving both citizens and officials to deal with an outdated and inconsistent system. "They just get desensitised to the human being facing them across the table. After some time, they stop caring about their jobs and the difference it makes to people's lives," he said, adding that he hopes the government will invest in improving these offices for the many citizens who depend on them daily.

India-US Trade Deal: From '99% Done' To Sudden Pullback

About two weeks ago, the much-anticipated bilateral trade agreement (BTA) between India and the United States (US) seemed close to completion. United States Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer led his team to New Delhi, and both governments aligned on claims that 99 percent of the India-US trade deal was finalised. 

Immediately after Greer’s visit, however, the Indian government unexpectedly pulled back from the deal. 

Why India Paused The India-US Trade Deal Despite Early Momentum

Clarifying India’s position, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, claimed immediately afterwards that the BTA would remain on hold unless the US offered India “some competitive advantage over what is being given to countries like Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and other neighbouring countries”. 

This about turn was surprising given India’s long-standing enthusiasm to clinch the deal with its second-largest trading partner. 

Negotiations began in early 2025 following political endorsement from the leaders of both nations, who launched “Mission 500” to double total bilateral trade to $500 billion by 2030. The BTA was to be the primary catalyst. Initially, both governments agreed that the first tranche of this multi-sector trade deal would be ready by the Fall of 2025. 

Also Read:  Fire and Ice: Trump's Erratic NATO Summit Rage Turns to Love

India-US Trade Deal Talks Hit Tariff And Agriculture Roadblocks

This timeline proved overly ambitious for two primary reasons.

The  “America First” Mandate of President Donald Trump’s trade policy explicitly stated he would “negotiate agreements on a bilateral or sector-specific basis to obtain export market access for American workers, farmers, ranchers, service providers”. This signaled that the US would prioritise its own stakeholders without guaranteeing reciprocal advantages to partner countries.

And, then there were tariff disputes between India and the US. President Trump repeatedly targeted India for maintaining high tariffs and enjoying a trade surplus with the US. It seemed, therefore, that the BTA was being envisioned as a mechanism for the US to extract market access concessions from India, particularly within its protected agricultural sector.

Although the original deadline was missed, the two nations announced a framework for an “Interim Agreement regarding reciprocal and mutually beneficial trade” in early February. The Indian government enthusiastically hailed this as a “landmark trade victory” that unlocked the “$30-trillion US market for exports across key sectors”.

But this optimism did not match the actual terms of the framework. 

Russian Oil, Reciprocal Tariffs And A Supreme Court Curveball

India had agreed to eliminate or reduce tariffs on all US industrial goods as well as a wide range of agricultural products, but the US secured the right to apply a reciprocal tariff rate of 18 percent on originating Indian goods. By accepting these asymmetric terms, India  was, in effect, opening its sensitive sectors even though the US could increase tariffs on Indian exports seven-fold, compared to July 2025 levels.

President Trump announced at the same time that India had committed to halting direct or indirect imports of Russian oil. In exchange, he said, the US had agreed to remove the 25 percent ad valorem duty it had imposed on India in August 2025 over these very oil imports. 

For India, halting Russian oil imports represented a major geopolitical shift, considering Russia’s decades-long role as a dependable strategic partner.

The framework was quickly turned upside down when the US Supreme Court ruled that President Trump did not have the authority to impose “reciprocal tariffs” under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). This knocked the bottom out of  the Trump administration’s trade unilateralism as it was the IEEPA under which high tariffs were levied on 57 countries in April 2025. 

The US Supreme Court ruling forced, therefore, both the Indian and US governments back to the drawing board.

Also Read:  Strait of Hormuz: Iran's Long War Trap for a Reluctant US

New Section 301 Probes Complicate India-US Trade Deal Talks

India’s initial acceptance of the lopsided February deal remains difficult to parse. Its subsequent refusal to finalise the BTA, however, stems from sudden and new US provocations. Within weeks of the Supreme Court ruling, the Trump Administration initiated two separate investigations under Section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974, which grants the USTR unilateral tariff authority to investigate and take unilateral tariff actions against other countries it trades with. 

In the first investigation, the USTR is examining 60 trade partners for their failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour. India is among the 54 countries facing the prospects of additional import duties of 10 percent. 

The second USTR investigation is for determining structural excess capacity of the countries it trades with. Sixteen of them are being targeted for manufacturing overcapacity across 22 sectors. In India, seven sectors are targeted — including broad categories such as construction goods – meaning that any subsequent duties could broadly depress exports to its largest trading partner, the US. 

Unlike the first investigation, the USTR has not as yet specified the duty rates it intends to impose. For decades, governments have been forging bilateral trade agreements to provide a transparent and predictable trading environment to their businesses. The Trump Administration is clearly an exception in this regard; its trade dealings have been anything but predictable. 

Given this situation, the Indian government faces some hard choices while continuing to negotiate the BTA. Surely, it would not like to be left in a situation where the US, after extracting all the concessions it is seeking, uses unilateral measures like Section 301 to deny benefits to Indian businesses.

Biswajit Dhar is Honorary Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi. Earlier, he was Distinguished Professor, Council for Social Development, New Delhi, and  a Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

At the NATO Summit, Trump's Most Erratic Moment Yet

US President Donald Trump’s media conferences at the NATO summit in Ankara were the most disturbing since his session with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018.

Back then, Trump stunned those assembled when asked whether he believed the conclusion of US intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” he replied. From that moment on, Trump’s credibility in standing for America first over Russia was in doubt.

The president’s media performances at NATO were even more destabilising and erratic.

Also Read:  Strait of Hormuz: Iran's Long War Trap for a Reluctant US

NATO Summit Rage: Trump Torches Spain and Reopens Greenland Bid

In the morning, Trump came in angry at NATO and Iran. “I’m not happy with NATO because of the fact that they didn’t want to help us with the number-one state sponsor of terror, that’s Iran. They were unwilling to help us.”

He was livid about Spain and demanded his treasury secretary cut off all trade with Spain immediately. “Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore, by the way. I’d like you to cut it off […] I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please. They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”

Trump: "Spain is a wasted cause. We don't want to do any trade business with Spain anymore, by the way. I'd like to cut it off. Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. Cut off all trade with Spain, please. Including visits. We don't want anything to do. They're hopeless. Bad… pic.twitter.com/mcWRBhARjF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2026

Trump then reopened his imperial design to acquire Greenland from Denmark. “Greenland is a big problem for us […] Greenland is very important for the United States, but it’s not important for Denmark. In fact, when Denmark was overrun by the Nazis in less than one day. Hitler beat them out in one day took over, and they asked us to take care of Greenland. In fact, we took Greenland and then stupidly we gave it back. We shouldn’t have given it back to them because we’re the ones that need it. We need it for protection of the world, not just the United States, and it’s very important. It doesn’t help Denmark, but it helps us, and it’s very important for us.”

NATO Summit Swing: Trump Calls Iran 'Scum,' Then Praises NATO 'Love'

Trump was cold on NATO and red hot on Iran. He was asked whether the memorandum of understanding to end the hostilities, open the Strait of Hormuz, and begin discussions to denuclearise Iran was dead.

To me I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.“

And more: "But these are evil, sick people, and we have to rid their cancer, their cancer, and you know what you do? You got to cut out cancer early. And that’s the way I feel.”

By the afternoon media session, Trump had adopted a more conciliatory, if not affectionate, tone.

I just want to say there was tremendous love in that [NATO] room […] And they have a lot of good in their heart, not evil, good. And they’re doing a great job for their country.

NATO Summit: Trump's Bravado Clashes With a War Still Raging

Trump assured the room his rough language about NATO leaders did not cause any consternation. “I mean, you know, they, they like the job I’m doing. They said, we love, sir, we love you. These are grown people saying that, isn’t that nice? Maybe, I don’t know, maybe they’re trying to get to me. And in the way they did because there was tremendous unity in that room.”

But the prospects for ending the current rounds of violence, reopening Hormuz and serious engagement on Iran’s nuclear programs are decaying rapidly. At the NATO meeting, Trump threatened imminent strikes on Iran, and a new wave of attacks has been unleashed. “This is in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran. If it happens again, it will get much worse!”

He signalled his awareness of his own mortality in the war with Iran. He repeatedly cites how he killed tiers of Iranian leaders. “Their leaders are gone. They had leaders they’re gone and they had another set of leaders, they’re gone. Now they have another set of leaders, they may be gone.”

Trump sees his life in danger. “They want to take out the US leader, me. I’m on every list. I saw things this morning. I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far I guess I’ve been a little bit lucky, but that maybe doesn’t last very long.”

What Trump had to say was all in the course of just one day. He left NATO proud of America’s standing. “They respect our country again […] They have more respect for our country than they’ve ever had before.”

But from this torrent of words and contradiction in speech, Trump left NATO with the Iran war continuing, the alliance under immense tension, and questions about the stability of the commander-in-chief growing.

Author Bruce Wolpe is a Senior Fellow (non-resident) at the United States Studies Centre. Bruce is a contributor on US politics to Sky News Australia, appearing regularly across its programs and for breaking news.

This story originally appeared in The Conversation. 

Strait of Hormuz Strikes Push the Ceasefire to Collapse

The United States has launched a series of strikes on Iran in response to the Iranian targeting of vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

These are the most severe violations yet of the Memorandum of Understanding that came into effect on June 17, and may signal an end to the truce.

For the first time since the initial ceasefire on April 8, US President Donald Trump has definitively stated the ceasefire is over.

These escalating tensions suggest the ceasefire will not turn into a permanent peace. The US is being drawn into a long war with Iran, against its will.

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

Fighting for control

The key sticking point that has driven the latest round of strikes is Iran’s determination to impose control over the Strait of Hormuz.

The Memorandum of Understanding stated Iran would use its “best efforts” to ensure safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait with no charge for 60 days.

However, tensions immediately spiked over ships using the “Omani route” through the strait. This is a US-endorsed maritime corridor that hugs the coast of Oman and involves international coordination.

Iran wants vessels to use a second route that passes along the Iranian coast and is closely monitored and controlled by Iran.

The Strait of Hormuz is too wide for Iran to maintain control over both routes without the use, or threatened use, of force.

Iran has shown it is willing to use live fire to deter vessels from sailing the Omani route.

A battle of different strengths

One reason it has been so hard for the ceasefire to hold is that US and Iran have different strengths. Neither sees themselves as having surrendered.

The US is militarily strong, with overwhelming military capability.

But it has weak political resolve. It does not want to stay in this war or put boots on the ground in Iran. The US does not want to expend its military arsenal in a long war, or focus its global military efforts on the Iranian regime.

So, while the US has the military capability, it is highly unlikely to force regime change in Iran or forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian regime’s greatest strength is its political resolve. It is determined to survive.

Since key political leaders were killed at the start of this war, the regime has become even more hardline and militaristic. The current regime is ideological, savvy and ruthless.

Iran is determined to show the US and the region that it is in control and will not back down. It is willing to bear staggering economic and security costs to achieve this aim.

Iran’s resolve is shown in its willingness to threaten civilian vessels in the strait with light, cost-effective drones and attack boats.

The Iranian regime’s main weakness is economic. Iran has suffered massive economic and military damage as a result of this war. It could not weather another long US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and sustained US air strikes on infrastructure and military targets.

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

The power of domestic politics

The very different domestic landscapes in the US and Iran are driving both parties closer to a breakdown of the ceasefire.

In Iran, as noted, the war has led to a hardened regime with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) more firmly in control of political power. Iranian leaders who even talk to US counterparts, let alone make concessions, may risk being branded political traitors by some IRGC elements.

As history has shown with the assassinations of President Anwar Sadat in Egypt in 1981 and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Israel in 1995, leaders can put their own life on the line if they make agreements with counterparts considered sworn enemies by hardliners in their own country.

This drives Iran to focus on controlling the Strait of Hormuz and appearing uncompromising, rather than capitulating to enjoy the economic benefits of sanctions relief and the promised US$300 billion reconstruction fund.

Trump, on the other hand, does not want to return to full-scale war due to a lack of domestic support.

However, Trump is also influenced by those in the US who do not want to see the US walk away from the war with Iran with no agreement on the nuclear issues, and Iran in full control of the Strait.

Trump expects Iran to cooperate with the Memorandum of Understanding due to its promised economic benefits. But he has vastly underestimated Iran’s determination to assert dominance over the strait and control in the region.

What will happen from here?

Trump’s reticence for full-scale escalation means we are unlikely to return to the war of February 28.

Iran’s determination to show control means we are also not likely to see the ceasefire hold or a substantial peace agreement forthcoming.

The most likely scenario is we will return to the status quo from the first ceasefire of April 8 until June 17. This was a precarious truce, below the threshold of all-out war, but also not a substantive peace.

Tit-for-tat strikes will continue over coming months. The Strait of Hormuz will remain partially closed with security uncertain.

As I have previously noted, this is more akin to a frozen conflict than a full ceasefire or a return to full-scale war.

ONOE: The Reset Button That Guts Federalism

Imagine that, one morning in 2029, India's President issues a routine notification — and in that instant, the clock on every elected state government in India is reset. A state government elected to a full five-year term would see that term cut short the moment the national election clock is reset — no matter how much of its mandate was left. Not because it lost a vote, not because it lost the confidence of its assembly, but because the national calendar demanded it.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is, Justice A.P. Shah told a gathering in New Delhi on 4 July, the plain mechanism of the One Nation One Election bill. "If the law is passed," the former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court said, "the next time India has a national election, the President will press the start button by issuing a notification. That moment becomes the start button for every state assembly as well." The consequence, he added, is blunt: "the term of every single state assembly will reset to match the term of the Lok Sabha."

The One Nation One Election project — ONOE, in the shorthand that has attached itself to it — is sold as a tidy reform: synchronise the country's elections, vote once every five years for both New Delhi and the state capital, and spare the nation its permanent campaign. But across an afternoon of a conclave on federalism, elections and citizenship, a former judge, a former Chief Election Commissioner, a former diplomat and others took the proposal apart. They arrived at a shared conclusion: that ONOE, as written into the 129th Constitutional Amendment Bill now before a Joint Parliamentary Committee, is not a scheduling fix at all. It is a rewiring of the federal compact — and the efficiencies it promises do not survive contact with the fine print.

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

A model found nowhere in the world

Shah walked the room through the machinery. The bill inserts a new Article 82A to create "simultaneous elections," and amends Articles 83 and 172 to handle governments that fall early. And it is that second part — what happens when a government collapses mid-cycle — that he called the strangest feature of ONOE.

Under the bill, a government elected to fill a vacancy does not get a fresh five years. It serves only the leftover portion of the original term, so that the national clock stays undisturbed. Take his example: a Maharashtra government elected afresh in 2029 would ordinarily sit until 2034. Should it fall in 2031, the replacement voters choose would not govern until 2036, as now, but only until 2034. "This kind of mid-term election for a then-unexpired term," Shah said, "is very novel, and does not appear to have any counterpart anywhere in the world."

That novelty, he argued, quietly corrodes the value of a vote. A citizen voting in a mid-cycle poll elects a legislature "only for the unexpired period," which means "a mid-term voter's vote has less value than that of a voter at the start of the full-term cycle." He put the unfairness as a question: "If the full-term and mid-term governments have the same powers and standing, shouldn't the votes also have the same strength and weight?" A government that knows its clock is already running down, he added, governs like a caretaker — unable to make hard decisions, its officials and its opponents alike simply waiting it out.

Then there is the one-time cost of getting every assembly onto the same start line. To launch ONOE, every state legislature would have to be dissolved together at the end of a Lok Sabha term, regardless of how much of its own term remained. "This en masse derogation of the legislative assemblies," Shah said, "even though a one-time affair, is a direct assault on the principle of federalism, and is unworkable for precisely this reason." His verdict on the design was unsparing: "Even if we assume that simultaneous elections are a good idea, the mechanism proposed in the current bill is deeply problematic." The One Nation One Election model, he concluded, "is a threat designed to centralise power and silence state voices."

The Election Commission's blank cheque

For Shah, the most dangerous clause was the one that hands the Election Commission of India the power to defer a state poll. If the Commission believes an assembly election cannot be held alongside the general election, it can recommend postponing it — and the bill offers no test, no criteria, no limits. The Commission, he said, "essentially has arbitrary and unfettered discretion to do as it pleases."

That would be worrying under any circumstances; it is more worrying, he argued, given who now controls appointments to the Commission. "We must also bear in mind that in India today, the government has an effective veto in making appointments to the Election Commission."

An umpire the government effectively appoints, handed the power to delay elections in states the ruling party is unsure of, stops being a referee and becomes a weapon. "You press the trigger," Shah said, "and the government in power is not sure about certain assemblies. The Election Commission, at their behest, can postpone or defer the elections for these legislative assemblies… So you can really distort the whole scheme of simultaneous elections." Simultaneity, in that reading, is not the point of ONOE at all — the discretion to set it aside, state by state, is.

Also Read:  The CAG Cannot Audit Ram Mandir. Its Officer Is on the Trust.

The savings that were never there

If Shah dismantled the design, S.Y. Quraishi dismantled the sales pitch. And he did it, at first, with a straight face — pretending to endorse the arguments for ONOE precisely in order to puncture them.

He began by conceding the government's case fairly. The Prime Minister, he recalled, had long argued that repeated elections are ruinously expensive, that the model code of conduct freezes governance for months at a stretch, and that a country perpetually in campaign mode wastes the time and money of its workers. Those are real concerns, and the Kovind Committee — the high-level panel under former President Ram Nath Kovind that recommended simultaneous polls — reported that some 80 per cent of the public responses it received backed the idea.

Then, one by one, Quraishi took the props away. On the claim that the model code paralyses governance, the former Chief Election Commissioner was categorical. "If you read the model code of conduct," he said, "you will find that everything under the sun is allowed to happen, except two things" — no new schemes announced to woo voters, and no fresh transfers of officials. Everything else continues. The paralysis, he suggested, is a myth that a former custodian of that very code could puncture from memory.

On cost, he turned the argument inside out. Mid-term elections, he pointed out, still have to be held — for the unexpired term — and cost the same as any other. As Shah had put it, "it is amazing that the bill lists cost-cutting as part of its Statement of Objects and Reasons, but offers a more expensive solution." And that 80 per cent public support? Quraishi said it collapses the moment you ask how it was gathered. "They issued the proforma only in Hindi and English," he said. "What about the other languages? Tamil Nadu, Kerala, the South — everywhere the issue of federalism comes in." The result, he argued, was that "all the responses are from the Hindi heartland, and then they say that 80 per cent of people are in favour. So this is totally misleading."

The tier that quietly vanished

Quraishi reserved a particular scorn for what ONOE has quietly dropped. The Prime Minister's original vision, he noted, was for simultaneous elections at all three tiers — Parliament, the states, and the panchayats and municipalities. But the third tier has all but disappeared from the conversation.

"The bottom tier is actually the most important — three million elected people," he said. "You have left them aside." What remains, he noted, are "4,120 MLAs and 543 MPs. So much for the determination for simultaneous elections, with this much dilution."

Where the local tier does appear — in the Kovind Committee's proposal to hold panchayat polls within a hundred days of the main election — it defeats the whole promise.

Turning to his former colleague Ashok Lavasa, Quraishi noted that conducting elections is "no joke," carried out not only in Delhi but "in the northeast, in Kashmir, and with what difficulty." To send exhausted polling staff back out again three months later, he said, is absurd: "Another election held after 100 days — is that a simultaneous election?"

His most damning point was about consent. The Prime Minister, Quraishi recalled, had himself asked for a national debate to build consensus. "The national debate happened, but no consensus was arrived at. So the logical conclusion should have been to drop the idea." Instead, he said, the response was: "Consensus may go to hell, we cannot achieve it — we are going to do it anyway."

The double engine

Where the two former election chiefs saw a broken mechanism, Yamini Aiyar saw a deeper design. Federalism, the public-policy scholar argued, is not merely a set of fiscal and administrative arrangements; it is the principle that lets a vast, plural country hold together. "The true challenge of federalism in today's India," she said, "is that precisely this idea — that you can be many, and you are still one — is the idea that is being challenged." ONOE, in her reading, belongs to a broader centralising drift, of which the most telling symptom is a single slogan.

"Yamini referred to the term 'double engine' many times," Quraishi had noted, and Aiyar built her case on it. The pitch that a state prospers only when it elects the same party that rules the centre is not, she argued, a claim about efficiency — it is an argument against the very idea of federal dialogue.

"There is no need for dialogue in a double-engine context," she said. When a government tells voters to pick the same party at both levels for "efficiency and development," it is "essentially pitting the federal principle of accommodation, dialogue and deliberation against the possibilities of development, almost arguing that too much democracy is not good for development."

Quraishi put the same point more bluntly, quoting what he called the most direct attack on federalism he had heard from the top. The double-engine argument, he said, amounts to a threat: "If you do not vote for me, I'll starve your state of all the funds" — and he added, witheringly, "as if the funds are coming from his ancestral property." A synchronised national election, both of them suggested, is the natural companion to a politics that wants one engine, one clock, one conversation — and no room for a state to answer back.

Also Read:  Indian by Birth, Passport Gone, Citizenship in Doubt: Samrat Choudhury

One design, many fronts

That the afternoon's separate anxieties belonged together was the argument Gautam Mukhopadhaya, a former diplomat, made in summing up. ONOE, the SIR, the delayed census, the coming delimitation — these, he said, should not be read as unrelated headlines. "These exercises are not isolated, but interlinked. They are part of a grand design." Among that design's purposes, he said, was "altering the balance in Parliament between the north and the south."

That last phrase points to the fear that hangs over the whole debate. A delimitation based on the 2027 census could reward the populous, slower-growing north with more parliamentary seats while the south, which curbed its population growth, loses relative weight — the very anxiety that makes ONOE's centralising logic so combustible in states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Aiyar framed the underlying inequality starkly: "UP's per capita GDP looks closer to Nepal's; Tamil Nadu's per capita GDP looks closer to Indonesia's." Redrawing representation across that gulf, she warned, "cannot be resolved by bulldozing legislation through Parliament, and by bulldozing the idea of delimitation without dialogue and debate. It needs a Union that is trustworthy" — and, she added, "all citizens of India should be entitled to minimum public services, regardless of whether they are born in Bihar or born in Kerala."

It fell to Mano Thangaraj, a DMK legislator from Kanyakumari and the one serving politician to take the floor, to state the constitutional stakes in a sentence. "Our Constitution begins with the words 'We the people'," he said, "not 'We the government'. Governments come and go, but constitutional values must endure." He offered a data point from his own state as a rejoinder to the sense of inevitability around the ruling party: a civil-society "Zero BJP" campaign, he said, had helped cut the BJP's Tamil Nadu tally from four seats to one. "We must unite," he said, "to oppose the common enemy."

Forever nation, forever election

Against ONOE, the conclave's chair offered a counter-slogan. Dr G.N. Devy, the linguist and cultural activist, said the phrase itself gets the order of things backwards. "Why talk of One Nation One Election?" he asked. "We should talk of forever nation, forever election." By "forever nation," he explained, he meant a simple correction: "the citizen comes before the nation — citizens constitute the nation." By "forever election," he meant a democracy in which representatives can be questioned and held to account continuously, "all the way from the panchayat to the presidential election," rather than one where a single synchronised vote every five years settles everything. He had a sharper line, too, for the state of the country the bill claims to be tidying: "Right now, half a nation has been made, and half an election exists — let that first become one." Not One Nation One Election, he said, but "a truncated nation and a truncated election."

There was, from the former Chief Election Commissioner, one note of hope — and it lay in the very slowness the government finds frustrating. The Joint Parliamentary Committee examining the ONOE bill, Quraishi observed, had been at it for the better part of two years without a resolution. "The fact that they have not been able to come to a conclusion means there is internal resistance from the states," he said. "That is where some hope lies."

If the bill's supporters cast ONOE as good housekeeping, the room's diagnosis was that housekeeping was never the point. The government has made a genuine case — that endless elections are costly, that campaign mode never ends, that a synchronised calendar would let it govern in peace — and the Kovind Committee's headline number lends it public cover.

What the speakers disputed was whether the cure fits the ailment: whether a reform sold as efficiency is worth a mechanism that shortens some mandates, cheapens some votes, dissolves elected assemblies by operation of law, and hands a government-appointed umpire the discretion to decide which states vote and which wait.

Aditi Mehta, the former civil servant who closed the session, refused to treat the outcome as settled. "Only 37 per cent of our country voted for this government," she reminded the room, and yet a sense of inevitability had set in. That, she suggested, was the real danger — not the bill, but the resignation around it. The task now, she said, "has to be about how" — how citizens and states answer a proposal that arrives dressed as a clock, and turns out to be a lever. On the evidence of this room, One Nation One Election is not the reform its name promises. It is a question about who, in a federal republic, gets to hold the button.

Terrorism or Resistance? The Leila Khaled Question

Leila Khaled, by today's definition, would be called a terrorist. Yet, in 1969 and 1970, when she hijacked an aircraft and later participated in the hijacking and destruction of four aircraft at Dawson's Field in Jordan, she was viewed very differently. These were audacious acts that brought the world's major powers to the brink of confrontation and intensified the repression of Palestinians living in Jordan, forcing many to seek refuge in neighbouring Lebanon.

Her daring actions compelled the international community, particularly the United States, to pay greater attention to the Palestinian cause. In distant towns and cities across the world, the reverberations of Leila Khaled's actions were widely felt. She was compared to the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, and countless newborn girls were named after her. At the time, she was regarded as an icon rather than a terrorist.

Also Read:  The Iran Deal Trump Calls a Win Is a US Climbdown

Why the Palestinian Struggle Was Recast as Terrorism

Imagine if Leila Khaled had carried out similar attacks in 2025 or 2026. The reaction would have been entirely different. The media might either have ignored the incident or, if it had reported it, unequivocally condemned it as an act of terrorism.

Despite the legitimacy of their demands, the Palestinian cause received only a lukewarm response from the US. Even Arab countries were relatively restrained when it came to supporting the demand for a separate Palestinian homeland.

Anju Gupta's excellent book, Glocal Terror in South Asia, traces the evolution of Islamic terrorism from the Arab world to South Asia. A retired senior police officer who also served with the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), Gupta provides a much-needed South Asian perspective on terrorism. She explains how the Soviet Union's entry into Afghanistan contributed significantly to the growth of radical Islam.

This reviewer, however, would have appreciated it had the author stated more explicitly that the United States also played a key role in the rise of Islamic militancy. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself has acknowledged that American support for the Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan contributed to the emergence of militant jihadist movements. At the time, both the Palestinian struggle and the Afghan resistance were often described as local jihads—two conflicts of immense historical and strategic significance.

What was overlooked, however, was that the Palestinian struggle was not fundamentally a jihad, as it was often portrayed, but rather a national liberation movement by people who claimed to be citizens of a country whose land was taken away on May 15, 1948—a day Palestinians remember as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Approximately 750,000 Palestinians lost their homes during this period, of whom an estimated 10 to 12 per cent were Christians.

Since then, the Palestinian struggle has remained relentless, even as the rise of Israel and the support it received from the United States and European powers increasingly recast the Palestinian quest for independence as an act of terrorism.

How Terrorism Reached the Indian Subcontinent

Gupta's meticulously researched book highlights the dominant Western narrative that equated the Palestinian struggle for independence with the Afghan campaign against the Soviet Union. As she points out, the funds raised by Saudi Arabia for the Palestinian cause through the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were not only considerably smaller but were also distributed over a much longer period than those provided to the Afghan Mujahideen.

Also Read:  US-Iran Deal: A Ceasefire That Solves Nothing

As Gupta notes, "The PLO received a total of $992 million from Saudi Arabia between 1978 and 1991, while the Afghan Mujahideen received $1.8 billion between 1987 and 1989." This was also the period during which Arab fighters began arriving in Pakistan in large numbers.

Gupta argues that the rise of terrorism in the Indian subcontinent was closely linked to the influx of Arabs such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who became al-Qaeda's chief strategist. Although their principal strategic interests lay in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they honed their capabilities in Afghanistan and used Pakistan as a sanctuary to strengthen their networks with the support of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir Valley provided legitimacy to Al-Qaeda and its Pakistan-based affiliates, including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hizbul Mujahideen.

The author, Anju Gupta, discusses how India was drawn into the Afghan imbroglio following the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 from Kathmandu to Delhi. For this reviewer, who has closely followed the trajectory of attacks on India's security environment, the episode has left many unanswered questions about the motives and identities of those who perpetrated a criminal act that had the potential to trigger a war between the two neighbours.

The book does not depart from the prevailing narrative that attributes the hijacking to Pakistan-based terrorist groups. IC-814 also brought the Taliban's growing role in terrorist operations into sharp focus. Subsequently, the Russians began to view the Taliban as an indigenous force that also challenged the Islamic State. This perception was gradually accepted by India and even by the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, the Taliban's emergence as a nationalist force also gave rise to a new Afghanistan that openly asserted territorial ambitions long constrained by the British Raj's creation of the Durand Line.

These differences have endured and continue to fuel armed standoffs between the two neighbours. Although Anju Gupta's book concludes with developments up to 2025, there are several reasons to believe that the geostrategic landscape of South Asia has changed significantly since then, particularly following the confrontation between the United States and Iran.

Pakistan's emergence as a mediator and its growing ability to stand up to India have enhanced Islamabad's strategic importance. Experts in strategic affairs argue that Pakistan has evolved into a significant defence power, aided by its close ties with Saudi Arabia. It is also a military ally of China and has actively marketed its defence capabilities and weapon systems to several middle powers.

In other words, the geopolitical landscape has changed considerably since Operation Sindoor and since Anju Gupta completed her book. That said, Gupta's scholarship is evident throughout as she deftly marshals forgotten facts about various terrorist organisations and their leaders. Glocal Terror in South Asia is an engaging, well-researched, and important contribution for readers seeking to understand the evolution of terrorism and the complex geopolitics of South Asia—a region inhabited by what Salman Rushdie famously called the "midnight's children."

This review originally appeared in Hardnews.

Picture a citizen who walks into a courtroom to reclaim the most ordinary of freedoms — the right to speak, to move about the country, to earn a living. Someone, somewhere, has decided that this person is no longer Indian, and with that stroke the freedoms have gone. The judge listens and asks a single question: what proof do you have that you are a citizen of India?

The person reaches for the one document that has always seemed to answer that question. "You have a passport," Justice Madan Lokur told a gathering in New Delhi on 4 July, walking his audience through exactly this scene, "but the judge says, sorry, the passport is a travel document, it is not a document of citizenship." The former Supreme Court judge let the silence do its work. "What is your answer? You don't have a single document to show that you are a citizen of India."

That courtroom is still hypothetical. But the machinery that could one day fill it was what a former Supreme Court judge, a former Election Commissioner, a former Union Home Secretary, a political scientist and a right-to-information campaigner had gathered to discuss, taking up the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls from very different directions. They arrived at more or less the same place: that the exercise has quietly reversed a founding assumption of the Republic. For seventy-five years, the state presumed you were a citizen, and had to prove otherwise. Now the burden has been flipped onto you.

Also Read:  R. Rajagopal Gets His Passport, But Wants the Government to Clarify

The presumption has been inverted

No one at the conclave named that reversal more precisely than Dr Niraja Jayal, a scholar of Indian citizenship. The Constitution and the Citizenship Act of 1955, she reminded the room, were built on the principle of unconditional jus soli — citizenship by birth on the soil. Underlying it was something simpler still: a presumption of belonging.

"The foundational conception of universal, equal citizenship in our Constitution," Jayal said, "was underpinned by a presumption of citizenship. That presumption of universal citizenship is being replaced, as we speak, by a presumption of universal alienage."

Alienage — the presumption that a person is a foreigner until shown otherwise — was, in her account, the thread connecting a set of developments that are usually reported as separate stories.

 "It is the principle underlying the NRC. It is the principle underlying the SIR. It is also the principle underlying the latest salvo against passport holders." Each arrives dressed as something routine. "One day it is an amendment to the law on citizenship. Another day it is a new method for the routine task of revising electoral rolls. Yet another day it is a throwaway comment about whether passports constitute proof of citizenship or not. But all of these are tending towards the same purpose, the same objective — the presumption of alienage."

Who is asked to prove themselves, she argued, is not random. "Who gets the memo and who doesn't is, for the most part, a function of one's identity: religion, caste, class, gender, tribe." Occasionally the net catches someone it was not designed for — "a Black Swan event, such as the story of the journalist R. Rajagopal" — but for the most part, she said, "this is precision targeting."

Jayal traced the erosion through the amendments of 2003 and 2019, describing a long migration in the law "from unconditional jus soli … to conditional jus soli, to what we are now in, which is more or less jus sanguinis" — citizenship by descent, by blood. The consequence, she said, was a settling of citizenship "to the service of a majoritarian agenda," and its sharpest edge now falls on the rolls. "Up until now, one's registration as a voter was limited to determining one's eligibility to vote," she said. "Today, the electoral rolls have become decisive in determining an individual's citizenship status, and in determining their access to welfare provisioning."

That last shift — from the vote as a right, to the vote as a gate — is what she called the true inversion. "The relationship between citizenship and the vote has been inverted," Jayal said, "from citizenship being the condition of the vote, to the vote becoming an instrument for sifting citizens, for inclusion and exclusion, for casting doubt on the citizenship of citizens."

Also Read:  Indian by Birth, Passport Gone, Citizenship in Doubt: Samrat Choudhury

A revision that 'defies logical explanation'

If Jayal supplied the frame, Ashok Lavasa supplied the view from inside the machine. A former Election Commissioner, he spoke as someone who has administered the very rolls now under revision — and he did not soften the assessment.

The Commission, he pointed out, has two tasks: to enrol electors, and to conduct free and fair elections. It has performed the first for seventy-five years without treating citizenship as something to be re-proven. He described the first electoral roll of 1950, drawn up before the 1951 census figures were even available, which nonetheless enrolled the overwhelming majority of eligible adults.

"In the absence of documents, the Election Commission, through its machinery, was able to enrol the maximum number of people," Lavasa said, citing the historian Ornit Shani's phrase for that early inclusiveness — "democratic imagination." His conclusion was a mirror image of Jayal's: "There was always a presumption of citizenship attached to whoever was around. And the identification of a non-citizen was an exception."

Against that long practice, he set the SIR notification of 24 June 2025. "To my mind, what has happened in that notification is something which defies logical explanation," he said. In Bihar, an electoral roll had been prepared through the normal legal process and published only in January 2025. "So, suddenly, less than six months down the line, there is a realisation that something is horribly wrong with the electoral roll."

The revision then split existing electors into those enrolled before and after 2003 — "all of them have been enrolled by following the same process," he noted — and introduced a word the Commission had, in his experience, never used in this context. "The Election Commission has never used the expression 'citizenship' while conducting a revision," Lavasa said. The law does allow a non-citizen to be excluded, he acknowledged, "but for that, somebody has to say that so-and-so is a non-citizen — and not only create suspicion, but produce evidence." That, he stressed, "is an exception, not the rule."

He returned repeatedly to a single unanswered question. The Supreme Court, in upholding the exercise, had accepted that there was "material on record" showing the rolls needed wholesale revision. "What is that material on record?" Lavasa asked. "We don't know. Nobody knows. At least, it is not in the public domain. I don't even think it is part of the court records."

If the stated purpose was to remove the ineligible, he said, then the public was owed a number: how many people had actually been found ineligible under Article 326, and how many referred to a Foreigners Tribunal as the court's own order required. "There is no data available in the public domain to show how many people have been deleted because they were ineligible."

He ended not with a statistic but with a story — a colonel of the Indian Army who telephoned to say his wife of fifty years had vanished from the rolls because a spelling of her father's name could not be reconciled with an older record. And then, a couplet by the poet Krishna Bihari Noor, which in translation runs: "I have been divided into so many parts that nothing of me is left in my own share."

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

The questions the Election Commission will not answer

Where Lavasa asked what the Commission knew, Anjali Bhardwaj asked why it would not say. A right-to-information campaigner, she has filed question after question during the SIR, and collected the Commission's refusals to answer them.

The pattern, she argued, predates the SIR. She pointed to the Commission's long resistance to releasing Form 17C, the statutory record of votes cast at each booth, and to its decision, after the Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered disclosure of certain election records, to amend the rules rather than comply.

When the Leader of the Opposition alleged manipulation of the rolls, she said, the Commission "hid behind technicalities," and its chief, asked for CCTV footage of polling stations, invoked "the privacy of the bahus and betis of the country." Bhardwaj was unsparing about the logic: "Clearly there was no concern about the privacy of women when the CCTV cameras were being installed."

On the SIR itself, she said, the Commission had launched an exercise touching the entire electorate "without offering any reason … and without any consultation." When activists filed RTI requests asking why, the reply, she said, was that "no information exists in material form." On appeal, the answer grew stranger still. "The Principal Secretary gave it in writing that the decision to hold the SIR had not been taken in the Election Commission," Bhardwaj said. "That begs the question: where was this decision taken? Was it taken in the BJP headquarters? Was it taken in the Ministry of Home Affairs?"

The figures she cited were her own, and large. Nearly 6.5 crore names, she said, had already been struck off, with estimates running towards 10 crore — a hundred million people. Many, she conceded, were the dead, the shifted or the duplicated. But others, she insisted, "were born here, we are citizens, we have documents to prove it," and had still been removed. In Bengal, she said, deletions in a large number of constituencies exceeded the winning margins in those seats — "so there is a huge question mark today over the Bengal election results." When those left off the rolls approached the courts, she said, the answer was that they could vote another time.

It is here that the other side of the ledger belongs. The Election Commission has consistently described the SIR as a constitutional duty, not an assault on it: an exercise to remove the deceased, the permanently shifted, duplicate entries and non-citizens, so that "eligible citizens are not left out." It has cast the revision as participative, with political parties invited to appoint booth-level agents.

And on 27 May 2026, the Supreme Court upheld the Bihar SIR, finding it within the Commission's statutory mandate and in consonance with the Representation of the People Act. That judgment — delivered, as Lavasa noted with some irony, on the death anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru — is the legal ground on which the exercise now rolls out across the country. The conclave's speakers were not disputing the Commission's power to revise. They were disputing what the revision has been made to mean.

When the passport stops being proof

For Justice Lokur, the meaning had crystallised in a single official claim: that an Indian passport is "nothing but a travel document." He had gone back to the Passports Act of 1967 to test it. The preamble, he said, speaks of "the issue of passports and travel documents" — two distinct things, each separately defined. "Parliament does not make laws using superfluous words," he said. "To say that a passport is nothing but a travel document is a complete misreading." His verdict was flat: "A person who holds an Indian passport is a citizen of India. I think that should be very clear."

Follow the official claim to its end, he warned, and the passport collapses into something trivial. "The passport is effectively reduced to a ticket. Not even an airline ticket, but perhaps a bus ticket." He dismissed the argument that a rarely used provision allowing passports for certain non-citizens undoes the general rule, calling it, on the evidence available, "a dead letter."

Then he made the move that turned a documents dispute into a rights emergency. Some fundamental rights, he reminded the room, belong to everyone — the right to life under Article 21, equality under Article 14. But the freedoms of Article 19 — speech, movement, the right to a trade or profession — "are granted only to citizens."

Strip a person from the rolls, treat that as a mark against their citizenship, and those freedoms fall away with it. "So you have these 27 lakh, or 22 lakh, or 6.5 crore persons — whatever the figure — roaming around the country without the fundamental right to freedom of speech, to movement, to expression, to carrying on any business or occupation, because they are not citizens." His refusal to fix the number was itself telling: even from the chair, the scale of exclusion could only be guessed at.

The burden of proof, he argued, had been turned upside down. A "rebuttable presumption" of citizenship, properly understood, means the state must come forward and rebut it. "I don't have to prove that I am a citizen of India," Lokur said. "Whereas now, what has happened is that I have to prove that I am a citizen." He reserved his sharpest phrase for the Commission's expanding authority, borrowing a term the Constituent Assembly had used as a warning: Imperium in Imperio, a power within a power. "That is what the Election Commission is becoming today. Nobody can question it."

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

The next turn of the wheel

If the SIR is the present, the census is the near future — and Gopal Pillai, a former Union Home Secretary who has overseen one, came to explain the machinery about to be set in motion. The 2027 census, he said, will be India's first digital count, its first to allow self-enumeration, and its first to record caste. Its data will feed two of the most consequential exercises in the Republic's political life: the reservation of seats for women, and the delimitation that will redraw the number of constituencies. "The number of constituencies will change," Pillai said, "and that itself has political implications, which the country will have to take care of when it happens."

His warning was about the caste count, but its logic rhymed with everything else that was said. Caste names, he explained, are not fixed; they shift with migration, with conversion, with the slow pull of Sanskritisation, so that any attempt to fix people into official categories will generate disputes.

The answer, he argued, was disclosure before decision. "It is so essential that there is a public debate, open, within the entire country, before this is done." The exercise, he said, was under way in the Ministry of Home Affairs, "but very little of it is still available to the general public." The refrain — a state machinery reclassifying who people are, without showing its working — was by now familiar.

Deconstruction before reconstruction

Jayal put it most starkly. Beneath the legal argument, she said, lay a purpose the separate controversies were converging upon: "to make Muslims into de jure second-class citizens." Their second-class status in daily life, she argued, had already been achieved; what remained was to write it into law. Before the country could talk of rebuilding, she said, it would have to reckon with what had been dismantled. "Before we can think about reconstruction … we may need to think about deconstruction — not in the sense in which literary theory uses the term, but in the sense of undoing the damage that has been done."

Lokur closed on accountability, drawing on two judgments he had read in the previous days — a man kept out of his own city for seven months on an externment order the Bombay High Court later found illegal, and a custodial death for which the Delhi High Court awarded compensation. The point, he said, was that a wrong quashed is not a wrong answered. "This entire controversy about the SIR — not being able to vote, not having fundamental rights, not getting welfare benefits — somebody has to be held accountable."

The speakers were careful to concede the Commission's power and the Supreme Court's endorsement of it. What they would not concede was the inversion beneath both — the quiet rewriting of a citizen into a suspect, obliged to produce papers for a status that was once simply presumed. Lavasa had reached, in the end, for a scene from an old film, in which a father demanding proof of a suitor's love is asked in return what proof he has that he is the girl's father. In a country now asking millions to prove what was never in question, the joke has stopped being funny.

Former Telegraph Editor R. Rajagopal has finally received his renewed passport, months after his ordeal began. His name was deleted from West Bengal's electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, and that deletion was subsequently cited as the reason for holding up his passport renewal. Rajagopal had first spoken to The Probe about his case in June, describing how a routine renewal turned into a nearly hundred-day battle involving the police, the Passport Office and the Security Control Organisation.

Also Read:  Passport Renewal Nightmare: Former Telegraph Editor Narrates Ordeal

Will The Government Finally Clarify If SIR Data Can Be Used To Deny A Passport?

The Probe spoke to Rajagopal after he received his passport. He said that as far as he is concerned, nothing has really changed. His fight, he said, was never about his passport alone.

“As far as I am concerned nothing has changed. I didn't speak for my passport alone. I wanted the clarification from somebody in authority to tell us whether SIR data can be used to deny passport to a citizen. Neither the MEA, MHA or the West Bengal government has still clarified this. Until this is clarified by the government, this confusion will continue to persist,” Rajagopal told The Probe.

Rajagopal's passport had expired in October 2025. When he applied for renewal in February 2026, his file was quietly diverted to the Security Control Organisation, which functions under the Kolkata Police Special Branch, instead of being processed routinely. On 17 June, the Regional Passport Office officially informed him that the police had submitted an adverse verification report, citing his deletion from the electoral rolls as the reason. He was then given an appointment to appear before the Passport Office on 17 July. In the months in between, Rajagopal spent his days tracking down decades-old records of his parents from Kerala, trying to establish an identity he had never once been asked to prove in over three decades as one of India's best-known editors.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

Rajagopal said the logic of how his case was eventually resolved raises more questions than it answers, and that he does not see this as a moment to celebrate.

“I recently read that another 17 people are affected like this. The actual numbers could be higher. If the police can use SIR data arbitrarily, it is a dangerous situation for people. The government could have issued a standalone statement to clear the air on whether SIR data can be used to deny passports to people, but that has still not happened. After my case came to light, no one in the government contacted me, except one passport official who called me three days ago and told me to send an email to the Regional Passport Office seeking re-verification. I sent the email. But the point to be noted is that I was not asked to submit any document or go anywhere — nothing. What does this show? It shows that the documents I had already submitted were enough for them to issue my passport. But if those documents were enough, then why did they deny me the passport in the first place? Obviously, it looks like they acted under pressure from the media, the Editors Guild of India, the Press Club of India and others who took up my matter. But what about those whose matters were not taken up by anyone? They deserve relief too. That is why I don't feel jubilant about getting my passport alone,” Rajagopal said.

Rajagopal received his renewed passport via speed post on 4 July. The resolution comes after sustained media coverage of his case, along with the intervention of the Editors Guild of India and the Press Club of India, who took up the matter with the authorities. Rajagopal had also written to the Kolkata Police Commissioner and approached the National Human Rights Commission during the course of his ordeal, neither of which yielded a substantive response at the time. His case before the SIR appellate tribunal, concerning the original deletion of his and his late father's names from the electoral rolls, remains pending.

Rajagopal said his thoughts now turn to others caught in the same uncertainty, particularly author and journalist Samrat Choudhury, whose case The Probe reported on separately.

“I really wish and hope that Samrat Choudhury gets his passport too. Samrat's case is more worrisome — even after he submitted all his documents, when they told him his citizenship was denied, they didn't give him a reason why. I want all the people who have faced this problem to get relief from the government,” Rajagopal said.

The Probe had earlier reported on Samrat Choudhury's case, a writer and former editor who has held an Indian passport since 1993. On 24 June, Passport Seva Divas, Choudhury's passport was impounded by the Regional Passport Office in Kolkata after an adverse police report stated that his citizenship was "not established" — a finding that came with no explanation on file. Choudhury was born before 1987 and is a citizen by birth under Indian law, meaning he is not legally required to prove descent from Indian parents. He was nonetheless asked to produce his parents' passports, his Aadhaar card, his voter ID, his Class 10 certificate and other documents. His case remains unresolved.

Also Read:  Indian by Birth, Passport Gone, Citizenship in Doubt: Samrat Choudhury

Inside The Passport Office: What Rajagopal Says He Witnessed

In his conversation with The Probe, Samrat Choudhury had described the Regional Passport Office in Kolkata as a Kafkaesque space where he saw people sitting on the floor, crying, overwhelmed by the process. Rajagopal told The Probe that this account matches exactly what he saw himself when he visited the same office.

“At the regional passport office in Kolkata, when I went there, I saw a lot of people crying. I could see that these were marginalised people, and many of them could barely breathe. One gentleman thought I was some sort of officer and approached me as I was leaving the passport office. He pleaded with me, saying, 'Sir, please help me, help me, help me. My job will be in jeopardy.' He was a Bengali who works abroad. I felt so helpless. So many people are facing the same problem. That is why, even today, when I get my passport, I am not happy about it," Rajagopal said.

Passport Taken, Citizenship Questioned: Samrat Choudhury in Conversation with Prema Sridevi

Today I'm joined by a writer who has spent years studying one of the most difficult questions in this country — the question of belonging. Who is an insider, who is an outsider, and who holds the power to decide this?

Samrat Choudhury was born in Shillong. He edited major newspapers in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru before turning to the Northeast to write its political history — the story of how a diverse, complex region became part of India, and how its people came to belong.

He co-edited two books on precisely that theme. The first is Insider-Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India. The second is But I Am One of You: Northeast India and the Struggle to Belong.

Samrat has held an Indian passport since 1993. He has a voter ID card and has been voting regularly. He has every document the state could possibly ask for — his own documents as well as his parents' documents.

And yet, on June 24 — look at the irony — on Passport Seva Divas, the very day the government celebrates the service of issuing passports, the state took his passport away. The reason recorded on the notice was simple: "Citizenship not established."

A man who spent his life writing about belonging is now being asked to prove that he belongs.

This is the second such story we are bringing to you — of a credible Indian, arguably more Indian than those now deciding whether he is Indian at all. Earlier, we brought you the story of R. Rajagopal, former editor of The Telegraph. Here is the story of Samrat Choudhury.

Prema Sridevi: Samrat, thank you for joining me on The Probe.

Samrat Choudhury: Thank you.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

How a Passport Held Since 1993 Was Suddenly Taken Away

Prema Sridevi: Samrat, you've held an Indian passport since 1993, but today you don't have one. Tell me exactly what happened.

Samrat Choudhury: I received a letter from the Regional Passport Office in Kolkata, which has jurisdiction over my passport since it was issued there. The letter simply stated that they had received an adverse police report regarding my passport.

It was a Tatkal passport that had been issued in 2022. Four years later, for reasons I still don't understand, I was informed that an adverse police report had been received stating that my citizenship had not been established.

The notice directed me to appear before the Regional Passport Office within 21 days to contest the case and show cause as to why my passport should not be cancelled.

As you mentioned in your introduction, it so happened that I appeared before the Regional Passport Office on Passport Seva Divas itself. On that day, my passport was taken away, and I was informed that my case would be sent for re-verification to establish whether I was indeed an Indian citizen.

"Citizenship Not Established" — But Why?

Prema Sridevi: But Samrat, this was a passport that had been issued to you in 2022 under the Tatkal scheme. Earlier, when we spoke, you mentioned that the process had been extremely straightforward. You received the passport within just two days. It is therefore very strange that four years later the authorities suddenly ask you to surrender your passport. When they wrote "citizenship not established", what exactly did they mean? What reason did they cite for arriving at that conclusion?

Samrat Choudhury: I have absolutely no idea. It is as much a mystery to me as it is to anyone else.

When I went to the Regional Passport Office, the official handling my case opened my computerised file in front of me. There is a designated field in the system where the reason for an adverse report is supposed to be recorded. That field was blank. No reason whatsoever had been entered.

So I was never informed why my citizenship had suddenly come into question. I was born in India, and I was born before 1987. Under Indian law, I am a citizen by birth. My entire education has been in India. My entire professional life has been in India. I have always been a resident of India. So I genuinely do not know what suddenly happened to cause this. It remains as much a mystery to me as it is to everyone else.

"Which Document Was Missing?" The Authorities Had No Answer

Prema Sridevi: When you visited the passport office and later the police station, I'm sure you must have asked the officials on what basis they believed your citizenship had not been established. Did they tell you which document was missing? Did they point out anything that you had failed to submit? What was their response?

Samrat Choudhury: I only went to the Regional Passport Office. As I mentioned, the official opened the computerised file in front of me. Since no reason had been entered into the system, even the person at the counter had no idea why the adverse police report had been issued.

I was also informed that my documentation was perfectly fine. So I still do not know what went wrong. After that, my file was sent back to the police for re-verification. I returned to the police station and submitted all my documents again.

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A Growing List of Documents

Samrat Choudhury: I have held an Indian passport since 1993. Over the years, I have gone through the passport verification process several times. My passports have been issued from Shillong, where I was born; from Delhi, where I worked with Hindustan Times and India Today; and from Bengaluru, where I was effectively functioning as the Resident Editor of The New Indian Express.

This is the first time I have ever been asked to produce not just my own documents but also copies of my father's passport, my mother's passport, my Aadhaar card, my voter ID card, my Class 10 certificate, electricity bills and several other documents. The list of documentary requirements seemed to grow longer and longer.

When I looked at the passport rules, I could not find any provision requiring such extensive documentation. Ordinarily, the rules require documents establishing identity and date of birth. If my Aadhaar card reflects my current address, then technically that single document should be sufficient. At most, one may need two or three documents.

There is no legal requirement in India that someone born before 1987 must prove descent from Indian parents. That simply is not the law. Fortunately, I had every one of these documents, so I was able to submit them all.

Citizenship Law: Why 1987 Matters

Prema Sridevi: It's important that you mentioned the year 1987 because that's where citizenship law changed in India. The law clearly says that if a person was born in India before 1987, birth on Indian soil itself automatically makes that person an Indian citizen.

The 1986 amendment changed that position. For those born between July 1, 1987 and December 2004, birth in India alone was no longer sufficient. At least one parent had to be an Indian citizen. For those born after December 2004, the law became even stricter. Both parents must be citizens, or one parent must be a citizen while the other cannot be an illegal immigrant.

But you were born before 1987. That means you fall squarely within the category of citizens by birth. You are not legally required to prove your lineage. Then why should you be asked to submit your parents' documents and so many additional records? It simply doesn't make sense.

Samrat Choudhury: I am completely mystified. I have no idea why this process was applied to me. I should also add that I do not believe I am being individually targeted. I don't think this is targeted harassment.

Instead, it appears to me that some sort of bureaucratic process has taken hold — a bureaucratic regime of suspicion. While standing in line at the Regional Passport Office and later at the police station, I noticed many ordinary people who had also been asked to produce similarly long lists of documents. So I don't think this is something directed only at me.

It appears that, somewhere within the administration, the bar has simply been raised, even though I don't believe the law itself has changed.

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Was This Linked to the Fake Passport Racket?

Prema Sridevi: You said that you don't think you were specifically targeted. Could there be another explanation? In 2024, a fake passport racket was busted in Kolkata, following which the police tightened passport verification norms. Do you think your case is part of that broader crackdown?

Samrat Choudhury: Well, that happened in 2024, which is already two years ago. I honestly don't know whether there is something continuing within the system because of that.

Normally, if a Tatkal passport is issued, there is post-police verification. But one would expect that verification to happen within 21 or 30 days — roughly within a month. In my case, however, four years later, an adverse police report suddenly surfaced.

An adverse report is not something that should be issued lightly, especially when it questions a person's citizenship. Ordinarily, the police are expected to verify whether the applicant has a criminal record and whether the particulars furnished in the application are correct. When they visit your home, they verify that the person matches the photograph, that the address is correct, and that the documents correspond with the applicant. That is why it is particularly strange that my citizenship itself has been questioned.

"Even I Cannot Understand Why My Citizenship Was Questioned"

Samrat Choudhury: What makes my case even more puzzling is that sometimes suspicions are raised because of a person's religion or ethnicity. But I am a Hindu Bengali currently residing in West Bengal, and my passport was issued by the Regional Passport Office in Kolkata. So even by those standards, I genuinely do not know what the reason could have been.

What Does It Feel Like to Prove That You Belong?

Prema Sridevi: You have now submitted far more documents than the law actually requires. Without getting into anything that could affect your ongoing case, I simply want to ask you this: What does it feel like to prove that you belong to a country that you love and respect so deeply? How frustrating was it to repeatedly visit government offices and convince people that you belong here?

Samrat Choudhury: It is actually heartbreaking. Especially for me. Throughout my life I have dealt with this question of belonging because I was born and raised in Northeast India, where there has long been suspicion towards Bengalis.

There is a long history of riots, violence and hostility in different parts of the Northeast. I could describe it year by year, state by state, going back to the 1960s. Even when I was growing up in Shillong during the 1980s and 1990s, there was always this feeling that one might be treated as an outsider.

But strangely enough, that treatment came from strangers, from mobs on the streets — not from the State. Friendships were never affected. The government never questioned my citizenship.

This is the first time in my life that the State itself has questioned whether I belong. Ironically, it has happened after I moved to West Bengal. If a Bengali does not belong in West Bengal, then where exactly am I supposed to go? Am I a Bangladeshi? Why is the State questioning my citizenship without even telling me why it is doing so? It is deeply painful.

The Burden Falls on Cross-Border Communities

Samrat Choudhury: I also think this burden falls disproportionately on particular communities. Certainly Bengali Muslims are affected. But Bengali Hindus are affected as well.

Nobody is likely to assume that a Tamil is Bangladeshi or that a Gujarati is Bangladeshi. However, any community that exists across national borders is vulnerable under this kind of bureaucratic suspicion. For example, Nepali-speaking Indians are often suspected because Nepal lies across the border. Similarly, Tamils may face suspicion because there is also a Tamil population in Sri Lanka.

Whenever the bureaucracy begins to operate through suspicion rather than law, every cross-border community becomes vulnerable. That is the danger of this kind of citizenship verification regime.

"Citizenship Not Established"

Prema Sridevi: What exactly was written on the notice you received? Did it simply say, "Citizenship not established"?

Samrat Choudhury: Yes.

Prema Sridevi: When you first saw those words, what went through your mind? It is not only shocking — it is deeply hurtful. How did you process that moment?

Samrat Choudhury: It was both shocking and hurtful. The first thing I wondered was: What on earth has happened?

If this had happened at the time I applied for the passport, I might have assumed it was some bureaucratic error. But because it happened four years later, naturally I began asking myself whether it had something to do with something I had written. The irony is that I am no longer actively involved in journalism. I hardly write these days. So I was left completely mystified.

Prema Sridevi: That's exactly what many citizens begin thinking. People naturally wonder whether they are being targeted because of something they wrote or said. But that should never be the case.

Samrat Choudhury: Exactly. Frankly, even if I had written something critical, that still would not be a valid reason to question my citizenship. Whether someone dislikes a headline I wrote has absolutely nothing to do with whether I am an Indian citizen.

We are also asked to participate in elections. If my citizenship can be questioned because I voted for the "wrong" political party, then what is the purpose of holding elections at all? If citizens are not free to vote according to their conscience, then why spend enormous public money conducting elections? That defeats the very purpose of democracy.

A Writer Who Spent Years Studying the Meaning of Belonging

Prema Sridevi: Samrat, I mentioned this in my introduction. You have written extensively about the Northeast. You have authored and edited books that examine the very concept of belonging. When we spoke earlier over the phone, you told me that you always feared this question of belonging would one day become a national issue. Today, that is exactly what seems to be happening. Tell me about your books. What does belonging really mean? Why is it so important for citizens to feel that they belong? And what happens when that sense of belonging is taken away? How dangerous is it when this becomes a national problem?

Samrat Choudhury: Belonging really lies at the core of a person's identity. It is one of the fundamental elements that shape who we are.

When the State questions your citizenship, it does not merely affect your sense of self. It also affects your rights. The right to travel. The right to vote. And sometimes even more basic rights. During the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, media reports have already spoken about people losing access to ration benefits because their names did not appear in the electoral rolls. A poor family can lose access to food without even understanding why their names have disappeared from the system.

If educated, privileged and well-connected people like me — or like R. Rajagopal — have to struggle to prove something that the law already recognises, then I cannot imagine what an ordinary landless farmer living in a border district must endure.

I am a Bengali. My name clearly identifies me. My religion is Hindu. Even then, I have found this process difficult. Imagine the situation of a Muslim farmer living in a border district whose name does not appear in the SIR records. I honestly do not know how such a person would survive repeated rounds of bureaucratic scrutiny. That kind of process can become deeply painful and drawn out.

The NRC Experience and Why Samrat Sees It as a Warning

Prema Sridevi: That's a very important point you've made. Like Mr. R. Rajagopal, you've repeatedly said that you don't want this discussion to be about you personally. You've already explained what ordinary citizens could face if their citizenship comes under question. But when you visited the Regional Passport Office and later the police station, what exactly did you see around you? What kind of difficulties were other people facing? Before that, however, you also spoke about Assam. You believe Assam's experience offers an important warning for the rest of India. Tell us why.

Samrat Choudhury: Assam is the only state in India where the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise was actually completed. I believe it provides an important case study of what could happen elsewhere if similar exercises continue.

The NRC exercise in Assam was conducted when Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who himself is from Assam, was the Chief Justice of India. The BJP was in power both in Assam and at the Centre. The exercise was carried out rigorously under their supervision. It took years to complete. It cost approximately ₹1,600 to ₹1,700 crore.

Every resident of Assam became part of that exercise, along with the entire state machinery. When the process finally concluded, around 19 lakh people had been left out of the NRC. But the irony was that the very people who had demanded the exercise ultimately rejected its outcome. As a result, the NRC left lakhs of people in limbo.

The next legal or administrative step — whether acceptance of the report, notification or implementation — never truly materialised. Years have now passed. Instead of resolving uncertainty, the process created more confusion.

My concern is whether this same documentary uncertainty — what I would call document terror — will now spread across the rest of India. That is what worries me.

Inside the Passport Office: "Kafkaesque Spaces"

Prema Sridevi: You and Mr. Rajagopal have both been clear that this isn't only about your individual cases. When you visited the Regional Passport Office and later the police station, what did you actually witness? What kind of environment did you find yourself in?

Samrat Choudhury: I have to say those spaces themselves felt dystopian. They were Kafkaesque. I didn't take photographs, but if photography had been permitted, those offices could easily have become the subject of an entire photo essay.

The buildings are old. The corridors are narrow. Rooms branch off in every direction. People wander through these corridors carrying files, trying to understand where they are supposed to go. What struck me most was the emotion. I saw people sitting on the floor crying. Some were crying loudly.

Prema Sridevi: Outside the passport office?

Samrat Choudhury: Inside the passport office. It felt like a place carrying the accumulated anxieties of countless people. Entry is tightly controlled — only those carrying the appropriate documents are allowed inside. Yet the building remains overcrowded. The queues snake through the corridors.

To be honest, I also felt sorry for the officials working there. I wish the Government of India would invest more resources in improving these spaces. Better buildings. Better layouts. More humane environments. Public service should begin by making citizens feel that they are entering a place designed to help them — not intimidate them. The entire process should become less harrowing for everyone who has to go there.

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Why Such Systems Create Middlemen

Samrat Choudhury: The other problem is that people often leave these offices without receiving the help they need. When citizens cannot navigate the system, they step outside the building — and someone immediately approaches them saying, "I know someone inside. I can help you." That is precisely the environment in which middlemen thrive.

Ironically, this is also the kind of system that eventually contributes to fake passport rackets of the sort we discussed earlier. If the government does not create a transparent, citizen-friendly process, people become dependent on unofficial intermediaries.

The officials behind the counters often appear to make life even more difficult by demanding documents that are not officially required. Citizens begin the process under suspicion. When they find themselves trapped in a maze of paperwork with no assistance, many turn to middlemen. That is not how a public institution should function.

"I Have Complied With Everything Asked of Me"

Prema Sridevi: The bitter irony in your case is impossible to ignore. Your passport was taken away on Passport Seva Divas — the very day meant to celebrate passport services. And another irony is that someone who has written extensively about the idea of belonging is now being asked to prove that he belongs, despite having been born before 1987, when no law required you to establish your lineage. At this stage, getting your passport back is obviously important. What happens next?

Samrat Choudhury: I have completed every documentary requirement placed before me. I responded to the show-cause notice. I appeared before the Regional Passport Office. I surrendered my passport because I was directed to do so.

The file was then sent back to the police for verification. I have met the police officials. I submitted all my documents once again. They told me that my documentation was completely in order and that everything was fine at their level. They said they would forward the file to the appropriate authority. As far as I know, the process is now simply moving through the bureaucracy. I hope it concludes without any further complications in the near future.

"We Are Citizens by Birth"

Prema Sridevi: My final question. You wrote a book titled But I Am One of You. Today, the system is asking you to prove exactly that. If you could say one thing to the system that is questioning your belonging, what would it be?

Samrat Choudhury: I would simply remind the system of what our Constitution and the laws of the Republic already say. Those born before 1987 are citizens of India by birth. This growing regime of suspicion, where everyone is treated as a suspect without any written law justifying that suspicion, shifts the burden onto ordinary citizens for reasons that are neither explained nor recorded.

That is an extremely harsh way to govern a country of 1.4 billion people. We have already seen in Assam that this model did not produce the results its supporters expected. If such documentary scrutiny is extended across the country, lakhs of people's lives could be disrupted simply because a name was misspelled in a document decades ago.

Families will be forced into endless bureaucratic battles over clerical mistakes. That kind of uncertainty creates anxiety, resentment and unrest. People will not be happy. Lakhs upon lakhs of citizens could find themselves affected. That is not a situation any country should want to create.

Prema Sridevi: Samrat, thank you for speaking with us, and for speaking so openly even while your own case remains unresolved. I genuinely hope your passport is returned to you soon and that the questions your experience raises are answered — not only for you, but for everyone else caught in the same uncertainty. Thank you.

Samrat Choudhury: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

In This Country, What Does It Take to Prove You Belong?

Samrat Choudhury will very likely get his passport back. He has a name, a body of work, and people willing to speak up for him. But that is exactly what should worry us.

Because the man who wrote the definitive history of how the Northeast became part of India — who co-edited two books on what it means to belong — was still asked by his own government to prove that he belongs. If it can happen to him, with every document in order and a passport held since 1993, it can happen to anyone.

This is now the second such story we've brought you, after R. Rajagopal. Two credible Indians, asked to prove something the law had already settled long ago. And behind them are countless others with no book to their name, no editor's title, and no one to write a letter on their behalf. These Indian citizens are quietly gathering old records, standing in queues, and trying to prove they are Indian.

The law says birth on this soil made them citizens. The state now seems to be asking for something more. Until there is a clear answer to this simple question, we will keep asking it: In this country, what does it actually take to prove that you belong?

I'm Prema Sridevi. This is The Probe.

In June 2026, the Delhi government's Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) arrested the former head of the Central Procurement Agency (CPA) of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS). Days later, it arrested a former DGHS chief and a senior accounts officer. The ACB pegs the alleged medical-procurement racket at roughly Rs 650–700 crore.

Portable X-ray machines were allegedly billed at Rs 33 lakh against a market price near Rs 10 lakh; hospital bedsheets at Rs 450 against Rs 150; oral rehydration sachets (ORS) at Rs 15 against Rs 2.5. This deep dive report seeks to reconstruct how the alleged CPA scam worked and how it surfaced, explain the digital procurement architecture — the Government e-Marketplace (GeM), the Central Public Procurement Portal and e-tendering — that was meant to prevent exactly this, and dissect where checks and balances, transparency and documentation failed. It also gives the accused the benefit of the doubt where the evidence permits, then asks the uncomfortable question: if such leakage is possible in a relatively small health budget, what is happening in the far larger arenas of roads, buildings and big-ticket capital equipment? 

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How the CPA scam worked

Strip away the jargon and the alleged fraud is almost insultingly simple: buy cheap, bill dear, pocket the gap. Investigators say the Central Procurement Agency — the centralised buyer for Delhi government hospitals and dispensaries, operating under the DGHS of the Government of NCT of Delhi — paid roughly three times the going rate for portable X-ray machines, triple for ordinary linen, and six times for a humble ORS sachet. The ACB has so far valued the CPA racket at around Rs 650–700 crore, and says the figure may climb as the books are reconstructed.

Three names anchor the case. Dr Vinod Kumar Ranga, former Head of Office of the CPA, was arrested on June 18 and remanded to police custody; the ACB alleges he kept crucial procurement files in his personal custody and failed to explain their disappearance. Days later the ACB arrested Dr Vatsala Aggarwal, a former DGHS chief, and Neeraj Chopra, a Deputy Controller of Accounts at the CPA, after they allegedly could not provide "satisfactory explanations." 

Around a dozen more officials, contractors and bidders are reportedly on the radar, and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has since opened a parallel money-laundering case under the PMLA. One clarification matters: this is the Delhi NCT government's health-procurement arm, not the Union Health Ministry's — a distinction the headlines blur but the accountability does not.

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How the CPA case came to light

Scams of this kind rarely announce themselves; they leak. This one began to surface in May 2026, when the Delhi Directorate of Vigilance, acting on complaints about tenders for medicines, surgical items and equipment, raided the Central Procurement Agency's office across two nights. When vigilance officers arrived on May 18 to collect the CPA's procurement records, they were told the key files were unavailable — and that they sat in Dr Ranga's custody. Even after some folders were later handed over, the principal procurement files allegedly remained missing. On June 2 the ACB converted the vigilance complaint into an FIR under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 (as amended in 2018), read with the criminal-conspiracy provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.

From there the dominoes fell quickly: Ranga's arrest on June 18, the arrests of Aggarwal and Chopra on June 27, the suspension of five pharmacists and two CPA officials after an internal inquiry, and a Section 17A sanction to prosecute. The Lieutenant Governor (LG) ordered disciplinary action; the Chief Minister invoked the familiar "zero-tolerance" refrain. The sequence is textbook — vigilance flag, FIR, arrests, ED entry — but the very fact that it took missing files and a tip-off, rather than the procurement system's own alarms, to expose the racket is itself the first indictment of the system.

The anatomy of the alleged fraud

The alleged padding was spread across categories so that no single contract screamed. On portable X-ray machines — Rs 33 lakh a unit against a market price near Rs 10 lakh — the vigilance department estimates excess payment of around Rs 100 crore under one contract alone. On linen, three linked suppliers were allegedly paid Rs 75 crore against an estimated true cost of Rs 25 crore, leaving Rs 50 crore to be siphoned.

For C-arm radiology units and anaesthesia workstations, technical specifications were allegedly tailored to favour particular models, with equipment available for a few lakh rupees invoiced at multiples of cost. And in ORS and surgical consumables — sachets, sutures, cannulas, gloves — procurement worth around Rs 400 crore was routed through hospital-level local chemist tenders, with nearly Rs 300 crore allegedly diverted.

The method, as alleged in the complaint, is where the real lesson hides. Manufacturers reportedly first agreed among themselves to nominate specific distributors; those distributors then drafted restrictive technical specifications and tender conditions tailored to their nominees; the documents were allegedly submitted to Ranga and approved by DGHS officials. Several ostensibly independent firms were allegedly controlled by a single distributor close to the officials under scrutiny. Approvals were granted on the same day, financial bids were opened secretly, and purchase orders were issued by the CPA without publishing the awards on the Government e-Marketplace or other e-procurement portals — and tenders were deliberately kept marked "Active" even after contracts were awarded and paid, so competitors and the public could never see the final rates. In other words, the fraud did not defeat the transparency machinery so much as route around it.

The digital system built to prevent this

India did not sleepwalk into this. The Government e-Marketplace (GeM), launched on 9 August 2016 and built in a record five months, was conceived precisely to drag public buying out of the paper-and-handshake era. It replaced the old Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals (DGS&D), is owned by a 100% government-owned non-profit (the GeM Special Purpose Vehicle), and was made effectively mandatory for central purchases through Rule 149 of the General Financial Rules, 2017. Its pitch is a holy trinity of efficiency, transparency and inclusiveness: open catalogues, e-bidding, reverse e-auctions, demand aggregation and audit trails, with the World Bank estimating median savings near 9.75% over legacy processes.

Alongside GeM sits the Central Public Procurement Portal (CPPP), where open tenders are advertised, and a suite of state e-tendering systems. The theory is elegant: publish the requirement, let everyone bid, open bids on a fixed clock, award to the lowest compliant offer, and post the result for the world to audit. "E-market" simply means buying standardised goods off a digital catalogue at displayed prices; "e-procurement" means running the tender — notice, bid submission, evaluation, award — through a portal that timestamps every click. The bitter irony of the Delhi case is that these rails existed and were allegedly avoided: routine consumables were pushed through off-portal "local chemist" tenders, awards went unpublished, and the "Active" status trick kept the digital trail permanently inconclusive. A transparency tool is only as honest as the official obliged to use it.

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How the Central Procurement Agency became a single point of failure

A central procurement agency exists for good reasons. Instead of every hospital separately haggling for gauze and ventilators, a single body aggregates demand, standardises specifications, negotiates volume discounts and professionalises buying. Done well, centralisation is the taxpayer's friend — it is the logic behind GeM itself. But centralisation has a dark twin: it concentrates discretion. When one Head of Office can shape specifications, one accounts wing can clear payments, and one distributor can allegedly puppeteer a clutch of "competing" firms, the CPA, designed to be a shield, becomes a single, well-guarded gate where a small group can quietly set the toll. The Central Procurement Agency was meant to be a bottleneck against waste; instead, the CPA became a bottleneck that throttled competition.

Where the rules and safeguards failed

Let us start with the foundation: India still has no single, comprehensive statute governing public procurement. The General Financial Rules (GFR) and the procurement manuals are executive instructions, not law; "procurement" does not even appear as a distinct subject in the Constitution's Seventh Schedule, and a Public Procurement Bill drafted in 2012 on the UNCITRAL model has been gathering dust ever since. That means much of the discipline depends on internal rules and the integrity of the people applying them — precisely the variable that allegedly failed here.

Even the digital system has gameable seams. GeM permits proprietary-article buying via a Proprietary Article Certificate (PAC), low-value direct purchases below fixed thresholds, and rate-based selection — features that are legitimate but exploitable. Splitting a large demand into many small ones to dodge competitive bidding is formally prohibited, yet remains a perennial dodge. The master key, though, is specification capture: write the technical specifications so tightly that only one model qualifies, and an "open" tender becomes a coronation.

Indian courts have recognised exactly this danger, carving out an exception to their usual hands-off stance for tenders that are "tailor-made" to favour one bidder or exclude all others. Add the lowest-bidder (L1) reflex — which has elsewhere left laboratories and hospitals with substandard supplies because price, not fitness, decides — and we have a regime that can be gamed from both ends: inflate through captured specifications, or hollow out through cheap, non-compliant goods.

Crucially, enforcement against the supply side has long been weak. Analysts note that while tenders routinely carry anti-corruption clauses, there has historically been little by way of penalties for bidders who collude, and scant institutional muscle to detect cartels and bid-rigging — even though these are the very mechanics alleged at the CPA.

At the Central Procurement Agency, four classic controls appear to have failed at once.

First, documentation: the CPA's audit trail is the spine of accountability, and missing files kept in an official's personal custody snap that spine cleanly — no records, no reconstruction, no proof.

Second, segregation of duties: when the same hands that draft specifications also approve them, open the financial bids and clear the payments, the wall between proposer and approver collapses, and "same-day approvals" become possible.

Third, transparency by publication: awards that are never posted, and tenders frozen at "Active", defeat the single cheapest anti-corruption device there is — the gaze of competitors and citizens.

Fourth, the timing of oversight: vigilance arrived after the money had moved, not before. Internal audit and pre-audit are supposed to be the smoke detectors; here they functioned as the fire brigade, useful only once the building was already alight.

Is there another side to the story?

Fairness demands it. These are allegations, not convictions; the FIR is a charge, not a verdict, and the accused are entitled to a defence and to the presumption of innocence until a court says otherwise. Beyond that bedrock, a sceptic can raise genuinely substantive doubts. Price benchmarking in healthcare is treacherous: a "market price" quoted for a bare consumer-grade device is not comparable to a hospital-grade machine bought with calibration, warranty, annual maintenance, spares and staff training bundled in; certified medical linen and pharmacopoeia-grade ORS legitimately cost more than the cheapest bazaar equivalent. Headline multiples — "six times the market rate" — can mislead if they compare a lifecycle contract against a spot price, or conflate total contract value with per-unit cost.

There is also a structural irony worth airing: India's own lowest-bidder orthodoxy has been blamed for substandard supplies, which means that paying more may not, by itself, be proof of graft — sometimes it is the price of quality the L1 rule otherwise crushes. And trial by media has a poor record of distinguishing aggressive negotiation from criminal conspiracy. That said, the benefit of the doubt has limits. Missing principal files, awards withheld from the portal, financial bids opened in secret, same-day clearances, and a web of firms allegedly run by one distributor are not the fingerprints of honest price variation. Even the most charitable reading struggles to explain why the CPA's paper trail vanished.

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Could it happen on a bigger scale?

Here is the sobering part. India's public procurement is gigantic — an estimated 15–20% of GDP, somewhere between Rs 15 and Rs 20 lakh crore, or roughly USD 500–600 billion a year. A Rs 700-crore health racket at the Central Procurement Agency is, in that ocean, a rounding error. And the larger the contract, the richer the opportunity. In civil works and infrastructure the favourite trick is the mirror image of inflation: the "suicide bid", where a contractor quotes absurdly low to win, then — often with complicit consultants and engineers — recovers and multiplies the loss through inflated variation claims, bogus "extra items", and ghost works never executed, sometimes leaving behind roads that crack and bridges that fail.

This is not hypothetical. In the Jal Jeevan Mission, investigators in Rajasthan flagged roughly Rs 960 crore in contracts allegedly awarded on fake documentation, with the broader manipulation network estimated to touch contracts worth up to Rs 20,000 crore. Cartelisation is now serious enough that the Competition Commission of India passed an order against 17 entities for collusive bidding in April 2026, and the national auditor is pushing data-driven detection of bid rotation and vendor clustering.

Defence — India's most capital-intensive procurement — remains rated a high corruption risk, with no dedicated central legislation governing it. The Delhi medical case, in short, is a small and legible specimen of a much larger pathology: scale up the rupees and the same levers recur — specification capture, collusive bidding, weak documentation and concentrated discretion.

If this could happen in the national capital — under the watch of a Lieutenant Governor, an active legislature and a press pack always on the lookout — it is worth asking what goes unnoticed in states where scrutiny is weaker and the spotlight dimmer. The Union government's 2016 e-procurement template has not stayed in Delhi: the Government e-Marketplace is now operational across all 36 states and union territories, and at least eight — Maharashtra, Gujarat, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Manipur and others — have made its use mandatory. That is a single, standardised pipe carrying a colossal share of public money through identical valves and joints — which means identical loopholes (specification capture, PAC misuse, off-portal "local" tenders, unpublished awards) are now replicable in thirty-six jurisdictions at once. This is precisely the terrain a performance audit is built for.

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) should mount a focussed, holistic, all-India performance audit of GeM and state e-procurement — not a politically selective trawl that singles out opposition-ruled states, but an even-handed, criteria-based examination applied uniformly to every government, ruling party and opposition alike. An audit that flinches along party lines audits nothing; one that maps the same red flags across all thirty-six is how a one-city scandal becomes a nationwide cure.

Fixing the system before the next scam

The fixes are not mysterious; the will to apply them is the scarce resource.

First, give procurement a spine of law: enact a genuine, statutory public-procurement Act — the long-pending UNCITRAL-based framework — so that integrity does not rest solely on executive rules an official can quietly ignore.

Second, make the digital rails unavoidable and tamper-evident: route routine goods through GeM or e-tendering with immutable, time-stamped audit trails, auto-publish every award by default, abolish off-portal "local" tenders for standard items, and kill the "keep-it-Active" loophole that hides outcomes.

Third, attack specification capture at the source — mandate generic, performance-based specifications vetted by independent technical committees, and auto-flag any tender that effectively names a single make or model. Fourth, professionalise price discovery: maintain shared benchmark-price databases and evaluate on whole-of-life cost rather than the crude L1 reflex, so that quality is rewarded and inflation is caught.

Fifth, rebuild the human controls: enforce segregation of duties, rotate procurement staff, demand conflict-of-interest declarations, and end personal custody of files through mandatory digital record-keeping with whistle-blower protection.

Sixth, shift oversight from autopsy to early warning — actually deploy (rather than presenting papers only in conferences) the analytics the CAG and CCI are now championing to spot bid rotation, suspicious vendor clusters and price outliers in near real time, and pair them with independent and social audits.

Finally, give accountability teeth: real penalties and debarment for collusion, swift asset recovery through the ED route, and time-bound prosecution so that "zero tolerance" becomes a track record rather than a press release. The Delhi CPA case will be remembered not for the bedsheets and the X-ray machines, but for whether it finally forces the system to install the smoke detectors before the next, far bigger, fire.

Passport Renewal Nightmare: "If This Can Happen to Me, It Can Happen to Any Indian"

For more than three decades, R. Rajagopal helped shape India's public discourse as one of the country's most respected editors. As Editor of The Telegraph, he was known for fearless journalism, sharp editorial judgment, and headlines that often defined the national conversation.

Today, however, Rajagopal finds himself at the centre of a bureaucratic battle unlike anything he reported during his long journalistic career. His name was deleted from the electoral rolls, preventing him from voting in the West Bengal Assembly elections. His passport renewal was subsequently held up, forcing him to miss the possibility of attending his daughter's wedding in the United States despite possessing a valid long-term U.S. visa. Now, he spends his days searching for decades-old records of his parents in an effort to prove his identity.

In this conversation with The Probe, Rajagopal recounts his experience, reflects on journalism, democracy and citizenship, and raises larger questions about the systems governing identity in India.

Passport Renewal Becomes an Unexpected Battle

Prema Sridevi: Mr. Rajagopal, thank you for taking the time to speak with The Probe.

Before we get into the larger issues surrounding your case, I'd like you to begin with the basic facts. You held a valid passport that was nearing expiry, and you applied for a routine passport renewal. The timing was particularly important because you wanted the option of attending your daughter's wedding in the United States.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

Could you walk us through exactly what happened? How did what should have been a routine administrative process become such a prolonged ordeal for you and your family?

R. Rajagopal: Thank you. I am speaking to you from Kolkata, where I have lived for many years. My first passport was issued in 2005 from this very address after the required police verification was completed.

Ten years later, in 2015, I renewed the passport from the same address. Once again, the police verification was carried out without any issues.

My passport expired in October 2025. At that time, I was in Kerala. I returned to Kolkata in February and applied for passport renewal. Nothing had changed—not my address, not my personal details. 

The initial process was remarkably smooth. Biometrics took barely twenty to twenty-five minutes.

The very next day, my application was forwarded to the Ballygunge Police Station for police verification. In the past, the police had always visited my residence for verification. This time, however, I received a call asking me to come to the police station instead.

I assumed the police were under considerable pressure because the West Bengal Assembly elections were approaching. I didn't want to insist that they visit my home, so I went to the station.

Before I went, the officer asked me to bring my voter identity card.

I asked why it was required.

He told me they needed it to generate a one-time password for verification of my antecedents.

I explained that while I could physically bring the voter card, it would not serve any purpose because my name had already been deleted from the electoral rolls on 29 March because of the SIR process.

The officer seemed momentarily unsure about how to proceed. He then asked me to bring other documents instead—my matriculation certificate, my father's death certificate, Aadhaar card, PAN card, and utility bills establishing my residence.

I took all the original documents to the police station. The officers examined them carefully, took photocopies, and informed me that the passport renewal process would continue.

At that point, I was not worried in the slightest.

I had absolutely no idea that there was any connection whatsoever between deletion from the electoral rolls and passport renewal.

As far as I was concerned, the deletion from the voters' list appeared to be because of some logical discrepancy—perhaps a spelling mismatch or some similar issue. I was confident that whenever the appellate authority called me, I would be able to establish my credentials without difficulty.

After all, you don't expect someone to suddenly tell you that you are not Indian.

So I assumed it was simply a procedural glitch.

Also Watch:  Passport IS Citizenship Proof: Government Documents Expose the Truth

 Meanwhile, Bengal was in the middle of election season. I attended campaign events in Khardah where a friend was contesting. I remained occupied and never imagined that my passport renewal would become a serious issue.

I had every reason to believe it would be completed quickly.

In fact, when my daughter's passport had been renewed earlier, the police had been extremely cooperative and the entire process had taken less than two weeks.

There seemed to be ample time before my daughter's wedding.

To be fair, I had not yet finalised my own travel plans to the United States. My wife was definitely going. I had not completely decided whether I would accompany her. So it would not be accurate to say that I missed the wedding solely because my passport was delayed.

However, the fact remains that even if I had wanted to travel, I simply could not have done so because the passport renewal had not been completed.

The Police Verification Takes an Unexpected Turn

R. Rajagopal: As time passed, I became slightly concerned because the passport had still not arrived. I called the police station. They told me that the file has been sent. Since I remained completely confident, I assumed they meant it had been forwarded to the Passport Office. I thanked them and disconnected the call.

I genuinely believed the passport would now be printed and delivered shortly. A few days later, however, I realised nothing had happened. So I called again. This time I was told something entirely different.

The officer clarified that when they had earlier said the file had been "sent," they meant it had been forwarded not to the Passport Office but to the Security Control Organisation, which functions under the Kolkata Police Special Branch.

I knew what that meant. Normally, applications reach the Security Control Organisation only when the local police station has reservations or doubts regarding police verification.

So I was asked to visit the Security Control Organisation. When I went there, I was categorically informed that my police verification would not be cleared unless my name was restored to the electoral rolls. That came as a complete shock. I immediately asked the officer under what law this decision had been taken. I asked whether there was any government notification, circular or official order linking electoral roll deletion with passport renewal. I said that such a significant policy decision could not have escaped public attention if it had indeed been issued. Could they please show me the government order? Instead of answering, they simply stonewalled me.

They repeatedly said they didn't know anything beyond the fact that this was what they had been instructed to do.

So I returned home. Then, on 17 June, the Regional Passport Office officially informed me that the police had submitted an adverse verification report, specifically citing my deletion from the electoral rolls.

At that point, there was no room for speculation. The reason had been officially recorded in writing. Nothing else had been cited.

The Passport Office then gave me an appointment to appear before them on 17 July. That is where the matter presently stands.

When Routine Delay Begins to Raise Questions

Prema Sridevi: You mentioned that throughout the initial stages you remained confident that your passport would eventually be renewed. But journalists develop instincts over the years. At some point, did you begin to feel that this was no longer an ordinary bureaucratic delay. Normally, when officials realise that the applicant is an established journalist with a long professional record, things tend to move faster rather than slower.

Did it ever occur to you that you might actually be facing something more than routine administrative delay?

R. Rajagopal: Not initially. To be honest, I thought it was simply routine bureaucracy. Most of my interactions were with junior-level officials. They were uniformly courteous and polite. None of them behaved in a hostile manner. I never got the impression that they were personally targeting me during the passport renewal process.

The point at which I became genuinely worried was 20 May, when I was told quite bluntly that my verification simply "could not be done." The Bengali expression they used was "Hobena." That is a very final expression. It means, "It cannot be done." When I heard those words, I was deeply shaken. I returned home and wrote an email addressed to the Kolkata Police Commissioner using the official email address listed on the Kolkata Police website. To this day, I don't know whether that email ever reached him. I never received even an acknowledgement. That silence worried me.

I expected that if the Commissioner's office had received the complaint, someone—if not the Commissioner himself—would at least acknowledge it. That never happened.

Later, I also approached the National Human Rights Commission. They acknowledged receipt of my representation. Beyond that, I have no idea what became of it.

That was when I slowly began to feel anxious. But even today, I do not possess any evidence that I was personally singled out or deliberately targeted.

Electoral Roll Deletion and a Father's Legacy

Prema Sridevi: You mentioned earlier that your passport renewal issue eventually became intertwined with your deletion from the electoral rolls. The explanation given to you was that your name and your father's name—could not be traced to the 2002 electoral rolls.

Before we discuss that process, I'd like to know a little more about your father. I read the article you wrote about him. You described him as a Gandhian. Could you tell us about him? And could you also explain how someone who has voted in election after election suddenly finds his name missing from the electoral rolls?

R. Rajagopal: To be fair, I was not surprised that my own name was not present in the 2002 electoral rolls. At that time, my wife and I were raising a young family, and my career required frequent transfers. I worked first in Delhi, then Mumbai, then Kolkata, then back to Mumbai, and again to Delhi. We were essentially a floating family. It was only during the early 2000s that we finally decided to settle permanently in Kolkata.

There was another reason as well, which younger journalists today may find rather unusual. In those days, journalism placed an enormous premium on neutrality. We were constantly told that journalists must never be seen as taking sides. The principle was taken so seriously that journalists working for business newspapers were discouraged from investing in companies they covered.

If you covered Reliance or ACC, for example, you were expected not to own shares in those companies because that might compromise your independence.

A similar philosophy existed in political journalism. There was a belief among many journalists that even voting could compromise neutrality. The argument was that if you voted for a political party, you were, in some sense, taking a political position. I wasn't a political reporter—I largely worked on the desk—but that philosophy influenced many journalists of my generation.

As a result, I did not seriously participate in elections until around 2010. From 2010 onwards, however, I became a regular voter after enrolling in Ballygunge. 

"My Father Never Missed an Election"

R. Rajagopal: My father was very different. He was an economics professor. After retiring from government service in Kerala, he became deeply involved in social work. He served as Secretary of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi. He actively participated in prohibition campaigns because Kerala had—and continues to have—serious concerns regarding alcohol abuse. He also worked for communal harmony during periods of tension in northern Kerala. That entire generation believed deeply in public service.

I remember him as an extraordinarily conscientious voter. He never missed an election. So I was genuinely surprised when we could not locate his name in the electoral rolls.

Later, my brother suggested that there had been a period—around eleven months perhaps—when my father had temporarily shifted residence while repairs were being carried out at his home. We searched the electoral rolls for that address as well. His name wasn't there either. It is also possible that the problem arose because of spelling variations.

His name was Ramadas. That name can be written in several different ways—Ramadas, Ramdas, and other variations. We simply don't know. The bottom line is that we could not locate his name. That was why I was placed in the SIR adjudication process.

Also Read:  The CAG Cannot Audit Ram Mandir. Its Officer Is on the Trust.

The Matriculation Certificate Was Rejected

Prema Sridevi: When your father's name couldn't be found, what happened next?

R. Rajagopal: Even then, I wasn't especially worried. The procedure was quite clear. If your name entered adjudication, you were required to submit one of the 11 to 12 documents prescribed by the Election Commission.

I submitted my matriculation certificate issued by the Government of Kerala. To my surprise, it was rejected. I believe that happened because of what they called "logical discrepancies." In India, names often have multiple accepted spellings. "Kumar," for instance, can be written in many different ways. So I suspect there were spelling mismatches between my current documents and older records. There was also another possibility. Some of us wondered whether these records were being matched through automated systems.

If a human being had examined them carefully, small spelling variations would probably have been recognised as harmless. Machines, however, operate differently. If they are programmed to detect exact matches, they naturally flag discrepancies.

At present, the matter is before the appellate tribunal. When I receive my hearing, I hope to establish my case there.

That, in itself, was the SIR issue. What I had never anticipated was that the passport verification process and the electoral roll issue would suddenly merge into one. That was the last thing I expected. After all, this was merely a passport renewal. It had already been issued once. It had already been renewed once. The address had remained unchanged.

As far as I know, I have no criminal case or any adverse record against me. So I had every reason to believe the renewal would be routine.

"Journalists Never Want to Become the Story"

Prema Sridevi: I know that you've said before that you don't want to be seen as a victim. Journalists generally don't want to become the story. They want to report the story. I understand that completely. But there is another reason we wanted to bring your experience into public view.

If this can happen to someone with your professional standing, your public profile and your credentials, then it can happen to anyone.

It is important not only for ordinary citizens but also for the bureaucracy to recognise that if someone like R. Rajagopal can be made to prove his citizenship repeatedly, something may be fundamentally wrong with the system.

For viewers watching this interview, could you explain how all of this has affected you personally? You couldn't vote. Your passport renewal stalled. Every morning now seems to involve chasing documents and checking portals. How has all of this changed your daily life?

"I Suddenly Felt Like Half a Citizen"

R. Rajagopal: It has been deeply frustrating. The moment my name disappeared from the electoral rolls, I kept trying to reassure myself that the process wasn't over. There was still an appeal pending. The law provided a mechanism. Yet something fundamental had already changed. I had voted in this constituency for several elections.

I had always regarded voting as an ordinary civic responsibility. People often say, "If you miss one election, you can vote in the next." That sounds simple. But until you actually lose the right to vote, you don't realise how precious that right really is. When it was taken away, I suddenly felt incomplete. Almost like a half-citizen. I found myself wondering why I was being denied something that every other citizen around me continued to enjoy. It created a strange psychological effect.

I would attend gatherings where everyone discussed politics. Normally, I am an extremely talkative person—as journalists usually are. We tend to offer opinions whether anyone asks for them or not. But after this happened, I found myself remaining silent.

Whenever someone asked why I wasn't participating in the discussion, I would simply say: "This election doesn't belong to me." I no longer felt entitled to discuss it.

In fact, I even recorded a small video for some friends joking that perhaps we should discuss municipal elections in Italy, or elections in Timbuktu, or Nicaragua. For me, the Bengal election had become just as distant because I had not been allowed to participate in it. That was emotionally devastating.

A Daily Search Through the Past

Prema Sridevi: You mentioned that every morning now begins with a set of tasks that have become almost ritualistic—checking the tribunal portal, tracking your passport application and writing to schools and colleges.

How are you coping with all of this? What exactly does your day look like now?

R. Rajagopal: It has become a routine now. Every morning, the first thing I do is check whether the tribunal has assigned me a hearing date. Before I go to sleep each night, I check it again, hoping that something has changed. Realistically, I know that a hearing is unlikely to be assigned overnight, but I still check. Without doing that, I find it difficult to sleep.

The second thing I check every day is the status of my passport application. These two things have become part of my daily routine. After that, I spend my time writing letters—to schools, colleges and government offices. Some institutions have been very responsive. Others take time.

But almost every enquiry involves explaining my entire story from the beginning.

Searching for His Mother's Records

Prema Sridevi: When you say you are writing to schools and colleges, what exactly are you looking for?

R. Rajagopal: I am trying to reconstruct my family's paper trail. For example, my mother taught at a college in Thiruvananthapuram in 1965. I discovered that year only because I came across a photograph from her postgraduate convocation ceremony. Once I identified the college, I found its email address and wrote to them. They responded by giving me a contact number. When I called, I had to explain everything from the beginning.

You have to understand that this is not a normal request.

Someone calls from Kolkata and asks whether the college has any record showing that his mother taught there in 1965. Naturally, people are puzzled. Sometimes you call again the next day and a different person answers the phone. Then you have to narrate the entire story all over again.

Eventually, the college informed me that they no longer had records dating back to 1965. However, the school where my mother had studied was able to locate an old register from 1959 containing her name. From that register I was able to discover her date of birth—a detail I myself did not know.

My mother passed away in 1978, when I was only ten years old. You cannot expect a ten-year-old child to remember dates of birth and similar details. So every small piece of information I recover now feels significant.

Correcting His Birth Certificate

R. Rajagopal: The next complication concerns my own birth certificate. On my birth certificate, my mother's name has been recorded as Radha Bai. Her actual name was Radha Devi. It appears to be a small difference, but officially it has to be corrected. The authorities have told me that they need her matriculation certificate before the correction can be made. That means I now have to locate her school records from 1959. 

The Kerala Pareeksha Bhavan maintains examination records. However, because my mother is no longer alive, I cannot apply directly. The application has to be made through the school. That, in turn, requires further documentation. So it becomes a chain of paperwork.

Once I obtain the matriculation certificate, I can request a correction on my birth certificate. Only then will I have what can reasonably be called a fully corrected birth certificate. I don't blame the officials handling these records.

In fact, considering that I was born in 1968—and registration of births and deaths became mandatory in India only from April 1, 1970—it is remarkable that these records still exist. Kerala has done a commendable job digitising old records. My birth record is available. The issue is that my mother's name now needs to be corrected.

I have no idea how long that process will take. It is a surreal experience. Here I am, sitting in Kolkata in 2026, spending my days researching documents from 1959. I never imagined that this would become my life.

"I Have Been Reduced to a Voteless, Passport-less Person"

Prema Sridevi: You have spent decades building one of the most respected careers in Indian journalism. You have edited one of the country's leading newspapers.

Yet today you find yourself searching through records from the 1950s simply to establish your own identity. How does that feel?

R. Rajagopal: It feels as though everything I have done in my life belongs to another world. Today, I have been reduced to what I can only describe as a voteless, passport-less person.

Every day I move from one government portal to another, searching for evidence—not merely about myself, but about my parents and my family. That is what my life has become.

Looking Back on a Career in Journalism

Prema Sridevi: I also want viewers to understand who is telling them this story. For over thirty-five years, you have been a journalist. Much of that time was spent at The Telegraph, a newspaper whose front pages were read across the country and whose headlines often shaped public debate.

Tell us about the work you are most proud of. For those who question your Indianness today, what would you want them to know about your contribution to Indian journalism?

R. Rajagopal: The Telegraph has always been known for its headlines. That reputation existed long before I became Editor. I did not reinvent the wheel. The paper already had a remarkable editorial tradition.

Our founder-editor, M.J. Akbar, established that culture. For example, when former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated, The Telegraph carried the unforgettable headline:

"Indira Assassinated. Nation Wounded."

People still remember it. So the newspaper always had a distinctive voice. What changed during my tenure was the arrival of social media.

Earlier, The Telegraph was largely regarded as an eastern Indian newspaper. Copies reached Delhi in the evening and other cities like Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram even later. There was no online edition in those days.

With social media, however, our front pages began travelling instantly across the country. That expanded our reach enormously. It was not because we had suddenly become more innovative. Technology simply amplified our work.

Standing With Students During the JNU Controversy

R. Rajagopal: If there is one period I remember most vividly, it would be the events surrounding Jawaharlal Nehru University. When students were attacked and beaten, we realised that journalism could not simply remain an exercise in recording statements from opposing sides. There are moments when a newspaper has to stand with constitutional values. We concluded that this was one of those moments.

It reminded me of the atmosphere surrounding American universities during the Nixon years. We believed we could not remain mere spectators. That was when we consciously moved away from what I earlier described as "neutrality." There is one front page that remains deeply etched in my memory.

When Kanhaiya Kumar and others were produced before a court, one of their supporters was brutally assaulted by a group of lawyers. The images were horrifying. The young man looked as though he had been hunted down. Later it emerged that he was the son-in-law of a well-known Bengali political figure. Those were difficult days. They were not pleasant stories to edit. But we believed they deserved to be reported prominently.

During the COVID-19 pandemic as well, despite our limited resources, we tried to do whatever journalism we could.

"It Was Never About One Headline"

R. Rajagopal: People often ask me which headline or which front page I consider my finest. I don't think about journalism that way. For me, it was about the editorial choices we made over time. The Telegraph had traditionally devoted considerable space to sports. During certain periods, however, sports virtually disappeared from Page One.

Politics occupied that space instead because we believed the country was going through events that demanded sustained public attention. We changed our priorities because the times required it. I was also fortunate to work with an exceptionally strong editorial team. Many members of that team were willing to disagree with me. They would tell me when they believed I was making the wrong decision.

There were occasions when I accepted their arguments and corrected myself. That, to me, was healthy journalism. Of course, there were difficult periods as well. We had to make painful decisions. At times, we had to let colleagues go. Those are decisions I still regret. I cannot fully defend them even today.

But at the time, I believed those decisions were necessary to keep the newspaper alive.

Journalism is never simply about writing memorable headlines. It also involves carrying the burden of difficult choices.

"Journalism Cannot Become Stenography"

R. Rajagopal: In fact, the current controversy itself provides a good illustration. Recently, I came across a news report about a woman who had been in Dubai when the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process was taking place. Because she was abroad, she did not submit the required form. When she returned to Kolkata, she realised that her passport would soon need renewal.

Someone apparently told her that because her name had been deleted during the SIR exercise, her passport would not be renewed. Now, that information may or may not have been correct. The newspaper simply reported her statement exactly as she made it. That, in my view, is an example of what I call neutered journalism.

Surely it is the responsibility of journalists to contact the police, the Passport Office or the government and ask a simple question:

"Is this correct?" If deletion from the electoral rolls can affect passport renewal, the public deserves to know. Even if the authorities refuse to answer, that refusal itself becomes part of the story.

Instead, if journalists merely reproduce what one person says without verifying it, they are doing little more than stenography.

That is not journalism. Journalism must go beyond recording statements. It must explain what is happening. That is what I meant when I criticised neutral—or rather neutered—journalism.

Journalism Must Evolve

Prema Sridevi: I completely understand what you mean. In many ways, newspapers once served as platforms for official statements. Political parties, governments and corporations relied on newspapers to communicate with the public. Today, that has fundamentally changed. Politicians have their own social media handles. Corporations have their own communication channels.

If the Prime Minister wants to address the country, he no longer depends on newspapers or television. He can communicate directly with millions of people. The same applies to companies like Reliance or virtually any major organisation.

So journalism also has to evolve. Today we have artificial intelligence, social media and instant access to information. People no longer need newspapers merely to know what someone has said. What AI cannot do, however, is stand on the ground, ask difficult questions, challenge official narratives and investigate facts. That remains the role of journalists. If we stop doing that, I don't think people will continue to need us.

R. Rajagopal: Exactly. That is the essential point.

If a Passport Isn't Proof, What Is?

Prema Sridevi: At The Probe, we recently examined the government's position that a passport is merely a travel document. We reviewed several official documents issued by the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Citizenship Rules and OCI guidelines. Many of those government documents clearly describe an Indian passport as evidence of citizenship. That raises an obvious question. If the government's own documents treat a passport as proof of citizenship, how should citizens understand statements suggesting otherwise?

Coming back to your case—you were denied passport renewal because your name had been removed from the electoral rolls. Then the country was told that a passport itself does not establish citizenship. If a passport is not proof, then what is? How does an ordinary Indian establish that he or she is an Indian citizen? What, in your view, should be the way forward?

"Why Do We Need a Citizenship Certificate at All?"

R. Rajagopal: At present, India does not issue a universal citizenship certificate. The only people who receive such certificates are those who acquire Indian citizenship through naturalisation. For most Indians born in this country, there is no single document officially called a citizenship certificate.

My question therefore is a different one. Why do we need one? A passport serves its purpose for international travel. Birth certificates serve their purpose. Educational records serve theirs. Why should every citizen constantly be required to prove citizenship through some additional document? The argument often made is that India faces the problem of illegal infiltration. If someone has violated the law, then of course the law must deal with that person.

But if someone wishes to live in India peacefully, I believe India should have the confidence to see that as a tribute rather than a threat. India is a large, civilisational nation. It should behave like one. We should not behave like a frightened or insecure power.

Historically, India's strength has always been its openness and pluralism. We became a great civilisation because we accommodated diversity. Attempts to make everything uniform—one language, one identity, one way of thinking—risk weakening that diversity.

That diversity is our greatest strength.

Personally, I do not believe we need a separate citizenship certificate for every individual. If someone genuinely belongs here and lives here, that itself should matter.

The Larger Question: Is It the Process or the Intent?

Prema Sridevi: The government justified the Special Intensive Revision exercise by saying it was necessary to identify illegal infiltrators. However, after lakhs of names were deleted from the electoral rolls in West Bengal, very few cases of actual infiltrators appear to have been established.

You have spent decades reporting on West Bengal and national politics. Looking at the larger picture, what do you believe is actually broken here? Is it the process, or do you think the problem lies in the government's intent?

"Citizens Are Being Kept in a Constant State of Flux"

R. Rajagopal: In the absence of concrete evidence that individual officials are deliberately breaking the process, I would have to say that the issue lies with the intent behind the policy. If you look back over the past several years—from demonetisation onwards—you notice a pattern. Citizens are constantly being kept on their toes. They are never allowed to settle into a sense of certainty.

It reminds me of military training. In the army, soldiers are constantly kept moving because they are not meant to become comfortable.

Similarly, citizens today seem to be kept in a permanent state of administrative uncertainty.

When people are constantly worrying about whether they are still recognised as citizens, whether their documents are valid, whether they will be allowed to vote, or whether they will have to prove themselves yet again, they stop asking larger questions. They stop asking whether the government has performed well. They stop asking whether their children will find employment.

They stop asking about climate change, clean air, drinking water or the quality of education. Instead, they spend their time digging through old records, tracing their family histories and worrying about whether they possess the right documents.

At the same time, we are constantly encouraged to look backwards—to celebrate what happened hundreds or thousands of years ago. We become obsessed with the past rather than focusing on either the present or the future. That, to me, is one of the biggest problems.

If the objective is to keep citizens permanently occupied with proving themselves, then this constant state of uncertainty begins to make sense.

"Demand Clarity From Your Representatives"

Prema Sridevi: For someone who does not enjoy the visibility that you do—someone without public recognition or influence—what would your advice be if they found themselves facing the same situation?

R. Rajagopal: Honestly, I feel rather helpless when I try to answer that question. The only practical advice I can offer is this: Citizens must immediately approach their elected representatives. Whether it is their councillor, MLA or Member of Parliament, they must insist on clarity. They must ask their representatives to obtain clear answers from the government. We often judge our elected representatives primarily on roads, bridges or infrastructure projects. Those things matter. But there are issues that are even more fundamental. Civil rights. Voting rights. The security of one's identity.

These are the questions representatives should be helping citizens resolve. If those rights become uncertain, then all the other achievements lose some of their meaning. I wish I had a better answer. Unfortunately, I don't.

Can Journalism Still Hold Power Accountable?

Prema Sridevi: After nearly thirty-five years in journalism, do you still believe Indian journalism can hold power accountable? Or do you think something important has been lost?

R. Rajagopal: I absolutely believe journalism can still hold power accountable. There are many outstanding journalists and independent news organisations doing excellent work today. Online journalism, in particular, has produced some remarkable reporting. If, however, you are asking me whether I still have faith in India's mainstream media, then my answer is no. I have very little faith in it at present.

Perhaps that will change if another political party comes to power. Perhaps then the mainstream media will suddenly rediscover its mojo and begin asking difficult questions again. But under the present circumstances, I do not expect mainstream journalism to perform that role. Fortunately, independent journalists continue to do important work. That gives me hope.

Prema Sridevi: When your passport is eventually renewed—and I sincerely hope it will be—what would you like to say to the bureaucracy that made you prove your own citizenship?

R. Rajagopal: I don't really have anything I wish to say to the bureaucracy. My concern is much larger than my own passport. What I want is clarity. The government needs to answer one simple question: If someone's name has been deleted from the electoral rolls during the SIR process, are they eligible for passport renewal or not?

People deserve a clear answer. I am not in any particular hurry to travel abroad. That is not the issue. The issue is that millions of people deserve to know where they stand. The Ministry of External Affairs could clarify this in a matter of minutes. A simple statement would suffice.

Either say that electoral roll deletion has no bearing on passport renewal, or say that it does. But the present uncertainty serves no one. As for me, I don't wish to engage in arguments with bureaucrats. I have spent nearly a hundred days trying to explain my situation. They did not listen then. I don't expect them to listen now.

Prema Sridevi: Mr. Rajagopal, thank you for speaking with The Probe. We sincerely hope your case is resolved at the earliest and that the system addresses the questions your experience has raised.

Your passport may eventually be renewed. Your name may eventually return to the electoral rolls.

But there are lakhs of ordinary Indians who do not have a public platform, whose voices are rarely heard, and who may be facing the same uncertainty without anyone speaking on their behalf.

The government says that a passport is not proof of citizenship. Electoral rolls can erase a citizen's name overnight. Until there is a clear answer to a simple but fundamental question, we will continue asking it: In this country, what truly proves that an Indian belongs?

I'm Prema Sridevi, Editor-in-Chief of The Probe.

Thank you for watching.

Confessions of a Smiling Desk: How the RBI's New Rulebook Quietly Catalogues Every Dark Pattern Played on the Indian Bank Customer

There is a useful rule of thumb for reading any regulator's circular: a watchdog only bothers to ban what is already flourishing. Nobody legislates against a problem that does not exist. So when the Reserve Bank of India, in a formal directive, finds it necessary to forbid something called "confirm shaming," we may take it as settled that confirm shaming has been alive and well across the screens of Indian banking, doing quiet damage to ordinary savers.

The columnist Dhirendra Kumar put the point with surgical precision: read the new rules as confessions, and the picture of what has been normal practice becomes uncomfortably clear. That is the lens worth keeping as we walk through what the RBI has actually done.

The temptation is to treat the headline — eleven RBI dark patterns banned — as the whole story. It is not. The annexure listing those eleven tricks is the most quotable page and the least important. The real document is the body of the directive, where every clause has been written to fit an abuse already in progress.

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

When the Watchdog Finally Names the Game

The directive did not arrive out of a clear sky. It is the final, hardened version of draft amendments the RBI floated on 11 February 2026, opened to public comment, and then notified on 15 June 2026 as the Responsible Business Conduct (Second Amendment) Directions, 2026, to take effect from 1 January 2027. It amends the parent Responsible Business Conduct Directions of 2025 and applies, in mirror-image versions, to commercial banks and to NBFCs.

The political weather had already turned. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had publicly lashed banks for mis-selling, asking the obvious and awkward question: if a home loan is already secured by the house itself, why is a fresh insurance policy being pressed on the borrower as though it were part of the paperwork?

Beneath the rhetoric sat a number that explains everything. Over a decade, the State Bank of India's bancassurance income — the fee it earns for selling insurers' products across its counters — multiplied roughly sixfold to around Rs 2,766 crore, even as its interest income, the thing a bank is actually supposed to do, merely doubled. For some insurers, bancassurance now supplies close to four-fifths of premiums. The branch had, in part, quietly become a commission shop with a banking licence.

A LocalCircles survey gave the rot a face: 57 per cent of respondents reported "basket sneaking" on banking platforms, 51 per cent ran into "forced action," and 46 per cent were worn down by "nagging." The RBI was not inventing villains. It was catching up to them.

Eleven RBI Dark Patterns — Read as an Itemised Confession

The directive defines a dark pattern, in language borrowed from consumer-protection law, as any interface or design choice engineered to mislead or trick a user into doing what they did not intend, by subverting their autonomy and choice. What makes these patterns dark is that the deceit lives inside the design itself — the easy, obvious, default path is reliably the seller's path, and the trap springs shut on the careful and careless alike.

Consider the list, and hear the admission in each.

False urgency — the countdown timer and the "offer ends soon" banner — exists for one purpose: to stop us comparing and make us click. Basket sneaking slips an extra charge or donation into the cart at checkout, hoping we will not notice the swollen total. Confirm shaming needles us with guilt for declining — "No, I don't want to protect my family." Forced action makes us surrender unrelated data or sign up for a service we never wanted, just to finish the task we came for. The subscription trap makes leaving harder than joining — the cancel button buried, or a branch visit demanded to undo what a single tap created.

Interface interference dresses the bank's preferred option in bold and bright while greying out the alternative, quietly defaulting our consent to "Yes." Bait and switch serves us something other than what was advertised. Drip pricing shows the seductive headline rate and reveals the processing fees only after we have waded through five screens. Disguised advertisement masquerades as news or honest user content. Nagging pings us again and again to enable a service we have already refused. And trick wording leans on vague phrasing and double negatives in consent boxes, so that we cannot tell what we have just agreed to.

Every one of these RBI dark patterns is now prohibited on banks' apps and websites. Every one of them, by the logic of the ban, was until now somebody's quarterly target.

The Structural Bans That Cut Deeper

Behind the eleven photogenic RBI dark patterns sit the structural clauses, and these are where the directive truly bites.

Compulsory bundling is dead — in principle. A bank may no longer make the sale of one product conditional on the purchase of another. Where a product genuinely is needed as a risk mitigant — say, insurance behind a home loan — the customer must be free to buy it from any provider they choose, not herded into the bank's captive partner. The implication is liberating and overdue: the policy "folded quietly into the loan you came in for" was, the rule concedes, routine.

A bank cannot fund a purchase out of your own loan without your knowledge. The directive forbids a bank from using a sanctioned loan facility to bankroll a customer's purchase of a product — its own or a third party's — without explicit consent. Read that twice. It exists because banks were, in effect, lending people money and spending it for them on products they had not knowingly chosen.

Consent must now mean consent. Approval has to be captured deliberately — via signature, OTP, a recorded confirmation, or a clearly marked consent block. Where a form carries several products, each must be explained and separately agreed. The default box must read "No" or "I do not agree." The pre-ticked box, that small masterpiece of inertia, is finished. But the deeper move is this: even valid consent no longer protects the bank. A product can still be ruled mis-sold if it was unsuitable for the customer in the first place. The legal question shifts from "Did you sign?" to "Why was this ever sold to you?"

Also Read:  GST Invoice Fraud: Why ₹58,772 Crore Slipped Through Audits

Suitability becomes a legal duty. Before selling, a bank must assess whether the product fits the person — weighing age, income, financial literacy and risk tolerance against the product's complexity, fee structure, risk-return profile and time horizon. This is the most quietly damning clause in the document, because to mandate that a bank check suitability is to admit that, until now, checking suitability was nobody's job.

The kickback is cut at the root. Bank staff selling third-party products may no longer accept any incentive, direct or indirect, from the provider whose products they push. The commission was the engine of the entire arrangement. Whether this clause holds is the open question of the whole reform.

Accountability outlives the sale. Within thirty days of any sale, the bank must seek feedback to confirm the customer actually understood what they bought and the risks attached. And if mis-selling is established, the remedy is not a token gesture: the bank must refund the entire amount paid, cancel the sale where applicable, and compensate the customer for losses. A standing refund mechanism is the kind of permanent cure one builds only for a chronic, recurring disease.

The salesman steps into the daylight. Promotional calls and visits are limited to a 9 a.m.–5 p.m. window; marketing may go only to those who opted in; unsubscribing must be as easy as subscribing; agents on bank premises must be visibly distinguishable from bank staff; and — crucially — the bank carries the liability whether the mis-sale was committed by a relationship manager, a call-centre voice, or an outsourced agent. The bank can no longer hide behind the intermediary it hired to do its selling.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

What Changes for the Customer — and What Does Not

For the customer, the gains are real and concrete. Fewer ambush add-ons at checkout. A genuine right to take the insurance elsewhere. A default that no longer quietly says yes on your behalf. A thirty-day window in which the bank itself must ask whether you understood what it sold you. And, where it all goes wrong, a refund rather than a runaround.

But it is worth being clear-eyed. The earnings at stake are enormous — bancassurance is too lucrative to surrender quietly — and history is not encouraging. The insurance regulator and the markets regulator have each issued earnest instructions against mis-selling before, and the practice carried on more or less undisturbed. A ban on staff commissions does not abolish sales targets, appraisal pressure, or the thousand soft coercions that never appear in a circular. And the whole edifice rests on enforcement: on the RBI actually establishing mis-selling, actually compelling refunds, actually penalising the bank rather than the branch clerk. A right that is expensive and exhausting to claim is, for most people, no right at all.

What Banks and Customers Must Now Do Differently

The honest lesson for banks is that the regulatory frame has shifted from disclosure to design and suitability. It is no longer enough to bury a fact in a footnote and call the customer informed. The bank must now show that its digital journeys do not steer, that its products fit, and that its consent is real. The smart institutions will treat this as a chance to rebuild trust. The foolish ones will re-engineer the same coercion in subtler clothing and wait for the next circular to catch up.

The harder lesson is for customers. The RBI has handed them an authorised list of the dark patterns played at the desk — avoiding them remains their own work. The single most reliable defence has not changed and will not change: a firm reluctance to buy anything offered unasked, and the instinct to treat every unsolicited pitch as a sales pitch until proven otherwise. Ask who earns what when you sign. Insist on buying the bundled insurance elsewhere. Read the box that defaults to "No," and leave it there until you are sure.

Also Read:  The CAG Cannot Audit Ram Mandir. Its Officer Is on the Trust.

RBI Dark Patterns: The Test Is in the Teeth

The test of this directive will not be its drafting, which is genuinely good, but its enforcement. Three things will decide whether 1 January 2027 marks a turning point or another well-meaning footnote.

First, penalties large enough that mis-selling costs the bank more than it earns, applied to the institution rather than the foot soldier.

Second, closing the incentive gap: as long as the commission survives somewhere in the chain, pressure will find a new channel, so the RBI, IRDAI and SEBI will have to move in concert. 

Third, transparency the public can actually see — the half-yearly suitability reviews, the dark-pattern audits, the mis-selling refunds made visible, so that the customer can judge the bank by its record rather than its brochure.

Until then, the wisest reading of this document is the one offered at the start. The RBI has, in the language of prohibition, confessed on the industry's behalf. The confession is welcome. The penance is yet to be seen.

Government's Own Documents Prove Passport Is Citizenship Proof

The Indian government made a stunning claim on June 24, 2026. At the 14th Passport Seva Divas, a Ministry of External Affairs official told the nation that the passport Indians carry is "not a document of citizenship" — merely a travel document to cross borders, nothing more.

The timing could not have been worse. The Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls is currently underway across 16 states and 3 Union Territories, with over 3.94 lakh Booth Level Officers going door to door verifying the citizenship of crores of voters. For ordinary Indians facing citizenship questions during this exercise, the passport should have been the ultimate safeguard. The government just said it is not.

But The Probe's investigation found something the government did not mention: its own live documents, on its own official portals, treat the passport as citizenship proof. Here is what they say.

Also Watch:  Is Your Passport Proof of Citizenship? The Government Says No — But Its Own Documents Say Yes

The Ministry of Home Affairs — the ministry that actually administers citizenship law in India — runs the Overseas Citizen of India scheme at ociservices.gov.in. At Question 7 of the official OCI FAQ, the MHA lists documents that serve as "Evidence of Being a Citizen of India." The first document on the list is the Indian passport. It is listed as independently sufficient — no corroboration required. The same FAQ states at Question 28: "Indian Passport is given only to an Indian citizen." This is the Home Ministry's own language, on its own portal, directly contradicting the MEA's Passport Seva Divas statement.

The MEA's own passport application process deepens the contradiction. Annexure E — the standard declaration form every adult must sign before a passport is issued — requires the applicant to solemnly declare: "I am a citizen of India by birth/descent/registration/naturalization." Citizenship is the foundational precondition for receiving the document. A false declaration invites criminal prosecution. The government issues the passport exclusively on the strength of a sworn citizenship declaration — then turns around and says the passport has nothing to do with citizenship.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

Documents That Establish Passport as Citizenship Proof

The MEA's own Passport Manual — the Compendium of Instructions and Guidelines Relating to Issue of Passports, disclosed under RTI and hosted on passportindia.gov.in — states plainly that the passport "provides evidence of the holder's nationality" and places this "in the same category as any other evidence of the citizenship status of an individual." The MEA's own rulebook equates passport evidence with citizenship status. The same ministry that made the June 24 statement cannot claim ignorance of its own governing document.

The most legally significant citizenship proof contradiction comes from the Citizenship Rules, 2009 — subordinate legislation made under Section 18 of the Citizenship Act, 1955, published by the MHA on mha.gov.in. Rule 3 of Schedule III states that obtaining a foreign country's passport is "conclusive proof" of having acquired that country's citizenship. The government applies this principle when the passport is foreign. It refuses to apply the same principle when the passport is its own.

The government's entire defence rests on Section 20 of the Passports Act, 1967, which allows the Central Government, in rare public interest cases, to issue a passport to a non-citizen. The argument: since passports can technically go to non-citizens, they cannot prove citizenship. But Section 20 opens with "Notwithstanding anything contained in the foregoing provisions" — parliamentary language for a narrow exception to a general rule. The general rule, in Section 6(2)(a) of the same Act, requires passport authorities to refuse applications from non-citizens. Passports go to citizens by default. Section 20 is a tightly controlled exception requiring approval at the level of Secretary or Joint Secretary. The government is using a marginal exception — applicable to an infinitesimal fraction of all passports ever issued — to deny the citizenship proof value of every ordinary Indian's passport.

If Passport Is Not Citizenship Proof, What Is?

This is the question the government has not answered. The Supreme Court has ruled that Aadhaar is proof of identity and residence, not citizenship. Voter ID is not citizenship proof. The 2013 Bombay High Court judgment held that birth certificates and Aadhaar may be insufficient for those born after July 1, 1987. The Bombay High Court reaffirmed in 2025 that Aadhaar, PAN, and voter ID do not establish citizenship.

Section 14A of the Citizenship Act, inserted in 2003, mandates a National Register of Citizens and National Identity Cards for every Indian. That provision has sat on the books for 22 years. It has never been operationalised outside Assam.

The government has placed the burden of proving citizenship on every individual Indian, declared that no single document can discharge that burden, and refused to create the document the law itself requires. Having told crores of passport holders what does not prove their citizenship, the government now owes them an answer to the only question that matters: what does?

Read The Probe's full investigation: Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

On 23 June 2026, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) charged 455 people — including 90 doctors and licensed professionals — in a sprawling USD 6.5 billion healthcare-fraud takedown that reached into 45 states and roped in a record number of Medicaid fraud units. India, by ugly contrast, has spent the same era perfecting the art of the slow walk: a medical regulator twice rebranded but never truly reformed; state councils that close two complaints in four years; a top commission that hears every doctor's appeal and slams the door on every patient's; an estimated 5.2 million malpractice incidents a year against barely a thousand recorded death-by-negligence cases; fake cardiologists leaving corpses in their wake; and the Ayushman Bharat flagship insurance scheme so leaky that 7.5 lakh "beneficiaries" once shared a single phone number. This deep dive reads the American spectacle against the Indian silence and asks why one system prosecutes its bad doctors while the other hands them a shield.

Also Read:  Ayushman Bharat Works on Paper. Ground Reality Tells Different Story.

America's $6.5 Billion Blade

The American announcement had the swagger of a Hollywood trailer. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stood at the lectern and warned that fraudsters could no longer rip off American taxpayers, vowing to find them, seize their assets, and prosecute to the hilt. Behind the bravado sat hard numbers: the 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown produced charges against 455 defendants — among them 90 doctors and other licensed medical professionals — over more than USD 6.5 billion in false claims, with patient harm that in places extended to death.

The Justice Department flexed an unprecedented coalition: cases in 56 federal districts, 45 states and territories, and 50 state Medicaid Fraud Control Units participating, billed as the most in the department's history.

The cast of alleged villains was lurid enough to script a limited series. A nurse practitioner in Texas allegedly billed Medicare for needless wound care and splurged the proceeds on jewellery and luxury cars.

A mental-health company owner allegedly hunted the homeless, billing for crisis services never delivered.

A hospice owner allegedly paid a funeral-home insider for the names of the freshly deceased so he could bill Medicare for phantom end-of-life care.

Most chilling was Florida cardiologist Jason Finkelstein, 53, charged in an USD 89 million scheme that preyed on student-athletes terrified of dropping dead on the field — administering tests they did not need and rubber-stamping results as normal without reading them. One young patient whose results were falsely certified as fine later died with undetected heart problems.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. framed the moral stakes bluntly, calling such fraud a theft that puts lives at risk, while Dr. Mehmet Oz's Medicare agency leaned into stopping dodgy payments before they ever leave the treasury. The wound-care racket alone accounted for USD 2 billion in Medicare payouts to one Arizona outfit and another USD 906 million in Texas, and the Medicaid component — 295 defendants and over USD 518 million — set a department record for sheer headcount.

For all the muscle, this is also a machine that runs every year: in 2025, the department charged 324 defendants over a far larger USD 14.6 billion, and critics in Democratic-led states have grumbled that the enforcement spotlight swings their way for political reasons — a reminder that even aggressive prosecution invites questions about even-handedness.

Also Read:  Medical Negligence Law in India: Why Doctors Escape Accountability

India's Regulator: Rebranded, Not Reformed

Now turn the camera east, and the contrast curdles. India's problem has never been a shortage of scandal; it is a chronic, almost institutional reluctance to pull the trigger. Consider the regulator itself. The old Medical Council of India (MCI) became a byword for rot, culminating in 2010 when its President was arrested by the CBI for allegedly demanding a Rs 2 crore bribe to bless a Punjab medical college. Investigators hauled away gold and silver by the kilo, and the President of India dissolved the council outright on 15 May 2010.

A court had earlier branded him an unscrupulous and corrupt man unfit to police medical education, yet the body limped on until it was finally replaced by the National Medical Commission (NMC) in September 2020. The reform was supposed to be a clean break. It has not felt like one. When the CBI in mid-2025 uncovered alleged collusion between health-ministry officials and private colleges — arresting NMC inspectors caught swapping Rs 55 lakh — The Lancet relayed the verdict of researchers who called the NMC, in effect, a rebranded version of its predecessor, hobbled by centralised power and bureaucratic drift.

If the regulator at the top is compromised, the machinery at the bottom is simply asleep. The Maharashtra Medical Council received 219 complaints against registered doctors between 2022 and August 2025 — allegations of negligence, malpractice, and fake certificates — and resolved exactly two, both dating to 2022, meaning fewer than one percent were acted upon.

Officials defend the torpor as the price of a quasi-judicial process; patients experience it as a void. The asymmetry runs deeper than backlog. RTI data show that since the NMC came into being, its Ethics and Medical Registration Board has admitted and processed 185 appeals filed by doctors against state-council rulings — while rejecting all 256 appeals filed by patients or their relatives, on a strained reading of the law that treats only "practitioners" as eligible to appeal. Doctors get a national forum; the bereaved get a closed gate. The 2002 ethics regulations promised accountability; the lived reality is a club adjudicating complaints against its own members.

The Trembling Scalpel Doctrine

The criminal-justice side is, if anything, more skewed — and here the courts deserve a share of the critique. In Jacob Mathew v. State of Punjab (2005), the Supreme Court read the word "gross" into Section 304A of the penal code for professionals, insisted that no private negligence complaint proceed without a credible second medical opinion, and warned that arresting a doctor should be the exception, not the rule.

The intention — shielding honest physicians from vengeful litigation and "trembling scalpels" — was humane. The effect has been near-immunity. Criminal prosecutions under 304A are rare, and the data gap is staggering: a petitioner before the Supreme Court in late 2025 contrasted research suggesting up to 5.2 million malpractice incidents a year with NCRB records showing a mere 1,019 death-by-medical-negligence cases logged across the entire 2017–2022 window.

The same petition noted the quiet scandal underneath: two decades after Jacob Mathew directed the Union and states to frame statutory rules governing such prosecutions, those rules still do not exist, and the government cheerfully admits it keeps no centralised data on medical-negligence cases at all. One cannot prosecute what one refuses to count.

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

The Damoh Fake Doctor and Ayushman Bharat's Open Door

What that vacuum permits is best illustrated by Damoh. In April 2025, a man named Narendra Vikramaditya Yadav was arrested for impersonating the celebrated British cardiologist John Camm and performing roughly 64 cardiac procedures — including 45 angioplasties — in just 42 days at a Madhya Pradesh hospital, after which at least seven patients died, five of them on the very day of their operations. He had allegedly forged degrees and registrations and operated for years across multiple states.

The hospital, empanelled under the Ayushman Bharat scheme, had never bothered to verify his credentials, and its licence was suspended only after the bodies piled up and a human-rights complaint forced the issue. A genuine system of pre-emptive verification — the kind Dr. Oz's agency boasts of building to stop payments before fraud completes — would have flagged a phantom cardiologist long before the seventh funeral. That the Ayushman Bharat network admitted such a provider without elementary checks is not an anomaly; it is a symptom.

Ayushman Bharat's Ghost Patients and Stolen Billions

Which brings us to the money — and to insurance fraud that in India bleeds directly from the public purse. The Comptroller and Auditor General's audit of the Ayushman Bharat–PMJAY scheme is a horror anthology in spreadsheet form: as many as 7.49 lakh beneficiaries registered against a single mobile number, 9999999999, with other dummy strings close behind; Rs 1.1 crore paid in Madhya Pradesh alone for 403 patients already dead; the same patient "admitted" to multiple hospitals at once with no system to catch it. Independent reporting found that roughly a quarter of Ayushman Bharat claims from Punjab and Haryana were fraudulent as far back as 2022, that 341 hospitals across 16 states were caught gaming the scheme in 2019, and that smaller hospitals registered ghost patients while larger ones perfected dual billing and upcoding.

The government's own answer to Parliament conceded penalties of around Rs 122 crore on more than 1,504 hospitals, with 1,114 de-empanelled and 549 suspended — numbers that sound tough until you set them beside a single American indictment worth USD 89 million against one doctor. India's response to Ayushman Bharat fraud leans almost entirely on administrative wrist-slaps: de-empanelment, suspension, the occasional fine. The criminal handcuff, the asset seizure, the perp-walk press conference — the instruments Washington wields with theatrical relish — are conspicuously, chronically absent.

The Takedown vs The Tiptoe

The critical lesson is not that America has solved healthcare fraud. Its takedowns are annual precisely because the fraud is perennial, the dollar figures are partly a product of an enormous federal-payer system, and the selective geography of enforcement raises fair questions about political motive. The lesson is structural. The American architecture fuses regulators, inspectors-general, the FBI, and dedicated fraud prosecutors into a coalition that treats medical fraud as crime — punishable, seizable, indictable. India's architecture, by inheritance and by judicial design, treats it as a delicate professional matter best handled by doctors judging doctors, slowly, behind closed doors, with the criminal law held at arm's length and the data deliberately uncollected.

One country built a machine to find the bodies and follow the money; the other built a shield and then forgot to count the casualties. Until India decides that a dead patient is a victim of a crime — and not merely the unfortunate by-product of an "error of judgment" — the Ayushman Bharat scheme will keep paying ghost claims, fake doctors will keep finding empanelled hospitals, and the gulf between the takedown and the tiptoe will only widen.

On June 24, 2026, at the 14th Passport Seva Divas, a Ministry of External Affairs official told the nation something that stopped crores of passport holders in their tracks. The passport they carry, the official said, is "not a document of citizenship." It is, in the government's new framing, merely a travel document — a tool to cross borders, not to establish who you are as a citizen of India. 

The statement landed in the worst possible moment for ordinary Indians. The Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls — SIR Phase III — is currently underway across 16 states and 3 Union Territories with over 3.94 lakh Booth Level Officers going door to door, verifying the citizenship of crores of voters. The final electoral roll for the exercise will be published between September and December 2026 in staggered phases. For a voter facing questions about their citizenship during the electoral roll revision, a passport should have been the ultimate safeguard. Government records have long presented the passport as citizenship proof. But the Centre has now argued that possession of a passport is not conclusive evidence of Indian citizenship, creating a striking contradiction with its own documentation.

But The Probe has found that the same government — in its own live application forms, its own statutory rulebook, its own passport manual, and the Citizenship Act itself — says the opposite.

Watch: Neeraj Thakur, Editor, The Probe, explains the government's passport-citizenship contradiction in conversation with Sanket Upadhyay, Senior Journalist and Founder, DoubleCheck.

Four Government Documents That Contradict the Government

The Probe examined four sets of primary government documents, all currently live on official Indian government portals. None of them are historical. None are buried in archived circulars. They are the active instruments through which the Government of India conducts its own business — and every one of them treats the passport as evidence of citizenship. Here is what each one says.

Also Read:  The CAG Cannot Audit Ram Mandir. Its Officer Is on the Trust.

Instance 1: The Home Ministry's Own OCI Portal Accepts the Passport, Alone, as "Evidence of Being a Citizen of India"

Government accepts passport as citizenship proof

The Ministry of Home Affairs — not the MEA, but the ministry that actually administers the citizenship law in India — runs the Overseas Citizen of India scheme through the national portal at ociservices.gov.in. The footer of the page states plainly: "Content managed by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA)."

The OCI scheme exists for a specific, carefully guarded purpose: to determine whether a foreign national has a genuine, citizenship-based claim of Indian descent. This is not a loose administrative process. It is the government's own mechanism for distinguishing people who were Indian citizens from people who were not.

At Question 7 of the official OCI FAQ, the form asks for "Evidence of self or parents or grandparents or great grandparents — Being a citizen of India at the time of, or at any time after the commencement of the Constitution i.e. 26.01.1950." It then lists the documents that will satisfy this requirement. The first document on the list is: "Copy of the Indian Passport."

The crucial word is "or." The documents are listed as alternatives — the passport, or a Domicile Certificate, or a Nativity Certificate, or an OCI/PIO card. They are each independently sufficient. An applicant who produces the Indian passport need not produce anything else. The Home Ministry asks for no corroboration. On its own, the passport satisfies the government's requirement to prove that a person was a citizen of India.

The contradiction does not stop there. Question 28 of the same FAQ asks whether an OCI cardholder can obtain a normal Indian passport. The answer: "No. Indian Passport is given only to an Indian citizen." The Home Ministry's own words, in the same document, on the same page — the passport is given only to a citizen. 

And Question 25, also on the same page, defines an OCI cardholder as "a foreign national holding passport of a foreign country and is not a citizen of India," confirming that the entire OCI exercise is about sorting citizens from non-citizens — and that in doing so, the government reaches first for the Indian passport as citizenship proof.

This language is mirrored in a High Commission of India, London OCI guidelines document dated June 17, 2025, and on an Embassy of India, Stockholm page last updated June 19, 2026 — five days before the MEA's Passport Seva Divas statement. The contradiction is not buried in history. It is live government practice.

Instance 2: The MEA's Own Passport Application Requires a Sworn Citizenship Declaration Before Issuing the Passport

Passport Citizenship Proof? MEA Requires a Sworn Citizenship Declaration Before Issuing One

If the MEA believes the passport is not a citizenship proof, it may wish to revisit its own application process — because the passport is issued only after an applicant swears, under oath, that they are a citizen of India.

Annexure 'E' is the "Declaration of the Applicant," published by the Ministry of External Affairs on its own passport portal, passportindia.gov.in. It is the standard government form that an adult applicant must sign to obtain a passport. A false statement on it now invites criminal prosecution under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and the Passports Act, 1967.

Clause 3 of Annexure 'E' reads: "That I am a citizen of India by birth/descent/registration/naturalization and that I have neither acquired the citizenship of another country nor have surrendered or been terminated/deprived of my citizenship of India."

Three things about this clause matter for the current controversy. First, the applicant is not asked to prove their address, their identity, or their residence — they are required to declare, specifically, that they are a citizen of India. Citizenship is the foundational precondition of the document.

Second, the form names the precise legal basis: "by birth/descent/registration/naturalization" are the four statutory modes of acquiring Indian citizenship under the Citizenship Act, 1955. The passport application does not bypass the Citizenship Act — it runs directly through it, requiring the applicant to locate themselves within its framework before the passport is issued.

Third, the declaration is sworn and criminally enforceable. Lying on it is a prosecutable offence.

The MEA's position, articulated by a senior official on June 24 and subsequently defended by the Centre, is that a passport is 'not a document of citizenship. Yet its own application process — managed by the same ministry, on the same domain — issues that passport only after the applicant has solemnly declared, under one of the four statutory modes of the Citizenship Act, that they are an Indian citizen. A document the government produces exclusively on the strength of a sworn, criminally enforceable citizenship declaration cannot coherently be called a document unrelated to citizenship.

Instance 3: The MEA's Own Passport Manual Calls the Passport "Evidence of the Citizenship Status of an Individual"

Passport Citizenship Proof? The Ministry's Own Manual Equates Passport Evidence With Citizenship Status

The third contradiction comes from the most authoritative source of all — and from the very ministry that made the June 24 statement.

The Ministry of External Affairs publishes a Passport Manual, formally titled the Compendium of Instructions and Guidelines Relating to Issue of Passports. It is disclosed under the Right to Information Act and hosted on the government's own passport portal. It is the MEA's official governing document — the rulebook that determines how India issues passports. And it states, in plain language, that the passport is citizenship proof.

The relevant passage, in full: "Thus, a passport provides evidence of the holder's nationality, but this is placed in the same category as any other evidence of the citizenship status of an individual. Under Section 20 of the Passports Act, 1967, Indian passports/travel documents may be issued to non-nationals. This power, however, vests with the Central Government only."

The first sentence is unambiguous. The Manual calls the passport "evidence of the holder's nationality" and then — critically — places that evidence "in the same category as any other evidence of the citizenship status of an individual." This collapses the very distinction the MEA tried to open between "nationality" and "citizenship." In the MEA's own Manual, the passport's evidence of nationality is expressly equated with evidence of citizenship status. They are the same question, and the passport is evidence of both.

The second sentence — the Section 20 exception — is addressed in detail below. But note what the Manual itself does not say: it does not say the Section 20 exception cancels the general rule in the first sentence. The Manual presents them as two separate things — the rule, and a narrow carve-out. It is the MEA official who collapsed the two, using the exception to deny the rule. The Manual never makes that move.

Instance 4: The Citizenship Rules Call a Passport "Conclusive Proof" of Citizenship

Passport Citizenship Proof: The Legal Framework Links Passports Directly to Citizenship

The most legally devastating contradiction in this episode is not in a consular guideline or an application form. It is in the subordinate legislation framed under the very statute the government has been citing as its own authority — the Citizenship Act, 1955.

Rule 3 of Schedule III of the Citizenship Rules, 2009 — made under Section 18 of the Citizenship Act, 1955, and published by the Ministry of Home Affairs on its own website at mha.gov.in — provides: "The fact that a citizen of India has obtained on any date a passport from the Government of any other country shall be conclusive proof of his having voluntarily acquired the citizenship of that country before that date."

The government's own foundational citizenship framework — the law the MEA, the MHA, and every court cites as the final word on who is and is not an Indian citizen — declares that a passport is conclusive proof of citizenship. Not one document among several. Not evidence to be weighed. Conclusive proof. The government's own law holds that when a person holds a country's passport, that fact is conclusive proof they are a citizen of that country.

Passport Not Citizenship Proof: Why Government’s Section 20 Defence Doesn't Hold

The government's entire legal architecture for the claim that a passport is not a citizenship proof rests on a single provision: Section 20 of the Passports Act, 1967. It reads in full: "Notwithstanding anything contained in the foregoing provisions relating to issue of a passport or travel document, the Central Government may issue, or cause to be issued, a passport or travel document to a person who is not a citizen of India if that Government is of the opinion that it is necessary so to do in the public interest."

The government's logic is straightforward: passports can be issued to non-citizens, therefore a passport cannot prove citizenship. If even a non-citizen can hold one, then holding one proves nothing.

But Section 20 opens with the words "Notwithstanding anything contained in the foregoing provisions" — which is parliamentary drafting language for "this is a carve-out from the normal rule." The normal rule sits in Section 6(2)(a) of the same Act: a passport authority shall refuse to issue a passport on the ground "that the applicant is not a citizen of India." The default position in law is that passports go only to citizens. Section 20 is the narrow exception.

And narrow it is. The MEA's own Passport Manual — the same document that calls the passport "evidence of the citizenship status of an individual" — describes Section 20 in the very next sentence: "This power, however, vests with the Central Government only" and cannot be exercised by any other Passport Authority. Every case requires the prior approval of the Central Government at the level of Secretary, Additional Secretary, Joint Secretary, Director or Deputy Secretary in charge of the Passport Division. 

The government is using a marginal, tightly-controlled exception — applicable to an infinitesimal fraction of all passports ever issued — to deny the documentary significance of the passport carried by every ordinary Indian. It is, in the most precise sense, using the exception to erase the rule. And the MEA's own Manual refuses to do this: it states the general rule in one sentence and the Section 20 exception in the next, keeping them clearly apart. 

Also Read:  S-400 Is Not Sudarshana Chakra. Here's the Hard Truth

If a Passport Is Not Citizenship Proof, What Is?

This is the question the government has not answered — and the one that makes the latest controversy more than a bureaucratic clarification.

The MEA's stand was triggered by a specific, urgent concern: whether a voter excluded from the SIR electoral rolls could use their Indian passport to establish citizenship and defend their right to vote. The government said no. But in saying no, it exposed a vacuum it created and has never filled.

Consider what else does not prove citizenship in India. The Supreme Court has ruled that Aadhaar is proof of identity and residence, not citizenship — a position Aadhaar's own legal framework has always held, since a resident foreign national can lawfully obtain one. Court rulings have held that the Elector's Photo Identity Card is not proof of citizenship. 

The 2013 Bombay High Court judgment held that a birth certificate, passport, or Aadhaar card may not be sufficient to prove citizenship for those born after July 1, 1987. Last year, the Bombay High Court reaffirmed in Babu Abdul Ruf Sardar v. State of Maharashtra (2025) that possession of an Aadhaar card, PAN card, or voter ID does not, by itself, establish Indian citizenship.

The MHA declined in Parliament last year to specify which documents prove citizenship, pointing only to the Citizenship Act and the routes through which citizenship may be acquired.

Under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946, the burden of proving Indian citizenship always lies on the individual, not the government. The state places the burden of proof on the citizen — while having never created a universally accessible document through which that burden can be discharged.

There is a statutory obligation that makes this failure particularly striking. Section 14A of the Citizenship Act, inserted by the 2003 amendment, provides for the creation of a National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the issuance of National Identity Cards to every citizen. That provision has been on the books for 22 years. It has never been operationalised outside Assam. 

The consequence of this abandonment is stark. No national citizenship card exists. No nationwide list of documents acceptable as citizenship proof has been notified. As of June 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs has not finalised one.

The government has constructed a legal labyrinth: it places the burden of proving citizenship on the individual citizen, declares that no single document — not the passport, not Aadhaar, not the voter ID — can serve as conclusive proof, yet offers no authoritative list of which documents, in combination, will suffice. It has rendered the passport legally meaningless while refusing to create the very document the law mandates.

Having said what does not prove citizenship, the government now carries an obligation it cannot defer: it must say what does.

The crisis in India's judiciary has long ceased to be merely a question of pending cases and delayed hearings. It has emerged as one of the country's largest hidden economic liabilities, an important contributor to governance failures, and perhaps the most under-examined institutional challenge confronting the Republic. 

With more than five crore pending cases, severe shortages of judges, mounting undertrial populations, rising litigation costs, and declining confidence in contract enforcement, delays across the judiciary impose enormous social, economic, and constitutional costs upon society. The consequences extend far beyond courtrooms, affecting investment, business confidence, prison administration, governance, social justice, and public trust in institutions.

This deep dive report argues that a carefully designed performance audit of judicial administration by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), without intruding into judicial decision-making, could represent one of the most significant accountability exercises in contemporary India. The larger question, however, is whether the CAG itself retains the institutional appetite to enter what may be the last great unaudited domain of governance.

India today may be the world's largest democracy, but it is increasingly becoming one of the world's largest waiting rooms. Citizens wait for bail, businesses wait for contract enforcement, governments wait for land acquisition disputes to conclude, accident victims wait for compensation, families wait for inheritance disputes to end, and undertrial prisoners wait for trials that often take longer than the sentences eventually awarded. Justice delayed has gradually ceased to shock the nation because delay itself has become institutionalised. What was once considered an exceptional failure has now become a routine feature of legal administration.

Also Read:  Pending Bail Cases: Do We Need Reforms or Revolution? 

When Delay Becomes the System

The scale of the crisis is now too large to be dismissed as routine pendency. According to the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), district and subordinate courts alone carry nearly 4.96 crore pending cases, of which about 3.84 crore are criminal and 1.13 crore are civil. The Supreme Court's own NJDG shows more than 93,000 pending cases before the apex court.

A Rajya Sabha reply of April 2026, relying on NJDG data as on 9 March 2026, placed pendency at 64.01 lakh cases in High Courts and 4.95 crore cases in subordinate courts. Taken together, India is not facing a backlog; it is facing a judicial avalanche.

The human cost is even more disturbing. NCRB's Prison Statistics India 2022 showed that 4,34,302 of India's 5,73,220 prisoners were undertrials, accounting for 75.8 per cent of the prison population, while prisons operated at 131.4 per cent occupancy. This means that India's jails are not merely overcrowded; they are overcrowded substantially because the trial process itself is slow.

In February 2024, the Ministry of Home Affairs confirmed in Parliament, relying on NCRB data, that thousands of undertrial prisoners had been confined for more than one year as on 31 December 2022. For the poor, delayed justice is not an abstraction. It is debt, stigma, lost livelihood, broken families, and incarceration without conviction.

Several High Courts function with substantial judicial vacancies, while trial courts struggle with shortages of judges, prosecutors, court staff, and infrastructure. India continues to have one of the lowest judge-to-population ratios among major democracies. The Law Commission had recommended decades ago that the country should move toward fifty judges per million population, yet actual availability remains significantly lower.

The judiciary's own leadership has repeatedly acknowledged the gravity of the problem. Former CJI N. V. Ramana bluntly described governments as the "biggest litigants", accounting for nearly 50 per cent of pending cases, and linked the "docket explosion" to the non-performance of various wings of the executive and legislature.

Former CJI Sanjiv Khanna, immediately after assuming office, identified reduction of case backlogs, affordable access to litigation, and simplification of complex legal procedures as core priorities. In a later official interview, he stated that case arrears and delays in decisions are pressing issues that directly undermine society's faith in the rule of law, adding that timely justice is not merely a right but a necessity for every litigant and citizen.

These are not stray laments. They are institutional warnings from the very top of the judiciary. When the NJDG, NCRB prison statistics, Supreme Court data, and successive Chief Justices all point in the same direction, the conclusion becomes unavoidable: delayed justice has become one of India's largest governance failures. It clogs courts, fills prisons, weakens contract enforcement, paralyses government decision-making, burdens businesses, and corrodes public faith.

Also Read:  Allegations of backdoor appointments in wings of J&K judiciary opens up can of worms

The Hidden Price of a Slow Judiciary

The consequences are no longer confined to court statistics. Judicial delay has evolved into a serious developmental issue. Economic growth suffers when contracts cannot be enforced within reasonable timeframes. Investors demand higher risk premiums. Commercial disputes outlive business cycles. Infrastructure projects remain stalled for years. Banks struggle to recover dues. Governments accumulate contingent liabilities arising from unresolved litigation. In effect, India has accumulated not merely a fiscal deficit but a growing justice deficit.

The hidden economic costs of a slow judiciary rarely appear in government accounts. National income statistics do not capture the value of investments postponed because of litigation. Budget documents do not estimate the costs arising from delayed land acquisition, unresolved tax disputes, stalled infrastructure projects, or prolonged commercial litigation. Businesses incur significant legal expenditures, lose valuable managerial time, and often postpone expansion decisions because of uncertainty surrounding judicial outcomes. Contract enforcement remains one of India's weakest areas in global assessments of the business environment, despite improvements in several other regulatory indicators.

Also Read:  The CAG Cannot Audit Ram Mandir. Its Officer Is on the Trust.

Justice for Sale, Delay for the Poor

The burden of delay falls disproportionately upon the poor. Wealthier litigants can afford experienced legal counsel, seek interim relief, pursue appeals, and sustain prolonged litigation. Poor litigants cannot. Rising legal expenses, repeated adjournments, and procedural complexities frequently make justice inaccessible to ordinary citizens. Public interest litigations have undoubtedly expanded access to constitutional remedies, yet routine civil and criminal justice remains expensive, slow, and intimidating. The constitutional promise of equality before law increasingly encounters the economic reality of unequal access to justice.

Perhaps nowhere is this crisis more visible than in India's prisons. The overwhelming majority of prisoners in Indian jails are undertrials who have not yet been convicted. Many remain incarcerated for periods longer than the sentences they might eventually receive. Delays in investigation, shortages of prosecutors, repeated adjournments, inability to secure bail, and inadequate legal representation combine to create a situation where punishment frequently precedes conviction. Entire families descend into poverty when the principal earning member remains imprisoned. Children discontinue education, debts accumulate, social stigma intensifies, and reintegration into society becomes increasingly difficult.

The Government That Sues Everybody

The government itself has become one of the largest contributors to congestion in the judiciary. Successive Chief Justices, Law Commission reports, and judicial pronouncements have repeatedly observed that government departments, public sector undertakings, and statutory authorities account for a substantial proportion of pending litigation.

Appeals are frequently filed as a matter of administrative routine rather than legal necessity. Officials often prefer litigation to decision-making because litigation transfers responsibility to courts, while settlements and compromises may attract allegations of impropriety. Consequently, the state increasingly litigates against citizens, against businesses, against its own agencies, and sometimes even against itself.

Despite repeated policy interventions, the problem persists. Alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, arbitration, mediation, and Lok Adalats have shown promise but have not substantially reduced the overall burden. Public sector enterprises continue to litigate against each other. Government departments routinely pursue appeals despite adverse precedents. Mediation remains underutilised. Arbitration proceedings frequently migrate back into conventional litigation. Consequently, the judiciary continues to absorb disputes that could have been resolved elsewhere.  

New Laws, Old Problems

The introduction of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam represents perhaps the most ambitious criminal law reform exercise in independent India. These enactments seek to modernise criminal procedures, strengthen digital evidence, prescribe timelines, and reduce procedural delays.

Electronic filing, virtual hearings, video testimony, and digital records have the potential to improve efficiency substantially. However, Indian governance has often demonstrated considerable legislative enthusiasm without corresponding implementation capability. The true measure of these reforms will lie not in their enactment but in their impact on pendency, disposal rates, and access to justice.

Digitising the Queue

Technology has undoubtedly introduced important changes. The e-Courts Mission Mode Project, virtual hearings, electronic filing systems, and digitised case records have modernised significant aspects of judicial administration. Yet technology by itself cannot compensate for structural deficiencies. Judicial vacancies remain unfilled. Adjournments continue. Infrastructure shortages persist. Procedural complexity survives. Digital platforms frequently coexist with manual processes rather than replacing them. In several respects, technology has accelerated existing processes without fundamentally redesigning them.

An equally neglected dimension concerns the enormous public expenditure incurred on the justice delivery system. Court buildings, judicial salaries, digital infrastructure, legal aid systems, prison administration, prosecution services, and tribunal structures involve substantial expenditure of public funds. Yet remarkably little attention is devoted to measuring outcomes. Questions regarding productivity, case disposal efficiency, resource utilisation, infrastructure management, vacancy management, and the effectiveness of judicial reforms remain inadequately examined. Such questions fall squarely within the traditional domain of performance auditing.

Should the CAG Audit India's Judiciary?

This inevitably raises the question of whether the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) should undertake a performance audit of judicial administration. The immediate objection concerns judicial independence, a principle that lies at the heart of constitutional democracy. Judicial decisions cannot and must never become subjects of audit scrutiny. Courts must remain free from executive influence and external interference. However, a distinction must be maintained between judicial decision-making and judicial administration. A performance audit would not examine the correctness of judicial decisions. It would examine systems, processes, efficiency, economy, and effectiveness.

A carefully designed audit could examine judicial vacancies, infrastructure utilisation, case-flow management, digital systems, undertrial detention, legal aid mechanisms, implementation of reforms, management of court infrastructure, and utilisation of public resources. It could identify bottlenecks, compare performance across jurisdictions, and quantify economic costs. Several Supreme Audit Institutions elsewhere do examine judicial administration without questioning judicial independence or judicial decisions.

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

Will the CAG Finally Step In?

The larger and perhaps more uncomfortable question concerns the CAG itself. Historically, the institution displayed considerable willingness to undertake politically sensitive performance audits involving telecommunications, coal allocation, natural resources, infrastructure projects, and public-private partnerships. These audits shaped national debates and demonstrated the potential of performance auditing as an instrument of accountability. Yet many observers increasingly believe that over the past decade, relatively few all-India performance audits have ventured into highly sensitive areas of public policy, governance failures, or politically contentious subjects. Whether this perception is entirely justified may remain debatable, but its existence cannot be ignored.

A judiciary performance audit would therefore test not merely the constitutional boundaries of audit jurisdiction but also the institutional confidence and courage of the CAG itself. It would require the institution to enter perhaps the most sensitive domain of governance while carefully respecting judicial independence. It would invite criticism from multiple quarters. It would raise difficult questions concerning accountability, transparency, and institutional performance. Yet it may also provide one of the most important contributions to governance reform in contemporary India. 

The Last Great Frontier of Public Audit

The Indian judiciary remains among the nation's most respected institutions, and its independence remains absolutely non-negotiable. Nevertheless, institutions derive legitimacy not only from constitutional status but also from performance and public confidence. Judicial delay today represents one of India's largest governance failures, one of its greatest hidden economic costs, and one of its deepest social injustices. The issue is no longer whether reforms are necessary; the issue is who will independently measure their effectiveness.

A limited but professionally designed performance audit of judicial administration would strengthen rather than weaken public confidence in the justice delivery system. It may provide evidence where opinion currently dominates, identify best practices, quantify economic costs, and suggest systemic improvements. Whether the CAG ultimately chooses to enter this territory remains uncertain. However, if the administration of justice has indeed become one of India's largest unresolved governance challenges, it may also represent the last great frontier of public audit.

The queues outside Indian courtrooms continue to lengthen. The nation continues to wait. The question is whether its institutions are willing to measure the cost of that wait.

What the CAG Told The Probe When We First Raised the Alarm

In November 2024, The Probe sent a detailed questionnaire to the then Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Girish Chandra Murmu, asking two pointed questions about a serving Indian Audit and Accounts Service (IA&AS) officer, Ashutosh Sharma, who held a position on the Construction Committee of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust. First, had the CAG formally authorised this appointment? Second, if authorisation had been granted, under which specific regulations or guidelines was a serving government officer permitted to participate in a religious trust while discharging his official responsibilities?

The questions were not asked arbitrarily. They were rooted in Rule 15 of the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964 — the code of conduct that governs all central government servants, including IA&AS officers.

Rule 15(2) lists the specific categories of outside activity a government servant may undertake without prior government sanction. These include "honorary work of a social or charitable nature" under clause (a), and management of "a literary, scientific or charitable society" or a club for sports, cultural or recreational activities under clause (d). The list is exhaustive. A religious trust — established by the Government of India specifically to construct and manage a Hindu temple — does not fall within any of these permitted categories. Any engagement outside what Rule 15(2) specifically permits requires prior government sanction under Rule 15(1).

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

What the CAG Said on Ram Mandir — and What It Did Not

The CAG's written response to The Probe, dated 14 November 2024, confirmed that the appointment had indeed been authorised. It stated: "At the request of the Chairman of the Construction Committee of Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, which was created by Govt. of India, the Competent authority formally authorised Shri Ashutosh Sharma to the Construction Committee; he works purely on honorary basis in the Trust's committee."

However, the response did not name the competent authority that granted the sanction, nor did it cite the specific rule or clause under which the sanction was granted.

A DoPT Office Memorandum (OM) (No. 11013/5/88-Estt.(A) dated 11.07.1988), issued under Rule 15 of the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964 adds a further dimension. On the question of government servants and religious organisations, it states: "As regards participation in purely religious activities, the freedom to profess and practice any religion is guaranteed under the Constitution of India itself. Since, however, the Constitution of India is based on the principle of secular state, the Government servants, while they are free to profess and practice any religion in their private lives, should so conduct themselves in public as to leave no room for any impression to arise that they do not subscribe to the secular philosophy of the State."

The same OM places the burden of compliance squarely on the officer and the institution. It states: "The responsibility for the consequences of the decision to join any organisation and participating in its activities will rest with the employee himself. It is, therefore, the duty of the Government employee who wishes to join any organisation or association to satisfy himself that its activities and objectives are not of such a nature as are likely to attract action under any of the provisions of the Conduct Rules. In the circumstances, any plea of ignorance or misconception as to the Government's attitude regarding participation in the activities of such organisations would not be tenable."

In simple terms, the rules are clear: ignorance is not an excuse. It was Ashutosh Sharma's own responsibility to check whether joining the Ram Mandir Trust was permitted under the Conduct Rules before accepting the position. The CAG, as the institution that authorised the appointment, bears the same responsibility. Neither can now claim they did not know.

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

A Second Problem — Even If You Accept the CAG's Explanation

But even accepting the CAG's response entirely at face value — that the Ram Mandir Trust was created by the government, that a competent authority formally authorised the appointment, and that Ashutosh Sharma served purely on an honorary basis — a separate and equally serious problem arises.

The land on which the Ram Mandir stands was not donated or privately purchased. It was acquired by the State under the Acquisition of Certain Area at Ayodhya Act, 1993, and subsequently vested in the Trust by the Central Government. Through gazette notification S.O. 568(E) dated 5 February 2020, the government directed that all rights, title and interest in the entire acquired area — including the inner and outer courtyard of the disputed site — shall vest in the Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra from the date of publication in the Official Gazette.

This is the fact that anchors the case for scrutiny. The Ram Mandir Trust's defenders argue that because the temple was built with voluntary public donations rather than money drawn from the Consolidated Fund, the CAG has no business examining its accounts. But that argument addresses only one half of the public-resource question. The construction may have been donation-funded, but the ground beneath it is public property — land compulsorily acquired by the State under a parliamentary statute and transferred to the Trust by government order. A body that holds, manages and develops publicly acquired land is not a purely private entity dealing only in private money. It is the custodian of a public asset, handed to it through a statutory process, for a public purpose.

That distinction matters for the audit question. The vesting of acquired land establishes precisely the kind of public-resource nexus that brings a body's affairs within the legitimate reach of public scrutiny — and it is the reason the demand for a CAG audit cannot be dismissed as a purely political one. 

Whether the formal trigger is invoked under Section 14 (1) of the CAG Act, on the question of government financing, or under Section 20 (1), through a Presidential reference, the legal pathways exist. What the land-vesting does is establish the public interest that justifies using them: a trust entrusted with public land and now handling thousands of crores in public donations is, by any reasonable standard, a matter the nation's supreme audit institution may legitimately examine.

These provisions are no longer abstract. As allegations of financial misappropriation at the Ram Mandir have mounted, calls for independent scrutiny have multiplied across the political spectrum. Some reports have claimed the diversion of devotee donations could exceed Rs 200 crore. 

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has gone further, alleging the figure may be as high as Rs 5,000 crore — though that number is an unverified political claim, larger than the roughly Rs 3,500 crore in total donations the Ram Mandir Trust itself has reported since 2020, and appears to reach back to collections from earlier decades for which no public accounting has ever been placed on record.

The demand has now moved from political platforms into court. A public interest litigation before the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court has specifically sought a comprehensive CAG audit of the Trust's financial records, alongside a CBI probe. The petitioner, according to the plea, had earlier written directly to the CAG seeking intervention, but received no response. The legal pathway under Section 20(1) — a Presidential reference inviting the CAG to audit a body not otherwise within its remit — is precisely the mechanism such a demand would travel through. It exists, it is available, and the public-resource character of the Trust's holdings is what gives the demand its weight.

And here lies the contradiction at the heart of the matter. Even if the public interest is established, even if a Presidential reference is made, even if every legal pathway is found to be open — one question remains, and it is the question the CAG cannot answer cleanly. Can the CAG actually conduct such an audit? Can the nation's supreme audit institution independently examine the accounts of an entity whose own governance body includes one of its serving officers? The demand for a CAG audit assumes an auditor standing at arm's length from the audited. At the Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra, that distance does not exist.

Also Read:  CAG Officer Suspended: The Probe Impact

Who Is Ashutosh Sharma — and What Is He Doing on This Committee?

Ashutosh Sharma, a 1997-batch IA&AS officer currently serving as Principal Accountant General (Audit), Haryana, Chandigarh, remains listed to this day as a Member of the Construction Committee on the Trust's official website.

Which raises a question: what exactly does Sharma do as a member of the Construction Committee? The Trust's website offers no description of his responsibilities. The CAG's written response to The Probe in November 2024 said that he only "works purely on an honorary basis in the Trust's committee" — and nothing more. Is his role limited to advising on construction-related matters, as the committee's name might suggest? Or does it extend to financial oversight, governance, and the utilisation of funds?

His own credentials make the construction-advisory characterisation difficult to sustain. Sharma's basic qualification is an MBBS. His professional qualifications are an MBA, a CIA — Certified Internal Auditor — and a CISA — Certified Information Systems Auditor. There is nothing in his educational or professional background that relates to architecture, engineering, or infrastructure. Everything in his training and certification is financial and audit-oriented. His career bears this out: his postings include Director (IT Audit), Chief Auditor NDMC, and a string of international audit assignments in which the CAG deployed him as its representative for the external audit of global bodies — among them the World Health Organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and United Nations entities — alongside membership of INTOSAI's IT-audit working groups. 

The CAG's own deployment history, in other words, treats Sharma as a senior audit and finance specialist, not a construction expert. A Certified Internal Auditor with an MBA, sitting on the committee of a trust managing thousands of crores in public donations, is not there to advise on brickwork.

His seniority at the time of appointment adds another dimension. Sharma's posting history, available on the government's IA&AS officer database, shows that he was listed on the Construction Committee while serving as Principal Director & Secretary to the C&AG of India — a headquarters post he held from March 2020 to July 2021, at the heart of the institution's administrative operations. He then rose, on 1 July 2021, to Director General & Secretary to the C&AG of India — one of the senior administrative posts in the institution and held it until 18 November 2024, all while remaining listed on the Construction Committee. 

He was subsequently posted as Director General (GST-II), and then, from April 2025, as Principal Accountant General (Audit), Haryana. This was not a junior field officer with a peripheral role. This was the administrative head of India's supreme audit institution, simultaneously listed as a member of the Construction Committee of a government-created religious trust managing donations that investigators now suspect may have been misappropriated to the tune of hundreds of crores.

The Construction Committee is chaired by Nripendra Mishra, a former Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, and includes retired IAS officers, a former Director General of the BSF, and a professor of architecture. It is a governance and oversight body, not merely a technical one. Sharma retires on 30 June 2032. He is not a retired officer with a fading association. Sharma is a serving CAG official with six years of service remaining, currently posted as Principal Accountant General (Audit), Haryana, Chandigarh — and as of June 23, 2026, his name remains on the Ram Mandir Trust's Construction Committee page.

Also Read:  CAG Report Leak: Who Leaked Reports to Tip the Scales in BJP's Favour?

What the Donation Fraud Allegations Reveal

The controversy over the Ram Mandir's finances erupted publicly on June 7, 2026, when Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav alleged that crores of rupees in offerings made by devotees at the Ayodhya temple had been misappropriated. While Trust General Secretary Champat Rai immediately dismissed the claims, stating that internal audits had found "nothing noteworthy," the denial failed to hold.

What followed was a cascade of revelations that transformed the matter from a political allegation into an active criminal investigation.

According to media reports, internal audits conducted by the Trust's statutory auditor V. Sankar Aiyar and Co. and technology firm TCS had flagged severe cash-handling vulnerabilities. Separately, multiple reports confirmed that ten chest-boxes of gold and silver offerings were removed from the temple without corresponding accounting entries, and that CCTV footage covering seven to eight months from the cash-sorting area had been deleted.

On June 13, 2026, the UP government, at the direction of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, constituted a three-member SIT comprising Vijay Vishwas Pant, IAS, Divisional Commissioner, Lucknow; Kiran S., IPS, Inspector General of Police; and Neel Ratan, Special Secretary, Finance Department. The SIT was given 15 days to submit its final report.

According to reports, the SIT and investigating agencies have so far recovered nearly Rs 2 crore in unaccounted cash. Of this, Rs 10 lakh was seized by the Special Operations Group from the residence of counting staffer Lavkush Mishra — part of it concealed beneath a pile of cow dung. The SIT separately recovered an undisclosed quantity of gold from the residence of Ramshankar alias Tinnu Yadav, who is considered a close associate of Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust General Secretary Champat Rai.

On June 21, the SIT met Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and submitted its preliminary investigation report, briefing him on over 60 hours of investigation conducted over six days. The same day, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge alleged that approximately Rs 5,000 crore had been misused in connection with the Ram Temple. "There are reports that about Rs 5,000 crore has been misused. The priests are robbing the money. A loot has happened in the name of Ram," he said at a party convention in Bengaluru. Kharge's figure — larger than the Rs 3,500 crore in total donations the Trust itself has officially reported since its formation in 2020 — is an unverified political allegation. He appeared to be referring to collections dating back to L.K. Advani's Rath Yatra era, for which no public accounting has ever been placed on record.

No FIR, No Arrests — and No Independent Oversight

Notably, despite the recovery of approximately Rs 2 crore in cash and gold from individuals linked to the donation-counting process, no formal arrests have been made and no First Information Report has been registered in the case as of June 23, 2026. 

The absence of an FIR — which would bring the matter under judicial supervision — has drawn sharp criticism from across the political spectrum. AAP's Arvind Kejriwal, Congress MP Tariq Anwar, and Samajwadi Party's Akhilesh Yadav have all specifically demanded that an FIR be registered and formal arrests be made. The SIT, which reports directly to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, has no obligation under its current mandate to register an FIR — a fact that critics say leaves the entire investigation without independent judicial oversight.

This is the vacuum the demand for a CAG audit is meant to fill. With no FIR yet, no judicial supervision, and an SIT answering to the very government that appoints the Trust's officials, the call for the Comptroller and Auditor General to step in has only grown louder. 

But that demand runs into the problem this story began with. The institution being asked to audit the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust still has one of its own serving officers listed on the Trust's Construction Committee. An audit is only as credible as the distance between the auditor and the audited. At the Ram Mandir Trust, that distance does not exist. Until it does, the CAG cannot answer the call for scrutiny without first turning the question on itself.

This story is part of The Probe's ongoing public interest coverage of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. Related stories: "CAG: Stalled Audits, Alleged Political Bias Shake Constitutional Body" | "CAG: Allegations of Corruption, Cronyism and Cover-Up" | "CAG Officer Suspended: The Probe Impact"

Six Days After His Third Birthday, Sarthak Yadav Was Dead

Sarthak Yadav turned three on December 11, 2025. His parents, Siddharth Yadav and Raja Devi Yadav, celebrated the birthday of their only child at their home in Bina tehsil, in Madhya Pradesh's Sagar district. He had been ill — diagnosed with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a blood cancer that attacks children — and for two months, the family had been making the long journey from their village to AIIMS Bhopal for chemotherapy. They believed they were in the right place. AIIMS Bhopal, an institution of national importance funded by the Government of India, is one of the country's premier medical centres. They trusted it with their son's life.

Six days after his third birthday, Sarthak was dead — not from the cancer he had been fighting, but from a fatal dose of a hazardous chemical that a nurse at AIIMS pushed into his IV line while his father stood at his bedside and begged her three times to stop.

On December 15, 2025, Siddharth admitted his 3-year-old son Sarthak to AIIMS Bhopal after he developed a fever. A bone marrow biopsy was scheduled for the evening of December 16 — a standard procedure in leukaemia cases, in which a sample of bone marrow is extracted and sent to a pathology laboratory for examination. For such procedures, biopsy samples must be immediately preserved in formalin — a solution of formaldehyde used in laboratories to fix tissue and prevent it from decaying before it reaches the pathologist.

Formalin is a hazardous chemical. When it enters the human bloodstream, it destroys blood cells and causes near-instantaneous cardiovascular collapse. It has no place on a patient's bedside unless it is sealed, clearly labelled, and being used for a specific, imminent procedure.

On the evening of December 16, duty nurse Anuka Gujarati brought a tray to Sarthak's bedside in preparation for the biopsy. The tray contained needles, syringes, and a syringe filled with formalin. Then the biopsy was postponed. It was rescheduled for the next morning. The formalin-filled syringe, according to the hospital's own internal inquiry, should have been discarded at that point. Protocol required it. It was not discarded. It was left on the tray, near the child's bed, overnight.

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The morning of December 17 began with routine ward work. Sarthak had been kept on an empty stomach as required ahead of the rescheduled biopsy. Around 6 am, nurses began administering IV fluids. At some point, the DNS bottle got blocked — the IV fluid stopped dripping. When nursing officer Madhubala Sharma arrived for her routine morning visit, Siddharth told her the bottle was not working. She said she would flush the IV line. She looked around for a flushing syringe.

Speaking to The Probe, Siddharth described what happened next. "I told her there was no flusher there," he said. "She then picked up the syringe from the tray. I told her three times not to take it and explained that it was meant for the biopsy. I even told her that the doctor was just outside near the counter and she should cross-check with her." Sharma, he says, was dismissive. "She went ahead anyway, saying, 'Are you the doctor or are we the doctors? We know what we are doing.'" She used the formalin to flush Sarthak's IV line. "In less than a minute," Siddharth told The Probe, his voice breaking, "my child was gone. His last words were — 'Mother, just hold my hands' — and that was it. He was gone forever."

Sarthak was rushed to the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit. Doctors administered emergency CPR. He was soon pronounced dead. AIIMS Bhopal's own fact-finding committee, constituted the same day and completing its inquiry within 48 hours, found that the cause of death was directly associated with the formalin injection, that Madhubala Sharma had administered it without verifying the contents of the syringe, and that Anuka Gujarati had failed to discard the formalin-filled syringe after the biopsy was postponed — a direct violation of protocol.

But the account of what happened at AIIMS Bhopal after Sarthak's death — in the ward, in the hours that followed, and in the six months since — is, if anything, more troubling than the medical negligence itself.

Siddharth told The Probe that as his son was being rushed to the PICU, Madhubala Sharma snatched the formalin syringe from his hand. "I immediately called the doctor and she came running," he said. "I told the doctor that the nurse had administered the wrong injection. Later, Madhubala Sharma snatched away the syringe from my hand." When doctors came out and declared Sarthak dead and Siddharth returned to the ward, he found the scene had been cleared. "By the time I came back to the ward, they had removed the tray and everything from sight," he told The Probe. "Madhubala Sharma was also nowhere to be seen. Everything had just disappeared without a trace."

What the Police Told The Probe — And What They Did Not

An FIR in the case of Sarthak's death was registered at Bagsewaniya police station in June 2026 — six months after he died at AIIMS Bhopal. Madhubala Sharma was charged under Section 106(1) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for causing death by gross negligence. Anuka Gujarati was charged under Section 286 for negligent handling of a dangerous chemical. By the time The Probe spoke to SHO Amit Soni of Bagsewaniya police station, neither accused had been arrested.

"We could not get them yet," Soni told The Probe. He confirmed that AIIMS Bhopal's own inquiry had found the nurses negligent, but said police were now seeking further clarity from the hospital. "In the AIIMS report it was found that they were negligent," he said, "but then the question is what action was taken by AIIMS Bhopal against them. We have sought them a report on this." When The Probe asked whether both nurses had been suspended, Soni's answer revealed a significant discrepancy from what had been reported elsewhere. "One was suspended," he said. "The second is working there only. Madhubala was suspended by them but... why don't you talk to AIIMS Bhopal only."

Multiple media outlets, reporting on the FIR registration, had stated that both nurses were suspended and both were absconding. When The Probe pressed Soni on the absconding claim, he said: "Till the time we don't get them, we will consider them as absconding." He confirmed that as of the date of The Probe's interview, police had not been able to record the statements of either accused nurse.

The six-month gap between the death and the FIR is itself a story of institutional failure — and the account of how it unfolded comes most clearly from the man who lived it. Siddharth says he went to Bagsewaniya police station immediately after his son's death on December 17, 2025. He was turned away. "They even refused to take my complaint," he told The Probe.

"I called the CM helpline and they took our complaint." What followed was months of jurisdictional buck-passing. "The Bagsewaniya police station did not file an FIR in December," he said. "They unnecessarily sent it to Bina police station because they said that you stay in Bina so your case will be registered there." Bina is the tehsil in Sagar district where the Yadav family lives. "It took us nearly two to three months to get the file transferred from Bina to Bagsewaniya again," Siddharth told The Probe, "and then finally in June the FIR was registered."

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What AIIMS Bhopal Told The Probe — And Why It Raises More Questions Than It Answers

When The Probe contacted AIIMS Bhopal for a response to the questions this case raises, we were directed to Medical Superintendent Prof. Vikas Gupta. His account, placed alongside what SHO Soni told The Probe, reveals a set of direct contradictions — and a picture of how AIIMS has handled the aftermath of a medical negligence death that should alarm anyone who has ever trusted a government hospital with a family member's care.

On the most basic question — the status of the two accused nurses — Prof. Gupta confirmed what SHO Soni had indicated and what most media outlets had missed entirely. "Just one," he told The Probe, when asked whether both nurses had been suspended. "The nurse who injected has been suspended." Anuka Gujarati, whose failure to discard the formalin syringe created the conditions for the tragedy, remains employed at AIIMS Bhopal.

"Anuka Gujarati has been served a showcause notice because she did not follow the protocol," Prof. Gupta said. When The Probe asked directly whether she was still working at the hospital, he confirmed it. "Yes, she is still working," he said, adding that she had been moved out of patient-facing duties.

The showcause notice, Prof. Gupta explained, was issued following the fact-finding committee's findings — the same committee that completed its work within 48 hours of Sarthak's death in December 2025. When The Probe asked what action had been taken since, the Medical Superintendent said: "We have given her a showcause notice and we are yet to take further action." Six months had passed at the time of this conversation. The showcause notice had been given. Nothing more had been done. Anuka Gujarati, found negligent by the hospital's own inquiry in a case where a three-year-old child died, continues to draw a salary from the institution.

On the fact-finding process itself, Prof. Gupta told The Probe: "When this happened, the same day we had initiated an inquiry committee. We call it the fact-finding committee — it took two days. It recorded the evidence, it recorded the statements of everyone. The finding was that she — Madhubala Sharma — injected, and the cause of death appears to be temporarily associated with the injection."

The Probe then asked Prof. Gupta about Anuka Gujarati's role. His response was telling. "She kept the formalin there," he said. "As per procedure, formalin was supposed to be discarded, but the procedure was not done at that time." When The Probe pointed out that if Gujarati had not left the formalin syringe on the tray, the injection could not have taken place — making both nurses equally responsible for the child's death — Prof. Gupta pushed back. "No, no, it is not like that," he said. "There are protocols for discarding but there are more stringent protocols for injecting into the body. Until unless I don't confirm what is inside the syringe, I will not inject." The Medical Superintendent of AIIMS Bhopal was, in effect, arguing that the nurse who failed to discard a hazardous chemical is less culpable than the nurse who failed to check what she was injecting — even though both were found negligent by the hospital's own inquiry, and even though one without the other would not have resulted in a child's death.

Sarthak's father, Siddharth, puts it more plainly. "I feel it is totally wrong to not suspend Anuka Gujarati," he told The Probe, "because it is her carelessness in the first place that actually triggered off the whole chain of events. Both are equally responsible."

The contradictions between what the police and AIIMS Bhopal told The Probe run deeper than the question of the nurses' status. SHO Soni told The Probe that police had sought an action taken report from AIIMS Bhopal on the disciplinary action against the nurses. Prof. Gupta denied this. "Action taken report they have not asked," he told The Probe. "Till yesterday — June 14 — I have not received an action taken report request."

On the police's stated inability to record the statements of either nurse, Prof. Gupta was dismissive. "That is their issue," he said. When The Probe pointed out that AIIMS Bhopal has an institutional responsibility to ensure accused employees are available to police for statement recording, he said: "If that is the case, they should have written to us. They have not written to us saying that they have not been able to locate them."

The police say they have sought a report from AIIMS. AIIMS says they have not received one. The police say they cannot locate the nurses. AIIMS says police have not told them that. Six months after the child's death, the hospital and the police are still contesting the most basic facts of the case.

Settlement Calls, Media Failures, and a Father Who Will Not Be Bought

In the months between Sarthak's death and the registration of the FIR, Siddharth says he received multiple calls from various quarters urging him to settle the matter out of court and not pursue a criminal case. One of those calls, he told The Probe, came from the family of one of the accused nurses. "I also got a call from the husband of one of the accused nurses," he said, "who told me: 'Tell us what you want and we are willing to do everything.'" His response was immediate. "I just told them that you will not be able to put a price on my son's life," he said. "I don't want money. I will move court. Let the honourable court give its verdict."

The Probe has noted this claim carefully. The accused nurse whose family is alleged to have made this approach could not be contacted for comment or rebuttal at the time of publication, and The Probe is therefore not identifying which nurse's family is alleged to have called. The allegation, if established, would raise serious questions about attempts to influence the outcome of a criminal case. The Probe has not been able to independently verify the call beyond the father's account.

The registration of the FIR in June 2026 brought the medical negligence case to wider public attention for the first time. The coverage that followed, however, got two basic facts wrong: many outlets incorrectly reported that both nurses had been suspended, and that both were absconding. The Probe's reporting — involving direct interviews with the hospital's Medical Superintendent, the investigating police officer, and the victim's father — establishes that one accused nurse remains employed at the hospital, that she has received only a showcause notice in six months with no further action, and that no recorded statement has been obtained from either accused. The failure of early media coverage to go beyond the FIR document and ask basic questions — of both the police and the hospital — gave AIIMS Bhopal's handling of this case a pass it did not deserve.

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AIIMS Bhopal Cannot Investigate Itself and Call It Accountability

What this case lays bare is the fundamental inadequacy of allowing a premier government hospital to investigate its own medical negligence through an internal fact-finding committee, issue a showcause notice to one accused employee, suspend the other, and consider its obligations discharged. AIIMS Bhopal is not a small private clinic operating outside public scrutiny. It is an institution of national importance, funded by the taxpayers of India, where families from across Madhya Pradesh and beyond bring their most critically ill family members for treatment. The police investigation, meanwhile, has produced an FIR but no arrests, no recorded statements, and a contradictory picture of what communication has or has not taken place between the investigating station and the hospital. 

'No Other Child Should Face What My Son Faced'

Siddharth Yadav is a farmer from a village in Sagar district. He has no legal training and no institutional connections. He brought his only child to AIIMS for chemotherapy because he believed it was the best chance his son had. He watched a nurse push a hazardous chemical into his son's IV line while he pleaded with her to stop. He watched evidence disappear from the ward. He was turned away from a police station. He spent months navigating a jurisdictional dispute he played no part in creating. He has received settlement calls that he has refused.

He is now preparing to fight a criminal case through the courts — not for money, but because he believes it is the only way his son's death will mean anything. "I just want my child to get justice," he told The Probe. "There are other children also in AIIMS Bhopal who are getting treatment. No other child should face what my son faced. We want justice."

Sarthak would have turned four in December 2026. He will not.

What Trump's Iran Deal Really Concedes

On the shore of Lake Geneva this week, at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, Donald Trump spent three days presenting a single achievement to the world's wealthiest democracies: the agreement he says will end the United States' war on Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. By the time the summit closed on June 17, he had what he wanted. The G7's joint statement — notable mainly because Washington signed it at all — praised the American president for the Iran deal. 

On the sidelines, Trump met Narendra Modi for the first time in some sixteen months, a handshake-and-photographs encounter that New Delhi was keen to read as renewed momentum in a relationship strained by tariffs and by Trump's repeated claims of having brokered last year's India-Pakistan ceasefire.

And yet, even as he collected the applause, Trump could not stop reaching for the threat. The memorandum of understanding due to be signed in Switzerland on Friday, he told reporters, was not final. If he did not like the final text, he said, it would be "back to dropping bombs." In the same period he turned on his closest ally, publicly rebuking Benjamin Netanyahu over Israeli strikes on Lebanon that Tehran says have violated the truce eighty-four times since the deal was struck.

This is the tell. A leader negotiating from genuine strength does not need to keep promising to resume the war he is claiming to have won.

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Decoding the Iran Deal: A Restoration, Not a Resolution

The text of the Iran deal itself, as far as its still-unconfirmed contours can be read, is less a framework for peace than a restoration of the world as it stood before the first American and Israeli bombs fell on February 28.

According to the draft circulated by Iranian outlets, the agreement runs to fourteen points: a permanent halt to hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon; the lifting of the US naval blockade within thirty days; the withdrawal of American forces from around Iran; the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz; the suspension of sanctions on Iranian oil sales; the release of twenty-four billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets; and a sixty-day window to reach a final settlement on the nuclear question. Tehran has insisted that talks will not even begin until half those assets are released and the restrictions around Hormuz are lifted. Crucially, Iran's missile programme and its support for allied movements across the region have been taken off the negotiating table altogether.

Read against the demands each side carried into the talks, the ledger is not ambiguous. The US entered the war seeking to dismantle Iran's nuclear capacity, curb its missiles, and break its grip on the Gulf's most important waterway. It is leaving with a sixty-day promise on enrichment, a pledge from Tehran that it will neither build nor acquire a weapon, and very little else. Iran keeps its missiles, keeps its leverage over Hormuz, recovers its frozen money, and watches the sanctions architecture begin to loosen.

The roots of that outcome lie in how each side read the other. From the first round of indirect talks in Pakistan in late March, Iran held to a narrow set of non-negotiables and bent only at the margins, absorbing economic pain while refusing to concede on security. Washington, by contrast, wagered almost everything on coercion — the maximum-pressure sanctions, the maritime blockade, the open-ended threat of escalation — in the belief that enough force would make Tehran's red lines negotiable. It misjudged.

The error is an old one. In Vietnam, the United States misread Hanoi's resolve and launched Operation Rolling Thunder to bomb a largely agrarian adversary into concessions; the threat of pain never outweighed an ideological commitment to survival, and the campaign failed.

Iran's resilience is of a different kind but produces the same result. Having weathered decades of financial warfare, Tehran built an economy designed to absorb sanctions, through import substitution, domestic industrialisation, shadow-banking networks, and a decisive pivot toward Asian buyers. Inflation was brutal and the social cost was real, but the state did not break. By the time American pressure reached its peak, no remaining threat was severe enough to move Iran off its core demands.

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The Non-negotiables

Two demands anchored Iran's position throughout: control of the Strait of Hormuz, and the protection of its nuclear and missile programmes. Around those, Tehran sought precisely the economic concessions that would let it survive the aftermath of the war — sanctions relief, the return of frozen funds, and a stabilising of oil markets that had pushed crude up some forty per cent since the start of the year.

There is a precedent for using a chokehold on energy to force a great power to the table. After the 1973 war, the Arab members of OPEC turned an oil embargo into a diplomatic instrument, compelling Washington into interventions that ended in major concessions, including the return of the Sinai to Egypt. Iran's threat to shipping through Hormuz performed the same function. By demonstrating that it could close, or credibly menace, the artery through which roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil passes, Tehran set the baseline from which it then bargained. Washington's room to counter was narrow, and what remained of its leverage expressed itself mostly as rhetoric.

"Peace with Honour"

Which brings us to the framing. Just as the Nixon administration sold the 1973 Paris Accords as "peace with honour" to dignify a withdrawal from Vietnam, the Trump White House is presenting the Iran deal memorandum as an unqualified victory. Vice-President JD Vance has called the Iran deal the dawn of a "new era" and declared that Iran will never possess a nuclear weapon. Trump, in an interview with the New York Times, mused that the United States might restart military operations or instead become "the guardian of the Middle East" in return for twenty per cent of the region's revenues — a remark that says more about transactional intent than about strategic design.

The honest description is narrower. The United States achieved a ceasefire, an exit, and a reopened waterway. It did not achieve its stated war aims. The danger now is that, in dressing a tactical withdrawal as a strategic triumph, Washington locks itself into caveats and riders that will make the Iran deal harder to keep than it was to sign.

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The Fragile Future

The spoiler is already visible, and it is not Iran. Israel, sidelined from talks it bitterly opposed, has refused to be bound by them. Its forces remain in southern Lebanon, its strikes continue, and its ministers have said so plainly. "Trump's agreement does not bind us," declared National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi has been unambiguous that the war cannot be considered over while Israeli troops occupy Lebanese territory, and that any further strikes will be treated as a breach of the memorandum. That a deal meant to end one war now hangs on the conduct of a third party to it is the clearest measure of how fragile it is.

The wider region is recalculating accordingly. An Iran that has emerged from the war with its leverage intact is a more confident actor than the one that entered it, and a more anxious Israel is a more unpredictable one. The Gulf's ambitious middle powers — the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — must now manage a board on which the old certainties have shifted. Abu Dhabi's turn toward a carefully hedged strategic autonomy looks, in hindsight, like the prudent read.

For India, none of this is abstract. The country imports close to ninety per cent of its crude oil, and before the war nearly 45% of it — along with the overwhelming majority of its cooking gas — passed through the Strait of Hormuz. The fighting forced an expensive scramble. New Delhi rerouted some seventy per cent of its crude away from the strait, invoked the Essential Commodities Act to ration natural gas, and watched refiners absorb supply cuts so that households and farmers could be shielded first. The reopening Trump is celebrating matters to an Indian reader not as a diplomatic abstraction but as the difference between one price and another for a litre of diesel and a cylinder of LPG — the very cooking-gas economy on which the government's own welfare promises rest. A handshake at Évian is pleasant; a stable Hormuz is consequential. And because that reopening rests on a truce Israel has said will not bind it, India's energy calm is only ever one escalation in Lebanon away from the next scramble.

What was signed, or will be on Friday, is not the end of a contest but a pause in one. The United States has bought itself an exit and called it a win. Iran has bought itself survival and the freedom to rebuild. Israel has bought nothing and conceded nothing, and retains the means to unravel the arrangement at a time of its choosing. The Middle East that emerges from this deal is not more settled than the one that went to war in February; it is merely armed with a fresh document. Trump's own warning — that the bombs could fall again if the final text displeases him — is not a guarantee of peace. It is an admission of how little this peace, for now, is worth.

The US-Iran Deal Is Done — But the War's Core Question Remains Unanswered

Shehbaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, which served as the key negotiator between the U.S. and Iran, announced on June 14, 2026, that the two sides had agreed on a deal to end the war. The US-Iran deal will be officially signed on June 19 in Switzerland.

President Donald Trump announced it on Truth Social as a triumph, claiming that the Strait of Hormuz is open for everyone, the U.S. blockade has been lifted, and the oil is flowing again. What Trump did not mention was Iran’s nuclear program and what happens to its enriched uranium stockpile, one of the main reasons cited for starting the war.

The nuclear issue – along with core issues such as ballistic missiles and Iran’s proxies – has been deferred for 60 days.

This raises two important questions: What was the war actually for? And what did the U.S. achieve?

As an international and nuclear security expert, I believe the answer is 'nothing' – and in the process the U.S. lost credibility as a negotiating partner.

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US-Iran Deal: Why the Nuclear Question Is the Hardest

The “rationalist theory of war,” as developed by political scientist James Fearon in 1995, identifies three problems that drive states to war when they would prefer to reach a deal: incomplete information about each other’s resolve; the inability to credibly promise a deal or commitment; and what international relations scholars call the indivisibility problem – when the thing in dispute cannot be split or shared, because it leaves no middle ground to settle on.

The war clarified the first reason. Each side saw what the other would actually do – how much force the U.S. was willing to use and what Iran could absorb while still staying in the fight.

What the war could not solve was the nuclear commitment problem. And this goes far back between the U.S. and Iran.

Iran adhered to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the landmark nuclear deal that restricted Tehran’s nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency verified that Tehran kept uranium enrichment to 3.67% and its stockpile under 300 kilograms – a concentration used to fuel a power reactor but far too low for a weapons program.

But the U.S. walked away in 2018, and Trump later called it “the worst deal ever” over its sunset clauses and on its silence on Iran’s ballistic missiles.

Iran returned to negotiations in 2025, and the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran while those talks were still taking place. Similarly, in February 2026 the negotiations were ongoing and a deal was within reach when Israel and the U.S. struck Iran – killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and lead negotiator Ali Larijani.

The U.S. has demonstrated a record of reneging on its deals and breaking the negotiating process. Which is why Iran now insists on guarantees and demands sanctions relief before signing a deal, and not just good faith.

A state that previously kept its commitments and was still bombed has little reason to accept promises of relief in the future. For this reason, I believe the 60-day deferral is a window for Tehran to watch whether the U.S. and Israel will hold the ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon.

The third problem of indivisibility – when the thing or issue in dispute can’t be split or shared – is why the nuclear question is the hardest.

Most disputes can be split. Sanctions, for example, can be lifted by degrees. Even a nuclear program can be split, which the world saw in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action deal, with centrifuges counted, enrichment capped and a stockpile metered.

What cannot be split is the U.S. demand for zero uranium enrichment and Tehran calling uranium enrichment a sovereign right.

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The 2015 nuclear deal also limited Iran’s centrifuges – the machines that do the enriching – and placed Iran’s nuclear program under the most intrusive inspections, all in exchange for sanctions relief.

The nuclear question was not part of the 2015 deal – it was the actual deal.

During the June 2025 negotiations with Iran, and again in February 2026, the U.S. position was about the nuclear program, but in the opposite direction from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It was not about limits but the total elimination of Iran’s nuclear program.

In both rounds of talks in 2025 and 2026, Washington’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, demanded zero enrichment and the dismantling of Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan – Iran’s three most important nuclear sites. Iran called enrichment a sovereign rightand refused.

Both rounds of negotiations ended in bombings.

The current US-Iran deal to be signed on June 19 does not put a cap on Iran’s enrichment, nor does it discuss the elimination of its nuclear program. It ends the fighting, reopens the Strait of Hormuz and consigns enrichment, the stockpile, missiles and Iran’s regional proxies to 60-day negotiations.

In a recent New York Times interview, Trump said he was in no rush to remove the near-bomb-grade fuel still buried under the bombed sites. He claimed Iran would suspend enrichment for 15 or 20 years and enrich only for nonmilitary purposes.

In the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action deal under President Barack Obama, the nuclear question was addressed where 97% of Iran’s stockpile was shipped out of the country and the cap was a verified fact.

Because it doesn’t address any of these issues, the Trump deal is a ceasefire agreement, not a nuclear agreement.

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US-Iran Deal: A Costly Return to the Status Quo

Going back to the bargaining theory, we know the war settled the information problem – it revealed what each side would endure.

The commitment problem remains. Neither side can yet make a promise the other believes, least of all an Iran whose negotiators were killed.

And I believe the indivisibility problem is now worse. The question of zero enrichment versus a sovereign right cannot be split. The current 60-day deferral is not a resolution. It is the same unsolved problem with a clock attached.

The one thing that could change is American restraint. If Washington holds Israel from striking Iran and Lebanon, it can slowly rebuild its credibility that was destroyed by the two wars. And that is a real challenge for the Trump administration.

Even as the US-Iran deal was being finalised, Israel struck Beirut, the kind of action that can derail any talks.

In my view, the 60-day window should be read not as the path to a settlement but as the interval or pause before the next one fails.

I argued in April that this conflict would not end in a clean settlement but in a series of contested pauses. The deal to be signed on June 19 is the first of them.

Iran emerges with its enrichment knowledge intact, its stockpile buried and fresh reason to believe that only a nuclear weapon would have deterred the U.S.-Israel attack.

But Iran also knows that it stood its ground and was able to strike U.S. bases and allies in the region. It has discovered leverage it did not previously know it held. The Strait of Hormuz has proved a better deterrent than the nuclear bomb.

The strait is open, the oil is flowing, and the question the war was fought over sits exactly where it began. Thousands of lives were lost to arrive back to square one. Nobody has won, though both sides will say they did. 

Farah N. Jan is a political scientist and Senior Lecturer teaching in the International Relations Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She has previously taught at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her research focuses on interstate rivalries and alliances, the causes and consequences of nuclear proliferation, and the security politics of South Asia and the Middle East.

This story originally appeared in The Conversation.

The SpaceX IPO of 12 June 2026 was not merely a stock-market event. It was a referendum on the new grammar of capitalism, where infrastructure, personality, artificial intelligence, national security and passive-index compulsion were bundled into one breathtaking public offering. 

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), trading as SPCX, raised USD 75 billion at USD 135 a share, opened higher, and closed at USD 160.95, crossing a market value of about USD 2.1 trillion on debut. Yet behind the market fireworks lies a more troubling prospectus story across its three verticals. Starlink is real and profitable, Falcon is strategically indispensable, and Starship is still the single technological hinge on which the valuation turns.

The AI story, built through xAI, Grok and Colossus, is more aspiration than demonstrated economics. Worse, the company came to market with a governance structure so management-friendly that public shareholders bought economic exposure without meaningful voting power, litigation leverage or related-party protection. This deep dive report critically examines the SpaceX IPO as both visionary infrastructure and a possible institutionalised governance challenge.

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The Road to the Most Anticipated IPO in History

SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the stated purpose of making humanity a multi-planetary species. For more than two decades, it remained a private enterprise, a structural choice that insulated it from the quarterly scrutiny that public shareholders impose, but also kept its finances opaque to all but its direct investors.

By 2025, the company had become the world's dominant commercial launch provider, operating the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket on an industrial scale, deploying its own Starlink satellite internet constellation, and securing billions in contracts from NASA, the Pentagon, and intelligence agencies. Its government revenue alone reached approximately USD 5.9 billion in 2025. These genuine achievements provided the operational foundation upon which a far more expansive narrative was eventually constructed.

The decisive structural transformation occurred in February 2026, when SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition of xAI, the privately held artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk and parent of the Grok large language model. The transaction valued the combined entity at USD 1.25 trillion, attributing USD 1 trillion to SpaceX and USD 250 billion to xAI. Simultaneously, Tesla, another company controlled by Elon Musk, announced a USD 2 billion investment in SpaceX during the first quarter of 2026, and both companies were reported to be engaged in joint development of a semiconductor facility called Terafab.

These pre-IPO manoeuvres substantially enlarged the scope of what would be offered to public investors, embedding into the prospectus a web of related-party relationships that had been negotiated entirely outside the scrutiny of public markets or independent oversight.

SpaceX confidentially filed its S-1, broadly equivalent to a Draft Red Herring Prospectus, on 1 April 2026. It selected a fixed offer price of USD 135 per share rather than the conventional bookbuild range, priced definitively after market close on 11 June 2026, and listed under the ticker SPCX on the Nasdaq the following morning.

SpaceX entered the public markets not as a conventional company seeking capital, but as a civilisational narrative seeking validation. It spent more than two decades outside public-market scrutiny while transforming global launch economics, building the world's most formidable reusable rocket franchise, and creating Starlink, the first genuinely global low-latency satellite internet network at scale. By the time it filed its S-1, SpaceX was no longer just a rocket company. It had become a hybrid of launch contractor, satellite telecom operator, defence infrastructure provider, AI hopeful, data-centre landlord and a platform within the broader Musk business empire.

The SpaceX IPO was historic by any measure. At USD 75 billion raised, it overtook Saudi Aramco's 2019 offering and became the largest IPO ever. The fixed price of USD 135 per share valued the company at around USD 1.75 to 1.8 trillion at issue, and first-day trading pushed the market capitalisation beyond USD 2 trillion. Demand was reportedly several multiples of the offer size, with retail enthusiasm, institutional fear of missing out, and anticipated index buying combining into a perfect storm. But the market's first-day applause should not be confused with analytical clarity.

The issue is not whether SpaceX is important. It plainly is. The issue is whether importance, charisma and technological optionality can justify a valuation and governance structure that would be unacceptable in almost any ordinary public company. SpaceX, however, is no ordinary public company, and its critics need to acknowledge that, however grudgingly.

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Three Businesses, One Rocket Suit

The prospectus revealed a company with three economic personalities. The first is the launch and space-systems business: Falcon 9, Starship, NASA work, national security payloads and future Mars architecture. This is SpaceX's founding strength and strategic moat.

Falcon 9 has changed launch economics, and SpaceX's manifest frequency and reusability record remain unmatched. Yet launch, by itself, is not the cash machine behind the SpaceX IPO. Heavy development expenditure, Starship testing and long-cycle government work make the segment capital-intensive and margin-volatile.

The second business is Starlink, and here the bull case has substance. Starlink has moved from science-fiction promise to operating utility. It has millions of subscribers across more than 150 countries, a first-mover constellation advantage, and a meaningful lead over Amazon's Kuiper, OneWeb and other rivals. Its value lies not only in rural broadband, but in maritime, aviation, defence mobility, disaster connectivity and sovereign-resilience use cases. Unlike many IPO stories, Starlink is not merely a projection. It is a functioning network, a revenue engine, and the closest thing SpaceX has to an investible core.

The third business is AI, and this is where the prospectus leaves earth's gravity and enters valuation theatre. The acquisition of xAI inserted Grok, the Colossus data centre, and a vast AI-infrastructure thesis into the SpaceX story. The argument is seductive: combine global satellite connectivity, launch capacity, and compute infrastructure, and perhaps one day orbital data centres, and SpaceX could become the operating layer of planetary AI. But seductive is not the same as proven.

Grok's enterprise adoption remains modest compared with the OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft-backed ecosystems. If the most bankable AI revenue comes from renting compute to competitors, the business resembles a data-centre landlord more than a frontier AI winner.

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Starlink Is Real, But It Is Not a Blank Cheque

Starlink is the strongest reason to take SpaceX seriously as a public company. It has product-market fit, scale, brand recall, military relevance and distribution reach. In many regions, it is not competing with fibre or 5G; it is competing with nothing. That gives it pricing power in some markets and strategic indispensability in others. During wars, disasters and infrastructure failures, satellite connectivity becomes not a luxury but a public good with private billing.

Yet even Starlink cannot be valued by applause alone. Subscriber growth has been accompanied by pressure on average revenue per user, or ARPU, as SpaceX expands into lower-income geographies. This is not necessarily fatal; lower ARPU may be the price of global scale. But it does mean investors must distinguish between subscriber growth and profit growth. Ten million users at falling ARPU do not automatically become a trillion-dollar telecom franchise. Capacity constraints, satellite replacement cycles, regulatory approvals, spectrum disputes, ground-station economics and local pricing resistance will all matter.

The biggest missing bridge in the Starlink thesis is Starship. The next generation of Starlink satellites, heavier payload economics, larger constellation replenishment and dramatically lower unit costs all depend on Starship becoming operational at scale. Without Starship, Starlink remains impressive but constrained. With Starship, it could become a global communications utility with economics no rival can easily match. The market has therefore capitalised not merely what Starlink is, but what Starlink could become if Starship works.

Starship Is the Hinge of the Entire Valuation

Starship is the technological keystone of the SpaceX IPO. It is central to Mars, lunar contracts, mass satellite deployment, orbital logistics, and the more exotic dream of space-based compute. But at the time of the IPO, Starship was still a programme in active development, not a proven commercial transport system operating at routine cadence. Aerospace history is littered with machines that were brilliant, late, expensive and humbling.

The valuation assumes that Starship will move from test spectacle to industrial transport. It assumes not one heroic launch, but repeated, reliable, low-cost, high-payload operations. It assumes regulatory tolerance, launch-site throughput, manufacturing discipline, heat-shield reliability, refuelling success and rapid reuse. That is not one risk; it is a chain of risks. If Starship succeeds, SpaceX may justify a large part of the dream premium. If it stumbles, the market will discover that the SpaceX IPO was priced not on current cash flows, but on a rocket still fighting physics.

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The AI Premium: Infrastructure or Imagination?

The AI story is perhaps the most controversial part of the offering, because it tries to convert Elon Musk's ecosystem logic into shareholder value. The merger with xAI allows SpaceX to tell investors that it is not merely in space and connectivity, but in the largest technology market of the next generation. The problem is that AI leadership is not declared by prospectus. It is earned through model quality, enterprise adoption, developer ecosystems, compute efficiency, distribution channels and customer retention.

Grok may become a stronger product. Colossus may become valuable infrastructure. Orbital compute may one day be technically feasible and economically compelling. But the current AI thesis asks investors to pay today for several tomorrow-level outcomes: that Grok catches up, that SpaceX converts compute into durable AI margins, that Starship makes orbital infrastructure practical, and that enterprises trust an AI stack controlled by Elon Musk at scale. That is a lot of "ifs" to capitalise at public-market prices.

The stronger version of the bull case is not that SpaceX will defeat OpenAI or Anthropic in models. It is that SpaceX may become a unique AI-infrastructure company: connectivity in the sky, compute on the ground, launch capability for orbital assets, and privileged government relationships. That is plausible. But plausibility is not valuation. The market priced optionality as though it were certainty.

The Musk Empire and the Related-Party Problem

The gravest weakness in the SpaceX IPO is not technology. It is governance. The S-1 disclosed an extensive web of transactions among entities linked to Elon Musk, especially involving Tesla and xAI. Purchases of Tesla products, energy systems and vehicles by SpaceX or its subsidiaries raise an obvious question: are these arm's-length commercial decisions, or intra-empire value transfers dressed as operational procurement?

This is not a minor concern. When one individual exercises decisive influence across multiple companies, each transaction between them becomes governance-sensitive. A battery purchase may be economically justified. A vehicle procurement may have operational logic. A data-centre arrangement may be defensible. But the burden of proof must be higher, not lower. Public shareholders need independent committees, clean fairness opinions, transparent pricing, and directors who are not socially, financially or psychologically dependent on the controlling founder.

The related-party issue becomes more troubling because SpaceX is not a mature dividend utility with stable cash flows. It is a capital-hungry enterprise raising enormous sums while simultaneously engaging in transactions within a founder-controlled network. That combination turns ordinary procurement into a potential channel of value migration.

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No Votes, Little Remedy, Full Exposure

The governance structure behind the SpaceX IPO effectively asked investors to bring capital but leave control at the door. Super-voting shares give Elon Musk overwhelming voting power despite a smaller economic stake. Public Class A shareholders receive economic participation, not governance influence. They can cheer, complain or sell. They cannot meaningfully discipline management.

That may be acceptable to some investors. Founder control is not inherently bad. Many great companies were built by founders who resisted short-term market pressure. But there is a difference between founder leadership and shareholder disarmament. SpaceX appears to have gone further than ordinary dual-class protection. Critics point to its Texas incorporation, constrained derivative-action pathways, limited books-and-records access, arbitration provisions, and management-favourable legal architecture, which would collectively reduce the practical remedies available to minority investors.

This is where SpaceX becomes a governance case study. The company did not merely ask investors to trust Elon Musk. It structured the bargain so that, if trust is broken, investors may have few effective tools. In public markets, many say that is not romance. It is institutionalised helplessness.

The Nasdaq Rule Change That Forces Investors to Buy

One of the most disturbing features of the SpaceX IPO is the index dimension. If exchange rules permit rapid inclusion of a massive newly listed company into major indices, passive funds may have no choice but to buy soon after listing. That means millions of investors who never consciously chose SpaceX, including retirement savers, ETF holders and pension beneficiaries, can become indirect shareholders at prices shaped by scarcity, hype and index mechanics rather than patient price discovery.

Perhaps the most structurally significant feature of the SpaceX IPO for the broader investor population has received the least public discussion: the modification by Nasdaq of its index inclusion methodology, timed precisely to accommodate this listing. On 1 May 2026, Nasdaq implemented a "fast entry" rule permitting large newly public companies to join the Nasdaq 100 after just 15 trading days, down from the previous three-month waiting period, and exempting qualifying entrants from the prior 10% minimum float rule and liquidity seasoning requirements. The rule change was openly described by commentators as having been designed specifically to win the SpaceX listing ahead of competition from the NYSE, with Elon Musk reportedly having made the rule change a condition of the Nasdaq listing.

The consequence for investors who never chose to buy SpaceX is direct and material. The Nasdaq 100 is tracked by more than USD 600 billion of passive index fund assets, and QQQ alone holds over USD 300 billion. Under the Nasdaq index construction rules, stocks with less than 20% float are weighted at five times their float-adjusted market capitalisation. SpaceX floated approximately 5% of its shares at IPO, producing an effective index weight equivalent to a USD 437 billion market cap, large enough to rank in the top ten of the Nasdaq 100 immediately.

Every passive fund tracking the index is then forced to purchase SpaceX shares at prevailing market prices, regardless of any independent assessment of intrinsic value. As mentioned earlier, pensioners, retirees, and passive investors in 401(k) plans tracking Nasdaq ETFs become involuntary holders of a deeply cash-burning enterprise, where they have no voting power and no meaningful legal recourse, and they typically receive no notification that this has occurred. This is not price discovery. It is mandatory allocation, driven by index construction rules that were changed specifically to accommodate this listing.

This matters because passive investing changes the moral economy of IPOs. A speculative buyer knowingly taking on Musk-related risk is one thing. A pension saver automatically acquiring governance-free exposure through an index product is another. When index rules are modified or applied in ways that create captive demand for a low-float, founder-controlled mega-cap, the line between market efficiency and market engineering becomes thin.

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Why the Bull Case Still Deserves Respect

A fair critique must, however, admit that SpaceX is not WeWork in a spacesuit. It has real assets, real technology, real revenue, real strategic importance and real execution history. Falcon 9 changed the launch market. Starlink changed satellite broadband. SpaceX has done things that incumbent aerospace giants treated as impossible. More importantly, betting against Elon Musk has repeatedly been expensive.

The bull case is therefore serious. It says Starlink becomes the global connectivity layer. Starship collapses launch costs. SpaceX dominates orbital logistics. AI demand makes connectivity-plus-compute a strategic infrastructure platform. Government contracts provide durable baseline revenue. Mars, while distant, keeps talent, capital and imagination aligned. In this telling, conventional valuation models fail because SpaceX is not a conventional company.

There is force in that argument. The greatest companies often looked expensive before they looked obvious. Amazon, Tesla and Nvidia all punished traditional valuation purists at different points. But those precedents should sharpen caution, not abolish it. For every Amazon, there are dozens of companies where "total addressable market" became a narcotic and governance abuse was excused as genius.

Why the Bear Case Is Not Cynicism

The bear case is equally serious. SpaceX came public with large cumulative losses, enormous capital expenditure needs, uncertain AI economics, Starship execution risk, falling Starlink ARPU, heavy related-party exposure, and unusually weak shareholder protections. That is not a small list. It is the entire risk register.

At nearly 100 times trailing revenue, investors are not paying for a good company. They are paying for domination. They are paying for Starship success, Starlink scale, AI optionality, government trust and the continued focus of Elon Musk, all at once. If one pillar cracks, the valuation may wobble. If two crack, the fall could be brutal.

The most underpriced risk may be attention risk. Elon Musk is not only SpaceX's central asset; some say he is also a portfolio of distractions. Tesla, X, xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, politics, litigation, culture wars and personal brand volatility all travel with him. Investors in the SpaceX IPO are buying not only rockets and satellites, but the behavioural volatility of one man whose genius and unpredictability are inseparable.

What Investors Should Watch Next

In the short term, the stock may remain supported by scarcity, enthusiasm, retail loyalty, institutional benchmarking fear and index-related buying. IPO sceptics often underestimate mechanical demand. A low float in a giant company can produce violent upside even when valuation is stretched. Therefore, an immediate collapse is not inevitable. Indeed, the first phase may reward momentum more than prudence.

In the medium term, fundamentals will begin to matter. Investors should watch Starship cadence, Starlink ARPU, capex burn, AI customer quality, related-party transaction disclosures, debt and lease obligations, government-contract concentration, and any fresh acquisitions using non-voting stock. The market will tolerate losses if milestones are met. It will punish losses if milestones slip.

For long-term investors, SPCX is not a normal equity. It is a leveraged option on the convergence of space transport, satellite connectivity, AI infrastructure and founder mythology. It may become one of the defining companies of the century. It may also become the most expensive lesson ever written on the difference between technological brilliance and shareholder accountability.

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Regulatory Lessons From the SpaceX IPO

The SEC and Congress should not respond to the SpaceX IPO by punishing ambition. Public markets must be open to bold companies. But ambition cannot be allowed to become a waiver of governance. Companies above a certain public-market size should face minimum governance floors: independent review of related-party transactions, meaningful shareholder litigation rights, clear disclosure of founder-controlled intercompany dealings, and restrictions on mandatory arbitration of securities claims.

Exchanges also need scrutiny. If index-entry rules can be adjusted in anticipation of a specific listing, passive investors deserve disclosure and protection. Index inclusion is no longer a technical matter. It moves billions of dollars. It can create forced demand. It can inflate debut valuations. It must therefore be governed with the seriousness of market infrastructure, not the flexibility of exchange marketing.

The Future Came Public, But So Did the Warning Label

The SpaceX IPO is therefore both magnificent and menacing. It represents American technological audacity at its best: reusable rockets, global broadband, national security capability, lunar ambition and perhaps one day interplanetary logistics. But it also represents capital-market surrender at its worst, with public money entering a structure where control is concentrated, remedies are narrowed, conflicts are normalised and valuation is powered by dreams not yet converted into cash.

The question is not whether SpaceX is extraordinary. It is. The question is whether extraordinary companies should be allowed to demand ordinary investors' money while denying them ordinary protections. On 12 June 2026, the market answered yes. History may be less generous.

Anthropic's newest artificial intelligence model, Claude Fable 5, was supposed to mark a major milestone for the company. Launched on June 9, the model was described by Anthropic as the most capable AI system it had ever made available to the public. Three days later, however, it disappeared.

On June 12, Anthropic announced that it had disabled access to both Claude Fable 5 and its more powerful sibling, Claude Mythos 5, after receiving a US government directive citing national security concerns. The order effectively forced the company to suspend access globally, making Claude Fable 5 one of the shortest-lived frontier AI releases in the industry's history. 

According to Anthropic, the directive was issued under export-control authorities and targeted access by foreign nationals. The company said it received the order at 5:21pm Eastern Time and immediately began shutting the models down to comply. While the government has not publicly detailed its concerns, Anthropic says officials were worried about a potential method for bypassing the safeguards built into Fable 5.

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Understanding Mythos 5 and Fable 5

To understand why the suspension attracted so much attention, it is important to understand the relationship between Mythos 5 and Fable 5.

On June 9 itself, Anthropic also launched Claude Mythos 5 but the launch was not meant for the general public. In Anthropic's own words, the launch of Claude Mythos 5 was only "for a small group of cyberdefenders and infrastructure providers".

Anthropic developed Claude Mythos 5 as part of a restricted programme known as Project Glasswing, giving access only to a small group of vetted organisations. According to multiple reports, participants included major technology companies, cybersecurity firms and selected government partners. Claude Fable 5 was built on the same underlying technology but was designed for wider public use. Anthropic added additional layers of safeguards intended to prevent misuse in areas such as cybersecurity, biology, chemistry and model distillation. When those safeguards detected a potentially sensitive request, the system was designed to redirect the query to the less capable Claude Opus 4.8 model instead.

In practical terms, Mythos 5 represented the unrestricted version of the technology, while Fable 5 was the public-facing version wrapped in protective controls. The distinction would later become central to the debate over whether those controls were sufficient.

Why Claude Fable 5 Was Considered a Major Leap

Before Fable 5 arrived, Anthropic's flagship public model was Claude Opus 4.8. Opus remains available today and serves as the company's highest-performing generally accessible model following the suspension.

Anthropic and independent benchmark organisations described Claude Fable 5 as a significant step beyond Opus. The largest gains appeared on long, complex tasks requiring sustained reasoning over extended periods. Reports published during the launch period showed improvements in software engineering, advanced reasoning, document analysis and autonomous task completion. It had more capabilities than Claude Opus 4.8 across agentic coding, knowledge work, spatial reasoning, tool use, computer use, legal, multidisciplinary reasoning, biology, cybersecurity and health benchmarks. Rather than simply answering questions, Fable 5 was designed to work through complicated assignments over long periods while maintaining context and adapting its approach as conditions changed.

Industry observers viewed the model as important because it appeared to push AI systems closer to functioning as independent digital workers. While previous models often performed best on shorter tasks, Fable 5 was designed to maintain performance across projects that could last hours or even days.

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The Capabilities That Drew Attention

Anthropic described Claude Fable 5 as state-of-the-art across a wide range of benchmarks, including software engineering, scientific research, knowledge work, visual reasoning and document analysis. The company argued that the model's advantage became more apparent as tasks became longer and more complicated.

One of the most notable features was its ability to work autonomously for extended periods. Instead of requiring constant human guidance, Fable 5 could plan, evaluate progress, adjust its strategy and continue working toward a goal with limited intervention. The model was also designed to interpret charts, diagrams, tables and complex documents, making it useful in industries that depend heavily on research and analysis.

Yet the same capabilities that made Fable 5 attractive also raised concerns. Anthropic itself acknowledged that cybersecurity represented one of the model's strongest areas. To reduce risks, the company implemented safeguards intended to block high-risk requests and redirect them to Claude Opus 4.8. Anthropic says these protections were deliberately conservative and occasionally blocked legitimate requests, but it considered the trade-off necessary.

When Powerful Becomes Potentially Dangerous

The controversy surrounding Claude Fable 5 was not primarily about ordinary chatbot use. It centred on what highly capable AI systems might be able to do if their safeguards fail.

Government officials and security experts have increasingly focused on advanced AI models that can identify software vulnerabilities, analyse computer systems and automate complex technical processes. According to reporting from several outlets, concerns intensified after claims emerged that the safeguards protecting Mythos-class capabilities could potentially be bypassed through a jailbreak technique.

A jailbreak in AI terms means the use of intelligent prompts or formatting techniques to bypass a model's built-in-safety filters and ethical guardrails. When they say an AI model has been jailbroken, they are referring to how the model was able to force the system to generate classified content, reveal information or perform actions that its creators explicitly programmed it to refuse.

Anthropic disputes the severity of those claims. The company says the reported bypass was narrow, non-universal and revealed only minor vulnerabilities that other publicly available models could also identify. Anthropic further argues that its strongest protections operate through independent classifier systems rather than through the model itself, meaning a successful jailbreak would not necessarily remove all safeguards.

Even so, the possibility that users might gain access to advanced cybersecurity capabilities appears to have been enough to trigger concern within the US government.

Why Mythos 5 Alarmed Security Experts

The deeper concern extends beyond Claude Fable 5 and centres on Mythos 5 itself.

Reports surrounding the restricted model described a system capable of identifying software vulnerabilities at a level that exceeded many existing tools. Anthropic previously stated that Mythos-class systems had discovered thousands of significant vulnerabilities during testing. Researchers and policymakers have worried that such technology could dramatically reduce the time required to find weaknesses in software systems.

The fear is not simply that Artificial Intelligence can locate vulnerabilities. The concern is that increasingly autonomous models could eventually help automate large parts of the process involved in discovering, analysing and potentially exploiting those weaknesses. In the wrong hands, critics argue, that capability could increase cyber risks for governments, companies and critical infrastructure. Supporters of the technology counter that the same tools can also help defenders identify and fix vulnerabilities before attackers find them.

This debate has become one of the defining questions facing the AI industry: whether powerful cybersecurity capabilities ultimately make digital systems safer or more dangerous.

What the US Government Actually Did

The US government issued an emergency export-control order that forced Anthropic to completely disable global access to both Fable 5 and Mythos 5. According to Anthropic, the Commerce Department issued a directive prohibiting access to the AI models by foreign nationals, including individuals located within the United States and even some of Anthropic's own employees. The company says the order did not provide detailed technical evidence explaining the national security concern. Anthropic has publicly stated that it was left to infer the government's reasoning based on discussions regarding a possible jailbreak.

It has come to be known that the US government intervened after it became aware of a specific jailbreaking technique which could allow unauthorised elements to pierce Fable 5's safety filters, unlocking unrestricted access to advanced software exploitation and zero day-hunting capabilities.

Zero day-hunting capabilities means the ability of an AI model to find secret, unpatched security flaws on software before any human has discovered them.

Anthropic's Defence

Anthropic has strongly challenged the rationale behind the suspension.

In a lengthy public statement, the company argued that it had spent thousands of hours testing Fable 5 alongside government agencies, external researchers and security specialists before launch. Anthropic says those exercises failed to uncover any universal jailbreak capable of broadly bypassing the model's protections. The company also stated that perfect jailbreak resistance may not be achievable for any frontier AI system.

According to Anthropic, the evidence presented by the government involved a narrow and limited technique that exposed only previously known software vulnerabilities. The company argued that similar results could be achieved using other leading AI systems already available to the public. Anthropic warned that recalling a frontier model based on such findings could create a precedent that makes future deployments significantly more difficult across the industry.

The company nevertheless complied with the directive while continuing to seek restoration of access.

Why Anthropic Shut It Down for Everyone

One of the most unusual aspects of the episode is that the government order targeted foreign nationals, yet Anthropic disabled Claude Fable 5 for everyone.

The reason appears to have been practical rather than technical. Anthropic said the directive applied to foreign nationals regardless of where they were located. Enforcing such a rule would require reliably determining users' nationality across consumer accounts, enterprise customers and employees. The company concluded that it could not implement such a system immediately and instead suspended the models entirely to ensure compliance.

As a result, American users lost access alongside international customers.

Three Days That Raised Bigger Questions

Claude Fable 5 was publicly available for roughly three days.

That brief window has left many unanswered questions. There is no public evidence that the model caused significant harm during its short period of availability. At the same time, the concerns raised by regulators illustrate how rapidly perceptions of AI risk are changing.

The central issue is not simply what Fable 5 did during those three days. It is what highly capable systems like Fable 5 and Mythos 5 might eventually be able to do as their capabilities continue to improve. Supporters argue that such models can accelerate scientific research, strengthen cybersecurity and improve productivity. Critics warn that the same capabilities could also help automate cyberattacks, reduce barriers to dangerous technical knowledge and create risks that existing safeguards cannot fully contain.

For now, Claude Fable 5 remains offline. Whether it returns may depend not only on Anthropic's technical safeguards but also on a larger political question that the entire AI industry is now confronting: who decides when an artificial intelligence system becomes too powerful to deploy?

Iran at FIFA World Cup 2026: Cheer Team Melli or Protest the Regime?

When Iran’s national soccer team walks onto American soil this June for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, it will do so against the backdrop of an Iranian government crackdown against protesters in January, an ongoing war launched by the U.S. and Israel in February, and a four-month digital blackout affecting some 92 million people. It has left many Iranian fans feeling conflicted about who exactly they’ll be cheering for.

Even before a ball was kicked, the tension has been clear among not only supporters but team members, too. Iranian players were issued visas to the United States at the 11th hour, and the team only arrived at their training base in Tijuana, Mexico, days before the tournament kicked off.

That came after a request to move their camp from Arizona, citing concerns over unfair treatment on U.S. soil, a move that required the formal endorsement of FIFA before it could proceed. Even with the team finally getting settled, however, multiple Iranian soccer fans have been denied visas to the U.S. Iran’s soccer association has also said its ticket allocation had been denied, leaving fans who had made the trek disappointed.

With a host nation actively at war with a competing one for the first time in World Cup history, the pitch will be a stage not just for soccer but for grief, resistance and competing nationalism. The Iranian diaspora, buffeted by the one-two punch of internal crackdowns and external interventions, now faces a deeply unsettling question: How do you express pride in one’s national team without tacitly supporting the government that it represents?

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FIFA World Cup 2026: Diasporic Identity Crises

Along with many Iranians, mainly expatriates in the U.S., I plan to attend Iran’s opening game against New Zealand on June 15 in Los Angeles. The location is important – Los Angeles is a city that is home to the largest Iranian diaspora, so much so that it is often referred to as “Tehrangeles” within the community.

It is also a community among whom feelings toward the Islamic Republic run deep, with many of them having left Iran during or following the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Many in the community have remained loyal to the deposed Pahlavi regime and the crown prince, Reza, and going so far as celebrating the joint U.S.-Israeli led war on Iran.

It is in this community that the Iranian national team – colloquially known as Team Melli to reflect the Farsi word for national – will face battle not only against New Zealand, but also the conflicted emotions of its ethnic brethren.

With the memory of the January protests still raw, calls have been circulating among some Iranian Americans to formally protest and boycott the occasion. Proposals range from purchasing tickets, only to leave seats conspicuously empty, to booing the national anthem and withholding any celebration of Iranian goals.

Supporters have also been urged within Iranian American communities to resist FIFA’s attempts to prohibit non-Islamic Republic flags inside stadiums, with some Iranian expats suggesting on social media of spray-painting over the symbols on the current flag, carrying plain green, white and red alternatives into the ground, or wearing clothing bearing political slogans. Others have proposed exposing politically motivated tattoos or using stuffed animals to caricature Iranian leaders.

In return, Mehdi Taj, the president of the Iranian Football Association, issued a statement demanding respect, stating: “We need a guarantee there, for our trip, that they have no right to insult the symbols of our system, especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

There is a broader question that Iran’s FIFA World Cup 2026 appearance forces into view, and it sits uncomfortably alongside FIFA’s own record. While the governing body of world soccer awarded President Donald Trump its inaugural Peace Prize ahead of the tournament, it is now looking the other way as the U.S. remains at war and denies visas to would-be participants and spectators. The collision of sport and statecraft is nothing new, from the 1936 Berlin Olympics to the Soviet boycott of Los Angeles in 1984. But it has rarely been managed with such apparent indifference to its own contradictions.

When sport becomes a theater for competing political claims, it is the integrity of the game itself that is diminished. One is entitled to ask whether the notion of sport existing purely on its own terms — especially on the global stage — has ever been anything more than a convenient fiction.

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FIFA World Cup 2026: Collision of Politics and Sport

Yet here lies the puzzle. Soccer occupies a place in Iranian life that borders on the sacred. One need only look to the fierce devotion surrounding Tehran’s great rival teams Persepolis and Esteghlal, a contest that ranks among the most intense club rivalries in world soccer, or to the scenes of street celebration that have swept Iran whenever the national team has won games at previous World Cups.

The memory of defeating the U.S. at the 1998 World Cup in France and the rematch in 2022 speaks to how deeply the game is woven into the fabric of Iranian culture. Supporting Team Melli has long been a source of collective pride, a point of unity that transcends politics and generation, regardless of religion, political views and social class. This creates the dilemma for the fans watching in Los Angeles and Seattle for Iran’s three group games.

Iran's FIFA World Cup 2026 Dilemma: Team Melli or the Regime?

In Arizona, where I teach global politics at Arizona State University, several members of the Iranian diaspora articulated this dilemma to me, capturing the tension at the heart of current events. One person invoked the sporting rivalries of the Cold War as a reminder of soccer’s capacity to transcend conflict, yet acknowledged that the wounds of the January protests remained too raw for many in the diaspora to set aside. Another was more straightforwardly hopeful, expressing a wish to see Iran progress in the tournament and a belief that success on the pitch might, however tentatively, cut across political divisions.

Yet for those who have watched the events of recent years with grief and fury, cheering on a team that represents the Islamic Republic feels, to some, like an act of complicity. For its part, the Iranian government – as well as some Iranian critics – would argue that the national team stands apart from politics entirely. From this vantage point, soccer is a matter of national identity and cultural heritage that belongs to all Iranians regardless of their views on those in power. It is, moreover, a moment of proud participation, according to one Iranian official, and that to deny the players their support is to punish athletes for the decisions of politicians.

The protests that shook Iran, and the complex political landscape that followed, have left the diaspora navigating questions that go far beyond soccer.

The Islamic Republic, whatever one’s view of its conduct, remains the sovereign government of a nation with a rich and fiercely proud culture, and the players on the pitch represent that culture as much as they represent the state.

That they do so on the soil of a country with which Iran is actively at war renders this perhaps the most politically charged sporting occasion in living memory – one in which every goal, every flag and every empty seat carries a meaning that extends well beyond the 90 minutes. In that sense, the FIFA World Cup 2026 has not created a division so much as it has given an existing one a global stage.

TMC Split: How Mamata Banerjee Lost Bengal and May Lose Her Party

In the span of barely five weeks after its historic electoral rout in the May 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, the All India Trinamool Congress — a party synonymous for nearly three decades with one indomitable woman — stands on the precipice of a legally ratified, organisationally engineered, and politically choreographed disintegration.

About sixty of its eighty MLAs have coalesced into a rebel legislative bloc, twenty of its twenty-eight Lok Sabha MPs have written to the Speaker seeking alignment with the NDA, and even its most celebrated loyalists are issuing him-or-me ultimatums from the floor of party press conferences. The proximate lightning rod is Abhishek Banerjee, Mamata Banerjee's nephew, heir-apparent, and the man who turned the TMC into his own private political laboratory. But the deeper pathology goes to the very marrow of how the party was constructed — not on ideology, not on institutional scaffolding, but on the cement of proximity to power and the promise of financial enrichment. Once power moved, the cement dissolved.

This deep dive report examines, in unflinching and integrated detail, the structural, personal, legal, and strategic dimensions of the TMC crisis; tests the argument that this is, at its core, a scramble for self-preservation rather than principled political realignment; and attempts to map out a credible trajectory for both Mamata Banerjee and Bengal politics in the short and medium terms.

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The Earthquake That Shook Bengal

The earthquake registered on 4 May 2026, when the BJP swept the West Bengal Assembly elections with a decisive 207 seats in the 294-member House, reducing the once-mighty TMC to a rump of 80 MLAs. Mamata Banerjee, who had governed Bengal for fifteen uninterrupted years and twice delivered to the BJP its most humiliating defeats in eastern India, lost her own Bhabanipur seat to Suvendu Adhikari by a margin of 15,105 votes. The BJP's vote share surged from 37.97% in 2021 to 45.92%, while the TMC's collapsed from 48.02% to 40.68% — a 7.95-percentage-point voter swing that the commentariat had underestimated almost to the last.

Five structural forces converged to deliver this verdict: the Election Commission's SIR-driven clean-up of voter rolls, a fierce anti-appeasement sentiment among demographic segments the TMC had taken for granted, the aftershocks of the RG Kar Medical College rape-murder case that had shattered the party's moral standing with the urban middle class, the 7th Pay Commission promise for state government employees, and a mountain of anger accumulated over TMC's school jobs and coal scams that had been festering through the courts for years.

The defeat was historic, but what followed was arguably more damaging. Within a month, as former Trinamool Rajya Sabha member Jawhar Sircar — perhaps the most eloquent insider-outsider observer of the TMC's arc — told a media outlet, about sixty of the party's eighty MLAs had staged what he characterised as a coup in the state assembly, announcing themselves as the principal opposition with a new leader, former CPI(M) figure turned TMC latecomer Ritabrata Banerjee. Twenty of the TMC's twenty-eight Lok Sabha MPs simultaneously wrote to the Lok Sabha Speaker expressing their desire to align with the NDA, and three Rajya Sabha MPs resigned in rapid succession. In a single month, the party that Mamata Banerjee had founded in 1998, nurtured through fifteen years of grinding opposition politics, and brought to near-total dominance in 2021, appeared to be haemorrhaging its institutional existence from every artery.

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The Abhishek Problem: A Sanjay Gandhi in Bengal

To understand why the rebellion crystallised with such velocity, one must understand the figure at its epicentre: Abhishek Banerjee, thirty-eight, Diamond Harbour MP, TMC National General Secretary since 2021, and the man the party's own spokesman had once publicly declared would be Chief Minister after 2036. Jawhar Sircar put it with characteristic bluntness when he described Abhishek as embodying the Sanjay Gandhi phenomenon — a second-generation dynast who entered politics not through the patient construction of a grassroots base but through the assertion of familial privilege and the aggressive deployment of organisational machinery.

The specific vehicle of Abhishek's control was I-PAC, the political consultancy originally associated with Prashant Kishor, which Abhishek retained after Kishor's exit and converted into what some describe as his personal army — a corps of young data analysts and field operatives posted across the party's hierarchical layers from block level to Lok Sabha, not to support but to monitor and report. Candidates for everything from panchayat seats to Assembly tickets were no longer selected after consulting local leaders with years of ground-level investment; everything flowed through I-PAC's feedback to Abhishek, and I-PAC's staffers — some barely out of their twenties — exploited this leverage to coerce senior leaders into compliance on pain of negative assessments being filed upward. As a former Trinamool MLA from Malda put it with piercing economy: Abhishek Banerjee transformed Trinamool from a political organisation into a corporate entity, where I-PAC became the decision-making authority.

The result was a double displacement. Externally, the party's traditional bottom-up mobilisation — the street-level muscle that had actually driven the 2011 revolution and the 2021 fortress-hold — was replaced by a top-down, data-driven model that alienated the very cadres who had bled for it.

Internally, veteran leaders who had been through the fire with Mamata Banerjee for decades — Suvendu Adhikari before his defection, Mukul Roy, and now a long list of others — found themselves bypassed, humiliated, or subjected to surveillance by consultants they could not remove. Kalyan Banerjee, a senior MP and advocate who had himself remained loyal as the rebellion erupted, captured this fury in the most personal terms available: I don't like Abhishek's arrogance; he destroyed TMC, he told reporters, adding a direct him-or-me ultimatum to Mamata Banerjee — she must choose between her nephew and veteran leaders like himself. When the party's own chief whip starts issuing such ultimatums, it is no longer a rebellion at the margins; it is a crisis at the core.

Crucially, however, as Jawhar Sircar emphasised, the revolt against Abhishek inside the party was only one layer of a two-layer story. The other layer was external: Suvendu Adhikari, now the BJP's Chief Minister of Bengal, had himself been pushed out of the TMC by Abhishek's manoeuvring years earlier, and his ascension to power represented a delayed but devastating personal reckoning. The photograph of Ritabrata Banerjee meeting Suvendu in New Delhi days before launching the legislative coup was not coincidental theatre; it was the visible surface of an invisible architecture. Whether Suvendu pretends he knows nothing about it, Sircar said, he was chuckling his way all the way to the legislative assembly because he's got his revenge.

Blood Thicker Than Party: Why Mamata Cannot Cut Abhishek Loose

The central question that preoccupies every observer of this crisis is deceptively simple: why can't Mamata just dump Abhishek and save her party? The answer is neither sentimental nor irrational — it is structurally determined by the peculiar political dynasty she has built and the choices she made in its construction.

Mamata has no children and no spouse in politics. Abhishek is the son of her elder brother Amit and is, in the most literal sense, her only family in the political arena. The academic literature on the TMC's evolution is explicit: for years, the TMC worked to simultaneously rejuvenate the party's political orientation while advancing a long-unfolding project of political dynasticism whereby Abhishek was positioned as the heir to Mamata's political kingdom. Having publicly and systematically groomed him, having given him the National General Secretaryship, and having handed him control of the party's organisational architecture in the last eighteen months before the election, Mamata Banerjee cannot now perform a surgical separation from Abhishek without effectively confessing that she misjudged both the man and her own succession planning — an admission that would destroy whatever residual authority she retains.

There is also the legal dimension. Abhishek faces multiple investigations — in the coal scam, the Narada sting case, and other PMLA-related proceedings — and as Sircar made clear, in the new dispensation led by Suvendu, those investigations will not remain dormant. Mamata disowning Abhishek would not protect him from legal exposure; it would only strip him of the one shield that has kept the full prosecutorial machine at bay. Blood, in this instance, is simultaneously a personal bond and a shared legal exposure — which is why, as Sircar observed with his characteristic precision, she had to operate behind shades now; she can't be putting his finger up on every bus and everything. The relationship has changed from dominance to mutual vulnerability, and that, paradoxically, makes it harder to rupture rather than easier.

Then there is the question of succession and legacy. For a first-generation regional founder — and Sircar correctly locates Mamata in this category, far more organically bound to her party's identity than second-generation leaders like Chandrashekhar Rao or Naidu, who inherited established organisations — the party IS the founder. She named it. She built it. She bled for it.

The TMC is her autobiography in political form, and the prospect of losing it to a claimant who joined only five years ago, working with the blessing of the man who threw her out of her own constituency, is not merely a political setback. It is an existential humiliation.

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Principle or Panic? The Rebellion's Hollow Core and the Operation Lotus Playbook

The rebellion has wrapped itself in the language of party renewal and democratic accountability — Mamata Banerjee is our leader but Abhishek must go — while its actual architecture tells an entirely different story. The trigger at the national level was not any ideological awakening. It was the replacement of Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar as Lok Sabha Chief Whip on 14 May, within days of the election results, with Kalyan Banerjee — a decision Kakoli took as a personal affront, writing publicly that she had met Mamata in 1976 and begun her political journey in 1984, and this is the reward she has received for four decades of loyalty. Seeing the exposed wound, the BJP moved. Home Ministry security for Kakoli was hastily elevated to Y-category. BJP leaders began making calls.

The mathematics of the anti-defection law explains the precision of what followed. Under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, if twenty of the TMC's twenty-eight Lok Sabha MPs leave together and merge with another party, it does not constitute defection — it is a legally protected merger. Two-thirds of twenty-eight is exactly 18.67. The rebels claimed twenty — one more than the threshold, a single unit of legal insurance. This is precisely the same mathematical formula deployed to split the Shiv Sena and to poach seven AAP MPs in the Rajya Sabha — the same playbook, the same numbers, the same choreography. There is a name for this kind of precision: it is not courage, it is not principle, it is actuarial calculation.

Jawhar Sircar was blunter still, naming what he called the Bima TMC — the insurance-policy TMC: It's a surrender to protect their own interests and to protect their own hide. Fifty of sixty of them are now, and more will join. They all have interests. They all have economic stuff going on here and there. For TMC leaders carrying the accumulated weight of a decade and a half of syndicate politics, coal scams, school jobs rackets, and cattle-smuggling cases, the choice between standing with a party in freefall opposition and seeking the portico shade of the ruling dispensation was not a philosophical dilemma — it was a survival calculation.

The rebel MLAs and MPs acquiesced and flourished under Abhishek's machine when it was in power. They did not develop principles. They developed fear. The contrast with Jawhar Sircar is instructive and painful. Sircar quit in September 2024, when the TMC was still in government, when quitting cost him everything and gained him nothing tangible — no security upgrade, no prosecution shelter, no NDA nod. He quit because the RG Kar horror broke something in him morally. The contrast between that exit and the coordinated parliamentary manoeuvre of June 2026 — calibrated to the exact two-thirds threshold, timed with BJP security upgrades and contact calls — captures the moral distance between principled dissent and naked political survival.

This TMC crisis cannot be understood in isolation from the broader pattern. Operation Lotus — the BJP's systematic playbook for dismantling regional parties after electoral defeat — has moved through its phases with the relentlessness of a long-term project. From the 2008 Karnataka buyout of independents, through the Maharashtra Shiv Sena split in 2022 and the AAP Rajya Sabha defections in April 2026, the methodology has been refined with each iteration: identify the disgruntled, provide legal immunity as the primary incentive, use central agencies to weaken those who resist, and deploy the anti-defection loophole to ensure the mathematics of the split give institutional cover. Henry Kissinger's dictum applies with ruthless precision: the BJP eliminates its enemies, but it does not spare its allies either. The BJD, the Akali Dal, the PDP, the AIADMK, and the JD(U) all discovered this sequentially.

There is, however, an important nuance that distinguishes the TMC situation from the Maharashtra model. Several rebel faction members have stated their opposition to staking a legal claim to the party name and symbol. The BJP's own Bengal state president Samik Bhattacharya has reportedly signalled that the party does not want TMC defectors in its ranks — a message that may reflect BJP ideological hardliners' reluctance to absorb cadres with a very different political DNA. So the rebel MPs find themselves in a peculiar halfway house: seeking the shelter of the NDA's portico without being formally invited through the front door — functioning, as Sircar put it, as half proposition, half opposition.

The Legal Labyrinth: When Does Mamata Lose Her Party?

The legal question is now as critical as the political one. Under para 15 of the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968, when rival sections of a recognised political party both claim to be the original party, the Election Commission of India may decide — after hearing all parties — which faction is the recognised party entitled to the name and symbol.

The precedent from the 2023 Maharashtra Shiv Sena dispute is instructive but also cautionary: the ECI ruled in February 2023 that the Eknath Shinde faction was the official Shiv Sena and awarded it the bow and arrow symbol, on the reasoning that the legislative wing could not be viewed in isolation from the party organisation. The TMC's iconic Jora Phool — the twin flowers that have graced Bengal's political landscape for nearly three decades — could face a similar fate if the rebel faction activates this route.

The threshold criteria are demanding. According to The Week's analysis, the rebels would need a majority not only among MLAs and Lok Sabha MPs but also among Rajya Sabha MPs, municipal and panchayat representatives, and, crucially, party office-bearers. The last category remains deeply contested.

Mamata Banerjee controls the party organisation; she founded it, registered it, and the party constitution vests supreme authority in her as chairperson. Constitutional expert Virag Gupta has observed that the ongoing TMC rebellion raises critical questions under the Tenth Schedule and will be a major test of whether a legislative majority can claim control of a legislative party despite opposition from the parent political organisation.

As Mahua Moitra argued — with characteristic sharpness — even if the rebels get their two-thirds parliamentary numbers, their legally protected option under the anti-defection law is a merger with another party, not a standalone claim to party identity. A merger means being absorbed into the BJP or the NDA, which the rebels have been careful to avoid declaring publicly — precisely because such a declaration would reduce their leverage to zero and expose them to the full glare of having betrayed their electoral mandate (41% of the vote) as TMC candidates. So they exist in the constitutional grey zone of NDA-aligned without formal merger — a position that gives them political oxygen for now but lacks legal durability.

The Maharashtra parallel is instructive in another, darker way. Uddhav Thackeray was defiant, declared he would rebuild, seemed confident, and had genuine mass sympathy — and yet, the institutional machinery ground inexorably against him. The party name, the symbol, the funds, the official machinery: all shifted to the Shinde faction. The TMC's registered fund corpus reportedly exceeds Rs 1,000 crore — a prize of considerable magnitude. The legal battle for it will be protracted, expensive, and ultimately decided by institutional actors who are not insulated from political pressure.

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Who Is Left Standing with Mamata?

When the analytical dust settles, the loyalist roster is telling. Shatrughan Sinha, the Asansol MP and veteran Bollywood actor, has been the most vocal loyalist, declaring he was, he is and he will remain with Mamata Banerjee. His loyalty is personal and genuinely felt, but his political weight in Bengal is negligible. He carries no organisational mass, no cadre network, and no ideological anchor in the Bengal political soil.

Derek O'Brien and Mahua Moitra complete what Sircar described as the residual loyalist core. Sircar's assessment was clinical: those who had no other careers, whose entire familiarity with the people lay in their power within the party, cannot leave because Ritabrata and his lot won't even take them. There are also individuals of genuine honour in the remnant camp — Sircar mentioned Sovandeb Chattopadhyay as an honourable man who has principled reasons to remain. But the arithmetic of mass mobilisation does not run on individual honour.

Abhishek himself has no option but to retreat, regroup, and operate from the shadows of this new reality. His properties have been raided, his I-PAC co-founder arrested, and he faces the immediate prospect of intensified legal scrutiny from the Suvendu-led administration. His value to Mamata at this point is paradoxical: his presence is the stated reason for the rebellion, and yet he cannot be detached without dissolving the very entity that gives Mamata Banerjee her political reason for being.

The Invisible Crisis: Bengal at the Grassroots

What neither the rebel MPs nor the loyalists are discussing with any candour is the catastrophic state of West Bengal at the grassroots level — and this silence is itself politically significant. Fifteen years of TMC rule were not simply fifteen years of governance; they were fifteen years of a systematically decentralised extraction model in which local strongmen — the panchayat-level functionaries, the syndicate operators, the block-level party bosses — enriched themselves within a system that provided upward cover in exchange for political loyalty and vote delivery. The schools scam, the ration distribution scam, the cattle smuggling operation, the teacher recruitment racket, the sand and coal syndicates — these were not aberrations; they were the operating system. When Sircar says that the TMC was stuck together not so much by ideology but by a desire to possess power and a desire to possess wealth, he is describing an extraction architecture, not a governance one.

The ordinary Bengali voter — the schoolteacher who couldn't get the job she was owed, the small contractor cut out of a government tender without paying the syndicate cut, the RG Kar patient whose relatives saw a trainee doctor's rape-murder become a political controversy rather than a human tragedy — has been watching this drama with something between disgust and exhausted disbelief. The BJP won because it channelled that disgust into an electoral majority. But winning an election with 207 seats and inheriting an administration riddled with the residues of fifteen years of systematic misgovernance — unpurged bureaucratic networks, captured local bodies, a judiciary stretched to breaking point with pending cases — is a very different thing from delivering transformative governance. The BJP's early actions are politically potent signals, but Bengal's grassroots problems are structural and will outlast any choreographed enforcement theatre.

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Three Scenarios for Bengal's Political Future

In the short term — the next six to twelve months — the most probable scenario is a protracted legal-political spectacle that mirrors but exceeds the Maharashtra sequence in its complexity. The Election Commission will be approached; the Tenth Schedule proceedings will be initiated before the Speaker; the Calcutta High Court and, ultimately, the Supreme Court will be drawn into the vortex.

During this period, the rebel faction will continue to exist in its legally ambiguous NDA-aligned but unmerged state, drawing on the BJP's administrative goodwill for constituency-level delivery while claiming to be the Prakrita Trinamool — the Real Trinamool. Mamata Banerjee has already approached the Calcutta High Court against the Speaker's recognition of Ritabrata Banerjee as Leader of Opposition.

Mamata Banerjee's meetings with Sonia Gandhi in Delhi — reportedly the most sustained personal engagement between them in years — suggest an exploration of a strategic alignment that would give the TMC a national platform and resource base even as its Bengal organisational ground erodes. Speculation about Mamata being offered the Congress National Vice Presidency and Abhishek a General Secretaryship were officially denied but not implausible as trial balloons. With the Left holding only one seat and the Congress two, Mamata and her twenty-odd remaining Lok Sabha MPs represent the INDIA bloc's only Bengal footprint — a fact that gives her leverage she would not otherwise possess in post-election negotiations.

In the medium term — one to three years — three scenarios compete for probability. The first, and most convenient for the BJP, is a complete Maharashtra-model replication: the rebel faction secures the TMC's name and symbol through the ECI, is formally recognised as the real TMC, and Mamata Banerjee either fades into political irrelevance or merges into the Congress as a supplicant rather than an equal. This scenario is not impossible, but it is not inevitable either. The ECI's standards for recognising a split are contested, the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on the Nabam Rebia case has made the disqualification and split architecture more complicated, and even the BJP's own Bengal unit has signalled reluctance to absorb the rebel MPs wholesale.

The second, and historically more resonant, scenario draws on Mamata Banerjee's own biography. In 1997-98, she was expelled from the Congress, began with hardly any flags, hardly any money as Sircar recalled, was dismissed by everyone as 5% of the Congress — and within a decade had consumed her mother party entirely. She spent fifteen years in the most grinding opposition politics Bengal has seen since the Left Front era, survived every attempt to domesticate or eliminate her, and swept to power in 2011 on a wave of popular energy that even her most sympathetic supporters had not fully anticipated. She is not an ordinary politician facing an ordinary reversal. She is a first-generation founder with a genuine mass connect that the rebel faction — which does not possess a single leader with the charismatic capital she carries — cannot replicate.

The third scenario is the most unsettling for everyone: an extended, low-grade political zombification in which the TMC loses its symbol but retains its founder's personal brand; in which the rebel faction holds the legal party shell but lacks the popular legitimacy to win elections on its own; in which Bengal politics fragments into a BJP-dominant state with a confused, multi-fractured opposition that cannot coalesce around a single vehicle. This is the Bihar-in-its-worst-years scenario — factional entropy in a state too important and too complex for factional entropy to serve it well.

The Moral Reckoning Nobody Is Having

There is a final dimension to this crisis that the television panels and the legal analyses consistently evade, and it is the most important one. Indian politics — and Bengali politics in particular, with its long tradition of ideologically grounded political activism — has arrived at a moment of terminal moral exhaustion. The men and women who are today filing letters to the Lok Sabha Speaker about directionlessness and Abhishek's arrogance are the same men and women who stood on platforms and cheered every autocratic overreach. They acquiesced when the panchayat elections were captured through violence and money in 2023. They stayed silent when Partha Chatterjee was arrested with about fifty crore rupees in cash. They did not resign when the RG Kar rape-murder became a political football. They raised no principled objection when I-PAC's twenty-five-year-old staffers were telling elected leaders how to vote and think. Power was sufficient. Enrichment was sufficient.

Now power is gone and enrichment is threatened, and suddenly there are principles. The rebel bloc's claim to be the custodians of the real Trinamool — the Prakrita Trinamool — is an insult to language. What they are the custodians of is their own survival, and the only force keeping them honest is the accidental constraint of a constitutional threshold. The BJP leadership itself is not acting from democratic conviction; Operation Lotus is a machine for the permanent extension of power, and its operators have stated — through Kissinger's logic as much as their own — that there is no ally that cannot become a target when the utility calculus changes. Neither the rebels nor their current hosts have principles at stake. What they have are calculations, and the calculations are brutal.

Bengal, meanwhile, carries the accumulated burden of the failure of three consecutive political formations — the Left Front's decay into calcified authoritarianism, the TMC's corruption-soaked promise of change, and now the question of whether the BJP can actually govern a state as complex and contentious as West Bengal with any consistency.

The grassroots problems — educational degradation, employment collapse, administrative capture, constitutional overreach in local governance — will not be addressed through legal-political chess games over party symbols and anti-defection percentages. They require governance, which requires courage, which requires something neither the rebels nor their patrons have yet demonstrated in Bengal.

Mamata Banerjee may yet surprise everyone. She has done it before — in 1998, in 2011, in 2021 — and those who write her off too completely will recall with some chagrin that this is a woman who fought the CPI(M) for fifteen years with nothing but her own extraordinary will and the credibility of sustained personal sacrifice. But even if she stages the most improbable of political revivals, the TMC she rebuilds — if she does — will be a smaller, leaner, arguably more honest organisation stripped of the opportunists who have now departed with their briefcases and their insurance policies. That, in the deepest irony of this entire affair, may be the best thing to have happened to it.

Why Only Some Defaulters Get Hauled Up

No one really expected that the Anil Ambani-backed Reliance Group, or ADAG, would be hauled up on charges of money laundering and defrauding banks such as State Bank of India and Yes Bank. While the conduct of the industrialist does not surprise those familiar with how business is done in India, what is intriguing is that a pro-business government would choose to act against him. After all, he is not the only one.

In 2025–26, banks in India were poorer by some ₹48,000 crore. This does not include the gargantuan losses worth ₹15 lakh crore incurred by the Indian financial sector because of a company called Rajesh Exports. What this means is that businessmen are not usually hauled up simply for doing business. They come to grief, as Ambani has, only when they dabble in politics.

These are still the early days of the Rajesh Exports scam, so more dirt may emerge regarding how government financial institutions such as the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) acquired a large stake in this gold refining and trading company. The main question is: at whose behest did LIC acquire a stake in the company when it was already bleeding financially? Ever since this mother of all scams broke out, the names of those who allegedly persuaded LIC to buy the stake have been discussed in hushed tones. Some have even mentioned the Prime Minister and the Home Minister as the two figures who may have asked LIC to overlook Rajesh Exports’ limitations.

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How Public Sector Banks Became Instruments of Crony Capitalism

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, an economist and journalist known for his work on the Adani Group and banking scandals, draws parallels with how the Prime Minister’s favoured business group has been funded by nationalised banks. A quick Google search will show that the Adani Group has bank loans amounting to approximately ₹2.6 lakh crore, much of it from SBI. Critics argue that its high debt levels stem from the overvaluation of its assets and companies, enabling it to secure larger loans than many public-sector companies could obtain.

Examples cited include Indraprastha Gas Limited (IGL), whose valuation was reportedly far lower than that of an Adani company involved in gas-based power generation. Other companies, too, were allegedly assessed in a similar manner by compliant public-sector banks whose managers appeared more than willing to extend loans to politically favoured business houses.

The phenomenal rise of many crony capitalists over the last decade has been attributed to the largesse they received through the transfer of loan-starved and weakened public-sector companies, often at throwaway prices. It was a case of giving a dog a bad name and then hanging it. Few tears were shed for these enterprises, but the beneficiaries grew larger and more powerful.

Some Indian conglomerates, including the Adani Group, were at one point compared with global giants such as Google, Apple, and even Elon Musk’s ventures, as their market valuations soared. It was around this time that the US-based Hindenburg Research investigated the Adani Group’s meteoric rise. The question asked then—and still asked today—is whether Hindenburg’s probe was entirely independent or whether it was backed by one of Adani’s global or domestic competitors, including the Ambanis.

The investigation led to the erosion of approximately $150 billion in market value. Hindenburg alleged that this wealth was built on accounting manipulation and inflated valuations, characteristics that critics describe as examples of crony capitalism, a phenomenon extensively analysed by Marxist economist and geographer David Harvey.

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When the Government Uses Raids to Send a Political Warning

As stated above, informed sources have dropped hints that the raids on Anil Ambani’s companies are the manifestation of a complex mix of business rivalry and alleged attempts to destabilise the present government. This may sound far-fetched, but there are many who firmly believe that regulatory pressure from SEBI on the Adani Group was influenced by rival business interests, including those associated with Ambani.

There are reports suggesting that certain detractors of the government concluded that a change in their fortunes was impossible unless Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was weakened or brought down. According to informed sources, this alleged plan involved splitting the constituents of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and reducing the government to a minority. There were also reports that this group sought the support of Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar to facilitate such an effort.

Dhankhar, who has worked with and built relationships across the political spectrum, has been alleged by some to have been involved in efforts to challenge the BJP-led government with the backing of influential financial interests.

“Ambani is being investigated not for his wrongdoing but for daring to conspire against this government,” claimed a source close to the government.

Bizarrely, some speculations suggest that the government does not believe the two Ambani brothers are truly hostile to one another and instead sees them as working together on political matters that could affect their business interests. According to these claims, the government believes the brothers acted in concert in the alleged conspiracy.

These sources further claim that the government is making an example of the younger brother while simultaneously signalling its willingness to act against the elder one as well. The government, they say, believes it is not yet politically secure enough to confront two of the country’s most powerful business houses at the same time. There are fears that such a confrontation could destabilise the government itself.

There is also a view that the Ambanis enjoy close ties with influential circles in the United States and that retaliation could come in some form if they are targeted. Some fear—perhaps incorrectly—that any action against the Ambanis could also have repercussions for the Adani Group.

To neutralise such risks, Adani, who is widely perceived to enjoy close ties with Prime Minister Modi and his government, is said to have strengthened relations with the Trump administration by promising investments worth $20 billion. Many observers within diplomatic circles in New Delhi believe that Adani’s influence could increase significantly in both India and the United States.

Some also speculate that it could affect the future role of External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar within the government. A reshuffle of the Union Cabinet is widely expected in the near future.

This article first appeared in Hardnews.

Rekha, 53, has lived in Seemapuri in east Delhi for most of her adult life. She is a mother of three, works as a domestic help in the mornings, and has been a beneficiary of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) since the scheme was launched. The day Rekha's Ujjwala Yojana connection arrived, she lit the stove and left the chulha outside. No more smoke. No more eyes watering through the cooking. A blue flame that came on when she turned the knob.

Last year, when the government cut the annual subsidised cylinder entitlement from 12 to nine, Rekha began rationing. She started using the chulha occasionally — on days when she could not pull together the money needed to pay upfront before the cylinder would be delivered. The LPG stove was still there. She just could not always afford to use it.

On June 8, 2026, the government cut the entitlement again — from nine cylinders to four. Rekha heard about it through neighbours. "We are poor people," she said. "We are already facing difficulties paying for LPG because we have to pay so much money upfront and we cannot afford it. Now with only four cylinders, I do not think using LPG makes sense at all. We are thinking of stopping it completely."

Rekha is one person. But she is not an exception. Across India, millions of households covered under PMUY face the same calculation she is making this week — whether the blue flame is still worth it, or whether the chulha is simply the only realistic choice left. What is happening in Seemapuri is a preview of what experts and civil society organisations warn will happen at scale: a reversal of the single most significant clean cooking transition in India's history, driven not by preference but by the arithmetic of poverty meeting the architecture of a shrinking subsidy.

On June 8, the Union government quietly reduced the number of subsidised cooking gas cylinders available annually to beneficiaries of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) from nine to four. The announcement came through a press briefing by Praveen Mal Khanooja, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, without a Cabinet note, without a parliamentary debate, and without a public consultation. For 10.5 crore women from below-poverty-line households across India, it was not a policy announcement. It was the end of a decade-long promise.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched PMUY on May 1, 2016, at Ballia in Uttar Pradesh — one of India's most economically deprived districts — the scheme came with a clear and specific commitment: free LPG connections to women from below-poverty-line households, with access to 12 subsidised 14.2-kg LPG cylinders every year. The stated aim was to end dependence on firewood, cow dung and crop residue — and with it, the lung disease, the daily labour of fuel collection, and the indoor smoke that had for generations been accepted as the condition of cooking poor in India. Over the decade that followed, the annual entitlement moved in one direction only. In August 2025, the cap was cut from 12 to nine cylinders. On June 8, 2026, it was cut again — from nine to four. What began as 12 has now become 4. Two-thirds of the original promise has been withdrawn.

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What Four Cylinders Actually Means

To understand what this decision means in practice, consider a family of six living in a village in Uttar Pradesh or Chhattisgarh — the kind of household PMUY was designed for.

When the scheme was launched, the family received a free connection — the government paid ₹1,600 covering the security deposit for the cylinder, pressure regulator, hose, and installation charges. The first refill and stove were also provided free under Ujjwala 2.0. That part has not changed. The connection remains free.

What has changed is what happens every time the family needs to cook.

A refill must be purchased. Today, a 14.2-kg LPG cylinder in Delhi costs ₹942. The family pays that amount upfront, in cash, at the door when the delivery arrives. The government then transfers ₹300 directly into the registered bank account through the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system — but only after the transaction is recorded, and only for the first four refills of the year. The effective cost per cylinder for those four refills is ₹642.

From the fifth cylinder onward, there is no transfer. The family pays ₹942 with no return.

A 14.2-kg cylinder lasts approximately 30 to 45 days for a family of four to six people cooking all meals exclusively on gas. Four cylinders therefore covers, at most, four months of the year. For the remaining eight months, the family must either pay the full market price of ₹942 per cylinder — an amount that exceeds the daily income of most agricultural labourers — or return to the chulha burning firewood, dung cakes, and crop residue.

The annual subsidy value has been cut sharply. When the cap was 12 cylinders, the maximum annual benefit was ₹3,600. After the cap was cut to nine in August 2025, it was ₹2,700. From June 8, 2026, it is ₹1,200. In less than a year, the annual monetary value of the PMUY subsidy has been cut by two-thirds — coinciding with a period in which cylinder prices rose by ₹89 in just three months.

The Poverty Trap

The government's justification for cutting the cap to four cylinders was provided by Khanooja at the June 8 briefing. "The revised entitlement broadly matches the average annual consumption of Ujjwala beneficiaries," he said. The average PMUY beneficiary, according to the government, uses four to five cylinders a year. The subsidy has therefore been aligned with actual use.

It sounds administratively reasonable. It is not.

Raj Shekhar, the national co-convenor of the Right to Food Campaign — a civil society network that has monitored welfare entitlements in India for over two decades — described the decision as deeply flawed. "Four cylinders per year is very damaging for PMUY beneficiaries," he said. "The government's justification — that average consumption is around four cylinders — is incorrect in what it implies. The government is not accounting for the reason why people are consuming less. The reason is affordability. They cannot afford to pay for LPG cylinders at current prices. We are seeing on the ground that people have already started going back to alternatives — firewood, dung cakes, whatever they can access. This year, when the conflict in West Asia began and cylinders were being sold in some areas at extremely high prices, people were cutting meals and shifting to alternative cooking methods."

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The situation Raj Shekhar described had a documented dimension. In March 2026, as the West Asia conflict disrupted LPG shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a parallel black market emerged across India. Domestic 14.2-kg cylinders were being sold for ₹2,000 to ₹4,000 in several areas — two to four times the official listed price. Commercial 19-kg cylinders reached ₹5,000 in Bengaluru's black market. In Ghaziabad, long queues formed outside gas agencies every morning, with many residents returning home without a cylinder after hours of waiting. Indian Oil Corporation deployed over 7,500 inspection teams and took action against 141 distributors for black marketing and hoarding. For the households PMUY was designed to serve — families without savings buffers, living on daily wages, unable to pay even the official price upfront — the black market price was not a number. It was a door that was closed.

Raj Shekhar added that the government's framing of a global energy crisis as justification missed a more fundamental question of policy priorities. "Yes, there is a genuine global crisis. But when there is a crisis, you have options about where the burden falls. You can raise revenue from the wealthy — impose a windfall tax, a wealth levy, something that targets those with the capacity to absorb it. The choice being made here is the opposite: the burden is being shifted onto the people least equipped to bear it."

When Smoke Returns: The Environmental and Health Cost

Every family that goes back to a chulha burning wood, dung cakes, and crop residue increases India's black carbon emissions — particles that the latest climate science has directly linked to accelerating glacier melt in the Himalayas. A June 2025 study published in Communications Earth & Environment, a Nature Publishing Group journal, found that black carbon from South Asia accounted for 33.7% of glacial mass loss on the southern Tibetan Plateau between 2007 and 2016. Researchers at the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) have established that household biomass burning contributes to nearly half of India's total black carbon emissions.

The health consequences are immediate and documented. The World Health Organization links household air pollution from solid fuel combustion to 2.9 million deaths globally every year, including over 309,000 deaths of children under five.

For India specifically, research published in Environmental Health Perspectives attributes approximately 1.04 million premature deaths annually to household air pollution from solid cooking fuels. Women and children — who spend the most time near the kitchen — bear the greatest burden.

Measured in Real Kitchens

The scale of this health risk is not theoretical. It has been measured, in real homes, in real time, in Delhi's own migrant labour settlements.

In November 2023, the Asia-Pacific Regional Network for Early Childhood (ARNEC) published a micro-research study titled Smokeless Kitchens: Assessing the Willingness to Adopt Cleaner Cooking Fuels among Migrant Labour Families in the National Capital Region of India. The study was authored by Bhavreen Kandhari, co-founder of Warrior Moms, a pan-India civil society collective of mothers campaigning for clean air. The research used real-time Airveda air quality monitors across three clean-fuel homes and three chulha homes in NCR migrant labour settlements, with measurements taken on January 6 and February 17, 2023.

The findings were stark — and more complex than a simple comparison. In households using LPG or induction cooking, the Air Quality Index during cooking hours ranged from 506 to 898. In chulha households, it ranged from 530 to 932. Both ranges sit well above 300 — the threshold at which the United States Environmental Protection Agency classifies air quality as hazardous, an emergency condition. The difference between the two groups was narrow. The study explains why: measurements were taken in densely packed migrant labour settlements where homes share walls and have no ventilation. Smoke from neighbours' chulhas permeated every kitchen, including those using clean fuel. The finding is not that LPG makes little difference — it is that one family switching to clean fuel cannot protect itself while surrounded by families who cannot afford to. When the government cuts the PMUY subsidy and millions return to chulhas, the air worsens for everyone in the settlement, including the families who are still managing to pay for gas.

PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations — the fine particulate matter most damaging to the respiratory system — spiked dramatically during active chulha cooking compared to clean-fuel homes across both measurement dates. The WHO safe limit for PM2.5 is 15 µg/m³ on an annual average basis and 25 µg/m³ for a 24-hour period. Concentrations recorded in chulha kitchens during cooking hours were multiples of that limit. Critically, even clean-fuel homes in the same settlements recorded elevated readings during cooking hours, as smoke from neighbouring chulhas permeated the shared, poorly ventilated spaces.

The study also conducted focus group discussions with women in these settings. The findings showed that women were not returning to biomass out of preference or habit. They expressed clear willingness to transition to cleaner fuels.

The barrier was cost and access — not choice.

The Study Said Strengthen. The Government Cut.

The ARNEC study that was submitted to the government made five recommendations. The third read: "Consider implementing targeted subsidy programs to make clean cooking fuels more affordable and accessible for vulnerable populations." The first called on the government to "continue and strengthen initiatives to address household indoor air pollution, promoting the use of clean cooking fuels and technologies."

Three years after that study was published, the government cut the Ujjwala Yojana subsidised cylinder cap from nine to four.

Bhavreen Kandhari, speaking to The Probe, described the on-ground situation since the West Asia conflict began driving prices upward. "Biomass is burning again at a scale we have not seen since before the scheme. With cylinders becoming unaffordable, households have started burning wood and whatever combustible material they can find. Our study has also showed that air quality in rooms where women were cooking with biomass was reaching AQI levels of 2,000 and above. We went into homes with our monitors. The difference between clean cooking and biomass cooking was not a matter of degree — it was categorically different. Now, with the government rolling back PMUY support, the environmental and health consequences will be severe. These are not projections. We have the measurements."

Kandhari added that the current crisis also presented an opportunity that the government was choosing not to take. "This is precisely the moment when India should be investing in the next transition — induction cooking, solar cooking, technologies that remove the dependence on imported LPG entirely. Instead of looking forward, this policy is pushing millions of families backward. That is not a response to a global crisis. That is an abdication."

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A Rising Price and a Flawed Justification

The subsidy cut on June 8 arrived alongside the second LPG price increase in three months. Following a ₹60 hike on March 7, a further ₹29 increase took effect on June 7, bringing the retail price of a 14.2-kg cylinder in Delhi to ₹942. The cumulative increase since February 2026 stands at ₹89. The government cited a 46% surge in the Saudi Contract Price — the global benchmark for LPG pricing — since February, driven by shipping disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz linked to the West Asia conflict. India imports approximately 60% of its LPG requirement, linking domestic costs directly to these international movements.

At the June 8 briefing, Khanooja offered a formulation that reframed the entire subsidy question. "Whether I'm a Ujjwala customer or a non-Ujjwala customer, I'm getting a cylinder which should have cost ₹1,600, at ₹942, even if I'm a non-Ujjwala customer. Now in that case, that is also an indirect subsidy to the customer. Now over and above that, Ujjwala customers get ₹300 more. So overall, if you see, they are getting ₹1,000. The non-Ujjwala are also getting ₹700 a cylinder."

This argument — that the gap between actual supply cost and consumer price constitutes a universal subsidy — has a surface logic but a deeper problem. By this reasoning, any government that does not pass on full costs to consumers is being generous. The decision not to raise the price to ₹1,600 is presented as a form of welfare. The framing makes it impossible for any price below full cost-recovery to be described as inadequate support for the poor. It is a definition that erases the distinction between targeted welfare for the most vulnerable and the ordinary management of a strategic commodity.

The Twenty Paise Calculation

Defending the ₹29 price increase specifically, Khanooja said it equated to roughly ₹1 per day, or "20 paise per day per household member" for a family using 12 cylinders a year. He called it a "very minor hike" compared to the ₹700 per-cylinder under-recovery being absorbed by public sector oil marketing companies.

The arithmetic is correct. The denominator is wrong.

The calculation was performed for a family consuming 12 cylinders a year. A PMUY beneficiary, by the government's own data, consumes approximately four to five cylinders a year. For such a family, the relevant calculation is not the incremental cost of a ₹29 hike spread over 12 cylinders. It is the cost of each cylinder at a time when the family must pay ₹942 upfront, receive ₹300 back for the first four purchases of the year, and pay the full ₹942 with no return from the fifth cylinder onward — at a time when that upfront sum represents multiple days of household income for a family engaged in agricultural or daily-wage labour.

What the Government's Own Auditor Found

The government was not operating without evidence. It had been told, by its own supreme audit institution, what the problem was — and what the problem was not.

CAG Report No. 14 of 2019 — a national performance audit of PMUY covering its implementation across 36 states and Union Territories from May 2016 to December 2018, analysing data from all three public-sector oil marketing companies — was tabled in Parliament in December 2019. Its findings were unambiguous.

The CAG found that the annual average refill consumption of PMUY consumers as of December 31, 2018 was 3.21 refills per connection — and that this figure was declining, not stable. It had fallen from 3.66 refills per connection among consumers who had completed one year by March 2018, to 3.21 by December of the same year. Among the 3.18 crore PMUY consumers who had completed at least one full year by December 2018, 17.61% — 0.56 crore women — had never come back for a second refill. A further 33.02% — 1.05 crore — had used only one to three cylinders in the entire year.

The report identified the reason directly. "Since the cost of refill has to be paid upfront by the BPL consumers," it stated, "this has become a constraint in ensuring sustained usage of LPG." That sentence — from India's independent constitutional auditor, in a document tabled in Parliament — is not ambiguous. It does not say families prefer biomass. It does not say awareness campaigns are needed. It identifies the upfront cash payment requirement as a structural barrier to use.

When the CAG presented these findings, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas replied that adoption of LPG "depends on several factors e.g. food habits, cooking habits, access and price." The oil marketing companies said the shift would be "a gradual process since they are habituated to their traditional cooking methods." The government's response, in other words, was to attribute low consumption to habit and culture — not to the affordability barrier its own auditor had named.

The CAG recorded its assessment of those replies: "The success of such a huge social scheme cannot be measured in terms of mere distribution of connections without ensuring the transition to clean fuel through sustained usage of LPG."

The report also documented that ₹2,617 crore in interest-free loans extended by oil marketing companies to PMUY beneficiaries — to cover the cost of the first stove and refill — remained outstanding, because families were not booking enough subsequent refills for the EMI recovery mechanism to function. Families had borrowed money to participate in the scheme. They then could not afford to use it. The CAG noted, further, that "inadequacy was also noticed in providing 5 kg cylinders to PMUY consumers facing affordability issue" — using the word "affordability" directly.

The state-level picture was even more alarming. Chhattisgarh recorded an average annual consumption of just 1.61 refills per PMUY connection. Madhya Pradesh recorded 2.38. Jharkhand, 2.57. These are among India's poorest and most tribal states — the states where PMUY penetration was celebrated as a success, and where the gap between connection and sustained use was widest.

The Subsidy Worked. Then It Was Cut.

Between 2019 and 2022, the government took no action on the CAG's affordability finding. Refill prices continued to rise. Average consumption remained below four cylinders per year.

In May 2022, under the pressure of rising inflation and approaching state elections, the government introduced a targeted Direct Benefit Transfer subsidy of ₹200 per cylinder for up to 12 refills annually. Consumption began to rise. By FY 2022-23, the average had reached 3.68 refills per connection. In October 2023, with assembly elections in five states imminent, the subsidy was raised to ₹300 per cylinder. By FY 2023-24, consumption had reached 3.95. By FY 2024-25, it reached 4.47 — the highest recorded average in the scheme's history.

The data confirmed what the CAG had identified in 2019: the barrier was financial, and a financial intervention could address it. When the government put money back in the bank accounts of poor women after each refill, those women bought more refills. The transition to clean fuel that PMUY had promised in 2016 was, slowly, beginning to happen.

In August 2025, the government cut the cap from 12 to nine cylinders. In June 2026, it cut it again — from nine to four. Both cuts came after consumption had risen in response to the subsidy. The most recent cut came when average consumption had reached 4.47 — just above four. The cap was set at exactly the level consumption had recently crossed, removing the support that had enabled families to cross it.

The government's stated justification — that the cap has been aligned with average consumption — uses the outcome of its own subsidy as proof that the subsidy is no longer needed at that level. It is a formulation that ensures the cap will always track poverty rather than need. Families unable to afford more than four cylinders in a year will always provide data showing average consumption of four cylinders, which will always be cited as evidence that four is sufficient.

This is the structure the government has built over ten years. In 2016, it gave 10.5 crore women a stove and called it clean cooking. It then provided no refill subsidy for six years, during which cylinder prices more than doubled and consumption remained at one-third of what a family needs to cook exclusively on LPG. It had access to a national audit that identified the problem precisely. It ignored the audit's findings for three years. It then introduced a subsidy — not as a rights-based entitlement, but as an electoral measure — and watched consumption rise in direct response. It then used that rising consumption figure, and the average it produced, as the basis for withdrawing the support that had generated it.

In August 2025, a family that had been averaging 4.47 cylinders a year had its subsidised entitlement cut to nine. In June 2026, it was cut to four. From the fifth cylinder onward, that family pays ₹942 upfront with nothing returned, at a time when the cumulative price increase over three months alone stands at ₹89. The government has not fixed the upfront cash barrier. It has not changed the DBT architecture. It has not introduced the seasonal vouchers or flexible payment mechanisms that independent researchers have recommended for years. It has reduced the number of transactions in which the barrier is temporarily offset — and labelled that reduction a reflection of reality.

The government did not cut the subsidy because the scheme failed. It cut the subsidy because the scheme was beginning to work — and that cost money.

CJI and the Question of Dissent: What Happened at London Event

On 4 June 2026, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant delivered a lecture on "Artificial Intelligence and International Law" at Birkbeck, University of London, as part of a six-day official visit to the United Kingdom. The event was organised at the invitation of the university and drew an audience of legal academics, students, and observers. During the question-and-answer session that followed, an attendee attempted to ask the Chief Justice about what she described as growing hostility to dissent in India. The organiser refused to take the question, ruling it outside the scope of the evening's academic topic. That refusal would set off a sequence of events that would echo far beyond the lecture hall. 

The exchange between the attendee and the moderator was captured on video and spread rapidly across social media. The attendee, widely described in reports as a student, began by noting that the CJI had spoken about India's democratic track record in the context of artificial intelligence governance. She then raised the question directly:

"We now hear from a number of legal observers from within the country as well as internationally that there is a great deal of concern about growing hostility to dissent within India, and it does seem that this hostility is somewhat reflected in His Lordship's recent very well-publicised remarks."

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The organiser intervened before she could conclude: "With due respect, I am so sorry, we will not be able to take that question. The topic is Artificial Intelligence and International Law."

The attendee persisted: "I will continue my question. I think when the respected speaker has referred to Indian youth and journalists and right to information activists as cockroaches and parasites recently, I think that he should be given a chance to respond." The organiser held firm: "Let's stick to the topic and we will not be taking any questions, and this is not a political event." The CJI did not intervene, and the question went unanswered.

In another clip circulating from the London event, another attendee was seen protesting and demanding respect saying, "Give us some respect please." The clip was shared widely alongside the main exchange, with multiple outlets reporting the student as demanding that the world's largest democracy acknowledge its citizens' right to be heard. 

The Chief Justice's decision not to answer, or to intervene to allow the question, has drawn significant commentary. While it is entirely within institutional convention for a moderator to manage questions at an academic event, the fact that the question being blocked was specifically about dissent — and that the CJI remained silent on the matter — has contributed to an impression that is, at minimum, awkward. It is not the place of a court or the press to compel a sitting judge to answer questions at a public lecture. At the same time, a Chief Justice who speaks publicly on democratic values and judicial power, and then allows a question about dissent to be excluded without comment, is unlikely to find that silence reassuring to those who raised it.

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The High Commission of India in London issued a formal statement the following day. The High Commission said the 4 June London event had featured a lively discussion after the lecture before an individual tried to disrupt the proceedings. "Such indecorous behaviour is unacceptable and inconsistent with respectful engagement that should govern public discourse. Differences of opinion are a natural part of a democratic society. However, they must be expressed in a manner that is civil and respectful," the High Commission said. The statement notably characterised the attendee's question as a "disruption," a framing that itself attracted criticism from observers who noted that asking a question — however pointed — at a public lecture is, by most definitions, an act of civic participation rather than disruption. 

To understand why the London event acquired the significance it did, it is necessary to go back three weeks. During a Supreme Court hearing on 15 May 2026, CJI Surya Kant made the following oral observations: "There are already parasites of society who attack the system and you want to join hands with them? There are youngsters like cockroaches; they don't get any employment, they don't have any place in profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, some of them become RTI activists, some of them become other activists, and they start attacking everyone." The remarks were made from the bench in open court, and were widely reported. 

The following day, Abhijeet Dipke, a political communications strategist who had previously worked with the Aam Aadmi Party and was then studying at Boston University in the United States, announced on X the launch of a "platform for all the cockroaches out there," listing the eligibility criteria as being unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and able to rant professionally. He called it the Cockroach Janta Party, a deliberate play on the name of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

According to Dipke, the digital membership of the CJP officially crossed the 1.2 million milestone and within days, the party's Instagram account crossed 22 million followers— a following that outstripped even the BJP's own Instagram presence. The movement drew support from many opposition parliamentarians, students, and first-time voters across the country.

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Within weeks, however, the Indian government moved to restrict the movement's online presence. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology directed platforms to block the CJP's primary social media accounts and website, citing national security concerns. Dipke publicly accused the government of seeking to silence dissent and vowed the movement would continue. 

On 6 June 2026, the Cockroach Janta Party held its first major offline demonstration at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. Dipke, who had flown in from the United States, secured permission from the Delhi Police for a peaceful sit-in scheduled until 5 pm. Thousands of participants gathered at the site, many wearing cockroach masks, with the central demand being the immediate resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over systemic failures in national examinations, including NEET-UG. Dipke addressed the crowd, saying it had been a month since they had been demanding Pradhan's resignation on social media, and that instead of taking action, those in power had focused on "hacking our accounts and getting our posts deleted." Security was tight across the capital, with over 1,000 police personnel deployed. 

India has finally received its fourth S-400 Triumf squadron from Russia. The contract was formally signed on 5 October 2018 at a deal value of 5.43 billion dollars — ₹40,000 crore — for the delivery of five S-400 regiments. 

As per the Indian Ministry of Defence's own statements to Parliament, deliveries were supposed to commence from October 2020 and be completed by April 2023. By that deadline, however, India had received only three of the five contracted regimental sets — a delay attributable primarily to the Russia-Ukraine war, which began in February 2022. The fourth squadron's arrival has been met with near-unanimous celebration across India's defence establishment and media, hailed as a landmark moment in the country's air defence journey. And there is genuine cause for acknowledgement: the system's combat debut during Operation Sindoor, where it reportedly downed a Pakistani surveillance aircraft at over 300 km, proved its operational value beyond doubt. But to treat a delayed, partial delivery of a foreign-built system as a measure of India's defence prowess would be to mistake an import for an achievement. Here is why.

Before getting into the details, it is important to understand what the S-400 actually is. The S-400 Triumf is a Russian long-range surface-to-air missile system designed to detect and engage enemy aircraft, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones. It can detect targets up to 600 km away and engage them at ranges of up to 400 km, depending on the target type. It can track and engage multiple targets simultaneously.

A full unit of the air missile system consists of radar systems to detect and track threats, command posts to process data and decide what to shoot, and launchers loaded with different types of missiles for different ranges and altitudes. The system automatically selects the right missile for the right threat. Most air defence systems specialise in defending against specific threats — ballistic missiles, aircraft, or cruise missiles. The S-400 uniquely integrates the ability to detect and engage all major aerial threats within a single system, which is relatively rare. This versatility, combined with its long range, makes it one of the most capable air defence systems in the world but with a low-tier dominance.

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The S-400's Formidable Low-Tier Dominance

The S-400 Triumf forms the backbone of India's long-range air defence, excelling against threats that operate within the atmosphere. With a detection range of 600 km and an engagement capability of up to 400 km, the system is masterfully designed to neutralise aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and cruise missiles — threats that represent the majority of tactical aerial challenges.

India's acquisition of multiple S-400 batteries provides comprehensive coverage over critical strategic zones, offering unmatched versatility in detecting and engaging diverse threat profiles simultaneously. However, this formidable capability operates within a clear tactical envelope: the lower atmosphere, where conventional air-breathing platforms conduct their operations. 

The system's strength in this domain is proven through its technical specifications, though it remains notably absent from combat validation against peer adversaries. For India's immediate aerial defence requirements — protecting cities, military installations, and vital infrastructure from Pakistan's cruise missiles or Chinese fighter incursions — this air defence system represents a decisive capability advantage.

The Exo-Atmospheric Void: Where India's Defence Collapses

Beyond the S-400's atmospheric ceiling lies a strategic vulnerability that threatens India's most critical assets. Ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, and intercontinental weapons operate in the exo-atmospheric realm — where India possesses no operational, combat-proven interceptor. While India's indigenous Ballistic Missile Defence Phase-II programme has successfully tested the AD-1 interceptor — with maiden and second flight tests in November 2022 and July 2024 respectively — and moved it into limited serial production for expanded trials, neither the AD-1 nor the AD-2 has been operationally deployed. AD-1 and AD-2 are India's indigenous exo-atmospheric ballistic missile defence interceptors, being developed under Phase-II of the Ballistic Missile Defence programme to counter long-range ballistic missile threats from adversaries like China and Pakistan.

In contrast, other major missile-defence operators already field dedicated ballistic missile interceptors. The United States operates THAAD, which has achieved a commendable intercept record in controlled flight tests since 2006. Israel deploys the Arrow-3, a hit-to-kill exo-atmospheric interceptor. And Russia has announced that its S-500 has entered operational service with its first regiment as of December 2025, though its claimed capabilities — particularly against hypersonic weapons and satellites — remain independently unverified.

India currently has no formally commissioned, operationally deployed exo-atmospheric ballistic missile interceptor — a critical gap that leaves its major cities and strategic assets exposed to China's DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missiles and Pakistan's growing medium-to-long-range ballistic missile arsenal, including the Shaheen-III and the reportedly MIRV-capable Ababeel. While the indigenous BMD Phase-II programme is progressing — with the AD-1 interceptor in limited serial production for expanded trials and the AD-2 still in fabrication awaiting its first flight test — neither system is operationally deployed. This places India in a significantly more vulnerable position than the United States, Israel, and Russia, all of which operate dedicated systems with operational exo-atmospheric intercept capability.

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The S-400's Hidden Fragility: What India's Defence Establishment Must Confront

India's celebration of the S-400 as a cornerstone of its air defence architecture rests on an assumption that deserves urgent scrutiny: that Russia can reliably sustain, replenish, and upgrade the system over the long term. A December 2025 research paper by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) — Britain's oldest and most respected defence think tank — delivers a sobering verdict that every Indian defence planner should read carefully. "Considering the vulnerabilities identified in this paper," the report states, "Russia's international customers for air defences should reassess the resilience of these systems to attacks, including cyberattacks, technical compromise and disruption of resupply in supply chains." For India, which has just received its fourth S-400 squadron and is actively considering five more, this is not an abstract warning — it is a direct challenge to the strategic premise of its most expensive air defence investment.

The RUSI report, titled Disrupting Russian Air Defence Production: Reclaiming the Sky, exposes a specific and alarming vulnerability at the heart of the S-400 system itself. The S-400's command-and-control centre and its 92N6 Gravestone engagement radar — the system's brain — run on Russia's Elbrus-90micro computing system. According to RUSI, this processor was originally manufactured by Taiwan's TSMC. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, TSMC terminated its agreement with the Russian developer due to sanctions risk. The developer, MCST, subsequently failed to fulfil its state defence order, and was placed under external management and is reportedly facing insolvency. The report's conclusion is unambiguous: "Russia's microelectronics industry is underperforming, still dependent on foreign suppliers for more complex chips, and disruption to its operations would have a serious impact on the production of some of the most critical components of its air defence systems." In plain terms, the processor that runs India's S-400 batteries is one whose production Russia has struggled to sustain since 2022.

The vulnerability goes deeper than microprocessors. RUSI documents that Russia's S-400 radar production depends on printed circuit board laminates manufactured by US company Rogers Corporation, imported largely through China. It further reveals that Russia has no domestic production facility for beryllium oxide ceramics — a critical material for radar components — relying entirely on a single factory in Kazakhstan, and that "the disruption of trade flows through the application and enforcement of sanctions operations would have a significant impact on radar production for the S-400." Russia's radar engineers also remain dependent on Western software tools for design and modelling, with the report finding that Russia lacked domestic substitutes across multiple critical product categories, with sophisticated replacements unlikely before 2027. 

Most critically for India's operational readiness, the report states plainly that "Russia is currently expending more air defence interceptors than it is producing" — a finding with direct consequences for any country seeking timely replenishment of S-400 missiles after combat use. India learned this cost firsthand when Operation Sindoor required the emergency expenditure of ₹10,000 crore to replenish just 288 interceptors.

The report's final warning is its starkest, and it is addressed explicitly to countries in India's position: "It should also be highlighted to those actors considering the purchase of Russian air defence systems that the exposure of Russian industry to disruption may make Russia an unreliable supplier of reloads in a crisis. Customers should ask whether they can provide a reliable shield against emerging strike systems." This is the question India must now answer honestly. 

The S-400 performed admirably in Operation Sindoor — its combat debut against Pakistan validated its atmospheric air defence capabilities. But a system is only as credible as its supply chain, and RUSI has documented, with financial records and industrial mapping, that Russia's S-400 supply chain is fragile, increasingly China-dependent, and exposed to disruption at multiple critical nodes. For India — which shares a contested border with China, relies on the S-400 as its primary deterrent against Chinese air power, and has no sovereign control over the system's components, software, or interceptor production — this is not merely a procurement risk. It is a strategic paradox that sits at the heart of its air defence doctrine.

Triumf in Russia, Sudarshan in India: A Name That Reveals Everything

In Russia, the system is known as the S-400 Triumf. The 'S' designation comes from Зенитная Ракетная Система — Zenitnaya Raketnaya Sistema — meaning anti-aircraft missile system, where 'S' serves as shorthand for this entire class of surface-to-air missile systems. "Triumf" means exactly what it sounds like: Triumph. It is a name that speaks to Russian pride in engineering — a declaration that this system represents the pinnacle of Moscow's air defence ambition. 

When India inducted the system in December 2021, it did something characteristically its own: it gave the foreign weapon an Indian soul. The Indian Air Force renamed it Sudarshan — short for Sudarshana Chakra — the spinning disc-weapon of Lord Vishnu, described in the Puranas as a razor-edged, ever-rotating discus that travels at unstoppable speed, covers all directions, strikes at great distances, and cannot be diverted once released. 

The parallel was deliberate and poetic: the S-400's 360-degree radar coverage, its ability to engage multiple targets simultaneously at ranges up to 400 km, and its near-inescapable terminal guidance all echo the mythological attributes of Vishnu's supreme weapon. In naming it thus, India wrapped a Russian machine in the oldest armour of its civilisation.

But here is the question that the mythology itself demands we ask: can a weapon truly be called Sudarshana Chakra if India did not forge it? The original Sudarshana Chakra was Vishnu's own — created for him, controlled by him, sustained by him. It was sovereign in the most absolute sense. The S-400 that India calls by this name is none of those things. India did not design the S-400. India did not manufacture it. India does not control its supply chain. And as the London-based Royal United Services Institute warned in its paper, India may not even fully control its long-term sustainment — given that Russia's manufacturing base for the system is increasingly dependent on foreign components. The report's warning to all foreign customers was explicit: Russia's exposure to supply chain disruption "may make Russia an unreliable supplier of reloads in a crisis." To call this system by the name of Vishnu's inviolable weapon is, in strategic terms, to mistake a leased shield for a forged one.

This distinction matters profoundly when we assess what India's greatest defence achievements truly are. A country that has indigenously developed a nuclear weapons programme, built and launched its own satellites, developed the Tejas light combat aircraft after decades of persistent effort, successfully tested the Agni-V ballistic missile, and is now pursuing Project Kusha — its own long-range air defence system — has far more authentic claims to defence achievement than a delayed delivery of a foreign system purchased in 2018 and promised complete delivery by April 2023. 

It bears remembering that as of June 2026, India has received only four of the five contracted S-400 squadrons — three years after the government's own deadline — with the fifth still pending. The delivery that has been celebrated as a milestone is, by the government's own stated schedule, an overdue partial fulfilment. The Sudarshana Chakra of mythology never arrived late, and it never arrived incomplete.

The S-400 makes India safer. That is real, and it must not be dismissed. But making India safer is not the same as making India self-reliant. A weapon India cannot build, cannot fully sustain, and cannot replenish without Russia's cooperation — and increasingly, without China's industrial participation — is a capability with a ceiling, not a sovereign shield. In the long arc of Indian strategic doctrine — from the founding vision of strategic autonomy to the current Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative — it is self-reliance, not procurement, that will define the country's greatest defence achievements.

Medical Fraud, Medical Ethics, and the Collapse of Indian Healthcare

India's healthcare sector, often celebrated globally for its low-cost medical tourism and world-class tertiary hospitals, conceals a deeply troubling underside — one defined by unnecessary surgeries, rampant medical fraud, organ transplantation rackets, pharma bribery, diagnostic commissions, and a regulatory architecture that is at once elaborate and toothless.

Parliamentary committees have openly acknowledged that the system is teetering on the edge. In the charged few minutes after a death is pronounced, the hospital corridor often becomes less a place of grief and more a courtroom without rules, with the person in the white coat cast as the most convenient villain. One may also need to contrast this with a system where over 75% of Indian doctors report having faced some form of workplace violence — each assault on one doctor quickly snowballs into mass walkouts and strikes, paralysing urgent medical care and deepening the spiral of mistrust between citizens and the very system meant to save them.

This note attempts to critically examine the full spectrum of medical fraud in India — from the structural incentives that make fraud endemic, to individual cases of breathtaking brazenness, to comparative international experiences, to the sorry state of legal accountability for wrongdoing doctors. It also examines what the failure of medical ethics at an institutional level looks like, and asks the uncomfortable question: is there a way out — including providing a safe enough work environment for doctors?

Also Read:  Medical Negligence Law in India: Why Doctors Escape Accountability

A System on the Brink: Parliament's Own Warning

When a parliamentary committee acknowledges publicly that a country's healthcare system is "on the brink of collapse," it is not merely an academic observation — it is an institutional alarm bell. India's Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare has issued precisely such a warning, citing chronic underfunding, staffing shortages, and inadequate research investment as structural causes of the deterioration. With nearly 30% of key health positions unfilled and the doctor-to-patient ratio languishing at around 1:1,500 to 1:1,655 against the WHO norm of 1:1,000, the systemic strain is not incidental — it is foundational. Into this vacuum of public capacity, a voracious private sector has stepped in, controlling over 80% of India's healthcare delivery, and in doing so, has transformed the healing arts into a marketplace governed not by medical ethics but by quarterly targets and kickback schedules.

India's public expenditure on healthcare stands at a mere 0.29% of GDP as of 2025–26, against the National Health Policy 2017 target of 2.5% of GDP by 2025 — a target that remains spectacularly unmet. In a devastating comparative context, India spends roughly 14–15 times less per capita on public health than BRICS nations, 10 times less than Thailand or Malaysia, and even 2.5–3 times less than Bhutan and Sri Lanka. This colossal underinvestment has created a perfect storm: desperate patients, inadequately supervised private hospitals, and a regulatory body historically more interested in approving new medical colleges than in policing practising doctors.

Also Read:  Neglected Public Healthcare Centres in Gautam Buddh Nagar In Uttar Pradesh Exposed

Operating for Profit, Not Patients: The Surgery Scam

The single most explosive claim at the heart of the current discourse is that an estimated 44% of all surgeries performed in India are unnecessary or fraudulent, driven not by clinical need but by financial incentive. While this figure deserves critical scrutiny — it appears to draw significantly from second-opinion studies and insider testimony rather than randomised clinical audit — it aligns broadly with the peer-reviewed literature. A systematic scoping review published in JAMA Network Open (2023), covering over 9.1 million surgical procedures across 133 studies in low- and middle-income countries including India, found that unnecessary caesarean delivery rates ranged from 12% to 81%, and identified private financing as the primary associated factor. This is medical fraud by design — not by exception.

The granular breakdown of these figures is equally striking. A second-opinion evaluation centre in India found 55% of recommended cardiac stents and heart surgeries to be inappropriate. The World Bank, in a BMJ-published warning as early as 2014, noted that people with private voluntary health insurance in India were two to three times more likely to be hospitalised than the national average, warning that "many of these interventions deliver only marginal benefits and can actually harm patients, leading to unnecessary suffering, especially among the frail and elderly." The perverse logic is simple: under India's predominantly fee-for-service private hospital model, a doctor who recommends a surgery generates revenue; a doctor who recommends watchful waiting or lifestyle modification does not.

The book Dissenting Diagnosis (2016), authored by Dr. Arun Gadre and Dr. Abhay Shukla and based on interviews with 78 practising doctors across seven Indian cities, provides perhaps the most forensically honest insider account of this phenomenon. The doctors interviewed — from general practitioners and cardiologists to gynaecologists and surgeons — collectively describe a system where "rational and ethical medical care is becoming increasingly rare," where honest doctors feel "under siege," and where the influence of the pharmaceutical industry has become "even more pervasive." Crucially, several practitioners confirmed that they felt pressure to recommend unnecessary interventions or face termination or loss of referrals from corporate hospitals. The wholesale abandonment of medical ethics in corporate hospital settings is not the story of a few bad apples — it is the story of a corrupted orchard.

Senior doctors in large hospitals in Maharashtra reportedly earn salaries touching ₹1 crore per month — not because of their medical expertise alone, but because their ability to push patients into unnecessary tests, admissions, and surgeries makes them extraordinarily profitable to their employers. This "target-based" medical practice is the corporatisation of healthcare reduced to its most brutal logical endpoint.

Also Read:  Medical Negligence in Tata Motors Hospital Killed My Sister - Brother

Ayushman Bharat and the Insurance Fraud Catastrophe

The Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY), India's flagship government health insurance scheme, has become a textbook case of how well-intentioned social policy can be systematically exploited through medical fraud. The National Anti-Fraud Unit processed 6.66 crore claims, of which 2.7 lakh claims from private hospitals — amounting to Rs 562.4 crore — were found inadmissible due to abuse, misuse, or incorrect entries. Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh alone accounted for Rs 74.5 crore of these fraudulent claims.

The scale of the government's own response tells the story of how entrenched the fraud became. As of 2025, the Union government had de-empanelled 1,114 hospitals, suspended 549 more, imposed penalties of Rs 122 crore on 1,504 hospitals, and rejected 3.56 lakh fraudulent claims amounting to Rs 643 crore. While the government rightly touts these figures as evidence of a "zero-tolerance policy," the numbers also reveal that hundreds of thousands of fraudulent transactions were successfully submitted — and in many cases paid — before detection.

The fraud mechanism is elegant in its simplicity: hospitals swipe the smart cards of enrolled beneficiaries, bill for treatments never rendered, inflate codes to claim costlier procedures, or in the most brazen instances, claim treatment for patients who are not even admitted. Multiple cases have been reported where patients with colds or minor ailments were enrolled under Ayushman Bharat and billed for expensive surgeries — hospitals pocketing the money and patients sometimes paid a small sum to cooperate.

The medical fraud is not confined to government schemes. Private mediclaim policies suffer equally. Over 3,000 reputed hospitals have reportedly been blacklisted by major insurance companies for false claims. The abuse during COVID-19, when hospitals across India are alleged to have claimed insurance for fake or inflated COVID cases, represents possibly the most callous exploitation of a public health emergency in India's modern history.

Also Read:  Ayushman Bharat Works on Paper. Ground Reality Tells Different Story.

Ventilators on the Dead: Fraud at Its Most Barbaric

Among the darkest categories of medical fraud documented in India is the ventilator fraud — the practice of keeping deceased patients on life support in order to continue billing their families or insurance providers. Cases reported in the media describe instances where clinically dead patients were placed on ventilators and declared alive for days or weeks before families were told the truth. In one well-documented case, a 14-year-old boy who had already died was kept on a ventilator for a month — hospitals extracting billing during this entire period — before finally being declared dead. After complaints, the hospital paid a Rs 5 lakh settlement. That settlement, derisory in comparison to the emotional devastation wrought on the family, also epitomises the inadequacy of current accountability mechanisms.

The reported practice of performing fake "emergency surgeries" on already-deceased patients — collecting surgery costs before informing families of the death, with the explanation that the patient "died on the table" — is documented in Dissenting Diagnosis as a known, if rarely acknowledged, occurrence. These cases sit at the intersection of medical fraud, conspiracy, and moral barbarism, yet the perpetrators face minimal criminal consequences. Medical ethics, in these instances, has not merely been stretched — it has been obliterated.

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

The Organ Trafficking Underworld: A Multi-Crore Industry

India's organ trafficking problem is not new, but its reach and sophistication have deepened alarmingly. The Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 1994 (THOTA) prohibits commercial organ trade and restricts donation to relatives or emotionally connected donors approved by state authorisation committees. However, trafficking networks have developed elaborate methods to bypass these provisions — fabricating family trees, forging notary certificates, manipulating DNA test results, and bribing transplant coordinators and hospital staff.

The case of Pushpawati Singhania Hospital CEO Deepak Shukla, arrested in 2019 for running an international kidney racket involving at least 13 suspects and multiple Delhi hospitals, underscored just how high up institutional complicity can reach. The Hiranandani Hospital case in Mumbai in 2016, where the CEO, medical director, and three doctors were arrested for trafficking kidneys from poor rural women sold as "wives" of recipients via forged marriage documents, implicated a prestigious institution at the highest levels. The 2024–25 Jaipur–Rajasthan case, involving an interstate and international trafficking network that lured Bangladeshi nationals with promises of money for kidneys using forged documents and fake identities, further confirms that this is an organised transnational crime. The Rachakonda police, in early 2025, busted a ring operating out of Alakananda Hospital in Hyderabad, arresting nine accused including two doctors, with allegations of operations running since at least 2023.

That apart, the media has reported fresh 2024 cases of kidney trafficking involving patients from Bangladesh brought to Delhi under fraudulent documentation, with one Delhi surgeon arrested for her role in the network. Al Jazeera's 2025 investigation into a "village of one kidney" — where impoverished Bangladeshis described being recruited, transported, operated upon, and sent home — highlighted how poverty is systematically weaponised by brokers who stand between desperate recipients and equally desperate donors.

The Union Health Ministry, alarmed by the Jaipur case, directed all states and Union Territories in April 2024 to investigate violations and mandated generation of a unique NOTTO-ID for all transplant cases — a belated but necessary step. However, the enforcement capacity of state "Appropriate Authorities" under THOTA remains woefully inadequate.

Also Read:  The Underworld of Organ Transplantation in India

Patients as Commodities: The Referral Scam

The referral commission system — where general practitioners and smaller clinics are financially rewarded by large hospitals for every patient sent their way — has become so normalised in India as to be practically an open secret. A reputed top-end private hospital in Mumbai reportedly once published an explicit payment schedule: Rs 1 lakh for sending 40 patients annually, Rs 1.5 lakh for 50, and Rs 2.5 lakh for 75 patients — irrespective of whether those patients had genuine clinical need.

Apollo, Fortis, Apex, and other brand-name hospital chains are alleged to be operating similar informal programmes. The consequences for patients are severe: they are subjected to the scrutiny and protocols of large tertiary hospitals for conditions that could be managed far more cost-effectively at primary or secondary care levels, while simultaneously being exposed to upselling of unnecessary investigations and interventions. The patient is not merely a human being seeking care — they are a revenue unit in a supply chain that begins at the neighbourhood clinic and ends in the operating theatre. Medical ethics has no place in this calculus.

The Diagnosis Scam: 200,000 Labs and Almost No Oversight

India has approximately 200,000 diagnostic laboratories across the country, of which only approximately 1,000 are certified by recognised quality bodies. This extraordinary gap between the number of labs and quality-verified ones creates an almost regulation-free environment where results can be manipulated, tests fabricated, and commissions freely exchanged.

Income Tax raids on reputed pathology labs in Bengaluru reportedly uncovered over Rs 100 crore in cash and 3.5 kg of gold kept aside as doctor commissions — rewards for routing patients toward those labs for tests, many of which are unnecessary. Doctors reportedly earn 40–50% commissions for such referrals, creating a powerful financial incentive to over-investigate.

The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), India's drug price regulator, found in a 2018 investigation that diagnostic services at major Delhi-NCR private hospitals were "invariably higher" than those charged at independent private centres — evidence that the hospital-lab nexus profits both from over-referral and over-charging once the referral is made.

Pharma Bribes and the Freebie Economy

The pharmaceutical industry's relationship with India's medical community is one of the best-documented examples of structural corruption in any professional sector. Around 20–25 major pharmaceutical companies collectively spend approximately Rs 1,000 crore per year on doctor incentives — ranging from cash and foreign travel to luxury hotel stays and conference sponsorships.

The Dolo-650 case became a landmark exposure: after the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) raided 36 premises of Micro Labs Ltd. in July 2022, it alleged that the manufacturer of Dolo-650 had distributed freebies worth approximately Rs 1,000 crore to doctors during the COVID-19 pandemic to incentivise prescription of its 650mg tablet — a formulation deliberately kept above the 500mg price control ceiling to maximise profit margins. The Supreme Court bench led by Justice DY Chandrachud called it "a serious issue" and noted that such practices directly endanger patients' fundamental right to health.

The drug pricing markup scandal runs parallel to the bribery crisis. Another media investigation documented pharmaceutical company quotations offering Emcure's Temicure 250mg to hospitals at Rs 1,950, while patients were billed Rs 18,647 — a nearly ninefold markup. Reliance Life Sciences offered its cancer drug Trasturel 440mg to hospitals at Rs 30,875; patients paid Rs 58,602. Abbott offered heart drugs to hospitals at roughly one-third of MRP. The NPPA investigation found trade margins on some hospital consumables as high as 2,100% — one injection bought for Rs 13.64 and billed to patients at Rs 189.95. The regulator's own report noted that it lacked jurisdiction to take action against hospitals for such overcharging — a damning admission of regulatory impotence by design.

Also Read:  Medical Negligence: “It Took 15 Years and $5M to Get Justice in India"

Laws Without Teeth: India's Broken Regulatory Architecture

India's regulatory framework for healthcare is a labyrinth of overlapping legislation — the Indian Medical Council Act 1956 (now replaced), the Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Act 2010 (CEA), the Consumer Protection Act 2019, the THOTA 1994, and the NMC Act 2019 — that collectively produces elaborate paper compliance and minimal real-world accountability.

The CEA 2010 was Parliament's landmark attempt to standardise healthcare regulation nationally. Fourteen years after its passage, it remains effectively unimplemented. Only 12 states have adopted it, none has implemented it properly, minimum standard notifications expected by 2014 have still not been finalised, and hospital associations have challenged in the Supreme Court the Centre's very authority to regulate private hospital pricing.

A 2025 policy analysis in the Integrated Journal for Research in Arts and Humanities identified eight critical implementation gaps — including federalism challenges, absent patient protection mechanisms, weak enforcement, disproportionate burdens on smaller providers, and digital integration failures.

The Medical Council of India (MCI) itself was dissolved in 2020 precisely because of its notorious corruption — members elected by the regulated profession, arbitrary decisions, opaque functioning, and allegations of freely issuing approvals to substandard medical colleges in exchange for considerations. Its successor, the National Medical Commission (NMC), established under the NMC Act 2019, was meant to be transformative. Yet a damning RTI response in January 2026 revealed that between its inception in September 2020 and January 2026, the NMC had taken up 185 appeals filed by doctors while rejecting all 256 appeals filed by patients — effectively converting itself into a doctors' protection bureau rather than a patient-safety regulator. The NMC only resolved in September 2024 to begin entertaining patient appeals — and even this decision has not been made publicly available. As health policy researcher Dr. KV Babu documented, the NMC was rejecting, on average, one patient appeal every week for five years. It is difficult to imagine a more complete institutional abandonment of medical ethics.

Under the NMC framework, professional misconduct regulations exist, but enforcement by state medical councils is notoriously weak. Rules requiring doctors to prescribe only generic (salt) names, to disclose full fees before treatment, to obtain informed consent, and to maintain records for three years are systematically violated. The gap between regulatory text and ground reality has never been wider.

Also Read:  NMC: Exposing How It Is Failing Patients and Shielding Doctors

The Elusive Penalty: How Few Doctors Are Ever Held Accountable

How many Indian doctors have actually been penalised — criminally or monetarily — for medical fraud or gross negligence? The honest answer is: very few, relative to the scale of documented wrongdoing.

Criminal prosecution of doctors in India operates under Section 304A of the Indian Penal Code (causing death by negligence). The Supreme Court's landmark 2005 judgment in Jacob Mathew v. State of Punjab established that criminal liability arises only in cases of "gross negligence" amounting to recklessness, adopting the English "Bolam Test" — which protects doctors if they act in accordance with a responsible body of medical opinion. While this standard appropriately protects doctors from vexatious complaints, it has also, in practice, raised the evidentiary bar so high that very few criminal prosecutions against doctors succeed. Courts have further required, as a precondition for criminal prosecution, an independent medical opinion from a credible panel — a requirement that itself depends on doctors opining against fellow doctors, a prospect the medical fraternity consistently resists.

On the civil side, the Indian Supreme Court's award of Rs 11 crore compensation in one landmark medical negligence case represented the highest sum ever awarded in Indian medical negligence history at the time — but the judgment itself noted that compensation calculation "is unpredictable as it varies hugely across different cases, courts and tribunals." This unpredictability itself discourages complainants. As of 2025, India saw 65,000 medical negligence cases filed annually across state High Courts, the Supreme Court, and NCDRC — a sharp rise in litigation, with paperwork lapses and administrative failures now driving more cases than clinical errors.

For government insurance scheme fraud, the enforcement record is mixed. Under AB-PMJAY, 1,184 hospitals have been de-empanelled and penalties of over Rs 231 crore levied. But de-empanelment without criminal prosecution means hospitals can reconstitute under different names and return — a revolving door that is well documented, including in Gujarat where 19 previously blacklisted hospitals were allowed to resume operations after nominal compliance.

For organ trafficking, sentences under THOTA remain relatively light given the gravity of the offence, and state Appropriate Authorities tasked with enforcement are routinely understaffed and under-resourced. The long-running Jaipur kidney trafficking case has seen accused secure bail after delays of two years — a pattern consistent with India's broader criminal justice bottleneck.

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

Not an Indian Exceptionalism: Global Comparisons

It is important to resist the temptation to frame India's medical crisis as uniquely aberrant. Healthcare fraud is a global phenomenon, and its contours in developed nations offer both comparative perspective and cautionary lessons.

In the United States, healthcare fraud is estimated to cost between USD 100 billion and USD 170 billion annually — accounting for 3% to 15% of total healthcare spending. A 2017 analysis in BMC Health Services Research examined unnecessary invasive procedures in the US, finding evidence of widespread overuse across surgical specialities. Hospital billing fraud — the practice of billing for services not rendered, "upcoding" to claim more expensive procedures, and ghost billing — costs the US Medicare and Medicaid system billions each year, and the FBI and Department of Justice run dedicated healthcare fraud enforcement units that have secured billions in recoveries and hundreds of criminal convictions. The False Claims Act provides qui tam provisions allowing whistleblowers to sue on behalf of the government — a powerful enforcement mechanism entirely absent in India.

In the United Kingdom, NHS England faces approximately 12,000 medicolegal claims annually at a combined cost of GBP 8 billion — representing 6.7% of the NHS England budget. The UK's regulatory regime, anchored by the General Medical Council (GMC) which operates independently and has the power to strike doctors from the medical register, provides a considerably more robust accountability mechanism. However, even the NHS was not immune to COVID-era fraud, with the Department for Health and Social Care estimating GBP 324 million in PPE fraud alone.

Why Medical Fraud Became Endemic: The Structural Roots

Understanding India's medical crisis requires moving beyond individual bad actors to examine the structural conditions that make medical fraud rational, rewarding, and low-risk.

The first structural driver is the near-total dominance of out-of-pocket healthcare spending. India's patients pay for most of their care themselves, with inadequate consumer protection, no price transparency requirements that are actually enforced, and deeply asymmetric information between provider and patient. When a doctor tells a semi-literate patient from rural Uttar Pradesh that their child needs an emergency laparotomy, there is no mechanism by which that patient can evaluate the advice, seek a quick second opinion, or refuse without risking their child's life.

The second structural driver is the commercial hospital model's incentive architecture. Target-based salaries, revenue-linked departmental budgets, and hospital rankings that reward volume over outcome create an environment where the financial rewards for over-treatment far exceed those for appropriate treatment. Senior hospital administrators, whose own compensation is tied to hospital profitability, look the other way. Medical ethics is, in this model, a commercial liability.

The third driver is the regulatory paralysis described above — a Clinical Establishments Act that exists on paper but not in practice, a National Medical Commission that until 2024 refused to hear patient complaints, and a pharmaceutical marketing code that remains voluntary and therefore irrelevant.

The fourth driver, rarely discussed, is the criminal-political nexus that protects many of these operations — one that makes the enforcement of medical ethics practically impossible in affected areas. Reports of collusion between police, hospital staff, and organ trafficking networks have been documented in multiple cases. ESI and Ayushman Bharat fraud cases involving inflated bills approved by corrupt government officials have been reported across multiple states.

Prescription for a Sick System: The Way Forward

The path forward is neither politically simple nor fiscally painless, but its broad outlines are reasonably clear from the global evidence on healthcare system reform.

First, the Government needs to immediately operationalise the Clinical Establishments Act (CEA) 2010 with mandatory price transparency, standardised treatment protocols, and enforceable minimum standards. The current situation — where draft standards issued in 2019 have still not been made permanent in 2025 — is simply inexcusable. Simultaneously, the Government must develop a Uniform Code of Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices with statutory teeth and criminal penalties for violation, as petitioned before the Supreme Court. The voluntary nature of the existing code makes it a dead letter.

Second, India needs an independent, adequately resourced patient ombudsman with suo motu investigative powers — analogous to the GMC's fitness-to-practise investigations in the UK — to review cases of suspected medical fraud, over-treatment, and institutional misconduct without depending on patients to navigate a hostile complaints ecosystem.

Third, the NMC's Ethics and Medical Registration Board must be genuinely empowered to hear and adjudicate patient complaints, strike off serial offenders from the medical register, and publish findings transparently. Restoring the centrality of medical ethics to the NMC's mandate requires statutory amendment to the NMC Act 2019, not merely internal board resolutions.

Fourth, the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act needs comprehensive revision — strengthening penalties, mandating national data reporting through NOTTO for every case, and providing enforcement resources to state Appropriate Authorities that currently exist in name only.

Fifth, and most fundamentally, India must fulfil its National Health Policy commitment to spend 2.5% of GDP on public health. The corrosive private sector dominance of Indian healthcare is in no small part a consequence of the state's abdication of its primary responsibility to deliver universal healthcare. As long as public health spending per capita remains among the lowest in the world, patients will remain desperate, vulnerable, and at the mercy of a private system that has little structural incentive to uphold medical ethics.

Sam Altman disregarded human life, Florida tells OpenAI court

The US state of Florida has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, alleging the tech giant and its CEO put profit over public safety with its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) product, ChatGPT.

The lawsuit, filed in Florida state court on Monday local time by Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier, is one of the most significant enforcement actions brought by a state attorney against an AI company to date.

It comes as OpenAI and other big tech companies are embroiled in a growing number of legal cases related to the alleged harm their products have caused.

Also Read:  Claude Mythos Preview: When AI Turns Fraud Into an Industry of Fear

Six key elements

The complaint opens with a screenshot of OpenAI’s own parental-control page, which states that ChatGPT was “built with safety in mind”. Then, in a standalone paragraph, the State answers with two words: “Not so”.

This signals the central allegation of the case: that Sam Altman and OpenAI sold ChatGPT to the public as safe and reliable, while knowing it could cause serious harm

More specifically, there are six key themes to Florida’s case against OpenAI. The first is that the company engaged in deceptive safety marketing, assuring parents the platform is safe for teenage use, while not clearly disclosing that ChatGPT can be wrong.

Second, despite OpenAI’s marketing, ChatGPT is unreliable. A 2025 study, for example, found AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, misrepresent the news roughly 45% of the time. Similarly, despite marketing suggesting ChatGPT can handle financial affairs, ChatGPT has failed in meeting basic accounting standards and provided incorrect tax advice to users.

The third element of the case is the public safety threat. The danger to young people in particular is illustrated by the tragic story of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who died by suicide in April 2025 after engaging in long conversations with ChatGPT. When Adam expressed suicidal thoughts, ChatGPT responded that it “won’t try to talk you out of your feelings”. It helped Adam plan a “beautiful suicide” and even offered to write his suicide note for him.

Why would a product behave this way? Because, Uthmeier argues, it was built to.

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

OpenAI designed ChatGPT to be highly agreeable, to say “yes” roughly ten times as often as “no”, according to a Washington Post review of 47,000 conversations. This forms the fourth element of the case – commercial exploitation through sycophancy. In other words, ChatGPT optimistically parrots back users’ responses in order to to manipulate them into deeper conversations, regardless of truth or safety.

But according to the lawsuit, even ordinary use carries a cost: it weakens people’s brain activity and critical thinking skills (also known as cognitive atrophy). This is the fifth element of the case.

The sixth and final element is knowledge – specifically, the knowledge of Sam Altman. According to Uthmeier, since at least 2023, OpenAI’s own documents warned that the model could coach people on committing crimes, but Sam Altman overruled the safety staff.

These six elements paint a picture of a product marketed as safe, engineered to be addictive, and known by its own makers to be dangerous – yet sold to us, anyway.

Sam Altman is at the centre of that picture. The complaint reconstructs his career and reaches for an April 2026 New Yorker investigation and testimony from the recent legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI to depict a man, who in Uthmeier’s telling, repeatedly chose speed over safety.

That is why Uthmeier is asking the court to hold Altman personally liable for “his utter disregard for the risk to human life”.

Also Read:  Jeff Bezos Faces Criticism Over The Washington Post Staff Reductions

Pay for past harms

Uthmeier is asking the court to declare that OpenAI broke the law, then to order the company to stop – permanently – its unlawful practices.

He wants the company barred from collecting children’s data without parental consent and the safeguards that should come with it, and barred from misrepresenting or staying silent about ChatGPT’s risks.

On top of the injunctions, the state is seeking civil penalties of up to US$10,000 per violation for OpenAI’s alleged wilful violation of the the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. Uthmeier said penalties could total billions of dollars.

In other words: pay for the past harms and change the product going forward.

In a statement to The Conversation, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed to the company’s “industry leading protections and policies” regarding user safety.

In particular we built safety for minors directly into our products, including a more protective experience specifically for minors, an age prediction tool, defaulting users whose age we are not confident into our more protective experience, and giving parents tools to monitor their kids use of AI.

Adding to a growing pile

This lawsuit is a significant development, but it has not arrived in a vacuum.

Across the US, the courts are filling with cases accusing tech companies of harming young people. In April, for example, Uthmeier launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI over the chatbot’s alleged role in a shooting at Florida State University.

Some juries have started to side with the plaintiffs.

In March 2026, for example, a New Mexico jury hit Meta with a US$375 million penalty in a child safety case. Days later, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and Google liable in a landmark trial over social media addiction.

This case rides the same current. But it broadens the scope by alleging Altman himself should be personally responsible.

Uthmeier is demanding a trial by jury.

On Sunday, May 31, 2026, a man sat down in the middle of the road on Old Airport Road in Bengaluru and refused to move. His pregnant wife was trapped in his car after traffic was halted by the Bengaluru traffic police for 30 minutes to facilitate the smooth passage of Karnataka Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot’s VIP convoy.

The incident has reignited a debate that India keeps having and never resolves — about VIP culture, about who the road belongs to, and about whether the security of the powerful is worth the suffering of the ordinary.

Also Read:  How CBSE OSM Turned Board Results Into a National Scandal

What happened on Old Airport Road

The Bengaluru Traffic Police blocked traffic completely on Old Airport Road for half an hour to clear a corridor for the movement of Karnataka Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot's convoy. The area was already prone to delays from ongoing metro construction work, and the abrupt shutdown left hundreds of commuters stranded with no warning and no timeline.

One of those commuters was travelling with his pregnant wife. Frustrated and desperate, he stepped out of his vehicle and sat down in the middle of the road in protest. His act of defiance, captured on video and widely shared on social media, quickly turned him into an unlikely symbol of public anger over VIP culture and traffic disruptions in India's technology capital. 

When VIP Culture Costs Ordinary Citizens

This is not an isolated incident. VIP culture has been routinely disrupting life in Bengaluru and across India's major cities for decades, with ordinary citizens bearing the cost in silence.

When Union Home Minister Amit Shah visited Bengaluru on a previous occasion, ambulances were found stuck in traffic jams stretching several kilometres as police provided zero-traffic corridors wherever he went. Indigo had to postpone flights as passengers failed to reach the airport on time. Motorists spent almost an hour covering just 100 metres.

The pattern is consistent and the victims are always the same — commuters with no warning, no recourse, and no apology.

What makes Sunday's protest different is that a man decided not to absorb it quietly. He sat down. He asked a question out loud. And it travelled.

A Viral Moment That Demands a Structural Answer

Police have ordered an inquiry and are reviewing CCTV footage to determine how long vehicles were held up and whether traffic management protocols were followed. Social media users claimed traffic had been stopped for nearly 30 minutes, though police said they were investigating the allegation. 

An inquiry is the least that is owed. But an inquiry alone does not fix VIP culture. India has had this conversation before — after ambulances missed emergencies, after funerals were delayed, after pregnant women were turned away from hospitals because a road was sealed for a motorcade. The conversation ends, the convoy moves on, and the next one forms.

The viral protest video of the Bengaluru man reopened an old question that surfaces whenever roads are cleared for dignitaries — how much inconvenience should ordinary people be expected to endure in the name of VIP security? It is a question that has never received a satisfactory answer from the system. 

The man on Old Airport Road eventually stood up and walked away. The convoy of the Karnataka Governor moved through. The road cleared. The debate it triggered has not.

In May 2026, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) announced Class 12 results that sent shockwaves through over 17 lakh households across India. The culprit was not a mysterious plague or a war — it was a piece of software. CBSE's maiden large-scale foray into On-Screen Marking (OSM) — a digital evaluation framework deployed for the first time at national scale — detonated into one of the most consequential examination scandals in post-independence India.

Students received wrong answer sheets. Blurred, illegible scans were marked by evaluators. Pages went missing. Portals crashed. Marks plummeted. The national pass percentage plunged to 85.20%, the lowest in seven years. The vendor at the centre of the storm, Coempt Edu Teck (formerly Globarena Technologies), had already cratered examination systems in Telangana — twice — in 2019 and 2023, leaving behind a trail of suicides and judicial intervention. 

The Promise That Became a Powder Keg

The idea of the CBSE On-Screen Marking system — is, in principle, unimpeachable. Answer scripts are scanned, uploaded to a secure digital portal, and evaluated by examiners on their screens. Marks are auto-tabulated, eliminating totalling errors. Access is decentralised — teachers from any CBSE-affiliated school anywhere in the world can log in and evaluate. Transparency is built in: students can access scanned copies of their own papers.

The Board had, in fact, conceived OSM back in 2014 but shelved it then because the technology to scan bound answer booklets without cutting them was unavailable, and loose pages risked getting misplaced. A decade later, CBSE decided the technology had matured sufficiently to attempt a grand rollout — not as a pilot with a few thousand scripts, not as a phased five-year transition, but as a single, all-in deployment covering 98,66,622 answer books across approximately 40 crore (400 million) scanned pages for Class 12 students alone.

In February 2026, CBSE formally notified affiliated schools that CBSE On-Screen Marking would be implemented for the Class 12 board examination 2026, promising multiple benefits: elimination of totalling errors, automated coordination, faster evaluation, wider teacher participation, and — crucially — the abolition of post-result verification of marks, which the Board declared unnecessary given the digital system's accuracy.

The Controller of Examinations, Sanyam Bhardwaj, was so confident he declared the system would deliver results in a compressed nine-day evaluation window, down from the traditional twelve-day physical cycle, and told PTI that "my evaluation is going very perfectly, better than the previous evaluation." Training was promised: dry runs, instructional videos, a call centre, and practice sessions for examiners. The Board was, to use its own words, "proud" of the rollout.

The pride came before a spectacular fall.

Also Read:  How NEET Let the Paper Leak—And Why It Will Happen Again

How CBSE OSM Failed: A Multi-Layered Systems Collapse

The collapse of the CBSE On-Screen Marking rollout was not a single event but a cascade of simultaneous failures across hardware, software, human capacity, and governance.

The Scanning Catastrophe

At the very foundation of the CBSE OSM chain lies scanning quality. If a student's handwritten answer sheet cannot be legibly digitised, the entire downstream evaluation is compromised — evaluators are, in effect, marking air. Students who accessed their scanned copies post-result discovered pages that were blurred to the point of illegibility, with evaluators apparently having assigned marks to content they physically could not have read. In one representative Reddit post that went viral, a student described "completely illegible" copies where "you can't read a single line," yet examiners had "marked them with red ticks and assigned arbitrary scores." Worse, some students received answer sheets that were not theirs at all — a different student's handwriting, a different student's responses, tagged to their roll number in CBSE's system.

Vedant Shrivastava became the human face of this failure. He posted his Physics answer sheet on X, and the difference in handwriting was immediately apparent to his family, his teachers, and, ultimately, to CBSE itself, which admitted the error and sent him the correct scanned copy. Sanjana, another student, described scoring 11 out of 70 in Chemistry theory — a grotesquely improbable result — and found that every page of her Chemistry script belonged to someone else. CBSE's own admission that it "discarded around 30 answer sheets due to issues like unclear images and duplicate entries" without re-scanning them — meaning some students may have been evaluated on nothing at all — crystallised the scale of the administrative delinquency.

The Portal Meltdown

The failures did not end at evaluation. When students tried to access their scanned copies for verification and re-evaluation, they encountered a post-result services portal that was not ready for prime time. It crashed under load, rejected payments, generated inflated fee demands (one widely circulated report quoted figures as high as Rs 69,000 per subject before the Board was forced to correct itself), and generally functioned as a deterrent rather than a redressal mechanism.

CBSE was eventually compelled to slash fees dramatically — Rs 100 for a scanned copy, Rs 100 for verification, Rs 25 per question for re-evaluation — and promised full refunds if marks increased after scrutiny. That this fee rationalisation took a national political controversy to achieve is itself a damning commentary on institutional empathy. IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur were roped in as technical firefighters, tasked with stabilising a portal that should have been stress-tested before results were declared.

The Training Deficit

Warning signs had flashed months earlier. During a mandatory mock evaluation session on 26 February 2026, teachers reported portal access failures, slow system performance, inadequate internet connectivity in schools, and errors in teacher data on the OASIS portal.

A senior teacher from a Delhi-based DAV school went on record to describe the system as facing "repeated glitches," with subjects like Business Studies and Biology barely commenced even weeks after the board examinations ended. CBSE's own Controller dismissed these concerns, insisting the system was "on track." Principals were allegedly instructed by regional officers to record videos supporting the CBSE OSM system after complaints surfaced — a damage-control exercise that, when it leaked, backfired spectacularly. The institutional instinct, once again, was to manage perception rather than fix the problem.

The Vendor at the Centre of the Storm: Coempt Edu Teck and the Telangana Precedent

If the technical failures were the body of the scandal, the vendor question is its inflammatory heart. The company entrusted with building and running the OnMark digital evaluation platform for CBSE is Coempt Edu Teck Pvt Ltd, a Hyderabad-based firm. CBSE floated its Request for Proposal on the Central Public Procurement Portal on 28 August 2025, conducted an e-bidding process, and awarded the contract to Coempt Edu Teck as the "qualified bidder," reportedly beating out firms including Tata Consultancy Services. What CBSE did not publicly disclose — or apparently investigate — was that Coempt Edu Teck was formerly known as Globarena Technologies Pvt Ltd.

The Telangana Tragedy of 2019

In April 2019, the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE) declared Class 11 and 12 results that stunned the state. Of 9.7 lakh students who had appeared, over 3.28 lakh — more than a third — failed. Many were bright students who had sailed through the year; their parents and teachers were incredulous. The culprit, as a government-appointed inquiry committee confirmed, was a "bubbling error in the OMR sheet" caused by the software deployed by Globarena Technologies, which the TSBIE had engaged for its examination processing. The consequence was not merely administrative embarrassment.

In the days following the results, students across Telangana — shattered by failure they had not earned — took their own lives. At least 19 to 21 students were reported to have died by suicide within a week. Protests erupted. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) issued notices to the Telangana government. Petitions were filed in the Telangana High Court seeking action against Globarena, re-evaluation of papers, and compensation of Rs 50 lakh to each bereaved family. The government appointed a three-member expert committee to probe the firm.

The 2023 Repeat

If 2019 were Globarena's only infamy, the story might have ended there. It did not. In 2023, the same entity was again linked to anomalies in Telangana's intermediate examinations, with 19 students dying by suicide in a single week as parents blamed the software firm. The pattern was identical, the consequences were catastrophic, and the institutional response was again reactive, slow, and inadequate.

By the time CBSE was awarding its 2026 contract, this history was publicly available. As Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi pointedly observed, "It took us 30 seconds to figure out that this company was earlier called something else." Gandhi demanded an independent judicial inquiry and an SIT, asking what relationship Coempt's management had with the government, what procedures were bypassed, and why background checks were not conducted.

CBSE's official defence was that it had followed General Financial Rules "scrupulously" and awarded the contract to the lowest qualified technical bidder. The CEO of Coempt, VSN Raju, maintained that the Telangana matters had been litigated in the High Court and the Supreme Court with no finding of wrongdoing against the company, and that the name change from Globarena to Coempt was a "branding exercise" under company law. Whether this defence is legally adequate is a separate question from whether it is institutionally responsible. The question that haunts the episode is not merely procedural — it is moral: when a vendor's prior deployments have been linked to student suicides and judicial proceedings, does "following GFR" exhaust the Board's duty of care?

The Political Firestorm and the Ministerial Response

Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan found himself at the intersection of institutional accountability and political heat. His response was, in some ways, more candid than what Indian public discourse usually expects of ministers. "Certain discrepancies have come to our notice, and I take responsibility for them," Pradhan said after a review meeting at CBSE headquarters. He was also unusually direct about accountability: "If someone is intentionally responsible, we will not spare them, whether it is within the CBSE or outside, or within the government." He defended CBSE OSM as a "progressive instrument" that is "student-centric" and globally adopted, while promising IIT teams would fix the portal glitches.

The political opposition, led by Gandhi, was less interested in technicalities and more in the systemic indictment — the choice of vendor, the scale of harm, and the government's silence at the highest level. Gandhi accused PM Modi of "no answers, no accountability, no shame." Pradhan accused Gandhi of being "frustrated after repeatedly losing elections" and opposing "scientific advancement."

In this back-and-forth, the students — the actual victims — risked being reduced to political collateral. The more disquieting revelation was CBSE allegedly instructing school principals to record videos praising the OSM system even as complaints mounted — an institutional reflex more concerned with managing optics than with providing relief. That is the deeper crisis: not the technology's failure but the system's unwillingness to acknowledge it until the outrage became politically unsustainable.

Also Read:  NEET 2026 Paper Leak: Inside the System Built to Keep Failing

NEET-UG 2026: A Second System Collapses Simultaneously

The CBSE OSM disaster did not occur in a vacuum. It detonated alongside an equally, if not more, consequential crisis in India's medical entrance examination system. NEET-UG 2026 was conducted on 3 May 2026 for over 22 lakh candidates. Within days, a "guess paper" circulating on WhatsApp and Telegram was found to contain over 120 questions that matched the actual examination paper.

On 12 May 2026 — the very week CBSE declared its compromised results — the National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelled the NEET-UG 2026 in its entirety, only the second full cancellation of any national exam in post-independence India after the 2015 AIPMT. The CBI was handed a comprehensive probe; by late May, 11 accused had been arrested from Delhi, Jaipur, Gurugram, Nasik, Pune, Latur, and Ahmednagar. The re-examination was scheduled for 21 June 2026, pushing back the entire medical admissions calendar for the year.

The Supreme Court was characteristically scathing. A bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe observed that the NTA "appeared not to have learnt its lesson" from 2024, when a paper leak in Hazaribagh and Patna had triggered the Vanshika Yadav v Union of India litigation. In that 2024 case, the Court had declined to cancel the exam, constituted the Radhakrishnan Committee (chaired by former ISRO chief K. Radhakrishnan) to recommend 101 reforms, and broadly trusted the government's submissions that the breach was not "systemic." Twenty-one months later, the breach repeated at greater scale.

The Court's 2024 direction that "the process be duly strengthened" had effectively been reduced to a Steering Committee that met on paper but failed to implement the Radhakrishnan panel's central recommendation: migration from the OMR pen-and-paper format to a Computer-Based Test, which would have structurally reduced the possibility of a physical paper leak. The minister admitted there had been "a breach in the command chain" while simultaneously claiming the recommendations had been implemented "word for word." The contradiction was hard to miss.

Why Did the Government Not Learn Its Lessons?

This is the question that cuts through the noise. It is not hyperbole to say the government had ample warning — from Telangana in 2019, from Telangana again in 2023, from NEET 2024, from UGC-NET 2024, from teachers flagging CBSE OSM portal failures in February 2026, from the Radhakrishnan Committee's own 101 recommendations sitting in a file. The pattern of failure is consistent enough to constitute institutional negligence rather than bad luck.

Several pathologies explain the pattern.

First, there is the problem of compressed timelines driven by political optics. CBSE deployed OSM at full national scale — 40 crore scanned pages — most probably without a phased pilot. The desire to announce a "digital India" milestone appears to have outpaced operational readiness.

Second, there is the procurement myopia that treats the lowest qualified bid as automatically the right bid, without fitness-for-purpose scrutiny. A vendor's litigation history in two state-board disasters was apparently insufficient to trigger deeper due diligence.

Third, there is the structural absence of independent technical oversight for examination bodies. The NTA and CBSE both function under the Ministry of Education, making internal accountability circular and self-referential.

Fourth, the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024 — enacted in the wake of NEET 2024 — criminalises paper leaks and vendor misconduct with up to 10 years' imprisonment and Rs 1 crore fines. Its enactment was the right legislative instinct, but legislative architecture without enforcement culture is a road without vehicles.

Fifth, and most fundamentally, India's examination governance philosophy has not yet absorbed the lesson that high-stakes examinations — ones that determine access to medicine, engineering, and the future — require a zero-fault tolerance that ordinary procurement processes cannot deliver.

The Radhakrishnan Panel, constituted after NEET 2024, had recommended "DigiExam" authentication (Aadhaar, biometrics, AI analytics), mobile testing centres for remote areas, multi-session testing formats, and permanent NTA staffing — all structurally sound ideas. The Steering Committee constituted to implement these recommendations over 18 months apparently failed to flag the non-implementation of CBT migration before the 2026 examination. This is institutional inertia at its most dangerous: committees are constituted, reports are filed, monitoring is promised, and the next crisis arrives on schedule. The matter is once again before the Supreme Court.

The Students in the Crossfire: The Human Cost of CBSE OSM

Behind every percentage point in the CBSE pass-rate decline — from 88.39% in 2025 to 85.20% in 2026, the lowest in seven years — are individual students whose futures ride on Class 12 marks. Board results determine admissions to colleges, professional courses, and scholarships. For Vedant Shrivastava, the wrong Physics answer sheet is not an abstraction — it is a corrupted record that, if uncorrected, could cost him his preferred college. For the over four lakh students who applied for scanned copies, the process was itself traumatic: portal crashes, inflated fees, illegible PDFs, and the anxiety of not knowing whether the sheet uploaded was even theirs.

The immediate grievance-redressal measures adopted by CBSE — fee reductions, IIT involvement in portal stabilisation, promises of full refunds on mark increases, extension of deadlines — are welcome but insufficient on their own. What is needed alongside them is a credible, time-bound commitment: every student whose marks were demonstrably affected by a scanning error, a mismatch, or an unmarked page must receive corrected results before college admission deadlines, with no additional cost and no bureaucratic obstacle course. The Board's statement that "no child will be allowed to suffer due to a technical error" — reportedly scripted into the very videos principals were asked to record — needs to be operationalised, not merely narrated.

CBI Probes and Court Orders Cannot Fix a Broken System

India now has a well-worn template for examination crises: controversy erupts, CBI is invoked, Supreme Court issues notice, minister acknowledges responsibility, committee is constituted, report is filed, implementation is monitored, next crisis arrives. NEET 2024 followed this template. NEET 2026 is following it again. The CBSE OSM controversy, while not yet attracting CBI intervention, has attracted demands from the Opposition for a judicial inquiry and SIT investigation.

The Supreme Court's growing impatience is evident. In the NEET-UG 2026 hearings, the bench issued notices on petitions seeking the replacement or dissolution of the NTA, with the Court observing it was "sad" that the agency had not learnt from 2024. The Court has also been careful to avoid stepping into the realm of managing examinations itself — Vanshika Yadav (2024) was premised on judicial restraint, trusting executive machinery to deliver on its commitments. That trust has been betrayed. The appropriate judicial response now may lie, as the Supreme Court Observer perceptively notes, "between a continuing mandamus and a dismissal" — probing what the Steering Committee actually monitored, what it flagged, and what it failed to report before 2026.

But courts cannot run examinations. CBI investigations are essential to criminal accountability but do not fix systemic infrastructure. The lesson we must absorb — and have failed to, repeatedly — is that CBI probes and judicial interventions are the last resort of a governance system that has already failed, not a substitute for the institutional capacity that should have prevented the failure in the first place.

One Diagnosis for Two Crises

The CBSE OSM fiasco and the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak appear superficially different in character — one is a technology deployment failure, the other a criminal conspiracy involving paper leaks circulated on WhatsApp. But they share a common diagnosis: India's examination infrastructure is governed by bodies that are chronically understaffed, technologically under-resourced, institutionally isolated, politically exposed, and culturally averse to admitting failure until failure becomes nationally undeniable.

The NTA, restructured in 2024 to focus only on higher education entrance examinations, still conducted NEET 2026 in pen-and-paper OMR format while CBT migration was deferred to 2027 — a decision that the 2026 paper leak immediately vindicated as catastrophically wrong. CBSE, rolling out OSM, abolished post-result mark verification simultaneously, eliminating the safety valve precisely when it was most needed. Both decisions reflect an institutional culture that conflates ambition with preparation. The result is a generation of students who cannot trust that their examinations are fair — and that loss of trust in public examinations is, arguably, the most corrosive outcome of all.

Way Forward: A Practical Architecture for Reform

India does not lack for reform committees or reform reports. What it lacks is the political will to implement them without waiting for the next catastrophe. The following recommendations are not new in isolation — many appear in the Radhakrishnan Panel's 101 points — but their urgency is now acute.

(i) Mandatory Phased Pilots Before Full Deployment. No examination technology should be deployed at full national scale without at least two years of phased piloting — starting with a representative sample of five to ten lakh scripts, under independent technical audit, with publicly released quality metrics before scale-up. CBSE OSM for Class 12 should have been piloted in 2024, evaluated in 2025, and deployed at scale only in 2026-27 at the earliest.

(ii) Independent Technical Audit Authority. An autonomous Examination Technology Audit Authority (ETAA), structurally independent of the Ministry of Education, should be created to certify vendor fitness, audit scanning quality, conduct stress-tests on portals, and publish pre-deployment readiness reports. This body should have statutory authority to halt deployment if readiness standards are not met.

(iii) Enhanced Vendor Due Diligence Beyond GFR. The General Financial Rules mandate procedural compliance, not substantive fitness assessment. Examination vendors handling the digital infrastructure of high-stakes national examinations must undergo enhanced background verification that includes prior track record in analogous deployments, litigation history, and adverse outcomes in previous engagements — regardless of whether the entity has been formally found guilty by a court. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) could specifically review, in a proactive manner, vendor selection for examinations affecting more than 10 lakh students and make its findings public in an effective manner, if necessary delinking its exercise from the statutory audit reports, which take time.

(iv) CBT Migration for NEET and Other High-Stakes Exams. The Radhakrishnan Committee recommended CBT. The NEET 2026 paper leak has proven the cost of deferral. The transition must begin with a hybrid model (encrypted question papers transmitted digitally, students answering on paper) in 2026 itself, with full CBT by 2028 at the latest. Every year of delay is a year of gambling with more than 20 lakh students' futures.

(v) Separate Student Grievance Tribunal for Examination Matters. The current process — portal applications, verification, re-evaluation through the board itself — is slow, expensive, and structurally conflicted, since the adjudicator is also the respondent. A Statutory Examination Grievance Redressal Tribunal, with a time-bound adjudication mandate of 30 days, would provide credible, independent relief.

(vi) Reinstate Post-Result Verification as a Safety Net. CBSE's decision to abolish post-result verification of marks simultaneously with the first-ever deployment of CBSE OSM was an astonishing gamble. The safety net must be restored — not as a routine, but as a quality-assurance backstop that is available when the primary system fails. Digital accuracy claims do not justify eliminating the right to verify.

(vii) Mental Health Support Protocol. Every CBSE and NTA examination crisis has a human health dimension that goes unacknowledged in official press releases. A mandatory protocol should require the Board and NTA to activate counselling helplines, publish them prominently, coordinate with school principals, and monitor social media for distress signals whenever a major result-related controversy erupts. The Telangana experience — where students died by suicide — is a permanent reminder that these are not administrative failures alone. They are human tragedies.

(viii) Parliamentary Oversight Committee for Examination Bodies. A dedicated Parliamentary Standing Sub-Committee on Examination Integrity — cutting across the existing Education Committee — should receive mandatory annual reports from CBSE, NTA, and other examination authorities on technology deployments, vendor contracts, complaint volumes, and systemic risks. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

(ix) Activate the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024. This legislation, enacted in response to NEET 2024, provides for imprisonment of 3 to 10 years and fines up to Rs 1 crore for organised examination crimes, and bars convicted service providers from conducting examinations for four years. It should be actively invoked in current investigations — not merely cited in press releases. Its deterrent value depends entirely on demonstrated enforcement.

(x) Long-Term: A National Examination Integrity Commission. India needs a permanent, statutory, multi-member National Examination Integrity Commission with representation from the judiciary (retired judges), technology experts, educationists, student representatives, and civil society — modelled in part on Election Commission-style independence. Such a body would provide the institutional continuity that ad hoc expert committees structurally cannot.

The CBSE OSM disaster and the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak are not isolated incidents. They are the latest symptoms of an examination governance system built on ambition without infrastructure, speed without safeguards, and accountability without independence.

The students of 2026 — 17 lakh of them in CBSE Class 12, over 22 lakh in NEET — have paid the price of institutional hubris. Union Education Minister Pradhan's candour in accepting responsibility is a better start than the default ministerial denial, but ownership of blame is not the same as structural reform.

India's examination system does not need another committee — it already has their reports. It needs the political will to implement what has already been recommended, the institutional courage to deploy technology only when it is genuinely ready, and the moral imagination to remember that behind every roll number is a human being whose life cannot be rescheduled like a re-examination.

A 24-year-old MBA student, mountaineer, and athlete walked into a doctor's clinic with a fever. Ordinary, unremarkable — the kind of thing that happens to all of us. A month later, he was dead.

This is not a fictional story. It is a real case that Advocate Nishant Bharihoke has lived with — a case that, as he explains, should never have ended the way it did. The first doctor missed the most basic clinical sign of jaundice: yellowing of the skin and eyes. The doctor prescribed high doses of paracetamol, a drug toxic to the liver, without admitting the patient or reviewing his deteriorating reports. What followed was severe acute liver injury, rapid deterioration, and a death that was entirely preventable.

Also Read:  Medical Negligence: Who Killed Simran?

What Medical Negligence Actually Means

Bharihoke clarifies that not every bad outcome inside a hospital is medical negligence. Doctors are not magicians. Medicine is an uncertain science. A patient can receive the best possible treatment and still not survive. A drug that works on one patient may fail on another. These are known complications, not medical negligence.

Medical negligence has three essential ingredients. First, there must be a duty of care — the moment a doctor examines a patient and begins treatment, a doctor-patient relationship is established and a legal duty arises. Second, there must be a breach of that duty — when the care provided falls below the standard that a reasonably competent doctor would have provided in the same situation. Third, that breach must result in measurable damage: long-term injury, disability, financial loss, unnecessary suffering, or death.

All three must be present. Without establishing all three, neither a civil nor a criminal remedy can be invoked.

The distinction between negligence and complication matters enormously. Giving the wrong medicine, ignoring visible signs of internal bleeding after surgery, administering treatment without reviewing test reports, providing oxygen from an empty cylinder — these are scenarios where medical negligence can be established. A treatment failing despite being medically correct is not.

Also Read:  Death Due To Medical Negligence At Hindu Rao Hospital?

What Victims Can Actually Do

Bharihoke lays out three legal options available to families who believe they are victims of medical negligence.

The first is the Consumer Court. It is the most accessible route — court fees are relatively low, procedure is less complicated, and it is faster than a civil suit. Victims can claim medical expenses, future treatment costs, loss of income, mental anguish, and compensation for death. The limitation, Bharihoke warns, is that it is still a long, drawn process, with appeals possible at the State Commission and then the National Commission. But for most families, it remains the most practical starting point.

The second option is a civil suit for damages. Bharihoke advises this not primarily for claiming compensation but for the court's powers to extract evidence — medical records, documents, and materials that a Consumer Court cannot compel. In several cases, critical evidence emerged only after civil court orders.

The third is criminal action under Section 106 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, previously Section 304A of the IPC. Here, Bharihoke is frank. Convictions in medical negligence cases in India are rare, even in cases of death. The law is not victim-centric, societal bias favours doctors, and proving criminal negligence is an extremely difficult task. Where records have been forged, however, the situation changes — forgery pierces the shield that the law otherwise extends to the medical profession.

Before pursuing any of these routes, Bharihoke recommends approaching the State Medical Council. A medical board will investigate ethical violations, falsification of records, consent failures, and professional violations. Its findings can result in warnings, suspension, or cancellation of a doctor's medical licence — and they generate evidence that strengthens subsequent civil or criminal proceedings.

The single most important first step for any family is to immediately collect all medical records in writing — discharge summaries, prescriptions, ICU charts, nursing records, consent forms, billing records, CCTV footage if possible, and every WhatsApp message or email exchanged with hospital coordinators. No hospital can legally refuse to provide these records. A document that seems completely irrelevant, Bharihoke cautions from personal experience, can turn out to be the most important piece of evidence in the entire case.

Medical negligence cases in India are long, exhausting, and structurally weighted against victims. But Bharihoke's message is clear: justice is possible. Courts have awarded compensation of ten to twelve crore rupees in some cases. And a penalty of that scale, he argues, does more to deter negligent practice than imprisonment ever could.

Watch Advocate Nishant Bharihoke explain this in full in the video above.

On the night of 17 March 2026, Atanu Chakraborty—a distinguished former IAS officer, ex-Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, and part-time Chairman of HDFC Bank, India's largest private sector lender—wrote three sentences that shook the financial world. "Certain happenings and practices within the bank that I have observed over the last two years are not in congruence with my personal values and ethics. This is the basis of my aforementioned decision. I confirm that there are no other material reasons for my resignation other than those stated above." He offered nothing more. No specifics. No named incidents. No pointed allegations. Just three loaded sentences and his resignation.

What those sentences cost investors was nearly Rs 1 lakh crore in erased market capitalisation. What they signalled was far more costly still: that the independent watchman of India's largest private bank had apparently looked the other way for two years before finally walking out the door.

This deep dive report examines the entire HDFC Bank episode in detail—how Rs 45 crore of 'differential interest' was allegedly camouflaged as contributions to a road safety awareness campaign for Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), the cascading governance failures that made it possible, the seismic implications of Chakraborty's resignation, and the urgent systemic reforms that India's banking sector must now reckon with.

Also Read:  Atanu Chakraborty Exit Exposes Gaps Inside HDFC Bank

How HDFC Bank Chased a ₹25,000 Crore Prize and Lost Its Ethics

In 2021, HDFC Bank's senior management set its eyes on a potential prize: the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), a state government infrastructure agency sitting atop massive land acquisition funds projected to be in the range of Rs 25,000 crore. For a bank locked in fierce competition for institutional deposits with public sector banks and other private lenders offering 6% or higher on comparable instruments, MSRDC represented exactly the kind of large, sticky, government-linked deposit that could meaningfully bolster the bank's liability franchise.

But there was one fundamental problem. MSRDC was not going to move its money for peanuts. Its officials made clear, through what the bank's internal records describe as a "verbal" understanding with a zonal head, that it expected a return of at least 6.01%—far above the 3.5% savings rate available to ordinary customers. The Reserve Bank of India's Master Directions on Interest Rates on Deposits, both in their pre-2025 form and as reissued and consolidated in April 2025, are unambiguous on this point: banks are prohibited from offering negotiated or differential interest rates to individual depositors. A uniform, board-approved rate schedule must apply without favour or exception across comparable deposit categories.

HDFC Bank knew this. And it pressed on anyway.

When HDFC Bank's 4.5% Promise Met the Reality of Zero Deposits

In a partial bid to meet MSRDC halfway, the bank's Asset Liability Committee (ALCO) formally approved a special 4.5% savings window for large institutional deposits—a rate higher than standard but still shy of the 6.01% that had been verbally agreed. This was at least a documented, committee-approved measure. But almost immediately, the plan ran into a wall of reality. MSRDC's actual deposits never remotely approached the Rs 25,000 crore jackpot the bank had anticipated. The inflows crossed Rs 3,000 crore for only a brief period in 2023 before stalling. By April 2022, the special 4.5% window was shut down.

That left the bank in an acute bind. MSRDC had been promised 6.01%. The bank could no longer deliver even 4.5% through any normal channel. The differential of 2.51 percentage points between what regular customers received (3.5%) and what MSRDC had been promised (6.01%) still needed to be paid somehow, to retain the deposits. What happened next transformed a regulatory breach into something that, if the vigilance report's findings hold, amounts to a structured, management-sanctioned act of deception.

How HDFC Bank Turned ₹45 Crore in Interest into a "Road Safety Campaign"

The Anatomy of Deception

The solution allegedly devised in the upper echelons of HDFC Bank was as audacious as it was simple: route the unpayable differential interest through the bank's marketing budget, disguise it as sponsorship contributions to a "Road Safety Awareness Campaign" run by MSRDC, and process the payments through four local marketing vendors. On paper, HDFC Bank would be paying for road safety outreach in MSRDC's name. In reality, it would be compensating MSRDC for the interest shortfall that RBI norms prohibited it from paying directly.

Between FY2024 and FY2025, Rs 45 crore flowed through this channel. The bank's marketing department was used as the conduit, and the bank's own Chief Marketing Officer, Ravi Santhanam, later testified during the internal vigilance probe that the department had acted as a "facilitator to camouflage differential interest reimbursement as marketing spend." If there was a moment at which the entire scheme's moral bankruptcy was stated with crystalline clarity, it was this—by a member of the bank's own senior management team, under oath during an internal investigation.

When the Same Photo Appeared on Nine-Crore-Rupee Invoices

Internal records reviewed by The Indian Express as part of its investigation reveal that the "road safety awareness campaign" was tissue-thin as a cover. Vendor invoices and supporting documentation were found to be grossly inadequate. Some invoices lacked proper event confirmation certificates.

In one particularly jaw-dropping detail, a single photograph was duplicated and attached to multiple invoices totalling nearly Rs 9 crore. There is little evidence in the bank's own audit records to demonstrate that any meaningful road safety campaign was actually conducted at a scale commensurate with Rs 45 crore in marketing spend. The bank's internal audit, which eventually reviewed the marketing department for FY24 and FY25, rated its performance bluntly: "unsatisfactory."

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

Ten Senior Officials Knew: Inside the HDFC Bank Vigilance Report

The internal vigilance investigation—formally ordered by the Audit Committee of the Board (ACB), chaired by M D Ranganath, on 12 March 2026—was exhaustive in its sweep. The probe, conducted between March and April 2026, concluded that over ten top officials bore responsibility. The names cited in the investigation and in The Indian Express report include the very top of HDFC Bank's executive pyramid: MD & CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan, CFO Srinivasan Vaidyanathan, and CMO Ravi Santhanam.

The report specifically records multiple officials testifying that Jagdishan "participated in the call convened to examine how the bank could compensate MSRDC and was part of the decision to provide the differential interest through the marketing budget as a one-off arrangement." The letters formalising the deposit arrangement were deliberately signed not by senior executives but by a junior staff member acting on a cluster head's instructions—an unmistakable paper-trail-thinning strategy. The entire arrangement, the vigilance report found, was "not vetted by legal or compliance teams" and made no mention of the 6.01% return that had been internally agreed.

The vigilance report was submitted to the Audit Committee of the Board on 10 April 2026 and to the Nomination and Remuneration Committee a week later. HDFC Bank, for its part, issued a firm denial, stating it "strongly rejects any assumptions of wrongdoing or culpability based on selective material" and asserting that it follows "robust internal oversight, audit and control processes." CNBC-TV18 cited sources who called the practice "industry-wide," with one person explaining: "When you pay a differential amount to one depositor, you don't want to set it as a precedent. So it is classified as a marketing expense." 

When Chakraborty's Resignation Shattered the Market

Six days after the ACB ordered the formal internal vigilance investigation—on 18 March 2026—Atanu Chakraborty submitted his resignation letter to HDFC Bank. Filed with the BSE under Regulation 30 of the SEBI Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements Regulations (LODR) 2015, the letter stated: "Certain happenings and practices within the bank that I have observed over the last two years are not in congruence with my personal values and ethics. This is the basis of my aforementioned decision. I confirm that there are no other material reasons for my resignation other than those stated above."

The market's reaction was visceral. HDFC Bank shares fell 5.11% on the BSE on 19 March 2026 alone. The American Depositary Receipts on the NYSE crashed 7–8%, reflecting the international investor community's alarm. In total, the bank's market capitalisation bled nearly Rs 1 lakh crore (approximately USD 12 billion) within the week following the resignation. HDFC Bank—which at its peak was among the ten most valuable banks in the world—had been destabilised by three cryptic sentences from a non-executive chairman.

Chakraborty had been appointed part-time chairman in May 2021 and was reappointed in May 2024 for a fresh three-year term running to May 2027. He had presided over the landmark and consequential USD 40 billion merger of HDFC Ltd. with HDFC Bank—the largest corporate merger in Indian history. In his resignation letter, he notably remarked that the benefits of this merger had "yet to fully fructify."

Also Read:  SEBI and the Limits of Boardroom Oversight

Why Two Years of Silence Before the Walk?

What makes Chakraborty's resignation simultaneously admirable and deeply troubling is the arithmetic of when he acted relative to when he apparently first became aware. The resignation letter cites "happenings and practices over the last two years"—placing the window of his ethical discomfort squarely between early 2024 and March 2026. The MSRDC marketing camouflage payments were made in FY2024 and FY2025—an exact overlap.

The proxy advisory firm Stakeholders Empowerment Services (SES), in a sharply argued governance analysis released on 21 March 2026, framed this as a fundamental governance dilemma: "Why did the Chairman remain silent for such an extended period? If the ethical issues were serious, one would expect them to be raised promptly rather than accumulating over time." SES further noted that Chakraborty had "both the time and the authority to escalate" concerns either through proper board channels or directly to the regulator, and that the absence of any such escalation raised the uncomfortable question of whether his resignation reflected genuine governance concerns or "a clash of perspectives at the top."

The Board's own response deepened the mystery rather than dispelling it. Management said it was "baffled" by the resignation and that Chakraborty had not provided any specific instances of governance lapses during his tenure. Interim Chairman Keki Mistry, who stepped in effective 19 March 2026 with RBI approval for a three-month stabilisation mandate, told media and investors that there was no power struggle and that all board decisions had been unanimous. Yet Reuters, citing nine sources including board members and current and former employees, reported a "cold relationship" with minimal engagement between Chakraborty and CEO Jagdishan, and deep friction over the bank's strategic direction, HR policies, and the handling of the HDB Financial Services IPO—where Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) had sought to acquire a stake at a USD 10 billion valuation before the bank pivoted to a public listing.

SEBI Investigates While RBI Grants Absolution

The regulatory responses were strikingly asymmetric in character. The RBI, within hours of Chakraborty's resignation becoming public, issued an unusually rapid public statement declaring HDFC Bank a "Domestic Systemically Important Bank (D-SIB) with sound financials, professionally run board and competent management team" and confirming "no material concerns on record as regards its conduct or governance." This statement—issued on 19 March, the very day shares crashed—was driven by the imperative of financial stability. An Indian D-SIB losing investor confidence in a disorderly fashion is a systemic risk, and the RBI was right to act. But its speed also created an optic of premature absolution.

SEBI Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey was more probing. He publicly stated that independent directors "should act responsibly" and are "expected to be protectors of the interests of minority shareholders," clearly directing his comments at the HDFC Bank situation. SEBI's corporate governance wing initiated a review of whether the bank's stock exchange disclosures on the resignation "fully and accurately" reflected internal board deliberations. SEBI was examining board minutes from the past three years—the same exercise the bank was conducting through two independent law firms, Trilegal and Wadia Ghandy & Co., whose findings reportedly indicated no significant governance lapses.

HDFC Bank's Governance Breakdown: How a Culture of Compliance Avoidance Took Root

When Compliance Becomes a Box to Check, Not a Boundary to Respect

The most profound governance failure in the HDFC Bank affair is not the Rs 45 crore itself. Forty-five crore is a rounding error on HDFC Bank's balance sheet. The failure is structural and cultural: the arrangement allegedly persisted across two full financial years without being challenged by any compliance function, any legal team, any Audit Committee of the Board, or any independent director.

The legal and compliance teams were not even consulted—the vigilance report found the arrangement was not vetted by them at all. This is not negligence by one person. It is the product of a culture in which aggressive deposit targets, competitive pressures, and the desire to retain high-value clients were allowed to take precedence over regulatory compliance.

The RBI had, in fact, already flagged compliance weaknesses at HDFC Bank as recently as November 2025, when it imposed a Rs 91 lakh penalty for violations including using multiple benchmarks for the same loan category, allowing a subsidiary to carry out non-permitted business, and outsourcing KYC compliance checks to external agents. These are not the hallmarks of a bank with a spotless compliance culture. They are the hallmarks of a bank that has, over time, grown comfortable with the view that compliance is a box to be checked rather than a boundary to be respected.

How HDFC Bank Used Marketing Budgets as Slush Funds for Interest Payments

The use of the marketing department as the vehicle for the camouflage is not accidental—it is almost diagnostic of how large institutions exploit the opacity of discretionary spending. Marketing expenditure—on campaigns, events, sponsorships, vendor payments—is inherently difficult to audit for economic reality. Unlike a loan or a bond, there is no obvious market price for a "road safety awareness campaign," no easy benchmark against which to test whether Rs 45 crore for such a campaign from an entity that happens to be a major depositor of the bank is reasonable value for money.

A single recycled photograph across invoices worth Rs 9 crore ought to have been caught in the first concurrent audit cycle. It was not. That failure of the auditing function—whether internal audit, concurrent audit, or statutory audit—is a governance lapse of independent significance that has received far less attention than it deserves.

Why HDFC Bank's Independent Directors Failed Their Most Basic Duty

The Chakraborty episode throws a harsh light on the structural inadequacy of independent directorship in Indian private banking. India's regulatory architecture for banks—the Banking Regulation Act, 1949; the RBI's "fit and proper" criteria; the Code for Independent Directors under Schedule IV of the Companies Act, 2013—collectively envision an active, engaged, vigilant board that serves as a genuine counterweight to executive management. The reality, in case after case, is something else entirely.

Chakraborty was not a lightweight. He was a 1985-batch IAS officer who had served as Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs—one of the most powerful bureaucratic positions in India. He had real-world experience, institutional authority, and regulatory literacy. And yet, by his own account, he observed practices "not in congruence" with his values for two years before resigning. The Stakeholders Empowerment Services' (SES—an independent proxy advisory and corporate governance research firm based in India) report asks the most incisive question: if serious governance concerns existed and were not escalated, has the Chairman fulfilled his fiduciary duty?

The Companies Act is unambiguous that independent directors must raise red flags, protect minority shareholders, and ensure transparency in board proceedings. Watching and waiting—and then resigning—is not an adequate discharge of that duty.

What of the other independent directors on HDFC Bank's board? If Chakraborty's concerns existed over two years, were any dissenting opinions formally recorded in the board minutes? Were any governance concerns escalated through the Audit Committee, the Nomination and Remuneration Committee, or directly to the RBI? The absence of any visible dissent from other board members—the collective silence—raises a possibility more disturbing than individual failure: that the board as an institution had either normalised practices that an individual member found unacceptable, or was so effectively managed by executive leadership that genuine dissent never found expression.

When HDFC Bank Lost ₹1 Lakh Crore in Trust

HDFC Bank, under its legendary founding CEO Aditya Puri's 26-year stewardship, had constructed one of the highest governance premiums of any bank in Asia. Its price-to-book multiple at its peak reached 5–6 times—a valuation that reflected not just earnings but trust: the premium that sophisticated investors attach to an institution they believe is governed with integrity and predictability. By March 2026, even before Chakraborty's resignation, that multiple had compressed to approximately 2.31 times. The governance premium was already under stress from the post-merger integration difficulties, the lag in deposit franchise rebuilding, and leadership uncertainties. Chakraborty's three cryptic sentences obliterated whatever remained of it in a single trading session.

That premium is not decorative. A higher price-to-book ratio means cheaper equity capital, which funds faster expansion, better talent, and stronger competitive positioning. Its erosion has real-world consequences for HDFC Bank's ability to compete with ICICI Bank—whose stock performance had already been pulling away from HDFC Bank's in the preceding two years—in an increasingly competitive banking landscape.

HDFC Bank's CEO Reappointment Hangs as Two Law Firms Contradict Vigilance Report

When Clean Chits Clash With Internal Investigations

Faced with mounting investor anxiety after Chakraborty's exit, HDFC Bank's board commissioned two "independent" Mumbai law firms—Trilegal and Wadia Ghandy & Co.—to review its corporate governance over the preceding three years. The exercise was unambiguous in its purpose: to produce a clean-chit report that would clear the path for Sashidhar Jagdishan's reappointment as CEO for a third term, with his current term ending in October 2026. The firms' findings, reported in early May 2026, indicated no significant governance lapses.

This creates an acute tension. The bank's own internal vigilance report—ordered by its own Audit Committee—reportedly found multiple senior officials responsible for alleged regulatory violations stretching across two financial years. If those findings are accurate, they represent far more than a minor compliance hiccup. They represent a management-level decision to circumvent an explicit RBI prohibition on negotiated deposit rates, concealed through a fabricated marketing campaign with forged invoices. How two law firms reviewing board records and governance processes over three years can square that with "no significant governance lapses" is a question that demands a credible public answer. Board minutes and governance procedures do not reflect what was never written down—and the vigilance report found that the MSRDC arrangement was deliberately kept off formal documentation.

The RBI, which must approve senior banking appointments under the Banking Regulation Act, is now in an uncomfortable position. If it approves Jagdishan's third term without requiring any public account of the vigilance probe's findings and their consequences, it signals that the MSRDC camouflage—if proved—carries no career consequences at the top of India's largest private bank. That signal, in an ecosystem where competitive pressures to secure large deposits have not abated, would be deeply corrosive.

Is HDFC Bank's Compliance Culture an Industry-Wide Problem?

Perhaps the most troubling statement in the entire affair came from the CNBC-TV18 report: an unnamed banking sector source asserting that routing differential interest payments through marketing expenses was "an industry-wide practice." This claim, even if factually accurate, is not a defence. It is a confession.

If the practice of paying negotiated, above-market interest rates to large institutional depositors and then hiding those payments in marketing budgets is genuinely industry-wide, then the RBI faces not a localised compliance failure at one large bank but a systemic regulatory evasion that has been normalised across the banking sector. The prohibition is clear. The creativity deployed to circumvent it is apparently also widespread. The regulator's next steps will be watched closely.

Five Critical Reforms HDFC Bank's Collapse Demands From Regulators

Verbal Agreements Must Trigger Immediate Compliance Review

The MSRDC arrangement lived and breathed through verbal understandings and deliberately thin paper trails. No compliance team was consulted. No legal review was conducted. Letters were signed by juniors rather than the executives who negotiated the arrangement. India's banking regulator and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) must jointly issue guidance requiring that any deposit arrangement involving a non-standard rate or a special facility—even a verbally agreed one—be formally documented, escalated to compliance, reviewed by the legal team, and recorded in the minutes of the relevant committee. The current framework assumes good faith among senior bankers. The HDFC Bank affair demonstrates that good faith cannot be assumed.

Auditors Must Flag Marketing Payments to Bank Depositors

Internal auditors and statutory auditors of banks need explicit, RBI-mandated protocols to cross-reference the bank's depositor database against its vendor payment database. If any vendor receiving material marketing payments is connected to an entity that also holds deposits with the bank, this must immediately trigger enhanced scrutiny. A rule requiring that all marketing payments above a specified threshold to a depositor or a depositor-linked entity be specifically approved by the Audit Committee of the Board and disclosed in the bank's annual report would have stopped the MSRDC camouflage in its tracks. Concurrent audit procedures must be upgraded to require verification of supporting documentation on a sample basis, with mandatory escalation when the same photograph, invoice, or supporting document appears across multiple vendor payments.

Independent Directors Can't Stay Silent on HDFC Bank-Level Governance Issues

Chakraborty's resignation, however principled in motivation, was also a governance failure in execution. An independent director who observes practices that violate the bank's values and then accumulates that observation for two years before acting has failed in the most fundamental duty of independent oversight: the duty to intervene.

India's Companies Act and the RBI's governance guidelines for bank boards must be amended to impose an affirmative and time-bound obligation on independent directors: if an independent director becomes aware of practices that, in their assessment, constitute regulatory violations or breaches of the bank's own code of conduct, they must escalate the matter to the Audit Committee, the full board, or directly to the regulator within a specified number of days. The current framework makes escalation optional and exit costless. This must change.

The RBI Must Increase Supervision of HDFC Bank and Other D-SIBs

HDFC Bank is a Domestic Systemically Important Bank. By definition, its failure would have outsized consequences for India's financial system. The RBI's periodic supervisory inspections of D-SIBs must include a dedicated review of marketing and discretionary expenditure for any payments to depositors or depositor-connected entities—a check so straightforward that it defies explanation why it has not been a standard supervisory procedure.

The November 2025 ₹91 lakh penalty for compliance violations—a figure so trivially small relative to HDFC Bank's balance sheet as to invite ridicule—also points to a structural problem: the Banking Regulation Act's penalty provisions are woefully inadequate as deterrents for a bank managing deposits of Rs 27 lakh crore. Parliamentary intervention to enhance maximum penalty levels for D-SIBs is overdue.

HDFC Bank's Board Must Publicly Account for the Vigilance Report

The remaining independent directors of HDFC Bank owe their shareholders and India's banking public a specific, transparent accounting of what they knew, when they knew it, and what they did about it. "The bank has robust processes" is not an answer. The SES governance report put it with admirable directness: "Silence or vague answers are no longer an option for the remaining independent directors."

The board should publicly disclose whether the findings of the internal vigilance report have resulted in any disciplinary action against any of the named officials. If they have not, it must explain why. If they have, it must say so and demonstrate that accountability reaches to the highest levels. Independent governance without public accountability is merely a theatre of respectability.

The Morning Everything Changed

On the morning of May 23, 2026, Meghna Patel walked into Fat Philly's supermarket in Norfolk, Virginia, unaware it would be her last shift. The 47-year-old Indian woman from Gujarat had worked at this store for a decade—long enough to know every regular customer, long enough for the work to feel routine. By 8:30 that morning, she would be dead.

Patel arrived for her shift as she had done thousands of times before. She stood behind the counter, performing the same duties that have become the invisible backbone of American convenience retail: managing the till, stocking shelves, serving customers. She was one of hundreds of thousands of Indian immigrants working in small stores across the United States—often the only face behind the counter, often working alone.

Also Read:  When Dreams Die Young: The Crisis Killing Indian Students Abroad

Virginia Shooting: A Cascade of Violence in Minutes

The violence didn't begin at Fat Philly's supermarket on Azalea Garden Road in Virginia. It began miles away, in an alleged domestic dispute that would claim an innocent life.

At approximately 8:13 a.m., Norfolk Police responded to a home in the 3100 block of Blackwood Avenue. A stepson and stepfather were fighting. The argument escalated. The stepson, identified as Marvale R. Bond, 20 years old, left the house—then turned back and fired shots into the residence, striking his stepfather with a non-life-threatening wound.

Bond didn't stop there. He left that house and drove to Fat Philly's supermarket, 2700 Azalea Garden Road. What happened next was captured on CCTV footage that would circulate across social media: a masked man in a hoodie and grey jacket calmly walked into the supermarket. He approached the counter where Meghna Patel stood. He had a brief interaction with her—just a few seconds of conversation. Then he pulled a gun from his clothing.

He fired multiple shots at Patel who was working behind the counter. Patel fell. Bond climbed over the counter and fired again, ensuring she would not survive. Then he fled.

Police arrived within minutes to find Meghna Patel with life-threatening gunshot wounds. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Also Read:  Indian Student Killed in Canada, Rising Violence Sparks Concerns

Virginia Shooting: What the Police Chief Said—And Didn't Say

The response from Norfolk Police raises more questions than answers. Norfolk Police Chief Mark Talbot addressed the media about the three incidents that morning—the domestic dispute, the shooting at Fat Philly's, and what came next. His statement reveals the limitations of an investigation where the primary suspect is already dead.

"I am Mark Talbot, Chief of Norfolk Police department," he began. "I am here to talk about three incidents all of which occurred between 8 and 9 this morning. The first incident occurred in the 3100 block of Blackwood Avenue. We got a call for some sort of domestic dispute between an adult male and his adult male stepson. Some argument occurred between the two of them. The stepson leaves the residence, turns back and fires a shot into the house."

Chief Talbot then outlined the sequence that led to the murder of Patel: "The suspect then leaves that location and comes here in the 2700 block of Azalea. He goes into a business. He has a brief interaction with a clerk. He then fires numerous shots at the clerk. The police respond a short time later and find the clerk deceased. The suspect then leaves this location, drives a short distance and is found with a self inflicted gun shot."

The chief's conclusion was chilling. "So three tragic incidents. However, we are not looking at any suspects. If anybody happens to have encountered any of this, we would like to hear from them. But we are not looking for any suspects at this time."

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When a reporter asked if the suspect knew the clerk—whether there was any connection between Bond and Patel—the chief's response was damning in its brevity: "Unknown at this time."

But more revealing than the unanswered questions was what the police chief chose to emphasise in his statement to the media. Talbot repeated it twice: “We are not looking for any suspects.” There was no promise of a deeper investigation. No assurance that authorities would pursue every lead. No indication that officials intended to uncover why an Indian woman working at a Virginia convenience store was shot dead at her workplace. The message was unmistakable: the investigation appeared to be over before it had begun. The suspect was dead. The case, effectively, was closed.

This raises a broader question about how law enforcement agencies in the United States approach cases in which the alleged shooter dies by suicide. When the suspect is no longer alive, does the inquiry into motive, circumstances, and the larger context of the crime effectively come to an end?

In this case, an Indian woman was shot dead while at work in Virginia. Yet the response from the police department appeared to indicate that the matter was considered resolved once the suspect was found dead. There was little indication of any effort to understand why Bond entered the store that morning, whether Meghna Patel had been specifically targeted, or whether the incident was entirely random.

No public information suggested attempts to reconstruct Bond’s movements before the shooting, examine whether there had been any prior connection between him and the victim, or determine if others may have had knowledge of the events leading up to the crime. With the suspect dead, the case appeared to reach a procedural conclusion — but for the victim’s family, many questions remained unanswered.

Also Read:  Indian Students Killed in US: Justice Evades Amarnath Ghosh

A Family Left With Questions, No Closure

Meghna Patel is survived by her husband, Upendrabhai Patel, and two children. According to reports, all three are settled in the United States. Her elderly parents, Karsanbhai and Kapilaben, received the news in their village of Jantral in Gujarat's Mehsana district. 

Her family is now left confronting a difficult reality: the man responsible for her death also died at the scene. There will be no trial, no formal examination of motive in a court of law, and no clear opportunity to fully understand the circumstances that led to the killing. In that sense, the possibility of closure — or justice in any meaningful form — remains deeply uncertain.

A Pattern Emerging Across America

The Virginia shooting did not occur in isolation. It is part of a larger pattern of violence targeting Indian immigrants and Indian-origin individuals working in the service sector across the United States.

In January 2025, Koyyada Ravi Teja, a young food delivery worker in his mid-20s from Hyderabad, was shot and killed in New Haven, Connecticut. Just weeks later, in February 2025, Indian-origin nurse Leelamma Lal was brutally assaulted by a psychiatric patient at a Florida hospital who made explicitly racist remarks during the attack. She suffered severe facial injuries and faced the risk of blindness.

By March 2025, the violence had claimed another life. Praveen Kumar Gampa, a student from Telangana, was shot dead in Wisconsin, at a store where he worked part-time. 

The pattern intensified through the year. In September 2025, Chandra Mouli Nagamallaiah, a motel manager, was stabbed and beheaded in Dallas, Texas. The killing was caught on camera—a brutal act of violence that shocked the Indian community and raised urgent questions about the safety of the Indians in the U.S. 

In September 2025 itself, Kiran Patel, an Indian-origin Gujarati immigrant was shot and killed at DD’s Food Mart, a local convenience store and gas station in South Carolina. 

In October 2025, three Indian-origin hoteliers were killed in 72 hours. Two were killed in Charlotte, North Carolina and the third person was killed in Pittsburgh.  

The Virginia shooting must be seen in this backdrop of rising crimes against the Indian immigrant community. 

What the Numbers Actually Say About Indian American Safety

There are more than 5.2 million people of Indian origin residing in the United States today. A February 2026 survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace quantifies the scale of discrimination that Indian Americans now face. The 2026 Indian American Attitudes Survey, conducted among 1,000 Indian American adults between November 2025 and January 2026, found that nearly half—48 percent—of respondents encounter racist posts targeting Indians or Indian Americans on social media "very or somewhat often" since the start of 2025. 

Beyond online harassment, direct physical violence is also documented: one in four Indian Americans has been called a slur since early 2025; 9 percent have been physically threatened; 8 percent have received hate mail; 6 percent have experienced property damage; and 4 percent have been victims of physical assault. The emotional toll is severe, with 50 percent saying such racist content makes them angry, 33 percent reporting anxiety, and 31 percent feeling fearful. 

This is the reality facing millions of Indian Americans today. Without institutional accountability and genuine investigation, incidents like this will continue to be treated as isolated tragedies rather than symptoms of a larger failure.

If You Knew Meghna Patel

If you knew Meghna Patel, worked with her, or are a member of her family, The Probe wants to hear from you. If you have details about her life, her work, or your frustration with how Norfolk Police have handled this case, write to us at tipusoff@theprobe.in. Your story matters. Your answers matter.

Two young tigers were found dead in Shyampur Range, in Haridwar forest division in Uttarakhand on May 19 and 20, 2026. Their paws had been severed. Post-mortem examination confirmed poisoning from a contaminated buffalo carcass deliberately placed as bait. The mother tigress has not been sighted since.

This incident, documented by forest officials and confirmed by the Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Vivek Pandey, occurred in a designated tiger corridor adjacent to Rajaji Tiger Reserve. It was not an isolated poaching incident. It was the visible manifestation of something the Indian forest administration has been quietly managing: organised wildlife crime operating beneath the surface of conservation success statistics.

For much of 2026, Uttarakhand's government has projected an image of tiger conservation triumph. Official figures showed the state's tiger population at 560 animals in 2022, up from 442 in 2018—a 26.69 percent increase. Corbett Tiger Reserve, the nation's oldest protected area, held 260 tigers in 2022, compared to 231 four years earlier. These numbers formed the basis of Uttarakhand's institutional narrative: a model state for tiger conservation, recognised nationally and internationally for exemplary protection measures.

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

The Concealment at Corbett

On April 8, 2026, reporting by The Probe on Corbett tiger poaching pointed to the nexus between poachers and forest officials in Uttarakhand. At least 40 tigers had died in a span of just two and a half years — a figure so alarming it shocked a High Court bench into calling in the Central Bureau of Investigation in 2018. Within a record 26 days, the CBI uncovered the cover-up: forged records, concealed tiger deaths, and forest officials allegedly directing the backdating of death documents. Then a Supreme Court stay froze the investigation. That stay has not been lifted in eight years. 

The CBI's preliminary findings, completed in the first 26 days of investigation, had been startling. Forest department records showed deliberate falsification. H-2 death proformas—the official documents recording tiger deaths—had been backdated. These alterations occurred on explicit orders of named forest officials. A tiger death had been concealed from the state's Forest Minister. National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) protocols governing the handling of tiger remains had been systematically violated across multiple forest divisions.

Yet despite these documented findings, no prosecutions had followed. Instead, institutional mechanisms had been deployed to prevent the CBI investigation from reaching a conclusion. The state's counter-affidavit in the Supreme Court, filed in April 2026, argued that a continued CBI probe would cause "unnecessary mental and social stress for retired officers."

Days later, on May 19, exactly as the Shyampur poisoning occurred, this institutional paralysis became operationally relevant. The poachers who killed the two juvenile tigers were professionals. They understood the vulnerable corridor area. They knew the extraction methods. They operated with confidence that organised investigation would not pursue them effectively.

The Shyampur incident was not an anomaly. In January 2025, in the Kumaon Division of Uttarakhand’s Champawat district, forest officials discovered a dead tiger whose front paws had been mutilated, with claws extracted from two of them. The extraction was precise, suggesting it was carried out by someone familiar with the illegal wildlife trade and aware of which body parts held market value. The same Kumaon division has also seen previous seizures of tiger skins, reinforcing concerns about organised tiger poaching. Tiger parts continue to fetch high prices in illegal markets, which creates strong incentives for professional criminal networks to target these animals.

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

Tiger Poaching: What the Numbers Actually Conceal

India holds approximately 3,682 tigers—roughly 66 percent of the global wild tiger population of 5,574. This concentration makes India's tiger conservation outcomes globally consequential. Uttarakhand, with 560 tigers, represents roughly 15 percent of India's total tiger population. The state's stewardship of these animals determines outcomes for the broader conservation effort.

Yet tiger population statistics measure only one variable: numbers. They do not measure how those numbers are achieved. A tiger population can grow through genuine protection while simultaneously experiencing significant poaching losses. Population growth and active tiger poaching are not mutually exclusive.

In 2024, tiger mortality events across India totaled 126. In 2025, this figure rose to 166. These deaths encompass all causes: disease, territorial combat, accidents, electrocution, and poaching. The breakdown between causes varies depending on which agency reports the figures. The Wildlife Protection Society of India emphasises that the primary drivers of mortality remain unchanged: international demand for tiger bones for traditional medicine and demand for skins for luxury markets, particularly in Myanmar and China.

Yet when a media outlet requested centralised data on "missing tigers"—animals previously documented through camera traps or field sightings that have subsequently vanished without recovered bodies—the National Tiger Conservation Authority stated it maintains no such data and deflected responsibility to state governments. Most states do not track missing tigers as a distinct category. This creates a data gap of potentially significant magnitude. If even ten percent of India's tiger population has vanished without recovered bodies and without investigation closure, that represents hundreds of unaccounted animals.

The NTCA Files That Exposed India’s Tiger Protection Crisis

The credibility of the NTCA came under serious scrutiny in January 2026 when the apex tiger conservation body issued a directive that conservationists say exposed deep institutional failures in India’s wildlife protection system.

The controversy emerged after Madhya Pradesh-based RTI activist Ajay Dubey sought information regarding unresolved tiger mortality cases across India. Documents obtained through the RTI revealed that investigations into 88 tiger deaths recorded during 2020 and 2021 remained officially “pending” or “under scrutiny” across several major tiger-range states. 

Among the documents was a January 12, 2026 communication issued by NTCA Deputy Inspector General Dr. Vaibhav C. Mathur to Chief Wildlife Wardens of tiger-range states. The letter directed states to submit complete documentation—including post-mortem reports, forensic examination reports, histopathology findings and colour photographs—for all pending tiger mortality cases by January 27, 2026. The communication further stated that cases for which records were not submitted within the deadline could be treated as closed.

“This is extremely shocking because the NTCA is effectively telling states that if they fail to provide details, the cases may simply be closed,” said Ajay Dubey speaking to The Probe. “Post-mortem reports, forensic reports, histopathology reports and colour photographs are the most critical evidentiary documents in wildlife crime investigations. In poaching trials, these reports are often central to securing convictions. If the reports were prepared, why were they never submitted to the NTCA? The very low conviction rate in wildlife crime cases reflects how poor investigations have been.”

Available wildlife crime records and historical monitoring data indicate that conviction rates in tiger poaching and wildlife trafficking cases in India remain extremely low, often estimated at around four to five percent nationally. Conservation experts say that despite hundreds of wildlife crime cases being registered, convictions remain rare because of weak investigations, incomplete forensic documentation, delayed charge sheets and poor inter-agency coordination.

Dubey argued that the NTCA possesses substantial statutory authority under India’s tiger conservation framework and cannot be dismissed as a powerless institution. “The NTCA has the authority to seek action against officials, recommend special audits and even withhold Project Tiger funding from states in cases of serious non-compliance,” he said. “It is the central implementation and oversight body for tiger conservation. But increasingly, there appears to be political hesitation in taking strong action against states, particularly where the same political party is in power both at the state and central levels. Conservation enforcement cannot be influenced by political considerations.”

Dubey also pointed to the transnational dimensions of tiger trafficking. Recalling a 2017 case involving the seizure of a tiger skin originating from Madhya Pradesh at an airport in Ethiopia, he said the incident illustrated how Indian tiger body parts continue to feed international smuggling syndicates operating across Asia and beyond.

India is currently conducting the 6th All India Tiger Estimation (AITE 2026), one of the world’s largest wildlife monitoring exercises. Since January 2026, forest staff across the country have been carrying out carnivore sign surveys and line transects, while thousands of camera traps are being deployed across all 58 tiger reserves and adjoining forest divisions for photographic identification of individual tigers.

“Even when a massive nationwide tiger monitoring exercise is underway, with camera traps deployed extensively across tiger habitats, it is shocking to note that incidents of poaching are still taking place,” Dubey stated. 

Wildlife enforcement agencies and international conservation bodies have long documented the illegal trafficking of tiger skins, claws, bones and other body parts through transnational smuggling routes linked to Nepal, Myanmar and parts of Southeast Asia and China. Tiger bones are trafficked primarily for use in traditional medicine markets, where they are falsely believed to possess therapeutic properties despite no scientific evidence supporting such claims. Tiger skins are highly valued as luxury status symbols and are also used in ceremonial displays in some regions. Tiger claws and teeth are frequently sold in illegal black markets as talismans, ornaments or objects associated with superstition, occult rituals and so-called “tantric” practices in parts of South Asia. Conservation experts warn that persistent demand for these products continues to drive organised poaching networks across the Indian subcontinent.

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

Uttarakhand Government’s “No Poaching” Claim Collapses Under Scrutiny

On April 4, 2026, Uttarakhand filed a counter-affidavit in the Supreme Court making specific claims about conservation success. The document, submitted by Additional Secretary Himanshu Khurana of the Forest Department, asserted that Uttarakhand was "nationally and internationally recognised as a model State for tiger conservation, as evidenced by independent scientific assessments conducted by the NTCA and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII)."

The affidavit presented tiger population figures. Corbett Tiger Reserve had grown from 231 tigers in 2018 to 260 in 2022—a 12.55 percent increase. Rajaji Tiger Reserve had expanded from 38 to 54 tigers, a 42.10 percent increase. 

Then the affidavit made a categorical claim: "Since 2019, no cases of tiger poaching have been reported in Corbett or Rajaji Tiger Reserves."

This statement was demonstrably false. The same affidavit, in earlier paragraphs, acknowledged that the CBI investigation had discovered systematic falsification of tiger death records. It referenced that an NTCA inquiry revealed poaching had "occurred at the border of the Lansdowne Forest Division and the Corbett Tiger Reserve."

The distinction—claiming "no poaching in the reserves" while acknowledging poaching "at the border"—attempted semantic evasion. But it collapsed under scrutiny. Rajaji Tiger Reserve and its adjacent areas, including Shyampur Range in Haridwar, function as a single ecological unit. Tigers do not recognise administrative boundaries. A tiger poached in Shyampur is a tiger lost from the Rajaji population.

More fundamentally, the affidavit's logic was circular. It claimed: "Since 2019, no cases of tiger poaching have been reported in Corbett or Rajaji Tiger Reserves." But this claim relied entirely on the forest department's own reporting system—the same system that the CBI had found had deliberately falsified death records and concealed tiger deaths from senior officials. Therefore, "no reported cases" proved only that reporting had stopped, not that poaching had stopped.

The affidavit advanced a second argument: that in high tiger density areas, increased mortality is inevitable and "governed by the law of nature, wherein 'survival of the fittest' operates as an evolutionary norm." Therefore, tiger mortality "cannot be construed as illegal or attributed to poaching, mismanagement or any connivance on the part of officials."

This argument represented the weaponisation of evolutionary biology. "Survival of the fittest" is not a cause of death. It is an evolutionary concept describing population-level outcomes across generations. A tiger poisoned through deliberate placement of contaminated bait has not died through "survival of the fittest." It has died from poisoning. The Shyampur tigers did not succumb to natural selection. They were deliberately killed using professional techniques.

Maharashtra’s Probe Shattered the “No Poaching” Narrative

While Uttarakhand's government was filing claims of conservation success, Maharashtra's Special Investigative Team was documenting something that directly contradicted those claims. Between January and March 2025, Maharashtra's forest department investigated an organised tiger poaching and trafficking syndicate, registering a case in Rajura, Chandrapur district.

The investigation resulted in multiple arrests and detailed interrogation records. The findings documented what the official report characterised as an "established network" with members across eight states. The exact language stated: "The involved syndicate and arrested members of this gang have an established network in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Assam, and Manipur and have been involved in criminal activity for the last few years."

This was not speculation. This was a sworn investigative finding. The syndicate was not emerging or newly established. It was "established" and had "been involved in criminal activity for the last few years"—meaning throughout the 2019-2026 period when Uttarakhand claimed no poaching had occurred.

The investigation documented operational methods with precision. Tigers were poached primarily from unprotected areas or corridor areas adjacent to reserves. Professional members of traditional hunting communities participated—particularly Pardhi and Baheliya members from Central India with generations of forest knowledge. After poaching, tiger skins and bones were extracted, dried, and transported through Guwahati to Shillong, then to Aizawl or Champhai. From these northeastern border areas, tiger products crossed into Myanmar.

The report noted that increasingly fragmented tiger corridors were making it easier for poachers to target and kill animals. This observation directly explained Shyampur's vulnerability. As Rajaji's tiger population grew and animals dispersed into surrounding corridor areas, they became ideal targets for organised syndicates familiar with movement patterns and extraction methods.

The NTCA’s Dangerous Incentive Structure

The failures in Uttarakhand cannot be isolated to the state government. They are enabled by the National Tiger Conservation Authority's institutional compromises. The NTCA's decision to force-close 88 unresolved cases by setting an impossible deadline created perverse incentives. States understood the message: if investigation is inconvenient, if it reveals official misconduct, simply fail to submit the required documentation. The NTCA will formally close the case. The problem disappears from institutional records, even though underlying crimes remain unsolved.

In Uttarakhand, where political alignment between the state and Centre may influence institutional decision-making, this system of administrative closure carries serious implications. A rigorous NTCA investigation into Uttarakhand's tiger conservation could expose failures by senior officials. A comprehensive audit of tiger mortality cases could reveal years of ignored protocols, delayed investigations and missing forensic documentation. Withholding Project Tiger funds from a politically aligned state would trigger an uncomfortable confrontation between institutions meant to work in tandem.

Instead, tiger deaths are quietly marked as “closed” while the real crimes remain unsolved.

The poaching disappears from the records. 

The tigers still disappear from the forests.

Over 22 lakh students took NEET in May 2026. Their exam was cancelled. The question paper was leaked. This is the second time in two years that India's largest medical entrance exam has collapsed due to a security breach. NEET 2026 represents not just a systemic failure, but a deliberate choice—a government that knew exactly how to fix the problem but refused to act.

In October 2024, after the first paper leak, the government constituted the Radhakrishnan Committee to diagnose NEET's vulnerabilities. The committee did its job. It gave 101 recommendations—specific, actionable solutions that could have prevented the exact scenario that unfolded in May 2026. But the government ignored almost all of them.

"The most important point is that the government has learned nothing from this occurrence in 2024 and that caused a repeat of the paper leak this year," Dr. Dhruv Chauhan, National Spokesperson of the Indian Medical Association (IMA), said in our discussion. "The need to conduct a re-examination itself simply points to the absolute failure of the authorities."

Also Read:  How NEET Let the Paper Leak—And Why It Will Happen Again

Understanding What NEET Is—And Why It Matters

NEET—the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test—is the gateway to medical education in India. It determines who becomes a doctor. Every year, over 22 lakh students compete for roughly 1.1 lakh MBBS seats. For students from poor and middle-class backgrounds, NEET represents the only path to a stable career, respect, and upward mobility.

But NEET is more than just an exam. It is the foundation of India's healthcare system. The doctors selected through NEET will treat patients, make life-and-death decisions, and shape the public health of the nation. When the exam is compromised, India's healthcare future is compromised.

"This is something that deals with the healthcare of the nation," Dr. Chauhan explained. "This directly deals with the economic status of the nation because if the country is healthy, the economic status will improve anyway."

Yet despite this critical importance, NEET 2026 operated on a system designed in an era before cybersecurity threats became existential. The exam is conducted on a single day, across 551 cities with over 5,400 exam centres, with 22.7 lakh students, using pen-and-paper format. Physical papers must be printed, transported, stored, and distributed—creating hundreds of vulnerability points.

The Leak That Should Never Have Happened Again

In 2024, the NEET paper leaked from Oasis School in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand. The principal and vice principal were arrested. The CBI launched an investigation. The Supreme Court heard the matter. The government said it would fix the system.

Then came October 2024: the Radhakrishnan Committee submitted 101 recommendations. These were not vague suggestions. They were specific, technical solutions:

Implement computer-based testing immediately. Encrypt question papers with access restricted to minutes before the exam. Use biometric verification. Implement AI-based surveillance. Decentralise exam administration by involving state governments. Create fast-track courts for prosecution of those involved.

The government officially accepted the committee’s report. But accepting a report and implementing its recommendations are two very different things. During our discussion, P. Sesh Kumar, former Director General of the CAG, underscored this distinction: “Accepting the report is one thing. Accepting the recommendations is another. But the most important step is actually implementing those recommendations.”

On May 3, 2026, the exam was conducted. Within 42 hours, a 'guess paper' circulated on Telegram with approximately 120 matching questions from Biology and Chemistry sections. Students panicked. On May 12, the NTA cancelled the exam. Once again, 22 lakh students were left in limbo. 

Also Read:  NEET 2024: An Educational Catastrophe of Unseen Proportions

NEET 2026: The Coaching Mafia and the Organized Nexus

What emerges from examining NEET 2026 is not a random security breach, but an organised ecosystem of profiteering. Coaching centers, brokers, exam administrators, and potentially NTA officials form a network that benefits from chaos.

"Money has the power to buy people, organisations, and even the government," Dr. Chauhan explained. "We are talking about exam paper leaks in 2024 and 2026. But I can tell you with confidence that the paper leaks have been regularly happening every year. It is just that it never gets reported by the media. It becomes a huge issue only when the media takes it up like in the case of 2024 and 2026."

Dr. Chauhan continued, "The coaching center ecosystem in Kota, Rajasthan—the epicenter of India's medical entrance exam preparation—is particularly troubling. Some institutions celebrate 700-plus marks for dozens of students, predicting with uncanny accuracy who will score high. How do they know? Because they have access to information others don't".

"This nexus extends into government agencies themselves. In the NEET 2026 case, two exam setters who were with the NTA were arrested for their involvement in the leak. Two people inside the system responsible for creating the question papers. This is not an external threat—it is internal rot," noted Dr. Chauhan.

Sesh Kumar acknowledged the complex landscape of accountability mechanisms: "There is clearly scope for improvement and microscopic examination of systemic failures. Parliamentary committees are actively examining the matter—they have summoned NTA officials for detailed questioning. The CBI has been tasked with a comprehensive investigation. The Supreme Court is being petitioned for direct oversight, and medical associations and civil society groups are pursuing accountability through legal channels."

But investigation alone is not enough when the system actively resists reform.

Also Read:  Kota's Ongoing Struggle with Student Suicides

Why Computer-Based Testing Wasn't Implemented

The most damning question surrounding NEET 2026 is simple: why wasn't computer-based testing implemented despite being one of the key recommendation from the Radhakrishnan Committee?

The government's answer: logistical challenges. Technical complexity. Timeline constraints. But these answers ring hollow when other countries manage equivalent or larger exams securely using technology. The SAT serves millions of students in the United States. The GRE is secure. Medical entrance exams in the UK, Canada, and Australia have not experienced recurring leaks.

“If the exam is converted into a computer-based test, these problems would be minimised, if not eliminated altogether,” Sesh Kumar said. “Why the government has not implemented computer-based testing, despite the recommendation of the Radhakrishnan Committee, only the government knows. It could be due to logistical challenges, or perhaps vested interests.”

The vested interests angle is critical. A pen-and-paper exam creates dependency on printing agencies, transportation networks, storage facilities, and exam centers. Each dependency point creates opportunity for corruption. Computer-based testing would eliminate most of these vulnerabilities—and eliminate the revenue streams for those who profit from chaos.

The Silent Toll: A Mental Health Crisis

The cancellation of NEET 2026 exposed a crisis that extended far beyond examination administration: the psychological devastation of over 22 lakh aspirants whose years of preparation were abruptly invalidated. Some students died by suicide in the immediate aftermath of the May 12 cancellation. These deaths were not isolated incidents—they reflect a documented pattern of psychological trauma among high-stakes examination aspirants.

What distinguished the NEET 2026 crisis was its timing: students had already completed the examination, calculated their performance, and begun the psychological transition from preparation to rest. The government's announcement of cancellation forced an impossible reversal—demanding that minds already in a state of completion suddenly return to active preparation, now under clouds of institutional failure and diminished confidence in the examination system itself.

The financial scale of preparation creates additional vulnerability. Aspirants invest ₹1.5 to ₹3 lakh annually on coaching, often in cities far from home, with total preparation costs reaching ₹3 to ₹5 lakh when accommodation and living expenses are included. These costs frequently require families to sell property, take loans, or incur significant debt. Many aspirants live in rented accommodation away from home for two to three years, isolated from family and social support systems. When the examination concludes, this psychological and financial exhaustion culminates in a state of release—study materials are put away, hostels are vacated, the body rests. In this fragile transitional state, when aspirants are most vulnerable to psychological disruption, the government's cancellation announcement created acute trauma for many. 

What Accountability Actually Looks Like

In response to NEET 2026, Dr. Chauhan co-filed a Supreme Court petition demanding immediate action: shift to computer-based testing this year itself. 

"I know implementing CBT this year itself may be very challenging as there is not much time. But my point is that if the government can spend crores on freebies, they can also spend a few crores more and get this exam conducted in a more professional manner using technology. We are waiting to see if the Supreme Court will hear our petition and give us a favourable order."

The solution is structural, not superficial. The Radhakrishnan Committee, in its recommendations, prescribed biometric and AI-based candidate verification, encrypted digital transmission of question papers, centre-based secure printing, expansion of computer-based testing, stronger CCTV surveillance, and reduced dependence on outsourced staff. The government has now announced that NEET will be conducted entirely in computer-based mode from 2027, a decision that addresses the fundamental vulnerability in the current system: physical question papers that must be printed, transported, stored, and distributed across thousands of examination centres create multiple points of interception for organised leaks. 

The Radhakrishnan Committee has recommended that the NTA develop at least 1000 secure Standard Testing Centres across the country in a phased manner, utilising reputed Government institutions including Kendriya Vidyalayas and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas. Computer-based, multi-shift exams designed from the ground up for digital integrity, as demonstrated by JEE Main, face fewer recurring breach patterns than pen-and-paper, single-shot models. This decentralised infrastructure combined with encrypted digital papers, biometric authentication, and near-election-grade security protocols transforms NEET from a vulnerable, centralised mass examination into a distributed, digitally secured assessment.

Technology alone is insufficient without institutional accountability. The Radhakrishnan report prescribed more permanent staff, less outsourcing, dedicated committees for test audit, ethics and transparency, and a clear mandate to focus on entrance exams rather than being burdened with miscellaneous tests. Proposed long-term reforms include curbs on the number of attempts and a cap on the candidate's age. Beyond NTA restructuring, the committee recommended stronger CCTV and data retention norms, limits on attempts, an oversight mechanism for coaching institutes, and a genuinely responsive grievance redress architecture.

In response to the 2026 crisis, medical associations have petitioned the Supreme Court for a high-powered monitoring committee chaired by a retired Supreme Court judge, a cybersecurity expert, and a forensic scientist. The Radhakrishnan Report itself recommends that the Government establish a High-Powered Steering Committee to oversee implementation of these recommendations. These institutional checks—permanent oversight bodies, dedicated NTA leadership, coach institute monitoring, and transparent grievance mechanisms—create accountability that prevents the implementation stalls that plagued 2024-2026. Without these structural and institutional reforms working in concert, technology safeguards become theater, and the cycle of leaks, cancellations, and student trauma repeats.

The latest NEET paper leak is not a freak accident; it is the inevitable consequence of a brittle, exam-obsessed ecosystem that refused to learn from its own post-mortems. Drawing on systemic critiques of NEET and India's medical education maze, this deep dive report traces how a high-stakes, single-shot, pen-and-paper exam moving in physical packets through a leaky logistics chain collided with a governance culture built on outsourcing, under-staffed regulators, and opaque private interests.

The 2024 NEET paper leak—originating in local centres, travelling through brokers and coaching networks, and finally acknowledged by courts and investigators—was supposed to be the wake-up call that fixed the National Testing Agency's DNA. An expert committee led by K. Radhakrishnan duly prescribed a radical shift to encrypted digital papers, biometric authentication, hybrid computer-assisted testing, and a near-election-grade security protocol. But implementation stalled, and NEET walked into 2026 still wearing the same old vulnerable armour.

Meanwhile, JEE Main—run by the very same NTA—demonstrates that computer-based, multi-shift exams designed from the ground up for digital integrity face fewer recurring breach patterns than pen-and-paper, single-shot models. This report dissects why NEET's design creates structural vulnerabilities while JEE's architecture offers comparative advantages, what exactly failed in 2024, how many of the Radhakrishnan panel's 101 recommendations have actually been translated into practice, and what India can learn from international models that combine high-stakes exams with robust digital and institutional safeguards.

The story closes with a hard-nosed, practical roadmap: treating NEET like a national election, migrating to secure hybrid or full computer-based testing in phases, shackling the coaching-broker nexus, and rebuilding credibility before another batch of aspirants finds itself victims of a system that claims to reward merit while repeatedly rewarding malpractice.

Also Read:  NEET 2024: An Educational Catastrophe of Unseen Proportions

How the 2024 NEET Paper Leak Really Happened—And Why It Wasn't a One-Off

The official story of NEET-UG 2024 reads like a crime thriller with a depressingly familiar plot. Hours after lakhs of aspirants walked out of centres, whispers began picking up on Telegram channels and in coaching-city hostels: screenshots of the paper had allegedly been circulating before the exam, particularly in Bihar and Jharkhand. As complaints piled up, the government and the NTA initially insisted there was no systemic breach, only localised "irregularities."

Investigators then followed the trail backwards. The CBI and state police unearthed a classic old-school leak chain. Sealed question paper packets, printed days in advance and stored in custody at local nodal schools, were reportedly opened ahead of time at a school in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand. Paper images were clicked, relayed through phones and messaging apps, and fed to aspirants in exchange for hefty payments. In some centres, dummy candidates and impersonators, using the leaked paper, produced suspiciously clustered high scores and perfect marks, triggering petitions across multiple high courts and finally in the Supreme Court.

By late 2024, the Supreme Court recorded that a leak had indeed occurred, yet stopped short of declaring the entire exam invalid, holding that the data did not show a nationwide, systemic paper collapse and refusing to order a full retest. Instead, individual admissions were cancelled where direct complicity was proven: dozens of candidates lost seats, some were debarred, and criminal cases rolled on in Bihar, Jharkhand and other states. What never really came, however, was a structural reboot of how NEET is conceived and delivered. The exam's vulnerabilities—a single national paper, printed in bulk, trucked to thousands of centres, guarded by a thin administrative line—were left fundamentally intact.

When NEET-UG 2026 burst into another leak storm, it was not lightning striking twice. It was the same dry forest catching fire again because nobody bothered to remove the tinder.

The Anatomy of Failure: Where NEET's System Broke Down

To understand why NEET paper leak keeps happening, we have to trace the full bloodstream of NEET—from policy design to printing press to the last classroom in a small-town school. Each layer carried its own fault lines, many already diagnosed in analyses of NEET's broader ecosystem.

First, NEET is a single-day, single-shot, pen-and-paper exam for more than two million aspirants, with one national paper set per language stream. That design is a gift to criminals: if even one packet is compromised before the bell rings, the same paper sits on every desk in the country. There is no cushion of alternate shifts, multiple question sets, or adaptive algorithms.

Second, the logistics architecture is stubbornly analogue. Question papers are printed centrally, physically packed, transported through layers of custodians to thousands of schools, and stored overnight or longer before the exam. Each extra human hand, every lock and key, every dusty storeroom is an attack surface. In 2024, it took only one school, one compromised custodian and one well-connected broker to turn the entire national exam into a courtroom exhibit.

Third, the institutional guardianship of NEET has historically been weak, even as the stakes have skyrocketed. The NTA was set up to be a high-tech, specialist testing body, but official reviews and parliamentary committees have noted its thin permanent staffing, heavy dependence on outsourced vendors and contract workers, and limited in-house capacity to run elections-scale operations multiple times a year. When the Radhakrishnan Committee later looked under the hood, it saw an agency running a national high-voltage grid with the wiring of a mid-sized coaching centre.

Fourth, the wider NEET ecosystem—particularly around counselling, private colleges and the coaching industry—has normalised rule-bending and monetisation in ways that make leaks economically rational. Investigations into NEET-PG seat-blocking and capitation rackets have already shown how brokers, private colleges and desperate families weaponise information asymmetry to turn merit lists into markets. A NEET paper leak is just the prequel to the same story: pay to edge ahead in the exam, pay again to secure a seat in counselling, pay once more to upgrade to a coveted college. In such a market, question papers are not sacred; they are inventory.

Finally, the governance reflex has been reactive, not preventive. Courts step in only after disasters, as they did in the NEET-PG seat-blocking case, prescribing synchronised counselling calendars and Aadhaar-based tracking years after the scams were already entrenched. In NEET-UG, the 2016–2023 battles were about centralisation versus state autonomy, social justice versus a single national test; the question of technological security was an afterthought. By the time 2024 exposed the leak, the system had already allowed a high-stakes exam to run for years on trust and tape.

Didn't We Learn Anything From 2024? Lessons Ignored

The cruel irony of the 2026 scandal is that 2024 had already forced a full-scale post-mortem. The Centre set up an expert panel under former ISRO chief K. Radhakrishnan, precisely to redesign NEET, CUET and other major tests for a post-leak era. The committee took its job seriously. It didn't recommend cosmetic fixes; it proposed a near-surgical reconstruction of how India conducts entrance exams.

On paper, the lessons were crystal clear. First, relying on printed, trucked question papers for exams of this scale is asking for trouble. The panel explicitly recommended shifting "maximum entrance examinations" to online or hybrid computer-assisted formats, with encrypted digital delivery of papers to secure servers at centres shortly before the exam, and last-mile printing only under CCTV-recorded supervision. That single step would have killed the Hazaribagh-style leak—there would simply have been no paper lying in a cupboard a day earlier.

Second, the committee recognised that impersonation, forged documents and coaching-facilitated cheating had become endemic in NEET, and pushed for multi-stage biometric and AI-based authentication of candidates, from registration to exam-hall entry. Third, it called for standardised, permanent test centres—especially in Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya schools—and mobile testing labs for rural districts, so that the exam's physical footprint could be tightly controlled, audited and reused rather than reinvented at thousands of ad hoc venues each year.

Fourth, it asked for NTA itself to be rewired: more permanent staff, less outsourcing, dedicated committees for test audit, ethics and transparency, and a clear mandate to focus on entrance exams rather than being burdened with every miscellaneous test the system could offload. In short, the Radhakrishnan report treated NEET not as a leaky bucket to be patched, but as a faulty pipeline to be rebuilt.

But between the report and the next exam cycle lay the swamp of implementation. The Centre told the Supreme Court at the start of 2025 that it would accept and implement "necessary and progressive" recommendations, and the Court directed that the panel's remit be widened to cover detailed standard operating procedures, CCTV norms, identity checks, secure logistics and a proper grievance redress mechanism. Yet by mid-2026, most of the heavy-lift reforms—full or hybrid CBT, standardised digital centres, multi-stage biometric protocols, reduced dependence on private vendors—still existed largely on paper or in pilot discussions.

What did get implemented were the easier, optics-friendly pieces: more cameras in centres, more helplines, more public posturing about zero tolerance. Without the deep structural changes, NEET marched into the 2026 cycle with fundamentally the same risk profile. When the next NEET paper leak detonated, it was less a surprise than a delayed consequence.

Also Read:  Medical Education in India Hits Rock Bottom

Why NEET's Design Creates Risk While JEE's Structure Offers Fewer Vulnerabilities: A Tale of Two Exams

The most instructive comparison for the NEET ecosystem is sitting next door: JEE Main. Both are run by the NTA. Both attract huge candidate volumes. Yet NEET has become synonymous with serial leak controversies, while JEE, despite past incidents, has experienced fewer recurring breaches in recent years.

The crucial difference is not in the agency, but in the architecture. JEE Main has for years been conducted entirely as a computer-based test, across multiple days and shifts. Question banks are created by multiple expert groups, encrypted and stored on secure servers; when the exam starts, the system assembles a paper in real time from the bank, unique to each shift, and unlocks it digitally at the appointed minute. There are no trucked cartons to steal, no single master paper to sell, and no way for a leak in one city to automatically poison the entire test.

CBT also makes scale an ally rather than an enemy. Because JEE runs in multiple sessions, the NTA can balance difficulty levels and normalise scores across shifts, while the very multiplicity of question sets makes a mass leak structurally harder to execute at scale. Even if a handful of questions were compromised somewhere, their impact would be drowned in the overall weight of the paper.

NEET chose the opposite design path. It remained stubbornly pen-and-paper, single-shift in most years, with one common question paper per language version distributed physically across the country. That method may feel more "traditional" and comfortable to some stakeholders, but it dramatically increases the attack surface. NEET's paper-based model almost invites leaks, whereas JEE's digital model structurally suppresses them.

It is not that CBT is magically incorruptible; any digital system can, in theory, be hacked. Parliamentary reports have noted this risk for high-stakes exams, and JEE itself experienced a sophisticated digital breach in 2021. The difference is one of probabilities and traceability. Hacking a well-fortified national question bank and going undetected is far harder than bribing a local custodian to crack open a wooden almirah the night before the test. If something does go wrong in a CBT, logs, timestamps and digital forensics give investigators a fighting chance to reconstruct events. In a paper model, you are often left chasing rumour trails and grainy smartphone screenshots.

The NEET-versus-JEE contrast has therefore become the system's own indictment. The same agency, using different architectures, delivers very different leak frequencies and severity patterns. The problem is not inherent in Indian testing; it is in the particular way we insist on testing future doctors—in a single-shot, single-paper, trucked-and-stored format.

The Radhakrishnan Committee: What It Prescribed and What We Ignored

When the Radhakrishnan report finally emerged, it was exhaustive: 100-plus recommendations, grouped around restructuring the NTA, hardening exam-centre protocols, digitising question delivery, regulating the coaching ecosystem, and rethinking the one-shot nature of NEET.

At its heart lay five big prescriptions. The first was institutional: rebuild the NTA as a high-capacity, semi-autonomous testing authority with dedicated sub-committees on test audit, ethics and transparency, and stakeholder relations, and with enough permanent staff and in-house capacity to reduce dependence on private service providers.

The second was operational: treat exam centres like polling booths. Seal them with the district administration and police, open them only under supervision on exam day, deploy a designated NTA "presiding officer" in each centre, and bring logistics under something close to an Election Commission-style command-and-control structure.

The third was technological: move towards a "Digi-Exam" ecosystem, including hybrid computer-assisted pen-and-paper tests where full CBT is not yet feasible, with encrypted question papers transmitted digitally to vetted centres and printed moments before the test under CCTV and biometric supervision. The fourth was infrastructural: upgrade Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya schools into permanent digital test centres, build at least one standardised exam hub in every district, and deploy mobile testing centres for remote regions.

The fifth was strategic: move away from a one-day, one-shot NEET towards a multi-stage exam model, more like JEE's two-tier system, to reduce single-day pressure, allow better psychometric design, and make any one leak less catastrophic. Around these pillars, the committee wrapped a series of softer recommendations: more robust SOPs, stronger CCTV and data retention norms, limits on attempts, an oversight mechanism for coaching institutes, and a genuinely responsive grievance redress architecture.

How much of this has been implemented? Public reporting suggests a mixed picture. Some process-level reforms—better centre vetting, more CCTV, a stronger grievance channel—have begun, and ministries have promised to phase in structural changes from 2026 onwards. But the headline shifts—full or hybrid CBT for NEET, district-wide digital centres, a transformed NTA, multi-stage exams—remain largely aspirational, with timelines sliding even as new leaks erupt.

In other words, the Radhakrishnan report reads today less like a checklist being ticked off and more like a prophecy that the system keeps postponing until the next scandal forces its hand.

Also Read:  The Privatisation of Higher Education in India: A Silent Coup

The Deeper Issues: High Stakes, Skewed Incentives, and a Culture of Crisis

Beneath the immediate failure of locks and logistics lies a deeper malaise that reverberates across India's medical education pipeline: the country has built an entire system that amplifies the consequences of every crack in NEET.

Start with the numbers. Over two million aspirants now fight for barely over a hundred thousand MBBS seats; the odds are brutal, and the difference between a rank that gets you a subsidised government college and a rank that pushes you into a crore-plus private seat can be a handful of questions. This high-stakes structure is the perfect breeding ground for leaks. When one answer bubble can mean the difference between a lifetime of debt and a publicly funded degree, the market price of a stolen paper skyrockets.

Layer on top of that the coaching-factory economy. Kota and its clones rake in tens of thousands of crores, pushing students through 12-hour grind days and turning success in NEET into a function of how much a family can pay for test-specific drilling. A system that already monetises every minute of preparation is more likely to monetise the exam itself; it is no coincidence that some leak networks have roots in the same states and cities that host the densest coaching clusters.

Then add the post-NEET chaos. Counselling has long been plagued by vacancies, seat-blocking, management-quota auctions and stray-round skulduggery, as the experience of NEET-PG has so vividly shown. When students and families see that those with money and connections can manipulate counselling outcomes, the moral barrier to paying for a leaked question paper erodes. If the back end is rigged, why not game the front end too?

Finally, we need to consider the governance psyche. NEET's origin story is one of courtroom battles, federal tussles and ideological wars over centralisation, minority rights and social justice. For years, the political fights were about whether NEET should exist at all (Tamil Nadu continues to protest), not about how to make it technologically secure and psychologically humane. That has left regulators in a perpetual fire-fighting mode—defending the idea of a single national exam, tweaking syllabi, juggling reservations—while the nuts and bolts of exam security got treated as a logistical detail.

The result is a culture where every summer brings a new NEET crisis: suicides in coaching towns, delayed counselling, seat-blocking scams, and now, serial paper leaks. The real tragedy is not just that papers leak. It is that the system treats each leak as an aberration, rather than as a symptom of structural design choices that privilege centralisation and volume over resilience and trust.

What the World Does Differently: International Exam Cultures

Let us look abroad. NEET begins to look like a stubborn outlier. Few major medical education systems bet the entire future of aspiring doctors on a single three-hour, once-a-year multiple-choice exam printed on paper.

In the United States, entry into medical school hinges on the MCAT, a computer-based test offered multiple times a year in secure centres, followed by a holistic admissions process that weighs grades, interviews and experiences. Licensing then runs through the USMLE, a three-step exam series spread across years, again fully digital and administered under tight, standardised security. If a test form were compromised in one window, the damage would be contained; the system does not hang all of a student's fate on a single date.

The United Kingdom uses UCAT and, until recently, BMAT—both computer-based, multi-session aptitude or subject tests—as one ingredient in medical-school admissions, alongside A-level results and structured interviews. China's gaokao remains a massive pen-and-paper enterprise, but its medical education system is increasingly wrapped in national accreditation norms and a portfolio of assessments that do not reduce the entire gateway to one exam day.

Across these systems, the trend is clear. High-stakes exams are either computer-based with strong digital safeguards and multiple sittings, or they are embedded in a broader selection matrix that dilutes the incentive to corrupt any single test. When leaks or irregularities happen, authorities rerun sessions, void specific forms, and use detailed data analytics to isolate damage; they do not typically find themselves contemplating the cancellation of the only annual gateway to the profession.

India's choice to bundle licensure, merit and social justice into one mega-test, and then to run that test as a one-day paper marathon for millions, has few international parallels—and even fewer international defenders.

No Patch Work, Build From Ground Up

Turning NEET From Soft Target to Hard System

So what would it take to stop NEET from bleeding every summer? The answer is not one clever gadget or one stern Supreme Court order. It is a sequenced, practical transformation that treats NEET like what it actually is: an exam with consequences on the scale of a national election.

Phase one has to be architectural. The Radhakrishnan panel has already drawn the blueprint; the state now has to build from it rather than file it. NEET-UG should migrate, in a staged but time-bound manner, to either full computer-based testing or to the hybrid "Digi-Exam" model the committee proposed, where encrypted question papers are delivered digitally to vetted centres and printed moments before the test under CCTV and biometric supervision. Every year that NEET remains a single-paper, truck-and-trunk exam is another year in which leak networks stay in business.

Phase two is institutional. The NTA must be reconstituted as a genuinely high-capacity testing authority, with permanent technical staff, in-house cybersecurity, independent test-audit and ethics committees, and sharply reduced dependence on external vendors for core functions. Kendriya Vidyalayas, Navodaya Vidyalayas and select universities need to be hardened into a national grid of standardised digital exam centres, one per district at minimum, with mobile test labs for remote regions. This is capital-intensive, but so is building medical colleges; securing the pipeline into them is part of the same investment.

Phase three targets the incentive structure. Seat-blocking scams, opaque management-quota auctions and post-exam manipulation must be strangled through the kind of synchronised counselling calendars, fee-disclosure mandates and Aadhaar-based tracking already ordered in NEET-PG—and extended decisively to UG as well. The less room there is to buy or juggle seats after the exam, the less demand there will be for buying the paper before it.

Phase four rethinks assessment itself. NEET does not have to remain a one-shot bullet. A two-stage model—an objective, computer-based screening exam held multiple times a year, followed by a narrower, perhaps more clinically oriented second stage—would both reduce psychological pressure and make any one leak less system-shattering. Coupled with modest weightage for school performance, this could begin to shift the ecosystem away from pure coaching-driven multiple-choice worship.

Finally, the human side cannot be ignored. As issues relating to coaching and student suicides underscore, NEET has become a mental-health hazard as much as an academic challenge. Robust counselling, exam-stress support, and transparent communication during crises are not luxuries; they are part of maintaining public trust. Every time authorities deny obvious irregularities or delay decisive action, they deepen cynicism and push more families into the arms of brokers and leak-peddlers.

The hardest part of this roadmap is not the technology. India already conducts massive CBTs, runs Aadhaar authentication at population scale, and manages general elections with near-military precision. The real challenge is political will: accepting that the current NEET architecture is beyond incremental repair, and being willing to shut down and rebuild the very machine that has become a symbol of national meritocracy.

A System That Refuses to Fix Itself

Until decisive action happens, NEET will remain what it is today: an exam that promises fairness in theory, enables a NEET paper leak in practice, and leaves lakhs of young Indians wondering whether they are competing in a test of knowledge or a lottery of access. The 2024 leak was supposed to be the moment India's medical-education gatekeepers woke up. The 2026 repeat was the moment they went back to sleep. The question now is whether it will take another scandal—and another generation of damaged careers—before the system finally accepts that some problems cannot be patched. They must be rebuilt from the ground up.

When the Trump Stock Trading Scandal Detonated Across Washington

On the morning of 14 May 2026, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics quietly released a filing that detonated like a slow-motion bomb across Washington. One hundred and thirteen pages. More than 3,700 individual stock and bond transactions executed between January and March 2026—an average of nearly 40 trades every single market day. A cumulative value estimated between USD 220 million and USD 750 million. And at the centre of it all: the name of the sitting President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

The companies? Nvidia, Oracle, Intel, Boeing, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Paramount Skydance, Netflix—names that read less like a diversified portfolio and more like a map of every major policy battlefield the Donald Trump administration was simultaneously fighting on. In any other era of American history, in any other democracy worthy of the name, this would have been a constitutional crisis. In the spring of 2026, it became a political firestorm—and the most searching test of whether America's ethical architecture could survive the most audacious presidency in its modern history. The Trump stock trading scandal would prove to be precisely that test.

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

The Tradition That Trump Shattered

To understand how extraordinary this moment is, we may need to understand just how unbroken the tradition of presidential financial restraint had been before Trump arrived to torch it. From Franklin Roosevelt onwards, the unwritten but ironclad convention was that a president cannot personally profit from the same corporate landscape he controls. By Lyndon Johnson's time, the instrument of choice was the qualified blind trust—a vehicle in which the president's assets are handed to a genuinely independent trustee, the president surrenders all knowledge of and input into investment decisions, and the appearance of conflict is structurally eliminated. Richard Nixon used it. George H.W. Bush used it. Bill and Hillary Clinton created their blind trust within months of entering the White House and ultimately liquidated it entirely when she ran for president in 2007, converting everything to cash to prevent even the shadow of conflict. Barack Obama simply parked his wealth in U.S. Treasury bills and widely diversified mutual funds, consciously avoiding individual equities. George W. Bush went the full blind trust route with a genuinely independent manager.

None of this was required by law. Under Title 18, Section 208 of the U.S. Code—the principal federal conflict-of-interest statute—presidents and vice presidents are explicitly exempt from the restrictions that apply to every other executive branch employee. It was constitutional convention, not criminal compulsion, that for nearly two centuries kept the commanders-in-chief from steering the ship of state toward their own private harbours. As Richard Painter, President Bush's former chief ethics lawyer, crystallised it: since the Civil War, every president had consciously avoided conflicts. Not because they had to. Because they understood that the republic itself demanded it. Trump, in both his terms, chose to sail a very different course.

Trump Stock Trading Scandal: The Numbers That Shock

The Q1 2026 disclosures are, on their face, staggering in their scale and specificity. The headline purchases—each valued between USD 1 million and USD 5 million—include Nvidia, Oracle, Microsoft, Boeing, and Costco. In the technology sector, Trump (or his designated advisers) bought into Apple, Broadcom, Motorola, Texas Instruments, and Dell. His (however indirect these may have been) largest single-category sales—ranging from USD 5 million to USD 25 million each—involved Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. Beyond equities, there were significant investments in S&P 500 index funds and hundreds of transactions in municipal bonds.

But what transforms this from mere financial disclosure into a full-blown political firestorm is the direct, undeniable overlap between these companies and specific Trump administration policy decisions playing out in real time. Nvidia is the world's dominant AI chip designer, and Trump has been aggressively courting its technology for an American AI supremacy strategy. Oracle secured a pivotal role in the TikTok restructuring deal finalised in January 2026—in which the administration helped the company become the security partner and primary auditor for the new U.S. TikTok joint venture—and Trump is reported to have purchased Oracle stock in early 2026 precisely around the time that deal was being engineered.

The U.S. government simultaneously negotiated and executed an USD 8.9 billion purchase of a 10% equity stake in Intel in August 2025, with Intel's stock subsequently climbing 20% in Q1 and doubling in April following government-endorsed sales estimates—and Intel also features prominently in Trump's trading disclosures. And then there is the media triangle: Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Skydance, and Netflix are locked in a titanic USD 80–108 billion acquisition battle requiring Department of Justice and FCC approval—and Trump has acknowledged personally purchasing stakes in all three while initially declaring he would be "personally involved" in the review of those very deals. The Trump stock trading scandal encompasses all these nexuses, raising questions that demand urgent scrutiny.

The filing itself is conspicuously opaque. It does not consistently specify whether transactions are stocks, bonds, or derivatives. It does not identify which accounts the trades ran through, who precisely executed them, or what instructions were given. Some transactions are labelled "unsolicited"—but the filing offers no explanation of what that designation means in the context of an investment programme ostensibly run by independent advisers. Forty trades a day, yet the paper trail offers more shadows than light.

Also Read:  Trading War? How $2.6B Oil Bets Triggered DOJ Probe

A Galaxy of Parallel Conflicts

The stock-trading disclosures are not an isolated controversy but sit within an entire galaxy of parallel financial conflicts that have accumulated across Trump's two terms. Trump launched the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins just before his inauguration in January 2025, with the Trump Organisation and its affiliates controlling approximately 80% of the tokens and collecting a fee on every transaction. By May 2025, the top 220 investors in the $TRUMP meme coin were invited to a private dinner at his golf club—access to the President of the United States effectively auctioned through cryptocurrency holdings, in what former Obama ethics adviser Norman Eisen called "the single worst conflict of interest in modern presidential history."

Then came the tariff timing scandal. In April 2025, Trump posted "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!" on Truth Social mere hours before announcing a 90-day pause on tariffs that sent the S&P 500 surging more than 9%. Democratic senators Adam Schiff and Mark Warner formally demanded SEC and CFTC investigations. The White House itself was forced to circulate a staff-wide email warning against trading on non-public information—an extraordinary self-indictment from within the very building the scandal emanates from. A Senate resolution introduced in May 2025 condemned Trump's private business agreements with foreign governments—including an Oman hotel deal on government-owned land and a USD 500 million complex in Serbia—as violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

Miami residents sued Trump over a plan to donate downtown Miami property for his presidential library, alleging violation of the Domestic Emoluments Clause. The Brennan Center for Justice catalogued numerous potential second-term violations of both Emoluments Clauses. Thread by thread, the ethical fabric unravels. The Trump stock trading scandal, in this context, is not an anomaly but a symptom of systematic institutional decay.

What Ought to Have Happened

The standard was not complicated, nor did it need to be invented for Trump—it existed, was practised by every modern predecessor, and was endorsed by the very officials Trump himself appointed to oversight roles. Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics who served under both Obama and Trump before resigning in protest in 2017, stated it with surgical precision: "Every president in modern times has taken the strong medicine of divestiture."

What Trump ought to have done upon his second inauguration in January 2025 was threefold. First, he should have directed complete divestiture of his equity portfolio and placed the proceeds in U.S. Treasury bonds or broad mutual funds—the Obama model—or at minimum into a qualified blind trust administered by an independent financial institution with no family involvement. Second, his sons Eric and Donald Jr., who oversee his business empire, should not have been permitted any role whatsoever in investment decisions connected to the president. A "blind trust" run by one's own children is not blind; it is theatre. Third, his ethics agreement published on 10 January 2025 was weaker than even the inadequate agreement of his first term: it did not prohibit the Trump Organisation from striking new business deals abroad, merely barring direct deals with foreign governments—a loophole the size of a continent. Beyond these structural remedies, Trump should have personally recused himself from any government decisions touching companies in which he held positions—a principle long applied to every other executive branch official, even if the statute does not technically reach the president himself.

Also Read:  Iran Demands Oil Tariffs in Chinese Yuan, Threatening Dollar Dominance

Trump Stock Trading Scandal: The Defence That Collapses Under Scrutiny

The White House defence has been consistent and rests on three pillars. The president does not personally make investment decisions; an independent financial manager executes trades through programmes that mirror recognised indices. All transactions were fully disclosed under federal law. And spokesperson Davis Ingle stated flatly: "There are no conflicts of interest. President Trump acts solely in the best interest of the public."

How credible is this defence? Narrowly and technically, partially. It is true that presidents are exempt from the conflict-of-interest statute. It is true that the STOCK Act's disclosure requirements appear to have been formally followed. And no regulatory body has yet found that Trump himself directed specific trades with advance knowledge of policy decisions.

But the defence collapses on its own logic when scrutinised. Independent financial managers using programmes that "mirror recognised indices" do not generate 3,700 bespoke trades in a single quarter, executing purchases of individual stocks in Oracle at precisely the moment an Oracle-centric government deal is being finalised, or selling Microsoft in billion-dollar tranches while simultaneously regulating its AI investments. The scale and specificity of the portfolio is flatly inconsistent with passive index-tracking. Moreover, the designation of some transactions as "unsolicited" in the filing is itself a red flag—suggesting that at least some trades were not algorithm-driven but individually initiated. As Richard Painter put it, the presidential exemption "diminishes public trust in the government." And Shaub's observation that the ethics programme is now a "smoldering crater" reflects the consensus view among good-governance experts across party lines.

The Stakes: When Policy and Profit Become Indistinguishable

The financial concerns are concrete and alarming. If Trump or persons close to him had advance knowledge of the tariff pause and traded accordingly, the S&P 500's 9% single-day surge could have generated hundreds of millions in profits—dwarfing even the disclosed transaction values. The Intel deal—government purchasing a 10% stake at a discounted price while the president held related positions—raises troubling questions about whether taxpayer-funded market interventions were in any way influenced by private portfolio considerations. Foreign governments—sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and investors from China—all feature in the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal requiring presidential regulatory approval, creating a situation where doing business with Trump-linked entities may directly influence American public policy. This is precisely what the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution were designed to prevent.

The ethical concerns cut even deeper. When the line between presidential policy and presidential profit becomes invisible, democracy itself is at risk. Citizens cannot know whether a given tariff, regulatory ruling, or government investment decision reflects the national interest or the president's portfolio.

The Q1 2026 disclosures do not merely reveal a conflict of interest—they reveal that under the Trump presidency, conflict of interest has become the operating system itself. Senator Elizabeth Warren was not being hyperbolic when she declared the media merger deals "reeked of corruption." She was being precise.

Remedies, Reforms, and the Political Will Problem

The situation is not without remedy, even at this late and scandalous juncture. Trump could, at any point, direct his trust to liquidate equity holdings in companies subject to direct government regulation and place proceeds in U.S. Treasury securities—the Obama model applied belatedly. He could replace the current family-overseen vehicle with a genuinely qualified blind trust managed by an independent institution. But why would he? Would it not strengthen the critique against him?

Congress could yet pass the Presidential Conflicts of Interest Act—introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren as early as 2017 and repeatedly since—which would mandate that the president and vice president divest conflicting assets and prohibit appointees from participating in matters affecting the president's financial interests. The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) retain jurisdiction over market manipulation and insider trading under the STOCK Act, and senators Warner and Schiff have already placed formal investigation requests on the table.

The Stop Insider Trading Act, introduced in January 2026 by House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, and the bipartisan PREDICT Act introduced in March 2026 to ban prediction market trading by officials, signal that even within the Republican Party, the ethical case for restraint is gaining ground—slowly, grudgingly, but gaining.

The Office of Government Ethics has been structurally crippled. When Walter Shaub resigned in 2017, he explicitly called for legislative reforms giving the office teeth—subpoena powers, enforcement authority, and the capacity to investigate and sanction rather than merely advise. His successors have operated under the same fundamental constraint: an advisory body without enforcement power, entirely dependent on the goodwill of the very officials it is supposed to oversee. A watchdog that cannot bite is not a watchdog; it is a monument to good intentions.

The Republic's Unfinished Business

The deepest lesson from this story is both simple and devastating: norms are not law, and law that exempts the president is not law. The bipartisan tradition that kept every modern president's personal portfolio free from policy-adjacent equities was not enshrined in statute because it was assumed that no president would need the compulsion. That assumption has now been shattered—and it will not be easily restored by future administrations invoking precedent, because Trump's conduct has itself become precedent, available to any future occupant of the Oval Office to cite in justification.

The blind trust, divestiture, and ethics walls that every modern president embraced were not invented because past presidents were corrupt. They were invented because even good people exercise better judgment when temptation is structurally removed.

What the Q1 2026 disclosures have exposed is not a single act of corruption but the systemic consequence of a presidency that has, across two terms, treated the ethics conventions of its predecessors as optional enhancements rather than foundational obligations. The 3,700-plus trades, the Oracle-TikTok nexus, the Intel government stake, the media merger investments, the meme coin empire, and the tariff timing posts form a coherent pattern: a president leveraging the incomparable informational and regulatory power of the White House in ways that, while not definitively proven to be criminally corrupt, are incompatible with the public trust that the office demands.

Somewhere in the institutional memory of the American republic, the standard set by every modern predecessor—from Eisenhower to Obama—stands as a rebuke and a compass. The remedies exist. The legislative tools are drafted and waiting. The watchdogs are barking, if not yet biting. The only question that remains—the question on which the republic's ethical future actually hinges—is whether the United States will choose to honour that standard in law before the next president decides that exploiting the gap is simply too tempting to resist.

Dr. Gupta chaired a MOHFW-constituted working group (2019) tasked with building convergence between Ayushman Bharat and Health and Wellness Centres.

The Ayushman Bharat Paradox: Why Indians Still Shun Public Healthcare

It is deeply paradoxical that despite India's extensive population-based public health network designed to serve every household through a tiered architecture spanning primary, secondary, tertiary, and super-specialty care, its utilisation remains strikingly low.

According to the NSS 80th Round (January–December 2025) conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, only about 25% of the urban population and 35% of the rural population depend on public health facilities for the treatment of non-hospitalisation ailments. This limited utilisation is alarming, particularly in a country where a large proportion of the population lacks the financial capacity to afford private medical care. As highlighted by the CEO of a leading medical insurance aggregator, Policy Bazaar, merely 30–35% of India's population can afford private health insurance, and even within this segment, coverage is often partial and inadequate.

Also Read:  Neglected Public Healthcare Centres in Gautam Buddh Nagar In Uttar Pradesh Exposed

The Financial Reality: Why Public Healthcare Fails

Data from the NSS 80th Round further illuminate the financial consequences of this imbalance. The average out-of-pocket expenditure per outpatient visit stands at ₹861 in private facilities, compared to ₹281 in public institutions for a treated spell of ailment, where the median expenditure is effectively zero. Notably, nearly half of patients using public facilities incur no direct costs, whereas in private settings, half spend more than ₹400 per episode.

In hospitalised cases, out-of-pocket expenditure skyrockets to ₹6,631 in public hospitals and ₹50,508 per hospitalisation case. Given the high frequency of outpatient episodes, a family spends far more out of pocket in OPD care, as this is neither covered in social insurance schemes like Ayushman Bharat (PMJAY) nor in privately purchased plans by families. The disparity between expenditure in public and private settings substantially increases the financial burden on households, often pushing families into poverty or trapping them in cycles of prolonged economic vulnerability. Earlier estimates from the NSS 78th Round (2017) suggested that nearly 55 million Indians are pushed into poverty annually due to catastrophic health expenditures—a troubling pattern that shows little evidence of reversal in the latest data.

India's public health system, widely regarded as the backbone of healthcare delivery for economically vulnerable populations, continues to grapple with persistent challenges related to accessibility, quality, and efficiency. Bridging the gap between system design and actual utilisation is therefore critical. While health remains a state subject, resulting in considerable variations across states and geographies, the aggregate national picture reveals significant systemic gaps. These gaps contribute to sustained high morbidity and premature mortality. On one axis, the country continues to struggle with infectious diseases; on another, it faces a rapidly growing burden of non-communicable diseases, creating a dual challenge that strains the system further.

Also Read:  Ayushman Bharat: Grand Promises, Harsh Reality on the Ground

The System Design Versus Ground Reality

Structurally, the system is well-conceived. Sub-Health Centres (now Ayushman Arogya Mandirs) cater to populations of 3,000–5,000; Primary Health Centres (PHCs) serve 20,000–30,000; and Community Health Centres (CHCs) cover approximately 80,000 people. These are supported by Sub-District Hospitals, District Hospitals, and Medical College Hospitals, each with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. In principle, patients with minor ailments should first access primary-level facilities and move upward only, when necessary, through a structured referral system.

In practice, however, this hierarchy is routinely bypassed. Patients frequently seek care directly at higher-level institutions even for common conditions such as fever, cough, or body pain, leading to overcrowding, compromised quality of care, and delays for critically ill patients. Simultaneously, primary health facilities remain underutilised due to limited operating hours, workforce shortages, inconsistent drug availability, and non-functional equipment.

Further complicating the landscape, NSS data indicate that 65% of rural and 75% of urban patients who seek private care rely significantly on informal providers, many of whom operate in villages and urban slums. These individuals, lacking formal medical training, range from faith healers and indigenous practitioners to those administering intravenous fluids, antibiotics, and corticosteroids for routine ailments. Such practices not only impose unnecessary financial burdens on patients but also pose serious risks to safety, including misdiagnosis, antimicrobial resistance, and avoidable complications.

Strengthening Ayushman Bharat Through Systemic Reform

Addressing both the overreliance on informal providers and the overcrowding of higher-level public institutions requires a fundamental rationalisation of public health service utilisation, beginning with robust strengthening of primary healthcare. Assigning a designated primary care facility to every family can establish a clear and accountable first point of contact. Patients with non-serious conditions should be systematically encouraged, if not institutionally guided, to seek care at this level, with well-defined referral pathways governing access to higher tiers. Additionally, simple digital tools and mobile applications can help individuals identify nearby primary care facilities during travel, much like widely used platforms for locating fuel stations or restaurants. Such a gatekeeping mechanism would streamline patient flow, optimise resource allocation, and allow higher-level institutions to focus on complex and critical cases.

Reducing out-of-pocket expenditure must remain a central policy objective. High medical costs continue to drive financial distress across India, largely due to gaps in accessible, reliable, and trusted public healthcare. Schemes like Ayushman Bharat and PMJAY were designed to address this, yet more than half of out-of-pocket expenditure in outpatient care stems from medicines, which can be significantly reduced through stronger primary care infrastructure. Strengthening primary care and rationalising service delivery can bring affordable, quality healthcare closer to people's homes, significantly reducing financial hardship even within existing resource constraints. Preventive and promotive health services delivered at the primary level can further reduce disease burden and long-term costs.

Decentralisation of health system governance represents another crucial pillar of reform. Empowering local governments with statutory administrative and financial authority can enhance responsiveness, accountability, and efficiency. Local bodies are better positioned to understand community-specific health needs, cultural contexts, and behavioural patterns, enabling more targeted interventions and improved health outcomes. They are also strategically placed to discourage reliance on informal providers and curb the continuous drain of both economic and health resources from vulnerable populations.

Also Read:  Medical Negligence Law in India: Why Doctors Escape Accountability

However, devolution of authority to manage the public health system must be carefully balanced with good coordination at central and state levels to ensure uniform standards of care and equity across regions. Higher levels of government must continue to provide policy direction, technical guidance, need-based capacity building, and assessment of outcomes. Sustained success will depend on adequate funding, continuous human resource development, technological integration, and robust accountability frameworks with grievance redress systems.

In conclusion, rationalising public health services is not merely an administrative adjustment—it is an ethical, social, and economic imperative. A more efficient, accessible, and equitable healthcare system can be realised by reinforcing primary care, operationalising a functional referral system, regulating informal practices, and empowering local governance within a cohesive national framework. The urgency is undeniable: the health, dignity, and financial security of millions depend on decisive, sustained, and systemic action today.

In a modest office at the Labour Commissioner's headquarters in Ghaziabad, a piece of paper changed everything. Gulfam held his release certificate with trembling hands—proof that six months of bonded labour had finally ended. He had waited two hours in the queue before they called him inside. Two hours for a document that should never have been necessary. Two hours for what amounts to an admission: your family was trapped, exploited, and the system failed to protect you.

This is not the beginning of Gulfam's story. The Probe first reported his case in April 2025, after he was rescued from Satyam Brick Kiln in Loni, Ghaziabad, working under conditions that defy description. Now, with the release certificate in hand, we return to document the aftermath—and the questions that remain unanswered.

Also Read:  Saharanpur Bonded Labour Crisis: Children Expose Exploitation

The ₹5,000 Advance That Trapped a Family in Bonded Labour

It started simply enough. A man approached Gulfam with an offer: work at a brick kiln in Ghaziabad with a ₹5,000 advance to help with immediate needs. His wife was pregnant. Money was tight. The advance seemed reasonable.

"They first said they will give us 600 rupees per day for the labour," Gulfam recalls, his voice steady but weighted with memory. "I told them that I can't relocate and work like that as I am already in debt of 5000 rupees. So they said we will give you 5000 and clear your debt. So they gave me 5000 rupees in advance. Then they told me that after 10 days we will give you 50,000 rupees."

He worked with hope. Days passed. Then weeks. Then months. No wages came.

"It was almost like they had purchased my entire family for 5000 rupees," Gulfam says, and the phrase hangs in the air—a bonded labour arrangement so complete, so total, that it felt like human trafficking disguised as employment. "And we couldn't escape. We were like prisoners there."

The brick kiln was owned by a man known as Pappu Pehelwan. The contract was never written. The promises were never kept. The ₹5,000 advance—meant to help a family in crisis—became the chains that bound them to Satyam Brick Kiln for half a year. This is how bonded labour works in Ghaziabad's informal economy—and across much of India: not through explicit agreements, but through the slow suffocation of debt, surveillance, and the complete erasure of choice.

Child Labour, Forced Work, and No Wages: Inside Satyam Brick Kiln in Ghaziabad

Gulfam's wife was pregnant at the time they were at the brick kiln. He says, the kiln owners did not care.

"My wife was very weak. Even during pregnancy, they made her work," Gulfam notes. "If she needed medicine, they would just give her a ₹2 tablet. They never allowed us to go out and get treatment for my wife. They would not enable medical treatment either."

But the cruelty extended beyond his wife, he states. Their children—five years old and three years old—were forced to work. Even his newborn daughter, only five days old, was present in those conditions.

"They would ask my children to lift bricks and help with labour work," Gulfam says, and the words carry the weight of a parent who could not protect his own children. "My newborn daughter was only five days old. Even during my wife's pregnancy and after childbirth, she was made to continue working."

In the final month of pregnancy, Gulfam's wife went into labour. It was after 9 PM. They had just finished work. The kiln owners called an ambulance and rushed her to the hospital—a moment of mercy that dissolved instantly.

"I told them I wanted to accompany my wife, but they said: 'What will you do there?' They took her alone," Gulfam says. His wife gave birth without her husband. 

When Gulfam asked for wages, he alleges he was beaten. "If I asked them for wages, they would beat me up. Even when I had a fever, I was forced to work." He tried negotiating for medicine for his mother, who fell critically ill. "I didn't even ask for the full wages they owed me. I just asked them for money to buy medicines. But they refused to give me any money."

Also Read:  Ludhiana Brick Kiln Horror: Bonded Labourers Sold and Assaulted

Escape Attempts and Surveillance: The Reality of Bonded Labour in Modern India

After three months at the Ghaziabad brick kiln, Gulfam began asking for wage slips and records of his work. According to Gulfam, whenever he asked for wage records, kiln operators told him they would provide them later.

"That's when I realised they had trapped me," he says.

By then, escape had become his obsession. He tried multiple times. "One night around midnight, I tried to leave with my wife and children. But there was constant surveillance. Whenever I tried to leave, someone was awake and watching. They had guards monitoring workers. They had heavy security deployment and they wouldn't let us escape."

This is not historical slavery. This is not a story from the 1800s. Gulfam’s case at the Ghaziabad brick kiln is not isolated. Across India, bonded labour survivors have described being trapped through debt, surveillance, withheld wages, and restrictions on movement.

Gulfam's rescue came through determination and a single phone number. Somehow, he obtained the contact of Nirmal Gorana, a labour rights activist. He called. He explained everything. Gorana responded immediately.

"Because of him, I was rescued and taken home," Gulfam says. "A lady from The Probe spoke to the government officials when I was not getting the release certificate after my rescue."

The rescue marked an end to the physical bondage. But the legal battle was far from over.

Release Certificate Received — But Justice Remains Incomplete

Gulfam has finally received his release certificate from the Labour Commissioner's office in Ghaziabad. He waited two hours. He stood in line. He received a piece of paper acknowledging that he had been bonded, that he had been a victim, that he had been freed.

"I went to the Labour Commissioner's office many times but then I couldn't get the certificate. Finally, The Probe spoke to the officials. The officials asked me to meet them after 8 days. When I reached there, I waited for two hours. Then they called me inside and handed me the release certificate," he says.

It should have been a moment of complete victory. Instead, it feels incomplete.

When asked about compensation—what the government had promised to make this right—Gulfam's answer was stark: "No. I don't know anything about compensation."

Six months of forced labour. A wife forced to work during and after childbirth. Children forced to lift bricks. A newborn present in conditions no infant should endure. And no compensation plan, no pathway to recovery, no acknowledgment of the damage done.

The release certificate proves the bonded labour happened. The law says workers who experience bonded labour are entitled to rehabilitation and compensation. But in practice, in Ghaziabad as elsewhere in India, victims are left to navigate a bureaucracy that moves slowly, if at all.

When asked what he would tell the District Magistrate if given the chance, Gulfam's response was not angry. It was not a demand for punishment or compensation. It was a plea for the most basic dignity:

"I would tell them only one thing: Workers should receive their wages on time. If labourers are working honestly, they should be paid fairly. That is all we want."

Also Read:  Hardoi Tragedy: Trafficked Teen Killed, Family Forced to Flee

The Larger Picture

Gulfam holds his release certificate—a piece of paper that, according to the National Human Rights Commission's May 2021 advisory, must be issued within 24 hours of rescue and serves as the key to unlocking immediate financial assistance and rehabilitation. But when we asked him about compensation, he had no answer: "No. I don't know anything about compensation." No government official explained what the certificate meant. No one briefed him on his entitlements, the timeline for payments, or the rehabilitation process. His wife, who was forced to work during pregnancy, has received no trauma counseling or medical rehabilitation. His children, aged five and three when they were made to work at the kiln, have had no psychological assessment, no counseling to process the trauma, no educational support. The release certificate is real. The roadmap for what comes after it is not. The Probe had to intervene—alongside labour activist Nirmal Gorana—to get the certificate issued at all. Without media attention, without civil society pushing, Gulfam's case would have languished.

The brick kiln owners and staff who inflicted this horror—locking the family in surveillance, beating Gulfam for asking wages, forcing his children to work—have not been arrested. They have not been prosecuted. They remain free. This is not an exception in Ghaziabad's brick kiln industry; it is the rule.

Across The Probe's previous reporting on bonded labour cases, we have documented the same pattern: criminal proceedings are rarely initiated against bonders. When an FIR is registered, brick kiln owners face minimal penalties and continue operating. In Gulfam's case, there has been no detailed investigation into how many other families were trapped by the same owner, how many other children were forced to work, or how to prevent future exploitation at the same kiln. The investigation has been narrow, reactive, and incomplete.

What happened to Gulfam represents a larger failure: bonded labour law in India works in a cosmetic way. The real questions are never asked. The brick kiln owner is never fully prosecuted. The conditions that created the bondage remain untouched. Gulfam has his freedom. His children still have nightmares. His wife still struggles with health complications. And somewhere in Ghaziabad, another family is walking into the same ₹5,000 trap.

DOJ Probe: The Central Question

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) probe into $2.6 billion of oil trades placed shortly before Trump's Iran war announcements is not, by itself, proof of insider trading. But the timing, scale, repeated pattern, and geopolitical sensitivity make it a textbook market-integrity red flag. The legal question is not whether traders guessed correctly, but whether someone traded, tipped, or misappropriated confidential government or diplomatic information before it became public.

The controversy arises from reports that U.S. federal investigators are examining large bearish oil-market bets placed shortly before public announcements on the Iran conflict that allegedly moved prices downward. Reuters reported an even wider pattern of oil and fuel futures bets totalling about $7 billion across March–April 2026, while other reports say the DOJ probe and CFTC are examining at least four trades totalling more than $2.6 billion. These reports remain allegations and investigative leads, not findings of guilt. The distinction is crucial: markets reward insight, speed and risk-taking; law punishes deception, theft of confidential information, tipping, manipulation and corrupt use of office-derived information. 

Also Read:  Iran Demands Oil Tariffs in Chinese Yuan, Threatening Dollar Dominance

A Two-Agency Investigation: What Each Regulator Brings

The issue is too complex for either agency alone. One must determine whether the trades were economically suspicious; the other must determine whether they were criminally corrupt. Together, the DOJ probe and CFTC are trying to answer the central question of the entire affair: did the market merely predict history, or did someone secretly sell history in advance?

The Justice Department can investigate wire fraud, conspiracy, obstruction, false statements, criminal commodities fraud, corruption, theft or misuse of government information, and potentially national-security related misconduct if classified or sensitive diplomatic information was involved. DOJ has grand jury powers, can obtain search warrants, compel testimony, seize devices and pursue imprisonment—not merely civil penalties.

The CFTC is the specialist market regulator for futures, swaps and commodity derivatives. Since the suspicious trades reportedly involved crude-oil futures and related derivatives, the CFTC becomes the primary technical regulator. It has the expertise, market surveillance systems, exchange access, trader-position data, audit trails and statutory authority under the Commodity Exchange Act to reconstruct what happened in the market. It can examine who placed the trades, through which brokers, on which exchanges, at what exact timestamps, using what algorithms, through what accounts and with what prior trading history. Modern oil futures markets on platforms such as NYMEX and ICE leave extraordinarily detailed electronic footprints. The CFTC can therefore perform the forensic market reconstruction. 

The Forensic Test: Oil Futures Insider Trading or Profitable Foresight?

At the heart of the matter lies a simple but explosive question: did the traders merely read the geopolitical tea leaves better than others, or did someone inside the decision-making chain leak price-sensitive information?

If the trades were based on public signals, satellite intelligence, shipping data, diplomatic chatter, options positioning, or disciplined macro analysis, the accusation weakens. Oil markets are inherently political markets; they move on war, ceasefire, sanctions, Strait of Hormuz shipping risk, OPEC signals and presidential rhetoric. A large short position before a de-escalatory announcement may be bold, but boldness is not illegality.

The defence will likely say that oil was already vulnerable to correction, that volatility was elevated, that traders had legitimate hedging or risk-reduction reasons, and that the trades can be explained by public news flow.

But the prosecution case, if one emerges, would be built on pattern, proximity and provenance. One lucky trade may be coincidence. Four or more large trades, clustered minutes or hours before market-moving announcements, may suggest more than luck. Investigators will ask who placed the orders, who financed them, whether accounts were newly opened, whether positions were abnormal compared to prior trading history, whether traders had links to officials, contractors, lobbyists, political advisers, defence intermediaries, diplomats, energy firms or prediction-market participants, and whether phone, encrypted-message, email, travel and payment trails show access to non-public information.

The question of whether this constitutes oil futures insider trading hinges on proving not just profitable timing, but deliberate misappropriation of classified war-policy information. If investigators can establish that traders knew the content and timing of announcements before they were public, the case transforms from market timing into criminal fraud.

Also Read:  Trump's Iran Speech Was Full of Lies — A Fact Check

The Legal Architecture: Why Oil Futures Insider Trading Requires Proof Beyond Timing

The statutory centre of gravity is the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC Rule 180.1. Rule 180.1 prohibits any person, directly or indirectly, in connection with swaps, commodity futures, or commodity transactions, from intentionally or recklessly using a manipulative or deceptive device, scheme or artifice to defraud. The CFTC has described Rule 180.1 as modelled on SEC Rule 10b-5 and broad enough to reach deceptive conduct even without traditional proof of artificial price manipulation.

The Commodity Exchange Act also specifically addresses non-public government information affecting commodity prices: it prohibits federal officials, members of Congress and certain government actors from improperly imparting such information for personal gain, prohibits knowing use by recipients, and prohibits theft or misappropriation of such information.

The legal hook therefore need not be conventional stock-market insider trading. This is not a case about shares of a listed company. It is about futures, swaps, oil-linked derivatives and perhaps physical commodity exposure. In commodities law, the sharper question is whether material non-public information was obtained or used in breach of a duty, by deception, by misappropriation, or through improper government leakage. The CFTC's own whistleblower guidance states that Section 6(c)(1) and Rule 180.1 prohibit trading on material non-public information in breach of a pre-existing duty or where the information was obtained by fraud or deception.

The precedents cut both ways. In Chiarella v. United States, the Supreme Court rejected the idea that mere possession of market-moving information automatically creates a duty to disclose; there must be a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence. In Dirks v. SEC, tippee liability required proof that the insider breached a duty and received a personal benefit, with the tippee knowing or having reason to know of that breach. In United States v. O'Hagan, however, the Court accepted the misappropriation theory: a person commits fraud when he secretly uses confidential information for trading in breach of a duty owed to the source of that information. In Carpenter v. United States, confidential pre-publication information was treated as property capable of being misappropriated through mail and wire fraud.

The more recent Blaszczak litigation is particularly relevant because it involved confidential government information. The first Second Circuit decision treated confidential government information as property for certain fraud statutes, but the case was later unsettled after the Supreme Court's decision in Kelly v. United States, which narrowed federal property-fraud theories where regulatory power rather than property is at stake. The lesson for prosecutors is clear: if they rely on wire fraud or conversion theories, they must carefully show that what was taken was legally cognizable property or that a specific commodities statute covers the misconduct. 

The Threshold Question: Leak or Luck?

The strongest prosecution theory would arise if investigators establish that a government official, political insider, military adviser, diplomatic channel, contractor, or connected intermediary leaked non-public information about impending Iran-related announcements, and that traders knowingly used it. The weakest prosecution theory would be one based merely on suspicious timing and profit. Courts do not convict on coincidence alone. The government must prove knowledge, materiality, non-public character, breach of duty, deception or misappropriation, and in criminal cases, guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

The likely defence will be equally forceful. Traders may argue that oil markets were already pricing de-escalation, that the relevant announcements were anticipated, that the trades were hedges rather than speculative bets, that the size was normal for institutional energy markets, that algorithmic systems reacted to public data, and that no trader knew the precise content or timing of any announcement. They may also attack causation: oil prices often fall for many reasons, including inventory data, macro demand fears, dollar strength, OPEC signals and refinery margins. A trade that makes money after a presidential statement is not automatically a trade caused by stolen information. 

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

The Political Combustibility: When War-Trading Becomes War-Profiteering

Politically, however, the case is combustible. War decisions are sovereign acts; trading around them is one thing, profiteering from leaked war-policy information is quite another. If confidential war or ceasefire information became a private trading asset, the scandal would be not merely market abuse but a collapse of public trust. It would mean that the fog of war was monetised before citizens even heard the announcement.

The DOJ probe will need to resist trial by headline. A public enforcement action should be brought only if the evidence shows more than profitable foresight. The test must be: who knew what, when, how they knew it, whether they owed or exploited a duty, and whether the market was deceived. 

The Structural Imperative: From Investigation to Reform

The larger reform lesson is that modern geopolitical decision-making now moves not only armies and diplomacy but also futures, swaps, prediction markets, shipping contracts and sovereign-risk trades. The U.S. may need tighter internal controls over market-sensitive national-security information, clearer trading blackout rules for officials and advisers, stronger surveillance of geopolitical event-driven derivatives, and faster cross-market alerts when abnormal positions appear before state announcements.

The allegation, if proved, would be a warning that the boundary between statecraft and speculative finance has become dangerously thin. If not proved, it will still show why suspicion blooms whenever billion-dollar trades appear to outrun history by fifteen minutes.

The Test Ahead

The DOJ probe into this $2.6 billion question will ultimately determine not just the guilt or innocence of specific traders, but the integrity of the markets themselves. The burden of proof is high—as it should be. But the stakes, if any breach is established, are higher still: the public trust that war decisions are made in the national interest, not as a private trading asset sold in advance.

The Staggering Numbers Behind the IPL Franchise Gold Rush

In the space of a few days, Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) and Rajasthan Royals (RR) were valued at the kind of numbers usually reserved for Big Tech, not a bat-and-ball game in Indian summer heat.

This analysis seeks to unpack how a domestic T20 cricket league, launched in 2008 as a glitzy experiment, has morphed into a financial asset class that global private equity and conglomerates are scrambling to own. Drawing from the viral narrative's "IPL as currency" framing and recent deal data, it examines the league's origin, the centrality of media rights, the guaranteed revenue waterfall to franchises, the sponsorship and attention economy, the deal timing strategies, and the extraordinary multi-bagger returns harvested by early owners. It then attempts to stack the IPL franchise ecosystem against other global sports leagues, probes the risks and bubble questions, and maps out the way forward for investors chasing "humongous" returns in a market where the real product is not cricket but the monetisation of 600-plus million eyeballs.

From Scrappy Experiment to Trophy Asset: The Rise of the IPL Franchise

When the IPL was auctioned into existence in January 2008, it was a bold, slightly crazy bet: eight city franchises, cheerleaders, coloured clothing and a T20 format that traditionalists dismissed as "cricket with ads." The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) set a base franchise price of USD 50 million; the market replied with bids totalling about USD 723.6 million, nearly double the floor, signalling that this was more than just sport—it was a media rights experiment on steroids.

Rajasthan Royals (RR) were the bargain bin pick, sold to Manoj Badale's Emerging Media for just USD 67 million, the cheapest of the eight original teams. At the other end, Vijay Mallya's United Spirits paid around USD 111.6 million for the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) franchise, making RCB one of the two most expensive teams at launch. In 2026, watching RR change hands for about USD 1.63 billion (pending regulatory approval from the BCCI and Competition Commission of India) and RCB for around USD 1.78 billion (also pending regulatory clearance) is to see those early IPL franchise calls mature into venture-style exits that most public-market investors can only dream about.

How Media Rights Became the IPL Franchise Money Machine

The core of the argument is simple and brutal: what is being valued at these numbers is not cricketing skill, but your attention and mine. That attention is securitised through a monster media-rights deal—roughly ₹48,390 crore, or about USD 6.2 billion, for the 2023–2027 cycle—which catapulted the IPL into the global elite of sports properties.

Based on that auction, each IPL match is worth roughly ₹118 crore (around USD 15 million) in media rights alone, putting the league second only to the US National Football League (NFL) on a per-match basis and ahead of the English Premier League.

The NFL itself generates more than USD 23 billion a year in total league revenue, according to reports from league financial briefings in 2025. That revenue is shared among the 32 teams, and one report said teams were told to expect about USD 416 million each from the league's shared national media, sponsorship and licensing pool. For franchise values, the NFL is in a different universe from most sports. Forbes' 2025 valuation list put the average NFL team at about USD 7.1 billion, with every team worth at least USD 5.25 billion and the Dallas Cowboys at USD 13 billion.

English Premier League (EPL) club finances vary widely, but a useful broad picture is that the league is hugely cash-generative while profits are much thinner and more volatile than the headline revenues suggest. At the league level, EPL clubs collectively generate several billion pounds in annual revenue, driven mainly by broadcast distributions, commercial deals, matchday income, and player trading. The richest clubs such as Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, and Chelsea can each generate revenues well above GBP 500 million in strong years, while mid-table clubs often sit far lower.

The IPL franchise narrative is that every team in an IPL franchise collects around ₹484 crore (approximately USD 51 million) a year, guaranteed, from the central media-rights pool before selling a single ticket, jersey or corporate box. That number is consistent with a rights structure in which a fixed percentage of broadcast and digital revenues is shared among teams, creating an annuity-like revenue stream that cushions on-field volatility. In that world, match days are not just sporting events; they are recurring monetisation windows in a highly financialised media product where broadcasters justify their bids on the back of 600-plus million seasonal viewers and peak concurrency in the tens of millions.

The 20x Revenue Question: Are IPL Franchises Overvalued?

On top of this media annuity, franchises stack local sponsorships, ticketing, hospitality, licensing, merchandise and, increasingly, data-driven fan engagement products. The narrative's provocation—that RCB and RR have effectively been sold at around 20 times revenue—speaks to a venture-style valuation mindset in a market where growth and scarcity trump classical price-earnings logic.

Let us take RR. Bought for USD 67 million in 2008, the IPL franchise is now set to be acquired by a Kal Somani-led US-based consortium at about USD 1.63 billion, a roughly 24-times uplift in absolute terms, representing around 2,333 percent total return according to contemporary coverage. RCB tells a similar story: acquired for about USD 111.6 million and now valued near USD 1.78 billion, implying something in the 15–16x ballpark over 18 years and validating the claim of a roughly 1,495 percent return that no Indian stock index has matched over the same period.

When the narrative says "the IPL isn't a sports league, it's a currency," that is what it means: a scarce, branded claim on future cash flows in a structurally under-supplied asset class where only ten IPL franchises exist globally.

Attention as Currency: Why Sponsors Pay Billions for IPL Franchises

The sponsorship machine rides on this attention currency. Every eyeball that flows through JioCinema, Star Sports or any global streaming partner is impression inventory that sponsors convert into brand recall, sales, app installs or financial-product sign-ups. The ₹6.2-billion media deal is justified not by nostalgia but by dashboards: minutes watched, stickiness, time-spent-per-user and ad-targeting precision, all of which feed into a sponsor's willingness to pay premium CPMs (cost per thousand impressions). It is an advertising pricing metric that tells how much an advertiser pays for every 1,000 times an ad is shown.

For sponsors, the IPL offers what few properties can: a compressed, high-frequency festival of content in prime time, across multiple languages, with a young, skewed demographic and a smartphone-first audience. The league's calendar creates daily rituals—7:30 p.m. first ball, weekend double-headers—that sponsors love because they can ride predictable spikes in traffic and consumption. In that sense, the IPL behaves less like an old-school sports tournament and more like a high-engagement OTT show where brands are baked into the narrative via jersey rights, associate partnerships, on-ground activations and second-screen integrations.

The Timing Game: How Owners Sold into Peak Euphoria

One of the most striking points in the narrative is the choreography: the RCB and RR deals are announced just days before IPL 2026 begins—RCB's sale was disclosed around March 24, with the season starting March 28—so that any debate about 20x revenue valuations gets drowned out by Virat Kohli's cover drives. United Spirits (Diageo's India arm) had flagged in late 2025 that cricket was non-core and it was running a strategic review, effectively signalling its intent to exit its RCB exposure by March 31, 2026. When the right mix of buyers—Aditya Birla Group, Times of India, Bolt Ventures and Blackstone's BXPE vehicle—lined up with cash and hunger, the board moved fast to close before the season put any cracks in the story.

There is the argument that this is by design: announce the blockbuster IPL franchise number, let the "Team X sold for ₹16,000 crore" headlines trend, then allow the tournament's emotion to bury uncomfortable questions about sustainability or valuation sanity. Diageo, it says, waited a decade, won a maiden IPL title in 2025, and then sold into euphoria—a classic "sell the news" trade that public-market investors would recognise instantly. RR's majority shareholder, Manoj Badale, appears to have played a similar game: hold through brand-building years, then exit when the league's structural story is fully priced in and global capital is desperate for scarce assets.

Why Wall Street Sees IPL Franchises as the Next Big Thing

Why are buyers so keen to step in at these numbers? For the Aditya Birla Group, Times of India and Blackstone, RCB is not just a cricket team; it is a distribution channel, a brand platform and a long-duration call option on India's consumption story. For a media group like Times, equity in a top-tier IPL franchise verticalises the content stack: it owns the eyeball, the story and part of the asset that the story is about. For a global PE platform like Blackstone, IPL franchise exposure fits neatly alongside other entertainment, sports and real-estate plays: it is a high-growth, cash-generative asset with a quasi-regulated monopoly structure and limited supply.

From the franchisee's standpoint, interests are essentially threefold: locking in and growing the guaranteed central pool, building a resilient local revenue stack, and maximising franchise equity value for eventual exit or refinance. The ₹484-crore-per-year central distribution number gives owners visibility to service debt, invest in academies, expand their brand into women's and junior leagues, and experiment with tech or content bets. That stability allows them to tolerate sporting volatility: a bad season hurts morale and some incremental sponsorships, but the central cheque still lands if the league format and media deals hold.

The Bubble Question: Is the IPL Franchise Bubble About to Burst?

The narrative's breathless tone about multibagger returns invites an obvious critical question: is this sustainable or are we watching the late stages of a valuation bubble? On the positive side, the IPL's media-rights curve has exhibited not just growth but step-changes; the 2023–2027 deal was about 196 percent higher in rupee terms than the previous cycle, and digital rights for the first time outpriced TV, signalling secular support from streaming platforms. India's demographic profile, rising per-capita income, and cheap mobile data support the thesis that viewership and monetisation headroom remain significant.

Yet the risks are real, and they are materialising faster than many IPL franchise investors anticipated. The most obvious is concentration risk in media rights: if one or two big tech or telecom players decide that bidding aggressively for sports is no longer strategic, the next cycle's pricing could disappoint, compressing the annuity that makes these valuations viable. Media Partners Asia now projects that the league's next media rights cycle—covering 2028–32—will plateau at USD 5.4 billion, flat against the current period on a total basis but representing a 13 percent per-match decline. This projection validates the exact concentration risk outlined above and should alarm current IPL franchise buyers betting on continued double-digit growth.

Regulatory interventions—over advertising loads, betting sponsorships, data privacy or antitrust concerns around the BCCI's dominance—could change the economics in ways current models underplay. There is also the softer but crucial risk of fan fatigue: expand the season too much, flood the calendar, or over-commercialise the product, and engagement metrics can plateau or fall, undermining the "infinite growth" story currently being baked into prices.

How IPL Franchises Stack Up Against Global Competition

Where the IPL franchise model stands out internationally is not raw revenue—as a league, the NFL, NBA and Premier League still generate far higher aggregate cash—but revenue density per match and growth velocity. An ESPN analysis of the rights cycle put the per-match value of an NFL game around USD 35 million under its latest ten-year deal, with the Premier League at roughly USD 11.3 million; IPL games, at about USD 15 million, now sit between the two. That makes the IPL the second-most expensive sports property for broadcasters globally on a game-by-game basis.

Crucially, the IPL franchise delivers this with a season that is short, intense and geographically concentrated, which keeps production costs and travel overheads lower than in sprawling leagues like MLB or the NHL. It also sits at the intersection of a national religion (cricket) and a rapidly digitising economy, which means it can test interactive formats, micro-transactions, in-app betting (where legal) and other revenue layers faster than more mature Western leagues encumbered by legacy contracts.

For international investors, that cocktail—high per-match monetisation, double-digit rights growth, and emerging-market optionality—explains why two Indian IPL franchises can trade at valuations comparable to mid-table Premier League clubs.

What Makes IPL Franchises Irresistibly Investable (For Now)

The real hook for global capital is that IPL franchises combine features of three asset classes: operating businesses with predictable cash flows, lifestyle trophy assets that confer soft power, and quasi-financial instruments whose value is tied to an index of Indian growth and digital consumption. When someone quips that "you and I watch cricket, but Blackstone watches us," it is pointing to that underlying reality: the investors do not care who wins the toss; they care about cohort retention, ARPU and lifetime value of a fan locked into the IPL universe.

Add scarcity—only so many teams, controlled tightly by the BCCI—and suddenly each franchise looks like a non-replicable token in a larger attention economy. For conglomerates like Aditya Birla and media houses like Times, synergies amplify this: they can pipe their consumer brands, financial products and news content through the RCB funnel, extracting value that a pure-play financial investor cannot. For PE buyers, the thesis is cleaner: lever up a portion of the purchase, ride media-rights growth, professionalise operations, and either list the asset, recapitalise it, or sell it to an even hungrier strategic buyer in the next cycle.

The Path Forward: From Sports League to Financial Ecosystem

The logical next frontier is further financialisation. If the IPL is truly a "currency," we should expect to see more securitisation of future media-rights cash flows, more structured deals where investors take slices of central pools, and eventually public listings or REIT-like vehicles that bundle multiple franchises or stadia. As valuations rise, franchise buyers will likely lean harder on leverage, making interest-rate cycles and credit conditions more material to what looks today like a pure growth story.

For regulators and the BCCI, the challenge will be to keep the sporting soul intact while accommodating global capital's appetite for yield and liquidity. Guardrails on season length, salary caps, conflict-of-interest rules and data governance will need regular upgrading if the league is to avoid the fate of over-financialised sports that lose their emotional core. For investors looking at "humongous" returns in the IPL franchise space, the discipline will be in not confusing a brilliant 15-year run of multiple expansion with a permanent law of nature: the IPL may be a currency now, but like all currencies, its value ultimately rests on trust—in the game, the fans and the institutions that run it.

Medical Negligence Law in India Is Built on a Foundation That Was Never Meant for India 

In 2005, the Supreme Court of India decided Jacob Mathew vs State of Punjab. The doctors were accused of criminal negligence under Section 304A of the Indian Penal Code. The Supreme Court, through a three-judge bench, acquitted them.

In doing so, the Court did something with far-reaching consequences. It formally adopted the Bolam test as the governing standard for assessing medical negligence in India. It also introduced the word 'gross' into Section 304A IPC, without making any formal amendments to law and without defining the meaning. While the section simply says 'rash or negligent act', the Court, borrowing from English jurisprudence, added the qualifier 'gross'.

The Bolam test was born in the womb of the NHS, and unfortunately, the Indian Supreme Court chose to overlook this fact when it transplanted Bolam onto Indian soil.

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

The Problem with Importing Medical Negligence Law

The NHS, when Bolam was decided in 1957, was the near-exclusive provider of healthcare in England. It was funded by the British state. When a patient—the victim of negligence—sued the hospital, he was actually suing the state.

Now contrast this with India. The private sector accounts for most of the treatment value in India. Private hospitals constitute a large chunk of operational hospitals. And unlike the NHS, it answers to no Parliament, no public accounts committee, and no meaningful regulator with teeth.

When negligence occurs in an NHS hospital, NHS Resolution, a state institution, investigates the claims. No individual has any vested interest in protecting the individual doctor or in denying a lawful claim. It wants to minimise claims, yes, but it does so through systemic improvements, not by shielding negligent doctors.

When negligence occurs in a private hospital in India, the Medical Negligence Board is constituted to investigate. It is generally composed of government doctors or nominated by government, who may have professional, social, or financial ties to the accused. The board members do not live in ivory towers but mingle with the accused socially, and thus they are amenable to influence.

In England, the NHS paid an average of £204,672 per settled negligence claim in 2023-24, which translates to about Rs 2.1 Crore in absolute terms and about 45-50 lakh INR on PPP basis. Importantly, NHS Resolution decides the claim amount in about 1-3 years, and the cases which are straightforward—i.e., where the principle of Res Ipsa Loquitur applies—perhaps much faster.

In India, families of the victims have no real chance of receiving anything. Firstly, they have to obtain a medical opinion substantiating the allegations of medical negligence, then fight a battle for at least two decades across the ladder of Consumer Courts for a claim, not to mention the final appeal before the Supreme Court.

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

But is the pace of justice the only issue? No. The quantum of compensation rubs salt on the wound. The poorer you are, the lesser the claim you get, because the claims jurisprudence is based on the potential of a person to earn during his lifetime. So a daily wager will get far less claim than a middle-class person. We cannot draw a comparison with the rich, because they never suffer on account of negligence. Medical negligence law in India is not class-agnostic.

Unfortunately, the legal framework governing medical negligence law in India, borrowed wholesale from England for the purpose of shielding the doctors, has simultaneously refused to borrow the English commitment to adequate and faster compensation. We have taken the shield without the sword.

Was it by oversight or was it a structural choice? In all probability, it was a deliberate choice made under the influence of the medical establishment that has successfully lobbied for its own protection while offering nothing in return to the patients.

Medical negligence law in India operates within a system where the private actor faces no meaningful liability, where compensation is nominal, where investigation is done by the very professional fraternity it is supposed to scrutinise. The same test, in these two environments, produces opposite outcomes.

In England, Bolam ensures that doctors are not unfairly prosecuted for honest clinical mistakes. In India, Bolam ensures that doctors are not prosecuted for anything at all—worse still, even when they should have been charged with homicide.

The Deeper Absurdity: When Law Produces No Offenders

But there is a deeper absurdity buried under all of this, and it touches on something more fundamental than legal principles. It touches on the nature of existence itself.

Existence is relational. A thing does not exist in a vacuum; it exists in relation to other things. I exist because someone can see me, hear me, or be affected by me. The moment there is no perceiving subject, existence becomes meaningless, absurd.

Apply this to law. A criminal provision exists as a law only in so far as it can produce an offender. If a section criminalises an act but is structured in such a way that no one can ever be convicted under it, then what exactly is the status of that law?

Section 304A of the IPC—now Section 106 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita—criminalises causing death by a rash or negligent act. To the best of my understanding, since 1860, when the IPC was enacted, not even a handful of doctors in India have been convicted and imprisoned under this section in a completed trial for death caused by medical negligence in the course of treatment. So the inference we can draw is that in a country with 1.4 billion people, millions of hospital admissions, and a private healthcare sector worth nearly a hundred billion dollars, Indian doctors are the smartest creatures and cannot harm anyone—but even this statement is absurd.

The law exists. But the offender does not exist, because he cannot exist. The legal system has ensured that the conditions for an offender to emerge can never be met.

There is nothing wrong, in principle, with borrowing from foreign jurisprudence. Law has always been a borrowing enterprise. The English common law borrowed from Roman law. American constitutional law borrowed from English traditions. India's Constitution borrowed from the Government of India Acts, from the Irish Constitution, from the American Bill of Rights.

But every meaningful borrowing involves adaptation. You take the principle and you ask: does the underlying assumption hold in our context? If it does not, you modify the principle or you reject it.

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

The English courts had already begun to chip away at Bolam before Jacob Mathew was decided. In Bolitho v. City and Hackney Health Authority (1997), the House of Lords held that the peer opinion relied upon must also be logically defensible. A judge cannot simply accept a body of medical opinion without scrutinising whether it stands up to rational analysis. If Indian judges start applying their brains, most of the biased medical negligence reports will be thrown out on the first hearing.

The Bolam test in England had already been qualified. The court that imported it into India in 2005 imported an already-outdated version, without the Bolitho qualification, and applied it as if it were an absolute standard.

Furthermore, the UK has since moved toward a patient-centered standard on informed consent—the Montgomery test (2015). It gives greater weight to what a reasonable patient would want to know, rather than simply what a responsible body of doctors would choose to disclose. English medical negligence law has been evolving. Medical negligence law in India, frozen by Jacob Mathew, has not.

Genuine Reform: What Medical Negligence Law in India Needs

What would genuine adaptation look like? It would, at minimum, require the following recognitions. First, that India's healthcare is primarily private, not public, and that the peer review mechanism cannot be assumed to be independent. Second, that the standard of compensation must match the standard of protection. You cannot import English protection for doctors while ignoring English compensation for patients. Third, that the procedural conditions for filing a complaint—i.e., requiring a prior medical opinion—must account for the reality that obtaining such an opinion in India is, for most families, effectively impossible.

None of these adaptations have been made. The law was transplanted without its roots. And roots, as any farmer will tell you, are not optional.

The argument here is not that doctors should be prosecuted for honest mistakes. Medicine is not an exact science. Decisions are made under pressure, with incomplete information, in conditions where even the best-trained mind can err. The reality is that doctors committing a bona fide mistake deserve protection.

But in India, the protection has become immunity. A system designed to produce zero convictions is not a system that distinguishes between honest mistakes and willful negligence. It is a system that demolishes accountability at its foundation.

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

What is needed, and what has been absent, is genuine structural reform in three directions.

First, the Medical Negligence Board system must be reformed. The composition of these boards cannot continue to be determined by the same administrative machinery that has institutional ties to the private healthcare sector. Independent composition, with mandatory inclusion of patient representatives and legal professionals, is a minimum requirement. The boards must be required to give reasons and not conclusions alone. And if the members of the board manipulate the report, they should be prosecuted under relevant sections of criminal law.

Second, the Bolam standard must be applied with the Bolitho qualification at minimum. A responsible body of medical opinion that is logically indefensible cannot serve as a shield. Indian courts must be willing to scrutinise the reasoning of expert opinion, not merely count heads in the medical community.

Third, and most importantly, the asymmetry between the protection imported from English law and the compensation denied must be addressed. If the standard for proving negligence is going to remain as demanding as Jacob Mathew makes it, then the compensation available when negligence is proved must be commensurate with English standards. You cannot keep the English shield coupled with an Indian staff.

The victims of medical negligence know, somewhere deep inside, that no justice will come. And yet they file. Petition after petition. Court after court. Year after year. Not because they believe the system will deliver, but because stopping feels like a betrayal of the dead. So to push for justice is the only option, no matter how illusory or absurd it may be.

This is a modern-day Sisyphus, who is not condemned by gods but by our system. With each dismissal of a petition or a complaint, the boulder comes down. And then the next victim steps forward. Fresh grief. Fresh hope. Same boulder. Same hill. Sisyphus at least knew what he was condemned to and he found it duty-bound to keep pushing the boulder, but these victims are condemned to the same thing, but with an illusion of belief.

In this ordeal, the hope is the cruelest part. Not the pain. Pain is survivable. The boulder will come down. It always does. And somewhere in Gurugram, in Chandigarh, in a district court corridor that smells of damp files and broken promises, someone is already bending their back to push it up again.