The Delhi High Court on Monday stayed the October 9 order of Jawaharlal Nehru University dismissing professor Angomcha Bimol Akoijam, who had been accused of sexual harassment by students, Bar and Bench reported.

Akoijam is a Congress Lok Sabha MP from Manipur.

Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani passed the interim order after Akoijam told the court that the university had not issued him a notice before dismissing him, the legal news outlet reported.

The court also issued notice to the university, seeking its response on Akoijam’s petition challenging his termination.

The matter will be heard again in January 2027.

Akoijam, who lived on campus, had been accused of inviting students to his residence for gatherings and making sexual advances. Some complainants also alleged that he made lewd and inappropriate comments during classes and viva examinations, including demands for sexual acts in exchange for marks.

Akoijam had denied the allegations, accusing what he described as “racist schemers” attempting to tarnish his reputation with unverified claims and lies.

On October 9, the university said that the allegations against Akoijam had been investigated by the internal committee. Based on the panel’s findings, the professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems was dismissed from service with immediate effect.

Edited by Sneha.

The Commission for Air Quality Management on Monday imposed Stage 2 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan in Delhi and the National Capital Region after air quality deteriorated to the “very poor” category.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in Delhi-NCR.

In its order, the commission said that Delhi’s Air Quality Index showed a sharp rise from 117 on Saturday to 261 on Sunday and further increased to 324 on Monday “owing to unfavourable meteorological conditions”.

As of 6.05 pm, the national capital recorded an average AQI of 327, showed the Sameer application that provides hourly updates published by the Central Pollution Control Board.

Thirty-eight of the 58 active monitoring stations recorded “very poor” air quality levels, while three stations recorded an AQI above 400, which falls under the “severe” category. At 447, the AQI in northwestern Delhi’s Jahangirpuri was the worst, followed by 420 in Rohini and 415 in Punjab Bagh.

An index value between 0 and 50 indicates “good” air quality, between 51 and 100 indicates “satisfactory” air quality and between 101 and 200 indicates “moderate” air quality. As the index value increases further, air quality deteriorates. A value of 201 and 300 means “poor” air quality, while between 301 and 400 indicates “very poor” air.

Between 401 and 450 indicates “severe” air pollution, while anything above the 450 threshold is termed “severe plus”.

The India Meteorological Department and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology have predicted that the AQI will remain in the “very poor” category in the coming days, said the Commission for Air Quality Management.

The second stage of GRAP involves a ban on the use of coal and firewood, including tandoors in hotels, restaurants and open eateries. It also includes a ban on the use of diesel generator sets, except for emergency and essential services.

It further comprises measures such as the mechanical sweeping of roads and sprinkling water on them to keep the dust from rising, and intensified inspections for strict dust control measures at construction and demolition sites.

The restrictions under Stage 2 includes the curbs under the first stage, which were imposed on October 21 after the average AQI crossed 200.

Air quality deteriorates sharply in the winter months in Delhi, which is often ranked the world’s most polluted capital. The lighting of firecrackers during Diwali, along with stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, vehicular pollution, falling temperatures, decreased wind speeds and emissions from industries and coal-fired plants contribute to the problem.

This year, Diwali will be celebrated on November 8. The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the manufacture, sale and bursting of certified green firecrackers in Delhi-NCR for two days during the festival.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• Why some Delhi residents leave the city during Diwali
• How an El Niño winter could worsen pollution in Delhi
• How Delhi’s rich are escaping air pollution

The Union Tribal Affairs Ministry has said that Nicobarese leaders seeking to join a petition challenging the settlement of forest rights on Great Nicobar Island are “neither necessary nor proper parties,” in the case, court documents show. The Nicobarese are one of two major tribes affected by the development of the Island, and primary claimants to forest rights in the area.

An ongoing petition in the Calcutta High Court, filed by former IAS officer Meena Gupta, has challenged the Union government’s claim that rights under the Forest Rights Act, 2005, were settled on the Island. The Forest Rights Act recognises the historical rights of tribal and other forest dwelling communities over forest resources, and makes compliance with its statutes necessary in clearing forest land for diversion.

On July 9, 2026, four Nicobarese residents sought to join Gupta’s plea, arguing that government certifications claiming the settlement of forest rights was based on gram sabha consent from non-tribal settler communities. Apart from the Nicobarese and Shompen – a particularly vulnerable and largely uncontacted tribe – the Island is inhabited by families of ex-servicemen from the mainland who were settled on the remote Island from 1969 onwards as part of a state-sponsored scheme.

“This certificate falsely states that the concerned Gram Sabhas have consented to the diversion of forest lands and cites meetings of the Gram Sabhas of the settler community in which no Nicobarese were present,” the impleadment document submitted to the court, seen by Mongabay-India, says. “No Gram Sabha meeting of the tribals was ever convened to discuss the issue of diversion of forest lands for the mega-project,” it adds.

A long-standing demand of the Nicobarese has been to return to their ancestral villages after they were displaced by the 2004 tsunami. Parts of this land will be diverted for the Great Nicobar Island development project.

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs responded by saying the plea “deserves outright rejection” as the tribal leaders were “sleeping over their alleged rights during the entire statutory process”.

Souparna Lahiri, a policy analyst associated with the Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance, said that it was surprising for the Tribal Affairs Ministry to “go so starkly against its own beneficiaries.”

“The legitimacy of the Forest Rights Act lies with the participation of the genuine forest dwellers. If they are not included in the gram sabhas, it constitutes a violation of the law,” he said.

Why FRA claims are being disputed

The ongoing dispute concerns the role of tribal consent in diverting land for the development project. The Holistic Development of Great Nicobar Island, the infrastructure project by the government, includes building a transshipment port, township, greenfield international airport, and solar and gas power plant over 166 square kilometres the Island.

Forest clearance regulations make the recognition and settlement of rights under the Forest Rights Act a central component of the decision-making process before forest land can be diverted. Under the Forest Rights Act, forest rights are settled when gram sabhas pass resolutions over individual and community forest rights. A Sub-Divisional Level Committee, formed by state or union authorities, is responsible for informing the gram sabhas of their rights and duties, as well as examining the resolutions passed to assess their veracity.

Before 2022, Forest Rights Act was never initiated on the Island. Reports by the Andaman and Nicobar administration said that the interests of tribals were “fully protected” under the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956 “by exclusively preserving the area for them, in which they enjoy unfettered rights to use forest products… so no claim as such is settled therefore settlement under FRA [sic].”

Three weeks from notification to NOC

Official documents show that the Lieutenant Governor constituted the Sub-Divisional Level Committee through a notification issued on July 26, 2022. Sixteen days later, on August 12, a “special” gram sabha was held and “unanimously resolved” to allow the diversion of 166 sq km of forest land for the Great Nicobar project. The Sub-Divisional Level Committee — which included Barnabas Manju, chief of the Great Nicobar Tribal Council — convened the next day, on August 13, and concluded that no rights were being infringed upon by approving the diversion.

On August 16, a No Objection Certificate for land diversion with Manju’s signature was appended to the Sub-Divisional Level Committee’s Minutes. Manju subsequently wrote to the Union Environment Ministry seeking rehabilitation within the ancestral villages, and in November 2022, withdrew consent for the NOC.

“An NOC was read out to Mr. Barnabas, but only in parts, especially those parts that mention the Forest Rights Act and protection of the tribal rights, while completely concealing what forest diversion means, which area is covered under the 160.10 sq km of forest that is being diverted, or explaining what that means for our plans to relocate to our ancestral villages,” the withdrawal letter said.

According to Lahiri, a No Objection Certificate cannot substitute gram sabha consent under the Sub-Divisional Level Committee. “A tribal chief himself is not entitled alone to say that we have given a consent for the village. There has to be a quorum and a written decision by the forest gram sabha,” he said.

In court, the Tribal Affairs Ministry said ”Stray copies of correspondence stated to have been marked to various authorities, including to the Hon’ble Minister, do not constitute objections, claims, or appeals in the eye of law.” It added that these objections “were never filed in or presented before any statutory forum, and cannot retrospectively manufacture a grievance that was never ventilated through the machinery which Parliament has provided.”

The impleadment submitted in court by the tribals raises several concerns over the legitimacy of the Forest Rights Act process followed by the government, however.

It alleges that firstly, Manju was not informed of his appointment to the Sub-Divisional Level Committee except on the day of the meeting itself, and that “he was not given adequate facts to make an informed decision.”

An NOC signed by him does amount to “consent on behalf of the entire Nicobarese community,” making it invalid, the impleadment says. Despite issuing a letter withdrawing the NOC, “no enquiry has been conducted about this till date.”

It also alleges that the failure to include tribal communities in the gram sabha meetings makes the claim that forest rights have been settled on the Island to be “false.”

“Indigenous communities have the first right to their lands, and they cannot be forced to surrender their lands… The manner in which they choose to decide on diversion of their forest lands has been left to the tribal communities by law. This autonomy cannot be wished away because it is inconvenient to a party implementing a project,” the impleadment says.

Draft plan suggests FRA is pending

Though the Union government and Andaman and Nicobar administration maintain that forest rights have already been settled on the Island, the latest annual report by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs doesn’t show any claims as being settled under the Forest Rights Act on the archipelago as of March 2025.

A draft Tribal Welfare Plan, drafted in October 2025 and shared with the Tribal Council in March 2026, also makes “land survey and FRA clearance” an agenda point for the first six months of the plan’s implementation, indicating pending processes. The plan is still under review.

It also says that displaced tribals “shall be granted access to forest rights” near their new settlements “wherever feasible.” It adds that “In cases where such families are able to maintain access or traditional entry to the forest areas… they shall continue to enjoy their earlier rights over these sources of livelihood, in accordance with existing laws and customary practices.”

“Forest dwelling tribals and communities already have suo moto rights over forest resources. These rights are neither created by the Act nor granted by the government. It is the duty of the government to see that those rights are settled on paper for documentary purposes,” said Lahiri.

The Union Environment Ministry reportedly approached the Supreme Court to stay the proceedings in the FRA case, but this plea was refused on October 5. “Preservation of culture is a constitutionally protected fundamental right. When you are talking about tribe cultures in Nicobar ecology. Tribe culture requires constitutional protection,” Justice Joymalya Bagchi said.

The Calcutta High Court has scheduled the next hearing for November 25 and 26.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The Bombay High Court on Monday said that Overseas Citizen of India cardholders do not have the right to protest and asked actor Imran Khan to apologise for participating in a demonstration against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in Mumbai in October, reported Bar and Bench.

Khan tendered an unconditional apology and gave an undertaking that he would not participate in similar protests as an Overseas Citizen of India cardholder.

A bench of Chief Justice Mahesh Chandra Tripathi and Justice Advait Sethna extended the order putting on hold the October 15 notice to Khan by the Foreigners Regional Registration Office, reported Live Law.

The office had directed Khan, a citizen of the United States, to leave the country by October 28, allegedly for participating in the protests against Kumar.

A Leave India Notice is a directive issued by the authorities requiring a foreign citizen to exit the country within a specified time period. Failing to comply with the order could lead to detention, deportation or blacklisting.

Khan holds an Overseas Citizen of India card, which is an immigration status that allows foreign citizens of Indian origin to live and work in India indefinitely.

After he moved the High Court, his lawyer said that rules do not prohibit Overseas Citizen of India cardholders from participating in a protest.

During the hearing on Monday, the bench asked Khan why he had gone for the protest, reported Bar and Bench.

“You are a celebrity, you are a star,” said the court. “If you have a film, you are promoting...”

Khan had been detained during the protest at the August Kranti Maidan in Mumbai on October 10.

Speaking at the protest, the actor had said that he was attending in his capacity as a resident of Mumbai and was not affiliated with any organisation.

“I am here as a citizen, as a person who lives in this city,” he had said. “I am here to see why freedom of movement is being restricted. Why are people’s voices being suppressed?”

The bench said on Monday that if an Indian citizen participates in protests in any other country, such as the United States, that person would be sent back to India, reported Live Law.

The matter will be heard next on December 7.

Edited by Anamika Pathak.

Also read: In Modi’s India, only ‘good’ OCIs are welcome

The Supreme Court allowed the manufacture, sale and bursting of certified green firecrackers in Delhi and the adjoining areas that form the National Capital Region for two days during the Hindu festival of Diwali. The bench permitted the bursting of green firecrackers between 6 am and 8 pm on November 7, and between 7 am and 10 pm on November 8.

The complete ban on firecrackers should be restored from November 9, added the bench.

The order came even as Delhi’s air quality worsened to the “very poor” level. As of 7.05 am, the national capital recorded an average Air Quality Index of 307. Read on.

How an El Niño winter could worsen pollution in Delhi, explains Vaishnavi Rathore

Following objections from the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has deleted a video from its social media handles featuring actor Dia Mirza urging citizens not to burst firecrackers during the Hindu festival of Diwali. In the video, Mirza had urged the residents of Mumbai to limit air and noise pollution during the festive season.

The BJP’s Mumbai unit chief Ameet Satam said on social media: “We don’t need lessons on how to celebrate Diwali from Dia Mirza. Our traditions are deeply rooted in our culture.”

Mumbai Mayor Ritu Tawde said that Mirza had “always taken an anti-Hindu and anti-government stand”. “That is the reason for opposing her, not her religion,” Tawde was quoted as saying. “We believe in secularism.” Read on.

The Bombay High Court said that Overseas Citizen of India cardholders do not have the right to protest and asked actor Imran Khan to apologise for participating in a demonstration against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in Mumbai in October. Khan tendered an unconditional apology and gave an undertaking that he would not participate in similar protests.

The court extended the order putting on hold the October 15 notice to Khan by the Foreigners Regional Registration Office.

The office had directed Khan, a citizen of the United States, to leave the country by October 28, allegedly for participating in the protests against Kumar. Read on.

In Modi’s India, only ‘good’ OCIs are welcome, writes Devyani Kacker

Three Aam Aadmi Party MLAs from Punjab joined the Bharatiya Janata Party, ahead of the Assembly elections expected to be held early next year. Harmeet Singh Pathanmajra and Chetan Singh Jauramajra had resigned from the AAP on Sunday, a day after the party released its first list of 40 candidates on Saturday.

Their names were not included in the list. On Monday, Amritsar North MLA Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh resigned from the Assembly and the AAP. Read on.

The Enforcement Directorate has registered a money laundering case against media baron Subhash Chandra in connection with an alleged loan fraud that caused a Rs 1,322 crore loss to Life Insurance Corporation Housing Finance Limited between 2018 and 2026. The agency registered the case based on a first information report filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation on August 31.

The complaint alleged that Chandra had submitted fake certificates with inflated net worth to avail loans. Read on.

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The Enforcement Directorate has registered a money laundering case against media baron Subhash Chandra in connection with an alleged loan fraud that caused a Rs 1,322 crore loss to Life Insurance Corporation Housing Finance Limited between 2018 and 2026, reported PTI on Monday.

On August 31, the Central Bureau of Investigation registered a first information report against Chandra for the alleged fraud on a written complaint filed by Neeta Menghani, the general manager of LIC Housing Finance Limited.

The complaint alleged that Chandra had submitted fake certificates with inflated net worth to avail loans.

The CBI FIR alleged that the first loan was granted based on a certificate submitted by Chandra, which said that his net worth was Rs 59,113.21 crore as on March 31, 2017. Another certificate, dated July 6, 2018, said that his net worth was Rs 40,562 crore.

However, during proceedings in his personal insolvency resolution process, Chandra said that his “net worth in 2024 is Rs 31.79 crores and stated that, even in 2017-’18, he did not have a net worth of more than Rs 40,000 crores”.

The complaint alleged that Chandra had, therefore, “colluded” with the borrowers to “defraud and cheat” LIC Housing Finance.

The borrowers defaulted on both loans. The outstanding amount in the loan for Vasant Sagar was Rs 570.50 crore, while for the Digital Subscriber facility, it was Rs 507.25 crore.

Chandra was a Rajya Sabha MP between 2016 and 2022. He was elected to the Upper House as an Independent candidate backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Since 2022, Chandra has been the subject of insolvency proceedings filed by Indiabulls Housing Finance Limited, now known as Sammaan Capital.

Chandra had stood as a personal guarantor for a Rs 170 crore loan given to a firm, Vivek Infracon. After the loan turned bad, Indiabulls moved the National Company Law Tribunal in 2022 under Section 95 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code for insolvency proceedings against Chandra. The plea was admitted in 2024.

On August 25, National Company Law Tribunal Member (Judicial) Nilesh Sharma allowed him to pay Rs 6.2 crore to creditors against admitted claims of about Rs 22,006 crore in his insolvency process.

However, the order was stayed on September 1.

Edited by Sneha.

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the manufacture, sale and bursting of certified green firecrackers in Delhi and the adjoining areas that form the National Capital Region for two days during the Hindu festival of Diwali, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices MM Sundresh and PB Varale permitted the bursting of green firecrackers between 6 am and 8 pm on November 7, and between 7 am and 10 pm on November 8. The complete ban on firecrackers should be restored from November 9, added the bench.

This year, Diwali will be celebrated on November 8.

The order came even as Delhi’s air quality worsened to the “very poor” level on Monday.

As of 7.05 am, the national capital recorded an average Air Quality Index of 307, showed the Sameer application that provides hourly updates published by the Central Pollution Control Board.

The court had permitted similar relaxations for the sale and use of firecrackers during Diwali last year. Despite the restrictions, several residents lit crackers outside the permitted period.

On Monday, the court asked the authorities to ensure that only green firecrackers approved by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research–National Environmental Engineering Research Institute are sold in the market, Live Law reported.

Green firecrackers are less polluting than regular ones as they are made with modified formulations and do not contain certain harmful elements such as lithium, arsenic, barium and lead.

The bench also said that firecrackers must not be burst within 300 metres of hospitals, nursing homes, primary and district health centres, old-age homes and notified silence zones. These areas, designated as “no-cracker zones”, must be marked on the ground and publicised.

The restriction would also extend to educational institutions.

Air quality deteriorates sharply in the colder months in Delhi, which is often ranked the world’s most polluted capital. Stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, along with falling temperatures, decreased wind speeds and emissions from industries and coal-fired plants contribute to the problem.

The court has asked the Central Pollution Control Board and State Pollution Control Boards within the National Capital Region to monitor air quality and prepare reports for three periods: pre-Diwali, Diwali and post-Diwali.

The pre-Diwali report would detail air quality for each day from November 2 to November 6. The report for Diwali would cover November 7 and November 8, while the post-Diwali report would provide daily air quality data from November 9 to November 30.

Firecracker ban

On October 14, 2024, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee banned the production, storage, sale and use of all types of firecrackers in the national capital till January 1, 2025.

Despite this, firecrackers were lit across the city during Diwali festivities. On November 1, 2024, the morning after the festival, Delhi’s air pollution was recorded at 14 times the “safe” limit prescribed by the World Health Organization.

In April 2025, the Supreme Court imposed a year-long ban on the manufacture, storage, sale and use of firecrackers in Delhi and the National Capital Region.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• Why some Delhi residents leave the city during Diwali
• How Delhi’s rich are escaping air pollution
• How an El Niño winter could worsen pollution in Delhi

Following objections from the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has deleted a video from its social media handles featuring actor Dia Mirza urging citizens not to burst firecrackers during the Hindu festival of Diwali, reported PTI on Monday.

In the video, Mirza, who is a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme, had urged the residents of Mumbai to limit air and noise pollution during the festive season.

On Sunday, the BJP’s Mumbai unit chief Ameet Satam said on social media: “We don’t need lessons on how to celebrate Diwali from Dia Mirza.”

Tagging the actor and the BMC in his post, Satam said: “Our traditions are deeply rooted in our culture.”

Hours later, the BMC took down the video. The municipal corporation did not clarify the reason behind deleting the clip, even as videos featuring other actor Madhuri Dixit and cricketer Ajinkya Rahane remain available on its social media handles.

On October 15, amid rising air pollution in the city, the Bombay High Court directed the municipal corporation, the Maharashtra government and the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board to launch awareness campaigns against bursting firecrackers during festivals and enlist celebrities for the purpose, Bar and Bench reported.

The High Court had said that its September 22 order banning firecrackers on public streets and roads, and the use of laser lights during festivities would remain in force throughout the year, covering all festivals, including Diwali.

On Monday, Mumbai Mayor Ritu Tawde said that Mirza had “always taken an anti-Hindu and anti-government stand”, reported NDTV.

“That is the reason for opposing her, not her religion,” Tawde was quoted as saying. “We believe in secularism.”

The mayor added that she would ensure Mirza was “blacklisted in our Mahayuti government”.

The Mahayuti comprises the BJP, the Shiv Sena led by Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and the Sunetra Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party.

After the BMC posted the video featuring Mirza, the Shinde Sena said that “Mumbaikars do not need lessons from others”, PTI reported.

Edited by Sneha.

Cyclone Murasu intensified into a severe cyclonic storm on Monday in the Bay of Bengal, triggering heavy rainfall alerts in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Chhattisgarh.

The cyclonic storm is expected to make landfall near Ongole in Andhra Pradesh between midnight on Monday and Tuesday morning. It is very likely to make landfall with wind speeds of 100 km per hour to 110 km per hour, gusting to 120 km per hour, the weather agency said.

As of 8.30 am on Monday, the storm was 180 km northeast of Chennai and 160 km east-southeast of Nellore, the India Meteorological Department said.

Heavy rainfall

There could be extremely heavy rainfall on Monday and Tuesday in some places in coastal Andhra Pradesh, the weather department said on Sunday. It predicted heavy rainfall in the region on Wednesday.

Tamil Nadu was forecast to receive heavy to very heavy rainfall in some places Monday and Tuesday.

The weather department said that southern Odisha will receive light to moderate rainfall at many places with heavy rainfall in some areas on Tuesday. Some places would receive "heavy to very heavy rainfall" on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The #Severe_Cyclonic_Storm “#Murasu” [Pronunciation: Murasu]” over Westcentral & adjoining Southwest Bay of #Bengal moved west-northwestwards with a speed of 22 kmph during past 06 hours and lay centered at 0830 hours IST of today, the 02nd #November, 2026 over the Westcentral… pic.twitter.com/WDow1zJ8Vd

— India Meteorological Department (@Indiametdept) November 2, 2026

Precautionary measures

Amid the heavy rain forecast, the authorities in Chennai and Tiruvallur ordered schools and colleges in the two districts to remain closed on Monday.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu said that he had spoken with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay to coordinate the states’ efforts to mitigate the damage.

Naidu requested human resources and machinery to restore damaged power systems, the chief minister’s office said on Sunday. It added that Vijay “responded positively” to the request.

The Andhra Pradesh chief minister said that 6,000 to 8,000 electricity poles may be damaged because of the cyclone, severely threatening power supply. “The CM has ordered that efforts should be made with the goal of restoring supply within 48 hours if the power system is affected,” his office said.

Flights cancelled

Ten IndiGo flights scheduled to operate from Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh on Monday were cancelled because of the cyclone, ANI quoted the airport authorities as saying.

Eleven IndiGo flights to and from Chennai, including three to and from Vijayawada, were cancelled, the airport operator said.

On Monday morning, IndiGo airline said that its to and from Visakhapatnam had also been “impacted”.

This is the second cyclone in the Bay of Bengal in less than a week, with Cyclone Arnab having completed landfall in Andhra Pradesh on October 28.

Three persons were killed and 31 houses damaged in Andhra Pradesh because of Cyclone Arnab. In neighbouring Odisha, 12 persons were missing after heavy rainfall triggered a landslide in Ganjam district on Friday.

Written by Abeer Khan. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Do you live near the coast in Mumbai or Kolkata?

Then, according to the United Nations, you could be among the 14 million people at risk of losing their homes to flooding caused by rising seas.

Both the cities – two of India’s most populous urban centres – continue to build expensive real estate along the coast despite a steady rise in sea water levels due to climate change and the increasing intensity of cyclonic storms. Worse, these projects are being built by destroying mangroves, wetlands and natural drains that act as buffers against coastal erosion.

Neither the real estate industry nor public authorities have cared to inform home buyers and coastal communities about these risks. As a result, many continue to invest their savings in apartments that could go under water in a few decades.

If you think this information must be publicly available, help us report from Mumbai and Kolkata. Led by Scroll’s award-winning climate reporter Vaishnavi Rathore, our team aims to map out the areas most vulnerable to coastal flooding and investigate if this risk-assessment has been part of real estate planning by private developers and government authorities.

You can fund our project by clicking here.

A man accused of attacking a minor girl at a school in Andhra Pradesh’s Anantapur district was shot at by the police on Sunday as he allegedly tried to escape custody, the Hindustan Times reported.

Meanwhile, the main suspect in a murder case was shot at by the Uttar Pradesh Police in Mathura after he allegedly fired at the police personnel during a search operation, ANI reported.

Andhra Pradesh

In Andhra Pradesh, the 21-year-old man was arrested in the Atmakur forest on Sunday evening and was being taken to Rapthadu village to reconstruct the crime scene. The police alleged that he threw stones at the team and tried to flee, the newspaper reported.

Several police personnel were injured, the Hindustan Times quoted an officer as having alleged.

The police opened fire in self-defence and to prevent the man from escaping, the officer was quoted as having claimed.

He was taken to hospital and his condition is serious, the newspaper reported.

The man had attacked the girl with a chainsaw on Saturday. The Class 10 student was taken to a local hospital. She was then moved to an intensive care unit at a hospital in Bengaluru, 200 km away, PTI quoted the state Education Minister Nara Lokesh as saying.

Another girl who tried to intervene during the attack was also injured, the newspaper reported.

Uttar Pradesh

The police in Mathura were conducting a search operation at Pali Khera-Maholi road in Mathura to arrest seven persons suspected to be involved in a murder.

During the operation, one of the suspects was seen “approaching rapidly” from the direction of Maholi village in a vehicle that did not have a number plate, ANI quoted Mathura Superintendent of Police Rajeev Kumar Singh as having alleged.

The man ignored warnings by the police personnel and “attempted to flee at high speed”, the officer alleged.

The suspect “exited the vehicle and opened fire on the police team,” the officer alleged.

The man was critically injured in retaliatory fire, the officer alleged. He was taken to hospital.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

In the latest chapter of the six-year-long saga of Ladakh’s quest for democratic autonomy, the Central government in October continued its record of broken promises.

In February, it had gone back on its assurance made in 2019 that Ladakh would get autonomy under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, just like four other tribal areas in the North East. This was when the status of Jammu and Kashmir’s status was downgraded to two Union Territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.

The Sixth Schedule allows for the establishment of autonomous district councils and autonomous regional councils that can make laws on local matters.

Many years of agitations and high-level committee meetings and the deaths of four protestors in police firing in September 2025 finally resulted in a breakthrough in May.

An agreement was reached between the Ministry of Home Affairs and the representatives of Ladakhi people – the Ladakh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance. It stated that statehood would remain the long-term aspiration of Ladakh. But “as a first step, an appropriate customized model of governance by establishing a UT-level elected body with executive, financial and legislative powers would be established”.

Among the Constitutional provisions that were to be considered was Article 371 of the Constitution, under which some regions and states, such as Nagaland, are accorded considerable autonomy to decide on crucial matters related to their own cultural, ecological, and economic needs.

But on October 15, the home ministry sent a draft of the legal status it was proposing for Ladakh, with provisions that are significantly weaker than what was agreed to in May. This draft is meant only for discussion, and “not to be construed as a final position or an official document”, the ministry clarified.

However, it clearly indicates what the ministry is thinking.

It has proposed a Constitutional provision for an elected body for Ladakh as a Union Territory and details about its powers and functions under Article 240, which deals with Union Territories.

This falls considerably short of a status under the Sixth Schedule or Article 371, which would have given Ladakh relative autonomy over crucial aspects like land, nature and natural resources, the bureaucracy, revenue generation and budgeting, legal and policy matters, and others.

This has been felt necessary by Ladakhis, and even accepted in principle by New Delhi, to enable the kind of development and decision-making that would be in tune with the region’s unique ecological and cultural heritage. There is over half a century of Constitutional and legal precedence for this, as several regions and sections of people in India have enjoyed such a status in recognition of the country’s enormous diversity.

This even includes the power to accept or reject national laws – for example, as with Nagaland and Mizoram – and make one’s own laws, as long as they do not violate the Constitution.

The home ministry’s draft provides for a legislative body to be elected by Ladakhis, and for such a body to have powers on aspects like land, culture and heritage, environmental planning and conservation and development planning. So far, so good.

But, reading the provisions proposed under Article 240, the inadequacies become clear, many of which have been pointed out by the Ladakh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance in a rejoinder sent to the home ministry on October 19.

Firstly, any provisions under Article 240 can be unilaterally removed or changed by the Central government, unlike such provisions being in the Constitution itself, which would require an amendment (taken through the Parliament) for any change.

Secondly, some crucial aspects on which Ladakhis should have control, have been left out of the list of items that the legislative body will have powers over, including natural resources. Third, legal, budgetary, and other crucial steps taken by the Ladakhi legislative body are subject to assent by the Lieutenant Governor (or Administrator) appointed by New Delhi.

Fourth, there is little financial autonomy. The draft says that “the UT Level Body would prepare its budget within its allocation, approve it, and submit it to the (Union) Government. Spending would take place after approval of the Government”.

Fifth, central laws would apply to Ladakh, and any regulations formulated by the Union territory’s legislative body would “not affect the powers of the Parliament, Courts, Central Government, or the Administrator”. This is seriously short of the legal autonomy that states like Nagaland and Mizoram have, and which Ladakh has also demanded.

Sixth, the Lieutenant Governor has the power to “dissolve the UT Level Body, after giving it notice and a chance to respond, for reasons such as persistent default or abuse of power”. As the response to home ministry by the Ladakh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance says, this renders the elected body answerable to New Delhi rather than to the public that has elected it. And it does not give the Ladakh body powers over the bureaucracy, which was agreed to in May.

In all of these and other ways, the home ministry’s draft makes Ladakh fully subservient to New Delhi. Even the language in the draft reeks of centralised power. For instance, with regard to the Ladakh legislative body as also Hill Councils at district levels, it says: “The Union’s executive power would extend to giving direction to both the bodies.”

Ladakhis are fighting to protect their sensitive region and their tribal identity. But what are their demands? @Priyanshi50 explains in this video.#sonamwangchuk #protest #delhi #ladakh #sixthschedule #statehood #article370 #BJP #Modi pic.twitter.com/AcAMoOMm8U

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2024

Why is the Central Government so reluctant to grant the legitimate needs and demands of Ladakh? Perhaps this can be understood in the context of India’s political economy. For over a decade, New Delhi has worked to subject “frontier” areas of India to more centralised control, and made it easier for powerful commercial and industrial interests to profit from the use of their lands, water, minerals, and other lucrative assets.

Constitutional provisions that were meant to safeguard the unique ecological and cultural heritage of such areas, and enable them to develop based on their own wisdom and capacities with sensitive help from New Delhi, are hurdles for such a quest.

There are reports of several commercially valuable minerals being found in Ladakh, lucrative tourism is being eyed by big players (thus far not allowed by local players), mega-solar projects are being planned, and major road construction has been underway since 2019. Most big contracts are going to outsiders.

Ladakh, like Kashmir, North East India, Kutch Lakshadweep, Andaman & Nicobar, is a mouth-watering destination for Indian and foreign companies keen to make a quick buck, regardless of the evident disastrous impacts on the local ecology and people.

In all this, the narrative that the central government needs to retain a stronghold on Ladakh for reasons of defence (the hungry Chinese wolf imagery comes to mind), is simply an excuse. Were this a real reason, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Assam, Sikkim and others would all have been Union territories administered from New Delhi.

Indeed, as Ladakhi leaders like Sonam Wangchuk have repeatedly said, a disgruntled civilian population in border areas is hardly a way to ensure their security.

Beyond the issue of Ladakh’s Constitutional status, some other key demands made by the Ladakh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance remain to be addressed. Earlier, the home ministry had accepted some demands, such as recognition of Bhoti, Purgi and Urdu as official languages, one-third reservation for women in the Ladakh Hill Councils, clarification on domicile status of residents, enhanced reservation for Scheduled Tribes, and creation of 2,000 jobs for youth. These are welcome.

But others that the home ministry has agreed to have not been addressed, including: dropping of criminal cases filed against several Ladakhis who were part of the protests in September 2025, as they are considered to be unfair; and enhanced compensation to the families of the people killed or injured in police firing then.

The police action that day has left a deep wound in Ladakh’s psyche, which the Administration of the Union territory and New Delhi have done little to heal.

Another agreement was that no major administrative or legislative measure would be taken by the administration till an agreed-to Constitutional status is operationalised. But this has already been violated, with the Union Law Ministry promulgating the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils (Amendment) Regulations 2026 without consulting the Ladakh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance or other Ladakhi representative bodies.

These groups have already voiced their disappointment at the draft by the home ministry and submitted their reasons for feeling short-changed. The demand for providing full democratic powers to Ladakh has been reiterated.

They hope that New Delhi will listen to this legitimate demand and stop dragging the matter, while it also clears big-ticket projects that threaten to gobble up land and reduce the chances of Ladakhis determining their own present and future.

Ashish Kothari is an environmental researcher-activist based in Pune. Views are personal.

The air quality in Delhi worsened to the “very poor” level on Monday.

As of 7.05 am, the national capital recorded an average Air Quality Index of 307, showed the Sameer application that provides hourly updates published by the Central Pollution Control Board.

Thirty-seven of the 58 active monitoring stations recorded “very poor” or worse air quality levels. At 417, the AQI in northwestern Delhi’s Jahangirpuri was the worst.

This was the highest AQI in the national capital since February, even as a series of additional measures under the Delhi government’s Winter Action Plan took effect on Sunday. The curbs will remain in force till February 28.

In Uttar Pradesh, Noida recorded a “very poor” AQI of 308, the application showed. At 267, the AQI in Greater Noida was “poor”. It was 276 in Ghaziabad, also in the “poor” category.

In Haryana, Gurugram recorded an average AQI of 225. Faridabad recorded an air quality level of 118, which is in the “moderate” category.

An index value between 0 and 50 indicates “good” air quality, between 51 and 100 indicates “satisfactory” air quality and between 101 and 200 indicates “moderate” air quality. As the index value increases further, air quality deteriorates. A value of 201 and 300 means “poor” air quality, while between 301 and 400 indicates “very poor” air.

Between 401 and 450 indicates “severe” air pollution, while anything above the 450 threshold is termed “severe plus”.

#WATCH | Delhi: The Air Quality Index (AQI) in the area around India Gate and Janpath is at 335, categorised as 'Very Poor', as per the CPCB (Central Pollution Control Board).

(Visuals shot at 06:39 am) pic.twitter.com/IKyYMg0TBk

— ANI (@ANI) November 2, 2026

The Union government’s Air Quality Early Warning System on Sunday had said that pollution will remain in the “poor” category till Tuesday before becoming “very poor” on Wednesday. It is likely to be “very poor to poor” till November 10, it forecast.

Air quality deteriorates sharply in the winter months in Delhi, which is often ranked the world’s most polluted capital. The lighting of firecrackers during Diwali along with stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, vehicular pollution, falling temperatures, decreased wind speeds and emissions from industries and coal-fired plants contribute to the problem.

This year, Diwali will be celebrated on November 8.

Stage 1 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan in Delhi and the National Capital Region have already been in force since October 21, when the average Air Quality Index crossed 200.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in Delhi-NCR.

The first stage involves measures such as mechanical sweeping of roads and sprinkling water on them to keep dust from rising. It also bans some kinds of construction and demolition activities.

Stage 1 of GRAP is activated when the AQI is in the “poor” category. The second, third and fourth stages are activated when the AQI crosses the “very poor”, “severe” category and “severe plus” category.

Winter curbs take effect

Starting Sunday, as part of the Winter Action Plan, non-Delhi vehicles below the Bharat Stage-6 emission norms were not allowed to enter the national capital till January 31. More than 1,500 vehicles in the category were turned back on Sunday, Delhi minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa said in a social media post.

Vehicles registered in Delhi that do not have a valid pollution control certificate were to be denied refuelling.

Meanwhile, the Delhi authorities collected Rs 68.4 lakh in penalties and environmental compensation, with 15,000 vehicles checked, the minister added.

Our teams are enforcing vehicle entry restrictions, checking PUC compliance and tackling construction dust. Today : 14,930 vehicles checked, 566 PUCC challans and 300 sites inspected. Keep PUCC valid, follow entry rules and dust norms. The quest for clean air needs our collective… pic.twitter.com/LyAn5pVYw8

— Manjinder Singh Sirsa (@mssirsa) November 1, 2026

On Friday, the Commission for Air Quality Management directed state government and private offices in Delhi and five adjoining regions including Gurugram and Noida to ensure that 50% of their employees work from home between November 5 and November 20. The precautionary measure was taken citing peak air pollution levels historically observed during and immediately after Diwali.

In Delhi, the requirement had already been announced on October 20 and took effect on Sunday.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Why some Delhi residents leave the city during Diwali
• How an El Niño winter could worsen pollution in Delhi
• How Delhi’s rich are escaping air pollution

On October 21, the morning after Dusshera, Delhi-NCR woke up to a pollution haze, with the air quality index jumping to 244 – the worst in the last 100 days. This marked the beginning of the air pollution season, and the air is set to get worse through the winter as a result of continued vehicular emissions, construction and stubble burning.

But this year, Delhi and the rest of the Indo-Gangetic plain faces an additional challenge that could worsen the air quality – an El Niño with “unprecedented strength”, expected to peak between November and January.

El Niño is a climate pattern that repeats every few years. Influenced by warming sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific, it can increase heat and reduce rainfall across the world. Between the coming months of November and January, the sea surface temperature could rise 3.8 degree Celsius above average, making this year a “Super El Niño” year, the World Meteorological Organisation has predicted.

While El Niño is not itself a source of pollution, meteorological factors associated with it, like temperature and wind speed, can affect the way pollutants mix in the atmosphere, and thus affect air quality.

Gufran Beig, chair professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru, and founder-director of the System of Air Quality Forecasting and Research, explained that normal winter months already see a greater accumulation of pollutants in the air. This is because wind speeds are lower during this period, which can reduce the dispersal of pollutants – in contrast, in the summer and monsoon seasons, pollutants rise with hotter air, and faster winds disperse them.

An El Niño scenario could “enhance the normal levels of weather trapping” by reducing wind speeds further, said Beig. Additionally, it could reduce the occurrence of western disturbances, a phenomenon that causes rain and snow in the Himalayas – this, in turn, can result in rain in north-western India, which helps flush out pollutants.

Both these factors could cause pollutants to remain suspended in air for longer and “much more than what it normally does in this season”, Beig said.

Local and global winds

Wind conditions in a particular region are determined by the interaction of local weather with global winds. The local conditions are temporary and specific to smaller regions, and are typically observed closer to the ground. For instance, Beig noted, coastal regions tend to see fast-moving local winds caused by the difference between ocean and land temperatures.

Meanwhile, global “background winds” have a strong influence on overall wind behaviour, he added. These winds are influenced by temperature changes associated with phenomena such as El Niño, and its opposing, cooling phenomenon, La Nina.

During an El Niño event, Pacific winds that usually move from South America to Asia weaken or slow down, and sometimes even reverse their direction back to South America. This impacts rainfall patterns – it brings very wet conditions to the west coast of South America, and leaves Asia unusually dry. This is why, with an active El Niño this year, India experienced a 13% monsoon deficit.

This slowing of global winds can impact local meteorological conditions. Beig explained that “When large-scale wind circulation becomes slow because of a global phenomenon”, the already slower and weaker local winds of the winter months “will become even weaker”.

These weaker winds are relatively ineffective at dispersing and flushing out pollutants, he added – this problem grows more serious over the months as El Niño peaks and air pollution intensifies.

Previous El Niño years

Experts have noted a correlation between previous El Niño years and poor air quality.

The Council on Energy, Environment and Water, or CEEW, examined air quality data between 2020 and 2024 – while 2023-’24 was an El Niño year, the other years were influenced by La Nina, the cooler global weather phenomenon, with faster winds.

They found that between November and January, the number of “very poor” and “severe” AQI days were higher in the El Niño year of 2023-’24, compared to the La Nina years. For instance, December 2023 had 27 such days, compared to 25, 21 and 20 in the previous three years. The distinction was even more pronounced for January – the El Niño year had 30 “very poor” and “severe” days, while the other years had 20 or fewer such days.

“Our study was based on just four years,” explained Prarthana Borah, a fellow at CEEW, who leads the air quality team. “And based on that, we can say that we did see the number of polluted days increase with El Niño year. This shows that there is a need to look deeper into these correlations.”

Meanwhile, in a 2026 paper, Beig and others looked at PM2.5 concentrations in cities through the La Nina year of 2022-’23 and the El Niño year of 2023-’24.

The study focused on two cities: Jaipur in the north and Hyderabad in the south. In Jaipur, they found that rainfall in the winter months of the La Nina year lowered PM2.5 concentrations, while the subsequent El Niño year saw less rainfall, which led to “less effective removal of atmospheric particles”.

Research has also drawn links between El-Niño years and weaker western disturbances.

A 2017 paper found that in 2015, El Niño conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean led to increased sea-surface temperature of the northern parts of the Indian ocean, near peninsular India. This atypical change of temperature between the sea and peninsular India led to a “branching and weakening of westerly jet streams”, which in turn led to weaker winds over north-west India, fewer western disturbances and “meagre precipitation” in the region that winter.

Experts noted that a poor monsoon in an El-Niño year can increase risks to air pollution in other ways also. Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist at Pune’s Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, explained that a weak monsoon delays the sowing of kharif crops like paddy, thereby increasing the possibility of a delayed and reduced harvest. “When harvests are pushed back, the window before rabi sowing becomes even tighter,” Koll said. This increases pressure on farmers “to burn crop residue”, he noted.

La Nina years

CEEW and Beig have also studied La Nina years closely. They found that in contrast to El Niño years, in these periods, higher wind speeds can lead to lower than average pollution, even in the winter.

CEEW’s study found that in the La Nina winters between 2020 and 2023, the lower numbers of “very poor” and “severe” pollution days “can be attributed, at least in part, to higher wind speeds”.

Similarly, in a 2024 paper, Beig and other scientists looked at air quality through the 2022-’23 La Nina year and found a “noticeable declining trend” of PM2.5 levels in most north Indian cities. For instance, compared to the “averaged winter values of the past three-years” Ghaziabad had a 33% reduction of PM2.5 levels, Rohtak a 30% reduction and Noida a 28% reduction.

This study also found that this reduction was connected with faster winds. Usually, the study noted, winds that blow towards Delhi and surrounding areas dump stubble-induced pollutants to the Indo-Gangetic regions, including Delhi. But the winds in November 2022 were “relatively faster”, and carried pollutants away from the city.

Tackling the problem

Experts argued that more long-term studies were needed, to make stronger correlations between air quality and climatic trends.

“Meteorological conditions are complex, and isolating winds or temperatures to air pollution is difficult,” said Borah. While recent short-term studies do suggest “that meteorology plays a major role”, Borah said, “we do not have enough long-term and larger studies to exactly say what the impact is”.

Experts also noted that even as studies make this connection between climate and air pollution clearer, it is imperative that pollution is curbed more effectively at sources.

“During cold weather, whether we have El Niño or not, it will slow down wind speed and reduce the possibility of air pollutants’ dispersal,” said Borah. Further, she explained, apart from year-round vehicular pollution, the season also sees a rise in other sources of air pollution, like the burning of wood and other materials in the city, which people do to keep warm, and seasonal burning of agricultural residue. “All of these would need to be targeted,” Borah said.

Borah explained that while Delhi has technologies like an early warning system developed by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, which gives up to 10-day forecasts of air quality, “We need to start using these and being more pro-active with these”, rather than reacting only when air quality deteriorates.

Koll echoed the argument that pollution needed to be controlled at its sources. Farmers should get “timely, affordable help to manage crop residue, while cities must cut their own emissions from transport, industry, construction, and waste burning”, he said. He added, “We have enough warning to act before these pressures come together.”

For Beig, too, the findings of the recent research studies are a reminder to move towards air pollution mitigation more urgently. “These relationships are showing us that we have to be even faster in curbing anthropogenic causes of air pollution,” he said.

More than 4,000 residents were displaced on Sunday after the authorities in Assam’s Dhubri district demolished the homes of over 640 Bengali Muslim families during an eviction drive, officials told Scroll.

The demolition took place on 650 bighas of government-owned land in Alamganj Part-IX village.

Dhubri District Commissioner Dibakar Nath told Scroll that eviction notices had been served to residents occupying 800 bighas of land. However, the drive was not carried out on the remaining 150 bighas because of pending court cases.

“The land would be handed over to the industrial department which has been looking for land for an industrial park for the last two years,” Nath said. “But the further decision would be taken by the government.”

He claimed that residents had settled on the government land in different phases, with some arriving five years ago and others a decade ago. “Most of them have land in other places,” he alleged.

However, residents have disputed this claim.

Videos circulating on social media over the past few days showed residents dismantling their homes and moving their belongings ahead of the demolition drive.

An eviction drive in Alomganj's Ninth Block in Assam's Dhubri district triggered emotional scenes on November 1, with a woman fainting as her house was demolished and residents seen praying at a mosque and breaking down near a shrine. Over 50 bulldozers were deployed to clear… pic.twitter.com/UhS3svGYZl

— India Today NE (@IndiaTodayNE) November 1, 2026

Ali Chand Fakir, an 80-year-old resident of the village told Scroll that he had dismantled parts of his house before the eviction.

“Today, the bulldozers flattened the three houses, trees, toilets etc,” Fakir said.

He said that he had been living in the village since 1962, after moving there from neighbouring Goalpara district because of erosion and floods caused by the Brahmaputra river.

He added that several residents had paid land revenue under the touzi system between 1972 and 2016. Touzi receipts are records of payments made by people occupying government land.

“Most of the displaced are now living in their relatives’ houses, makeshift huts along roadsides under tarpaulins or in low-lying char areas, as they do not have alternative land,” Fakir said.

The latest eviction comes amid an intensification of demolition drives by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Assam government.

Around two weeks ago, more than 1,100 Muslim families were evicted across Nagaon, Hojai and Golaghat districts in a two-day operation.

In the last ten years of BJP rule in Assam, around 19,000 families, the majority of them Muslim, have been evicted from government land, according to data from the state revenue and disaster management department and the district authorities compiled by Scroll.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a further fundamental statistical problem.

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

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

The National Sample Survey or NSS Survey uses Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) data and says organised manufacturing employment increased by more than 5.7 million between FY2015 and FY2024; grew at about 4% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR); and increased by more than one million in FY2024 alone, a 6% year-on-year increase.

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

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

In fact, what takes the wind out of the government’s claims, is that the increase in organised manufacturing has been accompanied by growing contractualisation. According to ASI, contract workers accounted for only about 13% of the formal manufacturing workforce in 1993-’94. However, this share rose sharply to 20% by 1999-’2000 and further to 37.8% in 2018-’19.

As per the latest ASI data (2022-23), it has reached 40.7%. Thus, so much for the claim of formalisation – the ILO defines it as work with social security, and contract work does not offer that. .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday alleged that neither Narendra Modi would have secured a third term as prime minister nor Amit Shah become Union home minister without the help of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

Kumar was appointed an election commissioner in March 2024 and took charge as chief election commissioner in February 2025.

Gandhi said the alleged theft of votes in the country amounted to “treason” and called for Kumar’s removal.

“This is not regular chori [theft],” the leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said. “That is when someone steals something from a shop. This is theft of the voice of every person. In legal parlance, it is called rarest of rare case.”

The Congress leader was addressing tens of thousands of people at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan alongside several INDIA bloc leaders, including Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary MA Baby and Jammu and Kashmir National Conference chief Farooq Abdullah at a rally demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged electoral irregularities.

At least three serving chief ministers, Telangana’s Revanth Reddy, Kerala’s VD Satheesan and Himachal Pradesh’s Sukhvinder Singh, also joined the demonstration.

Banerjee, the former West Bengal chief minister accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of “looting” the state and alleged that electoral irregularities had led to her party’s defeat in the Assembly elections.

“We didn’t lose, we were made to lose,” she said. “We will take revenge through politics.”

Banerjee added that “Bengal is the victim of the special intensive revision [of electoral rolls]”.

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav alleged that names of voters had also been deleted in Uttar Pradesh, including during the 2022 Assembly elections.

“BJP wants only its members to be voters and citizens of India,” Yadav said.

“We don't have any benefits keeping Modi as the Prime Minister,” a protester from #MadhyaPradesh tells @sighyush.

Demonstrators have gathered at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan demanding the resignation of CEC #GyaneshKumar. pic.twitter.com/ytymGCxmgO

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) November 1, 2026

BJP accuses INDIA bloc of plotting ‘riots’

Earlier in the day, Union minister and Bharatiya Janata Party leader JP Nadda said that the Opposition bloc’s rally was a “conspiracy to hand over the country to anarchy in the name of democracy”.

He said that India is not a “banana republic” where Gandhi would be able to “instigate riots” or run the “agenda for regime change”.

Nadda alleged that the rally’s objective was to “destabilise” the democratically elected government by “instigating riots and disorder” in Delhi, hurting the earnings of shopkeepers and traders during the festive season, and tarnishing the country’s image.

Meanwhile, Gandhi accused the BJP of “forcibly” shutting shops in the Connaught Place area.

“We had urged people attending the march and rally to shop in the area,” he said, adding that they found the shops shut.

He said that people should know “who is causing the loss to the traders, and how it’s happening”.

Protestors stage a symbolic protest at Ramlila Maidan with scores of 'chopped fingers' to demand CEC Gyanesh Kumar's resignation over the deletion of 13 crore voters.@sighyush reports pic.twitter.com/PIqp7WRRFO

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) November 1, 2026

This came a day after the Opposition INDIA bloc staged a symbolic “public impeachment” of Kumar, accusing him of “conspiring to steal elections” by “ensuring the intentional deletion of 13 crore voters”.

The demonstration was held at Kharge’s residence on Saturday, a day before the Opposition’s “Chalo Dilli” march against alleged vote theft through the special intensive revision of electoral rolls and to press for Kumar’s resignation.

The “public impeachment” followed a mock parliamentary format, with Kharge, the leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha, moving a symbolic motion for Kumar’s removal from his post.

Kharge said that the deletion of Indians as voters during special intensive revision was a “criminal act and an act against the Constitution of India”.

The Opposition parties further alleged that the chief election commissioner had “acted at the behest” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

Since October 2, nationwide protests have been held calling for Kumar’s resignation over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and the alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

The trigger for the protests was a September 23 investigation by The Indian Express, which revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

Inputs from Ayush Tiwari. Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Election Commission on Saturday directed that first information reports be filed against two electoral registration officers in Uttar Pradesh and ordered their suspension over irregularities in the electoral rolls for the Pilibhit Sadar Assembly constituency, The Indian Express reported.

Earlier in the day, Uttar Pradesh Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa had directed the immediate deactivation of the login IDs of all computer assistants working on the Election Commission’s ECINET portal in the offices of electoral registration officers across the state.

The developments follow the Congress’ October 21 allegations that the names of more than 13,000 voters had been replaced with those of other persons after the final electoral rolls were published in the Pilibhit Sadar constituency.

A day later, Rinwa said that “irregularities” had been found in 10,470 entries in the constituency after the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

In the 2022 Assembly polls, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Sanjay Gangwar won the seat by a margin of less than 7,000 votes.

An investigation by the Pilibhit district election officer found that a computer assistant had entered 13,779 Form 8 applications. Form 8 is used to correct details in an existing electoral roll or shift a voter’s residence. However, no physical forms or supporting documents were available to support the “corrections”.

On October 22, Rinwa said that legal action would be taken against the current and former electoral registration officers in the constituency. He also said that the services of a computer assistant at the Voter Registration Centre in Pilibhit would be terminated.

In a letter to Rinwa on Saturday, the Election Commission said that after examining the report on the matter, it had decided to order the suspension of Mayank Goswami and Hemant Chaudhary, The Indian Express reported.

“The erring officers shall not be reinstated without the prior approval of the Commission,” the poll body said.

The Commission also directed that Section 198 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which pertains to public servants disobeying the law, be added to the FIRs against the two officials and computer operator Anil Kumar. It also asked that their chargesheets be submitted to the poll panel for further scrutiny.

The Election Commission sought a report on the review of Pilibhit’s electoral rolls within a week, the newspaper reported.

It directed all district election officers and electoral registration officers in Uttar Pradesh to re-examine the voter lists under their jurisdiction, “especially data feeding of the addition, deletion or modifications done through Forms 6, 7 or 8”.

Uttar Pradesh was part of the second phase of the voter roll revision.

More than two crore names, or 13.2% of the electorate, were deleted from the final rolls published on April 10. The BJP-ruled state had more than 15 crore electors before the roll revision. Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh are expected to be held in February or March.

Around 806 computer operators are deployed in the offices of electoral registration officers across Uttar Pradesh. Each Assembly constituency has two computer assistants working as operators at voter registration centres in these offices.

A contentious exercise

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

In May, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the exercise, but said that it does not mean that the Election Commission can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen.

Despite this, BJP-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

Protests have been held in the country since October 2 against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read:

• Follow Scroll’s coverage of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls here.
• SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial

Jet fuel prices for domestic airlines rose by Rs 1.3 per litre on Sunday, marking the fourth consecutive monthly increase, PTI reported.

The price of aviation turbine fuel has been raised to Rs 138.5 per litre from Rs 137.1 per litre, the news agency reported.

The prices were last increased by Rs 16 per litre on October 1.

In September, the prices were increased by Rs 6.2 per litre, following a Rs 5 per litre hike in August.

The latest increase will add to the financial burden on airlines, as aviation turbine fuel accounts for about 40% of their operating expenses.

The war in West Asia has pushed up global oil prices and led to airspace restrictions that have increased operating costs.

On April 26, Air India, IndiGo and SpiceJet told the Union government that the country’s aviation sector was on the verge of “stopping operations” and had sought its intervention “for immediate and meaningful financial support to tide over the current situation”.

On May 13, Air India said that it would temporarily suspend its services on certain international routes from June to August due to airspace restrictions over some regions and record-high prices of jet fuel.

Commercial LPG prices hiked

The prices of commercial liquefied petroleum gas were also increased by an approximate Rs 10 per 19-kg cylinder across the country, The Hindu reported.

The increase applies to commercial cylinders used by businesses and industrial consumers, while prices of domestic cooking gas cylinders remain unchanged.

With the latest revision, a 19-kg commercial LPG cylinder costs Rs 2,820 in Delhi, Rs 2,775 in Mumbai, Rs 2,971 in Kolkata and Rs 2,994.5 in Chennai.

The hike was steepest in Kolkata, where prices increased by Rs 17 per cylinder. Rates rose by Rs 11.5 in Chennai and Rs 10.5 in Mumbai.

This marks the third consecutive monthly increase in commercial LPG prices.

Earlier, the prices were increased by Rs 62.5 per 19-kg cylinder on October 1, following a Rs 9.5 hike on September 1.

India imports half of its natural gas requirements and 88% of its crude oil needs. This mostly comes through the Strait of Hormuz, which had been effectively blocked since the conflict in West Asia began on February 28.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

An eight-year-old boy grabbed a kindergarten student by her hair and repeatedly banged her head against a desk before kicking and hitting her with a brick at a government school in Haryana’s Panchkula, The Indian Express reported on Sunday.

He continued hitting her after she fell to the floor and lost consciousness.

The incident took place on Wednesday and came to light after the auto-rickshaw driver who had arrived to pick up the girl could not find her. He informed her father, who then went to the school.

When the father arrived at the school, the boy told him, “Uncle, I will take you upstairs. She is there,” The Indian Express reported.

CCTV footage from the classroom, later shared on social media, showed the boy returning after some time, dragging the unconscious girl across the floor and continuing to hit her.

The girl suffered facial and nasal fractures and is undergoing treatment at hospital in Chandigarh. She regained consciousness only on Saturday.

The girl’s uncle told The Indian Express that the boy had lured her to an empty classroom by telling her that her father was coming to school.

The boy, a student of Class 3, allegedly narrated what happened to a teacher after the school administration examined the CCTV footage.

He was taken to a hospital on Saturday for a mandatory mental health assessment, as required in cases involving children between seven and 12 years of age.

A first information report has been registered under sections of the Juvenile Justice Care and Protection of Children Act, 2015, and provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the newspaper quoted Panchkula Deputy Commissioner of Police Aditi Singh as saying.

The Haryana government has formed a five-member committee to investigate the incident and ordered a safety audit of schools in the state. It will also bear the cost of the girl’s treatment.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Three men belonging to the Kuki community were killed in fresh exchange of gunfire between unidentified armed groups in Manipur’s Noney district on Saturday, a police official told Scroll.

A day later, two Kuki civilians who went missing from Taphou Kuki village on Wednesday were found dead, the Manipur Police said in a social media post.

The deaths brought the toll in clashes between Naga and Kuki groups since February to 68.

The killings came as thousands of persons from Meitei organisations held a rally in Imphal demanding the scrapping of the Suspension of Operations agreement with Kuki-Zo armed groups, The Hindu reported.

Naga civil society organisations also held rallies in several hill districts in support of the Imphal demonstration. The Naga organisations have also demanded the termination of the agreement, accusing Kuki-Zo militant groups of being involved in violence.

The Suspension of Operations agreement was signed between the Centre, the Manipur government and two conglomerates of Kuki militant outfits – the Kuki National Organisation and United Peoples Front – in 2008.

Under the agreement, the security forces and the militant groups are prohibited from launching operations. The militant groups must abide by the laws of the land and are also confined to designated camps identified by the Union government.

The agreement was renewed in September 2025.

This followed the ethnic clashes that broke out in Manipur in May 2023 between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities.

At least 306 persons have been killed and 49 are missing in Manipur since the beginning of the ethnic violence in the state in May 2023, the Assembly was informed in September. About 60,000 persons were displaced during the violence. Of them, 36,000 persons had been resettled and 24,000 remained in relief camps across Manipur.

Tensions between the Kuki and the Naga communities have also escalated in the state since February.

The three Kuki men killed on Saturday were identified as Thanglensang Singson, Thangkhosei Haokip and Lamminsang Kipgen, all from Churachandpur district, the Hindustan Times quoted the police as saying.

The Kuki Inpi Manipur, a Kuki apex body, said the three men were village volunteers.

“The murder of these three brave village volunteers in Noney district is the direct consequence of the state’s reckless refusal to provide adequate security to vulnerable Kuki-Zo communities,” the Hindustan Times quoted the group as saying.

On Saturday, members of the Kuki-Zo community from Kangpokpi district had taken part in a protest rally organised by the Committee on Tribal Unity, before the two civilians were found dead, demanding their safe release.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: ‘No one to protect us’: In Manipur, civilians easy targets as armed groups step up violence

If you had not heard of Friendship Files: How Modi and Adani Stole India till last week, it is likely that you have by now, thanks to an order by the Calcutta High Court asking social media platforms to take down the 36-minute documentary.

The order came after Adani Enterprises Limited, the flagship firm of India’s richest man Gautam Adani, filed a Rs 50-crore defamation suit against tech entrepreneur Sabeer Bhatia and unknown others for making and circulating the documentary. The court remarkably passed the order – a pre-trial injunction – without hearing the other side. Bhatia has since clarified that he did not make the documentary, he merely circulated it. No one has taken credit for the production. For good reason, I thought, when I finally watched it.

The risk of defamation might have been their primary concern. But did the makers not consider the possibility of being sued for copyright infringement, I wondered with some bemusement, since much of what the documentary goes over are known facts, painstakingly gathered by journalists.

Despite the court’s takedown order, the documentary is still floating around on the internet – on the X account of a prominent Opposition politician, for instance.

However, if you want to skip the trouble of finding it, you might want to consider reading and watching the reports that it relies on, directly and indirectly. We have a small compendium for you:

1. The genesis of Gautam Adani’s proximity to Narendra Modi. A 2013 report by M Rajshekhar, published in The Economic Times, details how the entrepreneur came to Modi’s rescue in 2003 when as chief minister of Gujarat, he faced growing criticism for his failure to prevent the worst-ever communal riots in the state. As Rajshekhar wrote: “Some leaders of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the country’s main industry grouping…told him that it would be hard for the state to pull in investments. ‘He needed to prove them wrong,’ says a senior official of the CII’s state chapter, not wanting to be identified. ‘Companies were being called to announce large investments in the state…Adani surprised everyone by announcing a Rs 15,000 crore investment.’”

2. Land for Mundra port at first-cheap prices. A 2014 report in the Business Standard by Premal Balan and Kalpesh Damor highlighted the rates at which the Gujarat government had allotted land to the Adani Group for its port and special economic zone project: “between Re 1 and Rs 32 per square metre”. It added: “By comparison, other companies setting up facilities in the state paid much higher rates: Tata Motors was given 1,110 acres for its Nano car plant in Sanand (near Ahmedabad) at Rs 900 per sq mt, Ford India paid at Rs 1,100 per sq mt for 460 acres close by, while India’s largest carmaker, Maruti Suzuki, bought about 700 acres in Hansalpur at Rs 670 per sq mt.” Days after the newspaper report appeared, Sreenivasan Jain of NDTV questioned Gautam Adani in a combative interview, which makes for compelling viewing today, especially since the news channel was acquired by Adani Group in 2022.

3. Adani’s coal empire. The documentary rightly notes that the Adani Group is India’s largest private coal miner as well as the largest private power producer. But it misattributes its sector dominance to a single decision taken by the Modi government in 2015 when it conducted the first coal mine auctions in the country. In reality, Adani’s coal and energy empire is built on the back of a series of government decisions, many of which Scroll has covered over the past decade. As a small sample, read this, this, this and this.

4. Adani’s acquisition of Mumbai airport. In June 2020, the Central Bureau of Investigation filed a case against the chairman of the GVK Group which owned and operated the Mumbai International Airport. Two months later, the Hyderabad-based group sold its prized asset to the Adani Group. In 2023, after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi alleged in Parliament that Mumbai airport had been “hijacked” by Adani “using government agencies”, the chairman’s son, Sanjaya Reddy, who used to run the airport, appeared on Adani-owned NDTV to say that his family had not sold the airport under pressure. In 2019, despite being a newcomer, the Adani Group acquired rights to manage six airports through a bidding process that both the finance ministry and NITI Aayog had objected to.

5. Phenomenal growth. Coal. Power. Airports. Ports. City gas. Food. In the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Scroll compiled data on how the Adani Group had expanded its footprints across the country, with the number of its projects doubling in five years.

To help us update this story in the run-up to the 2029 elections, please consider contributing to our ground reporting fund by clicking here.

Here is a summary of last week’s top stories.

Mass disenfranchisement continues. The names of more than 99.3 lakh voters were deleted from Karnataka’s final voter list following the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. The number of voters fell to 4.5 crore from the 5.5 crore who were on the state’s electoral rolls before the exercise began.

In the final stage of the exercise, more than 8.6 lakh names were reinstated to the draft list. In August, the draft list had excluded over one crore voters.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court verbally assured that voters would not be prosecuted for submitting Form 6 to restore their names to the electoral roll after being excluded during the special intensive revision. Form 6 is meant for first-time voter registration and requires applicants to state that they have not registered or voted previously.

“Pre-existing voters misrepresenting themselves as fresh voters is an offence and liable for prosecution,” said the petitioner’s advocate. In response, Chief Justice Surya Kant said: “Do not worry. Nobody will be prosecuted.”

Shubham Kumar explains why the Election Commission’s Form 6 for new voters has triggered a legal row. And follow Scroll’s coverage of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls here.

Rahul Gandhi wades into the Tata feud. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi accused the Union government of “criminally destroying” the Tata Group, the largest Indian conglomerate. While Gandhi did not specify what prompted his remarks, they came amid a dispute within the leadership of Tata Sons, the holding entity of the conglomerate’s companies.

The dispute revolves around the reappointment of N Chandrasekaran as the executive chairman of Tata Sons and the proposed listing of the holding company on the stock market.

When Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in response, alleged that Gandhi was “spreading distrust”, the Congress leader said that all of India’s businesses “except 3-4 of your cronies, already hate all of you and don’t need any incitement”.

Tough road ahead for Netanyahu. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu-led alliance finished ahead of the Opposition bloc in the country’s general elections, but failed to secure a majority. The Netanyahu-led coalition won 53 of the 120 seats in Parliament. A party or an alliance needs 61 seats to form the government.

The Opposition bloc won 48 seats. The Arab parties, which are supported largely by Israel’s Palestinian minority, secured 19 seats.

This was the first parliamentary election since the beginning of the conflict in Gaza three years ago and the Israel-United States’ war on Iran that started in February. Another election would be held if coalition talks fail and no government can be formed.

Also on Scroll last week

• Watch: Interview: Why Neha Bora wants ‘regime change’
• A new Brahmin-first party in UP symbolises a growing disquiet among BJP’s core voters
• A murder live-streamed spotlights the desperation and limits of Punjab’s anti-drug crusaders
• Why India’s ethanol push is not benefitting farmers
• How children with disabilities are made to jump through hoops to access benefits
• Demand for ‘peace’ bond from Neha Bora seeks to impose conditions for dissent and protest
• Mehran Hodiwala’s songs find the funny side of life’s uncomfortable moments
• Harsh Mander: The unlikely redemption of the 13-year-old jailed for the murder of Graham Staines
• A documentary revisits Libia Lobo Sardesai’s remarkable contribution to the Goa liberation struggle
• When 11 women made a film together: ‘No weeping, no sad songs in the background’

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The Chief Electoral Officer of Uttar Pradesh on Saturday directed the immediate deactivation of the login IDs of all computer assistants working on the Election Commission’s ECINET portal in the offices of electoral registration officers across the state.

The order came after the Congress on October 21 alleged that the names of more than 13,000 voters had been replaced with those of other persons after the final electoral rolls were published in the Pilibhit Sadar Assembly constituency.

A day later, Uttar Pradesh Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa said that “irregularities” had been found in 10,470 electoral roll entries in the constituency after the revision.

In the 2022 Assembly polls, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Sanjay Gangwar won the seat by a margin of less than 7,000 votes.

An investigation by the Pilibhit district election officer found that a computer assistant had entered 13,779 Form 8 applications. Form 8 is used to correct details in an existing electoral roll or shift a voter’s residence.

On October 22, Rinwa said that legal action would be taken against the current and former electoral registration officers in the constituency. He also said that the services of a computer assistant at the Voter Registration Centre in Pilibhit would be terminated.

On October 25, The Election Commission ordered the reverification of all names added to, deleted from or amended in Uttar Pradesh’s electoral rolls through Forms 6, 7 and 8 by computer assistants in all 403 Assembly constituencies after the special intensive revision ended on April 10.

Uttar Pradesh was part of the second phase of the voter roll revision.

More than two crore names, or 13.2% of the electorate, were deleted from the final rolls published on April 10. The BJP-ruled state had more than 15 crore electors before the roll revision. Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh are expected to be held in February or March.

Around 806 computer operators are deployed in the offices of electoral registration officers across Uttar Pradesh. Each Assembly constituency has two computer assistants working as operators at voter registration centres in these offices.

A contentious exercise

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

In May, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the exercise, but said that it does not mean that the Election Commission can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen.

Despite this, BJP-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

Protests have been held in the country since October 2 against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Supreme Court’s recognition in June of walking as a fundamental right is a moment for Indian cities to rethink the way we look at our roads and the purpose they serve.

The conversation around urban roads is largely dominated by familiar questions: how congested are they? Do we need to widen them? Won’t a new flyover ease bottlenecks?

However, congestion is not just a problem of insufficient road width. It also arises due to inadequate road networks.

A city does not function through a handful of wider roads. It functions through a hierarchy of roads – arterial roads carrying longer-distance traffic, primary and secondary roads distributing this traffic, and local streets providing access to individual properties.

Each layer of this hierarchy has a critical role to play, and its physical design should complement that role.

When the design of a road does not align with its intended role, the overall network becomes less efficient. Similarly, when connections between different levels of the hierarchy are missing, trips are forced onto a few major corridors, adding to existing traffic and increasing pressure on the network.

While cities do need to build road infrastructure, these efforts should translate to a better connected and more efficient road networks.

This requires a shift from project-by-project thinking to long-term network planning.

Road networks take years to build. The biggest obstacle is often not engineering but land acquisition. Acquiring land after a city has already developed around a corridor is expensive, politically challenging and disruptive. That is why road planning needs a 10-year-15-year horizon.

Cities need to create master plans that look at where growth is likely to happen, how people are likely to travel, and what road hierarchy will be required. The plan must also consider where land will need to be allotted for building better connectivity and what policies need to be adopted to rehabilitate affected communities.

Building better road networks are key to augmenting more robust public transport. A city can invest billions in a metro system or add hundreds of buses, but if the road network does not allow people to reach stations and bus stops safely and efficiently, the investment will not deliver its full potential.

Recent WRI India analyses show that Ahmedabad and Delhi have well-connected networks that help distribute traffic across several routes and retain higher peak-hour speeds than most other Tier 1 cities. However, in Bengaluru, Chennai and Pune, the movement stays concentrated to a few high-demand corridors.

Bengaluru offers a striking illustration of why connectivity matters. Consider two localities, Basavanagudi and Whitefield. In both cases, the origin and destination are roughly 3 km apart in a straight line. Yet the actual journey tells a very different story.

In Basavanagudi, a well-connected street network means the trip is 3.4 km, requiring only a 400-metre detour. In Whitefield, poorer street connectivity and missing links stretch the same journey to 4.7 km, forcing a 1.7-kilometre detour, more than 50 per cent farther than necessary.

This is the hidden cost of disconnected urban growth. When road networks lack continuity, people travel longer distances and spend more time on the road, putting greater pressure on already congested corridors.

The analysis is a part of the Shift Transport Initiative, being developed as a “digital public good”, enabling Indian cities and stakeholders to access insights, visualisations and tools to support more sustainable, inclusive and evidence-based mobility decisions.

Building better road networks requires cities to move from a congestion-focused approach to a connectivity-focused one. This means prioritising connectivity as cities expand, creating complete road hierarchies with adequate secondary and local streets, identifying and closing strategic missing links between neighbourhoods, and designing finer-grained street networks that allow direct travel.

These investments should be complemented by strong public transport, on-street parking policies and demand management measures.

The next phase of urban infrastructure should not be measured only in kilometres of new roads laid or the number of flyovers completed. Cities should instead ask: how connected is the network? Where are the missing links? How much traffic is being forced onto a handful of arterials? Can a person walk safely to a bus stop or metro station? And, crucially, what will the network look like when the city significantly expands – and expand it will.

The real test of our roads should therefore not be how wide they are. It should be how well do they enable a city to move.

Amitabh Kant is Chairperson, Fairfax Centre for Free Enterprise, and formerly India’s G20 Sherpa and CEO Niti Aayog and Madhav Pai is CEO, WRI India. Views expressed by the authors are personal.

Twelve persons went missing after heavy rainfall triggered a landslide in Odisha’s Ganjam district on Friday, reported The Indian Express.

Separately, three persons of a family, including a nine-month-old baby, died in a landslide in Dangesi village under Raikia block of neighbouring Kandhamal district. The death of another person was reported in Gajapati district in rain-related incidents amid the effects of Cyclone Arnab, the newspaper reported.

The landfall of the cyclone had continued for six hours on Wednesday as it crossed the coasts of Andhra Pradesh and Yanam in Puducherry between 2 am and 8 am.

In Odisha, 17 districts have been receiving heavy rainfall under the influence of the cyclone, with Gajapati being the worst-hit.

On Friday, the landslide in Ganjam occurred at Gidipabali village under Bhanjanagar block.

“The hamlet had a total population of 26, of whom 13 people were relocated following heavy rainfall,” an unidentified official was quoted as saying by The Indian Express. “After the landslide struck the hamlet, we received reports that 13 people were still missing.”

One person had been rescued and search was underway to locate the other missing persons, said Odisha’s Special Relief Commissioner Rajesh Patil.

More than a lakh persons are affected by floods in the district. Nearly 40,000 displaced persons were taking shelter in 367 relief camps in Ganjam, The Indian Express reported.

In Gajapati, more than 25,000 persons are affected by floods.

Meanwhile, the India Meteorological Department forecast the formation of another cyclonic storm over the Bay of Bengal.

“[The storm] is very likely to intensify further into a cyclonic storm during subsequent 24 hours, move west-northwestwards and reach over westcentral Bay of Bengal near Andhra Pradesh coast around evening of November 2, 2026,” stated the weather department.

Edited by Sneha.

The Opposition INDIA bloc on Saturday staged a symbolic “public impeachment” of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, accusing him of “conspiring to steal elections” by “ensuring the intentional deletion of 13 crore voters”.

The demonstration was held at Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence on Saturday, a day before the Opposition’s “Chalo Dilli” march against alleged vote theft through the special intensive revision of electoral rolls and to press for Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation.

The “public impeachment” followed a mock parliamentary format, with Kharge, the leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha, moving a symbolic motion for Gyanesh Kumar’s removal from his post.

Kharge said that the deletion of Indians as voters during special intensive revision was a “criminal act and an act against the Constitution of India”.

The Opposition parties further alleged that the chief election commissioner had “acted at the behest” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

Former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar presided over the mock impeachment. She was the speaker in the Lower House of Parliament from 2009 to 2014, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was in power.

The event, originally scheduled for Friday, was postponed due to incessant rainfall in the national capital.

In his speech, Kharge also demanded that the 2023 Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office Act be revoked.

The Act states that the head of the poll panel and the two other top members are to be appointed based on the recommendations of a selection committee comprising the prime minister, a Union Cabinet minister and the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.

The composition of the panel means that the government enjoys a 2:1 majority over the leader of the Opposition, if there is a difference of opinion.

Apart from leaders of the Opposition bloc, several persons whose names were deleted from voter rolls during the special intensive revision also spoke during the proceedings.

One of them, Kanta Prasad, a resident of northwest Delhi’s Mongolpuri, alleged that he was marked as “dead” during the special intensive revision.

Another person, Kamal Lal, is a resident of Bela Estate, which falls under the East Delhi parliamentary constituency. Located on the western bank of the Yamuna, the slum cluster has seen repeated demolitions since 2006. Lal said that 728 of the 729 residents of the area were deleted as voters during the revision exercise.

Rahul Gandhi, the leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, said that the symbolic impeachment had to be held in Kharge’s residence because “we have no other option”.

“Every single institution is closed to us,” said Gandhi. “I don't think anything like this has ever happened in history: the entire Opposition sitting in a garden to discuss the impeachment of the chief election commissioner of India.”

🔹Why are we holding this impeachment proceeding in a garden?

👉Because we have no other option. Every single institution is closed to us.

I don't think anything like this has ever happened in history: the entire Opposition sitting in a garden to discuss the impeachment of the… pic.twitter.com/nsPMKxmmxH

— Congress (@INCIndia) October 31, 2026

Since October 2, nationwide protests have been held calling for Kumar’s resignation over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and the alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

The trigger for the protests was a September 23 investigation by The Indian Express, which revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

Edited by Sneha.

Touristification and casinofication sound like made-up terms, but they have unfortunately entered our lexicon.

Touristification is “a complex process in which various stakeholders interfere, transforming a territory through tourist activity”, says Mexican geographer Antonio Ojeda and his collaborators.

The word was coined in the 1980s, and was initially used as a neutral academic term in geography to describe territorial transformation. But from the early 2000s, it has come to negatively describe the displacement of local residents, overcrowding and the conversion of cities into commercial tourist commodities.

If you are a resident of Panjim and live in or around the city tourist hotspots (São Tomé, Fontainhas, the areas with the “coloured houses”; Church Square; more and more of our once-scenic Mandovi riverfront), you will have noticed first-hand how the very character of those spaces residents prized and were justly proud of for their unique charm have degenerated into round-the-clock, all-year tourist thoroughfares.

Residents are mere museum exhibits in a tableau to be tolerated at best; irritating obstacles and party-poopers at worst when we call out traffic or parking violations, loutish drunken behaviour, invasion of our privacy, disturbing the peace or open urination and defecation.

Tourists are divided as Panjim authorities deploy inspectors to curb unruly behaviour in heritage areas. Some welcome the move to protect local culture, while others argue it dampens the lively spirit that draws visitors to Goa.#saotome #panjim #fontainhas pic.twitter.com/JAGYrhC78m

— Herald Goa (@oheraldogoa) June 22, 2025

I am not against tourism. I love travelling, which means I become a tourist myself in the destinations I visit, and there are several places still on my bucket list. It is a question of balance and proportion. It is also a matter of marketing and presentation. This is where Goa in general and Panjim in particular got it terribly wrong.

Last September, I attended an online workshop on heritage-based urban planning at which drew participants from various parts of the world (India, South Africa, Hong Kong, South Korea and more) who were stakeholders in tourism and heritage.

One important message that stuck with me was to “bring heritage upstream” during urban planning. This means giving foremost importance to the heritage assets of a town or city before even beginning the civic planning of that area, and designing everything, from the industries and businesses one encourages, and in which part of that city or town.

Bring the heritage upstream and then everything follows from there. It dictates the areas that should be pedestrianised, the traffic flow, the public transport network, the last-mile connectivity, the designated parking spaces and more.

Had Panjim kept her own heritage “upstream” at every turn in our urban planning and design, it would have been a win-win for residents as well as tourism. There should have been clean, efficient, reliable, affordable public transport, greatly reducing the need for private vehicular traffic for residents and visitors.

Visitor vehicles would have had designated parking outside city limits, with frequent public transport connectivity to and from Panjim. It would have facilitated pedestrianisation in residential areas, making life easier for everyone.

I recently visited Daman for the first time. The little Union territory, Goa’s former “little sister” has much to teach us.

A big lesson, that I’ve written about before, is the courage and moral uprightness with which her citizenry and government rejected the tentacles of the casino industry and its satellite ills and nuisances. Allowing the casino Trojan horse here was Goa’s monumental blunder.

In addition, the heritage areas in Moti and Nani Daman, although small, are spick-and-span with cleanliness levels I’ve never experienced in Panjim. The upkeep and landscaping of the two forts put Goa’s many, much larger forts to shame.

No alcohol is served within the Moti Daman fort precinct. Contrast this with the rampant mushrooming of more and more bars, pubs, clubs and “spas” within our heritage and residential spaces.

Not just Panjim, but nowhere in Goa is there a street as well-constructed, with exemplary storm drains and pavements, as Daman’s Seaface Road. It gets pedestrianised every evening, 8 to 11. Affordable bicycle-rentals allow one to use the cycle lane along its breath-taking coastline.

In Panjim, the casino industry has visibly transformed the city – for the worse. Casino workers have taken over large areas of Panjim’s heritage ward Sao Tome and the riverfront.https://t.co/uA5w65vJhi

Chryselle D’Silva Dias reports on #Goaprotests

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) May 26, 2026

The germ “casinofication” was first used to describe the proliferation of casinos throughout Las Vegas, even into the suburbs. The word aptly summarises Panjim’s unfortunate fate. A once-proud and beautiful city has been betrayed by her own custodians who have turned a blind eye, a stony heart to her casinofication, spreading like a Stage IV cancer through her arteries and veins – her sacred river Mandovi and her once-dignified streets and avenues.

There is another sad word that has been coined in parallel with touristification. It is solastalgia, “the collective melancholia that a community feels when its space is touristified”, Dutch researcher Lidija Lalicic writes. It is “the homesickness you feel while still at home,” a nostalgia for the peace and quiet we had before the touristification onslaught.

In her 2020 paper “Solastalgia: An application in the overtourism context”, Lalicic analyses how “unfettered growth” in tourism causes “a tense ratio of residents-to-visitors in some urban spaces”. This generates “additional difficulties for residents who must compete with tourists for local resources”, she writes.

Lalicic’s observation on heritage spaces becoming de facto “visitor-oriented environments that service an excessive number of unpredictable tourists in search of a personalised experience” reminds one of the insane compulsions of tourists from other parts of India to take selfies against the backdrop of Panjim residents’ heritage homes to upload on Instagram and other social media, ignoring with impunity the nuisance caused.

“Solastalgic people feel deprived when their daily activities are altered or restricted to cater for a more affluent tourist class and yearn for the past pre-mass tourism,” she writes.

Lalicic laments the “decided lack of research on how residents perceive tourism and the potential distress that tourism may cause them”. So much in her Austria-based paper fits Panjim’s predicament like a glove.

On the subject of lack of research: I was shocked to learn that Goa University has so far never studied the adverse social impact of casinos in Goa, nor is there research in the public domain on the public health implications.

One common thread, not just in Lalicic’s paper, but in the September workshop, and indeed in the coverage of the touristification phenomenon, is that the governments of those areas are taking steps to address it.

But not our government or bureaucratic machinery. Residents only have “voter value” and are forgotten, ignored between elections. Our politicians and bureaucrats have selective blindness, deafness and muteness. Our needs and grievances are not addressed, and neither are the many flagrant violations of the casino industry.

Opposition to the casino industry is dismissed by politicians and even some media-persons as prudery.

Touristification and casinofication have radically transformed Panjim’s ethos and use of its own private and public spaces. Neighbourhood stores that once catered to residents, now prioritise purchasing demands of tourists, casino staff and patrons over local needs for better commercial gain.

Residents have been nudged out of our gardens, once oases of peace and calm, and our riverfront. Female residents get leered at and subjected to verbal and physical abuse by gangs of men, and so avoid those spaces as they feel uncomfortable and unsafe. No wonder we feel solastalgic.

Panjim’s unique charm is her biggest asset – but also her Achilles heel.

This article first appeared in the Navhind Times.

The ruling Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab announced its first list of 40 candidates for the Assembly elections scheduled to be held in February 2027.

The party fielded Chief Minister Bhagwat Mann from his Dhuri constituency, while state Industries Minister Sanjeev Arora, who has been in jail in connection with an alleged money laundering case, was renominated from Ludhiana West.

The term of the 117-member Punjab Assembly ends on March 16, 2027. In the 2022 polls, the Aam Aadmi Party swept the state by winning 92 seats. The Congress had clinched 18 constituencies, while the Shiromani Akali Dal got three.

Apart from Mann and Arora, the Aam Aadmi Party also renominated Assembly Speaker Kultar Singh Sandhwan, who would contest from Kotkapura.

AAP’s Punjab unit president Aman Arora was not on the first list released, while working president Amansher Singh was nominated from Batala.

Of the 40 candidates, five have been named from Majha, eight from Doaba, and 27 from Malwa region.

While Malwa has 69 of Punjab’s 117 Assembly seats, Majha has 25 and Doaba has 23 seats.

The first list included four women candidates, including Amandeep Kaur Arora, the head of the party’s women’s wing in Punjab. She will contest from Moga. Inderjit Kaur Mann will contest from Nakodar, Santosh Kataria from Balachaur and Baljinder Kaur from Talwandi Sabo.

ਆਮ ਆਦਮੀ ਪਾਰਟੀ ਵੱਲੋਂ 2027 ਦੀਆਂ ਵਿਧਾਨ ਸਭਾ ਚੋਣਾਂ ਲਈ ਉਮੀਦਵਾਰਾਂ ਦੀ ਪਹਿਲੀ ਸੂਚੀ ਦਾ ਐਲਾਨ।
ਸਾਰੇ ਉਮੀਦਵਾਰਾਂ ਨੂੰ ਬਹੁਤ-ਬਹੁਤ ਸ਼ੁਭਕਾਮਨਾਵਾਂ pic.twitter.com/Jcfn6BDnGN

— AAP Punjab (@AAPPunjab) October 31, 2026

The AAP also named seven candidates who are members of the Scheduled Caste communities, The Indian Express reported.

Four former ministers are part of the list – Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal from Ajnala, Bram Shanker Sharma from Jimpa, Inderbir Singh Nijjar from Amritsar South and Balkar Singh from Kartarpur.

Other names on the list are Jagdeep Kamboj (Goldy) from Jalalabad, Narinderpal Singh Sawna from Fazilka, Jagdeep Singh Kaka Brar from Muktsar, Kultar Singh Sandhwan from Kotkapura, Amolak Singh from Jaitu, Baljinder Kaur from Talwandi Sabo, Gurpreet Singh Banawali from Sardulgarh, Labh Singh Ugoke from Bhadaur, Kulwant Singh Pandori from Mehal Kalan, Jaswant Singh Gajjan Majra from Amargarh, and Ajitpal Singh Kohli from Patiala.

On Friday, Mann said that the selection of candidates for the Assembly elections would be based on performance and public surveys, reported The Indian Express.

Written by Abeer Khan. Edited by Sneha.

An eighth-month pregnant Trinamool Congress supporter in West Bengal’s Cooch Behar delivered a stillborn baby two days after she was assaulted allegedly by Bharatiya Janata Party workers on Wednesday, The Telegraph reported.

Debajit Barman, a private tutor and TMC supporter, was on his way home at night when a group of alleged BJP workers attacked him. When Priya Pal, his pregnant wife, intervened to save him, she too was beaten up.

After the assault, the couple was admitted to the sub-divisional hospital. On Friday, Pal delivered a stillborn baby, Barman was quoted as saying.

Doctors had earlier estimated that Pal would deliver the baby in December.

Barman said that he had registered a complaint against 10 persons at the Sahebganj police station, reported The Telegraph.

The police have so far arrested two persons allegedly associated with the BJP in connection with the case.

BJP leaders, however, have denied allegations that those who assaulted the woman were linked to the Hindutva party. They claimed that the case stemmed from a wholly unrelated dispute involving the woman, The Telegraph added.

The incident comes more than a year after the BJP had alleged that its eighth-month pregnant supporter had been assaulted by TMC workers in Cooch Behar’s Salmara village in Dinhata.

At the time, the party claimed that several of its workers, including the pregnant woman, were injured after their homes were attacked, reported The Times of India.

However, the TMC had blamed the BJP’s internal rivalry for the incident.

“We don’t believe in violence.” the TMC leader Dipak Bhattacharya was quoted as saying then. “It was locals who attacked the BJP functionaries to protest the efforts to conduct [special intensive revision] and impose [National Register of Citizens].”

The BJP had alleged that the pregnant woman was kicked in the stomach for supporting the party.

“Her only ‘crime’? Believing in BJP!!,” the Hindutva party said on social media last year.

Edited by Sneha.

The Madras High Court on Friday directed the Tamil Nadu Police to deny permission for protests against judges and to immediately disperse any gatherings where personal attacks are made on a judge.

The court was ruling in a public interest litigation filed after protests against a June 25 verdict, which said that a person from the Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes, Denotified Communities and Scheduled Castes who converts to Islam cannot claim reservations under the Backward Class (Muslim) category.

The judgement was upheld by the Supreme Court on October 15.

The petitioner alleged that groups including the Tamil Nadu Thowheed Jamaath and Tamil Nadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam had organised protests across the state, adding that the demonstrations allegedly turned hostile and the protesters began to personally target a judge who was part of the High Court bench that delivered the verdict.

It was also alleged that posters, rallies and social media videos contained abusive language and caste-based comments intended to undermine public confidence in the judiciary.

The High Court ruled that a “blanket order” banning all public discussions or peaceful gatherings concerning court rulings “would go too far”.

The bench directed state police and district administrations to consider applications for protests pertaining to judicial decisions on a case-by-case basis.

“No permission shall be granted for any public gathering or march that aims to personally target, defame or intimidate a sitting judge,” the court said. “If a permitted assembly turns into a personal attack, the officers concerned shall end the event immediately and take appropriate legal action.”

The bench added that while citizens have “an undeniable right” to disagree with a judgement, coordinated attacks against judges are not protected by the constitutional right to free speech.

The court closed the petition.

Written by Abeer Khan. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Commission for Air Quality Management on Friday directed state government and private offices in Delhi and five adjoining regions including Gurugram and Noida to ensure that 50% of their employees work from home between November 5 and November 20.

The decision was taken as a precautionary measure citing peak air pollution levels historically observed during and immediately after Diwali, which will be celebrated on November 8 this year.

The five regions covered under the work-from-home order are Gurugram, Faridabad and Sonipat districts in Haryana, and Ghaziabad and Gautam Buddha Nagar in Uttar Pradesh. However, the order exempts industrial establishments and essential services.

In Delhi, the requirement for 50% employees in government and private offices to work from home had already been announced on October 20 as part of the government’s Winter Action Plan, which will take effect on Sunday. The measures in Delhi will remain in force till February 28.

Air quality deteriorates sharply in the winter months in Delhi, which is often ranked the world’s most polluted capital. The lighting of firecrackers during Diwali along with stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, vehicular pollution, falling temperatures, decreased wind speeds and emissions from industries and coal-fired plants contribute to the problem.

The Commission for Air Quality Management also imposed a 15-day ban on dust-generating demolitions and outdoor construction activities across the national capital region during the period.

Projects relating to the railways, metros, airports, inter-state bus terminals, hospitals, water supply and sanitation units, and activities linked to national security and defence were exempted from the construction ban.

The restrictions are in addition to the Delhi government’s Winter Action Plan.

On October 21, the commission enforced Stage 1 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan in Delhi and the National Capital Region after the average Air Quality Index crossed 200.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in the Delhi-NCR region.

The first stage involves measures such as mechanical sweeping of roads and sprinkling water on them to keep dust from rising. It also bans some kinds of construction and demolition activities.

An index value between 0 and 50 indicates “good” air quality, between 51 and 100 indicates “satisfactory” air quality and between 101 and 200 indicates “moderate” air quality. As the index value increases further, air quality deteriorates. A value of 201 and 300 means “poor” air quality, while between 301 and 400 indicates “very poor” air.

Between 401 and 450 indicates “severe” air pollution, while anything above the 450 threshold is termed “severe plus”.

Stage 1 of GRAP is activated when the AQI is in the “poor” category. The second, third and fourth stages are activated when the AQI crosses the “very poor”, “severe” category and “severe plus” category.

Delhi curbs take effect on Sunday

On October 20, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta had announced additional measures under the Winter Action Plan. The restrictions will take effect on Sunday.

As part of the measures, non-Delhi vehicles below the Bharat Stage-6 emission norms will not be allowed to enter the national capital till January 31.

Vehicles registered in Delhi that do not have a valid pollution control certificate will be denied refuelling, Gupta said.

Similar measures were imposed in Delhi last year.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• Why some Delhi residents leave the city during Diwali
• How Delhi’s rich are escaping air pollution

India’s extreme poverty rate fell to 2.6% in 2023 from 27.1% in 2011, the World Bank has said in its October Poverty and Equity Brief. However, it added that income disparities remain wide, with the top 10% of the workers earning a median income about 13 times more than the bottom 10%.

The World Bank sets the international extreme poverty line at $3 a day, or roughly Rs 284.9 per day.

“As poverty declined, it became increasingly concentrated among households with lower education, fewer assets, limited access to stable employment, and higher dependency ratios,” said the World Bank.

It added that the share of India’s population living below the lower-middle-income poverty line of $4.2, or Rs 398.8 per day, fell to 16.1% in 2023 from 57.7% in 2011, with an estimated 49.6 crore people moving out of poverty.

The World Bank attributed the decline mainly to “strong consumption growth, rising employment, especially among women and expanded social transfers, including food subsidies”.

Poverty also declined on non-monetary measures. The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative’s Multidimensional Poverty Index fell to 16.4% in 2019-’21 from 53.8% in 2005-’06. The World Bank’s own measure put multidimensional poverty at 15.5% in 2022-’23.

However, poverty remained higher in rural areas. In 2023, 19.3% of the rural population lived below the $4.2 per day poverty line, compared with 8.6% in urban areas, said the World Bank.

It found that states in a belt stretching from Uttar Pradesh to West Bengal accounted for about 57% of India’s poor population.

India added about 13.4 crore employed persons between 2017 and 2023, which was nearly two times the increase in its working-age population. Much of this growth came from rural women taking up paid work, increasing the number of earners in households.

Despite the rise in employment, real earnings remained broadly unchanged, with employment growth concentrated in relatively low-productivity activities.

Youth unemployment also rose to 15.9% in April to June, from 14.6% in the same period in 2025, particularly among rural young women.

Wealth inequality in India

The 2026 World Inequality Report released in December showed that India is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with the top 1% of the population holding 40% of the wealth. The richest 10% hold about 65% of the total wealth, the report had said.

Inequality in India has shown no signs of reduction in recent years, the findings of the study published by the World Inequality Lab had shown.

The richest 10% hold about 65% of the total wealth, it had said.

Five of the richest families in India saw their wealth increase by 400% between 2019 and 2025, according to the 2026 Wealth Tracker India study published by non-profit organisation Centre for Financial Accountability and Tax The Top campaign on April 1.

The study said that the share of the bottom 50% in the country’s wealth stagnated at 6.4% by 2024.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.

It’s that time of the year again, when well-heeled Delhiites start fleeing the capital for cleaner air, schools close, offices ask employees to work from home and air purifiers fly off the shelves. Once more, Delhi’s air is thick with the unbreathable – and, this year, with conspiracy too.

Besieged by youth protests against SIR that has disenfranchised 130 million people so far, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime has launched a vicious counter-offensive alleging foreign conspiracies to unseat the government. The Bharatiya Janata Party says the opposition Congress party is colluding with a global “red-green ecosystem” of disruptive organisations – which Fox News calls “Chaos Inc” – engineering social unrest in many countries to cause regime change.

The foreign conspiracy charges are wilder and more creative in India’s notoriously Modi-friendly news channels and social media. In this universe, the protests are being orchestrated by desi “anti-nationals” funded by all sorts of foreign adversaries, real and imagined, from “US deep state”, China and Pakistan to George Soros, Greta Thunberg and Elon Musk.

Modi himself fans these fantastical claims by his periodical tirades at what he calls “Dimagi Naxals” as foreign-funded enemies of the state. The spurt of student protests in Europe has only strengthened this argument, with a choreographed chorus of Modi’s devotees demanding to know who is funding the protests to drag India into a similar political turmoil.

The allegations flying thick and fast over foreign funding of protests would suggest Modi’s party has unimpeachable finances. The hypocrisy is stunning, given how his dispensation itself has cultivated and profited from dark money.

It was Modi’s government that entrenched and legitimised the built-in opaqueness of party finances in India through the instrument of electoral bonds allowing limitless, anonymous contributions to political parties, including from foreign entities. The BJP made the most of the torrent of dark money that came into politics as a result – some years cornering up to 95% of the electoral bond proceeds – before the Supreme Court ended the practice in 2024.

This unaccounted source of limitless cash has helped the party outspend rivals by miles in election after election.

The Supreme Court had on February 15 struck down the #ElectoralBonds scheme as unconstitutional, saying that the it could lead to quid pro quo arrangements between donors and political parties.

Read full report: https://t.co/IRDzr55fC3 pic.twitter.com/tVAFjbVPQ0

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) April 1, 2024

There is very little transparency in party finances in India in any case. Political parties – the BJP as well as others – enjoy exemption on income tax but it is virtually impossible to know their income. The parties are required to maintain and publish their audited accounts, but they choose the auditors themselves and the disclosures are mostly in the form of summaries. Neither the country’s Election Commission nor the public gets to do deep forensic audits.

This deliberately weak party-finance regime has enabled outright money laundering through politics wherein shell companies and paper parties can collect donations, claim tax exemptions, and recycle dark money with little scrutiny. An extreme form of this is registered unrecognised political parties, or RUPPs, which fail the minimum threshold of vote share and seats to be recognised as political parties but cannot be legally de-registered either.

There are over 3,200 such parties that received more than Rs 10,000 crore in electoral donations in two years from 2022 to 2024, pulling in more than the BJP and the Congress. In a system where political status itself is a laundering licence, the BJP’s finger wagging at protest funding is a manifestly laughable diversion from the real issues at stake.

But parties are a picture of unity when it comes to protecting this privilege of hiding their balance sheets. In 2013, a year before Modi rose to national power, the Central Information Commission declared that the six national parties were to be treated as “public authorities” under the Right to Information Act, and ordered them to disclose key data just as any other statutory body. It was a rare opportunity to open up India’s murky party finances to public scrutiny, but all six parties defied the directive. The then ruling Congress party called the order an “adventurist approach” that would “damage democratic institutions”.

The BJP received Rs 8,252 crore of the total Rs 16,492 crore redeemed through bonds – just over half the value. This means one party alone received more money from bonds than over 20 others.https://t.co/AwacFlySUN

By: Dhanya Rajendran, Supriya Sharma#ProjectElectoralBond

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) April 5, 2024

Two years later, the same information commission – now under a new government – quietly washed its hands of the matter, feigning inability to force the parties to comply. Governing institutions had already begun to fold under Modi, but the parties played their part as well. Not only had the six parties refused to comply with the order to respond to Right to Information queries, they did not even bother to appear before the commission to explain their point of view despite repeated summons.

There’s a pattern to such cross-party cooperation. In 2014, the Delhi High Court found both the BJP and the Congress guilty of flouting India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act by receiving donations from an Indian subsidiary of a foreign company. They promptly banded together and engineered an amendment through Parliament that simply changed the law to allow for such contributions.

But the same parties that have so carefully protected themselves from foreign funding regulations have ironically used these same rules to turn the screws on civil society organisations. Earlier applied only to political parties to prohibit their use of foreign funding, Modi’s predecessor Congress government expanded FCRA rules to regulate all kinds of nonprofits receiving foreign funds. Modi made it worse after coming to power in 2014.

He tightened the regulations in such a way that the government now not only has the power to decide which NGOs will get foreign funding and which ones won’t, it also decides how the NGOs with access to foreign funds get to spend it. Thousands of NGOs have died as a result while others have been forced to radically scale down their operations, adversely affecting the poorest and the most marginalised sections of the population who depend on non-profits for survival.

Stunning hypocrisy again, as Modi’s government would not subject the 100-year-old Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, “the largest far-right network in history”, to the same rules it applies to other non-profits. This motherboard of all Hindu supremacist organisations, including the BJP, is probably the country’s best-resourced non-profit that draws in millions of dollars through associated groups based abroad. Yet it is not even registered in India, shielding it from scrutiny and relevant funding laws.

Using the bogeyman of foreign influence is standard authoritarian ruse for delegitimising internal dissent. Serbia’s fallen strongman Aleksandar Vučić has been doing pretty much the same after being routed by a student-led group in a snap election this week, blaming unnamed European nations and the “US deep state” for losing his 14-year political dominance.

At the end, all of Vučić’s emasculation of governing institutions and media, the rhetoric over national resurgence, propaganda, and cult of personality, came to nothing when faced with organised resistance and popular rage. It is easy to see why a sudden students’ uprising has Modi so shaken that he is clutching at straw men to protect his turf.

Debasish Roy Chowdhury is a journalist, researcher and author based in Hong Kong, having recently co-authored To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism, OUP/Pan Macmillan.

This article first appeared on the Toda Peace Institute website.

The Gujarat High Court on Friday struck down a ban on the sale of meat imposed by the state government near the Somnath temple, only to reverse its order within four hours, The Indian Express reported.

The court was hearing a petition filed by six restaurants challenging the administration’s August 10 notification banning the sale, storage, distribution and cooking of non-vegetarian food along roads leading to and within half a km of the temple in Veraval.

At 3 pm, a single-judge bench allowed the plea and lifted the ban. Immediately after the ruling, the state government sought time to challenge it before a division bench.

The government pleader argued that the position on the ground had not changed since August 10 and requested the operation of the single-judge bench’s order be kept in abeyance for five working days, The Indian Express reported.

However, the judge declined to keep the order in abeyance.

The state government then filed an urgent appeal before the division bench, before the single-judge bench’s order had been published.

Before 7 pm, the division bench had stayed the operation of the single-judge bench’s order and kept the meat ban in force.

The division bench will hear the matter again on December 26.

During a hearing on October 21, the state had strongly defended the ban, arguing that the religious significance and large number of persons visiting the temple justified regulating the sale of meat along routes used by pilgrims.

It had cited court rulings and similar restrictions imposed at other pilgrimage centres such as Amritsar, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Mathura and Vrindavan. It argued that Somnath could not be treated as an ordinary commercial town.

The state contended that the ban had not been imposed across the entire town.

The lawyer representing the restaurants said that restrictions were beyond the powers available to the authorities under the stated provision of the Gujarat Police Act.

The provision pertains to regulation of public places, not restaurants.

The restaurants said that they had been operating for decades and the ban would hurt their livelihoods of hundreds of employees.

There had been no evidence of disturbances caused by the sale of meat, they added.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: The illogic of meat bans

Six persons were killed after a helicopter they were travelling in from Badrinath Dham to Dehradun crashed near Joshimath on Friday, The Hindu quoted the Chamoli district magistrate as saying.

Earlier in the day, the India Meteorological Department issued an orange alert for Chamoli, predicting isolated thunderstorms accompanied by lightning, hailstorms, and gusty winds reaching speeds up to 50 km per hour, reported ANI.

The weather department had also forecast light to moderate rainfall in the district, with light rain and snowfall likely along the Badrinath-Joshimath sector.

Uttarakhand: A civil helicopter operated by Trans Bharat Aviation crashed in the Hathi Parvat area of Chamoli district on Friday while flying from Shri Badrinath Dham to the Sahastradhara helipad in Dehradun. Six people were on board, including five passengers and a pilot. All of… https://t.co/qmCbTjgXUf pic.twitter.com/qvNKKUf1Ks

— ANI (@ANI) October 30, 2026

The police received information about the helicopter crash at around 2.21 pm, The Indian Express quoted Sub-Inspector Manohar Kanyal, posted at Joshimath police station, as saying.

Prateek Jain, the chief executive officer of the Uttarakhand Civil Aviation Development Authority, said the helicopter carrying six persons had taken off from Badrinath at 1.14 pm and went missing soon after.

Those who died were identified as Captain Himanshu and five male passengers – Prathapa, Arun, Shankar Gowda, Sudheer K and HS Natraja, reported The Hindu.

The five passengers were from Bengaluru, reported Deccan Herald.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah said a Uniform Civil Code would be implemented in Uttar Pradesh if the Bharatiya Janata Party returns to power in the 2027 Assembly elections. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav criticised the proposal, saying that a Uniform Civil Code was “not worth implementing”.

The announcement followed Shah’s statement in September that governments led by the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance partners in 21 states would introduce a Uniform Civil Code before 2029.

The Uniform Civil Code proposed by the BJP aims to introduce a common set of laws governing marriage, divorce, succession and adoption for all citizens. Read on.

‘Women’s rights’ are a convenient cover for UCC’s intrusive provisions, writes Divya Aslesha

The Madras High Court issued notice to Cockroach Janta Party convenor Saurav Das and the Union government, seeking their responses on a petition demanding an investigation into Das’ citizenship. The petitioner has sought that Das’ passport and Aadhaar card be cancelled if he is found to be a foreign citizen.

Further, the petitioner sought an investigation into the personal details of his parents. The plea also sought that Das’ social media accounts be blocked for his allegedly derogatory remarks about the judiciary. Read on.

The Supreme Court asked the Election Commission to take “corrective steps” against Form 7 applications filed in bulk to delete voters’ names during the special intensive revision in Uttar Pradesh. The bench asked the petitioners to submit a note detailing the alleged irregularities in the voter roll revision process in Uttar Pradesh to the poll panel.

It directed the Election Commission to examine “the factual aspects” of the allegations and file a compliance report before the court.

The poll panel acknowledged that Form 7 applications had been filed in bulk, but claimed that no action had been taken on them, as they were found to be false. Read on.

A flood caused by a glacial lake outburst in Bhutan prompted the authorities in West Bengal and Assam to issue flash flood alerts for districts along major rivers. Those residing in vulnerable areas downstream were being evacuated.

In West Bengal, Cooch Behar, Tufanganj and Busirhat districts along the Sankosh river and its tributaries were on high alert.

In Assam, settlements along the Brahmaputra river were also asked to remain alert. Read on.

How ‘glof’ became a common word in Sikkim – and why it haunts people two years later, reports Vaishnavi Rathore

The Supreme Court cancelled the bail granted to expelled Janata Dal (United) MLA Anant Kumar Singh in a case pertaining to the murder of Jan Suraaj worker in October. Singh was directed to surrender by December 1.

Dularchand Yadav was found dead inside a vehicle in Bihar’s Mokama constituency on October 30, 2025, days after a clash between alleged supporters of the two parties.

The court had directed the Bihar Police to complete the investigation into the killing within four months. Read on.

If you haven’t already, sign up for our Daily Brief newsletter.

The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Election Commission to take “corrective steps” against Form 7 applications filed in bulk to delete voters’ names during the special intensive revision in Uttar Pradesh, reported Bar and Bench.

Form 7 is used to object to the inclusion of a name or seek the deletion of an existing name from the electoral roll.

During the hearing, a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana asked the petitioners to submit a note detailing the alleged irregularities in the voter roll revision process in Uttar Pradesh to the poll panel.

It directed the Election Commission to examine “the factual aspects” of the allegations and file a compliance report before the court.

This came after the advocate appearing for the poll panel acknowledged that Form 7 applications had been submitted in bulk during the special intensive revision, Live Law reported.

However, he said no action had been taken on the applications, as they were found to be false.

The petitioners disputed the poll panel’s claim, saying that 32 voter deletion applications had been filed against members of a “particular community” in one constituency. They added that two of these forms were signed by booth-level officers.

“There are material inconsistencies and irreconcilable facts,” Bar and Bench quoted the petitioner’s lawyer as saying.

The petitioner further alleged that similar incidents had been reported in Telangana and Karnataka, where directions had been issued for the registration of first information reports, while no such action had been taken in Uttar Pradesh.

“Therefore, they became emboldened,” the lawyer added. “It is an orchestrated effort.”

HC seeks response over 32 voter deletions

Separately, the Allahabad High Court has sought a response from the Uttar Pradesh State Election Commission over the alleged illegal deletion of 32 persons’ names from the panchayat electoral roll in a village in Balrampur district, Live Law reported on Friday.

A bench of Justices Alok Mathur and Abdesh Kumar Chaudhary was hearing a petition filed by the persons who alleged that their names had been omitted from the final panchayat electoral roll.

The petitioners also alleged that the names of persons who did not reside in the village had been added to the voter lists.

The court directed the state election authorities to file a counter-affidavit explaining the basis for deleting the petitioners’ names and adding the others.

The matter has been listed for the next hearing on December 15, reported Live Law.

Earlier, the High Court had sought an explanation from the state election authorities over the omission of 138 residents of Amethi district from the final panchayat voter list, despite their names appearing in the draft roll, Live Law reported on Wednesday.

A contentious exercise

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

In May, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the exercise, but said that it does not mean that the Election Commission can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen.

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

The Opposition and civil society groups have been demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over revelations in a September 23 report by The Indian Express.

The newspaper reported that two election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the SIR, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.

Edited by Sneha.

The Supreme Court on Friday directed Bihar MLA Anant Kumar Singh, whom the Janata Dal (United) has expelled for six years, to surrender by December 1 in a case pertaining to the murder of a Jan Suraaj worker in October, reported PTI.

The worker, Dularchand Yadav, was found dead inside a vehicle in Tartar village in Patna on October 30, 2025, days after a clash between alleged supporters of the Janata Dal (United) and the Jan Suraaj. The area is part of Singh’s Mokama Assembly seat.

Singh had been arrested in the case on November 1 and was granted bail by the Patna High Court in March, reported PTI.

The bail had been challenged by JD(U) MLC Neeraj Kumar, who is the grandson of Yadav.

On Friday, a bench of Justices MM Sundresh and Prasanna B Varale cancelled the bail granted to Singh and directed the Bihar Police to complete the investigation within four months, reported The Indian Express.

Singh said he had faith in the judiciary and would abide by its directions, reported ANI. He also accused Kumar of getting his name added to the murder case.

The MLA accused Kumar of having got Yadav murdered, as well as making false witnesses testify in court.

On October 24, the JD(U) expelled Singh and his wife, Neelam Devi, for six years for “anti-party activities”, including campaigning for the Jan Suraaj party candidate in the recently concluded Legislative Council elections against Kumar.

Prior to the polls, Singh had accused Kumar, the JD(U)’s sitting MLC from the Patna graduates’ constituency, of framing him in several cases and vowed to ensure his defeat in the biennial polls.

Kumar won the constituency for the fourth consecutive time on Thursday.

Edited by Sneha.

In August 2024, Vikas Garg was appointed the convenor of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s economic cell in Delhi. Eight months later, his firms were raided by the Enforcement Directorate.

But the agency did not disclose what had prompted the action.

More than a year later, in a statement released on July 10, it has finally revealed that Garg is being prosecuted under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, for his involvement with “the Mahadev Online Book/Skyexchange illegal online betting case”. He was arrested in the case on Tuesday.

The Mahadev Book is a mobile app that claims to be a platform for “sports insights”. It has more than a million users. Skyexchange is a Dubai-based betting platform associated with Mahadev app.

Since 2022, central agencies have been investigating Mahadev’s promoters on charges that they used the app to run an illegal betting syndicate that laundered revenue through benami bank accounts, cryptocurrency and hawala networks, some of which was allegedly used to manipulate the Indian stock market.

The case first made national headlines in 2023 when the Enforcement Directorate alleged that the promoters of the app, Chhattisgarh-based businessmen Sourabh Chandrakar and Ravi Uppal, had paid nearly Rs 508 crore in kickbacks to then chief minister Bhupesh Baghel of the Congress party.

The revelations came months before the state assembly elections. Congress lost the election. Baghel has denied any wrongdoing.

Subsequently, the inquiry into the app by the Enforcement Directorate and Central Bureau of Investigation extended to private Indian firms, foreign institutional investors and even Bollywood celebrities who had attended Chandrakar’s lavish wedding in Dubai in February 2023.

While most of these alleged connections made headlines, what went unnoticed was that a member of the BJP was also under the scanner.

Businessman Vikas Garg belongs to an old BJP family. His father, Nand Kishor Garg, has been elected three times from the capital’s Trinagar constituency on the party’s ticket.

Although the central agencies remained silent on the proceedings against him, Garg’s firms acknowledged the Enforcement Directorate investigation as part of their mandatory stock market disclosures in 2024. In their annual reports, the firms denied all the allegations.

When Scroll asked Garg for a response in April, his lawyers sent a notice, threatening legal action. “That the contents of your communication with regard to the proceedings of Enforcement Directorate, it is submitted that the same is sub judice,” it said. “My Client has NOT been convicted of any offence of money laundering and/or any other offence, till date.”

In its July 10 statement, the Enforcement Directorate has said that it has attached assets worth Rs 940.7 crore worth belonging to Garg, his family and his firms under the money-laundering law. The agency described the attachments as “proceeds of crime” from illegal betting operations that were “routed into the entities owned and controlled by Vikas Garg”.

Garg did not respond to a request for comment.

In March 2026, the Enforcement Directorate said that it had searched more than 175 premises across the country in connection with this case, arrested 13 people, chargesheeted 74 and frozen assets worth nearly Rs 4,336 crore in India and abroad. In its latest statement, it pegged the value of attached assets at Rs 3,800 crore.

The BJP connection

Garg is the promoter of Vikas Lifecare Limited and Vikas Ecotech Limited, which manufacture chemicals and are listed on the National Stock Exchange, Ebix Limited, a global digital and financial exchanges firm which is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, and Ebix Inc, which is listed on the American stock exchange Nasdaq.

On his social media profiles, he describes himself as “Convenor – Economic Cell, BJP”. A list of functionaries released by BJP Delhi in August 2024 also identifies him as holding this position.

Garg’s social media accounts showcase photos of him with senior BJP leaders, including Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The photos show him meeting Union Parliamentary Affairs minister Kiren Rijiju in April 2025, former Union minister Anurag Thakur in September 2024, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla in November 2022, and BJP’s former Delhi chief ministerial candidate Manoj Tiwari in November 2021.

In September 2025, Garg met Harsh Malhotra, the Union minister of state for corporate affairs and road transport and highways, and tweeted that they had discussed “key issues related to the economic cell and its functioning”. In May 2026, Malhotra became the president of the BJP in Delhi.

Raids and probes

The first time that Enforcement Directorate officials visited Garg and his firms was on April 16 last year, Vikas Lifecare disclosed in a filing to the National Stock Exchange on April 18.

The disclosure was made under regulation 30 of the SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2015, which mandates listed entities to disclose significant information to stock exchanges to ensure transparency and prevent insider trading.

The firm said that Enforcement Directorate officials had visited its office and Garg’s home and the office of one of his companies. It added that the investigation pertained to “third-party entities and transactions”.

On April 21, an Enforcement Directorate statement said that it had raided premises across several Indian cities on April 16 in the Mahadev betting app case.

It added: “During the searches, evidence has been recovered to suggest that the promoters of such companies collaborated/colluded with the accused persons to manipulate to share prices of such companies with the help of ‘tainted money’ to raise their company’s valuation using a string of agents and middlemen.”

The agency did not name any firms and promoters.

In its 2024-’25 annual report published in September 2025, Vikas Lifecare, said that the Enforcement Directorate had initiated proceedings “against various persons including officials of the Company” under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

It denied the allegations and said that it was in the process of moving the High Court to quash the proceedings. While Scroll could not find pleas filed by the firm against the Enforcement Directorate in the Delhi High Court in 2025 and 2026 on the e-courts website, court proceedings from April 2026 show that Garg has moved the Prevention of Money Laundering Act appellate tribunal against the Enforcement Directorate’s Raipur branch, which is investigating the Mahadev betting operation.

In a stock filing on June 24, Vikas Lifecare said that the Enforcement Directorate had attached immovable properties worth Rs 13 crore as part of its investigation into the Mahadev betting app. Ebix Limited put out a similar filing on June 23 which did not mention the value of the attachments.

“The Parent company has represented that it is neither involved in nor a beneficiary of the alleged activities under investigation and is contesting the attachment before the appropriate legal forums,” Vikas Lifecare said.

The Enforcement Directorate, in its July 10 statement, said Garg’s attached assets included residential properties, land parcels, equity shares and other securities.

The Dubai connection

Since 2022, the Enforcement Directorate has released more than a dozen press releases on its probe into the Mahadev betting app, naming the owners Sourabh Chandrakar and Ravi Uppal and several others as under investigation. It has named those it has arrested and searched, detailed the modus operandi of the accused, and stated the assets it has frozen.

In a press release in March 2024, the Enforcement Directorate stated: “It was found that one Hari Shankar Tibrewal who hails from Kolkata but currently residing in Dubai…has partnered with the promoters of Mahadev Online Book.”

It added: “The searches revealed that Hari Shankar Tibrewal owned and operated one of the illegal betting websites viz. skyexchange.”

In April 2024, the Enforcement Directorate filed a prosecution complaint in court – the third supplementary chargesheet in the Mahadev app case – naming Tibrewal as accused number 24 and charging him with money laundering under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002.

In the prosecution complaint, the Enforcement Directorate said: “Investigations had further revealed that the accused, Mr Hari Shankar Tibrewal had laundered the proceeds of crime emanating from the betting operations through multiple companies operating both in India and outside India.” It added: “The operations of Indian companies were managed by Mr Suraj Chokhani.”

In a petition before a district court in Delhi in 2024, Tibrewala denied any role in the Mahadev betting app. The court passed an injunction restraining news outlets from labelling him a “fugitive” or reporting that he had been arrested or was absconding. In a final order in August 2026, the court also said use of the term “hawala trader” or “one of the main accused in Mahadev betting” for Tibrewala was “per se defamatory”.

Questions emailed to Tibrewal and Chokhani about the Enforcement Directorate’s charges against them remain unanswered.

Filings with the National Stock Exchange show that in 2022 and 2023, Vikas Garg’s listed firms received investments from individuals and entities based in Dubai and Kolkata, which were accused of involvement in the Mahadev betting app in 2024.

For instance, Vikas Lifecare Limited’s shareholding disclosure from September and December 2022 shows that a Dubai-based investor, Ecotek General Trading LLC, had a 1.76% stake in it, valued around Rs 10 crore.

By March 2023, five other firms from Kolkata bought nearly 8% of Vikas Lifecare: Brilliant Investment Consultants Private Limited, Discovery Buildcon Private Limited, Dream Achievers Consultancy Services Private Limited, Forest Vincom Private Limited and Sawarnbhumi Vanijya Private Limited. This investment was worth nearly Rs 38 crore.

The common director in the Kolkata firms was Suraj Chokhani.

Sawarnbhumi Vanijya also owned 1.1 % shares of Vikas Ecotech as of September 2023, worth nearly Rs 5 crore.

National Stock Exchange data shows that towards the end of 2023, these investors sold their shares in Garg’s firms.

All six investors – the five Kolkata firms and the Dubai firm – have been accused of being part of the money-laundering operations of the Mahadev betting app, according to Enforcement Directorate documents. One is a March 2024 letter from the agency to the Chhattisgarh government’s Economic Offence Bureau and the Anti-Corruption Bureau. The other is a freezing order from February 2024.

The names of the Dubai and Kolkata firms also feature in a list shared by the Ministry of Finance as part of a Lok Sabha reply in August 2024. The list disclosed the names of 1,519 firms against whom the Enforcement Directorate had filed prosecution complaints – or chargesheets under the money laundering law – between 2019 and 2024.

The six firms in Kolkata and Dubai did not respond to emails seeking comment.

In a bail hearing in the Supreme Court last year, Chokhani’s counsel had argued that his alleged involvement in money-laundering operations of the betting app was comparatively minor and limited to managing companies, not owning or operating the app directly.

The counsel also argued that the Enforcement Directorate case relied on statements by the co-accused, which were inadmissible in court and purportedly under retraction.

Chokhani was granted bail by the court citing extended duration of his custody, the fundamental right to a speedy trial, and the absence of trial proceedings.

Indian authorities have been trying to extradite and prosecute the app’s promoters – Uppal was reportedly arrested by the United Arab Emirates police in December 2023 and fled custody in November 2025. Chandrakar is reportedly in Oman.

Corrections and clarifications: This article has been updated on October 30, 2026, to include details from the Enforcement Directorate’s prosecution complaint and from judicial orders. A paragraph that relied on a news report published in the India Today has been removed.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday said that a Uniform Civil Code would be implemented in Uttar Pradesh if the Bharatiya Janata Party retains power in the 2027 Assembly elections, The Indian Express reported.

“UCC has already been implemented in many states,” the newspaper quoted the BJP leader as saying. “If you form the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, we will implement UCC in Uttar Pradesh.”

Shah made the remarks while addressing party colleagues at the BJP’s working committee meeting in Lucknow, PTI reported.

The Uniform Civil Code proposed by the BJP aims to introduce a common set of laws governing marriage, divorce, succession and adoption for all citizens. Currently, such personal affairs of different religions are based on community-specific laws, largely derived from their religious scriptures.

Introducing a common personal law has for long been on the BJP’s agenda and several states ruled by the party have been making advances towards implementing it.

The announcement on Friday follows Shah’s September statement that governments led by the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance partners in 21 states would introduce the Uniform Civil Code before 2029, when the next Lok Sabha elections are scheduled.

Reacting to the BJP leader’s statement, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said a Uniform Civil Code was “not worth implementing”, ANI reported.

The Opposition leader also said that despite the Lok Sabha passing the women’s reservation legislation, the BJP government had failed to implement it.

In April, the Union government introduced the 2026 Constitution 131st Amendment Bill in the Lok Sabha to amend the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act and redraw the boundaries of electoral constituencies.

The bill, one of the three draft legislations that were introduced, required a two-thirds majority of votes in Parliament to pass. The ruling National Democratic Alliance does not have a two-thirds majority of MPs in any House. Therefore, it required the support of Opposition parties to pass the amendment.

The consideration of the bill was rejected by the Lok Sabha with 298 MPs voting in its favour and 230 against.

In January 2025, Uttarakhand became the first state to implement the Uniform Civil Code after Independence when it brought the code into force. Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh have passed similar legislation but are yet to receive the president’s assent. Committees have been set up in Maharashtra, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh to draft proposals. In Rajasthan, the Cabinet approved a bill to introduce the code in August.

A common civil code has been in place in Goa since the Portuguese Civil Code was adopted in 1867.

Assam forms panel to frame rules for UCC

Meanwhile, the BJP government in Assam has formed an eight-member committee to frame rules for the implementation of the Uniform Civil Code in the state, PTI reported on Friday.

According to a notification issued by the state’s political department, the committee is expected to submit its draft rules within a month.

The state Assembly passed the bill on May 27 and it has since been sent to the Centre for the president’s assent.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: ‘Women’s rights’ are a convenient cover for UCC’s intrusive provisions

A flood caused by a glacial lake outburst in Bhutan on Thursday prompted the authorities in West Bengal and Assam to issue flash flood alerts for districts along major rivers and evacuate persons in vulnerable areas downstream.

In West Bengal, Cooch Behar, Tufanganj and Busirhat districts along the Sankosh river and its tributaries were on high alert, Reuters reported.

In Assam, settlements along the Brahmaputra river were also asked to remain alert, The Indian Express reported.

Glacial lake outburst floods occur when a lake fed by glacial melt breaches suddenly.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the state was monitoring the impact of the glacial lake outburst in vulnerable areas of Dhubri and Kokrajhar districts.

The state’s teams were coordinating with the National Disaster Response Force and other agencies, Sarma said on social media. “Residents are requested to stay alert, follow official updates and cooperate with local officials,” he added.

West Bengal Water Resources Minister Nisith Pramanik said that persons living near tea gardens in the northern part of the state and riverbeds “must evacuate immediately”, reported The Indian Express.

The glacial lake outburst occurred in the Sintaphu lake near Wakila mountain in Bhutan.

On Thursday night, the Union water resources department said that the flood water would flow downstream and reach the Bhutan-India border in six to eight hours, and was likely to impact districts in West Bengal and Assam.

#WATCH | Alipurduar, West Bengal: On the preparedness for the effect of a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) at Shintaphu Lake in Bhutan, SP Amit Kumar Shaw said, "First of all, I would like to tell the residents of the district that there is absolutely no need to panic. The… pic.twitter.com/sEBpEF9O3L

— ANI (@ANI) October 30, 2026

The large artificial lake is building up as we speak. pic.twitter.com/l6WsYzctMT

— Tenzing Lamsang (@TenzingLamsang) October 30, 2026

Glacial lake outbursts are becoming increasingly common across the Himalayas. Scientists point out that warming temperatures have rapidly caused more snowmelt, increasing the number and size of glacial lakes.

In Sikkim alone, there are almost 700 such lakes, of which 21 have been identified as “potentially dangerous with a high outburst probability”. The number of glacial lakes in Himachal Pradesh has increased by over 500% since 1990.

In August, nearly 1,500 persons were killed, over 9,200 injured and 5,000 missing in Nepal after a flash flood triggered by a glacial lake outburst on the country’s border with China.

Written by Abeer Khan. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• Nepal: Warming may have induced glacial floods, but the damage downstream is manmade
• How ‘glof’ became a common word in Sikkim – and why it haunts people two years later

The Madras High Court on Friday issued notice to Cockroach Janta Party leader Saurav Das and the Union government, seeking their responses on a petition demanding an investigation into Das’ citizenship and background, Bar and Bench reported.

The petition also asked for Das’ accounts on social media platforms Instagram and X to be blocked for his allegedly derogatory remarks about the judiciary and judges of the Supreme Court.

The petitioner has sought that Das’ passport and Aadhaar card be cancelled if he is found to be a foreign citizen.

The plea is also seeking an investigation into personal details of his parents, the legal news outlet reported.

A division bench of Chief Justice SA Dharmadikari and Justice G Arul Murugan will hear the matter again after six weeks.

The Cockroach Janta Party political campaign had named Das, an investigative journalist, as its chief spokesperson on June 3, days ahead of its protest demanding the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union education minister at the time, over alleged irregularities in conducting competitive examinations.

Pradhan resigned on July 25 after the protest spread to other parts of the country following police crackdown on demonstrators in Delhi.

Das was a key leader of the protests and held discussions with the Union government, along with another spokesperson of the campaign, Ashutosh Ranka.

Das and Ranka were also detained on October 13 after they trespassed on Jantar Mantar and waved the national flag amid protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the functioning of the Election Commission and the alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

They had “sneaked into” Jantar Mantar to oppose the authorities’ decision to denotify the area as a designated protest site. They were arrested a day later and released on October 21.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: ‘Impinges on freedom’: Former Delhi HC Justice S Muralidhar on CJP leaders’ custody

The Arunachal Pradesh Police has sought a search warrant against journalist Tongam Rina in connection with the violence that broke out in Pasighat town during a protest against the Upper Siang dam project.

Several organisations have been protesting against the proposed 12,500-megawatt power project on the Siang river. It will be built by the government-owned power company National Hydroelectric Power Corporation.

The police had arrested 69 persons and detained four after protesters on October 23 vandalised and set fire to an office of the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation and a police station in Pasighat following the use of tear gas by security personnel during the agitation.

Along with Rina, the deputy editor of The Arunachal Times, the police application on Tuesday also urged the chief judicial magistrate to issue search warrants against youth leader Otul Jerang, activist Tajong Talom and lawyer Sunny Tayeng.

Jerang, Talom, and lawyer and activist Ebo Mili were arrested in connection with the violence and are in judicial custody.

On Thursday, Rina said that the “intimidation” would not “stop me from writing or my activism”. She said that the violence in Pasighat would not have happened if the police and the government had handled the protests better.

What happened in Pasighat would not have happened had DGP Jamwal, SP Lamba, and the government handled it well. At this point, I have nothing to say about the police action against me and Sunny Tayeng, and their illegal surveillance. I just wish they had asked lawyer Sunny…

— Tongam Rina (@tongamrina) October 29, 2026

“At this point, I have nothing to say about the police action against me and Sunny Tayeng, and their [state’s] illegal surveillance,” she wrote on social media. “More power to the people of Siang valley and Arunachal. We owe it to Siang and her people.”

In a joint statement released on Thursday, the Arunachal Pradesh Union of Working Journalists and Arunachal Press Club condemned the inclusion of Rina’s name in the application for the search warrants and said that the move was “a serious threat to press freedom”.

The media bodies said that the action raised “grave concerns over the possible misuse of investigative powers to intimidate journalists reporting on contentious public issues”.

The statement also condemned the violence in Pasighat.

“…criminal investigations must never become instruments to intimidate journalists, suppress uncomfortable reporting or silence critical voices”, it said.

The media bodies demanded that the Arunachal Pradesh Police and state government “clarify the specific grounds for Rina’s inclusion in the proceedings, ensure an urgent review and take corrective action if her inclusion is found unjustified”.

Surveillance, search must be lawful, says Tayeng

On Friday, Tayeng said she had reasons to believe she was “being subjected to continuous surveillance” in connection with my legal work relating to the dam project, in which she represents Jerang, Talom and Mili.

“These developments are concerning, particularly in the context of my professional responsibilities as counsel,” Tayeng said about the police seeking a search warrant against him.

The developments “raise legitimate questions about the privacy of my professional activities, the confidentiality of lawyer-client communications and the safeguards that must be respected when an advocate’s chambers and professional work are involved in an investigation,” she said.

Any surveillance or search must have a lawful basis, Tayeng added.

Siang dam

The Siang flows into Arunachal Pradesh from Tibet and is the Brahmaputra’s main tributary.

The Siang Upper Multipurpose project was first proposed in 2017 by the Union government’s think-tank NITI Aayog and was meant to counter the threat posed by Chinese hydropower projects being developed on the Yarlung Tsangpo river upstream. The Siang is known as Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet, where it originates.

The Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum estimates that 27 villages along the river – in Siang and Upper Siang districts – will be affected because of the proposed dam. For years, the residents of the area have opposed the project.

Inputs by Rokibuz Zaman. Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: ‘Threats, detentions, militarisation’: How Arunachal government is choking anti-dam protests

The Election Commission on Thursday extended the deadline for filing claims and objections in the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Delhi and Maharashtra, and expanded the processing window in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Nagaland.

The poll panel also postponed the date of publication of the final voter lists in the five states and Delhi. The final voter list in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Haryana and Nagaland will be published on November 30 and in Delhi on December 22.

The decision came a day after the Supreme Court, while hearing a petition concerning the voter roll revision in the national capital, asked the Election Commission to consider extending the October 30 deadline for filing claims and objections. The window has been extended till November 25.

The extensions also followed requests from the state poll panels.

The date for disposal of the claims and objections in Delhi has been extended till December 15 from November 30.

In Maharashtra, the period for filing claims and objections had ended on October 26. It has now been reopened till November 13. The window for disposing of the claims will close on November 25 instead of November 10.

The names of more than two crore persons were removed from Maharashtra’s draft voter list in August as part of the electoral rolls revision. The electors excluded from the draft account for 21.1% of the state’s previous voter base.

In Delhi, 47.7 lakh names were deleted from the draft voter list. The names account for 33% of the Union Territory’s electorate.

The window for disposing the claims and objections has been extended till November 20 in Andhra Pradesh and Haryana, November 25 in Nagaland and November 26 in Telangana.

The five states and Delhi are among the 19 states and Union Territories where the voter roll revision is being carried out in the third phase of the special intensive revision.

A contentious exercise

In 2025, the first phase of the exercise was conducted in Bihar. It was extended to 12 states and Union Territories in the second phase in late 2025 and the first half of 2026.

Since the exercise began, concerns have been raised that the revision could eliminate genuine voters from the rolls and even shape electoral outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

In May, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the revision. But it said that the exercise does not mean that the Election Commission can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen.

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• Follow Scroll’s coverage of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls here.
• Explainer: Why the Election Commission’s Form 6 for new voters has triggered a legal row
• SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial

The Bombay High Court on Tuesday ruled that the re-arrest of activist Arun Ferreira by the police in 2011, as he was being released from the Nagpur Central Jail, had violated his fundamental rights. It directed Maharashtra, not the police personnel held responsible, to pay compensation of Rs 2 lakh to him.

Ferreira was arrested in May 2007 and spent more than four years in jail for his alleged involvement in Maoist activities.

On September 27, 2011, when Ferreira was being released after his acquittal in eight cases against him at the time, he was re-arrested near the jail’s gate.

Ferreira said that he had been taken into custody by a “group of unknown civilians” who “shut his mouth, lifted him and took him in a numbered vehicle”.

Six of the unknown persons “carried him, which was an act of forcible abduction”, he contended.

Ferreira said that he was intentionally shown to be absconding despite having been in jail between 2007 and 2011.

He was later informed that he was being held in two old cases related to Maoist violence in 2007. But at the time, Ferreira was not informed about the accusation against him and the grounds of arrest, read his petition.

The additional public prosecutor opposed Ferreira’s contentions and argued that due process had been followed during the arrest.

He was released on bail in January 2012 before being acquitted in 2014 in all cases against him at the time.

On Tuesday, the court upheld a petition by Ferreira that his re-arrest had violated Article 21 and Article 22(1) of the Constitution.

Article 21 guarantees personal liberty. Article 22(1) provides a person being arrested with the fundamental right to be informed of the grounds for being held as soon as possible and the right to be defended by a legal practitioner.

The court said that while the prosecutors had argued that the police had complied with legal processes, neither the general diary entry nor the arrest memo showed that Ferreira or his relatives were told why he was being arrested again.

The court held the Gadchiroli superintendent of police and police sub-inspector who had arrested him responsible for violating the law.

It directed the state to pay the compensation of Rs 2 lakh within eight weeks.

Ferreira was also among the 16 activists, academics and lawyers who were charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act for their alleged role in instigating caste violence at Bhima Koregaon near Pune in January 2018.

He was arrested in August 2018 and spent almost five years in custody before the Supreme Court granted him regular bail in July 2023, with certain conditions.

The violence broke out a day after a conclave called the Elgar Parishad was organised to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle of Bhima Koregaon. One person was killed in the violence and several others were injured.

The National Investigation Agency has alleged that the Elgar Parishad was part of a larger Maoist conspiracy to stoke caste violence, destabilise the Union government and assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In April 2024, the Maharashtra State Human Rights Commission asked the state government and the superintendent of the Taloja jail in Navi Mumbai to pay compensation of Rs 2 lakh to Ferreira for failing to send his mother a letter he had written to her while in custody.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• ‘As I stepped into freedom, the police abducted me from the gates of Nagpur jail’
• After almost five years in jail, alleged Maoist leader is found innocent

Students at Jamia Millia Islamia university in Delhi ended their 18-day protest on Thursday after the institute’ administration agreed to their demands, including setting a timeline for restoring the students’ union.

In an order issued on Thursday evening, the administration set May 15 as the deadline for approving and implementing the university’s student union constitution. Elections would be held within six weeks of the start of the next academic session, or by the end of August, the order added.

The university has not held student union elections since 2006. Students had been protesting on the campus since October 12, with five of them going on hunger strike, to demand the restoration of the union.

On October 16, the university rusticated one of the students on hunger strike, suspended two and banned all three from entering the campus for a year.

However, on Thursday it revoked all disciplinary action against protesting students.

The university also said that in-person classes for all courses would resume on Monday and end-semester examinations would also be held offline.

In an order issued on Wednesday, it had announced that end-semester examinations would be held online. Regular classes were also continuing in online mode.

On Monday, the university announced that the students’ union elections would be held within 15 days of the forum’s constitution being approved.

However, students had continued their protest saying that the administration had not addressed all their demands, with the lack of a specific deadline being a point of contention between them. They alleged that they had been pressured into signing the agreement.

They also said that the Delhi Police had detained more than 70 students since October 12.

A first information report was registered on Thursday in connection with alleged vandalism near a campus gate, based on a complaint by the university, the Hindustan Times reported.

This came a day after the university accused protesting students “along with locals” of vandalising university property and breaching security on the previous night.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

I have spent much of my professional life looking at cities from two directions: India, where I grew up, and New York, where I now practice architecture and urban design.

This has made one thing clear: cities do not become successful because they possess the right collection of infrastructure. They become successful because their infrastructure, land, housing, economy, public spaces and institutions work in relationship with one another.

This distinction matters enormously for India today. The country is entering one of the largest episodes of urbanisation in its history. The World Bank estimates that India’s urban population could rise from roughly 480 million in 2020 to 951 million by 2050.

India is building metros, expressways, airports, industrial corridors, housing, logistics infrastructure and digital systems at a pace that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago.

But what kind of city are we building through all this infrastructure?

Infrastructure is not the same thing as urbanism – the unique social and cultural patterns that emerge when residents of a city interact with their built and natural environments.

India’s problem may not be that it is building too little. It may be that we are building the pieces of the city faster than we are designing the relationships between them.

The project has become the city

The contemporary Indian city is increasingly being produced through projects: expressways, riverfronts, airports, townships. Projects are attractive to governments because they are visible and measurable. They have budgets, contractors, completion dates and inauguration ceremonies. But cities are cumulative, made from millions of public and private decisions that interact over time.

New roads change land values, housing districts change commuting patterns, new employment hubs change where people want to live. Urbanism begins where these relationships begin to matter. However, planning systems often evaluate each intervention separately.

Boundaries of the city

Perhaps the deepest problem is that India continues to organise much of its planning around city units administered by municipalities but urban life increasingly spills far beyond these limits.

People live in one jurisdiction and work in another. Goods move across several municipal areas. Pollution and watersheds certainly do not respect municipal limits.

Yet institutional responsibility remains fragmented: transportation is governed by one agency, land and water by others. Metropolitan regions, meanwhile, have no single coherent administrative agency.

The 74th Constitutional Amendment, passed in 1992, envisioned stronger urban local governments. More than three decades later, the devolution of functions, authority and resources to municipalities remains incomplete.

When responsibility for land, transportation, water and housing is fragmented, the physical city becomes fragmented too.

Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi

Bengaluru offers perhaps the clearest example of what happens when the economy outruns the city. Jobs were concentrated in parts of the region, housing followed unevenly, transportation struggled to keep pace, ecological systems came under enormous pressure. The institutions capable of coordinating the city’s growth did not evolve at the same speed as its economy.

In Mumbai, land is scarce, housing is extraordinarily expensive and the formal economy depends heavily on people who cannot afford the formal housing market. The result is a city in which formal and informal systems are deeply interdependent.

When domestic workers, delivery workers and street vendors are pushed to the edge of the city in the name of formalisation, the city becomes more expensive and dependent on long-distance travel. The informal city is not simply a planning failure. It is a response to the failure of the formal city to provide affordable access to land, housing and opportunity.

Density with urbanity

India should also question the assumption that increasing density in cities is the solution.

Unless it is accompanied by adequate transit facilities, density will result in congestion. Without affordability, density would be exclusionary. What kinds of density can create better access to opportunity, public life and greater environmental resilience?

The most urgent change in thinking concerns the relationship between cities and nature. For generations, urban development has often treated landscape as something to be overcome. Wetlands are viewed as land that can be developed, rivers as channels. When flooding or heat becomes a crisis, another layer of infrastructure is built to compensate.

Climate change makes this increasingly untenable. Heat is much an issue of urban form, just as flooding is of land use. The ecological system should help determine where and how the city is designed.

Lessons from New York

New York is frequently presented as a model of density and transit. What interests me about New York are its interconnected urban systems: Density is supported by transit and supports local commerce, public spaces nurture civic life.

These relationships are imperfect. But they demonstrate that the city works through connections between systems, not through the isolated excellence of individual projects.

Indian cities do not need to become New York. But they need to ask which relationships are transferable, which are not and which must be invented for Indian conditions.

India needs a different approach to the way cities are conceptualised. Instead of asking, “What project should we build?”, we should ask, “What relationship are we trying to create?”

The 20th-century master plan assumed that the future city could be sufficiently predicted to be drawn in advance. India’s urban reality is too dynamic for that confidence. Yet another master plan is not the answer. But abandoning planning in favour of market-driven growth is equally dangerous.

What India needs is an urban framework that would establish the relationships that must remain resilient even as individual buildings and developments change. Where should growth occur – and where should it not? Where should transit concentrate density? Which communities should be protected from displacement?

These are questions about what kind of society the city is intended to support.

India’s urban question cannot simply be: how much can we build? It has to be: what kind of city are we building?

Viren Brahmbhatt is a New York-based architect, urban designer, and Principal of de.Sign Studio | New York.

About 1,600 persons identified as foreign citizens were found on electoral rolls in six states during the special intensive revision, the Hindustan Times reported on Thursday.

After the voter roll revision, the six states have about 9.86 crore electors.

While launching the first phase of the exercise in June 2025, the Election Commission said that the “inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants” was one of the reasons for conducting the revision.

The Hindustan Times sent queries to the chief electoral officers of 26 states and Union territories where the special intensive revision had been completed or draft rolls had been published. The officials from 11 states responded.

Six states – Karnataka, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Kerala, Goa and Mizoram – provided the figures for foreign citizens. Four said they did not maintain such data. Odisha said that it had found such cases but did not record the number.

The Election Commission said that it had never asked states to collect such data separately.

“We also don’t have combined or state-wise data on this,” a poll body official was quoted as saying. “If any such cases came up, they were placed under the ‘Others’ category in ASDDO [Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate, and Others].”

State-wise figures

Karnataka accounted for the largest number of foreign citizens among the six states.

The authorities identified 716 foreign citizens for removal, including 545 Nepalese citizens in Bengaluru North, a state poll official told the Hindustan Times.

The names of more than 99.3 lakh voters were deleted from Karnataka’s final voter list published on Tuesday.

In Kerala, the authorities found around 500 people who held foreign citizenship but remained on the electoral rolls, a state poll official was quoted as saying.

The names of more than 8.9 lakh voters were deleted from Kerala’s final voter list published on February 21.

In Goa, 419 foreign passport holders were found in voter lists, state Chief Electoral Officer Sanjay Goel told the Hindustan Times.

The names of more than 1.2 lakh voters were deleted from Goa’s final voter list published on February 21.

In Jharkhand, the authorities identified three foreign citizens, all from Afghanistan, a state poll official was quoted as saying.

The names of more than 43.6 lakh voters were deleted from Jharkhand’s draft voter list published on August 5. The final voter list is scheduled to be published on November 30.

In Meghalaya, two men of Nepalese origin, both married to Indian women, were found on the electoral rolls, state Chief Electoral Officer BDR Tiwari told the Hindustan Times.

The names of more than 1.6 lakh voters were deleted from Meghalaya’s final voter list published on October 26.

Mizoram reported no such cases. Around 39,000 names were deleted from the state’s final roll published on September 7.

The total comes out to be 1640 persons identified as foreign citizens in these six states.

A contentious exercise

In 2025, the first phase of the exercise was conducted in Bihar. It was extended to 12 states and Union Territories in the second phase in late 2025 and the first half of 2026.

Since the exercise began, concerns have been raised that the revision could eliminate genuine voters from the rolls and even shape electoral outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

In May, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the revision. But it said that the exercise does not mean that the Election Commission can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen.

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.