💥Mains Ready By December. Smash Mains & Smash PYQ Admissions Open
Talk to Mentor

Civilsdaily

Login

Subject: Indian Society

  • Don’t make learning a test of worth

    Why in the News

    A student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has taken his life, and the circumstances of the death are under investigation. Accounts of what happened are sharply polarised, so establishing the immediate cause will not answer the larger questions the death raises. Over the last decade the IITs have recorded more than 170 deaths by suicide, a large number of them by students from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. A Supreme Court appointed task force on student suicides already has an interim report on the table. The contested point is whether such deaths are individual mental health events or the outcome of how these institutions treat the students they admit.

    Why does admission not deliver equality on campus?

    1. Society reproduced on campus: Prestigious institutions are not immune to the strains, power structures, hierarchies and discriminatory practices of society at large. Selectivity does not filter any of those out.
    2. The pressure to excel becomes outsized: Students arrive from very different social backgrounds into a system where the pressure to excel acquires outsized importance. Admission does not by itself guarantee equality for a student from a marginalised community.
    3. The additional burden: The burden is greater where a student must also negotiate subtle prejudice. A persistent sense of not quite belonging sits on top of the ordinary academic load.

    What did the Supreme Court appointed task force find?

    1. The panel and the report: A task force on student suicides appointed by the Supreme Court and chaired by a retired Supreme Court judge issued an interim report in June. Its findings are about the institutions rather than about the students.
    2. Complaint mechanisms do not work: Students often see institutional complaint mechanisms as difficult to access, ineffective, or operating in tokenistic ways. A mechanism that goes unused produces no record of the problem it exists to capture.
    3. Under reporting by the students most affected: For students from marginalised communities the fear of not being believed, or of retaliation, makes them hesitant to report discrimination at all. An absence of complaints is therefore not evidence that discrimination is absent.

    Why is the mental health framing insufficient?

    1. Counselling and wellness provision: More counsellors, helplines, wellness centres and greater awareness of distress are all necessary. None of them examines the conditions that produced the distress.
    2. The institution’s absence from the account: Individualising suicidal tendencies as personal difficulty, or as a student’s failure to cope, removes the institution from the account. It is then never required to ask difficult questions of itself.

    Why does faculty composition matter beyond representation?

    1. The social mismatch: The panel described a social mismatch between the backgrounds of a large number of students and those of their teachers. Access to higher education has grown more diverse and faculty composition has not followed.
    2. The measured gap: More than 65 per cent of faculty in IITs, National Institutes of Technology (NIT) and private institutions are from communities other than the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes (OBC).
    3. Understanding from within: A more diverse faculty helps a campus understand social difference from within. Support then rests on institutional culture rather than on the good intentions of individual teachers.

    What does making academic performance the measure of worth cost?

    1. The promise of social mobility: In a country with a large aspirational class, the promise of social mobility is an important part of pursuing a degree. Education cannot be separated from career ambition.
    2. The purpose of an institution of learning: At the heart of academic life sits the process of gaining knowledge rather than grades, degrees and the job market alone. The purpose of an institution is to intertwine the two.
    3. The cost of an unrelenting measure: A student thinking constantly about grades, rankings, deadlines, evaluations and the consequences of falling behind has little room to follow an idea. The pleasure of learning is displaced by the accounting of it.
    4. Artificial intelligence as a shortcut: The ease with which artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a shortcut to learning makes the question unavoidable. An institution has to state whether it rewards the acquisition of knowledge or the ability to produce the right answer under pressure.

    What would an institution that examined itself have to change?

    1. The question the system has not answered: Institutions have not examined whether all students have the same space to enjoy friendships, freedom and intellectual discovery. Those are part of what higher education promises and they are not evenly distributed.
    2. The variable an institution actually controls: Elite institutions cannot insulate students from the vagaries of the economy. They can decide whether those uncertainties are amplified on campus, or whether education supplies the intellectual confidence to confront them.

    Conclusion

    The difficulty is not that the cause of each death is unknown. It is that both routes by which a student could raise a grievance, the complaint mechanism and the teacher, have been found wanting by an inquiry the institutions did not themselves commission. The unresolved question is whether an institution will accept an external finding against itself, since nothing in the present response obliges it to. The marker to watch is whether the task force’s final report attaches a named accountability route to the grievance mechanism, or repeats the recommendation to strengthen counselling.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS1, 15 marks] Despite comprehensive policies for equity and social justice, underprivileged sections are not yet getting the full benefits of affirmative action envisaged by the Constitution. Comment.”

  • Towards recognising women farmers

    Why in the News

    Maharashtra has passed the Women Farmers’ Empowerment Bill. The law grants women independent recognition as farmers irrespective of land ownership, through a Woman Farmer Certificate. It is the first Indian State legislation to give enforceable legal form to the activity-based, land-delinked definition of ‘farmer’. The National Policy for Farmers set that definition out in 2007 and never operationalised it. A comparable central law was introduced in the Rajya Sabha in 2011 and lapsed. The contested point is that recognition as a farmer in India runs through land revenue records, and those records stand primarily in men’s names. The United Nations has named 2026 the International Year of the Woman Farmer.

    What is the Woman Farmer Certificate under the Women Farmers’ Empowerment Bill?

    1. Land-delinked definition: The Act recognises women residents engaged in agriculture for at least one agricultural season a year, irrespective of the nature of the land. It broadens the definitions of both ‘agriculture’ and ‘farmer’.
    2. Woman Farmer Certificate: The certificate is the document that confers an independent agricultural identity on a woman, drawn from what she does rather than from a title in a land record.
    3. Categories named in the Act: It explicitly recognises the landless cultivator, the landless livestock rearer, the agricultural labourer, the plantation labourer and the pastoralist.

    How far has women’s participation in agriculture outrun their recognition as farmers?

    1. Workforce size: In 2025 agriculture employed roughly 110 million women and 127 million men in rural India, on Census adjusted Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) estimates, bringing the sector close to gender parity.
    2. Rate of increase: The women’s agricultural workforce has more than doubled since 2017-18.
    3. Concentration in agriculture: Nearly three-quarters of all rural women workers are now in agriculture, against less than half of men.
    4. Unpaid work: In 2025 more than 41% of female agricultural workers were unpaid, against 20% of men.
    5. Own-account work: Nearly 63% of men were own-account workers, against 39% of women.

    Why does the land record decide who counts as a farmer?

    1. Ownership held by men: Women largely work family land without owning it or appearing on the land record, because patriarchal norms keep records in men’s names.
    2. Share of holdings: Only 14% of operational agricultural land holdings, measured primarily through land records, are with women, as per the Agriculture Census 2015-16.
    3. Land record as the source of truth: Each State uses its land revenue record for administrative purposes, so the bias against women is carried forward into databases and scheme access.
    4. What exclusion costs: A woman left off the record cannot reach credit, subsidies, technology, extension services and related opportunities tied to land titles.

    What does scheme access reveal about the recognition gap?

    1. PM-KISAN coverage: Only 23% of beneficiaries of the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) are women.
    2. PM-KISAN design: The scheme pays Rs 6,000 a year in direct financial assistance to eligible landholding farmer families for agricultural expenses and household needs.
    3. Gap where women dominate the workforce: Even in States where women are more than 50% of the agriculture workforce, women are under one-third of beneficiaries in most of them.
    4. Three measures of the gap: The gap is approximated by three shares taken together, women as a share of all agriculture and allied workers in 2025, women’s operational holdings as a share of all operational holdings in 2015-16, and women as a share of eligible PM-KISAN beneficiaries in 2024.
    5. Comparability caveat: The holdings and PM-KISAN figures sit nine years apart, and PM-KISAN counts individuals per landholding family, including successor widows, while the Census counts each holding once.

    Why is the binding constraint the identification system rather than land itself?

    1. Missing instrument: A women farmers’ registry delinked from land records had been absent before this legislation, so recognition shifts from the owner of land to the person who farms.
    2. Meghalaya: Women are 70% of PM-KISAN beneficiaries there, a share that reflects matrilineal inheritance under which women are the customary landholders.
    3. Kerala: Women are 44% of beneficiaries, and collective farming through groups such as Kudumbashree provides an alternative route to participation and recognition.
    4. Odisha: The KALIA scheme has reached landless and sharecropper women without a land title as the gate.
    5. Widest gaps: In Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh women are nearly two-thirds of the agricultural workforce but a small fraction of beneficiaries.
    6. The constraint named: Where the land record is the gatekeeper women are filtered out, and where an alternative mechanism exists their access rises substantially.

    What will turning recognition into access require?

    1. Route to registration: Implementation runs through either self-registration or identification of women farmers by the Gram Sabha, including women with no land and women with no title in their name.
    2. A new database: The Act provides for a database of women farmers, which has to be connected to existing agricultural databases.
    3. Digital integration: Linking the certificates to Agri Stack, the digital agriculture platform developed by the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, and issuing FarmerIDs to women is what carries them into the wider digital agricultural ecosystem.

    Challenges to the Woman Farmer Certificate

    1. Duplication and exclusion in the register: A second database beside existing agricultural databases can record the same woman twice or leave her out of both. Eg. States hold no common definition for identifying a woman farmer, issuing her certificate or maintaining the record.
      The Fix: Build a standardised cross-State system of definitions, certificates and databases, so one woman farmer carries one identity across schemes and platforms.
    2. Awareness as the binding step: A certificate confers status without telling its holder what the status unlocks. Eg. Registration depends on a woman either applying herself or being identified by her Gram Sabha, and a woman who knows of neither route stays uncounted.
      The Fix: Run a continuous local information campaign naming the schemes and the credit lines the certificate opens.
    3. Central eligibility still keyed to land: A State certificate does not by itself alter the eligibility test a central scheme applies. Eg. PM-KISAN pays landholding farmer families, so a landless certificate holder still fails that test.
      The Fix: Rewrite scheme eligibility around the activity-based definition of a farmer rather than around a land title.

    Conclusion

    One State has separated the identity of a farmer from the ownership of land. Access to credit and welfare still runs through databases that read titles. The unresolved question is whether scheme administrators treat an activity-based certificate as proof of farmer status, or whether a second register simply sits beside the first without opening anything. What to watch is whether other States legislate a comparable registry, and whether the Gram Sabha route reaches women who have never appeared in any agricultural record.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2014, GS1, 10 marks] Discuss the various economic and socio-cultural forces that are driving increasing feminization of agriculture in India.”

  • Global Gender Gap Index 2026

    Global Gender Gap Index 2026

    Why in the News?

    The World Economic Forum (WEF) released the Global Gender Gap Index 2026, ranking 145 economies across four dimensions. India retained its 131st position. Iceland remained at the top.

    Key Findings

    • India’s overall gender parity: 64.5%
    • Global average: 69.2%
    • India has closed 4.3 percentage points of its gender gap since 2006.
    • Globally, 69.2% of the gender gap has been closed.
    • Iceland: 1st, with 93% of its gender gap closed.
    • Top three:
      • Iceland
      • Finland
      • Norway
    • Chad: lowest-ranked country.
    • Iran and Pakistan were also among the bottom three.

    Four Dimensions of the Index

    1. Economic Participation and Opportunity

    India’s parity score: 41.2%

    • Improved by 0.5 percentage points from the previous edition.
    • Still 3.5 percentage points below India’s best score in 2013.
    • Professional and technical workers: parity increased from 26.6% in 2006 to 49.9% in 2026.
    • Legislators, senior officials and managers: 13.1% parity.
    • Labour-force participation parity: 44.1%.

    2. Educational Attainment

    • India recorded 96.6% parity.
    • Declined by 0.5 percentage points from the previous year.
    • Educational gains have been a major contributor to India’s improvement since 2006.

    3. Health and Survival

    • India’s parity score: 95.6%.
    • Sex ratio at birth remained nearly one percentage point lower than in 2006.

    4. Political Empowerment

    • India’s highest-performing subindex.
    • 24.5% of the gender gap closed.
    • Global rank: 67th.
    • Parliament: 16.1% of the gender gap closed in 2026.
    • Ministerial level: 5.9%, compared with 3.5% in 2006.
    • India’s ministerial parity had reached 30% in 2019, before declining.

    Important Global Observations

    • Southern Asia was the lowest-scoring region in Economic Participation and Opportunity.
    • Globally, political empowerment recorded the largest gains since 2006, but has experienced a reversal since 2016.
    • Women account for 19.1% of CEO roles globally.
    • Women remain underrepresented in Artificial Intelligence (AI), accounting for fewer than one in five AI engineers.
    • Australia entered the global top 10 for the first time.
    • Iceland was the only country to cross 90% parity, at 93%.

    Important Full Forms

    • WEF: World Economic Forum
    • AI: Artificial Intelligence
    • CEO: Chief Executive Officer

    Prelims Quick Revision

    • Global Gender Gap Index: World Economic Forum
    • 2026 edition: 145 economies
    • India: 131st
    • Top: Iceland
    • India overall parity: 64.5%
    • Global parity: 69.2%
    • Four dimensions:
      1. Economic Participation and Opportunity
      2. Educational Attainment
      3. Health and Survival
      4. Political Empowerment
    • India’s highest subindex: Political Empowerment
    • India’s Economic Participation parity: 41.2%
    • India’s Educational Attainment parity: 96.6%
    • India’s Health and Survival parity: 95.6%
    • Political Empowerment: 24.5% gap closed
  • PMAY-U: Housing, Inclusion and Empowerment

    PMAY-U: Housing, Inclusion and Empowerment

    Why in the News?

    The Ministry highlighted the achievements of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban (PMAY-U) and the progress of PMAY-U 2.0, aimed at achieving Housing for All in urban areas. PMAY-U was launched in June 2015, while PMAY-U 2.0 was launched in September 2024.

    Key Highlights

    PMAY-U

    • Provides all-weather pucca houses with basic civic amenities to eligible urban households.
    • Focuses on:
      • Economically Weaker Sections (EWS)
      • Low Income Groups (LIG)
      • Middle Income Groups (MIG)
      • Slum dwellers
    • Original mission period was up to March 2022, extended up to 30 September 2026 for completion of sanctioned projects.

    PMAY-U 2.0

    • Launched in September 2024.
    • Implementation period: 2024-2029.
    • Target: 1 crore additional urban poor and middle-class families.
    • Financial assistance: up to ₹2.50 lakh per unit.
    • Also includes affordable rental housing.

    Income Categories

    • EWS: Annual income up to ₹3 lakh
    • LIG: ₹3 lakh to ₹6 lakh
    • MIG: ₹6 lakh to ₹9 lakh

    Four Verticals of PMAY-U 2.0

    1. Beneficiary-Led Construction (BLC)

    • Financial assistance up to ₹2.5 lakh.
    • For eligible EWS families.
    • Construction on own available land.
    • Maximum carpet area: 45 sq m.

    2. Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP)

    • Public/private agencies construct affordable houses.
    • Houses generally have 30-45 sq m carpet area.
    • Financial assistance up to ₹2.5 lakh per unit.

    3. Affordable Rental Housing (ARH)

    • Provides affordable rental accommodation.
    • Covers EWS and LIG beneficiaries, including:
      • Migrants
      • Homeless persons
      • Industrial workers
      • Working women
      • Construction workers
      • Street vendors
      • Rickshaw pullers
      • Contractual workers

    4. Interest Subsidy Scheme (ISS)

    • Provides interest subsidy on eligible home loans.
    • Applicable to loans sanctioned and disbursed on or after 1 September 2024.
    • Covers EWS, LIG and MIG beneficiaries.

    Major Achievements

    As of 9 August 2026:

    • 1.25 crore houses sanctioned under PMAY-U and PMAY-U 2.0.
    • More than 1 crore houses completed and delivered.
    • Under PMAY-U 2.0:
      • 18.38 lakh houses sanctioned
      • 14.40 lakh under BLC
      • 2.48 lakh under AHP
      • 1.36 lakh under ISS
      • 13,046 dwelling units under ARH
    • Around 1 crore houses among the 1.25 crore sanctioned were allotted to women, either in the name of the female head of household or through joint ownership.

    Inclusion and Empowerment

    PMAY-U promotes:

    • Women ownership/co-ownership of houses.
    • Housing access for:
      • Scheduled Castes (SCs)
      • Scheduled Tribes (STs)
      • Other Backward Classes (OBCs)
      • Minorities
      • Senior citizens
      • Persons with disabilities
      • Transgender persons

    Technology-enabled Implementation

    • Unified Web Portal: application, processing, tracking and fund disbursement.
    • PMAY-U Dashboard: real-time monitoring of key indicators.
    • Geo-tagging: tracks houses through five stages:
      1. Grounding
      2. Foundation
      3. Superstructure
      4. Finishing and external development
      5. Completion
    • Technology Sub-Mission (TSM): promotes modern and disaster-resilient construction technologies.
    • Technology and Innovation Sub-Mission (TISM): promotes innovative, green and climate-responsive housing.
    • Technology Innovation Grant (TIG): supports innovative technologies in AHP projects.

    Prelims Quick Revision

    • PMAY-U: launched in June 2015.
    • PMAY-U 2.0: launched in September 2024.
    • PMAY-U 2.0 period: 2024-2029.
    • Target: 1 crore additional families.
    • Four verticals: BLC, AHP, ARH, ISS.
    • PMAY-U 2.0 covers EWS, LIG and MIG.
    • ARH focuses on rental housing, including migrants and working women.
    • ISS relates to home-loan interest subsidy.
    • Technology tools include geo-tagging, dashboards and unified digital platforms.

  • The murder of a musician, and a familiar unease

    Why in the News

    A guitarist from Manipur who had spent close to twenty years working and teaching in Delhi died after being assaulted by a group of people in his building, with the immediate dispute recorded by the police as one over noise. The death follows the 2014 killing of an Arunachal Pradesh student in Lajpat Nagar, which drew national attention to violence against people from the Northeast and led the Delhi Police to set up the Special Police Unit for the North East Region (SPUNER), a dedicated unit with helplines and nodal officers for complaints from Northeastern residents. More than a decade after that unit was created, an investigation this year found that one in four Police Control Room (PCR) calls from Northeastern residents was linked to landlord harassment. The tension is that a remedy built around policing violent incidents has left untouched the everyday transactions, tenancy above all, in which the vulnerability actually shows up.

    What does the record of the past decade show?

    1. The 2014 case set the institutional response: An Arunachal Pradesh student was killed in Delhi in 2014 after an altercation with shopkeepers in Lajpat Nagar, and the Delhi Police subsequently created SPUNER, with other measures opening avenues to seek help.
    2. The exposure has relocated rather than closed: An investigation this year found that one in four PCR calls received from Northeastern residents was linked to landlord harassment.
    3. The pattern extends past Delhi: A 24 year old student from Tripura died in Dehradun last December after being attacked.
    4. Motive itself is contested in the record: In that case the victim’s brother alleged that racial slurs preceded the assault, and the police said their preliminary investigation found no evidence of a racial motive and described the incident as a confrontation that escalated in the heat of the moment.

    Why has the existing remedy not closed the gap?

    1. A unit built for incidents does not reach a relationship: SPUNER responds to a complaint after an act. Tenancy harassment is continuous, deniable and rarely produces a single reportable offence. Eg. The concentration of PCR calls in landlord disputes is the measure of that gap.
    2. Establishing motive is left to the investigating officer: Whether an assault was racially motivated is a finding recorded during investigation, and a finding of no racial motive closes the question without an independent test.
    3. Availability is not the same as use: Avenues to seek help were created after 2014, and the sense of vulnerability has not disappeared from everyday life more than a decade later.

    Does length of residence settle the question of belonging?

    1. The record of residence was long: The musician moved to Delhi nearly two decades ago, spent around 17 years working and teaching in the capital, established a music school, mentored students from home and taught at the Delhi School of Music.
    2. The life was locally rooted: By the time of his death he had built a profession, made friends, raised a family, and walked the same streets for years, while continuing to teach the music he had begun playing in Manipur.
    3. The question the death leaves open: How many years a person has to live in a city before he is simply of that place, rather than someone from somewhere else, is a difficult irony for people from one part of India negotiating safety, recognition and belonging in its capital.
    4. A single night displaces the preceding life: The account of such a death reduces easily to the noise outside the home, the argument, the blows in the stairwell and the journey to hospital, and drops the two decades that came before them.

    Challenges to the Special Police Unit for the North East Region

    1. Its jurisdiction is one city: The unit is a Delhi Police creation, so a resident of any other city has no equivalent point of contact. Eg. The Dehradun death last December fell outside any comparable unit’s remit.
      The Fix: Require every State police force with a significant Northeastern student and worker population to designate a nodal officer with the same published helpline and reporting duty.
    2. It has no remit over housing: Landlord harassment is a civil tenancy matter until it becomes an offence, so the single largest reported grievance sits outside the unit’s powers. Eg. One in four PCR calls from Northeastern residents concerns exactly this.
      The Fix: Bring refusal to let or eviction on grounds of region or ethnicity within a rent authority’s jurisdiction, with a penalty attached to a proved refusal.
    3. Racial motive is not an aggravating factor in law: Where a statute does not treat racial motivation as aggravating, an investigating officer recording no such motive changes neither the charge nor the sentence. Eg. The Dehradun case was closed on the record as an escalation rather than a racially motivated attack.
      The Fix: Insert racial or ethnic motivation as a statutory aggravating circumstance at sentencing, so the finding carries a consequence and is therefore investigated.
    4. Reporting depends on the complainant’s confidence: A unit reached only by a call from the person affected undercounts precisely those most reluctant to approach the police. Eg. Students and short term migrant workers dependent on a landlord for accommodation carry a direct cost for complaining.
      The Fix: Route complaints through college and university grievance cells with a mandatory onward referral, so the first contact is not the police station.

    Conclusion

    The institutional answer built after that killing was designed for the kind of event that produced it, a violent incident with an identifiable offender and a police response. What the intervening decade has documented is a different and more ordinary exposure, concentrated in housing, where no criminal complaint is filed and no unit has jurisdiction. Until refusal and harassment on grounds of ethnicity carry a defined legal consequence, the record will keep registering the incidents and missing the condition. The measurable thing to watch is whether the PCR call category that is already being counted is ever converted into a reportable enforcement statistic.

    Discrimination against Northeastern Indians in the cities

    1. What the term covers: It refers to differential treatment of people from the eight Northeastern States in housing, employment, education and public spaces in metropolitan India, resting on appearance, language and food practices rather than on caste.
    2. The population it affects: Large student and working populations from the region live in Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune, most of them outside the State in which their community holds Scheduled Tribe status.
    3. The legal position of that status: Scheduled Tribe status is notified State by State, so a person from a Northeastern Scheduled Tribe usually does not hold that status in the city they migrate to, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 therefore does not apply to them there.
    4. The institutional response so far: It has been organised around policing and helplines rather than around anti discrimination law.

    Laws and Rules Governing Racial and Ethnic Discrimination

    1. Constitution of India, Article 15: It prohibits discrimination by the State on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and Article 19(1)(e) protects the right to reside and settle in any part of India.
    2. Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023: It penalises promoting enmity between groups on grounds of race, language, place of birth or residence, and it does not recognise racist motivation as an aggravating circumstance in an offence against the person.
    3. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989: It provides enhanced penalties and special courts for offences against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and its protection follows the State specific notification of that status.
    4. The Bezbaruah Committee, 2014: Set up by the Ministry of Home Affairs after the Lajpat Nagar killing, it recommended a dedicated penal provision against racial discrimination and fast track courts for such cases, and the penal provision has not been enacted.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS1, 10.0 marks] Unity in diversity remains the defining feature of Indian society despite the challenges from communalism and regionalism. Comment.”

  • Perilous retreat: Gram sabhas must have a veto on issues relating to tribal land

    Why in the News

    The Committee on Public Undertakings has suggested that a project require the consent of only most, rather than all, of the gram sabhas affected by it. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 is framed in spirit to require the consent of every affected village assembly before forest land is diverted. The Tribal Affairs Ministry has declined to claim jurisdiction over the question, leaving the reading of that requirement to the Centre and the State governments. The contest is between a consent rule that protects the specific village losing its land and a counting rule under which the villages losing least can decide for the village losing most.

    What is the Forest Rights Act, 2006?

    1. What it recognises: The Act recognises individual and community rights over forest land for Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have depended on that land.
    2. Why it was passed: It was enacted to undo the “historical injustices” meted out to forest-dependent communities whose occupation of forest land had never been recorded.
    3. Where the authority sits: The gram sabha is the body that initiates the determination of the nature and extent of individual and community forest rights.
    4. What it does to land diversion: The consent of the affected gram sabhas is the barrier a project must clear before forest land is diverted for non-forest use.

    What would a majority consent threshold change?

    1. Assemblies become stakeholders: A regime deeming the acquiescence of 70 to 75 per cent of affected gram sabhas to suffice would reduce them from democratic bodies protecting the constitutional rights of their specific inhabitants to corporate stakeholders.
    2. The village that loses most can be outvoted: A project developer may bypass the consent of a village located directly within a proposed reservoir, once less affected villages provide their no-objection certificates.
    3. The change is jurisprudential, not procedural: A right held by a particular community because of its dependence on a particular forest cannot be surrendered by the agreement of other communities, so the threshold alters what the consent requirement is for.
    4. Classification disputes feed the same result: The political fight over classifying tribal communities alters who qualifies as a community member, which makes it easier to split a village assembly and engineer consent.

    What does the Tribal Affairs Ministry’s recusal produce?

    1. A regulatory vacuum: The refusal of the Tribal Affairs Ministry to claim jurisdiction leaves the Centre and the State governments unchecked in rewriting the rules by which forested land is diverted for non-forest use.
    2. The recusal rests on a technicality: The Ministry has located the question between the Forest Rights Act and the Environment Ministry’s rules in order to recuse itself.
    3. The consequence is substantive: That bureaucratic manoeuvre could strip forest-dependent communities of their most potent legal instrument.

    What is the legal position on consent as it stands?

    1. No express clause for every gram sabha: The Forest Rights Act does not include a clause requiring a no-objection certificate from every affected gram sabha.
    2. That does not make consent optional: The claim that no legal requirement presently exists, and that gram sabha decisions can be bypassed, is untrue.
    3. The route to any change is legislative: A government that wishes to move to a majority rule must change the relevant rules or legislation openly and democratically, rather than through an administrative reading of the existing text.

    Why do energy targets and forest rights collide?

    1. Infrastructure is being scaled rapidly: The government has been scaling up energy infrastructure, including the long-stalled Teesta-IV project, to meet macroeconomic goals.
    2. The same state wrote the protection: The Forest Rights Act was passed by that state to undo historical injustices, so the consent requirement is a commitment it made against its own future convenience.
    3. The chosen path avoids the argument: Proceeding on the notion that the consent requirement was never part of the Act settles the conflict by denying that it exists, rather than by weighing the claims on either side.

    What does land carry for forest-dependent communities?

    1. It is the base of everything else: Land is the foundation of these communities’ livelihoods, culture, identity and political autonomy.
    2. The struggle has been over dispossession: Communities have fought to resist displacement and dispossession and to secure customary collective ownership.
    3. They also supply public goods: Scheduled Tribe communities render social and environmental services and contribute to national development, including by helping meet India’s climate commitments.
    4. The recommendation follows from that: The Centre and the States should strengthen the powers conferred on gram sabhas in Scheduled Areas by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 and the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996.

    Challenges to gram sabha consent under the Forest Rights Act

    1. Community forest rights lag individual titles: Most titles distributed under the Act are individual. Community forest resource rights, which are what a gram sabha exercises against a diversion, are recognised in a small share of eligible villages. Eg. Recognised community forest resource titles are concentrated in Maharashtra, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, with minimal recognition in several other States.
      The Fix: Complete community forest resource mapping and vesting in a village before any diversion proposal over its forest is processed.
    2. The consent requirement rests on executive instruction: It operates through Ministry circulars in the forest clearance process rather than through an express section of the Act, so it can be narrowed without going to Parliament. Eg. A 2009 circular of the Ministry of Environment and Forests made a gram sabha consent certificate part of the forest clearance record.
      The Fix: Write the consent requirement into the Act itself, so that any dilution requires an amendment debated in Parliament.
    3. Statutory exemptions have been widening: The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 removes categories of land from the forest clearance process, and the consent step travels with that process. Eg. Land within 100 km of an international border proposed for a strategic linear project falls outside the clearance requirement.
      The Fix: Retain the gram sabha consent step for every exempted category where forest rights have been recognised, independent of the clearance exemption.
    4. A refusal has no protected life: Nothing bars a fresh proposal over the same forest after a gram sabha has rejected one, so refusal delays a project rather than settling the question. Eg. In Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forests (2013) the Supreme Court referred the bauxite mining question in the Niyamgiri hills to 12 gram sabhas, and all of them rejected it.
      The Fix: Bar a fresh diversion proposal over the same land for a fixed period following a gram sabha rejection, as land acquisition law already does.

    Conclusion

    The consent requirement is the one instrument that makes a village’s refusal legally consequential, and the change under discussion replaces refusal with arithmetic. Two positions cannot both hold: that the right belongs to a particular community because it depends on a particular forest, and that other communities may supply the consent on its behalf. The Environment Ministry can settle which of the two governs, and the honest route to that is an open amendment rather than a fresh reading of existing rules. Until it does, the strength of a village assembly’s veto depends on which ministry is willing to claim jurisdiction over it.

    Back2Basics: Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996

    1. What it does: It extends Part IX of the Constitution, on panchayats, to the Fifth Schedule areas with modifications.
    2. The gram sabha’s status: It makes the gram sabha, rather than the elected panchayat, the primary body competent to safeguard traditions, customs, cultural identity and community resources.
    3. Consultation before acquisition: It requires consultation with the gram sabha before land is acquired in Scheduled Areas and before displaced persons are resettled.
    4. Control over resources: It vests ownership of minor forest produce in the gram sabha and gives it a role in preventing land alienation and in granting minor mineral concessions.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2013] Under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, who shall be the authority to initiate the process for determining the nature and extent of individual or community forest rights or both? (a) State Forest Department (b) Distrit Collector/Deputy Commissioner (c) Tahsildar/Block Develoment Officer/Mandal Revenue Officer (d) Gram Sabha ANSWER: (d)”

  • Safety in Delhi needs a regulatory reset

    Why in the News

    A building collapse in Satya Niketan has reopened the question of who is answerable for building safety in Delhi. Comparable failures have occurred at Saidulajab, Hauz Rani, Tughlakabad Extension, Palam and Vivek Vihar. Delhi already runs an online single window system for building proposals, built on Automated Development Control Regulations (Auto DCR) software, and that system reached none of these structures. The contest is between a regulator that examines the plans submitted to it and a city where the dangerous construction is precisely the construction that submits no plan.

    How does Delhi’s single window building approval system work?

    1. Online filing and document verification: Building proposals are submitted online. The Auto DCR software and the Building Plan Approval Management System verify the mandatory documents.
    2. Fee and site visit: The system issues a scrutiny fee challan for online payment. It then sends an SMS to the building inspector and the architect carrying the details of the site visit.
    3. Automated reading of the drawing: Auto DCR creates entities such as plots, building layouts and roads from the submitted drawings, using layers, geometrical mapping and reports.
    4. Rule checking and status: AutoCAD and allied software analyse the plans against the development control regulations and the building bye-laws, and the compliance status is available online before the plans are examined for approval.

    Which laws does illegal construction breach?

    1. Planning and municipal law: Illegal construction violates the Master Plan for Delhi, the Unified Building Byelaws, the Delhi Development Act and the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957.
    2. Fire law: It also violates the Delhi Fire Service Act, 2007, which is the source of the fire safety clearance a building is required to hold.
    3. The city absorbs the cost: Unapproved construction adds load to transport, services and civic amenities that were planned for a lower density.
    4. The failures are recurrent: Frequent fire incidents and structural failures in illegal constructions have endangered lives.

    Why is Delhi’s exposure larger than the collapses suggest?

    1. Seismic exposure: Delhi falls in Seismic Zone IV, where earthquakes may be severe, so unengineered construction carries a citywide risk rather than a single owner’s risk.
    2. Two cities with one problem: Planned development coexists with informal growth in slums and unauthorised colonies. Both are plagued by building violations along with a lack of oversight and enforcement.
    3. Safety is not conditional on tenure: The city cannot afford unsafe buildings irrespective of the type of development, the land ownership or the land use.

    Why has repeated official attention changed so little?

    1. The findings already exist: Courts, the commissions headed by G T Nanavati and by Baleshwar Prasad, and the high level committee headed by Tejendra Khanna have all underlined building safety, with very little impact.
    2. Monitoring is the weak link: Haphazard development and weak monitoring systems produce inefficiencies, delays and a loss of accountability.
    3. Non-compliance carries no standing consequence: Every building without a structural and fire safety certificate should be sealed and should display a safety related warning, and no such automatic consequence operates today.

    Why does approving plans not produce safe buildings?

    1. The department sees only what is filed: Building departments mainly deal with the plans they receive, so massive illegal and risky constructions are left out of the process altogether.
    2. The digital reform did not widen the net: The single window system improved the handling of submitted proposals. It brought no unauthorised construction into any approval or inspection stream, which is why the reform has not been successful.
    3. The software trails the city it regulates: The system needs updating to handle redevelopment, green buildings, transit oriented development and approvals under mixed land use.

    What would demunicipalising building regulation mean?

    1. Separating the regulator from the political apparatus: The proposal is to make the regulatory function for buildings independent of the municipal and political structure that currently houses it.
    2. One structure performs two conflicting roles: The same municipal apparatus both sanctions construction and polices it, so enforcement competes with local political interest.
    3. Bringing in the settlements now left out: Radical reform is required so that structures in informal settlements, urban villages and resettlement colonies receive regulatory attention.

    What can technology detect that inspection does not?

    1. Remote detection of new construction: Geospatial artificial intelligence, using high resolution satellite imagery and LiDAR (laser based remote sensing that measures distances to build a three dimensional model of a surface), can monitor and detect unauthorised construction.
    2. Continuous tracking in place of periodic visits: Spatial data driven Real-Time Morphological Tracking can change how building and layout plans are approved, and improve compliance with the building bye-laws, the Fire Services Act and land use stipulations.
    3. Less discretion, less rent: Automated detection reduces the human interface in approval and enforcement, and reduces the corruption that discretion creates.

    Challenges to an independent building regulator for Delhi

    1. Authority over building control is already split: Sanction and enforcement are divided among the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the New Delhi Municipal Council, the Delhi Development Authority and the Delhi Cantonment Board, so a new regulator adds a layer unless it absorbs theirs. Eg. The Delhi Development Authority prepares the Master Plan, and the municipal bodies sanction individual building plans under it.
      The Fix: Vest building safety certification in one statutory authority for the whole National Capital Territory, with the municipal bodies acting as its field arms.
    2. Unauthorised construction carries statutory protection: Punitive action against unauthorised colonies has repeatedly been suspended by law, so a regulator inherits a built stock it cannot act against. Eg. Successive National Capital Territory of Delhi Laws (Special Provisions) Acts have protected specified categories of unauthorised construction from demolition and sealing.
      The Fix: Convert that protection into a time bound retrofitting and certification requirement, so regularisation buys structural safety rather than immunity alone.
    3. Detection is not structural assessment: Satellite imagery and LiDAR identify a new or altered footprint, and they cannot read load bearing capacity, foundation integrity or the quality of materials. Eg. A failure triggered by excavation under an existing building leaves no external signature beforehand.
      The Fix: Pair remote detection with a mandatory structural audit by empanelled engineers for every building above a defined height or age.
    4. Certification capacity does not exist at that scale: Sealing every building without a structural and fire safety certificate presumes a supply of qualified structural engineers and fire auditors the city does not have. Eg. Fire safety clearance is required only above a prescribed building height, and even that stock is audited irregularly.
      The Fix: Licence and empanel private structural auditors under statutory personal liability, with random state verification of the certificates they issue.

    Conclusion

    Building regulation in Delhi is organised around a transaction, the filing of a plan, and the buildings that kill people are the ones that never generate that transaction. Better software and further audit requirements leave that structure untouched. The reform with any prospect of changing outcomes starts from the built stock rather than from the file, detects change on the ground, and carries the authority to act on what it finds without asking an elected municipal body first. Whether the proposal for a regulator of that kind moves past commentary is the thing to watch.

    Urban Governance in India

    1. Cities carry the economy: Cities house about 37 per cent of the population and generate close to 70 per cent of India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
    2. The urban share keeps rising: Urban India is projected to reach about 60 crore people, or 40 per cent of the population, by 2036.
    3. Authority is fragmented by design: Municipal functions are split across urban local bodies, development authorities and parastatal agencies, so no single body answers for a city.
    4. Cities raise almost nothing of their own: Urban local bodies raise under 0.6 per cent of GDP as own revenue, of which property tax accounts for about 0.15 per cent.

    Constitutional Framework Governing Urban Governance

    1. Part IXA, Articles 243P to 243ZG: Inserted by the Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act, 1992, it gives municipalities constitutional status and fixes their composition, duration and elections.
    2. Twelfth Schedule: Lists 18 functions a State may devolve to municipalities, including urban planning, regulation of land use and construction of buildings, and fire services.
    3. Article 243W: Empowers State legislatures to confer powers and responsibilities on municipalities as institutions of self government and for the Twelfth Schedule functions.
    4. Article 243Y: Requires the State Finance Commission to review municipal finances and recommend the sharing of State taxes with municipalities.

    Laws and Rules Governing Urban Development

    1. National Building Code of India, 2016: A model code issued by the Bureau of Indian Standards setting requirements for structural safety, fire and life safety and building services. States give it force through their own bye-laws.
    2. Model Building Bye-Laws, 2016: A template issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs for State and municipal bye-laws, covering sanction procedure, setbacks, parking and fire safety.
    3. Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016: Requires registration of projects and agents with a State regulatory authority, and fixes promoter liability for structural defects for five years from possession.
    4. Disaster Management Act, 2005: Provides the statutory basis for disaster management plans and for safety and retrofitting norms in hazard prone areas.

    Challenges in Urban Governance

    1. Devolution under the Seventy-fourth Amendment is incomplete: Many States have not transferred the listed functions or empowered mayors, so the body closest to a building is not the body that controls it. Eg. Urban planning and land use regulation sit with State owned development authorities in most large cities.
      The Fix: Complete activity mapping for the Twelfth Schedule functions and provide for directly elected mayors with a fixed tenure.
    2. Municipal finances cannot fund enforcement: Weak own revenue leaves cities without the technical staff to inspect, audit or prosecute. Eg. Successive Finance Commissions have tied municipal grants to property tax reform and audited municipal accounts.
      The Fix: Shift property tax to capital value with periodic revision, and make audited accounts a condition for central mission funds.
    3. Most urban land is not planned at all: Only about 30 per cent of urban land is properly planned, so the majority of growth happens outside any development control regime. Eg. Census towns cross the urban thresholds without having any urban local body.
      The Fix: Extend statutory planning coverage to census towns and peri urban areas before they are built out.
    4. Urban disaster risk is outrunning municipal capacity: Flooding, fire and heat concentrate on the least regulated built stock and on the poorest occupants. Eg. The Disaster Management (Amendment) Act, 2025 provides for Urban Disaster Management Authorities in large cities.
      The Fix: Make the city disaster authority the owner of building safety audits, with the power to seal non compliant structures.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2023, GS2, 10.0 marks] “The states in India seem reluctant to empower urban local bodies both functionally as well as financially.” Comment.”

  • Civil Service candidates await Centre’s word on foundation course amid case in top court

    Why in the News

    The Centre has asked the Supreme Court for permission to let the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) allocate services to the 2025 Civil Services Examination recommendees without implementing the Rohith Nathan judgment. That judgment, delivered on 11 March, found that the DoPT was excluding certain Other Backward Classes (OBC) candidates from reservation by treating them as creamy layer on the basis of their parents’ salary income alone. The Court directed corrective measures within six months. The examination results had been declared on 6 March, days before the ruling, which places one entire recruitment cycle across the line the judgment drew. The 958 candidates recommended in that cycle now have no service allocation and no foundation course date.

    What is the creamy layer income test?

    1. Where it comes from: The DoPT Office Memorandum of 8 September 1993 operationalised the Supreme Court’s direction in Indra Sawhney (1992) to exclude the socially advanced sections within a backward class.
    2. How it is structured: The Memorandum sets out a Schedule of six categories. The first five exclude a candidate by the status of the parent regardless of income, covering constitutional posts, service grades, armed forces ranks, professions and trade, and property ownership.
    3. The sixth category is residual: It applies an income and wealth test to everyone the first five do not catch, using gross annual family income above the ceiling for three consecutive years.
    4. What the income test leaves out: Salary income and agricultural income are excluded from that calculation. Only income from property, business, capital gains and similar sources is counted, and the ceiling has stood at Rs 8 lakh since 2017.

    What did the Rohith Nathan judgment find, and what did it direct?

    1. The finding: A Division Bench held that the DoPT was treating equals unequally, since the single variable separating two otherwise identical candidates was the parent’s employer.
    2. How the discrimination worked: A child of a government clerk was tested without salary income and passed. A child of a public sector or private employee on the same pay was tested with salary income counted and failed.
    3. What the Court held on the test itself: The income and wealth component is a residual filter, not the primary basis for exclusion. It must apply the same way to all until the government establishes equivalence between public sector posts and government grades.
    4. The direction: The Centre was to create supernumerary posts for the petitioners within six months, with services allotted according to the candidates’ ranks in their respective examination years.

    Why is the service allocation stalled?

    1. The Centre has asked to be excused from the ruling for this cycle: Its application seeks permission for the DoPT to allocate services without implementing the judgment.
    2. The cycle straddles the ruling: Results were declared on 6 March and the judgment came on 11 March, so allocation for this batch would be the first application of whichever reading the Court settles on.
    3. Nothing moves until the hearing: The Supreme Court is set to hear the Centre on 17 September, and the allocation question is what that hearing turns on.

    What are the 958 recommendees facing?

    1. The course has not begun: The foundation course was expected to begin in August and has not started.
    2. The schedule lapsed without a replacement: A tentative start date of 24 August was circulated, and nothing has been communicated since the matter came before the Court.
    3. No communication has reached the candidates: Recommended candidates report receiving nothing from the DoPT or from the academy about when the course will start.
    4. Neither official channel has been updated: No updates on the next steps have appeared on the DoPT website or on the website of the training academy.

    Challenges to the creamy layer determination

    1. The equivalence of posts was never established: The 1993 Schedule made the rank test for public sector and private employees conditional on an equivalence with government grades that has not been drawn up in three decades. Eg. Reservation policy is the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment’s subject under the Allocation of Business Rules, and the DoPT can only issue instructions once that Ministry frames the policy.
      The Fix: Notify a post-equivalence table so the rank-based categories apply uniformly whoever the employer is, which removes the need for the income test in these cases altogether.
    2. The income ceiling moves by discretion rather than by indexation: With no formula, the threshold stays static through years of inflation and then jumps, so the excluded population changes for reasons unrelated to backwardness. Eg. The ceiling went from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 8 lakh in five irregular steps over 24 years.
      The Fix: Tie the ceiling to a published price or wage index with automatic annual revision.
    3. Verification rests on self-declaration: Certificates are issued on a declaration checked by local revenue staff, so a defect surfaces only when the appointment is scrutinised. Eg. Recruitment bodies cancel candidatures years after selection over defective certificates.
      The Fix: Validate income declarations against tax and land records at the point the certificate is issued rather than at the point of appointment.
    4. No data exists on who actually captures the benefit: Without caste-wise data on selections and appointments, the claim that a small number of families corner reserved posts cannot be tested either way. Eg. The Rohini Commission on sub-categorisation of Other Backward Classes worked without a comprehensive survey of selections.
      The Fix: Publish caste-wise selection and appointment data against reserved posts as a standing annual return.
    5. Central and State lists diverge: A community recognised as backward by a State is often absent from the Central list, and the same test is administered differently across the two. Eg. Candidates holding State OBC certificates have been denied central reservation.
      The Fix: Publish a mapped concordance between the Central list and each State list, so a candidate can see which list governs a given post.

    Conclusion

    The dispute is no longer about whether the exclusion was wrong, since that has been decided. It is about who absorbs the cost of correcting it, and both available answers create a fresh set of claimants. A recruitment cycle cannot be held open indefinitely, and a batch allotted on a reading the Court has already rejected moves the litigation one year forward rather than ending it. The hearing later this month is where that choice is made, and the marker is whether the Court permits an interim allotment or holds the executive to the timetable it set.

    Back2Basics

    1. What it is: The Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration is the central training institution for the Indian Administrative Service.
    2. Where it is: It is located at Mussoorie in Uttarakhand.
    3. What the foundation course is: The Academy runs the common Foundation Course taken by fresh recruits to the All India Services and the Central Civil Services before they move to their own service academies.
    4. Who administers it: It functions under the Department of Personnel and Training, and was formed in 1959 by merging the earlier IAS Training School at Delhi and the IAS Staff College at Shimla.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS1, 15 marks] Despite comprehensive policies for equity and social justice, underprivileged sections are not yet getting the full benefits of affirmative action envisaged by the Constitution. Comment.”

  • State of exception

    State of exception

    Why in the News

    The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has expressed “grave concern” at reports of the law enforcement apparatus resorting to violence, physical and otherwise, against minority ethnic and ethno religious groups, Dalits and non citizens. This is India’s first review by the Committee since 2007, and India ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) in 1968. The Committee also recorded that India has not provided detailed and updated information on the state’s inquiries and sanctions arising from allegations of such violence. The government’s position before the Committee is that caste bias falls outside Article 1 of the Convention because caste is not synonymous with race. The Committee has read the Convention as covering all forms of discrimination based on inherited status. The tension is between a state defending a definitional boundary to keep caste a domestic matter and a treaty body reading descent into the Convention to bring caste inside international scrutiny.

    What is the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination?

    1. A treaty body: CERD is a body of independent experts that monitors how states that have ratified ICERD implement it.
    2. Periodic review: States file periodic reports and the Committee issues concluding observations recording its concerns and its recommendations.
    3. No enforcement power: Concluding observations are not binding and carry no sanction, so their effect runs through the reporting obligation and reputational exposure.

    Why does the caste and race question decide the Committee’s jurisdiction?

    1. The government’s reading: Article 1 of ICERD defines racial discrimination by race, colour, descent, and national or ethnic origin, and the government argues that caste is not race and therefore sits outside that definition.
    2. The Committee’s reading: The Committee treats discrimination based on inherited status as covered, which brings caste within the Convention through the descent limb rather than the race limb.
    3. What actually turns on it: If caste falls outside Article 1, India owes the Committee no account of caste discrimination at all, so the argument is jurisdictional rather than semantic.
    4. The scale of what the technicality would exclude: The position would place the situation of 200 million Dalits beyond the reach of international review. The underlying facts would remain undisputed.

    What specific practices did the Committee flag?

    1. Manual cleaning of sewers: The practice continues despite a law prohibiting it.
    2. Treatment of Rohingya Muslims: Hate speech against them, their poor living conditions, and their mass refoulement, meaning return to a territory where they face persecution.
    3. Citizenship deprivation: Mass deprivation of citizenship through the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
    4. Electoral roll deletions: Large scale deletions arising from the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
    5. Statutes used against civil society: Use of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 to hamper the work of civil society organisations.
    6. A gap in the criminal code: The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 does not expressly criminalise racist hate speech.
    7. Exemptions in forest law: The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 exempts “national security” projects from consultative decision making.

    Why is the data gap the enabling condition?

    1. Enumeration is overdue: A much delayed Census means suitably disaggregated data on disenfranchised communities does not exist in current form.
    2. Crime data arrives late: Slow release of National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data delays any independent check on recorded offences against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
    3. Special measures run on stale figures: Affirmative action is being implemented on 2011 Census data, which can mask a regression in the socioeconomic status of Scheduled Tribes and Adivasis.
    4. The effect is no longer administrative: The absence of data has moved past lethargy into actively impeding independent verification of the state’s own claims about fighting caste and faith based discrimination.

    What has happened to the domestic accountability machinery?

    1. Accreditation at risk: The Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI), the peer body that accredits national human rights institutions against the Paris Principles, recommended a downgrade of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) last year.
    2. The stated grounds: The appointment of police officers to investigative roles within the Commission, and a lack of pluralism in its composition.
    3. The consequence: With the domestic institution weakened, a treaty body review becomes the surviving external check rather than a supplement to a working domestic one.

    Domestic matter or international accountability?

    1. The sovereignty claim: The government treats the caste question as an internal matter and has dismissed the Committee’s concerns as politically motivated.
    2. The counter position: A definitional objection raised at the treaty body removes an entire class of discrimination from review without disputing that the discrimination occurs.
    3. Who is left carrying it: With the state contesting jurisdiction, the work of raising these issues in multilateral fora falls to civil society organisations, which are themselves the subject of the Committee’s concern about the use of regulatory and criminal law against them.

    What does the road ahead require?

    1. Institutional independence: Restoring the independence of the NHRC, beginning with the composition and appointment concerns that triggered the accreditation review.
    2. Criminal law: Expressly criminalising racist hate speech, which the current code does not do.
    3. Affirmative action: Supportive affirmative action, extended rather than narrowed, for the communities the measures are meant to reach.
    4. Data: Collecting and publishing disaggregated data on the affected communities.
    5. Electoral process: Improving the transparency of electoral roll revisions.
    6. Enforcement: Strengthening enforcement of existing protective law overall.

    Challenges to treaty body review as a check on caste discrimination

    1. No individual complaint route: India has not made the declaration under Article 14 of ICERD, so an individual or a group in India cannot petition the Committee directly. Eg. States that have made the Article 14 declaration allow individual communications, and India’s absence from that list leaves domestic courts as the only forum. Fix. Make the Article 14 declaration, which is a unilateral act requiring no amendment to the Convention.
    2. The evidence base is state controlled: The Committee reviews what the state chooses to report, so a gap in official data becomes a gap in the review itself. Eg. Shadow reports by non governmental organisations are the main corrective, which is why restrictions on their foreign funding directly shape what the Committee sees. Fix. Require the state report to be tabled domestically before submission, so its omissions are contested at home first.
    3. Long reporting gaps defeat periodicity: The Convention requires reports every two years and states file many years late with no consequence. Eg. Several states parties carry reports overdue by more than a decade on the Committee’s own schedule. Fix. Apply the review in the absence of a report procedure on a fixed timetable, so a missing report does not postpone scrutiny.
    4. Recommendations have no domestic legal effect: A concluding observation creates no right enforceable in an Indian court, since a treaty requires enabling legislation under Article 253 of the Constitution to become domestic law. Eg. Courts have used unincorporated treaty obligations as an interpretive aid rather than as a source of enforceable rights, as in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997). Fix. Route the recommendations through the NHRC’s statutory annual report to Parliament, so each produces a documented government response.

    Conclusion

    The dispute is not over whether the discrimination occurs but over whether an international body may examine it, and the two positions cannot both hold: a Convention read to cover inherited status, and a state reading that places caste outside its scope. What keeps the disagreement unresolvable is that the evidence which would settle either claim is the same disaggregated data the state has not produced.

    Back2Basics

    1. Statutory basis: It was constituted under the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993.
    2. Composition: It is chaired by a former Chief Justice of India or a former judge of the Supreme Court, with members including a serving or former Chief Justice of a High Court and persons with knowledge of human rights.
    3. Powers: It inquires into complaints of human rights violation, exercises the powers of a civil court during inquiry, and may visit places of detention.
    4. Recommendatory character: Its findings are recommendations to the government concerned, which must report the action taken, and the Commission cannot enforce them itself.

    “[2023, GS1, 15 marks] Why is caste identity in India both fluid and static?”

  • Old rules, New rebels — Haryana khap panchayats vs Gen Z

    Why in the News

    Several khap panchayats, unelected community bodies dominated by elderly men from landowning communities, across north Haryana have passed resolutions banning marriage within the same gotra or khap cluster, live-in relationships and same-sex relationships, with violators to be barred from entering their villages. The resolutions followed outrage over a remark by a Naugama khap member at a meeting in Jind district, who said the phones of young women riding pillion in “unsuitable” clothing while using mobile phones should be smashed. Khap leaders describe the resolutions as guidance to preserve social cohesion, while young Haryanvis, women and men, have used social media to argue the diktats target women’s autonomy and carry no constitutional or legal standing.

    What are khap panchayats, and what have they resolved?

    1. An extra-constitutional community body: A khap panchayat is an unelected council, typically drawn from elderly men of a dominant landowning community, that claims authority over marriage, relationships and social conduct within a cluster of villages it oversees. Haryana has more than 130 such khaps.
    2. The August 9 Kandela resolution: Twenty-four khap panchayats meeting at Kandela village in Jind passed a resolution disallowing marriage within the same gotra or cluster, on the belief that members of the network are one extended social family regardless of caste.
    3. Bans on live-in and same-sex relationships: The khaps also passed resolutions against live-in and same-sex relationships and against content they consider obscene, while urging the government to regulate love marriages.
    4. No legal enforcement power: Khap members themselves acknowledge that khaps hold no legal authority. Fix. The stated penalty for disobedience, social ostracisation and exclusion from the village, is enforced through community pressure rather than any legal process.

    What triggered the current backlash?

    1. The viral remark on women’s mobility: Virender Dhull, a khap member and a school director of physical education, said at the Naugama khap meeting on August 1 that young women’s phones should be smashed if they rode pillion with legs astride while using phones or wearing clothes the khap found unsuitable.
    2. Local khap leaders disputed the characterisation: Naugama khap president Jaivir Lohan said the remark was an individual’s opinion, not a khap ban, and that parents, not the khap, should decide what is appropriate for their children.
    3. Same-gotra marriage was defended on genetic grounds: Lohan justified the ban on same-gotra marriage by citing a shared gene pool leading to genetic disorders and weak offspring, a claim not supported by the resolution’s actual social rationale of treating khap members as kin.

    How has Gen Z pushed back?

    1. Satire and direct criticism on social media: An M.A. student from Jind posted a video imagining a “Gen Z panchayat” that restricts elderly men’s card-playing and hookah use, questioning why moral scrutiny falls only on women.
    2. A generational and constitutional framing: A journalism graduate from Jind argued the diktats are illegal and violate constitutional rights, including freedom of movement, expression and privacy, and said the views of a few khap members should not be taken as representative of Haryana.
    3. The backlash cuts across gender: Content creators, including men, have criticised the khaps, though some responses have relied on derogatory personal attacks on khap members rather than constitutional argument.
    4. Data cited by critics: Commentators have linked the diktats to Haryana’s skewed sex ratio, noting the state’s Sex Ratio at Birth fell to 898 girls for every 1,000 boys in the first four months of 2026, alongside high youth unemployment.

    Challenges to khap panchayats’ authority

    1. Conflict with constitutional guarantees: Khap resolutions restricting marriage choice, mobility and relationships run against the fundamental rights to equality, personal liberty and freedom of movement. Eg. The Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (2018) ruling directed states to prevent khap panchayats from interfering with marriages between consenting adults. Fix. State governments should operationalise the safe-house and police-protection directions already laid down in that ruling rather than reacting only after a controversy goes viral.
    2. Exclusion of women from decision-making: Khap leadership remains almost entirely male; the Naugama khap’s 42 members are all men. Eg. Women were first elected as sarpanches in Haryana only in the 1980s, decades after khaps themselves had been functioning. Fix. Institutionalise the recently convened women-led mahapanchayats as standing bodies with actual resolution-making power, rather than as one-off gatherings.
    3. Selective moral policing: Restrictions target women’s clothing, mobility and phone use, while comparable scrutiny is not applied to men’s conduct, including drug use and crime among Haryana’s male youth. Eg. Critics have pointed out that no khap resolution has targeted male youth involved in drug abuse or crime, even as such resolutions are passed against women’s dress and mobility.

    Conclusion

    The wave of khap resolutions has sharpened a long-running collision in Haryana between a community-based order that claims authority over marriage and relationships and a legal system built around individual rights, now amplified by a socially connected Gen Z that is contesting these diktats openly online. The khaps have no legal power to enforce their rulings, but social ostracisation remains a real cost for those who defy them, leaving the underlying tension between custom and constitutional right unresolved.

    Back2Basics

    Gotra: A patrilineal clan or lineage group traditionally believed to descend from a common ancestor; marriage within the same gotra is customarily prohibited in parts of north India, the belief the Kandela resolution draws on.

      (GS2-07, 2015, 12.5 marks) Discuss critically the actions taken by the legislative, executive and the judiciary to set the things right in this regard.”