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Type: Op-ed

  • Reclaiming universities through trust, student voice

    Why in the News

    The Supreme Court has stayed the Bar Council of India (BCI)’s order against the graduating batch of the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR), Hyderabad. The same intervention quashed all first information reports (FIRs) against the protesting students. It declared that the BCI has no disciplinary control over students. It also reduced the three year practice condition for writing the judicial services examination to one year. The order follows a protest by law students seeking a say in their own convocation, widely attributed to an oral remark by the Chief Justice of India that was quickly clarified. The contest is over whether campus unrest is a failure of student discipline or a failure of a governance model that leaves students out of the decisions binding them.

    What is academic freedom?

    1. The freedom to teach, research and question: Academic freedom is the entitlement of those engaged in scholarly teaching and research to decide what to study, what to teach and what to challenge, without direction from the government or the university administration.
    2. No express Indian guarantee: The Constitution of India does not mention academic freedom. Article 5(3) of the German Basic Law guarantees scientific freedom (Wissenschaftsfreiheit) as a right of everyone engaged in scholarly teaching and research.
    3. A recognised right elsewhere: The Constitutions of Japan, South Africa, Portugal and Spain contain a comparable freedom. Article 137 of the Basic Law of Hong Kong provides that educational institutions may retain autonomy and enjoy academic freedom.
    4. Its limit is conduct, not speech: The freedom carries no right to defame or to engage in anti-national activity. Where an academic activity involves conduct rather than speech, the state is entitled to regulate that conduct.

    Why is curriculum the sharp edge of the dispute?

    1. Curriculum is set without the people it binds: University curriculum should be decided by the stakeholders, including students. Eg. Delhi University dropped a paper on the Delhi Sultanate along with some other papers.
    2. Students read such changes as political: Curriculum changes of this kind are seen as having ideological reasons rather than academic ones, which turns an academic decision into a governance grievance.
    3. The direction of restraint runs both ways: Government is not to dictate to universities what to teach, how to teach and what not to teach. Universities owe the same freedom to their departments and faculties.
    4. The campus exists for the contested question: Universities are meant to be a special place for reflection, inquiry and discussion, which is the function a closed curriculum process removes.

    What do experiences abroad show about academic freedom under pressure?

    1. The United States has used funding as leverage: Federal funding has been weaponised to reshape campus culture. Diversity programmes have been dismantled and research funding in areas such as climate change has been reduced.
    2. Permitting protest has itself invited pressure: Universities have faced pressure for allowing student protests, including those over Gaza.
    3. Neither ideological side is exempt: Right wing and left wing regimes have both, at times, sought to control universities.
    4. The pattern is old: Arnold Toynbee resigned from King’s College London in 1924 over his writings on the Greek army’s atrocities. Professors were persecuted during the McCarthy era.
    5. Funders now shape the research agenda: Declining public funding has left research agendas increasingly influenced by funders, corporations and pharmaceutical companies.

    What is the control model of university governance?

    1. Authority sits in one office: Most universities remain Vice-Chancellor centric. Students, who are the reason universities exist, have little say in their governance.
    2. Grievances have no route upward: Vice-Chancellors rarely hold open houses and are often inaccessible to ordinary students. Unaddressed grievances leave students feeling ignored, and some then take extreme steps.
    3. Control substitutes for dialogue: Administrations adopted the control model as governments increasingly sought to control universities. A community of highly educated faculty and young people requires dialogue, trust and openness rather than surveillance.
    4. Knowledge creation needs the opposite conditions: Universities exist to innovate and create knowledge, which requires the freedom to question everything and challenge existing ideas.

    How does under-investment compound the control problem?

    1. The policy target has not been met: The National Education Policy 2020 promises public investment of 6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in education. Public investment has steadily declined and hovers around 4 to 4.1 per cent.
    2. Higher education gets the smallest share: Within that spending, higher education receives the smallest allocation, so the system is over-regulated and grossly underfunded at the same time.
    3. Autonomy is not alien to the system: The ancient Gurukul system was entirely autonomous, and the present arrangement regulates far more and funds far less.
    4. The shortfall is visible on campus: Public university infrastructure has deteriorated and hostels are in acute shortage, which produced the recent deaths in New Delhi. Faculty positions remain vacant and guest faculty are poorly paid.
    5. Teaching and examinations both fail the student: Poor teaching frustrates students. Repeated examination paper leaks add to their stress.

    What do Vice-Chancellor appointments reveal?

    1. Natural justice is overlooked: In one case a Vice-Chancellor changed the composition of the selection committee, chaired it and voted in the selection of his wife. She was appointed as Vice-Chancellor.
    2. The courts did not correct it: The judiciary declined to follow its own precedents of quashing such appointments.
    3. An adverse record is not a bar: Individuals with questionable records and adverse Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) reports have been appointed, and some State universities face allegations of bribery.
    4. Recruitment rewards leaning over merit: Faculty recruitment over-emphasises ideological leanings rather than merit. Ideological governments may prefer candidates with particular leanings, and merit should not be completely undermined on that account.
    5. Examination integrity follows appointment integrity: No examination system can be foolproof where paper setters, moderators or testing officials are appointed for reasons other than absolute merit and integrity.

    Who actually absorbs the blame for campus unrest?

    1. The anger travels past the administration: Student frustration erupts against the government rather than against university administrations. The government received the criticism for the actions of the Vice-Chancellor in the appointment case.
    2. Much of it is avoidable on campus: The backlash could largely be avoided where administrations engage students in meaningful dialogue and provide timely relief.
    3. The government is not a bystander either: Administrations adopted the control model because governments sought control of universities, so the incentive that produced the model is a governmental one.

    What does the liberty model change?

    1. Trust is the operative mechanism: The liberty model of governance was implemented across three universities over 16 years. Students who are trusted act more responsibly in turn.
    2. Access without gatekeeping: Students met the Vice-Chancellor without appointments and raised personal concerns and difficulties. That access made frank conversations possible when difficult or unpopular decisions had to be taken.
    3. Unpopular ideas are protected: The model treats the university as a space where even the most unpopular ideas can be freely debated, which is the opposite of the top-down model.
    4. Students sit inside the decisions: Students are given a meaningful role in academic, administrative and financial decisions, including faculty appointments, procurement, curriculum design and the drafting of university regulations.
    5. A statutory precedent already exists: Students at Aligarh Muslim University have a statutory role in selecting the Vice-Chancellor.

    Challenges to the liberty model of university governance

    1. Participation rights can be captured by party politics: Campus unions aligned to national parties can convert a participation right into a channel for external political control. Eg. Delhi University Students’ Union elections are contested by the student wings of national parties.
      The Fix: Tie student participation to reserved seats on academic and finance bodies with fixed terms, so it runs through statutory channels rather than street mobilisation.
    2. A Vice-Chancellor cannot devolve powers that are not his: Faculty appointments and university finances are governed by University Grants Commission (UGC) regulations and State legislation, so student participation in them rests on the incumbent’s discretion. Eg. The Vice-Chancellor is himself selected by the Chancellor or Visitor from a search committee panel.
      The Fix: Amend university statutes to create student membership on selection and finance committees, so participation has a legal basis rather than a personal one.
    3. The model lapses with the person who ran it: A governance style adopted by one Vice-Chancellor ends when that office changes hands, since nothing in the statute compels a successor to continue it. Eg. Open house access is an administrative practice and not a rule.
      The Fix: Write grievance redressal timelines and open house frequency into university ordinances so the practice survives a change of office.
    4. Trust cannot supply what money supplies: Dialogue does not create hostel seats, permanent faculty or laboratory funding, which are the material grounds of much campus unrest. Eg. Sanctioned faculty posts in central and State universities stay vacant regardless of the governance style adopted.
      The Fix: Link central grants to filled sanctioned posts and audited hostel capacity, so funding follows the deficits that generate protest.

    Conclusion

    The Supreme Court’s order settles who may discipline a law student. It does not settle who governs a campus. Curriculum decisions, convocation arrangements and appointments all turn on whether students hold any formal seat in university decision making, and at present they hold almost none. The measure worth watching is whether university statutes are amended to give students standing on academic and selection bodies, since a governance practice resting on the person in office leaves with that person.

    Higher Education in India

    1. Second largest system in the world: Total enrolment is estimated at 4.65 crore in 2026, up from 3.42 crore in 2014-15.
    2. Institutional spread: India hosts over 1,168 universities and 45,473 colleges, against 760 universities in 2014-15.
    3. Participation is short of the target: The Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education, meaning enrolment at that stage as a share of the population in the corresponding age group, stands at 28.4 per cent against the National Education Policy 2020 target of 50 per cent by 2035.
    4. Women now enrol marginally more than men: The Gender Parity Index stands at 1.01, indicating slightly higher female than male participation for the first time.

    Constitutional Framework Governing Higher Education

    1. Entry 25, List III: Education, including technical and medical education and universities, is a Concurrent List subject after the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976.
    2. Entry 66, List I: Coordination and determination of standards in institutions of higher education and research is reserved to the Union.
    3. Entry 63, List I: Banaras Hindu University, Aligarh Muslim University and Delhi University are institutions of national importance under Union competence, along with any other so declared by Parliament.
    4. Article 30(1): Religious and linguistic minorities have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.
    5. Article 19(1)(a): Free speech on campus is protected, subject only to the restrictions Article 19(2) itself permits.

    Laws and Rules Governing Higher Education

    1. University Grants Commission Act, 1956: Establishes the UGC to coordinate and determine standards in university education and to disburse grants to universities and colleges.
    2. All India Council for Technical Education Act, 1987: Creates the statutory regulator for technical education, covering planning, norms and approval of technical institutions.
    3. National Council for Teacher Education Act, 1993: Creates the regulator for teacher education programmes and the institutions that run them.
    4. Anusandhan National Research Foundation Act, 2023: Establishes the National Research Foundation to seed and fund research across higher educational institutions, including State universities.

    Government Initiatives for Higher Education

    1. National Education Policy 2020: Replaces the National Policy on Education, 1986, and is built on access, equity, quality, affordability and accountability.
    2. Academic Bank of Credits: A digital repository holding course credits, which enables multiple entry and exit within a degree programme.
    3. Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry (APAAR): A single student identifier linking academic records, skills and transfers in one portal.
    4. Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship: Doctoral fellowships for research scholars, expanded to award 10,000 new fellowships.

    Challenges in Higher Education Governance

    1. Fragmented regulatory structure: Multiple bodies issue overlapping and sometimes conflicting guidelines to the same institution, which delays academic decisions. Eg. A technical department inside a university answers to the All India Council for Technical Education and the UGC at the same time.
      The Fix: Consolidate approvals under a single higher education regulator with separate verticals for funding, standard setting and accreditation.
    2. Quality is unmeasured across much of the system: Over 30 per cent of Indian higher educational institutions remain unaccredited as of early 2026. Eg. Accreditation by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council is not a precondition for most colleges to award degrees.
      The Fix: Make one completed accreditation cycle a condition for degree granting status and for central grants.
    3. Research spending is stagnant: Research and development expenditure stands at 0.64 per cent of GDP, against about 2.4 per cent in China and 3.4 per cent in the United States. Eg. India contributes under 5 per cent of global research publications.
      The Fix: Route National Research Foundation funding towards State universities, which carry most enrolment and almost none of the research grant.
    4. Employability does not follow the degree: Curricula are not aligned to hiring requirements, so enrolment growth does not convert into work. Eg. Only about 4 per cent of higher education carries formal skill training.
      The Fix: Embed apprenticeship credits inside degree programmes under the National Credit Framework.

    Back2Basics: Bar Council of India

    1. A statutory body under the Advocates Act, 1961: It regulates the legal profession and legal education in India.
    2. Standard setting: It lays down standards of professional conduct and etiquette for advocates, and prescribes the conditions on which a law degree is recognised for enrolment.
    3. Composition: Its members are elected by the State Bar Councils, with the Attorney General of India and the Solicitor General of India as ex officio members.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2014, GS2, 12.5 marks] Should the premier institutes like IITs/IIMs be allowed to retain premier status, allowed more academic independence in designing courses and also decide mode/criteria of selection of students. Discuss in light of the growing challenges.”

  • Punjab stand on judge sets disturbing precedent

    Why in the News

    Justice Ashwani Kumar Mishra has taken oath as Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, with the front-row chair reserved for the Punjab Chief Minister left empty. A day earlier the State Cabinet had asked the Punjab Governor to hold off the oath-taking. Its stated ground was that the Centre notified the appointment without the State’s consent, in breach of the Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) that governs judicial appointments. The Supreme Court Collegium had recommended Justice Mishra and three other judges as chief justices of four High Courts on 6 August, and the Centre notified the appointment on 5 September. The contest is between a State’s right to be consulted on a High Court appointment and a consultative process that fixes no deadline for the State to answer.

    What is the Memorandum of Procedure?

    1. The rulebook for judicial appointments: The MoP sets out the sequence by which judges of the higher judiciary are recommended, consulted upon and appointed.
    2. It requires the States to be consulted: Before a High Court appointment is notified, the Centre must consult the State concerned.
    3. It fixes no time limit on the State: The document sets no deadline for a State to send its response.
    4. It is an executive document, not a statute: The MoP is settled between the Centre and the judiciary, and a revised version sought after the National Judicial Appointments Commission was struck down in 2015 remains unfinished.

    What is Punjab’s case?

    1. Consent was not obtained: The Cabinet’s position is that the Centre notified the appointment without the State’s concurrence, which it treats as a breach of the MoP.
    2. No deadline binds the State: Punjab is correct that the MoP prescribes no deadline for a State’s response, so a delayed reply violates nothing on the document’s own terms.
    3. The flexibility has a purpose: That absence of a deadline exists because judicial appointment is designed as a consultative process rather than a clearance queue.

    Why does the case not hold?

    1. Weeks were available and went unused: If the State government had reservations about Justice Mishra, it had weeks in which to put them on file, where they could have been examined on their merits.
    2. The silence blocked three other courts: The delay in Punjab’s response held up all four chief justice appointments recommended in the same Collegium resolution.
    3. The court had recently ruled against the State: As Acting Chief Justice, Justice Mishra’s bench pulled up Punjab in August for withholding dearness allowance dues and for finding ample money for advertising. His court also heard a Mohali case in which allegations were made against the Chief Minister’s wife, which the ruling party has described as politically motivated.

    Is this an isolated episode?

    1. The same move was attempted in Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party earlier sought to have Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma taken off the appeal in the excise policy case in which its leaders are arraigned as accused.
    2. The precedent this sets: Treating an adverse order as a personal affront converts a judicial outcome into a ground for obstructing an appointment, which is a template no political party should be able to rely on.

    What reform does the episode point to?

    1. Defined timelines belong in the MoP: The episode makes the case for writing fixed response periods into a document that currently has none.
    2. A benchmark already exists on the other side: The Supreme Court has set the Centre a benchmark of three to four weeks for clearing names reiterated by the Collegium.
    3. Deemed consent closes the gap: A comparable window for State responses, after which consent is treated as given, would remove the ambiguity this episode exposed.

    Conclusion

    Disagreement between the Centre and a State over an appointment is ordinary constitutional business, and nothing about it is improper. Withholding a reply is not disagreement; it is the absence of one, and it quietly converts a consultative step into a veto that no rule ever granted. A written objection with reasons can be examined and answered; silence can only be waited out. What remains unresolved is whether the duty to consult carries a corresponding duty to respond, and the present arrangement supplies no answer either way.

    Back2Basics: The Collegium

    1. What it is: The Collegium is the body of senior judges that recommends appointments and transfers in the higher judiciary. It finds no mention in the text of the Constitution.
    2. Its composition: For Supreme Court appointments it consists of the Chief Justice of India and the four seniormost judges of the Supreme Court.
    3. Where it came from: It emerged from the Second Judges Case (1993), which read “consultation” in Articles 124 and 217 as concurrence, and was expanded by the Third Judges Case (1998).
    4. Its binding force: The government may return a recommendation once, but a name reiterated by the Collegium is binding on it.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2025, GS2, 15.0 marks] Discuss the evolution of collegium system in India. Critically examine the advantages and disadvantages of the system on appointment of the Judges of the Supreme Court of India and that of the USA.”

  • [8th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: India can cut steel emissions before coal plants lock them in

    [8th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: India can cut steel emissions before coal plants lock them in

    Question (2025): “Write a review on India’s climate commitments under the Paris Agreement (2015) and mention how these have been further strengthened in COP26 (2021). In this direction, how has the first Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) intended by India been updated in 2022?
    Linkage: Since steelmaking alone accounts for roughly 12% of India’s national greenhouse gas emissions, the investment choices made during this relining cycle will decide whether India can successfully honor its updated NDCs and progress toward its long-term Net-Zero targets

    Mentor Comment

    Indian steelmakers are approaching a replacement cycle in which more than 43 million tonnes per annum of blast furnace capacity falls due for relining before 2030. Relining is a capital intensive overhaul carried out roughly every two decades that extends a plant’s working life by another 15 to 20 years. A study published in Nature Climate Change finds that avoiding new blast furnaces, declining to reline young ones, and redirecting that money to electric arc furnaces could almost halve globally committed steel emissions. India’s steelmaking emissions are about 32% above the global average and account for nearly 12% of national greenhouse gas emissions. The tension is that the decision is not a technology problem but a timing problem: the furnaces chosen in this cycle fix the sector’s emissions until the 2040s, well before any of the promised hydrogen supply exists.

    How is steel made, and where do the emissions come from?

    1. The blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace route: Coking coal is burned in a blast furnace to smelt iron ore and strip its oxygen, producing a carbon rich liquid iron. That liquid is then blown with pure oxygen in a basic oxygen furnace to burn off impurities and yield steel.
    2. Why that route is carbon intensive: Coal here is not only the heat source but the chemical agent that removes oxygen from the ore, so the carbon dioxide is produced by the chemistry itself and not merely by combustion.
    3. The scrap and electric arc furnace route: An electric arc furnace melts steel scrap using electricity, skipping the ore reduction step entirely. Its emissions intensity is less than half that of the coal route.
    4. The direct reduced iron route: Direct reduced iron (DRI) strips oxygen from ore using a gas rather than coal, and the resulting solid iron is then melted in an electric furnace. Run on natural gas it emits around 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne of steel, and run on green hydrogen it is close to zero.

    How large is India’s steel emissions problem?

    1. Intensity above the world: India’s steelmaking emissions are roughly 32% higher than the global average, meaning each tonne produced here carries more carbon than a tonne produced elsewhere.
    2. Share of national emissions: The sector accounts for nearly 12% of India’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
    3. Scale and growth: India produced around 160 million tonnes of crude steel in FY 2025-26, the second highest in the world after China. Demand is driven by infrastructure development, construction and automotive manufacturing.
    4. Scrap scarcity limits the easy route: A developing economy that has not yet accumulated a large stock of old steel cannot recycle its way to lower emissions, because there is little scrap to feed electric arc furnaces.

    What does the National Mission on Green Steel actually promise?

    1. The intensity target: The Mission aims to bring steelmaking emissions intensity down from the current 2.55 to 2.65 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) per tonne of crude steel to 2.2 tCO2e by 2029-30.
    2. The money behind it: A Rs 5,000 crore scheme to accelerate steel sector decarbonisation was announced last year and is set to launch in the coming months.
    3. The certification threshold: A certification scheme launched under the Mission in 2024 treats any steel made below 2.2 tCO2e as green, with the greenest band extending up to 1.6 tCO2e.
    4. The threshold sits above the world average: Global steelmaking averages around 1.85 tCO2e, so steel certified as India’s greenest can still be more carbon intensive than the world’s ordinary output.

    What does India’s furnace mix look like, and where is it headed?

    1. The current split: 43% of India’s crude steel comes from blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace plants, 22% from electric arc furnaces and 35% from electric induction furnaces, which use electromagnetic fields to process small batches of scrap or direct reduced iron.
    2. The projected drift: Blast furnace capacity is projected to rise to 56% of the mix by 2030 on the strength of planned new plants.
    3. The global picture: 70.4% of world steelmaking still uses the coal based route, with the remainder on electric arc furnaces.
    4. India’s mix is unusually heterogeneous: More than half of Indian output already comes from electricity based furnaces, which is a starting position most large producers do not have.

    Why does the relining decision lock in emissions for decades?

    1. Relining resets the clock: A blast furnace overhauled today keeps operating on coal for another 15 to 20 years, and more than 43 million tonnes per annum of capacity falls due for that overhaul before 2030.
    2. The plants are still on paper: The majority of new basic oxygen furnace plants planned in India have not broken ground, so switching them to direct reduced iron and electric arc furnace designs is a redirection of committed money rather than a fresh demand for capital.
    3. Sunk cost makes reversal politically hard: Once large sums are invested in a coal based asset, closing it early becomes a fight over stranded value rather than an engineering decision.
    4. The abatement is cheap only now: Emissions avoided at the investment stage cost far less than emissions removed later through bioenergy with carbon capture and storage or carbon dioxide removal technologies.

    What do the modelled transition pathways show?

    1. What was modelled: Two global steel sector pathways consistent with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, allowing an overshoot of up to 1.7 degrees Celsius.
    2. Who drives the outcome: China and India dominate the dynamics of the fast transition scenario, because their near term coal based investments far exceed those of every other region.
    3. The cost of moving slowly: In the slow transition scenario young blast furnaces are relined and announced plants are built as planned, which forces heavier reliance on carbon dioxide removal technologies that remain immature, plus deeper cuts in other sectors.
    4. The fuel sequence India would follow: The model has India running direct reduced iron and electric arc furnace plants mainly on natural gas until 2040 to 2045, switching to hydrogen once it becomes cost competitive.
    5. The reframing: Steel is described less as a hard to abate sector than as a sector facing a hard to abate investment barrier, since the technology already exists and only the green premium stands in the way.

    Is India’s certified green steel actually green?

    1. The brackets are wide: The certification bands are broad enough that steel qualifying as green can still be more carbon intensive than ordinary steel made elsewhere, which weakens the label as a signal.
    2. India defined the term first: No other country has set out a formal definition of green steel, so the taxonomy itself is an initiative rather than a copy.
    3. The demand side was never built: Certification creates a supply of labelled steel without creating any buyer obliged to prefer it, so the premium has no market to be recovered in.
    4. Uptake so far: ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India became the first integrated steel producer to receive green steel certification in February this year, and 89 steel units held the certification as of 31 March, covering 12.34 million tonnes of production.

    What is pushing steelmakers to move now?

    1. The export penalty: The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism came into effect in January, imposing steep penalties on carbon intensive imports including India’s high emission steel.
    2. The commercial response: India has been seeking alternative markets and boosting domestic consumption, while compliance obligations push producers to reconsider which furnace technology to invest in.
    3. Public money for hydrogen: The Union Ministry of New and Renewable Energy funded three pilot green hydrogen projects in March totalling more than Rs 400 crore, to validate the technical feasibility of using 100% green hydrogen in furnaces.
    4. The first commercial link: JSW Energy commissioned India’s largest commercial scale green hydrogen plant at Vijayanagar in Karnataka last year to supply 100% green hydrogen to the adjoining JSW Steel direct reduced iron unit.

    Challenges to steel decarbonisation in India

    1. The bridge fuel carries its own lock in: Natural gas based direct reduction substitutes an imported fuel for a domestic one, exposing the sector to supply shortages, price shocks and gas infrastructure that is stranded once hydrogen arrives. Eg. India imports roughly half its natural gas, and delivered prices swung sharply through the European supply crisis.
    2. The thermal power precedent: Once heavy capital sits in a coal asset, the owner resists closure in order to recover the investment, which is how India acquired thermal plants that are uneconomic yet politically impossible to retire. Eg. Several state generating stations continue running below viable plant load factors rather than shutting down.
    3. Electricity based steel is only as clean as the grid: An electric arc furnace shifts emissions from the furnace to the power station, so in a coal heavy grid the accounting gain outruns the physical one. Eg. Coal still supplies the majority of India’s generation, so an induction furnace running at night draws largely thermal power.
    4. Green hydrogen is not yet affordable at steel scale: Running a direct reduction plant on hydrogen today costs far more than running it on gas, and a steel plant needs hydrogen in volumes no pilot has demonstrated. Eg. Existing Indian projects supply a single adjoining unit rather than a cluster of plants.
    5. Iron ore quality constrains the switch: Direct reduction needs high grade iron ore or pellets, and much of India’s ore is not of that grade, so the route requires beneficiation capacity that does not yet exist. Eg. Indian producers rely on lower grade ore fines that suit blast furnaces but not shaft furnaces.

    Way Forward

    1. Make gas based DRI hydrogen ready: Design gas based direct reduction plants as hydrogen ready at the outset, so the shaft furnace does not need replacing at the point of switching.
    2. Plan for coal asset retirement: Attach a stated retirement date and a transition financing package to every new coal based approval, so the exit is priced when the asset is sanctioned.
    3. Link steel decarbonisation with clean electricity: Tie decarbonisation scheme support to a round the clock renewable supply contract for the plant rather than to the furnace type alone.
    4. Aggregate green hydrogen demand: Aggregate demand across neighbouring plants into a single hydrogen offtake contract, so an electrolyser project can be financed against assured volume.
    5. Build beneficiation and pelletisation capacity: Include ore beneficiation and pelletisation capacity within the decarbonisation scheme’s eligible expenditure, not only the furnace itself.

    Conclusion

    The steel sector’s emissions are being decided by a maintenance schedule rather than by a climate policy. Every furnace relined in this cycle removes a plant from the reachable set for two decades, and every plant still on paper can be redirected at no extra cost. The unresolved tension is that India has defined green steel and funded the technology without creating a single buyer obliged to pay for it, so the supply side moves while the demand side does not. The measurable thing to watch is how much of the 43 million tonnes per annum falling due before 2030 is relined rather than replaced.

    Back2Basics: Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism

    1. What it is: A levy charged by an importing jurisdiction on the greenhouse gases embedded in an imported good, set at the carbon price the importing jurisdiction’s own producers already pay.
    2. Why it exists: It is intended to prevent carbon leakage, meaning the shifting of production to countries with weaker climate rules rather than an actual reduction in emissions.
    3. What it covers: The European Union’s version applies to iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen, the goods with the highest embedded emissions per unit of trade value.
    4. How it is contested: Developing country exporters argue the levy shifts the cost of the importing country’s climate policy onto producers who bear no comparable historical responsibility.

  • India’s opportunity to put BRICS back together

    Why in the News

    The 18th BRICS Summit is to be held in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September 2026 under India’s chairship. The grouping now carries 11 members and 10 partner countries after an expansion India and Brazil both resisted. Its founding practice of adopting documents only by consensus has been bypassed more than once since 2020, most recently at the BRICS Foreign Ministers’ meeting held in New Delhi in May 2026. The contest is over what the group is for: a reform coalition of emerging economies working inside existing institutions, or a bloc defined by opposition to the West. The summit is the point at which the chair can push that choice one way or the other.

    What is BRICS?

    1. What it is: BRICS is a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, formed to give the emerging economies a greater voice in global governance and institutions, particularly financial and economic ones, and to work towards a more equitable multilateral order.
    2. How it works: It has no treaty and no binding decision procedure. It operates by consensus, and its output is a summit declaration adopted by all members.
    3. What it has built: Its principal institution is the New Development Bank, the multilateral development bank established by the members to lend for infrastructure and sustainable development.

    What did India originally want from BRICS?

    1. A vehicle for reform: India was an enthusiastic early participant, treating the group as a means of securing genuine reform of multilateral institutions.
    2. The first Indian-hosted summit: The fourth BRICS summit, held in India in 2012, took the theme “Global Stability, Security and Prosperity”, which tacitly reflected a much broader geopolitical canvas than economics alone.
    3. What the Indian presidency produced: It helped lead to the establishment of the New Development Bank. Other Indian initiatives followed, including the integration of a counter-terrorism architecture into the group’s work.
    4. The current chairship’s framing: This year’s theme rests on four pillars, Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability, and draws on the Prime Minister’s “Humanity First” vision and a “people-centric” approach to BRICS cooperation.

    How did China’s use of BRICS diverge from the reform agenda?

    1. A different purpose from the start: China saw the group as a counterpoise to Western domination, a view India also shared initially in the specific context of reform.
    2. Why China needed the platform: A group of emerging economies accounting for nearly 20 per cent of world GDP in 2010 could amplify Chinese global ambitions in a way China could not do alone.
    3. The outreach mechanisms carried the design: BRICS-Plus and BRICS Outreach were used to reach the Global South and consolidate its profile as a second pole in a future bipolar world.
    4. Reform support proved selective: China resisted supporting the bids of India, Brazil and South Africa for permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. India then shifted its own effort towards consolidation and intra-BRICS matters to resist Chinese grandstanding.

    What has happened to the consensus principle?

    1. Consensus is what held the group together: It is the practice that prevents a majority from binding the rest, and its erosion changes what membership is worth.
    2. The 2019 summit was the high point of restraint: The Brasilia summit was held with no invited guest countries at all, only the five original members.
    3. The first breach came in 2020: Under the Russian presidency a chair’s statement on COVID-19 was issued without consensus, probably the first such document in the group’s history.
    4. It has become routine: Non-consensus documents were resorted to again at the Foreign Ministers’ meeting in May 2026, because the new members could not agree.
    5. The failure model already exists: The danger is that BRICS goes the way of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), where a majority can bulldoze its view through.

    What has expansion done to the group’s cohesion?

    1. China pushed it and India resisted: China pressed first for expansion of the New Development Bank and then for expansion of BRICS itself. India and Brazil both resisted and were overruled.
    2. The size now: The group has 11 members following the addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia, along with 10 partner countries.
    3. The original five manage their differences: Some of those differences are serious, and the five handle them with the maturity that keeping the group intact requires.
    4. The new members do not: They carry their bilateral conflicts into the group and are subverting it through them.
    5. The regional precedent: The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is the case of a grouping paralysed by the bilateral disputes of its own members.

    Is BRICS non-West or anti-West?

    1. India’s line is “non-West”: India has worked to keep the group non-West against pressure from some members to turn it explicitly anti-West.
    2. Events push the other way: China is competing with the United States for global leadership, Russia is at war with Ukraine with the full backing of Europe, and Iran is being bombarded by the United States and Israel.
    3. Two members are under direct pressure: Brazil and India have both been subjected to punitive tariffs by the U.S. President, and the U.S. Congress is considering legislation empowering the President to levy punitive tariffs on countries importing Russian oil.
    4. India’s other options are weakening at the same time: The Quad is being emasculated by the United States, India-U.S. relations are under great pressure, Pakistan is being courted by the United States at India’s expense, and global institutions are being made dysfunctional by the West.
    5. The restraint has support inside the group: Many members share India’s effort to prevent an anti-Western drift, since they gain from engaging actors in different camps in their own national interest. They want change without geopolitical realignment behind China and Russia.

    Why is de-dollarisation not moving as China wants?

    1. The parallel currency proposal has stalled: The push for de-dollarisation through the establishment of a BRICS currency is receiving a lukewarm response.
    2. The reason is who would dominate it: Members are uncomfortable with a currency dominated by the renminbi.
    3. What they will accept instead: The preference is for interlinking payment systems, central bank digital currencies and transactions settled in national currencies.
    4. China is proceeding on its own track: After a successful pilot, it is formally launching mBridge, an alternative cross-border financial payment system.
    5. What India is guarding against: An alternative Bretton Woods system dominated by China is the outcome India least wants.

    What parallel orders are being built outside BRICS?

    1. Both major powers are writing their own rules: The United States and China are enunciating parallel visions of the world and playing by rules of their own rather than internationally negotiated ones.
    2. The contested areas are new ones: Parallel structures and standards are being set in artificial intelligence, digital and Internet governance, data ownership, state control, 5G and 6G telecom, satellite navigation and electric vehicles.
    3. China has added an institution: It has set up a World AI Cooperation Organisation in Shanghai.
    4. The financial architecture already has a rival: The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative and the Digital Silk Road challenge the Bretton Woods institutions and their governance and financing models.
    5. Neither power wants reform: Both are building around the existing institutions rather than seeking to change them, and both see BRICS as one vehicle for those broader goals.

    What is “reformed multilateralism” and why does India want it back?

    1. Where it came from: The Prime Minister first articulated the vision of “reformed multilateralism” at the leaders’ retreat of the 2018 BRICS Summit in South Africa.
    2. How it became group language: By 2019 it had found its way into the summit document at Brasilia, with India, Brazil and South Africa pushing for it.
    3. What it commits the group to: Changing the governance of existing institutions rather than replacing them, which is the opposite of building parallel structures.
    4. Why it matters now: Reviving it makes BRICS a strong voice for the non-West middle powers and, by extension, for the Global South.

    Can BRICS be an organisation of Global South middle powers?

    1. A Global South middle power is a different thing: The middle powers described at Davos by the Canadian Prime Minister are broadly West-centric, and a Global South middle power does not share that anchoring.
    2. BRICS is the only credible platform: If there is a credible organisation of Global South middle powers, it is BRICS.
    3. Its largest member does not fit the description: China is hardly a middle power and holds disproportionate influence within the group.
    4. The India-China relationship is the constraint: The two need greater synergy on emerging global issues even as their bilateral differences are being contained.
    5. The composition is incomplete: Some middle powers that ought to be in the group are not represented in it, which limits what it can claim to speak for.

    Challenges to BRICS

    1. De-dollarisation is rhetorical rather than operational: The share of world trade actually settled outside the dollar has barely moved despite a decade of declarations. Eg. The US dollar is still used in over 80 per cent of global trade settlement.
      The Fix: Set a measurable target for local-currency settlement of intra-group trade and report performance against it at each summit.
    2. Intra-group trade is thin: Members trade far more with the G7 than with each other, so the group’s combined economic weight does not convert into bargaining leverage. Eg. Most members still rely on G7 markets for high-technology imports and services exports.
      The Fix: Negotiate a tariff-preference arrangement covering a limited list of goods, rather than a full trade agreement the membership cannot agree on.
    3. There is no permanent secretariat or charter: Work does not carry between summits, so each chair restarts the agenda and commitments lapse without anyone recording that they have. Eg. The New Development Bank remains the only permanent institution the group has built since its first summit.
      The Fix: Create a small standing secretariat with the single mandate of tracking summit commitments and reporting compliance.
    4. Sanctions constrain the group’s own bank: Western sanctions on Russia limit the New Development Bank’s ability to lend for certain projects, which weakens the alternative it was built to be. Eg. The bank put new transactions in Russia on hold in 2022.
      The Fix: Raise the share of local-currency lending and widen the capital base to more Global South members, so exposure to one jurisdiction’s sanctions falls.
    5. The political systems diverge too far for common positions on norms: The membership spans established democracies and autocracies, so joint declarations cannot carry commitments on rights or governance standards. Eg. Group declarations avoid the language on domestic governance that G7 communiqués routinely carry.
      The Fix: Confine collective positions to the areas where interests genuinely converge, namely institutional reform, development finance and technology standards.

    Conclusion

    BRICS is now being asked to do two jobs that pull against each other. One is to press for reform of institutions that its largest member has no interest in reforming. The other is to hold an enlarged membership carrying live bilateral quarrels inside a body that can only decide unanimously. The Delhi outcome will indicate which job the group has chosen. The specific marker is whether the summit closes on a declaration adopted by every member or on a chair’s statement issued over the heads of some.

    Global South Plurilateral Groupings in India’s Foreign Policy

    1. About: A plurilateral grouping is a small, issue-focused coalition of states that operates outside a formal treaty organisation. Its instruments are summit declarations and working groups rather than binding law.
    2. Why India uses them: They allow India to pursue different interests with different partners at the same time, which is what multi-alignment means in operation.
    3. The spread in practice: India sits in BRICS and the SCO alongside Russia and China, and in the Quad and the I2U2 grouping alongside the United States, without either set of memberships cancelling the other.
    4. What they are measured by: Their output is agenda-setting and coalition building, not enforceable commitment, so their value lies in shifting what larger institutions are willing to discuss.

    Key Facts about BRICS and Global South Groupings

    1. The name: The acronym BRIC was coined in 2001 by a Goldman Sachs economist to group high-growth emerging economies. The first Foreign Ministers’ meeting was held on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in 2006.
    2. The first summit: The first leaders’ summit was held at Yekaterinburg in Russia in 2009, and South Africa joined in 2011 to make the grouping BRICS.
    3. Current weight: The enlarged grouping accounts for over 45 per cent of the world’s population, about 3.6 billion people, and roughly 37 per cent of global GDP measured at purchasing power parity, ahead of the G7 share.
    4. Energy: It controls roughly 42 per cent of global oil production and exports.
    5. New Development Bank: Headquartered at Shanghai, it has approved over $35 billion in infrastructure lending since it began operations.
    6. Contingent Reserve Arrangement: A $100 billion pool providing short-term liquidity support to members facing balance of payments pressure.
    7. Other Global South platforms: IBSA, the India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum, was formed in 2003. The G-77 was formed at the United Nations in 1964 with 77 founding members and now carries over 130.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS2, 10 marks] “BRICS acts as a powerful counterweight in global governance, actively amplifying the voice and influence of the Global South.” Explain the role of BRICS in projecting itself as an alternative to other groupings.”

  • What flu surge can teach us about next pandemic

    Why in the News

    Different parts of India have reported 2 to 10 times more influenza cases this year than last year. The official position is that the circulating strain has not changed, and public advisories ask people to remain vigilant without becoming alarmed. That instruction states no action a reader can take. The detection layer built after Covid-19 is working, and the layer that must convert a detection into a decision is not. A surge of this size is the period in which that gap can be closed, since a pandemic is the worst time to learn.

    Pillars of outbreak management

    1. Surveillance: The ability to detect an outbreak early and to initiate action on that detection. For influenza it also covers genomic surveillance to identify the strain or variant behind the rise, which is what allows its virulence and the population’s susceptibility to be gauged.
    2. Prevention: Issuing advisories to high-risk individuals to avoid crowded places, promoting mask use, and vaccinating high-risk individuals and health workers.
    3. Control: Ensuring that those already infected receive proper medical care.

    What does the current surge actually show?

    1. The size of the rise: Reported influenza cases across different parts of the country are 2 to 10 times last year’s level.
    2. Hospital positivity has risen: Among patients admitted with severe acute respiratory infection (an acute respiratory illness severe enough to require hospitalisation), the positivity rate in selected hospitals was 16 per cent this year against 12 per cent last year.
    3. An unchanged strain is not by itself the answer: A well-established virus does not warrant serious concern on virological grounds alone. The scale of transmission still decides how many avoidable deaths occur.

    Why does surveillance not convert into action?

    1. No alert threshold is defined: A rise in influenza positivity past a defined threshold should trigger an alert. No such thresholds exist.
    2. The data is not public: There is no publicly available dashboard on which positivity trends can be seen, so no one outside the system can tell when a threshold would have been crossed.
    3. Responsibility is split three ways: Laboratory surveillance sits with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), response coordination with the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), and implementation with State health systems.
    4. No one holds authority to act on the signal: No integrated command structure exists with clear authority to coordinate and implement a response during a disease upsurge. This was the specific lesson Covid-19 offered and it was not learnt.

    Where is the line between an appropriate response and one that causes panic?

    1. The stated fear is panic: Governments hesitate to issue advisories on the ground that a public warning will itself cause alarm.
    2. The line is genuinely thin: Governments across the world struggle to place it, and the WHO has itself been accused of overreacting.
    3. The asymmetry decides it: Where the primary concern is to save lives, overreaction is the better error of the two.
    4. The current position sits on the wrong side: The response is too cautious and too bureaucratic for the scale of the surge.
    5. This is a professional capability, not a temperament: Situations of this kind require trained risk communication and named experts speaking, rather than a general advisory.

    Why does influenza vaccine use stay low even among high-risk groups?

    1. Poorly perceived threat: Influenza is treated as an ordinary seasonal illness, so the risk it carries for the elderly and the immunocompromised is discounted.
    2. Non-affordability: The vaccine is largely an out-of-pocket purchase for those outside institutional programmes.
    3. Doubtful effectiveness: Protection varies by season and by strain match, which weakens the case a physician can make for it.
    4. The annual injection requirement: Immunity does not carry over, so the decision has to be taken and paid for again every year.

    What should the response to this surge prioritise?

    1. Preventing avoidable deaths: At the current scale the objective is not to stop transmission but to keep high-risk people out of severe illness.
    2. A specific advisory rather than a general one: The advisory should tell high-risk people to avoid crowded places and to wear masks, in those terms.
    3. Immunising high-risk groups during the surge: The case for routine immunisation is debatable and the case during a major seasonal surge is not. Skipping it leaves the system unpractised for the next pandemic.
    4. Low antiviral use needs examination: Antiviral use stays low even in peak influenza season, which calls for a relook at the influenza management guidelines.
    5. The private sector has to be inside the response: Private providers and professional bodies deliver most outpatient care and cannot be reached through public system instructions alone.

    Challenges to India’s outbreak surveillance and response system

    1. Influenza carries no statutory duty to notify: Reporting rests on administrative instruction rather than legal obligation, so private-sector cases stay outside the national count. Eg. Most States have no public health Act listing notifiable conditions, and the Kerala Public Health Act, 2023 is among the few that do.
      The Fix: Enact a public health law fixing the list of notifiable conditions and placing the reporting duty on private providers as well as public ones.
    2. Vaccine composition is set for the wrong season: Supply follows the Northern Hemisphere formulation while influenza in much of India peaks with the monsoon. Eg. The WHO issues separate Northern and Southern Hemisphere composition recommendations each year.
      The Fix: Procure the Southern Hemisphere formulation for monsoon-peak States and fix the public procurement calendar to that cycle.
    3. Surveillance is an additional charge, not a post: District surveillance duties are given to serving clinical or programme officers on top of their own work, so analysis is done last. Eg. Rural Community Health Centres run at about an 80 per cent shortfall of specialists, which is the pool such officers are drawn from.
      The Fix: Create a separate public health cadre with dedicated district epidemiologist posts filled on their own recruitment line.
    4. Antiviral supply is not pre-positioned: Oseltamivir was moved from Schedule X to Schedule H1 in 2017, and the prescription-record duty that follows keeps retail stocking low outside declared alerts. Eg. Shortages appear at the retail counter in the same weeks that hospital positivity rises.
      The Fix: Stock antivirals at district hospitals ahead of the seasonal peak rather than relying on retail availability during the surge.
    5. Sequencing capacity is concentrated in a few laboratories: Sequencing volumes are set by laboratory capacity rather than by case load, so variant detection lags the epidemic curve. Eg. Sequencing effort fell sharply between Covid-19 waves and had to be rebuilt each time activity rose.
      The Fix: Fix a minimum sequencing share of positive samples per State per week as a standing requirement rather than an outbreak-time instruction.

    Conclusion

    An outbreak response is judged by the interval between a signal and a decision. India has built the layer that produces the signal and has not built the layer that must act on it, which is a governance problem rather than a scientific one. The next seasonal peak will test the same gap. The markers to watch before it arrives are whether a numeric alert threshold has been fixed and whether positivity data is published where the public can see it.

    Outbreak Surveillance and Pandemic Preparedness in India

    1. About: Disease surveillance is the continuous collection and analysis of health data to detect unusual disease activity early enough to act on it. Preparedness is the standing capacity to respond once that detection is made.
    2. The zoonotic load: Over 60 per cent of emerging infectious diseases in India are zoonotic, so animal and human surveillance cannot be run separately. Eg. Nipah virus, avian influenza, rabies and brucellosis.
    3. The triple burden: India faces infectious disease, rising non-communicable disease and emerging zoonotic threats at the same time.
    4. The standing weakness: Surveillance remains event-based rather than predictive, with communicable disease, non-communicable disease and animal health data held in separate vertical silos.

    Government Initiatives for Outbreak Surveillance and Pandemic Preparedness

    1. Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme: Collects district-level disease data and has been upgraded to carry animal health indicators for integrated surveillance.
    2. National One Health Mission: A cross-ministerial effort involving 13 departments to coordinate pandemic preparedness across human, animal and environmental health.
    3. National Institute for One Health, Nagpur: The anchor institution for research, training and policy integration on zoonotic disease.
    4. National Joint Outbreak Response Team: A multi-disciplinary team of human, animal and wildlife experts constituted for rapid outbreak investigation.
    5. BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratory network: A national grid of high-security biosafety laboratories, with a new BSL-4 facility in Gujarat foundation-laid in January 2026.
    6. One Health Governance Framework: Released in December 2025 as a roadmap for States and Union Territories to set up State One Health Cells.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS2, 15 marks] In a crucial domain like the public healthcare system, the Indian State should play a vital role to contain the adverse impact of marketisation of the system. Suggest some measures through which the State can enhance the reach of public healthcare at the grassroots level.”

  • Draft SIR list shows anomalies, absurdities. Independent audit is needed

    Why in the News

    An analysis of the Election Commission of India’s draft rolls finds that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has removed 13.37 crore names at the draft stage. The revision began as a pilot in Bihar, where 65 lakh names were deleted, and has since run across the country in three phases. Deletion rates have risen with each phase rather than falling. India’s electorate stood at about 98 crore at the 2024 Lok Sabha election, against an adult voting-age population of about 99 crore. The electorate is projected to fall to about 88 crore against a projected adult population of 103 crore. Either the population projection or the electoral roll is badly wrong.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?

    1. A house-to-house verification: The Special Intensive Revision is a time-bound enumeration in which Booth Level Officers visit each household and verify every existing entry on the roll.
    2. Different from the annual revision: The routine summary revision only processes claims and objections that voters themselves file. The intensive revision re-verifies the entire roll on the ground.
    3. The sequence: Enumeration produces a draft roll. Claims and objections against that draft are then decided before a final roll is published.

    What do the national numbers show?

    1. The expected final figure: Publication of a draft roll is usually followed by more additions than deletions. Final deletions are estimated at over 11.5 crore once the remaining States are counted in.
    2. What is still outstanding: Draft rolls have not been released for Nagaland and Tripura. The revision has not begun in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.
    3. The scale against the early warning: An early projection that a nationwide revision could delete up to 10 crore names was dismissed when it was made. The draft-stage figure has already passed it.

    What explains the gap between the electorate and the adult population?

    1. Only two readings are available: Either the official population projection is far too high, at under 125 crore rather than the projected figure above 145 crore. Or close to 15 crore voting-age Indians are absent from the roll.
    2. Correct deletions do not settle it: The pre-revision roll carried accumulated errors and spurious names, so a majority of the deletions may well be correct. A wrongful share of even one third still leaves an unacceptable number of voters removed.
    3. Under-enfranchisement is the other half: Eligible voters who never appeared on the pre-revision roll, those struck off before the revision started, and young voters who should have been added during it are all outside the count. The revision was not designed to find any of them.

    How have the three phases differed?

    1. Phase one, Bihar: Deletions of 65 lakh amounted to a fall of under 8 per cent in the elector-to-population ratio (the electorate expressed as a share of the adult population). Judicial scrutiny brought the final figure down to 45 lakh.
    2. Phase two, 13 States: Deletions reached nearly 13 per cent of the roll, totalling 6.5 crore. Public attention concentrated on the targeted removal of Muslim voters in West Bengal.
    3. Phase three, the rest of the country: Deletions in the draft rolls crossed 17 per cent, totalling 6.1 crore. The phase followed a Supreme Court order that left the Commission free to proceed.
    4. The direction of travel: Each phase recorded a higher deletion rate than the phase before it, and each attracted less scrutiny than the phase before it.

    Which States account for the largest deletions?

    1. Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra lead: Uttar Pradesh recorded 2.9 crore deletions and Maharashtra 2.1 crore.
    2. The next tier: Karnataka recorded 1.08 crore, Tamil Nadu 97.4 lakh, Gujarat 73.7 lakh and West Bengal 58.2 lakh.
    3. Mid-sized States: Delhi recorded 47.6 lakh, Andhra Pradesh 44.9 lakh, Jharkhand 43.6 lakh, Madhya Pradesh 42.7 lakh, Rajasthan 41.9 lakh and Haryana 33.9 lakh.
    4. Smaller totals: Chhattisgarh recorded 27.1 lakh, Kerala 24.1 lakh, Punjab 20.7 lakh, Odisha 20.1 lakh and Uttarakhand 8.3 lakh.
    5. Where the rate is abnormal: Haryana, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana and Delhi recorded deletion rates well above the pattern for their phase.
    6. What the table excludes: Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya and the Union Territories are left out because population projections are unavailable for them. The projections used are drawn from the Report of the Technical Group on Population Projections of July 2020.

    Why are the deletion categories the core of the problem?

    1. Deaths are a small and stable share: Voters marked “dead” held steady at around 3 per cent of total deletions across all three phases.
    2. The two large categories are undefined: Most deletions were recorded as “absent” or “shifted”. Neither term has been defined so far, and local electoral officials have applied both at their own discretion.
    3. A further fifth is flagged rather than resolved: About one-fifth of the remaining electors face further scrutiny as “unmapped” or under “logical discrepancy”. No standard operating procedure states how such a flag is to be decided.
    4. The flag clusters oddly: Odisha, Jharkhand and Telangana show unusually high shares of “logical discrepancy”. A uniform software check applied across States would not produce that distribution.

    What happens to a voter deleted before the revision starts?

    1. No enumeration form is ever issued: A voter removed before the revision formally begins never receives an enumeration form. That removal is not counted as a revision deletion at all.
    2. The scale of pre-revision removals: Over 14 lakh such deletions took place between 12 May, when the third phase schedule was announced, and the day that phase formally began. Over 8 lakh of them were in Maharashtra.
    3. Delhi is the clearest case: Delhi lost more than 11 lakh voters before the revision was launched, counting from its assembly election in February the previous year. Its roll then fell from 1.56 crore to 98 lakh after the draft was published.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. The burden of proof sits on the voter: The exercise requires an elector to establish entitlement rather than requiring the state to establish ineligibility. Eg. Electors in Bihar were asked to produce legacy documents such as a parent’s entry in an earlier intensive revision roll.
      The Fix: Place the burden on the electoral registration officer to record a written ground and serve notice before any name is struck off.
    2. Field officers carry unworkable targets: Verifying every household within a few weeks exceeds the staff assigned to the task. Eg. Deaths and suicides among Booth Level Officers were reported during the West Bengal phase.
      The Fix: Fix a maximum number of households per officer and extend the enumeration window instead of compressing verification into the deletion window.
    3. Grievance redress runs slower than the roll: Claims and objections are decided after the deadline that freezes the roll for an approaching election. Eg. Only a fraction of the claims filed in West Bengal were disposed of before the roll was frozen.
      The Fix: Bar publication of a final roll until every claim against the draft carries a written and appealable order.
    4. Deletion data is not published in usable form: Rolls are released as image files, so any independent count of deletions has to be reconstructed by hand. Eg. The national deletion total here had to be assembled State by State from separately published draft rolls.
      The Fix: Publish booth-level deletion lists carrying the recorded ground for each name, in a downloadable machine-readable format.

    Conclusion

    The revision was justified as a clean-up and is producing a shrinking electorate. A roll that removes names far faster than it adds them cannot be defended as an accuracy exercise, and the Commission cannot certify its own accuracy. What is contested is not whether errors existed on the old roll but whether their correction followed any stated rule. An audit by a body outside the Commission is the only thing that would settle that, and nothing in the current process provides for one.

    Constitutional Framework Governing Electoral Roll Revision

    1. Article 324: Vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of elections in the Election Commission of India.
    2. Article 325: Mandates one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency and bars exclusion from it on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.
    3. Article 326: Provides for universal adult suffrage, with the voting age lowered to 18 by the Sixty-first Amendment.
    4. Article 327: Empowers Parliament to legislate on all matters relating to elections, including the preparation of electoral rolls.
    5. Article 329: Bars courts from questioning an electoral law or a completed election except through an election petition.

    Laws and Rules Governing Electoral Roll Revision

    1. Representation of the People Act, 1950: Provides for the allocation of seats and for the preparation and revision of electoral rolls.
    2. Section 19: Sets the conditions for registration, being 18 years of age and ordinarily resident in the constituency.
    3. Section 21: Authorises the Commission to order a special revision of a roll at any time, for reasons recorded in writing.
    4. Section 16: Lists the disqualifications for registration, including non-citizenship and unsoundness of mind.
    5. Section 31: Penalises a false declaration made in connection with the preparation or revision of a roll.
    6. Registration of Electors Rules, 1960: Lay down the procedure for house-to-house enumeration, publication of the draft roll, and disposal of claims and objections.
    7. Representation of the People Act, 1951: Governs the conduct of elections and confines a challenge to a completed election to an election petition before the High Court.

    Government Initiatives for Electoral Roll Management

    1. ECINET: A single digital interface launched in 2026 that consolidates more than 40 separate Commission applications used by voters and officials.
    2. National Voters’ Services Portal: Allows a voter to register, correct and verify roll details online without visiting a registration centre.
    3. Electors Photo Identity Card delivery standard: A revised operating procedure requires an updated identity card to reach the elector within 15 days of an update.
    4. Common electoral roll proposal: A single roll for parliamentary, assembly and local body elections, intended to end the parallel rolls maintained separately by State Election Commissions.

    Key Facts about Electoral Roll Revision

    1. National Voters’ Day: Observed on 25 January each year, marking the founding of the Election Commission in 1950.
    2. Frequency of intensive revision: An intensive revision of this kind has been carried out about 14 times, with earlier rounds in 1983, 1995, 2002 and 2004.
    3. The first rolls: The first intensive revisions ran between 1952 and 1956 to build the country’s first reliable voter database.
    4. Qualifying dates: Since the 2021 amendment to the election laws, a person turning 18 may register with reference to any of four qualifying dates in a year, 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October.

    Way Forward

    1. Link the roll to the civil registration system: Automatic removal of deceased electors through the death register would take the largest legitimate deletion category out of field discretion entirely.
    2. Permanent electoral tribunals: A standing tribunal for roll disputes would replace the temporary appellate arrangements assembled around each revision.
    3. Geo-tagged field verification: Recording each house visit with a location and time stamp would make a claimed visit checkable after the fact.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS2, 10 marks] Is the right to vote a fundamental right? Discuss the position of the Election Commission of India while undertaking the revision of electoral rolls. Can it also examine the question of citizenship of voters?”

  • Two countries and a shared river: Mistrust is not inevitable

    Two countries and a shared river: Mistrust is not inevitable

    Why in the News

    India’s most important rivers rise in a region it cannot see into, controlled by China, which treats the data about them as an asset to switch on and off. The Brahmaputra rises as the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet and enters Arunachal Pradesh as the Siang, and the Sutlej and the Indus rise there too. The arrangement that governs what India learns about them, a pair of flood-season memorandums, lapsed in June 2025. China broke ground in July 2025 on the Medog project at the Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo, immediately upstream of the point where the river turns towards Arunachal Pradesh. The tension is that hydrological data on rivers India depends on is a discretionary favour rather than a treaty right, and India practises the same discretion on the rivers where it sits upstream.

    What is the India-China hydrological data arrangement?

    1. No water treaty exists between the two countries: The relationship rests on two flood-season memorandums, one on the Brahmaputra signed in 2002 and one on the Sutlej signed in 2005.
    2. India pays for the data it receives: India pays roughly Rs 1 crore a year for the flood-season information supplied under those memorandums.
    3. A consultative body that convenes at China’s convenience: An expert-level consultative mechanism sits alongside the memorandums and meets when relations allow.
    4. The instrument is seasonal by design: The memorandums cover the flood season, so hazards arising outside that window carry no notification obligation at all.

    Why is there no legal floor under the arrangement?

    1. Both states sit outside the governing convention: The 1997 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses would oblige an upstream state to give prior notice of works and not to cause significant harm to those below. China voted against it and India abstained.
    2. A non-binding memorandum can be suspended without breach: Withholding data under such an arrangement carries no legal consequence, so there is nothing for India to invoke when supply stops.

    Why does shared data function as a lever rather than a right?

    1. Supply tracks the state of the boundary dispute: China stopped sharing Brahmaputra data during the Doklam standoff of 2017, blaming damaged collection sites, even as that summer’s floods killed scores in Assam.
    2. The pattern repeated and then ended the arrangement: Sharing resumed once relations thawed, dried up after the Galwan clash of 2020, and the memorandum lapsed in June 2025.
    3. Flood prediction data is not a neutral public good: It is released when ties are warm and withdrawn when they are not, which makes it a bargaining instrument rather than a technical input.
    4. Reassurances cannot be checked: Beijing attributes the stoppages to technical faults, calls the dam “fully within China’s sovereignty” and promises it will “prevent and mitigate disasters”. Those meant to be reassured cannot verify any of it, because the region is sealed and India, which hosts the Dalai Lama and the largest Tibetan exile community, is viewed with particular suspicion.

    What does the Medog project add to India’s exposure?

    1. The largest hydropower project in the world, at the worst possible point: The Medog project at the Great Bend will run to 60 GW, sited just before the Yarlung Tsangpo turns towards Arunachal Pradesh.
    2. It sits on the seam that generates the hazard: The site lies in one of the planet’s most seismically violent zones, the same tectonic seam that produces the outburst floods now hitting the border.
    3. Downstream states have been told nothing: Arunachal Pradesh’s Chief Minister has called the project an “existential threat” to the Siang valley. Bangladesh, at the river’s end, sought details in early 2026 and received none.

    Where does India’s own record cut against its demand?

    1. India settled for paid data instead of pressing for a right: Successive governments accepted the paid-data memorandum and did not push for the binding, basin-wide architecture that would make information an entitlement rather than a favour.
    2. India is an upstream withholder on its own rivers: It shares thinly with Bangladesh, and it has placed the Indus Waters Treaty, 1960 in abeyance following the Pahalgam terror attack.
    3. The same logic runs in both directions: The reasoning India faces on the Brahmaputra is the reasoning it practises on the Indus, which removes the ground from which it could demand a rule of general application.

    What do the Senegal and Mekong models show is possible?

    1. Poverty is not the constraint: On the Senegal River, four of the world’s poorest African countries jointly own their dams as “common and indivisible property”.
    2. Nor is conflict: That joint ownership was sustained even through a war between two of the member states, so mistrust between riparian governments does not by itself prevent pooled sovereignty over a river.
    3. China’s absence is a choice, not a limitation: Its neighbours built the Mekong River Commission and China stayed outside it, which shows the refusal to enter a basin institution is political rather than structural.

    Challenges to a binding India-China river arrangement

    1. Forecasting depends on a single unverifiable supplier: Flood forecasting for the Brahmaputra rests on upstream gauge readings that no Indian agency can independently audit, so a stoppage removes the input rather than degrading it. Eg. Central Water Commission forecasts for the Assam valley are built on flows measured at stations India cannot access.
      The Fix: Fund independent satellite-based flow and precipitation estimation for the upper basin, so a data cut-off reduces accuracy instead of ending the forecast.
    2. The hazards that kill fall outside the covered season: Glacial lake outburst floods and landslide-dam breaches occur without regard to the monsoon calendar the arrangement is built around. Eg. The South Lhonak glacial lake outburst flood of October 2023 destroyed the Teesta-III dam in Sikkim and killed dozens, outside any flood-season notification window.
      The Fix: Negotiate a year-round hazard-notification obligation covering lake formation, landslide damming and reservoir release, separately from seasonal flow data.
    3. Water has no forum of its own: The boundary question runs through the Special Representatives channel, and water sits in a separate expert mechanism with no power to compel a meeting or an answer. Eg. An interruption in data supply has no body before which it can be formally raised as a breach.
      The Fix: Give the expert mechanism a fixed annual calendar and a standing agenda item on notification failures, so a stoppage produces a documented exchange.
    4. The lower riparians negotiate separately on the same river: India, Bangladesh and China each deal bilaterally, so the basin’s downstream users never present a common position. Eg. India and Bangladesh’s Joint Rivers Commission covers 54 shared rivers and has produced only two water-sharing treaties in five decades.
      The Fix: Raise the Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra as a joint India-Bangladesh agenda item so notification is sought by the whole downstream reach at once.
    5. India’s own counter-project is contested at home: Storage proposed on the Siang as a strategic answer to Medog is opposed by the communities it would displace, which weakens the case India makes about consultation. Eg. Survey work for the Siang Upper Multipurpose Project has faced sustained local protest in Arunachal Pradesh.
      The Fix: Settle consent and compensation on the Indian side of the border before advancing a counter-dam as a security argument.

    Conclusion

    India cannot compel China to open the plateau, and the question is therefore not about leverage but about design. What is missing is an architecture that makes hazard information an obligation owed to everyone downstream rather than a concession granted when relations permit. Building it requires India to accept the same obligation on the rivers where it sits upstream, since a rule it will not apply to itself is not a rule it can ask for. The unresolved point is whether a shared river is treated as a common lifeline or as a weapon held in reserve, and neither government has yet chosen.

    Transboundary River Water Sharing in India

    1. About: A transboundary river crosses an international boundary, and its use is governed by bilateral treaties and memorandums between the riparian states rather than by a single binding global law.
    2. India’s position is both upstream and downstream: India is the lower riparian to China on the Brahmaputra, the Sutlej and the Indus headwaters, and the upper riparian to Pakistan on the Indus system and to Bangladesh on the Ganga and the Teesta.
    3. The dependence is agricultural: Around 45% of irrigation in the Indo-Gangetic plain depends on water from the Himalayan rivers, which is why control of the headwaters translates directly into food security.

    Laws and Agreements Governing Transboundary River Water Sharing

    1. Indus Waters Treaty, 1960 (India-Pakistan): Brokered by the World Bank, it assigns the Eastern Rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) to India and the Western Rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) to Pakistan, with run-of-the-river hydropower and limited storage permitted to India on the Western Rivers.
    2. Article XII: Termination is possible only through a ratified treaty between both governments, and the text carries no suspension provision.
    3. Ganga Waters Treaty, 1996 (India-Bangladesh): It fixes the sharing of dry-season flows at the Farakka Barrage and runs for 30 years, expiring in December 2026.
    4. Kushiyara River Treaty, 2022 (India-Bangladesh): It provides for withdrawal of an agreed quantum from the Kushiyara in the dry season, and is only the second water-sharing treaty between the two countries.
    5. Kosi Agreement, 1954 and Gandak Agreement, 1959 (India-Nepal): These provide for flood control, barrage construction and irrigation management on shared rivers, with India funding and operating the structures on Nepali territory.
    6. Mahakali Treaty, 1996 (India-Nepal): It covers the integrated development of the Mahakali river, including the Pancheshwar Multipurpose Project, which remains stalled over disagreement on benefit-sharing.

    Challenges in Transboundary River Water Sharing

    1. The customary principles bind weakly without a forum: Equitable and reasonable utilisation and the obligation not to cause significant harm are widely accepted in principle, and no standing tribunal exists to apply them to a river basin. Eg. The Mekong River Commission can review a member’s dam proposal and cannot stop it.
      The Fix: Build compulsory technical arbitration into each treaty at renewal, so a disputed project has a named forum rather than a bilateral stalemate.
    2. Treaties fix volumes that the climate then moves: Allocations negotiated on decades-old flow records become unworkable as glacier melt, monsoon variability and river morphology change the water actually available. Eg. Negotiations over the Ganga sharing formula are complicated by changing river morphology and by disagreement over water levels at Farakka.
      The Fix: Replace fixed quantum allocations with percentage-of-flow formulas carrying explicit dry-year and surplus-year rules.
    3. Domestic federal politics stalls bilateral agreements: A riparian State’s objection can hold up an agreement the two national governments have already negotiated. Eg. The draft Teesta agreement of 2011, providing for a 50:50 sharing arrangement, has never been implemented.
      The Fix: Include the riparian State in the negotiating delegation from the outset, rather than seeking its concurrence after a text is settled.
    4. Third parties build in the same basin without notice: A neighbour can bring in external financing and construction for a project on a shared river without consulting the other riparian. Eg. Bangladesh has re-engaged China on the Teesta River Management Project.
      The Fix: Write a prior-notification and joint-appraisal requirement for any new structure into every treaty renewal, applying to externally financed projects as well.

    [2016, GS1, 12 marks] Present an account of the Indus Water Treaty and examine its ecological, economic and political implications in the context of changing bilateral relations.

  • Judicial integrity – a case the Court cannot ignore

    Why in the News

    A sitting judge of the Supreme Court of India, Justice Sandeep Mehta, wrote three letters to the Chief Justice of India (CJI) on 2, 10 and 17 August seeking the immediate transfer of the Acting Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court, Justice Sanjeev Prakash Sharma. The letters allege victimisation of judges, maladministration, improper shifting of cases to his own Bench, and nepotism in appointments to the Permanent Lok Adalat. The last of the three records concern at the CJI’s inaction, with Justice Sharma due to retire on 26 September. The stated response is that allegations cannot be treated as findings and must be dealt with strictly through the established institutional mechanism. The tension is that the established mechanism is precisely what has not worked, since the appointment system carries no published criteria and the removal machinery has never removed a judge.

    What is the “master of the roster” power?

    1. What the power is: The Chief Justice of a court holds the exclusive administrative authority to constitute Benches and to assign cases among them.
    2. Where it comes from: It rests on convention and on the Supreme Court’s own rulings treating the Chief Justice as first among equals for administrative purposes, not on any statutory provision.
    3. Its reach in this case: The power covers roster allocation for the whole court, and it is exercised by the Acting Chief Justice wherever the office of Chief Justice is vacant.

    What do the letters allege?

    1. Interference with the roster: Cases were allegedly shifted improperly to the Acting Chief Justice’s own Bench, in misuse of the master of the roster power.
    2. Pressure on colleagues: Judges were allegedly intimidated with the threat of retributive measures including transfers, on the basis of claimed proximity to the CJI.
    3. Favouritism at the Bar: The letters refer to specific instances of alleged favouritism towards a chosen few among the lawyers.
    4. Appointments outside the court: Nepotism is alleged in appointments to the Permanent Lok Adalat, the statutory body that decides disputes relating to public utility services and whose award is final and binding.
    5. The state of the record: There has been no official denial of the reports concerning the contents of the letters, and Justice Sharma has publicly denied the accusations as baseless.

    What is the record behind the appointment itself?

    1. A long acting tenure: The High Court functioned under an Acting Chief Justice for about 11 months, which is not a sound institutional arrangement for a court of that size.
    2. An earlier transfer out: Justice Sharma was transferred to the Patna High Court in 2022.
    3. A rejected repatriation: His request to return to the Rajasthan High Court was rejected by the Collegium in 2023, which instead proposed his transfer to the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
    4. A reversal without a stated reason: He was nonetheless retransferred to the Rajasthan High Court in 2025 and then allowed to function as Acting Chief Justice with wide administrative and judicial powers.

    How did the institution respond?

    1. The Bar acted first: Lawyers staged a sit-in protest on the High Court premises, following which Justice Sharma opted out from hearing cases.
    2. The Collegium moved on the vacancy: On 31 August the Supreme Court Collegium recommended the appointment of Justice Sanjay Agrawal as the new Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court, and that appointment has since been made.
    3. The complaint itself drew no step: For several weeks no cogent step was initiated on the letters, with the retirement date approaching.
    4. The trust cost is measurable: Transparency International’s 2002 report, based on a household survey, identified the judiciary as the second-most corrupt institution in certain South Asian countries including India.

    Why does the appointment system produce this?

    1. There are no criteria at all: The selection of judges proceeds without published standards against which a candidate can be assessed or a rejection explained.
    2. The Collegium and the Executive must collaborate: The unavoidable joint working of the Collegium and the Union Executive under the present system makes appointments partisan, opaque and often arbitrary.
    3. The filter cannot do the job asked of it: A process built this way is incapable of identifying the cleanest and most meritorious candidates.
    4. The link to corruption is direct: Corruption in the judiciary is inseparable from the method of selecting candidates for judicial office, so the accountability problem starts at entry rather than at removal.

    Why does the removal machinery not work?

    1. The inquiry statute is dormant: The Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968 is inadequate to tackle judicial corruption and has for all practical purposes become defunct.
    2. A criminal investigation cannot begin: In K. Veeraswami vs Union of India (1991) the Supreme Court held that the permission of the CJI is a necessary precondition for registering a First Information Report against a judge of the higher judiciary. The requirement is circular in practice, because the police will not seek permission without clinching evidence and cannot obtain that evidence without investigating.
    3. Impeachment has failed as a route: Removal on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity, as provided by Articles 124(4) and 217(1)(b) of the Constitution, has not worked in practice.
    4. The internal route has no teeth: The in-house mechanism adopted by the Supreme Court in 1999 has not proved fault-free or effective.
    5. The legislative fix lapsed: The Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill passed the Lok Sabha in 2012 and lapsed with the dissolution of the 15th Lok Sabha in 2014, and the later effort to revive it with changes remained a non-starter.

    What do other systems do differently?

    1. Canada invites applications: Candidates apply for judicial office rather than being identified privately, so the pool and the criteria are both visible before a selection is made.
    2. The United Kingdom uses an independent body: Judicial selection is conducted by a body separate from both the judiciary and the executive, which breaks the circularity of judges choosing judges.
    3. Neither is currently available in India: Both arrangements remain unthinkable in the Indian setting, which is why the accountability argument keeps returning to the removal stage rather than the entry stage.

    How have earlier Chief Justices responded to comparable situations?

    1. The 1990 precedent, advice to step back: When an inquiry was underway against Justice V. Ramaswami for alleged misconduct, the then CJI advised him to take leave and keep away from judicial work.
    2. The 1993 precedent, work withheld after a failed motion: The impeachment motion against him failed in Parliament following the Congress party’s strategic abstention. He attempted to resume judicial work with about nine months of tenure remaining, and the then CJI refused to allocate any cases to him for hearing.
    3. The recent precedent, immediate transfer: After partly burnt currency notes were reportedly found at the Delhi residence of Justice Yashwant Varma, the then CJI quickly transferred him to the Allahabad High Court, where he was practically not allocated judicial work.
    4. The Court’s own statement of the duty: In XXX vs Union of India (2025) the Supreme Court emphasised the responsibility of the CJI in matters relating to judicial integrity and allegations of corrupt practices.

    Challenges to judicial accountability in India

    1. Asset declaration rests on resolution rather than statute: Judges of the higher judiciary declare their assets under an internal resolution, so a failure to declare carries no legal consequence. Eg. Publication of the declarations on the Supreme Court’s website began only in 2025.
      The Fix: Place the declaration requirement in statute, with an annual filing deadline and a public register maintained by an authority outside the court.
    2. The selection record stays outside disclosure: The reasons recorded for an elevation, a rejection or a transfer are not published, so a questionable appointment cannot be traced to a reasoning. Eg. The 2023 rejection of a repatriation and the 2025 reversal of that position were never explained on the record.
      The Fix: Publish the Collegium’s recorded reasons for every recommendation and every transfer at the time the decision is communicated.
    3. The in-house procedure runs to no timeline: An internal inquiry proceeds at the discretion of the CJI, with no fixed stage limits and no published outcome. Eg. The procedure can end in advice to resign, leaving no finding on the record at all.
      The Fix: Fix statutory timelines for each stage of the inquiry and require publication of the finding, with reasons, on completion.
    4. Removal depends on parliamentary arithmetic: The final step turns on the numbers in both Houses rather than on the inquiry’s finding, so a party decision can defeat a proved case. Eg. No judge of the higher judiciary has ever been removed under the constitutional procedure.
      The Fix: Make an adverse inquiry finding trigger the automatic withdrawal of judicial work, so the consequence does not wait on a vote.

    Conclusion

    Two failures are operating at once and neither can substitute for the other. Entry into the higher judiciary is decided without published criteria, and exit from it is governed by a statute that has never produced a removal, which leaves everything in between resting on how quickly one officeholder chooses to act. That is not accountability but discretion, and discretion is what the present controversy has tested. The measure of what follows is whether a complaint carrying verifiable material now generates a recorded step with a date attached to it, rather than a retirement that closes the file.

    Back2Basics: The Collegium system

    1. What it is: The mechanism through which the higher judiciary selects its own judges, evolved through the Supreme Court’s judgments rather than from the text of the Constitution.
    2. Its origin: The Second Judges Case (1993) and the Third Judges Case (1998) read the word “consultation” in Articles 124 and 217 as requiring the concurrence of the CJI, and fixed the collegium’s composition.
    3. Its composition: The CJI and the four senior most judges of the Supreme Court decide Supreme Court appointments; the CJI and the two senior most judges decide High Court appointments and transfers.
    4. The failed replacement: The National Judicial Appointments Commission, created by the 99th Constitutional Amendment, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2015 as violating judicial independence, leaving the collegium in place.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2019] Consider the following statements: 1. The- motion to impeach a Judge of the Supreme Court of India cannot be rejected by the Speaker of the Lok Sabha as per the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968. 2. The Constitution of India defines and gives details of what Constitutes ‘incapacity and proved misbehaviour’ of the Judges of the Supreme Court of India. 3. The details of the process of impeachment of the Judges of the Supreme Court of India are given in the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968. 4. If the motion for the impeachment of a Judge is taken up for voting, the law requires the motion to be backed by each House of the Parliament and supported by a majority of total membership of that House and by not less than two-thirds of total members of that House present and voting. Which of the statements given above is/are correct? (a) 1 and 2 (b) 3 only (c) 3 and 4 only (d) 1, 3 and 4 (c)”

  • [7th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: India’s unemployment data dilemma

    [7th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: India’s unemployment data dilemma

    Question (2023, GS3): “Most of the unemployment in India is structural in nature. Examine the methodology adopted to compute unemployment in the country and suggest improvements.
    Linkage: This is the most direct match. The transition to high-frequency monthly indicators based on CWS directly challenges how India computes its unemployment. CWS captures employment status over a short seven-day reference period (which is why seasonal peaks like the kharif sowing season show a temporary drop to 5.1%), but it fails to address the underlying structural nature of informal underemployment.

    Mentor Comment

    India has converted its official unemployment estimate from a quarterly and yearly release into a monthly indicator, measured on the Current Weekly Status approach. The latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) reports the unemployment rate for those aged 15 years and above at a four-month low of 5.1 per cent in July. The review period coincided with the peak of the kharif season, when demand for agricultural labour rises for land preparation and transplanting. The tension is that a higher frequency reading is being asked to measure a labour market where roughly 90 per cent of the workforce is informal and tens of millions of workers circulate seasonally. A rate can be published every month without becoming a measure of the quality of work behind it.

    What is the Periodic Labour Force Survey, and what changed?

    1. What it is: The Periodic Labour Force Survey is the household survey through which India produces its official employment and unemployment estimates.
    2. The reference period: Under the Current Weekly Status (CWS) approach, a person’s activity status is determined on the basis of the preceding seven days.
    3. What the change is: The survey has moved from quarterly and yearly unemployment data to a monthly indicator, raising the frequency of the headline rate without altering the sample’s household basis.

    What does the July reading actually show?

    1. The headline: The unemployment rate for those aged 15 and above marked a four-month low.
    2. The rural share of the move: The overall decline was owing to rural areas, where unemployment fell to 4.5 per cent from 5 per cent.
    3. A supply side signal: The month recorded an increase in the labour force participation rate, meaning a larger share of the working age population entered the labour market.

    Why is a seasonal reading not a structural improvement?

    1. The month is the agricultural peak: July hiring rises for land preparation, transplanting and allied activities, so the decline reflects the calendar rather than a turn in the market.
    2. The affected sectors are the seasonal ones: Construction, agriculture, small trade, logistics and local services all fluctuate seasonally, and the fall concentrates there rather than in formal sector jobs.
    3. A falling rate can mark distress: A decline in unemployment can indicate distress-driven entry into low-productivity jobs rather than genuine employment creation.
    4. The correct status of the number: A monthly unemployment figure functions at best as a leading indicator, not as a comprehensive measure of labour market health.

    Why does informality defeat a high-frequency headline rate?

    1. The scale of the informal market: Various reports place around 90 per cent of the population in informal work, where wage payments are negotiated informally rather than contracted.
    2. The workers the frame misses: Independent labour studies estimate 30 to 35 million seasonal labourers moving across India annually, forming the backbone of urban construction and infrastructure.
    3. Underemployment does not register: Disguised employment and underemployment are widespread, and neither shows up in a status that records whether a person worked.
    4. The granularity is missing: Data is sketchy on wage growth, hours worked, job quality, occupational shifts and sector-wise employment trends, so the rate carries no information about the nature of the job.

    What do mature labour markets do differently?

    1. The common benchmark: Most advanced nations count unemployment through a Labour Force Survey built on the definition of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which fixes what counts as employment, unemployment and labour force participation.
    2. The depth behind the number: The United States, Japan, the European Union and the United Kingdom hold decades of household survey data carrying full-time versus part-time status, hourly wages, job duration, labour mobility and unemployment spells.
    3. The administrative spine: Those markets run payroll surveys, unemployment insurance records, formal contracts and extensive administrative databases alongside the survey, so the headline rate is corroborated rather than standalone.

    Can administrative data close the gap?

    1. The sources already exist: Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation and Employees’ State Insurance Corporation payroll data, Goods and Services Tax based enterprise information, income tax records, corporate payroll data, gig economy employment data and rural wage indicators are all being built up.
    2. They do not yet speak to each other: These sources remain fragmented, so none can be used to cross-check the survey’s monthly movement.
    3. The gap they would close: A large informal employment market is difficult to track through a household survey alone, which is precisely the market these registers touch at the formal edge.

    Challenges to the revamped Periodic Labour Force Survey

    1. A short reference period counts any work as employment: A person engaged for as little as an hour on a single day in the reference week is recorded as employed, so a full-time job and a day of casual work carry the same weight. Eg. Unpaid work in a family enterprise is counted as employment.
      The Fix: Publish hours worked and earnings distributions alongside the headline rate, so the composition of employment is visible.
    2. The household frame loses the circulating worker: A survey records a person at their usual residence, so a worker moving between a home district and a distant worksite can be missed at both ends. Eg. Urban construction runs on labour that its home district still records as resident.
      The Fix: Link the survey frame to social security registration numbers, so a worker traced at the destination is not lost at the origin.
    3. Unemployment is the wrong headline where there is no income support: Without unemployment insurance a worker cannot afford to remain unemployed, so joblessness appears as low-paid self-employment rather than in the rate. Eg. A person selling goods on the street with no earnings floor is counted as employed.
      The Fix: Publish an underemployment and working poverty series with each monthly release.
    4. Monthly sampling limits disaggregation: A monthly sample supports a national and rural-urban split, not a State, district or occupational reading. Eg. The release carries no monthly breakdown by sector or by occupational shift.
      The Fix: Pool three consecutive monthly rounds into a rolling State level estimate published alongside the headline.

    Conclusion

    A statistical system has been made faster without being made deeper, and the two are not substitutes. The unresolved question is whether the survey will be judged on how often it reports or on whether it captures the working lives of a largely informal workforce. Frequency answers a demand from markets and commentary; job quality answers the policy question of whether participation is converting into stable, higher-productivity work. Until the administrative registers are integrated into a single frame, the monthly rate will keep being read as a verdict it cannot deliver.

    Back2Basics: International Labour Organization

    1. Formation: Established in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles, and it became the first specialised agency of the United Nations in 1946.
    2. Headquarters: Geneva, Switzerland.
    3. Structure: It is the only tripartite United Nations agency, bringing together governments, employers and workers of member States with equal standing in its decision making.
    4. Why it matters here: Its conferences of labour statisticians set the international statistical definitions of employment, unemployment and the labour force that national surveys are benchmarked against.

  • The economy, its math and politics

    Why in the News

    A former Economic Affairs Secretary in the Ministry of Finance has claimed that nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in the first quarter of 2026-27 was 2.6 per cent, against the 10.3 per cent estimated by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI). Adjusted for inflation of 2 to 2.5 per cent, that arithmetic puts real growth at zero rather than at the official 7.8 per cent. The claim was built by comparing the April-June 2025 GDP level computed on the old 2011-12 base year with the April-June 2026 level computed on the 2022-23 base year that MoSPI adopted in February 2026. Splicing two series produces a growth rate that measures neither of them. The contest is between an official estimate the government spent a week publicly defending and a public mood in which a very low growth number was readily believed.

    What is a base year in GDP computation?

    1. The purpose: A base year fixes the set of prices at which output in every later year is valued, so a change in the measured total reflects a change in volume and not a change in prices.
    2. Nominal against real: Nominal GDP values output at the prices ruling in the year it was produced. Real GDP values that same output at base year prices, which is what makes growth comparable across years.
    3. The worked illustration: A country producing only crude oil sells 10 million barrels at $10 in year 1, giving a GDP of $100 million, then 5 million barrels at $30 in year 2, giving $150 million. Measured at year 1 prices, year 2 output is $50 million, so the economy has contracted by half even though its nominal GDP rose 50 per cent.
    4. What the base year carries: It fixes the relative prices and the weights of the period chosen, and those weights then run through every year of the series.

    Why is the base year revised every five to six years?

    1. Consumption patterns move: What households spend on shifts substantially over a decade, so an old price structure misvalues what the economy now produces. Eg. Telecom tariffs collapsed after 2016 and digital services barely existed as a separate category in 2011-12.
    2. Measurement itself improves: Technology and method allow faster and more precise capture of output and prices than were available when the previous base was set.
    3. Administrative data replaces proxies: The 2022-23 series draws on Goods and Services Tax returns, the Public Financial Management System for central government accounts, e-Vahan for transport spending, and the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises and the Periodic Labour Force Survey for the informal economy.
    4. Every earlier year is restated: When the base moved from 2011-12 to 2022-23, the GDP values changed for all years from 2011-12 onwards, so growth must be computed between two comparable periods within the new series.

    Where did the disputed calculation go wrong?

    1. The splice: The claim took the April-June 2025 level from the 2011-12 series and the April-June 2026 level from the 2022-23 series, then divided one by the other.
    2. What that number actually measures: A ratio across two series captures the gap between two different valuations of the economy, not the change in output between two quarters.
    3. The office lent the claim weight: The claimant had headed the Department of Economic Affairs and was designated Finance Secretary, which is why the government machinery responded for most of a week rather than ignoring the claim.
    4. The rebuttal crossed party lines: A Congress Rajya Sabha member who is himself critical of the government’s economic management wrote publicly that the arithmetic behind the real growth estimate was not among the things wrong with India’s economy.

    Why did a wrong number travel so far?

    1. Perception ran ahead of the arithmetic: A low growth number was plausible to a section of readers before any of them checked how it was derived.
    2. The protest backdrop: The claim landed during the Jantar Mantar protests, which had already made the government’s economic record a live public argument.
    3. The employability gap: An education system that does not leave its graduates job ready weakens the link between a headline growth number and what people observe.
    4. The demographic pressure: More than a crore young people enter the job market every year, so growth is judged against absorption rather than against output.
    5. Political amplification and its limit: The Congress and several of its leaders amplified the claim. The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, a standing critic of the government’s economic policy, did not comment on it.

    Challenges to the 2022-23 GDP series

    1. The deflator is built for goods: Converting nominal output into real output leans heavily on the Wholesale Price Index, which carries no services component at all. Eg. Services are close to 55 per cent of gross value added and are deflated using price indices constructed for wholesale goods transactions.
      The Fix: Complete the Wholesale Price Index base revision and introduce a Producer Price Index, which is the standard deflator in most large economies.
    2. The corporate database carries inactive firms: Private corporate value added is estimated from company filings, which can include shell and dormant entities. Eg. A National Sample Survey Office technical report on the corporate affairs database found a large share of sampled companies untraceable or wrongly classified.
      The Fix: Publish an annual reconciliation of the active company frame against Goods and Services Tax filings before the frame is used for estimation.
    3. Independent verification lags the release: The detailed sources and methods document that lets researchers reproduce the estimates is published well after the series itself. Eg. After the 2011-12 revision, the back series for years before that base remained contested for years, with a committee estimate and the official estimate disagreeing about growth in the 2000s.
      The Fix: Release the sources and methods volume on the same day as the new series rather than as a follow-up publication.
    4. Growth is not tracked by tax collections: High measured nominal growth that is not matched by proportionate corporate tax receipts leaves the estimate open to challenge. Eg. Direct tax buoyancy has repeatedly diverged from nominal GDP growth in years of strong headline expansion.
      The Fix: Publish the nominal GDP to tax base reconciliation alongside quarterly estimates, so the divergence is explained rather than argued over.

    Conclusion

    The arithmetic is settled and the credibility question is not. Two incompatible growth claims about the same quarter circulated side by side because most readers have no way to adjudicate between them. A statistical office that must be publicly defended each time a headline number is disputed is carrying a trust problem that no revision of the base year resolves. The transition to the 2025 System of National Accounts, due by 2029-30, is the next occasion on which that gap is either closed or carried forward.

    What is National Income Accounting?

    1. About: National income accounting is the set of methods used to measure economic activity across a national economy as a whole, producing indicators such as GDP, Gross National Product and Net National Income.
    2. Rationale: National accounts give fiscal policy, monetary policy, welfare targeting and cross-country comparison a single common measurement base.
    3. Named typology, the three methods: The production method sums value added at each stage across agriculture, industry and services. The income method sums rent, wages, interest, profit, mixed income and net income from abroad. The expenditure method totals consumption, investment, government spending and net exports.
    4. Who compiles it in India: The National Statistical Office under MoSPI prepares the estimates using the benchmark indicator method.

    Laws and Rules Governing National Income Accounting

    1. Collection of Statistics Act, 2008: Empowers the Centre, State governments and local bodies to collect statistics on economic, demographic, social, scientific and environmental matters, and makes furnishing the information a legal obligation.
    2. Collection of Statistics Rules, 2011: Prescribe how a statistical collection is notified and how statistics officers are appointed and their powers exercised.
    3. Collection of Statistics (Amendment) Act, 2017: Extended the parent Act to Jammu and Kashmir, closing a jurisdictional gap in national statistical collection.

    Key Facts about National Income Accounting

    1. National Statistics Day is observed on 29 June, the birth anniversary of P.C. Mahalanobis.
    2. MoSPI was created in 1999 by merging the Department of Statistics with the Department of Programme Implementation.
    3. The National Statistical Commission was set up in 2005 on the recommendation of the Rangarajan Commission and remains a non-statutory advisory body.
    4. The first estimate of India’s national income was made by Dadabhai Naoroji in 1868, and the first official post-Independence estimates came from the National Income Committee of 1949.

    Challenges in National Income Accounting

    1. The unorganised economy resists direct measurement: A large share of output comes from unregistered enterprises that file no accounts, so their contribution is surveyed and then projected forward. Eg. The informal sector contributed roughly 45 per cent of gross value added in 2022-23.
      The Fix: Shorten the interval between unincorporated enterprise surveys so projection periods are measured in months rather than years.
    2. Final and intermediate goods are hard to separate: Counting the same output twice inflates the total, and the distinction depends on who buys the good rather than on the good itself. Eg. Flour bought by a bakery is an intermediate input, and the identical flour bought by a household is final consumption.
      The Fix: Extend the Supply and Use Tables framework, which balances production against consumption and forces the discrepancy to surface.
    3. Non-market work is excluded by construction: Subsistence farming, barter and unpaid care work produce real output that no price attaches to, so they never enter the total. Eg. Time use survey data shows women performing several hours of unpaid domestic and care work daily, none of which is counted.
      The Fix: Publish satellite accounts for household and care production alongside the main accounts, as several statistical systems already do.
    4. Natural capital depletion is treated as income: Resource extraction adds to measured output and the loss of the resource is not netted out anywhere. Eg. Groundwater drawn beyond recharge in Punjab and Haryana raises agricultural value added. The stock that produced it shrinks, and nothing in the accounts records the loss.
      The Fix: Build a Green GDP series that deducts resource depletion and pollution costs, reported as a companion to the headline estimate.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “Explain the difference between computing methodology of India’s Gross Domestic Product(GDP) before the year 2015 and after the year 2015.”