The Maharashtra government on Saturday postponed the Teacher Eligibility Test 2026 after parts of the question paper were allegedly leaked a day before the examination.

The exam was scheduled to be held on Sunday at 1,028 centres across the state.

In a statement, the Maharashtra State Council of Examination said that it had put in place all necessary security measures in light of the alleged irregularities surrounding the undergraduate National Eligibility cum Entrance Test earlier this year. However, the police received information on Saturday that some persons in Bhiwandi city in Thane district had access to examination paper.

Acting on the information, the Bhiwandi Police conducted a raid and recovered documents from the site. Officials from the examination council verified the material and found that some of the questions in the seized documents matched the eligibility test’s question paper, the statement added.

A criminal case has been registered and an investigation is underway.

The Maharashtra State Examination Council said a fresh date for the examination will be announced later on its official website.

Around 4.28 lakh aspiring teachers were expected to appear for the examination on Sunday, Hindustan Times reported.

The Maharashtra Teacher Eligibility Test paper leak came even as a protest is underway at Jantar Mantar since June 20, demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the alleged paper leak in the Undergraduate National Eligibility cum Entrance Test and other alleged irregularities in competitive examinations.

The protest is led by the Cockroach Janta Party, which began as a satirical political campaign.

The NEET examination originally scheduled for May 3, was cancelled by the National Testing Agency following allegations of a paper leak. More than 22 lakh candidates had appeared for the test the first time.

It was cancelled after the Rajasthan Special Operations Group began investigating allegations that a “guess paper” circulated before the examination contained questions closely matching the actual paper.

The “guess paper” contained around 410 questions, of which about 120 matched the questions asked in the chemistry section, according to the Rajasthan Police. The Central Bureau of Investigation filed a first information report in the matter based on a complaint by the Union education ministry.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Narendra Modi government’s continued silence about Israeli “genocidal actions” in Palestine “cannot be explained rationally or morally”, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi said in a column in The Indian Express on Saturday.

Gandhi said that two and a half years after Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an “absolutely unacceptable” attack on Israel, it has become clear that Tel Aviv’s retaliation has been “characterised by wanton cruelty and barbarity”.

Israel’s military offensive in Gaza began in October 2023 after Hamas killed 1,200 persons during its incursion into southern Israel and took hostages. Israel has been carrying out unprecedented air and ground strikes on Gaza since then, leaving more than 73,000 persons dead.

On Saturday, Gandhi wrote in The Indian Express that senior Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “called for the ‘complete siege’” of Gaza and described Palestinians as “‘animals’ who have ‘no right to exist’”.

‘India remains a lone voice of silence’

While the Donald Trump administration in the United States had enabled Tel Aviv to “continue its brutal campaign” against Palestinians, the rest of the world “has felt the pricking of its conscience”, the Congress leader said.

Gandhi said that amid the conflict several countries in the West, including the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, had recognised Palestinian statehood “after decades of indifference to the Palestinian cause”.

She noted that South Africa had taken Israel to the International Court of Justice for violating the 1948 Genocide Convention and that several European nations had restricted arms sales to Tel Aviv. The International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants for the Israeli political leadership, the Congress leader added.

“Amidst the growing public backlash against Israel and the international community’s cognisance of the unjustifiable brutality unleashed on Gaza, India remains a lone voice of silence,” she said.

Gandhi said that India had been “historically exceptional” for its commitment to postcolonial solidarity, sovereignty and international peace.

However, today India was “exceptional in our continued indifference to the flagrant violation of the global rules-based order”, the suffering of the public in the Global South and to the “abasement of human dignity” in Palestine, she added.

India’s longstanding position has been to support a two-state solution for establishing a sovereign, viable and independent state of Palestine within recognised and mutually agreed borders, living alongside Israel in peace.

“We are slipping further into Israel’s strategic orbit, at a time when the world is increasingly pivoting away from it. The Prime Minister’s visit to Israel will go down in history as a bewildering strategic decision.

The spirit of Indian nationhood demands that we speak up for… pic.twitter.com/GmB28smfl1

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 27, 2026

Gandhi said that the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry had in September said that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. She also noted a report published by the panel on Tuesday that the Israeli military has deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children.

By targeting the children, Tel Aviv was attacking the capacity of the Palestinian people “to exist and to determine their future”, said the commission headed by retired Indian judge S Muralidhar. Israel’s foreign ministry has rejected both the reports.

Stance ‘inexplicable from national interest perspective’

Gandhi said that the Modi government’s “silence and inaction are not just morally reprehensible, but also inexplicable from a national interest perspective”.

“We are slipping further into Israel’s strategic orbit, at a time when the world is increasingly pivoting away from it,” the Opposition leader said.

Modi’s visit to Israel amid these circumstances and only days before Israel launched its war on Iran and assassinated the top political leadership in Tehran, “will go down in history as a bewildering strategic decision”.

Modi had visited Israel on February 25 and February 26 before the war in West Asia began on February 28. During the visit, Modi told the Israeli Parliament that India stands with Israel “firmly, with full conviction, in this moment and beyond”.

“Our sacrifice of our strategic interest and morality has yielded us nothing but the friendship between [Modi and Netanyahu], who is now under attack all over the world, including in the US,” Gandhi added.

The Congress leader said that India must speak up for Palestinians.

“The calculus of national interest demands that we respond to the global public opinion” against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its “brutal displacement and dispossession of lakhs of Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank”, she added.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read:

• India’s discernible shift away from Palestine
• Opinion: Could India be considered complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

The Madras High Court on Thursday struck down a Tamil Nadu government order that allowed persons from the Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes, Denotified Communities and Scheduled Castes to be treated as Backward Class Muslims after they had converted to Islam.

A bench of Justices GR Swaminathan and PB Balaji ruled that the March 2024 order was unconstitutional.

The court held that a person who has converted to Islam cannot claim the status of a Backward Class Muslim. “He is only a Muslim and that’s all there is to it,” the bench said.

The observations came while ruling on a plea filed by a 33-year-old man who was born as a Hindu in Thoothukudi district.

The man converted to Islam in 2015, changed his name and married as per Islamic traditions. He had subsequently applied for a community certificate that identified him as a Muslim Lebbai, one of the seven sects recognised as Backward Class Muslims in Tamil Nadu under the 2024 government order.

He approached the High Court after the tahsildar had rejected his application for the certificate.

During the proceedings, he had cited the 2024 government order.

The state government also defended its order, contending that it was based on a recommendation made by the state Backward Classes Commission. It said that only the persons who were eligible for reservations before conversion would continue to receive the benefits.

However, the bench rejected the state’s defence. It said that a High Court order from “more than 75 years ago” had established that when a person converts to Islam, he becomes a “just another Mussalman”.

It held that the legal position cannot be undone by a government order.

The High Court further observed that the government order had clubbed converts from the Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes, Denotified Communities and the Scheduled Castes into the Backward Class Muslims category “just for the sake of ensuring” that the persons continue to get reservations.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Sara Varghese.

A United States judge on Friday ordered the US Department of Justice to justify its decision to drop fraud charges against Adani Group chairperson Gautam Adani, Reuters reported.

Judge Nicholas Garaufis at the US District Court in the Eastern District of New York declined to rule immediately on a request filed by Gautam Adani’s lawyers to dismiss the case. The court gave the prosecutors time till July 13 to submit more information to support their decision to drop the charges.

“The government’s terse, ​bland and conclusory statement affords the court neither a sufficient basis to reach any conclusion, nor the opportunity to conduct ​any analysis of the government's request for dismissal,” Reuters quoted Garaufis as having said.

The US authorities had in November 2024 indicted Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar Adani for allegedly orchestrating a $265 million fraud scheme to bribe officials in India for solar energy contracts, and then misrepresenting the company’s anti-bribery practices to investors in the US.

The details of the alleged bribes were concealed to secure financing, the US justice department had claimed.

The Adani Group has denied the allegations. In a stock exchange filing in November 2024, the conglomerate said that Gautam Adani and Sagar Adani had been charged in the US for securities fraud, not bribery.

On May 18, the Donald Trump administration asked the court to dismiss the fraud charges against Gautam Adani.

The justice department had told Garaufis that it had decided, “in its prosecutorial discretion, not to devote further resources to these criminal charges against individual defendants”.

For the charges to be dropped, Garaufis must approve the request.

The request to drop the charges came days after reports said that Gautam Adani’s lawyers had told the justice department that he would invest $10 billion in the country’s economy and help create 15,000 jobs if the charges against him were dropped.

Earlier this month, two Democratic senators alleged that the reported proposal by Gautam Adani to invest in the US economy if the fraud charges against him are dropped appeared to be an “egregious quid pro quo offer”.

On May 14, The New York Times reported that the justice department was planning to drop the charges against Gautam Adani after he hired a legal team led by Robert J Giuffra Jr, one of US President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers.

The newspaper reported that Giuffra met officials at the justice department’s headquarters in Washington in April. He presented about 100 slides arguing that the prosecutors lacked evidence and jurisdiction in the matter, The New York Times quoted unidentified persons familiar with the meeting as saying.

One slide allegedly made an offer that Gautam Adani would make investments in the US, according to the newspaper.

Even if the criminal charges are dropped, Gautam Adani is still expected to pay financial penalties, the US newspaper quoted persons aware of the case as saying.

During the same meeting, the lawyer also sought to resolve a parallel civil case filed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission against Gautam Adani, The New York Times had reported.

On May 14, the US markets regulator reached a settlement with Gautam Adani in the matter, the Financial Times reported. As part of this settlement, Gautam Adani agreed to pay $6 million and Sagar Adani $12 million.

Adani Green Energy, a subsidiary of the Adani Group, had told stock exchanges on May 15 that the “company is not a party to this proceeding, and no charges have been brought against it”.

However, the company confirmed that Gautam Adani and Sagar Adani had agreed to the “payment of a civil penalty”, while stating that the decision was made “without admitting or denying the allegations made in the civil complaint”.

The final judgement of the US Eastern District Court of New York is awaited in the matter, the company had said.

On May 18, the US Department of Treasury ‌also said that Adani Enterprises had agreed to pay $275 million to settle its potential civil liability for alleged violations of US sanctions on Iran. Adani Enterprises is the flagship company of the Adani Group.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The latest debate over eggs being dropped from school midday meals in West Bengal reflects yet another attempt to ideologically reshape India’s diverse food habits while disregarding the health of children from poor families.

Earlier in June, the new West Bengal government, now ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, said it would hand over the preparation of school meals to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, a Hindu religious organisation.

A spokesperson of the organisation said eggs will be replaced with alternatives such as soybeans, rajma and paneer. Hindutva supporters say the alternatives provide adequate nutrition. But others, including Opposition leaders, have criticised Hindutva supporters for redefining what Indians should eat according to ideological preferences rather than nutritional needs or cultural realities.

Other Indian states had dropped eggs from their midday meal programmes long before West Bengal. In 2015, the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh refused to include eggs in school meals. In 2025, Maharashtra withdrew government funding for eggs and millet-based sweet dishes in school midday meals.

Since the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014, debates over food have moved well beyond questions of diet or health. Beef bans have devastated the livelihoods of Muslims, Dalits, and communities dependent on cattle trade and leather industries. Vigilante violence in the name of cow protection has claimed numerous lives and spread fear across several states. University hostels have seen conflicts over “non-vegetarian” food. Festivals have become occasions for policing dietary practices.

Malnutrition, food diversity

Unlike disputes over adult dietary choices, this concerns children, many of whom depend on school lunches as the most nutritious meal they receive each day. Should ideological commitments override scientific evidence when India faces a serious malnutrition crisis?

The findings of India’s latest National Family Health Survey, released in May, shows that many children are wasted, or too thin for their height, and stunted, or too short for their age due to poor nutrition.

At least 19% of children under the age of five surveyed were wasted while 29.3% were stunted. In Bengal, 20.3% of children under the age of five were wasted and 22.4% were stunted. A child deprived of adequate nutrition is more likely to carry those disadvantages throughout life.

School feeding programmes were aimed at breaking this cycle. The Mid Day Meal Scheme started in 1995 and was later rebranded as PM POSHAN in 2021-2022, For children from poor households, particularly in rural areas and urban slums, the school lunch is often the only balanced meal of the day.

Eggs are among the cheapest and most efficient sources of protein and other nutrients. The plant-based alternatives that ISKCON proposes are nutritious but imperfect substitutes that are more expensive, take longer to cook and may also not be widely accepted by children. Nutrition is about affordability, accessibility, consistency and acceptability, and eggs satisfy all four conditions. The West Bengal government should examine why it is replacing an inexpensive, scientifically-proven source of protein in a programme aimed at improving child nutrition.

Malnutrition is also a national security issue. Malnourished children will grow into a weak future workforce, reducing economic productivity and increasing healthcare costs, limiting development goals. The government aspires to build an “atmanirbhar” or self-reliant India, yet compromises on one of the most simple and effective nutritional interventions available.

There is also the irony in dropping eggs from school meals when meat is widely consumed in Bengali society – at least 98% of Bengalis are reportedly non-vegetarians. Meat and fish have been part of festive celebrations cutting across communities.

Yet, Hindutva supporters claim vegetarianism is an authentic expression of Hindu identity despite the enormous diversity of dietary practices among Hindus. Millions of Hindus across eastern, southern, and northeastern India consume fish, meat, and eggs without seeing any contradiction with their faith.

In the caste-based beliefs of purity and pollution, meat and eggs are “impure” unlike vegetarian food. But Dalits, Adivasi and tribal communities and Other Backward Classes have depended on affordable animal protein for nutrition and survival. When governments remove affordable animal protein from public welfare programs, it is the poorest families who suffer.

Religion and food

Finally, public nutrition programmes paid for taxes must serve all citizens, irrespective of religious beliefs or dietary philosophies. A democratic state should accommodate food diversity rather than be decided by the ethics of one religious organisation.

School meals must reflect the Constitution’s promise that there will be no discrimination and that public policy advances social justice rather than religious orthodoxy. Every child should receive food based on nutritional science and public health, not on the dietary preferences of those who happen to hold political power.

The debate over eggs in West Bengal is a test of whether the most vulnerable children will become casualties of political symbolism a majoritarian ruling party or receive the nutrition they need to grow and thrive.

Ashok Swain is a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden.

The toll from an ammonia gas leak at a private seafood processing and export unit near Periyapalayam in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruvallur district has risen to 15, the state government said on Thursday.

Eighty-three persons were affected by the leak, which occurred on Sunday at a facility in the Kannigaipair-Manjangaranai area, the health and family welfare department said.

The incident reportedly took place during routine industrial operations and exposed workers at the site to ammonia gas.

The affected workers experienced symptoms associated with ammonia inhalation, including breathlessness, irritation of the eyes and respiratory tract, coughing, chest discomfort and respiratory distress, the department’s bulletin said.

Of the 83 affected individuals, 40 were being treated and under medical observation. Among them, 38 are women and two are men.

Two patients are on ventilator support, nine are receiving oxygen through nasal support and 29 are in stable condition.

The leak occurred at a shrimp processing and export facility that employed several migrant workers, many of them women from Odisha, Assam and Jharkhand.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust General Secretary Champat Rai and trustee Anil Mishra resigned from their posts on “moral grounds” following the alleged embezzlement of donations to the Ram temple in Ayodhya. The trust manages the temple.

A day earlier, eight persons were arrested in the case. They have been booked under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to theft by a clerk or servant, criminal breach of trust, stolen property and criminal conspiracy.

The first information report stated that the eight were involved in counting the cash and valuables donated by devotees at the temple. Read on.

Karnataka has made it mandatory for the police to register first information reports in cases involving the non-consensual sharing of intimate images and videos, including revenge pornography, sextortion and blackmail-related cases. “Consent to record is not consent to share,” state Home Minister Priyank Kharge said.

The minister warned that police officers who refuse to file cases over prior consent by the complainant may face departmental action. Read on.

The toll from the twin powerful earthquakes in Venezuela increased to 589, acting president Delcy Rodríguez said. At least 4,300 persons were injured, the country’s health ministry had said.

The two earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 struck the South American country on Wednesday. Videos posted on social media showed several collapsed buildings and damage at the airport in the capital city of Caracas. Operations were underway to rescue persons trapped under the debris.

The “doublet” earthquake was the most powerful to occur in the region in 126 years. There were several aftershocks. Read on.

Canada rejected 71% of the visa applications filed by Indian citizens to watch the 2026 football world cup. Of the 1,225 Indians who applied for visas, only 355 were approved.

Indians were the fourth-largest group to apply for Canadian visas for the football world cup, after Ghana, Colombia and Pakistan. Canada is co-hosting the FIFA World Cup along with the United States and Mexico.

Canada did not have a special visa category for the world cup. Instead, for tracking purposes, applicants were asked to mention in their regular visitor visa forms that they planned to attend the tournament. Read on.

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Nasibi Shermamad Jat, 55, remembers how, as a child, she would walk to the rakhal near her village with her mother to take their buffaloes for grazing. “I plucked imli [tamarind] from the trees and collected grass during drought,” she recalls. After she got married, her visits to the rakhal continued with her husband and their camels.

A protected area, a rakhal is typically characterised by sparse tree cover, shrubs, and grass in a savannah-like landscape, found in the arid and semi-arid regions of Kachchh, Gujarat.

Nasibi’s village is one among the many villages across the parched region of Kachchh, where shades of white, beige and sandy brown dominate the landscape. Belonging to the pastoralist Maldhari community in Dhragavandh, a village near the India-Pakistan border, Nasibi’s family of eight owns 30 camels and six buffaloes. There are four rakhals surrounding her village located inside the Narayan Sarovar Sanctuary.

“The kings gave us rakhals to graze our animals,” says Nasibi. Rakhals began as grass preserves in the 1880s, with the purpose of supplying fodder for animals and for hunting by the rulers of the princely state of Kachchh. Cutting trees was banned even then.

The royal court earned revenue from some rakhals by allowing Maldharis to graze their herds in these areas. After Independence, the rakhals were taken over by the state forest department.

In present times, rakhals are facing several pressures in the form of urbanisation, industrialisation, the fading away of traditional ecological knowledge, invasive species, renewable energy expansion, and a younger generation that knows little about them.

Biodiversity of rakhals

More than a hundred plant species are present in just five such rakhals in Kachchh, according to a recent study by the botanists from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat. “We tend to believe there is very little diversity in desert areas,” says Kavi Oza, the lead author of the study, adding that the study has proved otherwise.

Conducted between 2020 and 2023 across five rakhals in the Mandvi region of Kachchh – Sherdi, Vanothi, Pyaka, Godhara, and Hamla-Manjal – the study utilised field interviews of locals, including those from pastoral communities, to conclude that Azadirachta indica (neem), Cocos nucifera (coconut), Acacia nilotica (babul) and Prosopis juliflora (vilayati kikar, known as gando baval in Gujarati), were the most present. The majority of the species have medicinal uses for the local communities, followed by their use as food, firewood, and fodder, among others.

Co-author of the study Vinay M Raole shares that rakhals remain most critical in Bhuj, Khavda, Nakhatrana, and Naliya talukas, where water and arable land are scarce.

Invasive problem

An invasive species, P juliflora, plays a significant role for the community because of its value, such as firewood, the study finds. Ecologist Arun M. Dixit, who has studied the plant biodiversity of Kachchh extensively, acknowledges that this is a concern, but notes that communities have genuine use of this tree and their knowledge of it cannot be dismissed. “We use gando baval as firewood to cook,” says Nasibi.

A plant species found in rakhals that is struggling for survival is Commiphora wightii (Guggul), used as a medicinal resin, says Raole. He says that there has been a steep decline in mature Guggul trees between 1985 and 1995, adding that only young saplings remain in many locations.

“When I was a child, there were many native trees in rakhals, such as desi babul (Acacia nilotica subsp. indica), Kher (Acacia chundra), liyar (Cordia gharaf), gangeti (Grewia tenax), and guggul, but now those trees are very few in numbers. Gando baval has spread over the entire area,” says Nasibi.

Rakhals today

After Independence, the forest department classified rakhals as “superior” and “inferior”. The superior rakhals served as emergency grass stores, Dixit explains. “During drought periods post independence in Kachchh, the department distributed grasses harvested and stored from these rakhals to Maldharis at nominal prices or for free,” he adds. The inferior rakhals are leased out to villagers for grazing.

Most rakhals continue to be managed by the forest department, according to Dixit. The local community has some formally recognised rights such as right of way, grazing, and limited fuelwood collection, but tree cutting is prohibited, he adds.

Despite having recognised forest rights in some rakhals, Maldharis such as Nasibi struggle to find grazing land. The forest department has threatened her family with action if they take their animals to the rakhals, which are within the Narayan Sarovar Sanctuary. In rakhals that fall under national parks sanctuaries, grazing and grass collection are not allowed. Nasibi will soon have to find a new place to feed her animals.

Traditional knowledge

To document these rakhals that are under various pressures, the research team spent three years conducting field visits to Kachchh and spoke to village heads, traditional healers, and members of pastoral communities. After data collection, the team used ethnobotanical indices to understand it further.

The restricted grazing in rakhals makes them better managed than surrounding unprotected areas, points out Dixit as a reason for the high biodiversity in those lands. He notes that an index used in the study indicates significant species richness and habitat heterogeneity within the rakhals – the rocky, uneven terrain creates a microhabitat, where rarer species survive alongside dominant ones such P. juliflora, sheltered from competition.

The researchers faced some challenges. Most interviewees were elderly males and the study acknowledges the need for more inclusive research in the future. Dixit shares that one of the limitations of the study is the two separate investigations presented – one, the ethnobotanical survey of community knowledge and the other, the biodiversity assessment of rakhals – without building an explicit relationship between them. He also points to the small sample study of just 45 informants across one taluka as a drawback.

Studies like this can feed directly into People’s Biodiversity Registers – documents listing all bio-resources and their uses, that every village panchayat is required to maintain under the Biological Diversity (BD) Act, 2002 in India. “This in turn, can protect community knowledge from commercial exploitation,” says Dixit. “The younger generation is losing touch with their roots,” Oza says.

Future of rakhals

The study recommends formally recognising rakhals as critical biodiversity zones in local conservation policy, prioritising species that have high cultural importance, and planting saplings and knowledge sharing initiatives where elders share their ecological knowledge with the youth.

The study opens ground for further work which could include identifying the actual custodians of traditional knowledge, and linking research findings to biodiversity conservation, eco-restoration, and climate resilience policy, Dixit says.

Back in Dhragavandh, Nasibi’s 19-year-old grandson Hussain uses his phone to look up rakhals in maps and learn more about the plant life there. Her daughters know the land very well. “Our parents taught us about the rakhals and we teach our grandchildren about them. They take an interest in it because they also have their own small herds,” she says.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The Right to Information Act has been hollowed out by Indian governments over the years – most recently by way of amendments to the law through the Digital Personal Data Protection Act.

Transparency activists and legal experts have warned that India’s new Digital Personal Data Protection Act bars the disclosure of personal information about public officials even on the grounds of larger public interest.

The RTI is a very, very strong weapon, said veteran activist and retired bureaucrat Aruna Roy, who led the movement that resulted in the passage of the Right to Information Act in 2005. “And it’s this fear of the weapon that makes them all want to destroy the RTI.”

In this special episode with author and peace worker Harsh Mander, recorded in Tillonia village in Rajasthan, days before Roy’s 80th birthday on June 26, she reflects on the many struggles that shaped her life. They discuss the challenges before Indian democracy, and the moral and political crises India faces today.

In their conversation, they talk about the legacy of the RTI movement and how it transformed the relationship between the citizen and the Indian state to one of equals. “What a change that was,” she notes.

The RTI brought in a very small equation, said Roy. It may be tall claim, she says, but like all the greatest scientific equations, it’s very simple: “everything in the government is mine because the Constitution says, in its Preamble, that I am sovereign, and if I am sovereign, I have a right to know what is happening because you’re dealing with my money.”

The fight to keep the RTI alive is also a fight against data collection and data wars, she said. From the education system to consumption and lifestyle-driven debt among families, Roy said the battle is very dense. We have to desegregate these battles and fight many small battles, she tells Mander.

But Gandhi’s wisdom about the fighting the “little battles” is Roy’s guiding light. “Fight the little battles, lest you forget how to fight,” she says. “Who knows, one day multiple small battles may one day become a large battle.”

The name of Karwan e Mohabbat’s Yeh Daag Daag Ujala series is a tribute to the iconic poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Canada rejected 71% of the visa applications filed by Indian citizens to watch the 2026 FIFA World Cup, CTV News reported on Wednesday.

Of the 1,225 Indians who applied for the visa, only 355 were approved. Indians were the fourth-largest group to file Canadian visa applications for the football world cup, after Ghana, Colombia and Pakistan.

Canada did not have a special visa category for the world cup. Instead, for tracking purposes, applicants were asked to mention in their regular visitor visa forms that they planned to attend the tournament, CTV News reported.

Canada is co-hosting the FIFA World Cup with the United States and Mexico. The 13 matches in Canada are being held in Toronto and Vancouver. The tournament began on June 11 and will conclude on July 19.

Between November 14 and March 31, the Canadian immigration authorities processed nearly 17,000 visitor applications that were related to the world cup from more than 160 countries and territories. Only 41% of them were approved, the news outlet reported citing data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Citizens of countries that need an electronic travel authorisation to enter Canada had a 96% approval rate as compared to 32% for those requiring a visa.

The highest number of visa applications (1,725) came from the citizens of Ghana. Less than 11% of the applications were accepted, CTV News reported. The second-highest number of applications (1,630) came from Colombian citizens and 69% of them were approved.

Pakistan, the third-largest group of applicants (1,250), had an approval rate of just under 9%.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The names of five Indian Army personnel and one Indian Air Force staffer who were killed during Operation Sindoor were published in the Roll of Honour section of the National War Memorial website on Friday. This is the first time that the government has formally disclosed the identities of the military personnel killed during the operation.

The six personnel were Subedar Major Pawan Kumar, Rifleman Sunil Kumar, Lance Naik Dinesh Kumar, Agniveer Murali Naik, Havildar Sunil Kumar Singh and Air Force Sergeant Surendra Kumar.

On May 7, 2025, the Indian military carried out strikes on what it claimed were terrorist camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in response to the Pahalgam terror attack, which had killed 26 persons on April 22, 2025. The two sides had reached an “understanding” to halt firing on May 10, 2025.

The names of the six personnel will also be inscribed on the “Tyag Chakra” or the “Circle of Sacrifice” at the National War Memorial in Delhi. Their names were released alongside the list of all soldiers who were martyred in various military operations in 2025.

The Tyag Chakra commemorates military personnel who have been killed in combat since Independence.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

One day, around two years ago, Raghav D, a newly recruited assistant professor at a government college in Delhi, was summoned to the principal’s office. There, he was handed an envelope.

Raghav had a guess for what was in it – and he was right. The envelope contained Rs 5 lakh.

The principal instructed him to hand over the money to three members of an assessment committee from the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, who were on an inspection visit to the college. As part of the process of assessing colleges on metrics such as infrastructure, curricula and teaching, the central government body sends inspection committees to verify information that colleges submit to the council before assigning them grades.

Raghav, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym in this story, was puzzled that he had been chosen for the task, given that he was new at the college. But the principal explained his rationale.

“The principal told me that if he went to meet the NAAC officials in person, they would push him to cough up more money,” he said. “But the NAAC officials would not be able to do that with me, so it was a better bet to send me.”

As he was directed, Raghav proceeded to a hotel where the committee members were staying. “It was a posh five-star hotel,” he recalled. The committee members were waiting for him in the lobby of the hotel. He handed them the envelope and a bouquet of flowers, along with a few gifts whose value also totalled about Rs 5 lakh, he recounted.

As soon as the committee members opened the envelope, their faces dropped in disappointment. They asked why the principal of the college had not bothered to come and meet them personally. Raghav told them that the principal was busy with other work, an answer he had been asked to rehearse.

The officials were not satisfied with this answer. “They told me that they had given the college a higher grade than we deserved despite not being given the amount due for doing so,” Raghav said.

The principal’s strategy appeared to have worked – the committee had already assigned its grade, and Raghav did not have the authority to negotiate with the committee.

He recounted that just as the committee members were boarding the taxi to leave, the chairman called out to Raghav and asked him to tip a butler at the hotel Rs 500. “I found this quite amusing,” Raghav said. “Even the tipping they wanted me to do.”

This was not the only task related to the NAAC that Raghav was assigned. He and other staff were informed about the NAAC team’s visit weeks in advance, and were directed to ensure that the college was adequately prepared for it, based on the criteria that the committee would assess. If there were any criteria the college did not fulfil, staff were instructed to manipulate data to show that it did.

Raghav, for instance, had to create documents that served as proof of seminars and lectures that never happened. “We were also asked to manipulate financial data to show that the donations made by the alumni were utilised for college activities, but honestly we have no idea where it went,” he said. “We also had to create files that showed that the college conducted classes that had never once taken place.”

Raghav’s college is far from unique in its efforts to manipulate NAAC assessments. Scroll spoke to ten faculty from several institutions across the country, all of whom said that for years now, it has been an open secret in the academic community that NAAC committees take bribes to overlook manipulations in data submitted for assessment, and to turn a blind eye to flaws they may encounter during campus inspections.

This manipulation of data has massive ramifications. A high NAAC grade can ensure, among other benefits, that an institute attracts a high calibre of students and faculty and also becomes eligible for certain government funds.

“With so many private universities popping up, students often have no way of being sure of institutional quality,” said Ravikant Kisana, an associate professor at a private university. “All websites claim research excellence and pedagogical innovation. Students and parents often look to NAAC ratings, since it is from a government agency. A good rating signifies institutional quality and depth.”

Thus, Kisana explained, when a college falsely boosts its rates, it may attract students who assume it is better than it is. “Once admitted, it’s difficult to drop out even after discovering the sham, since there is a social stigma of dropping out and starting anew,” he said.

While this corruption has long been known in academic circles, it was recently brought into the limelight.

In February, the Central Bureau of Investigation arrested seven members of a NAAC inspection committee, who were employed in different institutions in the country, including Jawaharlal Nehru University, Davanagere University and Bangalore University. According to a first-information report filed by the agency, members of the committee accepted bribes in exchange for agreeing to provide a favourable grading to the Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation in Andhra Pradesh.

The CBI recovered Rs 37 lakh in cash, as well as gold, mobile phones and laptops, across 20 locations.

This appeared to be just the tip of the iceberg. In late February, the NAAC removed from duty 900 of the 5,000 assessors it employed because of “irregularities in their work”.

In statements following this move, NAAC officials said that they would be taking measures to curb corruption within the system, but academics are pessimistic about these promises. Sai Balaji, an assistant professor at a private college, questioned the NAAC’s decision to simply remove the assessors who were caught indulging in corruption. “Why were they just removed? Why are they not being prosecuted?” he said.

He argued that it was a “joke” that arrests and investigations were being limited to NAAC assessors. “We should be looking at the entire organisation,” said Balaji.

Scroll emailed the NAAC seeking responses to the cases filed against inspection committee members, and our own findings of corruption in the system. This story will be updated if any responses are received.

Are the institutions and frameworks governing higher education in India serving the country’s students as they should? We find out in this three-part series. You can read the other two stories here and here.

A boom in competition

The NAAC was established in 1994 after the Programme of Action, 1992, a revised version of the National Education Policy, 1986, advocated for the establishment of a body that would independently assess institutes of higher education. It is funded by the University Grants Commission and is headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

“The standards of education in the country were dipping and so NAAC was introduced to ensure that certain standards were maintained by institutions,” said Kisana.

The NAAC assessment is voluntary, and institutions can apply for accreditation by uploading their information on the council’s portal. Any institution of higher education that has a record of at least two batches of students who have graduated or has been in existence for six years is eligible to apply to be assessed.

While assessments began as a method to monitor institutions and ensure they were maintaining prescribed standards of education, academics said that over the years, competition between institutions has steadily increased, which has led to administrations bribing inspection committees and manipulating data.

Many linked this to the boom in the number of new institutions over the past two decades. “In the late 2000s, more private institutions started to pop up,” said Jawahar Nesan, a former vice-chancellor, who served as a chairperson on NAAC committees for close to a decade.

Balaji concurred with this view. “Not to say that corruption did not exist before, but in the last eight years especially, institutions have been mushrooming at a very fast pace,” he said.

Academics pointed out that today, nearly every institution’s website mentions its NAAC grade right below its name. “Today a NAAC grade is mandatory for marketing,” Nesan said. “The better the grade, the more students enroll.”

He added, “Parents will only consider the institution if it has an A or A++, so it is very essential that institutions garner this grade.”

There is another reason why NAAC grades are important for institutions: they are categorised by the education ministry based on their grades which also determines the funds and grants they receive. “All A, A+ and A++ institutions are categorised at Category 1 and this means that they are prioritised over others when it comes to funds,” Nesan said.

It was for these benefits, academics said, that many institutions resorted to unscrupulous measures to secure their grade.

Mock inspections

All the ten academics that Scroll spoke to said that the months leading up to a NAAC committee visit were usually among the most stressful ones of their professional lives, in which they would be burdened with significant excess work beyond their teaching hours.

“About six months before NAAC is supposed to visit, all the staff were called for a meeting and we were informed about the visit and we were asked to get ready to take on more work,” one professor, who asked to remain anonymous, said of a private university where he was previously employed.

The professor said that in the year in which he was part of the process, the institution hired a former NAAC assessor to conduct a mock inspection. “He went through all our files and data,” he said. “He point-blank said that there was no way that we were going to get more than a B grade.”

But the consultant was not merely tasked with predicting what grade they would get, the professor said. “He was there to tell us what we could do to change the outcome of the assessment,” he said. For instance, the assessor pointed out that though the institution had good infrastructure, what mattered more was showing better results in terms of faculty research work, an area in which it was severely lacking.

Aware that research can sometimes take years to be published, the professor felt that there was nothing the institution could do in the six months that remained before the inspection to change the outcome of the NAAC assessment. But he was in for a surprise.

“The management told us that they would give us the funds for the research but that somehow we needed to try to get published in the next six months,” he said. “Some teachers took the funds and some didn’t. The institution treated the teachers who took the funds very well and looked down on those who didn’t.”

The professor said that some teachers resorted to paying for their papers to be published. “There are journals that are not legitimate that publish such papers,” he said.

Further, he recalled, the administration now began to display posters on sexual harassment across the campus, in keeping with UGC rules – as mandated, these posters carried details of laws against harassment, and contact details of the internal complaints committee. This was despite the fact that he had worked there for close to a decade, and had not ever seen these posters displayed on the campus before.

“I remember telling the students too that soon after the NAAC visit is done, the posters will disappear,” the professor said. “And I was right.”

Former NAAC assessors and professors also described other kinds of last-minute changes that institutions would make on campus before the team visits, including building ramps and other mandatory infrastructure on campus.

E Balagurusamy, a former vice chancellor who has also been a chairman of NAAC committees, recounted that he had noticed institutions buying library books just a few days before the NAAC visit. “But each time, we cannot always sit and check if all the books have been bought recently or in the past,” he said.

Another teacher from a private college said that he was asked to generate false data to show high placements for students who had graduated from the institution. “We either need the offer letters, salary slips or a copy of the ID cards of the students to prove this. We had neither,” he said. Therefore, he added, faculty were asked to fabricate documents that would show high placements.

Often, the teacher explained, the process of inspecting facilities and infrastructure was far from thorough. He recounted that, for instance, the NAAC inspection team would meet faculty in a conference room, select a file at random from those submitted to the council and put questions about data it contained to the faculty member in charge of compiling it.

“All the information is already uploaded on the NAAC site,” the teacher said. “The team visits so they can physically verify the information that we have uploaded. If they paid attention to what information we were handing to them, they would know that there’s something amiss. But they overlook it.”

Despite these numerous flaws in the inspection and accreditation process, Kisana said, experience in preparing for NAAC inspections has itself become desirable in faculty during hiring. “If a candidate mentions in their resume that they have participated in an NAAC inspection and been on the team that compiles data, institutions are keen on hiring them,” he said.

How bribery happens

A former vice chancellor of a prominent university in Tamil Nadu alleged that during his tenure at the university, he had been approached by a third party seeking bribes for the inspection committee. “I would get phone calls from people claiming they were a third party who would facilitate with the NAAC team and get us a good rank,” he said. Sometimes, he added, this “third-party person” would be somebody who worked for the NAAC.

He said that peers at other institutions had also complained of being approached by third parties, and that some entertained the demands in the fear that they would be given a low grade if they did not.

“Everybody knows this happens,” he said.

Nesan, as a former chairperson on a NAAC team, however, recounted that it was institutions that would seek to bribe the committee members during their visits, before or after inspections. “Somebody from the institution will come and try to convince me to give the institution a good grade,” he said.

In his years of carrying out assessments, Nesan said, around 30% of the time, members of institutions would overtly offer him bribes seeking a higher grade, while about 60% of the time, they would hint that they were open to such means of improving their grade.

He recounted that often, institutions would ensure that their offers were not so obvious that any conscientious committee members might penalise them for their actions.

Nesan explained that this process could occur through committee members who were more amenable to corruption. On some occasions, he suspected that members of his teams were trying to influence the assessment in favour of institutions.

He recounted that he would first notice them fraternising with faculty of the institution during their off-duty hours, and then “during the discussion, I noticed that they would try to influence the assessment by defending the institution or promoting them”.

But, Nesan said, the process largely depended on the head of the inspection committee. “If the chairperson is sincere and honest, there is no chance of any wrongdoings. Even if the members try to indulge in it,” he said.

Even in cases where direct bribery might be difficult to establish, academics said, even the manner in which NAAC teams are treated suggested that the process was inherently compromised. For instance, institutions typically book them into luxurious hotels, they said. Further, “The NAAC teams are given the best food and fancy cars to chauffeur them around,” one teacher said.

This was not always the case. Moushumi Basu, faculty from Jawaharlal Nehru University, said that until a few years ago the NAAC team that visited the campus would only stay in the guesthouse on the campus.

“It actually makes sense for them to stay on campus so they get the full experience of the campus,” she said. “But the last time, they didn’t stay on campus, they were instead put up in a private five-star hotel. I’m not sure how the university even had the money to pay for that.”

These practices persist despite formal changes to NAAC policy intended to prevent them from occurring, Nesan said. “About ten years ago, they made it mandatory for us to stay in the hotel that is booked for us and only travel by the tickets that are booked for us by NAAC.”

He added, “Only food and travel can be arranged by the institution.”

But in spite of these rules, several teachers said, institutions continue to host inspection committee members in extravagant hotels, and provide them with cars, and lavish meals.

The vice chancellor of the prominent university in Tamil Nadu said that, indeed, in his experience NAAC teams visiting campuses carry these expectations too. “Those few days are very hectic for us,” he said. “Our staff is burdened with work and we have to focus especially on making their stay and travel comfortable.”

Changes to the process

In 2022, a committee formed by the ministry of education recommended reforms intended to “strengthen assessment and accreditation” by the NAAC. In November 2023, the committee released its report, recommending reforms such as eliminating field visits as far as possible, converting the assessment process to an entirely online one, making the accreditation purely binary and dropping the grading system but introducing one that categorised institutions as being between Level 1 and Level 5.

The NAAC did not implement the reforms for two years, but stated in January 2024 that it would do so by December 2024. In February, after the incidence of corruption came to light, the NAAC stated that the reforms would be fully implemented by May 2025.

In any case, Nesan said, the reforms were unlikely to have a significant impact because, in his view, many institutions also had access to the NAAC as an organisation, and that while inspections were a key step, the final grade was assigned by NAAC officials, not the inspection committee.

He recounted that in some instances, he had given a poor grade after inspecting an institution, only to later find that its final grade was an A. “How is that even possible?” he said.

Balaji and Kisana also believe that the decision to go completely online appeared to have been taken hurriedly, in response to the controversy, and was unlikely to make any difference in the long term. “Just because something is online doesn’t mean corruption doesn’t take place,” Balaji said. “People will always find a way.”

Kisana said, “Because NAAC is under pressure to take some measures they have announced this decision. How can there be any transparency when the process is online?”

Meanwhile, in the new binary system, according to an NAAC document, an institution will be either be “‘Accredited’, ‘Awaiting Accreditation’ (for those who are close to the threshold level) or ‘Not Accredited’ (for those who are far below the standards for accreditation).”

In theory, Nesan believes this is a good idea. “India is the only country where there is a grading system, which is why institutions are in a rat race to get the best grade,” he said.

He explained that he had visited universities across the world and had observed that all of them had a binary system of accreditation. “You are either accredited or not. That’s it,” he said. “All they need to know is that the university meets minimum standards of quality education. And 100% of the score is based on the field visit, and it’s a completely qualitative assessment.”

But, experts argued, the new binary system is unlikely to be significantly different given that the NAAC has also brought in “maturity-based grading accreditation” where institutions that are graded can move from Level 1 to Level 5, a scale in which the first four levels mark an institution out as being of national excellence, while the fifth marks it out as being of global excellence.

“So all they seem to have done is moved from alphabets to numbers,” Kisana said.

Balaji noted that the National Education Policy, 2020, had exacerbated the problem of institutions racing to secure good NAAC grades and even indulging in corruption in the process.

“The NEP states that the education ministry will come up with an accreditation system and determine parameters” to grade institutions, Balaji explained. The NEP recommends that this grade should determine whether an institution can be granted autonomous status, or the status of a university.

“Essentially what the NEP is saying is that all colleges need is a good grade to become a university, which has led to the mushrooming of private institutions and the privatisation of education,” he said.

Further, he noted, this new system and parameters that the NEP laid out were never set up – rather, the ministry continues to rely on the three-decade-old NAAC system, which is riddled with problems.

Some academics believe that the very introduction of the NAAC was itself problematic because the quality of teaching and learning cannot be quantified. “Each person teaches differently. How do you quantify something like that?” Kisana said.

Nesan said that the NAAC followed a “rote and notorious backward system”. Any quantification should “assess outcomes, not functions of the institution”, he said. How, he asked, “do you assess teaching, the ambience and culture on campus and its social aspects?”

Kisana argued that in effect, the NAAC pushes “institutions to invent a whole paper bureaucracy”.

He added, “There is no mechanism for teachers to come out and openly state these things out in the open. The minute we do, we will be fired from our jobs and also be unable to get any jobs in the future.”

Every year, around the time when the new academic year begins, the ministry of education releases its annual rankings of government and private higher education institutions in the country. The rankings, which have been published since 2016, are calculated based on the government’s National Institutional Ranking Framework.

The rankings are published across different categories, including engineering, management, medicine and law. In each category, the ministry lists the 200 institutions that in its assessment are the best in the country that year.

The NIRF rankings are a crucial resource for millions of students who have to decide what institutions and programmes to seek admission in each year.

But are the rankings based on a rigorous methodology and consistent data?

This question came to fore last September when an employee of the Indian Institute of Management Mumbai alleged that the institute had inflated numbers pertaining to income, expenditure and faculty strength in the data it submitted to the NIRF. Scroll cross-checked these claims by sourcing data that the institute had submitted to the NIRF, as well as the data published in its annual reports, and found that there were indeed significant discrepancies between the two. Neither the institute nor the ministry of education had responded to Scroll’s requests for comment.

However, the case highlighted one of the fault lines of the rankings system: it relies on self-reported data. Data that the institutions submit is used to assign ranks to them, raising questions about the reliability of the process.

The IIM Mumbai employee’s allegations raised concerns over whether similar discrepancies could be found in data from other leading institutions.

Scroll examined the data submitted to NIRF by all government engineering and management institutes ranked in the top ten. We picked data from 2022-’23, the same year for which IIM Mumbai’s data came into question.

That year, seven Indian Institutes of Management were among the top 10 institutes in the management category. The engineering category featured nine Indian Institutes of Technology.

We compared the data submitted by the institutes to NIRF with the data published in their annual reports. We specifically considered the data in these documents pertaining to income and expenditure.

Our analysis showed significant discrepancies between data submitted for NIRF and data published in the annual reports of institutions.

Most institutes did not respond to our questions about these discrepancies. But professors with administrative experience in public institutes, speaking on the condition of anonymity, admitted there was a widespread lack of clarity about how data should be categorised. One IIT professor said he had heard that “institutions often exaggerate numbers to get higher rankings, even when it comes to their number of published papers”.

Are the institutions and frameworks governing higher education in India serving the country’s students as they should? We find out in this three-part series.

Confusion over data

Experts who have analysed the NIRF system have raised concern in the past over the lack of clarity and transparency when it comes to the data submitted for the rankings.

In June 2024, V Ramgopal Rao, a former director of IIT Delhi, and Abhishek Singh from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science published a paper on the rankings and found several flaws and inconsistencies in the system.

“The reliance on self-reported data raises pertinent questions regarding the consistency and accuracy of the information presented,” they wrote.

This was not only because it would be in each institution’s interest to report favourable data. “Institutions varying in size, structure and resources may interpret and report data differently, potentially leading to disparities in the ranking outcomes,” they wrote. “The absence of stringent mechanisms for verifying the accuracy and uniformity of the submitted data introduces an element of uncertainty into the rankings.”

This, they noted, has serious implications on the reliability of the rankings system. “Without standardised reporting practices, the rankings may inadvertently favour institutions adept at presenting data in a favourable light rather than those genuinely excelling in academic parameters,” the paper stated.

The paper also criticised the NIRF system for the lack of transparency about its methodology, specifically about the assessment of financial data.

“To mitigate ambiguity and potential misinterpretations, it is imperative to establish unambiguous and explicit definitions of metrics, especially those which capture financial data,” the paper noted. “Formulating clear and well-defined rules and criteria is essential to ensure a standardised and equitable assessment.”

Comparing data for the IIMs

In the NIRF documents of the IIMs, expenditure is broken down into two heads: operational expenditure and capital expenditure.

In contrast, the annual reports of the IIMs break down expenditure into several heads, including staff payments and benefits, academic expenses, and administrative and general expenses.

The IIT professor mentioned above, who has been involved in submitting data for NIRF, and an IIM professor, who has analysed such data closely, told Scroll that the categories of expenditure mentioned in the annual reports correspond to the “operational expenditure” category of the NIRF documents.

Thus, we compared these two sets of figures between the NIRF documents and annual reports.

We found that only in one instance, of IIM Lucknow, did the two figures correspond exactly. IIM Bangalore reported an operational expenditure of around Rs 287.87 crore to NIRF, which was Rs 70 crore higher than what it declared in its annual report. In the remaining four IIMs, expenditure figures declared to NIRF were lower than those declared in the annual reports.

Thus, the data did not suggest that a majority of these institutes had exaggerated expenditure figures in their NIRF submissions. This was despite the fact that the framework’s methodology rewards institutions for high operational expenditure, as part of a calculation termed “financial resources and their utilisation”. But the data did show widespread discrepancies between these figures and those in the annual reports, indicating a lack of clarity about what data that falls under these heads.

When it comes to income, the IIM NIRF document lists income from three categories: sponsored research, consultancy projects and “executive development programs/management development programs”.

However, the annual reports of the IIMs list income under several heads, including from academic receipts, “grants/subsidies”, income from investments, income from sponsored research and consultancy projects, and income from executive/management development programmes, as well a category termed “other income”.

Where the NIRF documents and the income statements of annual reports contained identical categories, we compared figures directly. When the categories did not match, we examined other sections in the annual reports to locate income from sources mentioned in the NIRF documents, such as sponsored projects. Even in instances where money from sponsored research was listed under sections such as “current liabilities and provisions”, we included it in our calculations, despite three IIM professors maintaining that these entries were not technically categorised as income.

Thus, we compared the total income from sponsored projects and consultancy listed in the NIRF documents, with the highest income or credit shown under these heads in any section of the institutions’ annual reports.

Separately, we compared the income from executive and management development projects in the former documents, with the highest income or credit listed under this category in the annual reports.

We found that of a total of 12 such comparisons across the six institutes, in 10 cases, the income reported to NIRF was higher than that declared in the annual report. The highest such difference was found in the instance of IIM Kozhikode, whose NIRF documents listed an income from executive development programmes of Rs 137.13 crore, which was Rs 60.16 crore higher than the figure declared in its annual report.

“Higher income and expenditure allows institutions to project a bigger scale of operations,” a professor from a private university told Scroll.

Another professor from a public university said, “If institutions are able to garner higher earnings from their consultancy programmes and research, it secures them a higher ranking.”

Indeed, the NIRF methodology rewards institutions for high research funding and consultancy income, and in the case of management institutes, for income from executive and management development programmes.

Scroll emailed all the above institutions, seeking clarity on these apparent discrepancies. As of publishing, only IIM Bangalore had responded.

The institute did not reply to specific queries about figures in the two sets of documents. It noted that a “NIRF Methodology document spells out the ranking formula for Financial Resources Utilisation”. A guidelines document “has further instructions on what kind of expenditure should be included and what are those that are to be specifically excluded”, it noted. It added, “Our reporting is compiled on the basis of the Methodology and Guidelines documents.”

For their annual reports, the institute said, “institutes like the IIMs are governed by the uniform reporting format issued by the Ministry of Education in consultation with the CAG”. It stated, “The Income and Expenditure and Balance Sheet formats and significant accounting policies are spelt out in that document. Our annual accounts are also compiled on the basis of the mandated reporting format.”

Further, it said, “Given this background, when we report relevant data under Financial Resources utilisation for the NIRF evaluation, data is taken from the annual accounts and specific inclusions and exclusions as per the guidelines are made in order to arrive at the final number that is used in the methodology document to arrive at per student values.”

Data for the IITs

Similarly, Scroll also analysed the data submitted by all the IITs that figured in the top 10 ranks of the engineering list for the year 2022-’23. Nine out of the ten ranks were occupied by the IITs – but since data was unavailable for the Hyderabad and Rohtak institutes, we analysed data for a total of seven institutes.

With regard to the IITs too, Scroll compared the sums of operational expenditure mentioned in the NIRF with the total expenditure mentioned in the institutions’ annual reports.

Out of the seven, three institutions stated higher expenditure figures in the NIRF documents. IIT Madras had the largest difference between the figure submitted to NIRF and the figure mentioned in its annual report. In its NIRF submissions, the institute stated that its expenditure for the year was around Rs 1,360 crore, but in its annual report, the figure mentioned was around Rs 727 crore, or Rs 633 crore less.

The other two institutions that stated higher expenditure figures in the NIRF documents were IIT-Delhi and IIT BHU.

When it came to income, the NIRF documents listed income from sponsored research and consultancy projects. As with the IIMs, we looked through the annual reports and compared these figures with figures listed in any section of the annual report under the same category. If more than one section contained an entry under the same head, we used the higher number.

This analysis indicated that four IITs had reported higher income from sponsored research and consultancy projects to NIRF than the figures they had declared in their annual reports.

The largest such difference was seen in the case of IIT Bombay, which showed a total income from these sources of Rs 569.49 crore. Of this, the consultancy income mentioned in the two sets of documents was identical: Rs 99.63 crore. But the declared income from sponsored research in NIRF documents, Rs 469.86 crore in NIRF documents, was Rs 196.52 crore higher than the figure in the annual report.

On the other end of the spectrum was IIT Madras, which in its annual report declared income of Rs 1505.16 crore from consultancy and sponsored projects, which was Rs 656.74 crore higher than that declared in its NIRF documents.

Only IIT Kharagpur explicitly mentioned a specific category under the income statement of its annual reports that listed income from “Sponsored/Research/Consultancy Projects”. While the institute listed income from these sources of Rs 227 crore in its NIRF documents, it listed income of Rs 116 crore from them in its annual reports.

“I’ve also heard that institutions often exaggerate numbers to get higher rankings, even when it comes to their number of published papers,” the IIT professor said. “There is no proper verification that happens to ensure all the data institutions are sending in is true.”

Another professor from an IIT noted that “if NIRF made definitions clearer”, confusion over data categories could be avoided. “Some of these discrepancies happen because there is not enough clarity,” the professor said. “Sometimes when we have doubts, we ask counterparts in other IITs to find out what data to submit.” The professor suggested that NIRF conduct sessions or workshops to clearly explain all the categories and what they entail.

After the IIM Mumbai staffer flagged concerns about the institution’s data, the administration suspended two of its staff for six months – one, the whistleblower themself, and another staffer who the adminstration believed was involved in the process of drafting the letter. Staff at IIM Mumbai said that the author of the letter faced pressure from the institute and decided to give up on the matter. After their six-month suspension ended, they were absorbed back into the administration.

However, the other employee, a professor at the institution, continued to be targeted by the administration, other staffers told Scroll. His six-month suspension was extended to nine months and in January to his surprise, he was handed a termination letter. Both the reasons for his suspension and termination were that he had allegedly “maligned the name of the institution”.

It was Saipriya S’s second time taking the National Eligibility Entrance Test, the entrance exam for undergraduate medical programmes, conducted by the National Testing Agency.

She began studying for it while in school, and wrote the exam first in 2024. Then, on May 4, 2025, Saipriya, who is from Chennai, attempted the exam for the second time after taking a gap year to focus on preparing for it, a common strategy among candidates. The venue was a Kendriya Vidyalaya government school in the city.

Like most candidates, Saipriya was nervous before the exam – but she was confident about performing well. The paper was handed to her exactly at 2 pm. At first glance, it looked long and difficult, but the first hour went off smoothly, and Saipriya settled in.

Then, in the middle of the exam, invigilators began the process of verifying the identities of students, which cut into their precious writing time, Saipriya recounted.

The first time she wrote the exam, she said, students were given an optical mark reader, or OMR, sheet, with details such as their names and roll numbers filled in. They had to confirm that the information was accurate. But this time, they were given two such sheets and had to fill in the information themselves in the middle of the exam, as well as register a fingerprint. “They took so long and it caused a lot of disturbance,” she said.

From there, the situation went downhill. A little after an hour, there was a power outage in the exam hall. “Around the same time, it also became really cloudy and dark outside because of the rains,” Saipriya said. “I couldn’t even read the question paper.”

Saipriya tried to read the questions by holding the paper up close to her eyes. “We have a minute to answer each question,” she said. “These questions were very long, and because it was so dark, I took longer.”

For about 20 minutes in between, Saipriya recounted, the electricity returned – but when she saw the paper more clearly, she realised that she had missed many questions. “I began to panic and started crying, but I knew I just had to keep pushing until the end,” she said.

A similar scene played out in a testing centre in Indore, where Devesh Tripati was writing the same exam. As heavy rains lashed the city, “Rainwater was coming in through the windows and his paper got wet,” said SS Tripati, Devesh’s father.

This centre also saw a power outage, for one-and-a-half hours, which hampered Devesh’s ability to read questions properly. “The collector said the next day that the NTA had not prescribed guidelines that advised on what centres have to do if the power goes off,” the father said. “These are big shortcomings on the part of the administration. How can they not have a generator?”

Criticisms, failures

Last year, the NTA had faced a storm of criticism over its functioning after several exams, most prominently NEET, saw a range of irregularities, from paper leaks and errors in question papers and answer keys, and apparent discrepancies in final scores.

Students and parents from across the country petitioned the Supreme Court over these problems, demanding measures such as retests and investigations into malpractices.

The court directed the NTA to formulate reforms to improve its functioning. In June 2024, the ministry of education constituted a seven-member committee which recommended a range of reforms, many of which have been implemented by the NTA.

Despite this, a year later, the agency’s conduct of exams has fallen short.

For instance, after the Joint Entrance Exam Main, for admission to undergraduate engineering programmes, was held in April, factual errors were discovered in some questions, which were then dropped. Meanwhile, some students claimed their answers were recorded incorrectly in their response sheet, which they can access online after the exam, while others reported facing other technical glitches.

Takers of the Common University Entrance Test, for admission to various central government universities, also faced hurdles. The exams were initially supposed to begin on May 8, but on May 7, the NTA announced that it was not prepared to conduct them, and that it would do so between May 13 and June 3 instead.

Other problems followed. After the CUET exams for accountancy were held in mid-May, the NTA offered retests to students because it had included questions in the paper that were not part of the prescribed syllabus. Retests were also announced for the Tamil and Urdu papers, held later in the month.

Further, on May 27, media reported that the first shift of CUET tests was delayed in several centres across the country due to technical glitches in the servers.

Many educationists argue the continuing failures of NTA point to larger questions surrounding its very nature and structure – questions that they say the committee set up last year failed to address.

Are the institutions and frameworks governing higher education in India serving the country’s students as they should? We find out in this three-part series.

Misguided reforms

The committee was led by Dr K Radhakrishnan, the former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, and included academics from the All India Institute of Medical Science, Delhi, the University of Hyderabad, and the Indian Institutes of Technology in Delhi and Kanpur.

In October 2024, the committee submitted its recommendations to the ministry of education. Among these were that the NTA conduct only entrance exams and not recruitment exams, such as those for jobs in bodies like the National Highway Authority of India and the Employees Provident Fund Organisation. The committee also recommended that security for exams be improved, that “mobile testing centres” be created for students in remote areas and that it set up grievance redressal cells.

Some of the recommendations made by the committee were to be implemented for the exams conducted in 2025, while others were to be implemented over a longer period.

Faculty across the country argued that these recommendations were riddled with problems – while some were misguided, others were insufficient. “The reforms are more a knee-jerk reaction to the NTA controversies and court case and nothing more,” said Prince Gajendra Babu, an education activist from Tamil Nadu. “The recommendations seem extremely superficial.”

Scroll emailed queries to the NTA about its failures and criticisms of its functioning. This story will be updated if the agency responds.

Many criticisms of the NTA, as well as the committee’s report, pertained to the very nature of the agency.

Among these is that the NTA is not fully a government body, rather a society registered under the Societies Registration Act of 1896. And while other bodies that play a crucial role in education, such as the Central Board of Secondary Education, which formerly conducted the NEET exam, are also societies, educationists noted that these bodies operate with a significantly higher degree of transparency.

For instance, after the 2024 leaks, educationists expressed concerns that the NTA had not published its memorandum of association on its website, as the CBSE had. They argued that doing this would be crucial to informing the public about how the agency was established and how it functions. As of this story’s publication, the agency had still not published the document on its website.

For its part, the expert committee suggested only that the government “consider continuing NTA as a Society or re-define it as a Statutory Body (under the Union Ministry of Education) in due course”.

Maya John, a member of the Delhi University Academic Council and a faculty member of Delhi’s Jesus and Mary College, argued that the recommendation needed to be far clearer and more decisive. “The committee’s recommendations call for restructuring the setup of the National Testing Agency,” she said. “However, in the very first recommendation, it leaves to the government the decision regarding operating the NTA as a society or making it a statutory body.”

Babu said that it was particularly worrying that the NTA outsourced some of its work, such as setting up exam centres, managing security and capturing biometric data. “They are an autonomous body that continues to outsource all their work,” he said. “So there is no way that the NTA is an academic body. I don’t see the report delving into the question of why a non-academic body has been given the responsibility of conducting such large-scale exams.”

Earlier, students had more access to personnel in charge of conducting the examinations, explained Dr Amalorpavanathan, a retired surgeon from the Madras Medical College. “In Tamil Nadu, you could just go to the office and get assistance,” he said. Now, however, the work had been centralised and they “have to rely on some nameless office in Delhi”, he added.

Question papers

Another crucial aspect that experts argued the NTA had faltered on, and which the committee had not sufficiently addressed, was the setting of question papers.

In numerous exams in 2024, such as JEE and NEET-UG, question papers were found to contain a variety of errors or flaws – for instance, some papers contained questions outside the designated syllabus.

In one prominent instance, a paper had two correct answers, resulting in confusion among students. “In the 2024 NEET-UG exam, students suffered because one of the physics questions had two different answers,” Babu explained. One of these was listed in an old textbook and another in a newer one.

After students and academics pointed out that both answers were technically accurate, the NTA announced that students would be granted marks if they provided either answer. But K Ravi Kumar, a physics professor from Tamil Nadu, explained that many students lost time in the confusion, and that many left the question unanswered because of it.

When the Supreme Court demanded that the NTA explain how this situation had arisen, Kumar said that the agency merely blamed the National Council of Educational Research and Training, which had published different versions of a textbook that contained the question, with both answers.

“The NTA is an independent body, it has no connection to NCERT, so if there is a mistake that was made, the NTA must hold itself accountable for it,” Kumar said. “Are they just copy-pasting the questions? If they have a team that is given the responsibility of setting these questions on their own, why are they reliant on a textbook?”

Critics explained that they had hoped that the committee would frame recommendations that would address this problem, and prevent it from recurring. Instead, the committee’s recommendations were superficial, they argued.

“The committee recommends that NTA must have a ‘secure and trusted question bank’,” said Kumar. Such a recommendation was too vague to serve any purpose, he noted. “Firstly, I’m not sure what having a question bank means. And second, did they not have a secure and trusted source for their questions before? That’s extremely concerning.”

Babu explained that the report also had a vaguely phrased recommendation about the kind of resources that should be used to set question papers, which was likely to cause immense stress to students. Specifically, the report states that the “NTA should create an extensive resource library catering to each subject area covering the textbooks and reference books by different authors.” Further, it noted that while these resources could include prescribed school and university textbooks, “they are not limited to these alone”.

Such an approach would be entirely unsuitable to young people who have just completed school and have limited exposure to subjects and resources, he argued. “The method that the report recommends for preparing question papers may be best suited for post PhD appointments or civil service exams, but definitely not applicable for higher secondary students,” he said.

He added that “evaluation can be only to assess the knowledge gained from the prescribed syllabus. One cannot go beyond the prescribed syllabus and expect the candidate to know the full depth of the subject at the higher secondary level.”

Experts said they were also worried by the committee’s apparent inclination towards a greater centralisation of the tests. In its report, the committee stated that the agency should draw insights specific to India from some large-scale examinations, such as those for admission to the IITs and IIMs.

But as Maya John pointed out, while these intensely competitive exams are based on their own syllabus and have their own formats, the NTA in fact needed to be more cognisant of a wider range of students who write some of its exams. For instance, the CUET exams determine admissions for a range of universities – John argued that for such an exam, the agency should ensure that paper-setters take into account “the differences in secondary education boards across the country” so as not to exclude any students.

Further, N Sukumar, a professor from Delhi University, said he was apprehensive of a suggestion by the committee that test administrators print question papers at the test centres, as a way to prevent papers from leaking. “It seems unlikely that all the test centres will have printing machines,” he said. “And how do we know it’s safe to print at these centres?”

Governance and functioning

Some recommendations that the committee made were implemented by the NTA. For instance, the committee noted that since its inception in 2018, the NTA had conducted 244 exams, including those for jobs in the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya schools and the National Horticulture Board. It stated that the agency was “overstretched”, a concern that many academics echoed.

“NTA should primarily conduct entrance examinations,” the report said. “Enhancing its scope for other examinations may be considered after the capacity of NTA is augmented.”

Following through with the recommendations, the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced in December 2024 that the NTA would only conduct entrance examinations.

But other recommendations remain unfulfilled, educationists noted, including those pertaining to the agency’s governance.

For instance, the report recommended that the NTA appoint two additional director generals to oversee key functions – however, as of publication, the NTA website only names the chairperson and the director general, while others in the governing body are merely referred to as members.

The report also recommended that the NTA work in tandem with other agencies, such as the UGC, as “knowledge partners”. But they specify that the NTA and the other agency “should clearly define their roles and responsibilities through an MoU and set up an Advisory Body”. No documentation pertaining to such arrangements is available on the website.

Legal challenges

This year as well, the NTA faces a slew of legal challenges over the conduct of the NEET exam.

In Chennai, Saipriya and Akhtar, along with 11 other students, approached the Madras High Court seeking a stay on the NEET results. On May 18, the court directed the NTA to temporarily hold back the results. Students in Madhya Pradesh also approached the high court seeking a stay on their results after many exam centres faced power cuts. Here too, the court put a temporary stay on the results of students from 11 centres in the state.

On June 6, however, the Madras High Court dismissed the petitions, in effect allowing the agency to proceed with the release of the results. In Madhya Pradesh, the high court ordered on June 9 that results for 75 petitioning students be held back – as of publication, it was unclear whether the court would order that a retest be held for the candidates.

Parents, meanwhile, fear their children will face lifelong consequences as a result of the agency’s inefficiencies. “Even the chief minister has several ministers under him because he cannot take on all the jobs. Then why does the NTA think that they can conduct every exam?” said A Yousaf Ali, a parent, whose son wrote the NEET exam at the same centre as Saipriya did. “Why is the government giving the NTA responsibility for all the exams? That’s why they are unable to conduct any of them properly.”

Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust General Secretary Champat Rai and trustee Anil Mishra on Friday resigned from their posts on “moral grounds” following the alleged embezzlement of donations made to the Ram temple in Ayodhya, ANI reported.

The trust manages the temple.

The development came a day after a first information report was registered against eight persons in the case. The FIR was filed based on a complaint by the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust.

All eight accused named in the FIR – Ramashankar Yadav alias Tinnu, Anukalp Mishra, Avinash Shukla, Karunesh Pandey, Manish Yadav, Lavkush Mishra, Ramashankar Mishra and Subhash Srivastava – have been arrested.

They were booked under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to theft by a clerk or servant, criminal breach of trust, stolen property and criminal conspiracy.

The FIR stated that the accused were involved in counting the cash and valuables donated by devotees at the temple, The Hindu reported. The accused had allegedly misappropriated donations collected through the donation boxes installed on the temple premises, the newspaper reported.

On Tuesday, the Special Investigation Team probing the alleged irregularities at the Ram temple submitted its preliminary report to the Uttar Pradesh government. The contents of the report have not been made public.

However, unidentified persons aware of its contents told The Indian Express that the report highlights alleged lapses, inadequate supervision and negligence in the handling, maintenance and counting of donated cash and valuables.

The government said that the investigating team would continue its work and submit a final report after 15 days.

The team was set up by the state government on June 14 following a request from the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust.

Opposition leaders and a whistleblower have claimed that cash and jewellery offerings made by devotees had been embezzled by temple staffers under the trust’s watch.

The Ram temple in Ayodhya was built on the site of the Babri Masjid, which was demolished by Hindutva extremists on December 6, 1992, because they believed that it stood on the spot where the Hindu deity Ram was born.

In 2019, the Supreme Court held that the demolition of the Babri mosque was illegal, but handed over the land to a trust for a Ram temple to be constructed. At the same time, it directed that a five-acre plot in Ayodhya be allotted to Muslims for a mosque to be built.

The Ram temple was inaugurated in a ceremony led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January 2024.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• The RSS man at the centre of Ram temple trust’s controversial run in Ayodhya

• In Ayodhya, it’s Sangh Parivar vs Sangh Parivar as Ram temple fund ‘theft’ charges blow up

Karnataka has made it mandatory for the police to register first information reports in cases involving the non-consensual sharing of intimate images and videos, including revenge pornography, sextortion and blackmail-related cases, state Home Minister Priyank Kharge said on Thursday.

“Consent to record is not consent to share,” Kharge said, warning that police officers who refuse to file cases over prior consent by the complainant may face departmental action.

The Karnataka Police has issued a standing order directing its officers to take immediate action in all such cases, he said.

The order clarifies that even if content was originally recorded with consent, any subsequent sharing, publishing, forwarding or transmission without consent is a “distinct cognizable offence”.

The police cannot refuse or delay registering cases on the grounds that the complainant had earlier consented to recording the content, the order adds.

The police have been instructed to mandatorily register cases under Section 77 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita that pertains to voyeurism, and Section 66E, Section 67 and Section 67A of the Information Technology Act that cover violations of privacy, and the electronic publication or transmission of obscene and sexually explicit material.

In cases involving threats, extortion, demands for sexual favours or other forms of coercion, officers have been directed to also invoke provisions relating to extortion and criminal intimidation, the home minister added.

He further said that in cases where jurisdiction is a problem, police stations have been directed to register a Zero FIR and transfer the case to the correct station.

Moreover, the police have been instructed to take immediate steps to remove or block offending content, preserve electronic evidence and coordinate with cyber crime units for investigation.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court on Thursday closed a defamation case against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi filed by the son of Union minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

Kartikey Singh Chauhan had filed the suit before a trial court after Gandhi allegedly linked him to the Panama Papers row during the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections campaign in 2018.

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Shivraj Singh Chouhan was the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh at the time.

Between 2016 and 2018, several documents from the database of a Panama-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca, were leaked. The documents revealed details about hidden offshore wealth of some of the world’s top leaders and celebrities. The list included 500 Indians. At least 12,000 documents published in the 2018 tranche were linked to Indian citizens.

On Thursday, the High Court closed the proceedings against Gandhi after the Opposition leader expressed his regret for making the statement. Gandhi said that soon after the allegedly defamatory statement was published, he had issued a clarification.

Gandhi had clarified that he intended to refer to the son of the Chhattisgarh chief minister at the time and not Madhya Pradesh.

Abhishek Singh, the son of the former Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh, had denied the allegations made by Gandhi.

On Thursday, the bench also took into account a statement by Kartikey Singh Chauhan that he would not like to escalate the matter further after Gandhi had expressed regret.

Congress MP Vivek Tankha, who appeared in the court as Gandhi’s lawyer, said that publicly acknowledging a mistake “is the hallmark of a true and honest person”.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Sara Varghese.

Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday said that a trade deal between India and the United States will only take effect once Washington ensures a clear tariff advantage for New Delhi over competitors.

Speaking at the India Global Forum in London, Goyal said the agreement had already been agreed to by both sides in February, but its implementation depends on finalising a “competitive advantage” for India compared with countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Goyal added that the US must find appropriate tools and legal backing to ensure this outcome. “The day that happens, the deal is on,” he added.

The commerce minister said that the negotiations between the two countries had centred on reducing tariffs to 18% from 50%, which he described as creating an advantage for India over several competing economies.

“We were lower than all our neighbouring countries, lower than all the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] countries other than Singapore,” Goyal said. “And that is why the deal was attractive for us.”

He added that with changes in the US tariff system following a US Supreme Court ruling and the introduction of a temporary 10% tariff that expires on July 24, further work was needed before the bilateral agreement could be implemented.

The minister said that both sides are continuing discussions but reiterated that “a free trade agreement is basically about getting a comparative advantage over your competitors for market access”.

Goyal’s comments came amid uncertainty about the India-US negotiations on the trade deal.

The trade deal uncertainty

After an interim bilateral trade deal was agreed on February 2, US tariffs on Indian goods would have been reduced to 18% from a combined rate of 50%. The earlier rate of 50% had included a punitive levy of 25% imposed in August over India’s purchase of Russian oil.

However, negotiations on the final deal were postponed after the US Supreme Court on February 20 struck down Trump’s global tariffs, ruling that he had exceeded his authority.

In response, Trump imposed a temporary 10% tariff on goods imported into the US, citing his authority under the 1974 Trade Act. The new tariff rate is for a maximum of 150 days, unless the US Congress approves an extension.

On February 21, the US president said that he was increasing the tariffs to the “fully allowed, and legally tested” level of 15% from 10% with immediate effect. However, it is unclear as to when the increased tariff rate would take effect.

This has left the status of US’ trade deals with countries, including India, unclear.

On June 4, Trump said that the two sides would soon reach the trade agreement, while claiming that New Delhi had for years “taken advantage” of Washington but the relationship had been reversed.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

India will resume issuing tourist visas to Bangladeshi citizens starting Sunday, ending a suspension that lasted for nearly two years, ANI reported.

The announcement was made on Thursday by newly-appointed Indian High Commissioner Dinesh Trivedi in Dhaka.

Tourist visa applications will initially be accepted through five centres in Dhaka, Rajshahi, Chattogram, Sylhet and Khulna, with more centres expected to reopen later, The Daily Star reported.

Urgent medical visas will continue to be issued on humanitarian grounds, Trivedi said.

“We hope that this will further strengthen the people-to-people ties between our two sovereign nations,” he added.

India had suspended the tourist visa services in August 2024 citing security concerns amid widespread anti-government protests that forced Sheikh Hasina, the Bangladeshi prime minister at the time, to flee to India.

Bilateral relations deteriorated further in December 2025 after another unrest that followed the death of Bangladeshi student leader Sharif Osman Bin Hadi. Hadi had been a prominent figure in the July 2024 protests.

Hadi’s death had triggered protests, vandalism and attacks in Bangladesh, including reported attacks on minority communities, which also prompted demonstrations in India. Both countries had summoned each other’s envoys that month to raise concerns over the situation.

Despite the disruptions, India continued operating visa centres in Dhaka, Chattogram, Khulna, Sylhet and Rajshahi for humanitarian cases, particularly medical patients, The Daily Star reported.

It has been issuing more than 1,500 visas a day across all categories except tourist visas.

More than two million Bangladeshi tourists visited India in 2023, according to the Indian Ministry of Tourism.

In February, Bangladesh had resumed issuing all categories of visas to Indian citizens.

The ties between New Delhi and Dhaka had strained during this period until Tarique Rahman’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party government came to power in February.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Union government on Thursday removed all restrictions and restored supplies of non-domestic packed liquefied petroleum gas as they stood before the war in West Asia.

The decision is expected to provide relief for restaurants, hotels and other businesses.

The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas said that restrictions on bulk LPG supplies have also been eased, with supplies restored to 50% of pre-crisis consumption levels.

“The restoration follows the recent improvement in the LPG supply situation,” the government said.

During the West Asia crisis, the government had used emergency powers under the Essential Commodities Act to ensure certain hydrocarbon streams were used only for liquefied petroleum gas production instead of petrochemicals and other industries to boost domestic LPG supplies.

With the supply improving amid the peace talks between the United States and Iran, the government has decided to reduce the diversion of hydrocarbon streams to the LPG pool.

It said that this would be done without affecting domestic LPG availability and while maintaining indigenous liquefied petroleum gas production at no less than 40,000 metric tons per day.

“Since the onset of global supply disruptions arising from the West Asia crisis, [the] government has accorded the highest priority to ensuring uninterrupted availability of LPG to domestic consumers across the country,” the ministry said.

Oil marketing companies have been told to keep detailed records of commercial and industrial LPG consumers. They will also maintain a shared sectoral database to improve supply planning and management.

Moreover, the government said it would continue expanding the use of piped natural gas. Commercial and bulk consumers that have already switched to piped natural gas will remain on the network. Other eligible LPG users with access to PNG will gradually be transitioned in coordination with city gas distribution companies, it said.

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.

However, the US and Iran last week held an initial round of talks in Switzerland aimed at reaching a final peace deal. The two countries will establish a communication channel “to avoid incidents and miscommunication with the aim of safe passage for commercial vessels” through the Strait of Hormuz, mediators Pakistan and Qatar said.

The supply disruption during the crisis had pushed up LPG prices. In March, the price of a 14.2 kg domestic LPG cylinder increased by Rs 60, followed by a further Rs 29 rise in June, taking the price in Delhi to Rs 942 per cylinder.

The price of a 19 kg commercial LPG cylinder increased several times in recent months, including a Rs 1,000 rise in May. It currently costs Rs 3,113.5 in Delhi.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

A first information report was registered on Thursday against eight persons for alleged embezzlement of donations made to the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

The FIR was filed based on a complaint by the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, which manages the temple, The Hindu reported.

It invoked provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to theft by a clerk or servant, criminal breach of trust, stolen property and criminal conspiracy.

The development came after the Special Investigation Team submitted its preliminary report on the allegations to the state government. The contents of the report have not been made public.

However, unidentified persons aware of its contents told The Indian Express that the report highlights alleged lapses, inadequate supervision and negligence in the handling, maintenance and counting of donated cash and valuables.

The government said that the investigating team would continue its work and submit a final report after 15 days.

The team was set up by the state government on June 14 following a request from the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, The Hindu reported.

Opposition leaders and a whistleblower have claimed that cash and jewellery offerings made by devotees had been embezzled by temple staffers under the trust’s watch.

The Ram temple in Ayodhya was built on the site of the Babri Masjid, which was demolished by Hindutva extremists on December 6, 1992, because they believed that it stood on the spot where the Hindu deity Ram was born.

In 2019, the Supreme Court held that the demolition of the Babri mosque was illegal, but handed over the land to a trust for a Ram temple to be constructed. At the same time, it directed that a five-acre plot in Ayodhya be allotted to Muslims for a mosque to be built.

The Ram temple was inaugurated in a ceremony led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January 2024.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Sneha.

Also read: In Ayodhya, it’s Sangh Parivar vs Sangh Parivar as Ram temple fund ‘theft’ charges blow up

The Jammu and Kashmir Police has filed a first information report against the commanding officer of the 17 Rashtriya Rifles and several other Army personnel in Kishtwar district for allegedly assaulting police officers and damaging public property, The Indian Express reported on Thursday.

The Army said that the matter was being examined through the appropriate institutional mechanisms and assured that appropriate action would be taken based on the joint investigation, PTI reported.

The FIR has been registered at Atholi police station.

The incident reportedly took place on Wednesday after a police team intercepted and seized a private vehicle owned by an Army official for alleged traffic violations.

Station House Officer Amrit Kotach was quoted as saying by PTI that around “30 to 40 personnel…led by Major Vikash Sharma and Naib Subedar Shankar Gurkhe, launched a ‘pre-planned’ attack after scaling the main gate and boundary wall of the police station”.

“They were armed with lathis, iron rods and other weapons,” the news agency quoted the inspector as saying.

Kotach added: “Their common intention was to cause fatal injuries and kill the police personnel on duty.”

He alleged that Special Police Officer Suresh Kumar was injured after being struck on the neck with the butt of a service rifle, PTI reported. The inspector added that several other personnel on duty also sustained injuries.

The FIR alleged that the Army personnel also assaulted the assistant regional transport officer of Kishtwar and his personal security officers inside the police station, PTI reported.

Attackers caused damage to government and public property and broke down the main gate of the police station, it further claimed.

The FIR names Commanding Officer N Arun Gandhi, Major Vikash Sharma, Naib Subedar Shankar Gurkhe, four sepoys and unidentified Army personnel. They have been booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to attempt to murder, rioting, trespass, assault on public servants and offences under the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act, PTI reported.

Army Public Relations Officer Colonel Suneel Bartwal said that they “will extend full cooperation in the legal process”.

Edited by Sneha.

Opposition leaders on Thursday asked the Centre what documents Indians can rely on to prove their citizenship. The question came a day after the Ministry of External Affairs said that a passport is a travel document and not proof of citizenship.

Congress leader Supriya Shrinate noted that a passport is a “document issued by a sovereign nation to its citizens for international travel”.

“Does this mean non-Indian citizens have been issued an Indian passport?” she said in a social media post. “What about foreign countries and immigration desks – should they now believe a person with an Indian passport is not necessarily an Indian?”

Modi govt has said that Passport is not a proof of citizenship

• Isn’t passport a document issued by a sovereign nation to its citizens for international travel?

• Does this mean non-Indian citizens have been issued an Indian passport?

• What do govt agencies including the… pic.twitter.com/bokUo7uFY1

— Supriya Shrinate (@SupriyaShrinate) June 25, 2026

All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen MP Asaduddin Owaisi said that the “direction in which the country appears to be heading raises serious concerns”, PTI reported.

“It increasingly seems that, in the coming days, [Bharatiya Janata Party] membership could become synonymous with citizenship,” he added.

VIDEO | Hyderabad: On being asked about the MEA's statement that "a passport is not proof of citizenship," AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi said, "The direction in which the country appears to be heading raises serious concerns. It increasingly seems that, in the coming days, BJP… pic.twitter.com/xoyzsmUmuh

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) June 25, 2026

Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) Spokesperson Clyde Crasto said that the government needs to clarify what proves that a person is a citizen of India, PTI reported.

He added: “Don’t be surprised if tomorrow, the government comes up with a clause saying that if you become a member of the BJP, you prove yourself to be the citizen of India.”

Trinamool Congress MP Sougata Roy also asked the Union government to specify which documents are valid proof of citizenship.

Following the Opposition’s criticism, the government on Thursday clarified that passports have never been considered proof of citizenship, adding that no such decision was taken either recently or in the last 12 years, ANI reported.

The government cited Section 20 of the 1967 Passports Act, which grants the Union government discretionary authority to issue a passport or travel document to a person who is not an Indian citizen if it deems it necessary in the public interest.

It also pointed to Bombay High Court judgements from 2013 that observe that possessing a passport does not establish citizenship.

Reacting to this, Congress leader Salman Khurshid asked why the government “felt the need to bring up old documents and old judgements after so many years”, IANS reported.

“Courts make observations based on the context prevailing at that particular time,” Khurshid was quoted as saying. “The question is: what is the context today, That needs to be explained. The circumstances have changed significantly, especially when questions are being raised in different places about whether a person is a citizen or not, and whether that person has the right to vote.”

Delhi: On the 2013 Bombay High Court ruling that citizenship cannot be established solely through a passport, Congress leader Salman Khurshid says, "There may be a court judgment, and courts deliver many judgments. But such decisions can also be challenged in appeal. If the… pic.twitter.com/r1JseBNNeL

— IANS (@ians_india) June 25, 2026

The Supreme Court and different High Courts have, over the years, held that documents such as Aadhaar card, voter identity card, permanent account card and a certificate issued by the Gram Panchayat Secretary, as well as ownership of a bank account or property, are not evidence of citizenship.

There is no single document that proves Indian citizenship. Only foreign nationals who take up Indian citizenship are granted actual citizenship certificates. People born in India do not have any such document.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Sneha.

Explained: Why an Indian passport is not proof of citizenship – and no single document is

In a move that signals a blunt recalibration of South Asian geopolitics, the United States has quietly shifted its strategic focus. It has reverted its “Indo-Pacific Command” back to its traditional designation of US Pacific Command (USPACOM).

The structural reversal effectively undoes a 2018 policy that symbolically merged the maritime interests of the US across both the Pacific and Indian oceans. Under the newly restructured USPACOM, the Indian Ocean is being treated largely as a strategic back up plan.

While the policy shift sends a clear signal that Washington views its ties with New Delhi as subsidiary to its broader relationships with China and Pakistan, India remains surprisingly undeterred.

Despite the apparent administrative and symbolic downgrade, New Delhi seems determined to demonstrate its strategic tilt toward the US, preparing to collaborate closely under a command structure that now positions the Indian Ocean as a secondary theater.

With a single strategic sweep, Washington has decisively reprioritised the Pacific. This is a major shift in American geopolitical strategy and not merely a semantic tweak.

The Pacific has re-emerged as the ultimate strategic theater. Its shores are lined with critical global flashpoints and major players, including China – explicitly designated as America’s only “near-peer” competitor – and Russia in the northeast, a vital gateway to the resource-rich Arctic routes of the future.

The region also anchors Washington’s most critical allies, including Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, while containing vital maritime choke points like the Straits of Malacca and the heavily contested passages of the North and South China Seas. Ultimately, this major restructuring serves as a direct response to the rapidly evolving and increasingly tense dynamics of US-China relations.

Under the new “constructive strategic stability” put in place by President Trump and Xi Jinping’s Beijing Summit in May 2026 , the two agreed to respect each other’s red lines and “manage” their relationship. For now, the China threat may have receded but it remains a useful tool for the US to retain the co-dependency of their Asian allies who suffer from China phobia.

The US wants partnership with Asian allies for providing security to manage their relationship with China, Japan, South Korea and Philippines.

India has shown ambiguity but is part of the US’s co-dependency thesis.

The US expects far more service from India and has been exacting in its demands, which India has consistently met. Washington ordered India to reduce purchases of discounted Russian oil, India complied, sacrificing its own energy security.

Later, it “allowed” India to buy Russian oil again when it suited US interests.

The US imposed punitive tariffs of 50% – its highest – and floated a trade deal whose details remain undisclosed. India also pledged to invest $500 billion in the US over the next few years to support American re-industrialisation, at its own cost.

India stopped buying oil from Iran in 2019 under US pressure. It then downplayed the International Strategic Economic Transport Corridor, where Iran’s Chabahar port was to be a key link for India’s sea-rail transport route to Russia via Central Asia. India’s multimillion dollar investments in Chabahar stagnated once the US intervened.

Meanwhile, Washington’s closest Middle East allies proposed the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, linking India to Europe through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Greece – bypassing Iran and ignoring Russia.

India nearly abandoned the International Strategic Economic Transport Corridor, years in the making, for the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which remains a paper dream.

After the Iran-US/Israel war, the UAE suffered economic and logistics setbacks, while Saudi Arabia moved toward rapprochement with Iran. China, welcomed across the Middle East, especially by Iran, is poised to secure reconstruction contracts and a role in a renewed regional security architecture where both China and the US may participate.

Trump has publicly thanked Russia, China and Pakistan for their respective constructive roles in the Middle East. India had hoped to curry favor with Washington by aligning with the Jewish lobby and becoming indispensable to Israel. It diluted its traditional support for Palestine, supplying weapons to Israel despite the latter violating humanitarian and international law through ethnic cleansing. India, once a staunch defender of international law, compromised its position by arming a state committing humanitarian crimes.

Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Israel was ill timed, occurring just before the US and Israel unilaterally attacked Iran, a traditional Indian ally. When the US Navy sank an Iranian vessel returning home after an India-initiated naval exercise, India was humiliated but did not condemn Washington.

Later, the US struck Indian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, killing three sailors, underscoring its disregard for India. Today, Israel is unpopular globally, forcing Washington to distance itself.

India’s misreading of these shifts, while calling Israel “Fatherland” (for the Jewish people who migrated from India), has not gone unnoticed by the Global South, Arab nations, and others whose goodwill India seeks.

India’s attempt to balance ties with the US has turned into a tilt, still deemed insufficient by Washington. The US has shifted its policy toward Pakistan. This was evident after India’s May 2025 Operation Sindoor, in which Trump claimed to have mediated peace.

Washington views Pakistan as a major ally for its Middle East and Central Asia ambitions. It endorsed the Pakistan-Saudi Defense Partnership, potentially with a nuclear component, and cultivated close ties with Pakistan’s Army and General Asim Munir. India’s long-standing effort to isolate Pakistan as a “terror supporting state” has failed.

For a decade, India’s strategic establishment has claimed four guiding principles: strategic autonomy, multi vector engagements, Global South leadership, and multipolarity. Recent Indian foreign policy misadventures have undercut each.

Anuradha Chenoy is Adjunct Professor at Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

A section on the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi between 1975 and 1977 has been introduced for the first time in the National Council of Educational Research and Training's Class 9 social science textbook. The section has been added to the textbook Understanding Society: India and Beyond as part of a chapter on the strengths and challenges of democracy in the country.

Until now, the Emergency was covered in detail only in the Class 12 political science curriculum, which includes extracts on the political, constitutional and democratic implications of the period. The Emergency had been imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of the Congress and involved a suspension of fundamental rights. Read on.

Modi has drawn many lessons from Indira Gandhi’s Emergency – save one, writes Ajaz Ashraf

The toll in the warehouse collapse in Kolkata has risen to nine, West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said in the Assembly. The under-construction warehouse near Brace Bridge in the Taratala area had collapsed a day earlier, trapping several persons under the rubble.

At least 20 persons were injured in the incident, said the chief minister. Five persons have been arrested in the case. Read on.

At least 164 persons died and nearly 1,000 were injured after two earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 struck Venezuela. The epicentres of both the quakes were close to the capital city of Caracas, said the United States Geological Survey.

The “doublet” earthquake was the most powerful to occur in the region since 1900. There were more than 20 aftershocks. Read on.

One person was killed and four went missing after heavy rains triggered flash floods and landslides in Arunachal Pradesh’s Keyi Panyor district. The flash floods occurred around a project site of the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Limited in the district’s Yazali circle.

The body of Nirmala Gupta, a teacher at the power corporation’s Vivekananda Kendriya Vidyalaya, was recovered during a search operation.

Meanwhile, the southwest monsoon continued to advance in western and central India, covering more parts of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, and the remaining regions of Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh. Read on.

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

The National Council of Educational Research and Training has, for the first time, introduced the topic of the Emergency imposed from 1975 to 1977 in a Class 9 social science textbook, ANI reported on Thursday.

The section has been added to the textbook Understanding Society: India and Beyond. The Emergency has been made part of a chapter that deals with the strengths and challenges of democracy in the country.

Until now, a detailed examination of the Emergency only took place in the Class 12 political science curriculum, which includes extracts on the political, constitutional and democratic implications of the period, India Today reported.

“One of the major challenges to democracy in India was recorded when an Emergency was imposed in 1975-77,” the section reads, according to ANI. “In the early 1970s, public dissatisfaction with the government led by Indira Gandhi was growing. Rising unemployment, inflation, and allegations of misgovernance led to widespread protests.”

The textbook says that during the Emergency, most fundamental rights were suspended, the press was censored, and political leaders and activists were arrested.

The book also highlights the role of socialist leader Jayprakash Narayan in resisting the Emergency.

“Mass movements led by Jayaprakash Narayan – a political leader and socialist thinker, popularly known as Lok Nayak-mobilised students and citizens, especially in Bihar and Gujarat,” the book was quoted as saying by ANI. “The Emergency was lifted in 1977, and general elections were held, allowing people to express their will through the ballot.”

The book said that the defeat of the Congress in the 1977 general election showed the “strength of Indian democracy and highlighted the importance of democracy.”

The NCERT’s decision came as the Emergency completed 51 years on Thursday.

The Emergency was imposed by Congress leader and former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975, after the Allahabad High Court disqualified her from elected office for six years, holding that she had misused government machinery during the 1971 election campaign. It was lifted on March 21, 1977.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, whose leaders were among those jailed during the Emergency, has frequently criticised the Congress for this period, when constitutional rights and civil liberties were suspended in the country.

The Congress, on its part, has often accused the BJP of running an “undeclared emergency” since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. It accused the BJP of destabilising institutions such as the courts and the Election Commission, suppressing critical media coverage and misusing central investigative agencies.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: Modi has drawn many lessons from Indira Gandhi’s Emergency – save one

One person was killed and four went missing after heavy rains triggered flash floods and landslides in Arunachal Pradesh’s Keyi Panyor district, The Hindu reported on Thursday.

The flash floods occurred after heavy rainfall on the intervening night of Tuesday and Wednesday, particularly around a project site of the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Limited in the district’s Yazali circle.

The body of Nirmala Gupta, a teacher at the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Limited’s Vivekananda Kendriya Vidyalaya, was recovered during a search operation, Keyi Panyor Superintendent of Police Angad Mehta told the newspaper.

On Wednesday, the rain also triggered landslides along a national highway, disrupting traffic and leaving several commuters stranded.

Meanwhile, the southwest monsoon continued to advance in western and central India on Thursday, covering more parts of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, and the remaining regions of Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh.

The India Meteorological Department said that conditions were favourable for the monsoon to advance further into Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and parts of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand in the next three to four days.

The weather agency has forecast widespread rainfall in many parts of the country over the next week, including Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, eastern Uttar Pradesh, the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and the North East.

The IMD has also warned of heavy to very heavy rainfall, ranging from 7 cm to 20 cm, along the west coast, across northeastern India, and in sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim during the week.

मौसम संबंधी चेतावनी

मुख्य बिंदु

(i) अगले 3-4 दिनों में दक्षिण-पश्चिम मानसून के गुजरात, मध्य प्रदेश के कुछ और हिस्सों, छत्तीसगढ़, झारखंड और बिहार के बाकी हिस्सों, और उत्तर प्रदेश व उत्तराखंड के कुछ हिस्सों में आगे बढ़ने के लिए परिस्थितियाँ अनुकूल हैं।

(ii) इस हफ़्ते पश्चिमी तट,… pic.twitter.com/oijIsXDqMU

— India Meteorological Department (@Indiametdept) June 25, 2026

In Tamil Nadu, the department has warned of heavy rainfall in Nilgiris, Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Theni, Dindigul, Tenkasi, Virudhunagar, Tirunelveli, Kanyakumari, Tiruvallur, Ranipet, Vellore, Kancheepuram and Tiruvannamalai, The Indian Express reported.

Fishermen have been advised not to venture into the sea due to stormy weather conditions over the southwest Bay of Bengal.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The toll in the warehouse collapse in Kolkata has risen to nine, West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said in the Assembly on Thursday.

The under-construction warehouse near Brace Bridge in the Taratala area had collapsed on Wednesday, trapping several persons under the rubble.

At least 20 persons were injured in the incident, said the chief minister.

A total of 31 persons have been rescued, the Indian Army’s Eastern Command said on Thursday, adding that several others are feared trapped under the rubble.

The chief minister announced an ex gratia of Rs 10 lakh each for the families of those killed and Rs 1 lakh for each injured person.

The Prime Minister's Office also announced an ex gratia of Rs 2 lakh each for families of those who have lost their lives. The injured will receive Rs 50,000.

Meanwhile, Kolkata Police arrested five persons after overnight raids in the city, PTI reported.

The police have also constituted a Special Investigation Team to probe the collapse.

Edited by Sneha.

I. The statement that should surprise no lawyer – but has startled everyone else

On June 24, by coincidence, the 59h anniversary of the Passports Act coming into force, the Ministry of External Affairs stated plainly that an Indian passport is a travel document, not proof of citizenship.

The official clarification, reported by diplomatic correspondent Sidhant Sibal, has generated considerable public heat. It should not have. The legal position has been settled for decades. What the ministry has done is say publicly what administrators have known privately, and what the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls has been forcing the country to confront: identity and citizenship are not the same thing, and no document routinely issued to tens of millions of Indians conclusively establishes the latter.

The Ministry of External Affairs official also disclosed that 1.39 crore passports were issued in 2025 alone, with total passport-related services reaching 1.5 crore people. At that scale of issuance (one passport issued roughly every two seconds across the working year), the suggestion that each document represents a verified, conclusive certification of citizenship would be administratively implausible even before one examines the statutory position.

The statutory position is this: under Section 20 of the Passports Act, 1967, an Indian passport may be issued to a non-citizen by the Central Government in specified circumstances. That single provision is sufficient to establish that possession of an Indian passport is not, in law, conclusive proof of Indian citizenship. The Ministry of External Affairs has not discovered a new legal position. It has acknowledged an old one.

🧵Passport is a travel doc for Indian govt
Explaining
Stated Law:
Section 20 of the Passports Act, 1967 says a passport can be given to a non citizen by Indian govt if it is in "public interest"

Link: https://t.co/VJefRzXAzG https://t.co/BdNLFj7sFO pic.twitter.com/4ARd98picI

— Sidhant Sibal (@sidhant) June 24, 2026

II. I was born here. Does that make me a citizen?

I was born in Bathinda, Punjab, on July 31, 1961. Under the law as it stood on that date, my birth on Indian soil made me an Indian citizen by birth, automatically and without condition. No inquiry into my parents’ status was required; no administrative determination was necessary.

The territorial principle – jus soli, citizenship by place of birth – governed, and it governed without qualification.

That legal certainty no longer exists. India has, through two Parliamentary amendments, progressively dismantled unconditional birthright citizenship. A child born in India today does not automatically acquire Indian citizenship. The position now depends entirely on parental status at the time of birth – and the conditions are strict.

Understanding how we arrived here requires tracing the statutory journey from 1950 to the present.

III. The constitutional settlement of 1950

When the Constitution came into force on January 26, 1950, the question of who constituted India’s first citizens was answered through Articles 5, 6, and 7 – provisions shaped not by abstract theory but by the lived emergency of Partition.

Article 5 conferred citizenship on persons domiciled in India at commencement if they were born here, or either parent was born here, or they had been ordinarily resident for five preceding years. Articles 6 and 7 addressed the Partition migration: those who had crossed into India from Pakistan, and those who had gone the other way and returned.

These provisions created a one-time constitutional settlement, not a permanent regime. After 1950, citizenship became statute-driven under the Citizenship Act of 1955, which Parliament has amended substantially on three occasions that matter here.

IV. The three-phase narrowing of birthright citizenship

Phase I – January 26, 1950 to June 30, 1987: Open territorial citizenship

During this period, anyone born on Indian soil was a citizen by birth, regardless of the nationality or status of their parents. This was jus soli in its classical form. It was also, for most of this period, broadly uncontroversial – the population was relatively settled, Partition’s wounds were raw and the politics of migration had not yet sharpened into the form they would take over the following decades.

Phase II – July 1, 1987 to December 2, 2004: The first restriction

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 1986, which came into force on July 1, 1987, required that at least one parent be an Indian citizen at the time of the child’s birth. The immediate driver was large-scale undocumented migration from Bangladesh into Assam and West Bengal.

The amendment was a legislative response to Assam’s political crisis, itself the product of demographic anxiety that had boiled over into the Assam Movement and eventually the Assam Accord of 1985.

Pure jus soli was gone, replaced by a modified version that still allowed citizenship through a single Indian parent.

Phase III – On and after December 3, 2004: The current position

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003, enforced from December 3, 2004, tightened the conditions further. A child born in India on or after that date is a citizen by birth only if:

• both parents are Indian citizens at the time of birth; or

• one parent is an Indian citizen and the other is not an illegal migrant.

The consequence of this formulation is absolute: if either parent is an illegal migrant, the child born in India acquires no citizenship by birth, regardless of any other factor. India has, in effect, moved from jus soli to a form of jus sanguinis – citizenship by descent – while retaining the fiction that birth on Indian soil is relevant.

It is relevant only to the extent that it is the occasion for the inquiry; it is no longer the answer.

V. When the law creates statelessness

The human consequences of this framework deserve direct examination, because they do not resolve themselves tidily.

Consider a child born in India to an Indian citizen father and a mother who is an illegal migrant from Bangladesh. Under the post-2004 law, the child is not an Indian citizen by birth. The bar is absolute. The child cannot acquire citizenship by registration under Section 5 of the Citizenship Act, because illegal migrants are expressly excluded from that provision.

Naturalisation requires years of lawful residence – lawful residence the child may not be able to establish. The mother’s home country may not recognise the child. The child risks being rendered stateless.

This is not a hypothetical situation. In the border districts of Punjab, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Assam, administrators encounter variations of this situation with some regularity. During my tenure as Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar between 1992 and 1996, the question of undocumented persons – their status, their children’s status, and the documents they did or did not possess – was a live administrative challenge, not a constitutional seminar. The law then was less stringent than it is now.

Under the current framework, the gaps are wider and the human cost of falling into them is higher.

The Supreme Court addressed the broader context in Sarbananda Sonowal v Union of India (2005), reaffirming the state’s duty to prevent illegal immigration from undermining the citizenship framework. The courts have consistently upheld the 2004 amendment.

Where humanitarian concerns have been raised, judicial responses have been compassionate in language but firm in law: any relaxation must come from Parliament, not from the bench. That legislative gap – between the law’s strictness and the human reality it produces at the margins – remains unfilled.

VI. The Tibetan exception: How the courts applied the law

The most extensively litigated application of these citizenship-by-birth rules has involved Tibetan refugees born in India – a community whose situation illustrates both the precision and the occasionally arbitrary consequences of the three-phase framework.

In Namgyal Dolkar v. Government of India (2010), the Delhi High Court ruled that Namgyal Dolkar, a Tibetan born in India in 1986, was an Indian citizen by birth. The court applied the law as it stood in Phase I: born between 26 January 1950 and 30 June 1987, citizenship accrued automatically regardless of parental status. The government was directed to issue her an Indian passport.

In Phuntsok Wangyal v. Union of India (2016), the Delhi High Court reaffirmed this position and held that the government could not deny passports to eligible Tibetans merely on account of their classification as foreigners in administrative records. Bureaucratic labelling, the court held, did not override statutory entitlement.

The administrative follow-through came in stages. In 2014, the Election Commission directed that Tibetans born in India before July 1, 1987, were eligible to vote. In 2018, the Ministry of External Affairs formally instructed passport-issuing authorities to issue Indian passports to Tibetans born in India between January 26, 1950, and June 30, 1987.

The Tibetan cases illuminate the Phase I /Phase II boundary with particular clarity. A Tibetan born in India on June 30, 1987, is an Indian citizen. One born on July 1 1987, is not – unless at least one parent was an Indian citizen, which in most cases of Tibetan refugees would not have been true.

The difference of one day, one legal provision, produces entirely different citizenship outcomes for persons in otherwise identical situations. That is not an anomaly; it is the law operating exactly as Parliament intended.

VII. What the SIR has forced into the open

The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls has brought the citizenship documentation question into sharp public focus for the first time in a generation.

The logic of the revision is straightforward: electoral rolls should contain only Indian citizens, and the commission is entitled under Article 324 of the Constitution to verify entitlement. What the Special Intensive Revision exposed is that most Indians do not possess a document that conclusively establishes their citizenship.

Aadhaar establishes identity and residence; it does not establish citizenship. A voter ID establishes prior registration; it does not establish citizenship.

As the Ministry of External Affairs has now confirmed, a passport establishes entitlement to travel; it does not, in the strict legal sense, establish citizenship.

The Supreme Court, in its judgment of May 27, 2026, upholding the constitutional validity of the Special Intensive Revision, inserted a critical limitation: the Election Commission’s role is confined to determining eligibility for electoral rolls. It cannot adjudicate citizenship. The deletion of a name from the voter roll does not strip a person of citizenship. Citizenship can only be determined by a legally competent authority under the Citizenship Act.

The Election Commission must refer disputed cases to that authority rather than making its own citizenship determinations.

That judicial qualification is important, but it does not resolve the underlying problem: there is no single, commonly held document that conclusively proves Indian citizenship for the ordinary resident. The exercise to compile a National Register of Citizens in Assam – which accepted “legacy documents” such as pre-1971 electoral rolls, land records, school certificates and court documents – illustrated the difficulty of answering the citizenship question with documentary certainty at scale.

VIII. So what does prove Indian citizenship?

This is the question the statement by the Minister of External Affairs invites – and which the government has, so far, not answered with the specificity the public requires. On the basis of existing law and administrative practice, the following documents carry citizenship-probative weight, though none is conclusive in every circumstance:

• A Naturalisation or Registration Certificate issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs is the closest to a conclusive citizenship document. It is issued infrequently and in specific circumstances.

• A passport, despite Wednesday’s clarification by the Ministry of External Affairs, remains the most widely accepted working proof of citizenship in practice – precisely because it is issued by the ministry to persons who represent themselves as citizens and who are not knowingly issued passports by the government if they are not. The ministry’s clarification is legally accurate but practically nuanced: the passport is not conclusive proof, but it is strong evidence.

• Birth certificate combined with parental documentation, establishing the conditions required under the phase applicable at the time of birth.

• Legacy documents of the kind used in the Assam National Register of Citizens (pre-cut-off electoral rolls, land records, school certificates), which establish residence and family connections over time.

The honest administrative answer is that India does not currently have a universal, standardised, conclusive citizenship document available to all citizens. This is a gap that any future National Register of Citizens-type exercise – such as that envisaged by the High Level Committee on Demographic Changes constituted by the Union Government in May 2026 – will have to confront directly.

IX. The global frame: India is not alone

India’s journey from jus soli to conditional, descent-based citizenship is part of a wider global trend. The United States, which has maintained the most robust jus soli regime in the world through the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment – ratified in 1868 primarily to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that denied citizenship to African Americans – has faced sustained political pressure to narrow birthright citizenship.

US President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14156 of January 20, 2025, sought to deny birthright citizenship to children of undocumented parents and those on temporary visas. Within days, US District Judge John C. Coughenour in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order calling the order “blatantly unconstitutional”.

Amending the Fourteenth Amendment would require a two-thirds Congressional majority and ratification by three-quarters of states – a threshold that renders legislative change effectively impossible in the current political climate.

The contrast with India is instructive. The United States changed birthright citizenship by constitutional interpretation in the nineteenth century and has largely held that line since. India changed it by Parliamentary statute in 1986 and again in 2003 – a far simpler mechanism, requiring only a legislative majority.

The comparative ease with which India has narrowed citizenship by birth is a function of the parliamentary sovereignty model and the absence of a constitutional entrenchment of jus soli equivalent to the US Fourteenth Amendment.

X. The unfinished legislative agenda

Three legislative and policy gaps deserve attention from India’s Parliament:

Statelessness prevention: The current framework creates a real risk of statelessness for children born in India to one citizen and one illegal migrant parent. The 1954 United Nations Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness – to which India is not a party – provide a framework.

Parliament should consider a provision that prevents statelessness without undermining the law’s deterrent purpose against illegal migration: a child born in India who would otherwise be stateless should have a pathway to citizenship that does not require proof of parental status that may be unascertainable.

A universal citizenship document: The statement by the Ministry of External Affairs on Wednesday, the Special Intensive Revision exercise, and the demographic mandate of the High-Level Committee on Demographic Changes established in May collectively expose the absence of any document that most Indians can routinely hold as conclusive proof of citizenship.

This gap needs to be addressed – not by stretching Aadhaar, the voter ID or the passport beyond their statutory purposes, but by creating a citizenship register with a corresponding document accessible to all citizens.

The CAA judgment: The Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, creates a religion-based fast-track to naturalisation for non-Muslim refugees from three specified neighbouring countries. The Supreme Court has heard arguments on its constitutional validity and judgment is awaited. Whatever the court decides, Parliament will need to address the question of how India’s citizenship framework treats stateless and persecuted communities without reference to religious identity – a question the legislation has posed but not answered in a constitutionally durable way.

What the MEA statement really means

The Ministry of External Affairs official who stated that a passport is a travel document rather than proof of citizenship was not making policy; he was describing law. The Passports Act, 1967, the Citizenship Act, 1955, and the Supreme Court’s judgment on the Special Intensive Revision of May 2026 are all consistent with that position.

The significance of the statement lies not in its novelty but in its timing – issued as the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls is being conducted across the country, as 1.39 crore new passports are added annually to the pool of documents that a confused public believes establishes their citizenship.

The deeper question the statement raises is one that neither the Ministry of External Affairs nor the Election Commission, nor the High Level Committee on Demographic Changes has yet answered directly: if not the passport, then what?

India owes its citizens not merely a legally accurate description of what documents do not prove citizenship, but a clear, accessible, administratively feasible answer to what does.

Until that answer is provided, the gap between the legal reality and the public understanding will continue to generate the confusion, anxiety, and political heat that the Special Intensive Revision has already demonstrated this question can produce – at a scale of 1.39 crore new passports a year and counting.

Karan Bir Singh Sidhu is a retired IAS officer of the 1984 Punjab cadre who superannuated as Special Chief Secretary to the Government of Punjab.

This article was first published on The KBS Chronicle.

A parliamentary committee on Wednesday sought a report from the Union home ministry on the ecological impact of the Great Nicobar project on the islands, The Indian Express reported.

The chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Congress MP KC Venugopal, asked Home Secretary Govind Mohan to submit a brief report on the matter. The committee had met to discuss observations in an audit report prepared by the Comptroller and Auditor General on the establishment and functioning of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Institute of Medical Sciences.

The committee took suo motu cognisance of the Great Nicobar project, drawing an objection from Bharatiya Janata Party MP Anurag Thakur who said the matter was not on the agenda for the meeting, the Deccan Herald reported. Venugopal said that the committee was not discussing the subject, and that he had only directed the home secretary to submit a report on it, based on which the panel would decide whether to take it up.

In April, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi travelled to the Great Nicobar islands, and had expressed concerns that the project could destroy large tracts of rainforests and displace vulnerable tribal communities.

The Andaman and Nicobar chief secretary was not present at the meeting on Wednesday, about which the parliamentary committee took “serious note”, The Indian Express quoted Vengopal as saying. “The committee has asked the Union home secretary to give an explanation on why he [Andaman and Nicobar chief secretary] was not present at today’s meeting,” the Congress leader was quoted as having told reporters.

Venugopal also asked the home secretary whether he was aware of the environmental damage that could be caused by the felling of about 1.5 crore trees, even as the government claims that only a little over 7 lakh trees would be cut, the Deccan Herald quoted unidentified persons aware of the matter as saying. He also reportedly questioned the officials on concerns about the land being handed over to private companies.

Moreover, the MPs present at the meeting asked Mohan about alleged deficiencies in the establishment and operationalisation of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Institute of Medical Sciences. They noted that as per the Comptroller and Auditor General report, even after a decade of the institute’s inception in 2015, the key objective of providing high-quality medical education and robust healthcare services on the islands remains unfulfilled, according to the newspaper.

The Great Nicobar Project includes the construction of new townships, a power plant, a greenfield international airport and a transshipment port.

It is expected to use 166 sq km of the Great Nicobar island, which is part of the Nicobar Islands. The island falls within the Sundaland Biodiversity Hotspot, spanning the western half of the Indonesian archipelago.

Concerns have been raised about the impact of large infrastructure projects on the Shompen, a vulnerable tribal group, and the Nicobarese community. The project has also faced criticism for its potential impact on the island’s biodiversity, rainforests and endemic species.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read: How Nicobar’s corals disappeared on government maps

The Vishva Hindu Parishad has called for a first information report to be registered and a police investigation launched into allegations of misappropriation of donations made to the Ram temple in Ayodhya, The Indian Express reported on Thursday.

The demand came after a Special Investigation Team submitted a preliminary probe report to the Uttar Pradesh government.

The Vishva Hindu Parishad is part of a group of Hindutva organisations led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Alok Kumar, the president of VHP International, told the newspaper that media reports about the probe team’s findings suggested that “there are enough grounds to file an FIR in the matter”.

He said that the investigation report indicated that security camera footage allegedly showed persons misappropriating money and that their identities had been established.

“So, no further fact-finding is required for lodging an FIR,” Kumar further told the newspaper. “An FIR should be lodged earlier, investigation should be expedited and a chargesheet filed, and the case should be heard on a day-to-day basis in a fast-track court.”

He added that persons responsible should face the maximum punishment and that devotees would not be satisfied until those found guilty were jailed.

Kumar also said that an internal inquiry alone would not be sufficient and that the truth would emerge only through a formal legal investigation, the Hindustan Times reported.

The Hindutva group’s demand came a day after the Special Investigation Team submitted its preliminary report to the state government. The contents of the report have not been made public.

However, unidentified persons aware of its contents told The Indian Express that the report highlights alleged lapses, inadequate supervision and negligence in the handling, maintenance and counting of donated cash and valuables.

The government said that the investigating team would continue its work and submit a final report after 15 days.

The team was set up by the state government on June 14 following a request from the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, The Hindu reported. The trust manages the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

Opposition leaders and a whistleblower have claimed that cash and jewellery offerings made by devotees had been embezzled by temple staffers under the trust’s watch.

The Ram temple in Ayodhya was built on the site of the Babri Masjid, which was demolished by Hindutva extremists on December 6, 1992, because they believed that it stood on the spot where the Hindu deity Ram was born.

In 2019, the Supreme Court held that the demolition of the Babri mosque was illegal, but handed over the land to a trust for a Ram temple to be constructed. At the same time, it directed that a five-acre plot in Ayodhya be allotted to Muslims for a mosque to be built.

The Ram temple was inaugurated in a ceremony led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January 2024.

Also read: In Ayodhya, it’s Sangh Parivar vs Sangh Parivar as Ram temple fund ‘theft’ charges blow up

The toll from an ammonia gas leak at a private seafood processing and export unit near Periyapalayam in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruvallur district has risen to 10, the state government said on Wednesday.

Eighty-three persons were affected by the leak, which occurred on Sunday at a facility in the Kannigaipair-Manjangaranai area, the health and family welfare department said.

The incident reportedly took place during routine industrial operations and exposed workers at the site to ammonia gas.

The affected workers experienced symptoms associated with ammonia inhalation, including breathlessness, irritation of the eyes and respiratory tract, coughing, chest discomfort and respiratory distress, the department’s bulletin said.

Of the 83 affected individuals, 68 were being treated and under medical observation. Among them, 65 are women and three are men.

Seventeen patients are on ventilator support, 21 are receiving oxygen through nasal support and 30 are in stable condition. Five persons have been discharged.

The number of fatalities increased over several days. Two deaths were reported on Sunday, followed by six on Monday, one each on Tuesday and Wednesday, taking the total to 10.

The mortal remains of five persons were airlifted to Odisha on Tuesday, the government said, adding that the bodies of the remaining five will be transported after legal formalities are completed.

The leak occurred at a shrimp processing and export facility that employed several migrant workers, many of them women from Odisha, Assam and Jharkhand.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Dhun Mehta hollered a greeting as he passed by the compound of our office on the morning of June 26, 1975. Were we aware, he inquired, that prominent opposition leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan, Morarji Desai, Jyoti Basu, LK Advani and others had been arrested, censorship imposed and a state of emergency declared in the country?

We confessed total ignorance.

The morning papers had made no mention of any such developments. Mehta, a former neighbour, said he had heard the news on BBC Radio earlier that day.

There was no reason to doubt the veracity of his startling announcement. Jayaprakash Narayan had been demanding Prime Minister Indira Gandhi resign office after the Allahabad High Court on June 12 had found her guilty of electoral malpractices while contesting her parliamentary seat from Rai Bareilly in the 1971 general elections.

She had appealed the verdict and appointed noted lawyer and civil rights advocate Nani Palkhivala to argue her case. Much to the surprise and chagrin of many civic-minded libertarians, Palkhivala had agreed. Indira Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay, reportedly urged his mother to adopt a more contrarian stance.

Sadly, fearful of losing her legal appeal, the beleaguered Indira Gandhi succumbed despite Palkhivala assuring her she had a good case. She opted to suspend the civil liberties of all Indians. A pliant president, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, conspired to do her bidding and declared a state of Emergency.

As jurist AG Noorani later bemoaned in his column in the weekly Opinion, rarely had one witnessed such low cunning in such high places.

Among the many citizens who opposed her authoritarian diktat were former Indian Civil Service officer Astad Dinshah Gorwala and former parliamentarian Minoo Masani, a founder of the laissez faire Swatantra Party.

Gorwala edited the highly regarded weekly Opinion that relentlessly and fearlessly criticised the authoritarian rule of the Congress party headed by Indira Gandhi. (One of his headlines labelled her “An arrant liar”.) To add insult to injury, the fiery editor sent his weekly journal complimentary to all members of parliament.

He kept the annual subscription at an economical but unviable Rs 2. A handful of bold well-wishers lent advertising support. Gorwala kept his lifestyle simple. He lived on his pension as a retired Indian Civil Service officer and bore the financial burden of publishing the journal from his rented home on Bombay’s Malabar Hill.

Masani, who ran a consultancy firm, edited Freedom First, a monthly journal of liberal ideas from the offices of the Democratic Research Services near Kala Ghoda downtown.

Under the Emergency, an already pliant national press had to have editorial content filtered by government appointed censors. In Bombay, editorial material had to be submitted to the censor’s office in Sachivalaya (now Mantralaya) while assistant censors sat in the offices of all major newspapers to oversee content. Publications were encouraged or coerced to publish stories that extolled the positive aspects of the government (many had done so even prior to the Emergency).

Hoardings and bus panels were emblazoned with government slogans inspired by Indira’s 20-point programme stating: “Discipline makes the nation great,” and “Hard work is the only magic.”

With radio and television channels owned by the government and the major newspapers by large business houses beholden to the ruling party for licences, permits and quotas (including for newsprint), silence for most meant survival. Little dissent was voiced. As LK Advani, leader of the Jan Sangh (which later became the Bharatiya Janata Party), admonished the press after the Emergency, “You were asked to bend but you crawled.”

A day or two after the Emergency was declared, Gorwala phoned Palkhivala to ascertain his views on the course of action to be followed. Palkhivala called Gorwala to his residence at Nariman Point. Talking on the phone was risky as the telephone lines of prominent people were being tapped.

A chagrined Palkhivala first justified to Gorwala why he took on Gandhi’s brief. He believed she had a winnable case and by overturning the verdict she could continue to remain in office; there would be no need to take recourse to extra-constitutional methods.

For the forthcoming issue of Opinion, Gorwala put together his editorial material and ventured to the chief censor Binod Rao’s office on the ground floor of Sachivalaya, a white, elongated, six-storey building that houses the state government’s offices. Rao greeted Gorwala courteously, glanced at the editorial and other content and, without looking him in the eye, said his office would respond to him.

After exiting, Gorwala, who had no intention of waiting for any censorial approval, dispatched the editorial matter for typesetting to the Mouj Printing Press at Charni Road, the weekly’s printers since its inception. After printing, copies were transported to the General Post Office’s sorting centre near Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) to be posted to subscribers.

Shortly after the copies were mailed, Gorwala received a summons from the magistrate’s court at Azad Maidan asking him to explain why he had published the journal without the censor’s approval.

Gorwala, accompanied by well-wishers and noted lawyers like Noorani and Rani Jethmalani, appeared at the Esplanade Magistrate’s Court before Chief Magistrate Jal Vakil. Vakil, like many other jurists, was apparently not in favor of the suspension of human rights and the arrest of opposition leaders, not to mention censorship. Vakil asked the lawyers how much should he fine Gorwala. They proposed Rs 200. The chief magistrate agreed but added that left to himself he would have levied a fine of only Rs 50.

When the next issue of Opinion was printed and taken to the General Post Office, the mailing staff refused to post the copies. When Gorwala went to the post office to inquire why, he was informed they had been instructed to act this way. He thought for a moment and then decided to approach the post master general. After all he had been a very senior civil officer and the postmaster general would have been subordinate to him so he felt justified in approaching the officer without an appointment.

The cordial, sari-clad postmaster general, respectful of Gorwala’s former standing in the civil service, graciously called him in. Gorwala asked her why the mailing had been forestalled to which she replied this was as per the orders received. When further pressured for the rationale, she repeated politely that the orders were “not to post”.

Gorwala arranged for the copies to be retrieved from the post office and had his well-wishers and volunteers stuff them in envelopes and mail them in batches of 50 from various other post offices in the city.

When the next issue was sent to Mouj, they said they could not print the journal. The material was sent to another press but the police went there and broke up the hand-composed, metal type pages.

Undeterred, Gorwala decided to cyclostyle the issues. A stencil was cut by a sympathetic secretary and taken for cyclostyling to a shop near the Bombay Stock Exchange. The copies were inserted in envelopes to avoid detection and posted in batches of 50. Around 1,500 copies had been prepared.

When the next stencil was cut, the copies, through an oversight, were printed on a larger sized sheet and needed to be trimmed to fit in the envelopes. They were carried to a nearby printer whose staff knew the proprietor of the cyclostyling shop and as a favor agreed to cut the paper.

Just then, the proprietor of the press stepped in and asked what was being cut. He picked up a copy and started reading. Gorwala’s volunteer froze. After reading a few lines the owner glanced up and commented, “You are people of principles. I used to have principles” but now follow a more practical approach. He permitted the cutting to proceed.

It was a close call. Had he called the police, everyone involved with the process could have been implicated and eventually imprisoned. All of them, barring the lady who cut the stencil, were unaware of the seditious nature of the content. They went along innocently assuming they were acting within the bounds of the law.

Was it therefore morally right to have exposed them to such perilous risks without their consent? That quandary may have weighed on Gorwala’s mind and that of his well-wishers.

A few days later, Gorwala received another summons from the magistrate’s court. He decided to appear but without any lawyers. He had wilfully disregarded the law, had no defense and would plead guilty. The magistrate fined him Rs 50.

The prosecuting attorney badgered the jurist to make Gorwala disclose the location of the cyclostyling machine but the magistrate took no heed of his persistent query. Gorwala sat in the courtroom while a constable accompanied his companion to a higher floor where the cashier was located. Once the fine was paid, Gorwala was free to leave.

Masani followed another track. He roped in jurist Soli Sorabjee to argue before the Bombay High Court that the censor did not have unbridled powers to decide what was suitable or not for publication. Justices RP Bhatt, and later a divisional bench headed by Justices Dinshaw Mehta and MH Kania all restricted the censor’s powers.

“The Press is not only an instrument of disseminating information but it is a powerful medium of molding public opinion…,” the bench observed. “It is not the function of the censor acting under the censorship order to make all newspapers and periodicals trim their sails to one wind… The censor is appointed the nursemaid of democracy and not its gravedigger.”

Despite his judicial success, Masani opted to cease publication of Freedom First for the duration of the Emergency. He was not going to submit any editorial content to the censor. Opinion similarly ceased publication for some time.

Many opposed the Emergency directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly. Gorwala chose to defy censorship and violated the unjust and arbitrary legislation meant to stifle any dissent. Masani followed the law but used its checks and balances to hopefully minimise arbitrary abuse by the bureaucracy and its masters. The Maintenance of Internal Security Act gave the government unrestricted power to do whatever it wanted. A pliant Supreme Court further cemented Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. One of Gandhi’s even remarked that the opposition should be grateful she didn’t have them shot.

In such an environment, we have to admire all the more the courage and boldness of individuals like Gorwala and Masani and many others. Today, without an Emergency being officially declared, India ranks 157 out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders. India is placed in the “very serious category” of endangered media. In 2025 we were positioned at 151. Fifty-one years after the noxious Emergency, we are still crawling.

The author is a journalist who edited and published Parsiana magazine for 52 years until 2025. He had previously edited Opinion for a few months prior to its closure, and was also publisher and assistant editor of Freedom First.

Five persons were killed and several injured when an under-construction warehouse near Brace Bridge in Kolkata’s Taratala area collapsed on Wednesday, The Hindu reported.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said that three persons had been killed and 18 injured. Several persons were believed to be trapped beneath the rubble at the time, The New Indian Express had quoted the chief minister as saying.

Two more deaths were reported in the evening.

Teams from the Indian Army, the National Disaster Response Force, the State Disaster Response Force, the Kolkata Police and the municipal corporation were undertaking rescue and relief work at the site, Adhikari had said.

The police detained three people for interrogation, The Hindu reported.

Deeply pained and saddened by the tragic loss of lives due to the collapse of an under-construction warehouse building near Brace Bridge in Taratala, where several workers got trapped beneath the debris. So far 21 people have been pulled out of the collapsed structure, out of… pic.twitter.com/Hq9vZhg5AI

— Suvendu Adhikari (@SuvenduWB) June 24, 2026

Edited by Sneha and Nachiket Deuskar.

In April 2023, a public relations storm broke over Bournvita.

That month, the influencer Revant Himatsingka, better known by his Instagram moniker, Food Pharmer, published a series of videos about the malt drink mix. He focused on one specific ingredient in the product: sugar.

Himatsingka noted that 100 grams of the product contained 37.4 grams of added sugar and questioned its categorisation as a “health drink”.

Mondelez India, which manufactures and distributes Bournvita, slapped Himatsingka with legal notices. The influencer, an online crusader against unhealthy ultra processed foods, took down his videos.

These developments drew wide attention and sparked outrage among the public. The Union government took notice. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights called on the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, or FSSAI, to investigate Mondelez’s claims about Bournvita.

Within a month, the regulator issued a press release declaring that it had flagged 32 fresh cases for misleading claims. The release did not specifically mention Bournvita but mainstream media outlets, quoting “official sources”, said the Bournvita controversy had sparked the government’s crackdown on misleading claims. The FSSAI indexed these articles and then uploaded them on its website.

In December that year, Mondelez announced that it was cutting sugar levels in the product from 37.4 grams per 100 grams, to 32.2 grams – a 14.4% reduction. The public outcry appeared to have yielded some results.

But documents accessed by Scroll, which were obtained through a right-to-information application, reveal that the same month that the controversy broke out, the FSSAI in meetings had flagged other concerns pertaining to the composition and marketing of Bournvita.

In an “action-taken report” that summarises developments related to several cases, including Bournvita’s, the regulator questioned one of the basic pillars of the malt drink’s marketing: the use of images of children both on its label and in its advertisement to suggest that “the product is for children”.

The regulator noted that while the product was marketed to children, the recommended dietary allowance of ingredients contained per serving as listed on its packaging were “made considering the daily intake for an average adult”.

The documents Scroll accessed show that after the regulator raised concerns, it received a response from the company. Without citing any details of justifications provided by the company, or changes it proposed to make, the FSSAI declared that the response was “satisfactory” and declared the case “closed”.

Scroll emailed the FSSAI to ask what information, arguments or commitments the company provided in response to the regulator’s notice. We also emailed Mondelez, seeking a response to concerns that had been raised about Bournvita. Neither the regulator nor the company have responded at the time of publication. This report will be updated if there is a response.

Meanwhile, Bournvita continues to widely use images of children in its packaging and marketing. It also continues to rely on adult intakes as the basis for its calculations of how much percentage of the recommended dietary allowance of different ingredients the product contains per serving.

Nutritionists Scroll spoke to criticised the company for this approach. “If a product is marketed to children, then relying on adult nutritional standards for comparison is fundamentally misleading,” said Dr Vandana Prasad, a community pediatrician and public health professional. “How can we expect ordinary parents to translate adult values into meaningful information for a three-year-old, four-year-old or five-year-old child – the very audience these advertisements target?”

Unhealthy packaged food is fuelling an epidemic of lifestyle diseases in India. The government knows this. But its measures to regulate the industry are falling short. This series, based on previously unpublished internal documents, takes a hard look at this failure.

The functioning of the FSSAI

The FSSAI, which functions under the Union Ministry of Health, is India’s “apex food regulator”.

The organisation has an in-house committee tasked with monitoring claims in advertisements and labels by food and beverage companies.

This committee flags claims as misleading if they run contrary to India’s food advertisement regulations. These claims are identified either by the committee itself or based on complaints made to it, such as by the public or other arms of the government.

Once flagged as misleading, the regulator asks the business to explain and substantiate the claim. If even after the company responds, the claims are found to violate regulations, the regulator can direct it to modify them. It also has the power to penalise the company and even revoke its licence.

Under FSSAI regulations, packaged foods must carry several details about their ingredients. These include the proportions of ingredients and the kind of nutrition they provide. For each ingredient, they must also state how much of the recommended dietary allowance for adults one serving contains. These calculations are based on estimates of food consumption by the Indian Council for Medical Research.

For instance, according to these calculations, if a bag of chips contains 200 calories, it would account for 10% of the daily requirement of calories for an average adult Indian.

The concerns about Bournvita

The FSSAI’s claim monitoring committee examined Bournvita’s case in a meeting held at the end of April 2023. An action-taken report shows that by May 2024, the case was declared closed.

Scroll compared all the concerns that the FSSAI flagged about Bournvita, and the claims that can currently be found on its packaging and marketing material, and on its pages on e-commerce platforms.

In the section dealing with Bournvita, the regulator first noted its concerns about the depiction of a child in the packaging, and a QR code to calculate “the nutrition score of a child”, as well as the fact that calculations about recommended dietary allowance were based on adult intakes.

The product’s packaging and its website still carries images of children, and a page that invites parents to check their “child’s nutrition score”. Further, an advertisement released in February depicted a mother explaining that she gives her daughter Bournvita daily because it gives her “double strength”.

Meanwhile, calculations of what percentage of recommended daily allowance each serving contains, of particular ingredients, are still based on adult intake, as the packaging itself states.

The regulator had also flagged the product’s recommendation of two daily servings “as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle”. It noted that this “may be misinterpreted as the consumption of Bournvita is essential for ensuring a balanced diet”. On packaging and listings on e-commerce platforms, the company continues to make this recommendation.

“Anything these products claim to contribute can generally be provided through ordinary foods and simple dietary alternatives,” Prasad said.

Further, the regulator took note of the claims that Bournvita was “scientifically designed”, as well as boosted strength and immunity. The regulator stated that while these claims had been “explained with a justification”, they still could “mislead the consumer that the product improves physical strength, mental strength, and immunity, especially if it is targeted towards children”.

Scroll found that the company continues to make claims pertaining to Bournvita’s scientific design, and its links to physical and mental strength, and benefits to the immune system, at least on some platforms. On Blinkit, for instance, text on the product page reads, “With nutrients that support”, followed by a list: physical strength, mental strength and immune strength.

On Amazon, text accompanying the product’s page describes it as “a scientifically designed formula”, containing nutrients like calcium, vitamin D, iron, zinc, magnesium, among others, which strengthen bone and muscle health and help in cognitive and immune functions.

Bournvita’s video ads on e-commerce platforms state, “Two cups contain 50% of your daily Vitamin D, Iron and Zinc.”

Prasad expressed concerns about this aspect of the product’s marketing, particularly given its sugar content. She noted that Indian children struggle with nutritional deficiencies of protein, iron, vitamin A and other micronutrients.

“Sugar is not what Indian children lack,” she said. “So why is it there?”

She added, “If a company genuinely wanted to create a useful nutritional supplement, it could simply leave sugar out and allow parents to decide whether they want to add sugar and how much.”

Besides, she noted that she had “not seen convincing randomised controlled trials supporting those claims”.

Arun Gupta of the Nutrition Advocacy for Public Interest, a collective of independent nutrition experts, explained that according to guidelines issued by the National Institute of Nutrition, added sugars should not account for more than 5% of an individual’s daily caloric intake. For adults, the institute recommends a daily limit of 25 grams per day. Bournvita’s recommended two daily servings would measure around 40 grams, which would contain almost 13 grams of added sugar, and “more than half the daily limit for adults”, he noted.

A health drink?

In 2023, while the FSSAI deliberated over Bournvita’s claims behind closed doors, public controversy raged over its claim of being a “health drink”. Among those who took objection to this claim was the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights.

In its 2023-’24 annual report, the commission pointed out that in its licence, Mondelez had formally categorised Bournvita as a “cereal based beverage mix”.

Raising concern over the use of the term “health drink”, the commission noted that the FSSAI had informed it that the term “is not defined” under regulations.

However, the commission claimed that a representative of the company had told it that it was not a health drink.

Gupta noted that while “there is no legal definition of health drink”, Bournvita “cannot be considered healthy as it contains a high amount of added sugar”.

Two years after this directive, Scroll found that in some listings, Bournvita continues to be called a health drink. Elsewhere, the company now deploys a different phrase, calling it a “nutrition drink”.

For public health advocates like Prasad, such product positioning is questionable. “The problem is not simply that these products contain sugar, “ she said. “The problem is that they occupy a space where they present themselves as health-promoting while relying on claims that are often unsupported, exaggerated or misleading.”

Read the full series here.

A passport is a travel document and not proof of citizenship, the Hindustan Times quoted officials from the Ministry of External Affairs as saying on Wednesday.

The clarification was issued on the occasion of the 14th Passport Seva Divas. “A passport is issued after a lot of due diligence, and it is based on documents from several government agencies,” an unidentified official was quoted as saying.

The Supreme Court and different High Courts have, over the years, held that documents such as Aadhaar card, voter identity card, permanent account card and a certificate issued by the Gram Panchayat Secretary, as well as ownership of a bank account or property, are not evidence of citizenship.

There is no one single single document that proves Indian citizenship. Only foreign nationals who take up Indian citizenship are granted actual citizenship certificates. People born in India do not have any such document.

Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader Aaditya Thackeray described the external affairs ministry’s statement as “absurd”.

“If the [Ministry of External Affairs] believes passport is not a document of citizenship why do the police verify before granting a passport,” Thackeray wrote on social media. “Does our country give passport as travel documents to non Indians as well?”

He added: “Wouldn’t this announcement create doubts in the minds of other countries, of whether non Indians get Indian passports as a travel document?”

If the MEA believes Passport is not a document of citizenship:

1) What do the police verify before granting a passport?

2) Does our country give passports as travel documents to non Indians as well?

3) Wouldn’t this announcement create doubts in the minds of other countries,… pic.twitter.com/p3ebg90A3C

— Aaditya Thackeray (@AUThackeray) June 24, 2026

Edited by Sneha.

Also Read: Bihar voter roll revision: Why having to prove you are an Indian citizen is a nightmare

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

India is partnering with the United Arab Emirates to ease the grip of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google on artificial intelligence computing.

G42, backed by Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, signed an agreement on May 15 to deploy an AI supercomputer in India, comprising 64 systems made by US chipmaker Cerebras. A G42 unit will handle installation, operations, and maintenance, with Cerebras providing technical support, G42 said in response to questions from Rest of World.

Any government that wants to use AI today typically rents computing power from Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. India already has at least $45 billion in commitments from the three companies. The country’s $1.25 billion national AI program runs entirely on Nvidia processors, with 34,000 available to researchers and businesses, and a target of 100,000 by the year’s end.

The G42 deal adds a second path, where India will have machines on its own soil, under its own rules, run by a non-US partner.

“This is an example of India’s pragmatic approach to AI sovereignty, using the power of its scale to adapt what’s available from other countries, whether AI leaders like China and the US or others, to adapt to its own needs,” Cameron Kerry, former acting secretary at the US Department of Commerce, told Rest of World.

Kerry, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, co-authored a report in February, arguing that no country has full control over every element of AI and that governments must assemble capabilities from multiple partners.

G42 has been working on what it calls the Intelligence Grid, a global network of AI facilities that it builds, owns, and operates for governments. India is the first country to sign up. Discussions are on with other governments, G42 said, without naming the countries.

The UAE-India deal

India’s autonomous scientific society, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, will work with G42’s Core42 unit, with all data remaining under Indian governance rules. G42 declined to disclose the financial terms of the India deal or confirm who will own the hardware after installation.

India already has substantial AI infrastructure commitments from US companies: Microsoft plans to invest $17.5 billion over four years, Google has pledged $15 billion, and Amazon Web Services has earmarked $12.7 billion, all built around Nvidia processors and the companies’ own cloud platforms.

G42 faces a steep challenge entering India, Chris Miller, professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and an expert on global semiconductor competition, told Rest of World. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google offer integrated packages of hardware, software, developer tools, and customer support that any newcomer has to match.

“A key question will be whether they can offer competitive software and other services to their data-center customers,” Miller said.

Cerebras chips

Cerebras, founded in 2016, makes AI chips and the supercomputer systems they power. Its AI chip is the largest in the world — a single piece of silicon the size of a dinner plate that accomplishes what Nvidia needs thousands of smaller processors wired together to do.

The choice of Cerebras appears driven by practical considerations, Kerry said.

Nvidia’s most advanced processors are designed for training large AI models from scratch. Cerebras is built for speed in running AI applications, which matches India’s focus on deploying AI across healthcare, agriculture, and public services.

G42 became Cerebras’s largest customer in 2021, and from 2023, the two companies built three supercomputer facilities in California, Texas, and Minnesota, called Condor Galaxy. The Condor Galaxy partnership gave G42 hands-on experience in deploying and maintaining Cerebras hardware across multiple locations and regulatory environments, G42 said.

Cerebras counts G42 and the UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence as its two largest customers. It went public on the Nasdaq on May 14 and raised $5.55 billion in the biggest U.S. tech stock offering since Uber in 2019. Together, the two UAE buyers accounted for 86% of Cerebras’ 2025 revenue, according to its SEC filing.

At home in the UAE, G42 works with the same US companies to which it offers an alternative abroad. Amazon operates a full cloud region in the UAE, and Microsoft has committed $15.2 billion to UAE data center expansion through 2029, working through G42’s subsidiary Khazna.

The deal may give India less control than it appears, Kerry said. India’s laws allow personal data to be sent to most countries and restrict transfers to a short list of blacklisted nations, according to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Whether India’s government has imposed stricter rules for this specific deal is unknown, and G42 declined to share those details.

As more governments seek to own their AI machines rather than rent them, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google will need to find ways to serve those customers or risk losing them to partners like G42, said Kerry. “The better they respond, the better for the US position in the world regardless of what the U.S. government does,” he said.

Additional reporting by Divsha Bhat in Dubai.

Indranil Ghosh is the Middle East and Africa Editor at Rest of World, based in Abu Dhabi.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

The Congress asked whether the Bharatiya Janata Party would agree to an independent judicial inquiry into allegations pertaining to land purchases by Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav, his family members and their real estate companies. The Congress’ Madhya Pradesh chief Jitu Patwari asked whether Yadav would release a white paper on the land he had bought since taking oath as the chief minister.

This came a day after The Indian Express reported that Yadav, his family and their real estate firms bought at least 137 plots worth Rs 45 crore in areas that will benefit most from infrastructure projects announced by him.

Patwari urged Yadav to explain the source of the funds used by him and his family to buy the land. Read on.

Three persons were killed and 18 injured after an under-construction warehouse near Brace Bridge in Kolkata’s Taratala area collapsed. Eighteen more persons are believed to be trapped beneath the rubble, West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said. Read on.

The Israeli military deliberately killed Palestinian children to commit a genocide, said the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry. More than 20,000 children have been killed by the forces and 44,000 injured since October 2023, it added.

“Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, the chair of the commission.

The panel also alleged that sexual violence had been used against children as part of the “collective shaming and oppression, entrenched within a prolonged, ethnic, gendered, and intergenerational pattern of Israeli occupation and hostilities”. Read on.

Three persons have gone missing after heavy rains triggered flash floods in Arunachal Pradesh’s Keyi Panyor district. At least 18 homes were also damaged and several low-lying have been inundated.

This led the government in neighbouring Assam to issue an alert for districts in downstream areas.

In Mumbai, heavy overnight rainfall disrupted suburban train services and caused waterlogging in several low-lying areas. The southwest monsoon has advanced into more parts of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, and some areas of Chhattisgarh. Read on.

A video installation at London’s National Portrait Gallery was withdrawn after a controversy over claims about the role of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the Bengal famine in colonial India. The 40-minute video by artist Helen Cammock, titled Persistence, had been on temporary display at the gallery, scheduled to end in August.

In the video, Cammock described 17th-century English soldier and parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell’s military campaigns in Ireland, and remarked that he “starved people en masse, a little like the wilful starvation of the Indian population by Winston Churchill. Read on.

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The Congress on Wednesday alleged that Union Home Minister Amit Shah was “breaking” the Trinamool Congress and the Shiv Sena to secure a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha, PTI reported. The “real and ultimate target” of this was to amend the Constitution and end reservation, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh told the news agency in an interview.

Both the Trinamool Congress and the Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray-led Shiv Sena have faced defections and internal rebellions in recent weeks.

On June 14, TMC leader Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar said that 20 of the party’s Lok Sabha MPs will merge with the Tripura-based Nationalist Citizens’ Party and back the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance.

On Monday, six MPs from the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) switched to the rival faction of the party led by Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, which is part of the NDA. The defections increased the Shinde faction’s tally in the Lok Sabha to 13.

On Wednesday, Ramesh alleged that Shah was taking “revenge for the humiliation he was forced to suffer” after a proposed constitutional amendment bill to redraw the boundaries of electoral constituencies was defeated in Parliament in April.

The 2026 Constitution 131st Amendment Bill, one of three draft legislations, 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 House with 298 MPs voting in its favour and 230 against. With 528 MPs present in the Lower House, the bill would have required the support of 352 of them.

The government decided to withdraw the two other bills, saying that they were linked to the Constitution Amendment Bill and therefore could not be taken up for consideration separately.

On Wednesday, Ramesh said that Shah had promised Prime Minister Narendra Modi that he would get the three delimitation bills passed.

“...[Shah] could not muster more than 298 votes in the Lok Sabha,” he told PTI. “And he needed 362 for two-thirds majority. Now he is busy in tod-phod ki rajneeti [politics of sabotage].”

The Congress leader added that the “truth of our 2024 campaign” was becoming apparent. “Why 400 paar? [Why beyond 400?]” Ramesh told PTI. “They were asking for 400 seats so that they could amend the Constitution and end reservation”.

STORY | BJP wants 2/3rd majority in LS as its 'real target' is to end reservation: Congress

The Congress on Wednesday alleged that the BJP is striving for a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha as its "real and ultimate target" is to be able to amend the Constitution for ending… https://t.co/1xkGoNm28L

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) June 24, 2026

Ramesh claimed that while delimitation was the immediate target for the BJP, the ultimate goal was to end reservations.

The Congress leader said that his party was opposed to the delimitation exercise not only because of a 50% increase in seats but also related to how an 800-member Lok Sabha would function, PTI reported.

“In 500 odd MPs, they do not get a chance to speak and you want to get 815 MPs,” Ramesh told the news agency. “For whom are you doing this? And what happens to the Rajya Sabha? There are questions about that and the government is silent.”

The Congress leader added that women’s reservation in Parliament should be implemented from the next Lok Sabha elections with 543 seats, with one-third of them reserved for women, PTI reported.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Congress on Wednesday asked whether the Bharatiya Janata Party will agree to an independent judicial inquiry into allegations that Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav, his family members and their real estate companies bought large tracts of land in areas that will benefit most from infrastructure projects.

Madhya Pradesh Congress chief Jitu Patwari asked whether Yadav would agree to release a white paper providing details of the land that he and his family bought since the Bharatiya Janata Party leader became the chief minister in December 2023.

The Congress leader held a press conference a day after a report in The Indian Express reported that Yadav, his family and their real estate firms bought at least 137 plots worth Rs 45 crore between December 13, 2023, when he took oath as chief minister, and December 2025.

Most of the properties are either close to road projects announced in and around Ujjain or in areas where the land use will be changed from agriculture to residential or commercial under the Ujjain Master Plan 2035, the newspaper reported.

Ujjain is among Madhya Pradesh’s important religious tourism centres and has been the focus of several infrastructure projects in recent years. Yadav has been the MLA from Ujjain (South) since 2013.

On Wednesday, Patwari questioned whether farmers who had land holdings in the areas knew about the projects planned there. He urged the state’s BJP government to make public the details of changes in the area’s land use for development.

He also urged Yadav to explain the source of the funds used by him and his family to buy the land. “Should the complete details of the land bought by the chief minister’s family not be made public?” he asked.

हमारे सवाल:

• क्या मोहन यादव के CM बनने के बाद परिवार ने जमीन खरीदी?

• क्या ये सच है कि जमीन का बड़ा हिस्सा वहां है, जहां विकास परियोजनाएं बाद में आईं?

• क्या सरकार उन सभी प्रोजेक्ट्स की टाइमलाइन सार्वजनिक करेगी?

• यदि सबकुछ पारदर्शी है तो क्या BJP स्वतंत्र न्यायिक जांच… pic.twitter.com/hxZEGRKskh

— Congress (@INCIndia) June 24, 2026

On Tuesday, The Indian Express reported that of the 168 acres that Yadav and his family had acquired after he took oath as the chief minister, 111 acres are located next to one of the road development projects in and around Ujjain announced by him.

Within the city limits, Yadav and his family own land in almost every zone where land use will change under the 2035 master plan, the newspaper reported.

After the report was published, the Congress on Tuesday alleged that the “engine of loot was running at full speed” in Madhya Pradesh and that Yadav was the mastermind behind the alleged corruption.

State BJP chief Hemant Khandelwal on Tuesday said that the allegations were baseless and accused the Congress of “targeting an [Other Backward Classes] chief minister”, PTI reported.

In response, Patwari questioned why the BJP was invoking caste instead of addressing the allegations. “I belong to the OBC category myself,” he said. “Does my community not belong to the state’s economic system? Was their [OBCs’] share not stolen too?”

Yadav and his family have not yet responded to the allegations in the report or to the Congress’ demands.

Written by Neerad Pandharipande. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Congress on Tuesday alleged that the “engine of loot was running at full speed” in Madhya Pradesh, citing a report by The Indian Express, that said Chief Minister Mohan Yadav, his family members and their real estate companies have bought at least 168 acres of land since December 2023 in areas that will most benefit from infrastructure projects.

“The chief minister of the state himself has become the mastermind of this loot,” claimed Congress leader Jairam Ramesh in a social media post.

Mohan Yadav became the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh in December 2023 after the Bharatiya Janata Party won the Assembly elections in the state.

भाजपा की मध्य प्रदेश की 'डबल इंजन' की सरकार में 'लूट का इंजन' तेज रफ्तार से चल रहा है।

खुद प्रदेश के मुख्यमंत्री मोहन यादव इस लूट के कर्ताधर्ता बने हुए हैं।

चर्चा यह भी है कि मुख्यमंत्री के खिलाफ "खबर की खेती" मप्र से केंद्र में गए कृषि मंत्री ने ही करवाई है! आपसी लड़ाई कुर्सी… pic.twitter.com/RjV3xDtUJ2

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) June 23, 2026

According to The Indian Express, Mohan Yadav’s family and their real estate companies bought at least 137 plots worth Rs 45 crore between December 13, 2023, when he took oath as chief minister, and December 2025. Most of the properties are either close to road projects announced in and around Ujjain or in areas where the land use will be changed from agriculture to residential or commercial under the Ujjain Master Plan 2035.

Ujjain is among Madhya Pradesh’s important religious tourism centres and has been the focus of several infrastructure projects in recent years.

Mohan Yadav has been the MLA from Ujjain (South) since 2013.

The newspaper noted that the chief minister has for long been involved in the development of the city’s tourism and infrastructure. Before becoming the chief minister, he served as the chairperson of the Ujjain Development Authority from 2004 to 2010 and as the head of the Madhya Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation during 2011-13.

On Tuesday, at a press conference, Congress’ Madhya Pradesh unit chief Jitu Patwari listed the land holdings of the chief minister and his family members, as well as the infrastructure development works that have taken place around the plots.

He asked if the government will make public every aspect of these land transactions and if the chief minister will order an investigation into the allegations.

“Narendra Modi often speaks about clean and ethical politics...will Modi Ji take cognisance of these unethical acts and ask Mohan Yadav to resign?” PTI quoted Patwari as asking.

What does the report say?

The Indian Express reported that Mohan Yadav and his family members, including his son Vaibhav Yadav and sister Kalavati Yadav, owned at least 108 plots measuring 179 acres in and around Ujjain before he became the chief minister.

Of this, at least 85 acres were purchased between 2021 and 2023, when Mohan Yadav was the education minister in the state.

Of the 168 acres that Mohan Yadav and his family acquired after he took oath as the chief minister, 111 acres are located next to one of the road development projects in and around Ujjain announced by him.

Within the city limits, Mohan Yadav and his family own land in almost every zone where the land use will change under the master plan, reported The Indian Express.

In 2025, his family and their companies acquired at least 62 plots measuring 92 acres in Ujjain, reported the newspaper. The purchases were made despite the state government facing resistance from farmers over plans to pool agricultural land for permanent Kumbh infrastructure.

The Madhya Pradesh chief minister and his family members have not yet responded to the questions sent to them by The Indian Express.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Three persons went missing after heavy rains triggered flash floods in Arunachal Pradesh’s Keyi Panyor district on Wednesday morning, PTI reported.

They were at the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Limited project colony near Poosa under the Yazali circle, where an under-construction retaining wall collapsed due to the downpour, the news agency quoted State Disaster Management Secretary Dani Sulu as saying.

The flash floods inundated low-lying areas and damaged at least 18 houses.

The rains also triggered landslides along a national highway, disrupting traffic and leaving several persons stranded.

The government in neighbouring Assam has issued a high alert, warning of possible impacts of the flash floods in districts in downstream areas, PTI reported.

Mumbai records heavy rain

A day after the monsoon arrived in Mumbai, heavy overnight rainfall disrupted suburban train services and caused waterlogging in several low-lying areas, PTI reported.

Parts of the city recorded more than 200 mm of rainfall in the 24 hours ending at 8 am on Wednesday.

The IMD had issued a red alert for Mumbai and Palghar in the early hours of Wednesday, warning of thunderstorms, lightning, intense to very intense rainfall and winds of 40-60 kmph.

The alert was later downgraded to orange, though moderate to intense spells of rain are expected to continue in Mumbai, Thane, Raigad, Palghar and Sindhudurg districts.

Monsoon advances further

The southwest monsoon has advanced into more parts of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, and some areas of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, the India Meteorological Department said on Wednesday.

#WATCH | Delhi: On monsoon arrival across India, IMD Scientist, Dr Shashi Kant says, "... In the past 24 hours, monsoon progress has been strong. It has now covered all of Maharashtra, parts of southern Gujarat, southern Madhya Pradesh, and nearby areas. It has also advanced into… pic.twitter.com/Q4yVb4xOeN

— ANI (@ANI) June 24, 2026

Conditions remain favourable for its further advance into the remaining parts of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, more areas of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, parts of Uttar Pradesh, and parts of Uttarakhand over the next two to three days.

However, heatwave conditions are likely to continue over eastern Uttar Pradesh for the next four to five days and over northeastern Madhya Pradesh and Bihar for the next two to three days.

Edited by Sneha.

Eggs will be removed from mid-day meals served in government and aided schools in Kolkata after the West Bengal government announced that the International Society for Krishna Consciousness would provide cooked food under the scheme, The Telegraph reported on Wednesday.

Radharaman Das, the Kolkata spokesperson of the Hindu religious organisation, said that the meals would not contain eggs but would instead include ingredients such as paneer, rajma, soybeans, pulses and other vegetarian protein sources.

Under the existing arrangement in West Bengal, students are usually served eggs once a week, with rice, dal and potato curry on the remaining school days.

Egg is a wholesome, nutritious food with high nutrient density. It is a high value protein and provides other nutrients such as vitamins, essential amino acids and minerals that are crucial for growth and good health, the Union government’s department of animal husbandry, dairying and fisheries.

Some schools have also occasionally arranged chicken or fish through additional funds raised by teachers. Students who do not eat eggs or follow vegetarian diets could choose other food options.

However, the new arrangement will introduce a vegetarian menu.

“We have empanelled dietitians to curate our menus,” The Times of India quoted Das as saying. “We will ensure that whatever nutrients a child gets from eggs will be matched or exceeded by the superior quality protein and vitamins in our meals.”

Das said that the programme would be implemented through ISKCON’s Annamitra Foundation. He added that the organisation was awaiting a list of schools from the government, and planned to set up kitchens to prepare and distribute the cooked meals.

He said that ISKCON was already operating similar mid-day meal programmes in more than eight states and 22 cities, and had been serving about 12 lakh students nationwide.

In other states such as Karnataka and Odisha, the ISKCON-linked Akshaya Patra Foundation, which runs government mid-day meal programmes, has faced criticism from Right to Food activists for excluding eggs, onions and garlic from its menus in line with the organisation’s religious dietary principles.

On Wednesday, Trinamool Congress leader Derek O’Brien said that the BJP government was depriving children of nutrition by removing eggs from the midday meals. The Rajya Sabha MP said that the Hindutva party was “imposing vegetarianism” and that the state “rejects this”.

After the fish🐠eating tamasha during the election campaign, the Gujarat Gymkhana finally reveals itself. New BJP govt at work in Bengal. Throw eggs at rivals. But DEPRIVE CHILDREN of nutrition by taking🥚🥚eggs off from midday meals. Imposing vegetarianism. Bengal rejects this

— Derek O'Brien | ডেরেক ও'ব্রায়েন (@derekobrienmp) June 24, 2026

The mid-day meal scheme, which is officially known as the National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education, was launched in August 1995 to boost universalisation of primary education, while improving nutrition levels of children.

The scheme simultaneously lays emphasis on providing cooked meals with minimum 450 calories, between eight and twelve grams of proteins, and adequate quantities of other nutrients. The 2013 National Food Security Act made the mid-day meal up to Class 8 a legal right.

State Finance Minister Swapan Dasgupta had announced in his Budget speech on Monday that the International Society for Krishna Consciousness would provide cooked meals in schools in the Kolkata Municipal Corporation area.

Dasgupta also said that the material cost for mid-day meals in primary schools would increase to Rs 10 per student from Rs 6.7 per student, The Times of India reported. It would remain unchanged at Rs 10.2 per student at the upper primary level.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• Not just Madhya Pradesh: Denying eggs to malnourished children is common in BJP-run states
• Odisha finds a way to serve children eggs at mid-day meals catered by ISKCON-linked NGO

A video installation at London’s National Portrait Gallery has been withdrawn after a controversy erupted over claims about the role of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the Bengal famine in colonial India, the BBC reported on Tuesday.

The 40-minute video by artist Helen Cammock, titled Persistence, had been on temporary display at the gallery, scheduled to end in August. In the video, which Cammock narrated, she described 17th-century English soldier and parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell’s military campaigns in Ireland, and remarked that he “starved people en masse, a little like the wilful starvation of the Indian population by Winston Churchill”, The Guardian reported.

The Bengal famine of 1943 resulted in the deaths of an estimated 30 lakh persons in eastern India. Many scholars, including Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, have argued that the famine was caused by the wartime policies of the Churchill-led British government, such as failure to control inflation and the prioritisation of food for soldiers.

However, some have maintained that the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1941, which cut off a major source of rice to India, was the primary reason for the famine, rather than Churchill’s policies.

Cammock’s video installation at the National Portrait Gallery earlier this month prompted an open letter to the gallery by historian Andrew Roberts. The letter, signed by 50 peers, alleged that the video’s description of Churchill was an “ideologically motivated rant”, The Guardian reported. Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s grandson, was among the signatories to the letter.

On Monday, the gallery said that the installation was removed at Cammock’s request.

“We respect her decision, just as we acknowledge the opinions of those who were offended by what was said in the film,” BBC quoted the National Portrait Gallery as saying. “The aim of this project was to give artists the opportunity to create works as personal and creative responses to our collection.”

It clarified that the work was an artistic piece, not a documentary, and the views expressed in the film do not necessarily reflect those of the gallery.

Cammock said her installation was based on academic work, and that it “asks us to think about who is honoured and valorised and who is not; whose stories are told and whose are not”, the BBC reported.

She was further quoted as saying: “Nina Simone [American musician and civil rights activist] once said ‘An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times’ and sometimes this means revisiting, enquiry and challenge.”

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read: This work of micro-history illustrates how laissez faire economics killed millions in British India

India has recorded a 43% rainfall deficit so far this monsoon, raising concerns about how it will hurt the kharif crops, Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said on Tuesday.

To tackle the problem, the Union government has activated contingency plans for vulnerable districts and stepped up monitoring of the advance of monsoon, and crop conditions, Chouhan said.

The Kharif season in India is between June and October. The crops are sown at the beginning of the monsoon and harvested at the end of it.

About 315 districts in the country are likely to have been affected by low monsoon rainfall, Chouhan said after chairing a meeting with state agriculture ministers, district collectors and experts from agricultural and weather agencies.

Of these, 111 districts with irrigation coverage of less than 25% have been classified as high priority, 76 districts with coverage between 25% and 50% as medium priority, and 128 districts with relatively better irrigation facilities as low priority.

The minister said that most of the districts that have been affected by low rainfall are in 12 states: Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh.

Chouhan said that India was facing the possibility of a weak monsoon because of El Niño weather conditions, which were already affecting rainfall patterns.

The El Niño weather phenomenon involves the warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific. It typically occurs every few years and has been linked to reduced monsoon rainfall in India.

Besides the 43% deficit, forecasts suggested that weak rainfall conditions could continue into the week ending July 2, the minister said.

The India Meteorological Department has forecast seasonal rainfall at 90% of the long-period average. For June, rainfall had been projected at 92% of normal levels, but with one week remaining in the month, the national rainfall deficit stood at more than 42%, The Indian Express reported.

As of Tuesday, 26 of the country’s 36 states and Union Territories had recorded rainfall deficiencies of at least 20%. Nine had deficits exceeding 60%.

Chouhan said the Union government had set up an El Niño Monitoring Cell and a Crop Weather Watch Group to track the advance of monsoon, crop sowing, crop conditions, agricultural inputs and market trends based on real time data feedback and advice.

States have also been directed to establish control rooms and appoint nodal officers to coordinate with the Union government.

The Union government has also advised states to promote short-duration and low-water crops, with particular emphasis on pulses, oilseeds and millets in rain-fed areas.

Chouhan said that districts should be ready to switch to alternative crops if rainfall delays continue and added that the government did not want agricultural land to remain uncultivated.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

India’s energy challenge is increasingly becoming a cooling challenge. As extreme heat drives electricity demand from air conditioning and other cooling services, it is straining an already stressed grid.

On May 21, for instance, peak demand exceeded the Central Electricity Authority’s 2026 projection of 270 gigawatt, with some regions in the country facing power cuts.

Air conditioners account for 40% to 60% of peak summer load in large Indian cities, studies show. The growing demand has exposed the vulnerability of India’s power system, as is evident in the regular power cuts, equipment breakdowns, outages, and transformer burnouts across the country.

Such disruptions highlight that the challenge of India’s energy transition is no longer limited to adding renewable energy capacity – it is also about building a resilient power system capable of equitably meeting rapidly increasing demand.

A power system under stress

Extreme heat does not merely increase power demand; it also weakens the infrastructure required to meet that demand. Around 1.3 million distribution transformer failures occur in India annually due to factors such as overloading and poor repairs.

Heatwaves also impact transmission infrastructure, as overhead lines sag and trip under soaring temperatures. All this results in mounting transmission and distribution losses and further adds to power shortages.

India’s cooling energy demand has been increasing drastically and is poised to grow 15-fold by 2050. This increase is driven in part by rising household incomes, rapid urbanisation and the necessity to adapt to frequent heatwaves, resulting in a surge in AC ownership.

The government’s India Cooling Action Plan projects the residential AC ownership to increase five-fold by 2038, driving the current 8% penetration rate to a staggering 40%.

This surge would test the resilience of our power grid and intensify heat-related hardships for low-income households due to frequent outages and breakdowns.

Power system failures disproportionately impact vulnerable populations who are not only the most heat-exposed but also contribute minimally to energy demand. Many low-income households continue to rely only on fans and work in the most heat-exposed occupations. They also live in dense informal settlements, which act as heat traps with tin roofs and minimal green and blue cover.

Heat stress is exacerbated on severely hot days when AC usage in well-to-do neighbourhoods pushes power demand to unprecedented levels. This often leaves low-income neighbourhoods among the first to face load shedding, thus worsening energy inequity during extreme heat.

The rising cost of cooling

The challenge of managing peak power demand is increasingly becoming intertwined with efforts to advance a clean energy transition. India has certainly improved power availability during daytime peaks, thanks to the expansion of renewable energy sources.

Between March 2021 and March 2026, renewable energy, including hydro, expanded from 140 GW to 275 GW, raising its share of India’s total installed capacity from 37% to 52%. This rapid expansion has translated into a growing role of renewable energy sources in daytime peak demand management. Renewable energy, led by solar, helps meet around one-third of the daytime peak demand in India.

However, managing evening peaks remains a challenge.

Moreover, peak demand patterns are changing, with cooling demand emerging as one of the largest contributors. Escalating heat stress has thus exposed gaps in traditional demand forecasting based on a normal summer. As a result, electricity distribution companies are forced to procure costly power from the spot market to meet peak demand, further straining their already frail financial health.

Beyond supply expansion

The growing cooling demand and the power system’s exposure to heat stress are an opportunity for India to rethink how electricity demand, infrastructure resilience, and equitable energy transition pathways are planned. Rather than responding only through short-term supply augmentation, the emerging challenge calls for a broader approach that combines technological innovation, policy reform and socially inclusive adaptation strategies.

At the technical level, India needs to move beyond simply adding generation capacity. Improving energy-efficient cooling technologies, strengthening appliance efficiency standards, and promoting passive cooling measures could significantly reduce peak demand.

As a large share of future housing has yet to be built, greater emphasis on climate-responsive building design could reduce energy demand. Such measures are particularly important in urban areas where heat stress is amplified by a dense built environment that absorbs, retains and re-radiates heat, making urban areas warmer than the surrounding areas. This is often referred to as the urban “heat island” effect.

In addition, decentralised renewable energy, such as solar rooftops with battery storage, could help manage demand peaks during non-solar hours. An emphasis on storage infrastructure and demand-side management technologies could further reduce pressure on the transmission and distribution infrastructure during peak demand and improve the reliability of power supply.

At the policy level, escalating heat stress highlights the need for climate-resilient power system planning. Heatwave scenarios, volatile cooling demand and peak load variability should be integrated into electricity planning, urban governance frameworks and adaptation policies. India also needs to strengthen and promote measures like time-of-day tariffs, smart metering, and incentives for storage and flexible consumption.

Most importantly, energy transition must be reimagined to strengthen grid resilience in the face of uncertain future climatic conditions.

Making cooling equitable

At the social level, the growing demand for cooling raises important questions about equity and energy access. With rising temperatures and more frequent heatwaves, cooling is increasingly becoming essential for protecting health, livelihoods, and productivity, rather than being just a luxury. However, infrastructure failures disproportionately affect low-income households, who have limited access to affordable cooling options.

Therefore, ensuring affordable and reliable thermal comfort requires socially inclusive approaches that combine energy access, housing design, public infrastructure and decentralised energy systems.

Heatwaves are no longer temporary disruptions to India’s power system; they are emerging as one of its defining operating conditions. The challenge is not merely to keep pace with rising power demand, but also to build a power system that is reliable, climate-resilient, socially equitable, and capable of supporting the country’s long-term energy transition.

Sarada Prasanna Das and Anna Agarwal are fellows with Sustainable Futures Collaborative, New Delhi, and Shubhranshu Suman is a research associate with the organisation.

The new Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam government in Tamil Nadu has moved the Supreme Court against a Madras High Court order from January that allowed the lighting of a lamp at a stone pillar on Thiruparankundram hill near Madurai, Live Law reported on Tuesday.

The Vijay-led government had challenged the High Court order on June 11.

On December 1, High Court judge GR Swaminathan ruled that the stone pillar on Thiruparankundram hill near Madurai, Tamil Nadu, was a deepathoon, or a structure designed to hold lamps, and that the temple should restore the tradition of lighting the lamp at the site. This came after some temple devotees had sought permission to light a lamp at the stone pillar.

Swaminathan had also held that the practice would not infringe upon the religious rights of the nearby Muslim shrine.

The hillock has the Arulmigu Subramania Swamy temple and the Sikkandar Badhusha dargah.

The previous Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government, the temple authorities and the dargah management, among others, had challenged the order of the single judge, raising concerns about law and order, ownership of the site and the nature of the ritual that had been allowed.

On January 6, another bench of the High Court upheld Swaminathan’s order, observing that the stone pillar is located on the land that belongs to the Subramania Swamy temple.

However, it said that the lamp should be lit only by members of the temple management and that the public would not be allowed to accompany them.

This direction was challenged in the High Court by a Hindu association named the Hindu Dharma Parishad. In April, the court dismissed the challenge and criticised the association for filing a plea allegedly for political benefits and imposed a cost of Rs 50,000.

The Hindu Dharma Parishad then moved the Supreme Court, which also dismissed its petition earlier this month.

The top court, however, reduced the cost to Rs 5,000, saying that a penalty of Rs 50,000 was “on the excessive side”.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Refusing an urgent hearing, the Supreme Court told petitioners to approach the Calcutta High Court against the Bharatiya Janata Party government in West Bengal denying ration benefits to those excluded from the electoral rolls after the special intensive revision. The petition was filed by the Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity, a farm labourers’ union.

It had argued that 35 lakh to 60 lakh ration cards could become inactive if the government applies the new criterion.

Linking ration benefits to the electoral roll revision exercise violated the fundamental rights to equality and life, the union said, adding that the court itself had clarified that exclusion because of the revision exercise would not determine the citizenship status of a person. Read on.

The Congress on Tuesday alleged that the “engine of loot was running at full speed” in Madhya Pradesh, citing a report by The Indian Express. The newspaper reported that Chief Minister Mohan Yadav, his family members and their real estate companies have bought at least 168 acres of land in Ujjain since December 2023 in areas that will most benefit from infrastructure projects.

The land, spanning at least 137 plots, was bought at Rs 45 crore between December 13, 2023, when Yadav took oath as chief minister, and December 2025, according to the newspaper. Most of the properties are either close to road projects or in areas where the land use will be changed from agriculture to residential or commercial under the Ujjain Master Plan 2035.

Congress’ Madhya Pradesh unit chief Jitu Patwari asked if the government will make public every aspect of these land transactions and if the chief minister will order an investigation into the allegations. “Narendra Modi often speaks about clean and ethical politics...will Modi Ji take cognisance of these unethical acts and ask Mohan Yadav to resign?” Patwari asked. Read on.

The Trinamool Congress has sent a fresh list of its office-bearers and National Working Committee members to the Election Commission, stating that Mamata Banerjee is the party chief. This came after a group of rebel West Bengal MLAs led by Ritabrata Banerjee “removed” Mamata Banerjee as the party chairperson on Monday.

The rebel MLAs named party leader Arup Roy as the chief of the “real TMC”. Ritabrata Banerjee said that the legislators wanted Mamata Banerjee to serve as their chief adviser. Read on.

The southwest monsoon has advanced further into parts of Maharashtra, including Mumbai, said the India Meteorological Department. It added that the weather system has also reached the remaining parts of Telangana and Odisha and some areas of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar.

The usual date of onset of the southwest monsoon in Mumbai is June 11. In southern Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, it typically arrives between June 10 and June 15. Read on.

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