There is no road to Bargur. To get to the village, in the Kotagiri taluk of Tamil Nadu’s Nilgiris district, you have to step down from a tar road onto a mud path that leads to a stream below. Then, you cross the stream and follow the path up to the village.

When I visited the village in early October, Mari Manday was still grappling with a tragedy. Manday, who said he was between the ages of 50 and 55, is a member of the Irula community, a Scheduled Tribe in the Nilgiris. The previous week, Manday’s eight-year-old granddaughter had died.

Manday is not sure what had caused his granddaughter’s death. “The first day she had fever, vomiting and diarrhea, and the second day it continued,” Manday said. “The third day, we took her to the hospital. But she died almost immediately after she reached the hospital.”

The child’s parents had also fallen ill and were admitted to the hospital along with her – their condition had improved and they were out of danger.

Manday was distraught that they could not save the child, particularly because they could not afford to take her to the hospital in time. If they had, he said, “Maybe she would have survived.”

Conversations with others who live in the area revealed that such struggles to access healthcare were commonplace.

The cost of an auto, jeep or car to the nearest hospital in Kothagiri, about 20 km away, is at least Rs 700. This cost is prohibitive to residents, many of whom are daily wagers and earn between Rs 200 and Rs 300 per day. Locals explained that in some emergency cases, hospitals send ambulances free of cost, but that in other instances, they have to pay.

Public transport in the area is unreliable. Jyothi N, a resident from a hamlet near Manday’s settlement said that a bus that usually passed through the area had not arrived for the last few weeks because the roads were in a poor condition. “We have to fully rely on private vehicles to go to the doctor now,” Jyothi said.

Jyothi herself was struggling with this problem when I met her. “My daughter, like so many others here, has also been ill,” she said. “I should take her to the doctor soon.”

Because travel is unaffordable, many in the area undertake arduous walks across the terrain, particularly challenging when they are ailing.

Dr Ajith JS, a community health specialist who works in the Gudalur Adivasi Hospital, explained that the risks of such journeys are far greater than they may seem. “In a two-dimensional view, it may seem like the distance to a primary health centre or a government hospital is only 4-5 km but if you look at it three-dimensionally, there could be a hill or a forest patch or a private estate in between the nearest primary health facility and the residence of the patient,” said Ajith.

He added, “It is either uphill or a dangerous slope. The roads are made of concrete and cement, which is often slippery, especially during rains. And so by the time they get to a road where they can access public transport, they are completely enervated.”

Doctors, too, cannot easily access some of these villages. “There are some areas which we can visit only two or three times a year,” Ajith said.

Manday recounted that one of his daughters experienced the immense risks of these journeys a few years ago. “We were carrying her in a makeshift stretcher and could not make it to the road on time and right when we were crossing the stream, she gave birth,” he said.

Efforts to bring better healthcare to locals are few and unreliable. In a neighbouring hamlet, a nurse visits once a week but since she does not have any fixed timings, Manday and his neighbours often miss her. Sometimes, a van operated by a local NGO makes rounds in the area, but they miss it also because they cannot see the road from their homes. “Unless one of us happens to be on the road, we have no idea that it is close by,” Manday said.

These challenges are particularly striking in light of Tamil Nadu’s overall strong performance in the field of health. The state has switched between the second and third positions over the last few years in NITI Aayog’s Health Index, indicating that it provides affordable healthcare, and also offers a high degree of specialised services. It is well known for drawing patients from other states and even countries to its hospitals.

But in the Nilgiris, the district in the state with the highest density of Adivasi population, a combination of factors has meant residents have little access to even basic health services. These include the villages’ remoteness and discrimination that locals face when they seek out health services. As activists and experts noted, these challenges are further exacerbated by the social and cultural alienation they experience as a result of their displacement from their traditional homes and ways of life.

While many in the region first seek help at hospitals closest to them, typically run by NGOs, since these are usually small, patients are often referred on to government hospitals. Locals said when they visited these, they often felt discouraged by the poor treatment they were met with.

Mallika Suresh, who lives in Sri Madurai panchayat in Gudalur taluk, is the mother of three children. Suresh, who is in her late thirties, and belongs to the Kattunayakan community, recounted that after her third and fourth child died shortly after birth, doctors and nurses at the government hospital in Gudalur had warned her that having another child was not advisable.

After losing two children, Suresh was heartbroken, but she had two sons, and now yearned for a daughter.

When she got pregnant again, for the first four months, Suresh did not visit the hospital, worried that she would be scolded.

But when Suresh’s due date approached, an NGO-run hospital in Gudalur referred her to the government hospital in Udhagamandalam, more popularly known as Ooty, 50 km away.

There, she recounted, she had one of the worst experiences of her life. Suresh, who was carrying her daughter in her arms as she spoke, wiped away tears streaming down her face as she recalled her ordeal. “They spoke to me very rudely, humiliated me for getting pregnant again,” she said. “I could not tolerate the way they were behaving. It left me very distressed.”

She added, “At one point, I felt it would have been better to die than to remain in the hospital. But just for the sake of my child, I held on to whatever little strength I had and stuck on.”

She delivered her daughter at the hospital, but said that she would hesitate to return to it. “We look at doctors like they are gods, but they treat us so badly,” she said.

Kamalachi, a social worker who also belongs to the Kattunayakan community, said that the rights of Adivasi women and men over their own healthcare choices were often violated.

As a particularly egregious example, she noted that Adivasi women are often compelled to get sterilised after the birth of two children. “They somehow make us say yes even if we don’t want to,” she said. She added, “Sometimes they insert Copper-T and don’t tell women about it” – referring to the reversible contraceptive device.

People that Scroll spoke to also said that they were often given medication without being told what diseases they suffered from, and what the medication was meant to treat.

Manday, for instance, recounted that on one visit, he was given pills to take, but could only guess that they were for “BP or sugar”.

Patients are denied clear information even in more serious situations. “Once a neighbour called me and said the doctors had asked her to transfer her son to a hospital in Kozhikode and I was helping coordinate,” Kamalachi said. “The next thing I heard was that he had been brought dead to Kozhikode. We were not given any information of what had happened to him or how he died.”

Even this treatment is an improvement from what was meted out to locals just four or five years ago, Kamalachi explained. Then, she noted, healthcare workers actively segregated Adivasi patients from others.

“They would make Adivasis sit in a separate line and wait for a long time, but we would see that they would allow other people to go in first,” she said. “And when we went in to see the doctor, they would barely touch us and just write a prescription.”

Among the key structural factors that affects the health of Adivasis in the region is malnutrition.

One study, by the Association for Health Welfare in the Nilgiris, which surveyed more than 1,000 children under five years of age in the Gudalur and Pandalur regions, found that almost half were malnourished.

Manday also said that his granddaughter had been malnourished and had frequently fallen sick.

On the day I visited Manday’s house, residents in the neighbouring Adivasi settlements said that almost every house had someone who was running a fever or had a cold. They explained that they had become more susceptible to illnesses in the last few years.

A crucial reason for their low immunity and malnutrition, they argued, was the changes their diets had seen as a result of their displacement from their original settlements.

In 2008, the government, acting on the orders of the Supreme Court, resettled more than 800 families inside the district’s Mudumalai Tiger Reserve outside the forest. Over the years, many Adivasi families have also been forced to move out of forests to make way for expanding tea estates, as well as an increasing number of settler communities in the region.

Even in Suresh’s case, she and her neighbours from the settlement had been displaced from the heart of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve to different parts of Gudalur. While some were settled in government-constructed houses near existing villages, some were given money to purchase land outside the reserve.

These locations are far away from their traditional hunting and foraging grounds, which also served as cultural centres for their communities.

Every Adivasi person I spoke to said they missed the food that they previously foraged from the forests. This included various kinds of leafy vegetables, native tubers, different types of millets, ragi, honey, pumpkin and mushrooms.

“We would eat so many different kinds of greens and that would keep us very strong,” an elderly woman who was Suresh’s neighbour, and who used to live in the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, recalled with a smile. “None of that is available to us now.”

In a neighbouring hamlet, Velkan Verai, another elderly man who could not recall his age, and was displaced from his original home, said that when he was younger, he never needed to go far to get food or water.

“We would get fresh water all through the year and we would pluck so many greens, potatoes and vegetables from the forest,” said Verai, who is from the Paniya tribe, which is classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group. “And we had enough land to grow anything else that we wanted. There was never a dearth of nutritious food for us.”

“Today, we don’t even have proper water,” added Verai, who, along with a few other Paniya families, lives in a government-constructed house.

Kamalachi said she too felt there was a significant difference in her own body from the time she lived inside the forest to the present, when she lives closer to the town. “Those days we could walk long distances, carrying heavy loads and not feel tired. The previous generation too had more strength and stamina,” she said. “Now we never have any strength to do anything.”

“Look at us now,” she added, showing me her thin arms. “We barely weigh anything.”

Communities’ displacement and their current low incomes particularly affect their intake of protein, a major part of their diet when they lived in forests. “We used to eat all kinds of meat when I was younger,” said an elderly man in Kil Kothagiri, who was herding his cows. “That’s what made us strong. Now we barely eat meat.”

Even those families who live closer to forests cannot easily access produce they once could because their entry into them is restricted.

“The forest department prevents us from going into certain parts,” said Manday, who still lives close to the forest.

Adivasi communities are now solely dependent on the food provided to them by the government – mainly rice, lentils, oil and sugar. Their displacement “has caused Adivasis to become heavily dependent on the public distribution system”, Ajith said.

Rice, which they receive in the greatest quantity, forms the bulk of their diet. Ajith noted that while it satisfied hunger, it did not provide adequate nutrition.

Further, the quantity of rice they are provided is not always sufficient. “We cook only once a day and eat only one meal a day, which is mainly just rice,” Suresh said.

Ajith noted that the government had been making some efforts to remedy the situation. “In the last few years, the Public Distribution System has been providing millets alongside rice, but dietary diversity in most households remains a persistent challenge,” he said.

The Association for Health Welfare in the Nilgiris has also been supporting the government’s work by providing families with nutritional foods such as dates, peanuts, and a millet-based mix. Ajith said that these various efforts have led to a slow and sustained improvement in the levels of malnutrition over the last two years.

But he explained that this was not “a magic bullet solution” since the problem is often “intergenational” – that is, “malnourished mothers carry and give birth to low-birth-weight babies, who grow up to become malnourished children”. Thus, he noted, “We can’t bring them up to normal weight by merely supplementing their diets with high calories, as this might give rise to future metabolic disorders like high blood sugar and blood pressure during adulthood.”

Another pressing problem that the Adivasi communities are facing that is linked to their displacement is alcohol addiction. “Alcohol dependence is a massive issue among Adivasi communities,” social worker K Mahendran said.

In early October, as Mahendran spoke with the residents of a Paniya settlement about some compensation that was due to them as part of their relocation, he advised them not to spend it on drinking.

All the women instantly began to complain to him about how they were tired of putting up with their husbands’ addiction.

“They are not going to listen to us,” one visibly angry woman said.

Kamalachi’s husband died as a result of an alcohol addiction. “When we lived inside the forest, he didn’t have that much access to alcohol,” she said. She recounted that he would typically remain busy with work through the day. “But once we were moved closer to the town, it became easier for him to buy,” she said. “He began drinking all the time and eventually died due to it.”

She added, “Now there is a liquor shop in every nook and corner, and many Adivasi men end up spending most of their money on liquor.”

Ajith, who runs community health initiatives to address malnutrition and mental health in the region, has also found that alcohol dependency is a matter of great concern. “It is safe to assume that in the backdrop of undernutrition in these communities, consumption of alcohol will have much more addictive and toxic effects,” Ajith said.

Mahendren explained that suicides also occur often as a result of addiction. “Sometimes fights break out and we have had cases where often Adivasi individuals impulsively commit suicide,” he said.

In fact, the suicide rates among Adivasis in the Gudalur and Pandalur regions is also significantly higher than the general population, Ajith pointed out. While data from 2022 shows that the national average of suicides in the country is 12 per 100,000 persons, these regions saw 19 suicides among 34,000 persons in 2023-’24.

Ajith explained that in his research on mental health in the region, he had found that another factor behind the high suicide numbers was the inequality that communities had been exposed to in recent years.

“Just across the road from an Adivasi hamlet, they are able to see signs of development and prosperity, and people who are not struggling like them, which leads to a sense of hopelessness,” he said.

In contrast, most resettled Adivasis live in small, cramped houses. In one Paniya settlement close to Gudalur town, families lived in two-room houses around 300 square feet in area. Though they once had access to land to forage in and cook in, they now largely survived by cooking inside their homes, which had resulted in soot settling on the walls, turning them black. Many residents suffer from difficulty in breathing as a result of inhaling smoke indoors.

Displacement has also weakened community bonds. “They have become isolated, and now every individual has to look out for themselves, which is very different from the way community kinship bonds usually operate in Adivasi communities,” Ajith said.

He added, “Land alienation, rapid and unsustainable urbanisation, economic hardship made worse by restricted access to forests, and the flattening of cultural identities, all lead to a sense of alienation, further exacerbating feelings of social isolation.”

Dr Mrudula Rao, the medical superintendent and family physician at the Gudalur Adivasi Hospital, noted that a major obstacle to improving healthcare in the region was the reluctance of communities to seek help when they needed it. “There used to be a lot of fear about what we would do to them,” she said.

She explained that the Gudalur hospital was making an effort to address this problem and had seen improvement. For instance, the administration sought to ensure that Adivasis were consulted and made part of the process of delivering care. “The patients trust us as they see people from their own community and who speak their language treating them,” she said.

But persuading them to follow through on referrals to other, bigger hospitals, remains a challenge.

“In government hospitals, which often have big campuses, it’s easy to get lost if you don’t have help.”

The doctors said it would benefit the Adivasi population if doctors were sensitised to their needs. “Doctors sometimes see hill districts as punishment postings,” said Ajith. “Many doctors who get transferred here are on bonds, so they may not have an understanding of what the needs of the patients are.”

He added, “It’s important to make doctors go through sensitivity training so they treat Adivasi patients with extra care in order to encourage them to seek healthcare.”

Rao said that one way to address this problem would be for the government to sanction more tribal counsellor posts in healthcare centres and hospitals. As the website of the National Health Mission Tamil Nadu states, these counsellors help communities overcome “cultural shyness, lack of education/awareness, poverty, illiteracy, ignorance of cause of diseases, hostile environment”. In effect, they act as a link between health systems and tribal communities.

“It would be beneficial if there are tribal counsellors in every healthcare centre,” Rao said. “It would help patients get the care they deserve.”

The Rajasthan government on Sunday withdrew an order directing schools to observe December 6, the anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, as “Shaurya Diwas”, PTI reported.

The order, circulated late on Saturday on an official WhatsApp group, had instructed government and private schools to hold activities to promote “patriotism, nationalism, bravery, cultural pride and national unity” to mark the occasion, The Indian Express reported.

The Babri Masjid 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. The incident had triggered communal riots across the country.

In November 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 constructed.

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

On Sunday morning, Education and Panchayati Raj Minister Madan Dilawar recalled the order citing scheduled school examinations, The Indian Express reported.

“All schools in the state are currently conducting examinations, which will be held from December 5 and 6,” the newspaper quoted Dilawar as saying. “Therefore, it is not possible to conduct any other activities or events in schools during the examination period. Therefore, the ‘Shaurya Diwas’ celebrations are postponed.”

However, Director of Secondary Education Sitaram Jat told PTI that no such instructions had formally been issued to schools and that he did not know how the circular had been disseminated.

The withdrawn order, issued following instructions, had proposed a full-day programme for December 6.

Schools were asked to conduct essay and speech competitions on themes such as “Indian culture and the Ram temple movement, as well as painting and poster-making activities themed on the Ayodhya Ram temple”, The Indian Express reported.

The circular also proposed patriotic song performances, folk dances, short plays, group surya namaskar sessions, yoga practice and a special assembly beginning with hymns and aarti dedicated to the deity Ram, the newspaper reported.

Schools were also encouraged to host “Shaurya Yatras” within their premises and invite military personnel, social workers and history enthusiasts to address students.

Roadside shops selling steaming hot chai and samosas were among the first to down their shutters. The lull then spread gradually across this bazaar, located in front of a major thermal power plant in eastern India, with shop after shop winding up business after their sole customer base, the plant’s workers, were forced to leave after the plant’s closure four years ago.

“This road was a thoroughfare,” said Nrupati Jena, 65. “Workers thronged my shop through the day; I had a daily business of Rs 4,000.” Jena still sells biscuits, cigarettes, and paan [betel leaves] at the wide gate leading to the old plant, his shop the only one standing amidst shuttered ones.

“For three years now, my income has dropped to less than half,” he told Mongabay-India. “Nobody has asked us how we are surviving.”

The National Thermal Power Corporation, India’s largest power company, retired its 460-MW Talcher Thermal Power Station in the mining hub of Odisha in March 2021. The move was fiercely contested by worker unions in court, as worker unions cited insufficient notice – of less than a month – given to the contractual workers who lost their jobs. The court finally allowed the plant’s closure in October of the same year, said officials of the National Thermal Power Corporation.

While National Thermal Power Corporation employees were transferred to other projects of the power giant, and nearly three-quarters of the contractual workers who lost their jobs have since been reinstated at the new under-construction plant, the invisible collateral damage was the approximately 120 shops in the two nearby market areas.

Many shopkeepers from there returned to the undependable work of farming in the villages they had migrated from decades ago, while others took up odd jobs.

A few, like Jena, stayed on.

Warning for the future

This experience of Talcher’s shopkeepers, energy transition experts say, must guide India’s future actions to cushion fossil-fuel-dependent communities from the impact of imminent mine and thermal plant closures as the country builds its renewable capacity, aiming for a net-zero target by 2070.

The last of the shopkeepers in Talcher, where decades of coal mining and thermal plant operations have plummeted the town’s air quality to levels poorer than Delhi’s on occasion, now await a revival – in the form of a new, bigger thermal plant with a total 1,320 MW capacity, with one unit expected to be functional by March 2027, National Thermal Power Corporation officials said.

The Indian government, citing the ever-growing demand for energy and the need for energy security, is currently expanding coal mines and has decided not to shut any more thermal plants until 2030.

Energy transition experts note that the luxury of time this affords is an opportunity to strategise and build a post-coal future for local economies in coal-rich regions.

“The future of coal is uncertain, and planning to retire, repurpose, or upgrade a plant must begin 10 years before the closure. It is not like closing a small shop. It is a large-scale industry,” said Manideep Gudela, director, energy transition at the Centre for Energy, Environment and People, a Jaipur-based research and policy advocacy nonprofit, who has visited Talcher among other thermal plants in the country to study the socio-economic impact of the plant’s closure.

Gudela said that communities, particularly in areas such as Talcher, are deeply linked to coal mining and power operations and risk severe impacts if the government and businesses do not plan well in advance. Citing local estimates, he said that nearly 500,000 people were directly or indirectly dependent on the Talcher plant’s operations for a living.

“There was time to plan for a post-closure industrial diversification,” he said, citing findings from his research into government records on thermal plant closures that show that the National Thermal Power Corporation proposed to the CEA in June 2017 their intent to retire the existing 460 MW plant by December 2023. “There are other industries (beyond coal) that can be drawn to such regions. But the current focus of closures is to transition from coal to coal. This is a missed opportunity.”

The decline

Ice-cream parlour owner Biswanath Nahak, 56, had sensed an imminent decline in the years preceding the plant’s closure, even though shopkeepers like him were the last to find out about what workers said was a “sudden decision” to shut the plant.

The steady stream of children who cycled to his shop for cones and ice-lollies had gradually thinned out, and officers who would stop by on a late evening stroll had one by one said their goodbyes.

“People were retiring and there were no new hires,” said Nahak, standing in his shop, now a photocopying centre, located inside the sprawling National Thermal Power Corporation residential quarters, which in its prime housed nearly 5,000 people living in over 2,000 flats. The complex now wears a deserted look, with shopkeepers estimating that fewer than 200 people live here.

Nahak was drawn to the opportunity the thermal town offered as a young boy in the early 1990s. He was visiting his married sister in Talcher, from Ganjam, a district nearly 300 km away, but stayed on after seeing the town bustling with hundreds of workers.

There would always be work here, he thought. His bet paid off. He started work as a newspaper boy, soon opened a photocopying shop, and finally set up an ice-cream parlour. “It was a bull run,” he said of the market.

Until the closure

India decided to close Talcher Thermal Power Station along with those of 19 other thermal facilities across the country between 2021 and 2023, following “a detailed technical and economic evaluation”, according to a National Thermal Power Corporation and Indian government statement.

The closure led to 879 contractual workers losing their jobs while those on the company’s payroll were transferred to other National Thermal Power Corporation plants, according to the corporation Workers’ Union president Bishnu Mohan Rath and officials.

Of the laid-off workers, 678 have been reinstated, 135 appointments are pending, 30 have reached retirement age since the closure, 24 have passed away, and the rest have moved to other jobs, Rath said.

Those reinstated speak of being offered labour jobs rather than the technical roles they handled at the old plant, though Rath said those concerns would also be sorted in a couple of years once the new plant was operational.

The National Thermal Power Corporation said that most contractual workers affected by the closure were subsequently reemployed in the new project or provided employment through various agencies, with experienced workers given priority.

Officials cited new emission norms, the plant’s poor efficiency, and overall obsolete technology for the decision to close the plant, which dates back to 1967, when it was a major installation to serve India’s growing power demand. It went on to create jobs and nurture a local economy.

While the Indian government has stated that labourers and casual workers who may lose their jobs following thermal plant closures can be reemployed in other available jobs at National Thermal Power Corporation, there is no such assurance for impacted shopkeepers.

Biswanath Behera, 55, owned a small repair shop for bicycles and motorbikes but was forced to close it after the workers left. “Now I cook food at wedding parties,” he said, adding that he earned Rs 500 a day at his shop but now makes as little as Rs 200 as a kitchen help, that too when he gets work. His biggest regret, however, is that he could not fund the higher education of his two sons, who have also taken up odd jobs.

Officials from Odisha’s industries department and Talcher’s district administration did not respond to phone, email, or WhatsApp queries about the state’s plan for industrial diversification in coal-dependent regions such as Talcher.

According to local media reports, in May this year, the state cleared proposals to set up industries of steel, iron and ferro alloys, industrial gases, logistics, food and beverage, agro-processing, tourism and hospitality, chemicals, and apparel and textile in 11 districts of Odisha, which include Angul, where Talcher town is located.

The National Thermal Power Corporation said that the plant’s closure in 2021 “has served as a valuable learning experience”. The energy giant told Mongabay-India that key takeaways included the need for “early engagement with stakeholders, structured re-skilling programmes, proactive communication with affected communities, and closer collaboration with state employment and development agencies”.

“These insights are actively shaping the company’s approach to future decommissioning or transition projects to minimise socio-economic disruptions,” the National Thermal Power Corporation spokesperson said.

Burden of disease

The industrial district of Angul is dotted with coal mines, and steel and aluminium plants, its highways always busy with massive trucks ferrying metals and coal.

India’s Central Pollution Control Board categorises Talcher as a “critically polluted region,” its 2017 data showing its deteriorating air quality. It cites the town’s disease burden due to air pollution as “the second-largest risk factor responsible for premature deaths in Odisha.” Air pollution has also fuelled cases of ischaemic heart disease – when the heart muscle does not receive enough oxygen – and lower respiratory tract infections.

Respiratory diseases ranging from asthma to tuberculosis are common, said Dr Madan Mohan Pradhan, chief district medical officer of Angul district, adding that compromised lungs were more prevalent among adults and the elderly due to their longer exposure to unclean air.

Shopkeeper Jena’s wife has been suffering from asthma for 15 years. She takes regular medication for her condition and has a nebuliser at home. Jena attributes his wife’s condition to the toxic air they breathe in Talcher, but said, “Our problems will not shut down the coal business.”

Like in most coal-dependent regions, despite polluted air and water, and the impact of mining and thermal power on all life forms, the fossil fuel remains a lifeline.

But communities in regions such as Talcher cannot be blamed for not being able to imagine a life beyond coal, said sociologist and water activist Ranjan Panda, convenor of Water Initiatives, a network that works on water, environmental, and climate change advocacy, especially for vulnerable communities.

“The conversation around ‘just transition’ [an equitable shift to a green, sustainable future that leaves no one behind] is elitist so far,” he said. “The communities are not being seen as primary stakeholders in this transition dialogue, which mainly involves technocrats. There are discussions on redesigning, repurposing technology, and reducing emissions. But communities that had coal thrust upon them decades ago are non-entities.”

A new thoroughfare

Meanwhile, another bazaar is taking shape about a kilometre from the old market, on a once-quiet stretch of road that is now a thoroughfare for workers and officials. Shops selling soft drinks, crisps, tobacco, groceries and even clothes and medicines have come up in the past six months on this road, which leads to a new gate constructed for labour entry to the new plant.

Local shopkeepers estimate that more than 2,000 workers have already come in from the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat for the ongoing work on the new plant.

Among those who have set up shop here is Draupadi Raut. Her matchbox-sized store is stacked with bags of crisps, cookies, and dozens of small tobacco pouches in a polythene bag. The 47-year-old worked at the old plant for over two decades, earning a monthly income of Rs 12,000, which she said was steady, unlike her income now.

But the new plant promises assured business, with an endless stream of customers stopping by to purchase water, tobacco, or a small packet of potato wafers on a hot, sleepy afternoon. In the past six months, the road has been widened and streetlights installed.

The old market’s shopkeepers said they had no access to the land alongside the new road, as it was privately owned and they didn’t have the funds to lease a shop there.

For Jena, the gate of the old plant remains home.

“I haven’t thought of moving. This is my shop. I have been here since I was a 10-year-old, helping my father. Many shops have closed down, but the market is still there,” said Jena, sitting idle behind the counter on a weekday morning, a couple of local men hanging around for a chat.

“With the plant’s revival, I do hope workers will return to this market. Business might then improve,” he said.

This story is co-published by Mongabay-India and The Migration Story.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Cyclone Ditwah was on Sunday moving north along the coast of Tamil Nadu, leading to heavy rainfall in the region.

This came after the cyclonic storm caused devastation in Sri Lanka.

It is unclear where and when the cyclone will make landfall.

Here are the top updates:

• The India Meteorological Department said on Sunday afternoon that the cyclone was located about 170 km south-southeast of Chennai, 110 km northeast of Karaikal and 100 km east-southeast of Puducherry. It had moved at a speed of about 7 km per hour since morning.
• The cyclonic storm was very likely to move nearly northwards parallel to the northern Tamil Nadu-Puducherry coast in the next 24 hours. It would be within a minimum distance of 30 km from the coastline by Sunday evening, the weather department added.
• Three persons have died in rain-related incidents, the state’s Disaster Management Minister KKSSR Ramachandran said. The deaths occurred in Tuticorin, Thanjavur and Mayiladuthurai.
• Ramachandran said 28 disaster response teams are on stand-by and additional 10 teams have reached Tamil Nadu from other states, PTI reported.
• The weather department on Sunday issued a red alert warning for heavy to very heavy rain, with extremely heavy rain likely in one or two places in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruvallur and Ranipet districts. An orange alert for heavy to very heavy rain was issued for parts of Kancheepuram, Chennai, Chengalpattu and Vellore districts.
• In Andhra Pradesh, a red alert warning of extremely heavy rain was issued for Prakasam and SPSR Nellore districts.
• Two IndiGo flights operating between Chennai and Jaffna in Sri Lanka were cancelled on Sunday, The Indian Express reported.

Sri Lanka

• In Sri Lanka, the toll from flooding and landslides triggered by the cyclone increased to 212, The Hindu quoted the country’s Disaster Management Centre as saying. More than 200 persons are missing.
• The northern areas of Colombo were flooded as the water level in the Kelani River increased rapidly because of the heavy rainfall, AFP reported.
• Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake declared a state of emergency on Saturday to deal with the devastation caused by the cyclone. He also appealed for international help. More than 25,000 homes have been destroyed and 1.4 lakh persons were taken to temporary shelters, AFP reported.
• India’s National Disaster Response Force sent two teams to Sri Lanka to assist in relief operations. The Indian Air Force said it has positioned helicopters in Colombo for humanitarian assistance. Transport aircraft have also been earmarked for large-scale evacuation of Indians and to deliver essential relief material.

The Election Commission on Sunday extended by one week the timeline for the special intensive revision of electoral rolls underway in 12 states and Union Territories.

Booth-level officers had begun distributing enumeration forms on November 4.

The last date of submitting the forms has been extended to December 11 from December 4.

As per the updated schedule, the draft electoral rolls will be published on December 16 instead of December 9.

Voters will be able to file their claims and objections between December 16 and January 15, and hearings will be held by February 7 instead of January 31, according to the updated timeline.

The final electoral rolls are to be published on February 14 instead of February 7.

The exercise is underway in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Goa, Puducherry, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Lakshadweep, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

The task of preparing voter lists before elections is typically assigned to primary school teachers and anganwadi or health care workers, who are employed by state governments. They are required to go door-to-door and check the identities of new voters and verify the details of those who have died or permanently moved out of an area.

In the commission’s parlance, they are called booth-level officers. Each booth level officer is responsible for maintaining the voter list for one polling booth, which can sometimes have as many as 1,500 registered voters.

Several suspected suicides allegedly because of the work pressure related to the revision process have been reported in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Kerala and Rajasthan.

On November 24, reports stated that more than 60 booth-level officers and seven supervisors were booked in Noida for allegedly failing to comply with orders from senior officials during the revision process.

In Bahraich district, the administration has ordered first information reports against five booth-level officers, withheld salaries of 42 personnel and suspended a village-level revenue officer for alleged negligence.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll. Several petitioners also moved the Supreme Court against it.

Also read: I struggled to fill SIR forms. BLOs have it much worse

The Department of Telecommunications has issued directions to app-based communication service providers to make it impossible for their users to use services without a SIM. This comes after the DoT notified the Telecommunication Cybersecurity Amendment Rules, 2025, which bring in the category of telecommunication identifier user entity under the scope of telecom regulations.

The amendment introduced a new category of service provider called the Telecommunication Identifier User Entity, which would fulfill a range of cybersecurity obligations, including using a Mobile Number Validation Platform to verify the customers or users associated with a telecommunication identifier for services linked to such an identifier.

Besides validation, the government can also direct TIUEs to stop using a specific telecom identifier to identify customers or deliver services.

When the rules were first introduced, many raised concerns that the TIUE category was too broad and would cover almost any business collecting customer phone numbers to provide a service. This could range from food delivery platforms like Swiggy or Zomato to a local grocery store sending e-receipts via mobile numbers.

The new directions, which have been sent to WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Arattai, Snapchat, ShareChat, JioChat, and Josh, effectively recognise these companies as TIUEs. They require platforms to ensure that SIM cards remain continuously linked to their services within the next 90 days. For website or web-app-based access, TIUEs must ensure users are logged out periodically (not later than six hours) and must offer an option to relink accounts through a QR-code-based method.

The rationale

According to the directions, the government has observed that some apps using mobile numbers for customer validation allow access even when the underlying SIM is not present in the device. The government argues that this creates vulnerabilities exploited from outside India to commit cyber fraud. This reasoning aligns with the Cellular Operators Association of India’s August statement supporting SIM binding.

“Presently, the binding process between a subscriber’s app-based communication services and their mobile SIM card occurs only once during the initial installation and verification phase, after which the application continues to function independently on the device even if the SIM card is later removed, replaced or deactivated,” the industry body had explained.

This creates situations where a removed SIM does not prevent the use of an OTT communication app for criminal activity from any location. Without an active SIM, authorities have no verifiable link, such as call records, location data, or carrier logs, to establish where the service was used. As such, the Cellular Operators Association of India said that persistent SIM is binding on OTT communication services, which remains active beyond initial installation.

“This would ensure that the communication service cannot operate without the authenticated SIM physically inserted in the device, maintaining critical traceability between the user, the number and the device,” the association had mentioned in its statement. “COAI believes that this will not only help reduce the occurrence of spam and fraud communications significantly over these applications, but also help mitigate financial frauds by acting as a deterrent against misuse of app-based communication platforms, thus bringing relief to both the telecom service providers and the OTT communication platforms.”

Other sectors

Several financial applications, including banking and Unified Payment Interface apps, already enforce strict active-SIM rules to prevent fraud.

In February, the Securities and Exchange Board of India proposed hard-binding trading accounts to SIM cards, similar to the UPI system, ensuring only the actual trader can access the account. SEBI also suggested mandatory biometric or facial recognition checks to mitigate unauthorised trading risks.

How effective will SIM binding be?

At a 2023 MediaNama event, cybersecurity researcher and DeepStrat co-founder Anand Venkatnarayan explained that scammers frequently use loaned or forged IDs to procure SIM cards, bypassing KYC norms.

“They need 10 SIM cards for scamming a hundred victims; they don’t reuse SIM cards,” he said. He added that the scammers only need to procure two to three IDs per year to conduct their activities. In such cases, binding communication services to SIM cards may offer limited benefits, as fraudsters can simply acquire new SIM cards and resume operations.

Industry professionals had pointed out similar concerns during MediaNama’s discussion on the telecom cybersecurity amendment rules when they were in a draft stage. “Video KYC verification process through the ASTR database has been there for at least two years,” MediaNama Editor Nikhil Pahwa asked. “Frauds have not reduced. So if frauds have not reduced, how is bringing the same identifier to a different ecosystem going to increase trust?” ASTR is the AI- and facial-recognition-powered telecom subscriber verification system deployed by the DoT in 2023.

Pahwa also questioned whether the rules adequately address the issue of mule accounts. Responding to this, COAI Deputy Director General Vikram Tiwathia said the government’s goal is to maximise the usefulness of the telecom database.

“Now, where is the government coming from?” he said. “You see, there is a serious problem of cybersecurity plus fraud. Which is the most prevalent KYC? Is the mobile number devices. Correct. That’s the most prevalent, most updated, most monitored compared to any other device. So, the intent of the government is, how can I squeeze more juice out of this national resource?”

Full text of the directions

1. WHEREAS, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has, vide Notification No. CG-DL-E-21112024-258808 dated 21st November, 2024, notified the Telecommunications (Telecom Cyber Security) Rules, 2024, and has subsequently amended the same vide Notification No. CG-DL-E-22102025-267074 dated 22nd October, 2025 (hereinafter collectively referred to as “the Rules”);

2. AND WHEREAS, Rule 2(i) of the Rules defines “Telecommunication Identifier User Entity (TIUE)” to mean a person, other than a licensee or authorised entity, which uses telecommunication identifiers for the identification of its customers or users, or for provisioning or delivery of services.

3. AND WHEREAS, Rule 4(3) of the Rules obligates every telecommunication entity and TIUE to ensure compliance with the directions and standards, including timelines for their implementation, as may be issued by the Central Government for the prevention of misuse of telecommunication identifiers or telecommunication equipment, network, or services for ensuring telecom cyber security

4. AND WHEREAS, Rule 10(2) of the Rules permits the Central Government to use secure modes of communication, other than the designated portal, for issuance of orders, directions, or instructions to telecommunication entities, TIUEs, manufacturers, or importers of telecommunication equipment, or for collection of any information from such entities

5. AND WHEREAS, it has come to the notice of Central Government that some of the App Based Communication Services that are utilizing Mobile Number for identification of its customers/users or for provisioning or delivery of services, allows users to consume their services without availability of the underlying Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) within the device in which App Based Communication Services is running and this feature is posing challenge to telecom cyber security as it is being misused from outside the country to commit cyber-frauds

6. AND WHEREAS, it has become necessary to issue directions to TIUEs providing such App Based Communication Services to prevent the misuse of telecommunication identifiers and to safeguard the integrity and security of the telecom ecosystem;

7. NOW THEREFORE, the Department of Telecommunications, in exercise of the powers conferred upon it under the Rules, hereby directs TIUEs providing App Based Communication Services utilizing Mobile Number for identification of customers/users or for provisioning or delivery of services in India, to:

   • From 90 days of issue of these instructions, ensure that the App based Communication Services is continuously linked to the SIM card (associated with Mobile Number used for identification of customers/users or for provisioning or delivery of services) installed in the device, making it impossible to use the app without that specific, active SIM.

   • From 90 days of issue of these instructions, ensure that the web service instance of the Mobile App, if provided, shall be logged out periodically (not later than 6 hours) and allow the facility to the user to re-link the device using QR code.

8. All TIUEs providing App Based Communication Services in India shall submit compliance reports to the DoT within 120 days from issue of these directions.

9. Failure to comply with these directions shall attract action under the Telecommunications Act, 2023, the Telecom Cyber Security Rules, 2024 (as amended), and other applicable laws.

10. These directions shall come into force immediately and shall remain in force until amended or withdrawn by the DoT.
    
    This article first appeared on Medianama.

Key Maoist leader Vikas Nagpure alias Navjyot alias Anant surrendered before the police in Maharashtra’s Gondia district on Friday along with 10 others.

Anant was the spokesperson of the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh special zonal committee of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). Days earlier, he had issued a press release urging the chief ministers of the three states to halt anti-insurgency operations, and setting January 1, as the deadline by when the Maoists would surrender, The Indian Express reported.

Ankit Goyal, the deputy inspector general of police (Gadchiroli range), camp Nagpur, told the newspaper that multiple factors had led to Anant’s surrender.

“We tried to convince him, and the operations were also going on, and probably he felt that this was the right time to surrender,” Goyal said.

महाराष्ट्र-मध्यप्रदेश-छत्तीसगढ (एम. एम. सी.) झोन मधील स्पेशल झोनल कमेटी मेंबर विकास नागपुरे उर्फ नवज्योत यांचेसह एकूण ११ माओवाद्यांनी गोंदिया जिल्हा पोलीस समक्ष केले आत्मसमर्पण pic.twitter.com/ztWNnXm9mg

— गोंदिया पोलीस - Gondia Police (@Gondiapolice) November 29, 2025

Anant was among the key Maoist leaders in the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh zone, with only one Central Committee member – Ramdher – above him in the CPI (Maoist) hierarchy, the official said, according to The Indian Express.

“Ramdher’s group is still there in the northern part of the region, but we are sure that he will surrender soon,” Goyal further said.

The others who surrendered on Friday were divisional committee commander Nagasu Golu Wadde, Rano Poreti, Santu Poreti, Sangeeta Pandhare, Pratap Bantula, Anuja Kara, Puja Mudiyam, Dinesh Sotti, Sheela Madavi and Arjun Dodi, the Hindustan Times reported.

Gondia Superintendent of Police Gorakh Suresh Bhamare told the newspaper that the surrendered Maoists carried a collective reward of Rs 89 lakh.

The Union government has repeatedly vowed to end Maoism by March 31, 2026.

Since January, 114 Maoists have surrendered before the Maharashtra Police, the Hindustan Times reported. On October 15, 61 Maoists, including CPI (Maoist) politburo member Mallujola Venugopal alias Bhupathi, had surrendered in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli in the presence of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis.

In neighbouring Chhattisgarh, about 2,400 Maoists have surrendered in recent times, while 1,792 have been arrested and 485 killed by security forces, the Hindustan Times reported.

Malini Subramaniam has reported for Scroll that while many of those killed in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region in 2024 were declared by the police to be reward-carrying Maoists, several families dispute the claim. The families claim that the persons killed were civilians.

Also read:

• Skill training for surrendered Maoists or forced detention by Chhattisgarh police?

• Rs 5 crore bounty: Are rewards making anti-Maoist operations more deadly?

The Delhi Police has filed a fresh first information report against Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi on the basis of a money-laundering investigation by the Enforcement Directorate related to the National Herald newspaper, PTI reported on Sunday.

The move comes six months after the agency submitted a chargesheet naming the two leaders and five others in connection with the case.

According to the complaint lodged on October 3 by Enforcement Directorate Assistant Director Shiv Kumar Gupta, government properties originally allotted to Associated Journals Limited at concessional rates for public welfare activities were allegedly “diverted for personal gain”, The Indian Express reported.

The FIR invokes sections of the Indian Penal Code relating to cheating, criminal conspiracy, dishonest misappropriation of property and criminal breach of trust.

It names Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Suman Dubey, Sam Pitroda, Young Indian, Dotex Merchandise Private Limited, its promoter Sunil Bhandari, Associated Journals Limited and other unidentified persons, The Indian Express reported.

The Enforcement Directorate alleges that the case concerns a “serious form of criminal conspiracy and financial fraud”, asserting that Young Indian, which is owned by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, fraudulently took control of Associated Journals Limited properties worth more than Rs 2,000 crore for a “paltry sum” of only Rs 50 lakh.

“The accused persons have exploited these assets by engaging in fraudulent activities such as collecting bogus rents or generating fake revenue through sham advertisements, thereby laundering illicit money under the guise of legitimate transactions,” the newspaper quoted the complaint as saying

The Economic Offences Wing registered the FIR based on the Enforcement Directorate's request under Section 66(2) of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, which allows the agency to share evidence to enable registration of predicate offences, PTI reported.

The Congress criticised the FIR, accusing the Union government of “mischievous politics”.

In a statement on X, party leader Jairam Ramesh said the “Modi-Shah duo is continuing with its mischievous politics of harassment, intimidation, and vendetta against the top leadership of the INC”.

“Those who threaten are themselves insecure and afraid,” he said on social media. “The National Herald matter is a completely bogus case. Justice will ultimately triumph.”

The Modi-Shah duo is continuing with its mischievous politics of harassment, intimidation, and vendetta against the top leadership of the INC. Those who threaten are themselves insecure and afraid.

The National Herald matter is a completely bogus case. Justice will ultimately…

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) November 30, 2025

The allegations

In April 2008, the National Herald, which was founded and edited by Jawaharlal Nehru before he became India’s first prime minister, suspended operations as it had incurred a debt of over Rs 90 crore.

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy filed a complaint against the newspaper in 2012, alleging that Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi set up Young Indian to buy the debt using the funds from the party.

Swamy alleged that Young Indian paid only Rs 50 lakh to obtain the right to recover Rs 90.2 crore that the Associated Journals Limited owed to the Congress.

The Congress has claimed that there was no money exchange, and that only debt was converted into equity to pay off certain dues including employee salaries.

The Congress on Saturday said that Delhi’s escalating air pollution was like “slow poison” and that the government must be held accountable on the matter.

Party leader Sandeep Dikshit said an MP-level committee should be considered to coordinate action, warning that residents were suffering while the Punjab and Delhi governments were exchanging political accusations.

The Aam Aadmi Party is in power in Punjab, while the Bharatiya Janata Party is at the helm of the Delhi government.

Dikshit, addressing a press conference at the Congress headquarters, noted that doctors have said that air pollution in Delhi reduces the life of an average person by 6 to 7 years, and that the risk is even greater for those suffering from diseases.

दिल्ली की प्रदूषित हवा हर सीमा पार कर चुकी है। दिल्ली में अभी जो गंभीर हालात हैं, वो स्लो-पॉईजन जैसा है।

डॉक्टरों का भी कहना है कि दिल्ली की प्रदूषित हवा एक सामान्य व्यक्ति का जीवन 6 से 7 साल तक कम कर रही है और बीमार व्यक्ति को खतरा ज्यादा है।

वायु प्रदूषण के कई कारण हैं, लेकिन… pic.twitter.com/P6viKrurce

— Congress (@INCIndia) November 29, 2025

The Congress leader said Delhi’s air quality had deteriorated to such an extent that “the city is no longer worth living in”.

Dikshit argued that while stubble burning and festive firecrackers contributed only marginally and seasonally, the biggest source of air pollution was year-round vehicular emissions, which he estimated contributed to “around 30 to 45%” of the pollution.

Also read: Delhi’s failure to act against the biggest source of its air pollution – vehicles

He said increasing congestion and deteriorating road conditions had slowed down traffic compared with the years when Delhi was developing. Public transport, particularly buses, had “collapsed”, he claimed, adding that the number of private vehicles had risen even as metro expansion had stalled.

“Another major cause of pollution is industrial pollution, which uses dirty fuel,” the Congress leader added. “Illegal factories in Delhi cannot operate without the connivance of the MCD, police, and politicians.”

He also said garbage burning and the decline of proper waste-segregation systems were further aggravating factors.

“Previously, dustbins were installed in many places in Delhi, where waste was kept separately,” he said. “The people of Delhi participated enthusiastically in this, but now everything is gone.”

“Money should be invested on road infrastructure, bus system, and the metro,” he added. “You will get enough time to do populist politics – if governments spend all funds for giving things free, there will not be finances for basic facilities.”

On Sunday, Delhi’s average Air Quality Index stood at 269, categorised as “poor”, showed the Sameer application, which provides hourly updates published by the Central Pollution Control Board, at 11.05 am.

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

Between 401 and 450 indicates “severe” air pollution, while anything above the 450 threshold is termed “severe plus”. An Air Quality Index in the “severe” category signifies hazardous pollution levels that can pose serious risks even to healthy individuals.

Air quality deteriorates sharply in the winter months in Delhi, which is often ranked the world’s most polluted capital.

Stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, along with the lighting of firecrackers during Diwali, vehicular pollution, falling temperatures, decreased wind speeds and emissions from industries and coal-fired plants contribute to the problem.

Delhi has been recording air quality in the “poor” or worse categories since mid-October, leading to Stage 3 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan being imposed on November 11.

On Wednesday, the Commission for Air Quality Management withdrew the Stage 3 restrictions, citing improved air quality. The restrictions under the GRAP 1 and GRAP 2 remain in force.

Also read: What the air-pollution advisory from India’s health ministry hides

The authorities in Assam’s Nagaon district on Saturday launched an eviction drive to clear encroachments from 795 hectares of reserved forest land, where about 1,500 families – all of them Bengali-speaking Muslims – had been living.

The eviction was carried out in the Lutimari area of the Nagaon district.

The administration had issued notices three months ago directing the families to leave the area within two months, PTI reported. The families had asked for an additional month to vacate the area, to which the administration agreed, the news agency quoted an unidentified official as saying.

When the demolition drive took place on Saturday, more than 1,100 families had already dismantled their homes and left with their belongings. The remaining homes were demolished in the drive, the official told the news agency.

The Assam Tribune quoted one of the evicted residents as saying that they did not have a place to stay after the drive. “It would have been better if the government had provided a place for us,” the individual said. “We left voluntarily as per the order, and we want rehabilitation.”

Forest Department Special Chief Secretary MK Yadava said that clearing the encroachments from the area would help curb human-elephant conflict on the forest land, the Assam Tribune reported.

Since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in Assam in 2016, multiple demolition drives have been conducted across districts, mostly targeting areas populated by Bengali-speaking Muslims.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has claimed that since he took over the post in May 2021, over 160 square kilometres of land had been freed from encroachments.

Many of those displaced have claimed that their families had been living in the areas for decades, and that their ancestors had settled in the areas after their lands in riverine areas were washed away because of erosion by the Brahmaputra river.

The Election Commission’s revision of voter lists in 12 states and Union Territories has been marred by suspected suicides of booth-level officers, or BLOs, since the exercise began on November 4.

There have been at least two cases reported from West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh and one each from Rajasthan, Gujarat and Kerala. There are also news reports of BLOs dying due to SIR-related stress and work pressure.

What is it about this current round of special intensive revision that has put so much pressure on booth-level officers?

BLOs are part-time employees of the Election Commission. They do this work in addition to their roles as school teachers, post-office employees, anganwadi workers or local revenue officials. Till August, they were paid Rs 500 a month for their election duties. After that, it was hiked to Rs 1,000.

These BLOs are accountable to Electoral Registration Officers, who are usually sub-divisional magistrates. According to The Indian Express, during the entire span of the Bihar special intensive revision, 39 BLOs were suspended and 42 had first information reports filed against them. In just one week in Uttar Pradesh, 60 FIRs have been filed against BLOs in Noida alone.

Imagine a day in the life of a BLO who is a school teacher in Uttar Pradesh. School begins at 9 am in the winter and ends at 3 pm. When clubbed with pre-work preparation and the commute, this alone takes about eight hours of the day.

Then comes the special intensive revision work. A polling station in Uttar Pradesh has 953 electors on average. The BLO has to distribute enumeration forms to all these electors and guide them on how to fill them. She has to make inquiries about electors who are enrolled in the village but have migrated for work, since they too need to submit the forms.

The special intensive revision now underway puts more work on the BLO than the Bihar exercise did. Its order says that BLOs need to mention probable cause for electors they cannot find. After inquiries with neighbours, they need to be labelled as “absent”, “shifted”, “dead” or “duplicate”.

Most crucially, BLOs in Bihar were not bound to search for the names of electors in the 2003 electoral roll. In some pockets of the state, they were simply collecting filled forms with Aadhaar details – even before the Supreme Court ordered Aadhaar to be included as one of the documents to prove one’s identity. I observed this first-hand while reporting in Purnia district.

BLOs outside Bihar do not have this luxury. For the ongoing revision, the Election Commission has categorically laid down that “no document is to be collected from electors during the enumeration phase”.

Instead, this revision has a more detailed enumeration form that demands excruciating detail. In addition to information about themselves, their parents and spouse, electors have to put down the serial number, booth number and the Assembly constituency number as it was in 2003 for themselves and their relatives.

“Hardly anyone in our village has bothered to fill in these details,” Pawan Kumar Tripathi, a BLO in Raini village in Uttar Pradesh’s Mau Assembly constituency, told me. “They are busy working in the fields. Many are occupied with wedding duties because this is the wedding season. Instead, we have to find the 2003 precedents of each elector ourselves and fill them in.”

Last week, I found out how difficult this could be when I decided to fill all the special intensive revision forms in my family. The hardest part is figuring out the polling station my parents were registered in 22 years ago.

The Election Commission adds and modifies polling stations every year, which means your local booth had a different number than 2003.

What complicates this further is that polling stations split and merge over time. So while my locality might have its own booth now, two decades ago, it shared one booth with two other colonies.

To get around this, I had to download the voter lists of several booths around my area. Only after a couple of hours of painstaking work could I find my parents’ names in the roll.

Unlike me, a BLO in Uttar Pradesh has to do this for 953 people. It must be done before December 4, while struggling with patchy internet, that too while juggling it with her school duties, commute, family chores and, if she is lucky, some much-needed rest.

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

The contentious labour codes. Kerala’s Labour Minister V Sivankutty said the state will not implement the Union government’s new labour codes. He said that the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment had convened a meeting of all states in October, during which Kerala reiterated its position against adopting the codes.

The Union government on November 21 notified the implementation of four labour codes, which replace 29 labour laws.

The Centre claims the new codes are aimed at extending coverage of statutory protection to platform workers. This includes need-based minimum wages, non-hazardous working conditions and universal social security entitlements.

However, critics have argued that the codes fail to extend social protection to the vast majority of informal sector workers.

Polygamy ban. The Assam Assembly passed a bill to ban polygamy. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma contended that the new law is not against Islam, and said that several Muslim-majority countries have also prohibited the practice.

However, Opposition leaders argued that the draft law violated constitutional provisions pertaining to the freedom of religion and the freedom to manage religious affairs.

The 2025 Assam Prohibition of Polygamy Bill had been introduced on Tuesday. It proposes up to seven years of imprisonment for persons convicted of polygamy. Those found guilty of having concealed their previous marriage can face punishment of up to 10 years’ imprisonment.

Sarma also said that if he returns as chief minister, he will introduce a Uniform Civil Code in the first Assembly session.

The Ram temple. Prime Minister Narendra Modi hoisted a saffron flag atop the Ram temple in Ayodhya, marking the completion of its construction. He claimed that the event marked “centuries-old injuries” being healed, and “centuries of torture” finding respite.

However, the Congress’ Rashid Alvi said that India has no religion as per the Constitution, and questioned whether Modi would similarly hoist a flag atop a mosque, gurdwara or church.

The Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was demolished on December 6, 1992, by Hindutva extremists because they believed that it stood on the spot on which the deity Ram had been born. The Ram temple that now stands at the site was built in line with a Supreme Court verdict from 2019.

Also on Scroll last week

• How Tata Group became BJP’s biggest donor weeks after Modi Cabinet cleared its semiconductor units
• As Ladki Bahin squeezes Maharashtra welfare schemes, will discontent surface in civic body polls?
• Why the police claim that a protest against Delhi pollution had ‘Naxal’ links
• Adani-led firm charged Rajasthan PSU over Rs 1,400 crore it wasn’t entitled to: Jaipur court
• What the air-pollution advisory from India’s health ministry hides
• Bangladesh: The death sentence for Hasina makes India’s hand stronger
• Harsh Mander: The incomplete dream of constitutional socialism in free India
• The rugged and tender charms of movie legend Dharmendra (1935-2025)
• ‘Gustaakh Ishq’ review: The real romance is between words rather than humans
• ‘Perfect Family’ review: Many home truths in a show about a dysfunctional clan

Follow the Scroll channel on WhatsApp for a curated selection of the news that matters throughout the day, and a round-up of major developments in India and around the world every evening. What you won’t get: spam.

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The National Investigation Agency has arrested a cleric and one of his associates from the Haldwani district in Uttarakhand in connection with the blast near Delhi’s Red Fort on November 10, PTI reported.

The two men – Mohammed Asif, the imam of the Bilali mosque in Haldwani, and electrician Nazar Kamal – were arrested on Friday night by a team of the central agency with the help of police officials in Delhi and Haldwani. They have now been taken to the national capital.

Asif and Kamal were arrested from Haldwani’s Banbhulpura area based on call records from a mobile number linked to Umar Nabi, the doctor who was believed to have been driving the car that exploded near the Red Fort, PTI quoted unidentified officials as saying.

After their arrests, a large number of police personnel from several stations, led by Haldwani City Superintendent of Police Manoj Kumar Katyal and Lal Kuan Deputy Superintendent of Police Deepshikha Agarwal, were deployed in Banbhulpura.

The police have increased security around the cleric’s home and around the Bilali mosque, PTI quoted Katyal as saying.

The blast near the Red Fort metro station left 13 persons dead. Two days after the explosion, the Union government described it as a “terrorist incident”.

On November 16, the agency arrested an aide allegedly linked to Nabi, who was identified as Amir Rashid Ali. The NIA alleged that the Hyundai i20 car used in the blast was registered in Ali’s name. This was the first arrest in the case.

The others arrested in the case till now have been identified as Jasir Bilal Wani alias Danish, Muzammil Shakeel Ganai, Adeel Ahmed Rather, Mufti Irfan Ahmad Wagay, Shaheen Saeed and Soyab.

This is a good time to think about the consistent attacks on a university system that, under the most constrained circumstances, has rivalled the best in the world. One, whose graduates have contributed to a wide variety of knowledge systems both within India and beyond it. Its modern history has something to tell us about what we stand to lose.

It is 1901 and Rabindranath Tagore is addressing a group of young boys on the model of education he favours. He would not like them, he says, to be soldiers, bank clerks or businesspeople. Rather that they should be “the makers of their own world and their own destiny”.

The Tagore family’s fortune derived from a combination of zamindari, money-lending and commercial activities and the privileged scion of a prominent landholding clan had a peculiar take on the educational needs of critical modernity. The latter requires something other than Tagore’s self-satisfied views on world-making.

Coming to Punjab

It is 1966 and 19-year-old Somalian Nuruddin Farah – employed as a clerk in the Ministry of Education in the national capital of Mogadishu – is about to make a decision about his university studies.

Local universities are in a state of intellectual and infrastructural disrepair and Farah has been offered scholarships at two institutions outside Somalia. One is at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the other, the University of Panjab, Chandigarh. Farah is an aspiring writer and an American mentor tells him. “If you don’t go to the United States, you will never become a writer.” Farah chose to study literature and philosophy at the University of Panjab.

Born in 1945, Nuruddin Farah published his first novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970), at the age of 24. He is widely regarded as one of the key figures of African and global literature. In September this year, he – along with lawyer Rebecca John and historian Ramachandra Guha – was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

My congratulations and best wishes to mentor Nuruddin Farah on being awarded an honorary doctorate by SOAS.

I first read "From A Crooked Rib" - Nuruddin's debut first novel - while still a child in primary school and found it extremely captivating.

Big talent. Deserving of… pic.twitter.com/2sbDGRZxZ6

— Rashid Abdi (@RAbdiAnalyst) September 2, 2025

When I heard him tell of his choice of Chandigarh over Madison – and their respective universities – I was taken aback. On the one hand, there was the apparently infinite promise that – within Africans and Asian imaginations of the 1960s – marked the idea of an American education. And, on the other, the instant disadvantage that might come from an enrolling at an Indian university, one that might have ranked quite a few stages below even others within India, such as those in Calcutta and Delhi. Why the University of Panjab, I wondered.

Some part of the answer lies in the Nehruvian promise of educating bank clerks, merchants, soldiers and engineers to be both clerks, merchants, soldiers and engineers as well as poets and philosophers.

In a recent conversation, I asked Farah if, when making the choice of Panjab over Wisconsin, he did not fear that he was condemning himself to a future life of disadvantage. Others, I suggested, would have jumped at the opportunity of taking up a fully funded place at a major American university. His responses tell me that my line of questioning was out of time, unable to capture the spirit of an age.

For, though by the time Farah arrived in India, Jawaharlal Nehru had been dead for two years, the Nehruvian promise of the possibility of a non-western modernity – nurtured by local educational and cultural institutions – was still alive. “I thought,” Farah said to me, “that India and Africa could become closer to each other and that is one of the reasons I went to study in India.”

The Nehruvian promise

Nuruddin Farah came to India, he says, as he “had faith in India and the goodness of its intellectual class”. The Nehruvian promise emerged, to borrow the words of the great Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, through pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. It was premised on the hard work of understanding and undoing the negative effects of the past – pre-colonial and colonial – without ever being overwhelmed by the task.

What attracted Farah to Panjab University was a fundamental promise of decolonising the mind through the pessimism-optimism framework. Pessimism is a condition of the mind that reflects its capacity to analyse and optimism is a condition of thought that seeks solutions to the problems that pessimism identifies. This Nehruvian model of decolonisation – the belief in the capacity of all people to think, reflect and act – was fundamental to the attraction that was India.

When the novel “From a Crooked Rib” by Nuruddin Farah was published in 1970, I heard there were calls from sectors of #Somali society denouncing the book for immorality. I read the book years ago and the only thing that can be construed as “immoral” are short passages describing… pic.twitter.com/TruwNeF8qN

— Macawisle (@nololfiican) February 29, 2024

Nuruddin Farah’s much-celebrated From a Crooked Rib was written during his Indian sojourn and is frequently regarded as a parable of Somalian modernity: a story about its structures of colonial and gendered oppression and possible ways beyond them. Of this novel and of the time in which it was written, Farah has written that his literary skills were developed “in the iron words of a fiery truth that was given shape to and etched on the skin of lived history”.

While it would be both simplistic and unfair to entirely attribute the young Farah’s literary and political sensibilities to his time in India, it is reasonable to say that he found himself in an environment of debate and discussion that nurtured them. He was thrown into the middle of a bracing storm where “lived history” emerged out of a questioning of the past – rather than romanticising it – and directed him to imagine alternative futures. That was the Nehruvian promise.

As we conclude our discussion about his time in India, I ask Farah if he experienced personal anxiety as he prepared for his Indian stay. No, he says: “Even at that young age, I had the belief that Somalians were special and that I would be able to make my way in the world.”

At an Indian university in the mid-1960s, the young Somalian government clerk found himself in the crucible of a time and a promise where the “specialness” of non-western identities could be nurtured through the pessimism of critical thinking and the optimism of analytical thought. The clerk continued his journey to other worlds of possibilities.

Now, when university education seeks to promote the obedience that is inherent in clerical thinking, this is the world that we are in the process of losing. The problem, notwithstanding Tagore, isn’t to do with producing clerks and merchants. Rather, it concerns the making of an educational system that valorises clerical thinking as the ideal of national character.

Sanjay Srivastava is a Distinguished Research Professor in the department of anthropology and sociology, SOAS University of London.

Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) was a woman on the move. An Indian feminist, activist, and reformer, she journeyed to the United States in the 1880s – having previously traveled to Great Britain where she converted to Christianity.

In the US, she gave lectures to packed audiences across the country and raised funds to support and educate Hindu child widows. On her return to India, she wrote a book in Marathi explaining America and its customs, institutions, and people to her fellow Indians.

Radha Vatsal appeared as a guest on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s programme Ideas to discuss Ramabai’s life and legacy in an episode titled, “How this 19th-century Indian feminist flipped the travelogue on its head”. Here, Vatsal speaks to producer Pauline Holdsworth, to go deeper into Ramabai’s story and the making of the episode.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What interested you about Pandita Ramabai when you first heard about her?

I’ve always been really interested in travel narratives and what it is that people observe or are drawn to when they travel. I was really struck by, first, the clarity and sharpness of Ramabai’s voice, and she’s also very funny and very strong minded. She is moving through all of these spaces and learning from them and shaping them, as well as maintaining her own autonomy.

I was also really interested in her travels within India, and the fact that she had a childhood that was on the move. From a very young age, she was speaking in public, and encountering people of all different backgrounds and it made me think about how somebody shaped by that kind of life would develop her own moral center.

The other thing that I was struck by was her writing about American democracy, especially in this 21st-century moment where there’s a lot of discussion about a crisis of democracy, not just in the United States, but worldwide. Reading her initial hope and faith in democracy as a political system made me wish that we could read what she would write about the state of democracy worldwide today.

You took Ramabai’s story and opened it up so that it was more than just a narrative of her life. Can you talk about your process and how you found the areas that would be the most helpful to expand on?

I’m always fascinated by looking at both microcosms and macrocosms. And that’s something I’m always looking for when I’m working on episodes for Ideas – which is a programme on CBC radio that’s been running since the 1960s. On the show, we try and look at how ideas play out across time and space, and Pandita Ramabai is, of course, somebody who is moving across time and space in a really interesting way.

One of the things I wanted to explore were the dynamics between her and the different white women that she was encountering. I came across an article by Dr Tarini Bhamburkar [research affiliate at the University of Bristol] in which she points out that there hasn’t been a lot of attention paid to women’s relationships with women across race during this time period.

Dr Bhamburkar says that Victorianists love to theorise women’s relationships across race through the label of female friendship, but there’s a lot more that’s going on under the surface. And that was something that came up in the letters between Pandita Ramabai and her two friends and mentors in England, Sister Geraldine and Dorothea Beale. They were not very happy with the way that Ramabai was not accepting their Christian beliefs – because she had converted at this point, and that’s something that, when she returned to India later in her life, was quite controversial.

There’s one moment where they’re trying to get her to accept teachings that they consider to be proper Christianity. And Ramabai writes back: “I am not prepared to accept an essential doctrine which I shall not find in the Bible. I hope you will not be vexed with my freedom of speech.”

At another point, one of them says that she needs to come to them in a humble, childlike, teachable spirit. And Ramabai ends up replying: “Far be it from me to listen to such teaching. It is not humility, but a gross cowardice.”

When you read her writing, it’s hard not to be compelled by her as a figure, and by her very independent mind.

So when you put the episode together, you have read material about her and found out these interesting things. Do you try to get your guest speakers to hit on those points, or do you ask the questions and see where they lead?

I feel like I can never exactly hear what the final form will be when I’m starting an episode or even when I’m doing the interviews… And I often find that when the interviews lead me in directions that I couldn’t have anticipated, it makes for a richer episode.

When you and I spoke first, I had a sense of the chronological narrative arc of Ramabai’s life and her travels, and I thought that that would probably be a through line for the episode, and then I had in my mind, a sense of certain aspects that would open up. But speaking with Dr Sandeep Banerjee [associate professor of English at McGill University] opened up other questions around the British colonial travelogue and how it narrates space, as well as the formation of solidarity across geography between, say, African Americans and Indians.

Pandita Ramabai is very engaged with the work of people like Harriet Tubman [former slave who became a prominent abolitionist], and I think she really sees that as a model or inspiration for India.

So when you first reached out to me about Pandita Ramabai, I was really excited because I think there’s so much in this larger archive that is so fascinating.

For instance, there are also Indian travelers in this time period going to China, going to the Middle East – they’re not just looking towards the West. They’re looking to other parts of Asia, and these travelogues give us really interesting insights into the formation of transnational connections.

For me it always a reminder that transnational connections are not new. Particularly now, when there’s so much rhetoric about immigration, it makes us feel that all these connections and immigration and travel, it’s all relatively recent. But that’s not correct, it’s been going on for a long time.

Yes. So all of these worlds keep opening up from the interviews, and I’m trying to figure out how can I have a balance between the forward momentum of the story of Pandita Ramabai’s life with also, doors opening up from it.

You can listen to the episode on Pandita Ramabai, How This 19th-century Indian Feminist Flipped the Travelogue on its Head, here.

Pauline Holdsworth is a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where she produces radio documentaries for Ideas, CBC’s national program for intellectual history and contemporary thought.

Radha Vatsal is the author of No. 10 Doyers Street and other novels. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

The Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest in the world. A maze of tidal waterways, mudflats and small islands, shaped by the ebb and flow of the Bay of Bengal, it stretches across 10,000 sq km of the India-Bangladesh border.

The Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers all meet the sea here, forming a rich habitat for Bengal tigers, spotted deer, saltwater crocodiles, fishing cats, monitor lizards and a wide variety of birds and fish.

What is sometimes overlooked is that millions of people also reside here. Behind the famous biodiversity lies a complex history of human dispossession, migration and climate adversity that shapes these people and threatens their existence.

Settlements and historical marginalisation

The Sundarbans has long been a site of resource extraction and exploitation, from Mughal settlements and Portuguese smugglers to East India Company rule. By the late 18th century, colonial rulers began clearing vast tracts of the mangrove forests for agriculture, with timber production displacing ecosystems and communities. Today, mangroves are still being lost due to a variety of factors including climate change and overexploitation, making the Sundarbans even more vulnerable.

Communities of Dalit and Adivasi make up the majority of the population. Locals told me how their ancestors migrated as early as the 1820s from the Chota Nagpur Plateau in eastern India, nearby towns, and parts of eastern Bengal.

Both Dalits and Adivasis are historically oppressed communities who face ongoing discrimination. Caste discrimination against the Dalits has led to atrocities such as the Marichjhapi Massacre in 1979. While Adivasi communities only arrived in the Sundarbans after being forcibly relocated by the British and colonial-era landlords, who needed labour to clear the forest.

As a result, these communities have lived, adapted and protected this mangrove ecosystem for centuries, yet remain largely invisible in conservation frameworks that prioritise wildlife over human rights. The Sundarbans is often portrayed as largely uninhabited, but it is home to 7.2 million people. These people now experience more frequent and destructive cyclones and flooding, as well as riverbank erosion caused by the rising sea and, as a result, increased salinisation of fresh water.

Climate effects

Life in the Sundarbans is labour-intensive, harsh and, thanks to the tigers, crocodiles and venomous snakes – often dangerous. Fishing and agriculture have been the two main forms of work for a long time but now climate change is taking its toll.

During my visit, a fisherfolk family told me they lost half their land in 2020 to rising sea levels. Sadly, they are not alone. Since the 1960s, 210 sq km of Sundarbans land has been lost to the rising sea.

Farmers told me they cultivate rice in paddies, vegetables, fruits such as watermelon and lately pulses (moong daal). The cultivating period is largely from July to November and harvesting takes place from December to February. From March to May the land remains fallow.

Locals said farming has become more and more challenging. Older generations shared stories about difficult but prosperous harvest cycles. Growing traditional crops becomes harder each year, damaging livelihoods and food insecurity.

“The water was sweet [here] before,” one farmer told me in the village of Namkhana, the gateway to the Sundarbans. “We could grow rice, and vegetables easily and the yield was good. Now… the water has become saline. It ruins our crops.”

Extreme weather events

Sundarbans and its residents are surviving in severe environmental stress and anxiety. The locals I spoke to recalled the devastation caused by Cyclone Aila in 2009, which destroyed 778 km of mud embankments that protected fields and aquaculture ponds from saltwater intrusions.

At the time, a project worth Rs 50 billion ($570 million) was proposed to rebuild the British-era embankments, but 10 years later only 15% of the project had been completed. When the more intense Cyclone Amphan hit in 2020, the region was once again devastated. Some 250 people died and the environmental losses were huge.

In the Indian portion of the Sunderbans, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss costs Rs 6.7 billion ($147 million) per year, equivalent to 5% of the region’s GDP in 2009, according to a 2014 World Bank study. “Floods are common here,” one local told me. “Every year the sea is so fierce it breaks the bandh.”

Bandh means embankments. Here they are supposed to be installed and maintained by the local government, though around the coastline all that is seen are incomplete or broken structures.

One farmer said floods last year killed freshwater fish in two of the ponds in his village. “We saw all the fish die and their eyes turning hazy within minutes of the flood. We had no fish for consumption that whole season,” he said.

Another farmer said soil in the Sundarbans is now too muddy for cultivation because of the rising salt content. Salt is known to lower the drainage capacity of soils.

Fishing problems

Some farmers have decided that fishing and fish farming offer better sources of income even though they are also impacted by climate change. “At least there are still fish to catch,” one said. “There is less and less land to grow with each passing year.”

The rise of commercial seafood farming – mainly crab and shrimp – has brought its own problems, however. To walk around the villages is to see many pond-like structures used for aquaculture. Mangroves are cleared to construct these, further weakening defences.

The Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, a tourist attraction that will soon be expanded, brings yet more problems for local fishers. Designed to protect the endangered Bengal tiger, it currently covers over 2,585 sq km in West Bengal. Of this, 885 sq km acts as a buffer zone, and is the only area small-scale fish farmers are allowed to operate in. If they cross into the rest of the area, called the “core zone”, their boats are likely to be seized.

Small-scale fisherfolk are fighting another battle on the coastlines. Fish workers said the number of trawlers has sharply increased, reducing their catch. One told me: “I have been fishing for 30 years here, before that my father. We could catch 100 kg of fish in a season, but now I am lucky if it’s even 25 kg.”

Over 300 species of fish have been recorded in the mangroves. The small-scale fishers and fish farmers are natural custodians of these water bodies. One farmer said: “We don’t catch small fishes, we know where the breeding grounds are, we place our catch far away from there.”

Women fish workers who I had the chance to meet shared a slightly different experience. They told me they make up half of the workforce, if not more, but remain under-represented in labour discussions, collective bargaining efforts or are represented tokenistically for political gains.

Then there is the annual fishing ban. In India, the government bans fishing for two months each year to help stocks regenerate. During this period, local and state governments provide welfare to affected fishers. But in West Bengal, where fishing is restricted from mid-April to mid-June, this does not happen. After protests, the local government announced it had introduced its own scheme in 2019. But locals told me they have not received any support funds since the announcement.

In the wake of recent climate disasters like Cyclone Amphan, however, grassroots organising has emerged, with local groups asserting their rights to land, livelihood and dignity. During my visit I was told that across West Bengal, 8,000 small-scale fishworkers organised a protest against repressions by local governance bodies. The group held a press conference demanding recognition of small-scale fish workers and for smooth processing of licence applications. They say the process is currently riddled with corruption and delays.

Climate resilience

One local leader, who is part of a small-scale fish worker union, told me: “The future of the Sundarbans and its inhabitants cannot be fulfilled by tokenistic approaches to conservation or short-term climate projects.”

Another union leader, who has been organising inland and oceanic fishworkers across West Bengal, added: “The need of the hour is to support grassroots movements and collectives who are forging new paths for themselves to advocate for and amplify their demands for economic alternatives, sustainable management of resources, and decolonising authoritarian structures.”

When asked about sustaining life and livelihoods in Sundarbans, many members of the local Dalit and Adivasi communities have a constant fear of displacement. A “managed retreat” of the population has been floated for over a decade, but locals I spoke to were strongly against the idea.

One of the locals said: “We have been witnessing hardships since we were young, now our children are growing up. We still face the same fears, all the restrictions are for us, but the tourist departments, forest departments have to follow no rules.”

While discussing how to adapt to these changes, many locals echoed that fisherfolk and farmers should be involved in restorative actions planned for the region. They believe that until Indigenous and local knowledge of the region is taken into account, the efforts will fail.

Puja Mandal is a feminist social worker focusing on gender, labour, caste and migration. As associate senior manager of labour rights organisation SLD, her expertise lies in community organising, feminist action research and documentation. She works with various human rights based collectives in India.

This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under the Creative Commons BY NC ND licence.

At least 123 persons died and more than 130 were missing in Sri Lanka due to floods and landslides triggered by Cyclone Ditwah, AFP quoted the country’s Disaster Management Centre as saying on Saturday.

The Sri Lankan government also declared a state of emergency.

The cyclone has since exited the island nation and is moving towards the south Indian coast, the country’s meteorological department said.

In a release issued at 2 pm, the India Meteorological Department said that Cyclone Ditwah was centred over northern parts of Sri Lanka and the adjoining parts of the southwest Bay of Bengal.

At 4.46 pm, the weather agency said on social media that the cyclonic storm over the southwest Bay of Bengal was moving north-northwest and was expected to approach the north Tamil Nadu-Puducherry-south Andhra Pradesh coast by early Sunday.

“Residents are advised to follow safety instructions and stay indoors during severe weather,” it added.

The IMD also issued a red alert for heavy to extremely heavy rainfall on Saturday for Chengalpattu, Viluppuram, Cuddalore, Mayiladuthurai and Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu, along with Puducherry and Karaikal in the Union Territory of Puducherry.

It also warned of heavy to extremely heavy rainfall across Tamil Nadu, south Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry for the next two days, the Hindustan Times reported.

Tamil Nadu Minister for Revenue and Disaster Management KKSSR Ramachandran told ANI that about 6,000 relief camps had been set up all over the state ahead of the landfall of Cyclone Ditwah.

“We have placed as many camps for people to stay in the cyclone-affected areas,” the minister told the news agency. “But people have come in very small numbers.”

Ramachandran added that 28 teams of both the National Disaster Response Force and the State Disaster Response Force had been deployed. “We have asked extra 10 teams,” he told ANI. “They are also coming through the flight now. We have also asked the Coast Guard for help if any disaster happens...”

Amid the adverse weather, 54 flights have been cancelled across several districts in Tamil Nadu, ANI reported, quoting officials at Chennai Airport.

Sixteen flights from Chennai to Thoothukudi, Madurai and Trichy have been cancelled, the news agency reported. Similarly, 16 flights from Thoothukudi, Trichy and Madurai to Chennai were also suspended.

Another 22 flights from Madurai, Trichy and Puducherry to Bengaluru and Hyderabad have also been suspended.

Meanwhile, an Indian Air Force aircraft reached Sri Lanka with 80 personnel from the National Disaster Response Force, including four sniffer dogs, along with relief supplies and rescue equipment.

An IL-76 IAF aircraft arrived in Sri Lanka carrying 80 NDRF (National Disaster Response Force) personnel, including four females, four sniffer dogs, disaster relief supplies and rescue equipment to support ongoing relief operations.#IAF #il76 #NDRF #DisasterRelief pic.twitter.com/eQDakTbh0L

— Sri Lanka Air Force (@airforcelk) November 29, 2025

Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his condolences to the families of those killed in the cyclone in Sri Lanka.

“Standing with our closest maritime neighbour, India has immediately provided relief, essential humanitarian support, and disaster assistance under the Sagar Bandhu mission,” he said on social media. “As the situation develops, we are prepared to provide further assistance and support.”

Modi added: “In line with the policy of ‘neighbour first’ and the ocean vision, India stands strongly with Sri Lanka at this moment when Sri Lanka needs help.”

The Mumbai unit of the Congress on Friday claimed that there were 11 lakh duplicate voters in the draft electoral roll released for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections and demanded that the list be made public, The Hindu reported.

A delegation of the Opposition party members led by Varsha Gaikwad, Lok Sabha MP representing Mumbai North Central and Mumbai Congress chief, met the state election commissioner and sought an immediate clarification.

This came after the State Election Commission on Wednesday extended the deadline for the final publication of voter rolls for all local body elections in Maharashtra from December 5 to December 10, The Hindustan Times reported.

The extension was granted after the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and other civic bodies received a large number of complaints about erroneous shifting of voters and duplicate entries.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is the governing civic body for Mumbai.

This is the second extension and is likely to further delay the local body elections in the state, including for the zilla parishads, panchayats and municipal corporations.

Elections in 27 municipal corporations, including the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, along with 243 nagar parishads and 289 panchayats, have been stalled since 2022 due to a Supreme Court case on reservations for Other Backward Classes.

This means that most urban and rural bodies in the state have been functioning without elected representatives, whose terms ended between 2020 and 2022.

In September, the Supreme Court also criticised the State Election Commission for its failure to adhere to an earlier timeline set by the court to conduct local body elections in the state. The court set January 31, 2026, as the final deadline.

On December 2, polling for smaller urban and rural bodies – 246 municipal councils and 42 nagar panchayats – will be held, with results on December 3. Elections to the larger municipal corporations, including the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, are expected in January 2026.

An unidentified official from the state urban development department told the Hindustan Times on Wednesday that the State Election Commission had planned to hold the local body elections between January 15 and 20.

“But with this extension [on the publication of the final voter list ahead], the elections are expected to be delayed at least by two weeks,” the official was quoted as saying.

On the alleged duplicate names in the draft voter list for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation polls, Gaikwad on Friday claimed that district collectors and civic deputy commissioners had been unable to explain the anomaly or the procedure to address them, The Hindu reported.

The Congress leader claimed that the draft list had been released without proper coordination between the State Election Commission and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation administration.

“Officials say affidavits may be required from duplicate voters,” the newspaper quoted her as saying. “This will only create more confusion and could reduce voter turnout. Citizens are being subjected to unnecessary harassment.”

The Lok Sabha MP said that the state poll panel should publish a list of duplicate voters and specify where each duplicate entry has been recorded.

The Congress has repeatedly accused the Election Commission of large-scale vote rigging, including in the Maharashtra Assembly polls held in November 2024, alleging what they called “industrial-scale rigging involving the capture of national institutions.”

The Election Commission has rejected these allegations

On November 5, a day before the first phase of polling for the Assembly elections in Bihar took place, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi alleged at a press conference that there was large-scale rigging in the 2024 Haryana polls as well.

He claimed that about 25 lakh fake voters were added to the electoral rolls of the state ahead of the polls held in October 2024.

A political row erupted in Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday after the Jammu Development Authority demolished the home of journalist Arafaz Ahmad Daing in Jammu’s Narwal area, claiming it had been built on its land, NDTV reported.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and the Bharatiya Janata Party both questioned the manner in which the demolition was carried out.

The National Conference is in power in Jammu and Kashmir. However, the lieutenant governor, who functions under the BJP-ruled Union government, is in charge of law and order.

Amid the uproar, a Hindu neighbour gifted a plot of land to the journalist.

The single-storey structure, belonging to Daing’s family, was pulled down by Jammu Development Authority officials on Thursday morning, The Indian Express reported. The authority said the house had been constructed on land belonging to it.

Jammu Development Authority Vice Chairperson Rupesh Kumar said that the action was a “routine exercise” and part of an ongoing drive to remove encroachments from its land, the newspaper reported.

He said the family had been served a first notice on October 29, and when no reply was received, a second notice was issued on November 18.

Daing later submitted in writing that the Narwal house did not belong to him or his family, The Indian Express quoted the chairperson as saying.

The journalist, however, told reporters that the now-demolished home had been built nearly 40 years ago and was owned by his father, NDTV reported.

He had moved into the home after his house in Bhatindi was demolished by another agency last year as it was constructed over government property, The Indian Express reported.

Videos of the demolition on Thursday were circulated widely on social media.

Abdullah described the action a “conspiracy” to defame the elected government in the Union Territory and accused officials posted by Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha of carrying out demolitions without approval, NDTV reported.

“No one supports encroachment on government land,” NDTV quoted the National Conference leader as saying. “But there cannot be a pick-and-choose approach by the JDA. I see a clear design to defame and discredit the elected government.”

He also claimed that a particular community was being targeted.

“Was this the only place in Jammu where encroachment had taken place?” Abdullah asked.

The chief minister also asked the JDA to provide a full list of illegal encroachments in Jammu.

Former Jammu and Kashmir BJP chief Ravinder Raina, however, said that the demolition was “selective” and blamed the elected government for the action, NDTV reported

“The lieutenant governor has not used the bulldozer,” Raina was quoted as saying. “I spoke to him and he said no such orders were issued. Where did the order come from? I won’t politicise it.”

He added: “Our Prime Minister [Narendra Modi] believes in giving houses to the poor, not demolishing them. We will ensure all help.”

Following the demolition, Daing’s neighbour Kuldeep Sharma, who belongs to the Hindu community, gifted him a plot of land, NDTV reported.

“I will not let down my brother,” the news outlet quoted Sharma as saying. “Whatever it takes, I will rebuild their home. I am giving this plot to him. They have destroyed his home on a three Marla plot. I’m gifting him a five Marla plot.”

Sharma also criticised the chief minister for not being able to exercise his authority. He said if Abdullah cannot prevent such demolitions, remaining in office serves no purpose.

Daing, who runs a news portal in Jammu, had been arrested in 2022 for reporting on protests against a demolition drive, NDTV reported.

There are no provisions in Indian law that allow for the demolition of property as a punitive measure. However, the practice has become commonplace in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states.

In November, the Supreme Court held as illegal the practice of demolishing properties of persons accused of crimes as a punitive measure.

The Jammu and Kashmir government had recently said in the Assembly that over 16,000 kanals of land belonging to the JDA had been encroached in Jammu.

The Gauhati High Court has quashed the detention of All India United Democratic Front MLA Aminul Islam under the National Security Act more than six months after he was arrested for his statements about the Pahalgam terror attack, The Indian Express reported on Friday.

A bench of Justices Kalyan Rai Surana and Rajesh Mazumdar directed that the legislator, who represents the Dhing constituency in Assam, be released if he is not wanted in any other case.

Islam was arrested on April 24 after he alleged that the attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam on April 22 was a “conspiracy to incite hatred and violence against Muslims” by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government.

The authorities had alleged that his statements were “misleading and instigating”. The remarks, which were widely shared online, also had the “potential to create an adverse situation”, the police had claimed.

The AIDUF MLA was arrested under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, including one pertaining to acts endangering sovereignty, unity and integrity of India, The Indian Express reported. This is similar to the charge of sedition under the erstwhile Indian Penal Code.

Islam received bail in the case on May 14, the newspaper reported. However, he was detained under the National Security Act on the same day.

The Act allows the Union or state government to order the detention of a person “with a view to preventing him from acting in any manner prejudicial to the defence of India, the relations with foreign powers, or the security of India”.

It may also order detention to prevent them from acting in any manner prejudicial “to the security of the state”, the “maintenance of public order” or the “maintenance of supplies and services essential to the community”. The police and district magistrates have the power to issue detention orders, subject to approval by the state government within 12 days.

Islam’s detention under the Act was based on an order by the Nagaon district commissioner, citing a report from the superintendent of police that said that the MLA had engaged in “activities prejudicial to maintenance of public order and the security of the state”, The Indian Express reported.

It was also claimed that Islam “was likely to continue engaging in activities prejudicial to public order and the security of the state”.

The legislator filed a representation against this order on May 23, which was addressed to the principal secretary to the state government, the Home and Political Department and to the chairperson of the state Advisory Board for the National Security Act.

This representation was forwarded to the authorities on June 4, after 12 days had lapsed.

In its judgement on Thursday, the High Court ruled that the order to detain Islam under the National Security Act stood vitiated due to an unexplained delay by authorities in dealing with his representation.

“The affidavits filed by the district magistrate and the joint secretary to the Government of Assam, respectively, do not attempt to explain the delay caused in forwarding the representations to the concerned authorities,” the newspaper quoted the High Court as saying.

It also referred to an observation made by the Supreme Court in the KM Abdulla Kunhi vs Union of India & Others case, which said that there was no period prescribed either under the Constitution or under the detention law within which a representation should be dealt with.

“The requirement, however, is that there should not be supine indifference, slackness or callous attitude in considering the representation,” the Supreme Court had said then.

It had added: “Any unexplained delay in the disposal of representation would be a breach of the constitutional imperative, and it would render the continued detention impermissible and illegal.”

The High Court noted that the Nagaon jail superintendent had forwarded Islam’s representations on May 23 itself.

It added that the MLA had also been informed of his right to represent before the Union government only 23 days after he was detained.

“In the present case, there is no explanation for the time consumed by any of the authorities while dealing with the representation filed by the petitioner,” The Indian Express quoted the judgement as saying.

Directing that Islam be released, the High Court said that it did not consider it necessary to go into the other points raised during the proceedings as it was “satisfied that for the said one reason alone, the detention order stands vitiated…”

The terror attack at Baisaran near Pahalgam town on April 22 left 26 persons dead and 17 injured. The terrorists targeted tourists after asking their names to ascertain their religion, the police said. All but three of those killed were Hindu.

Following the attack, about 58 persons, including Islam, had been arrested across Assam for “defending Pakistan on Indian soil”. At the time, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had described those who had been arrested as “anti-nationals” and “traitors”.

Protests have erupted in Assam’s Kokrajhar after the state Cabinet cleared the Group of Ministers report that recommends granting Scheduled Tribe status to six communities, reported India Today.

The report that recommends including the six communities – Tai Ahom, Chutia, Moran, Motok, Koch-Rajbongshi and Tea Tribes (Adivasis) – in the Scheduled Tribes list was cleared on Wednesday.

It will be tabled in the Assembly during the ongoing Winter Session before being sent to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs for consideration.

Communities that are already part of the Scheduled Tribes list have been holding protests against the move. They have alleged that the decision to expand the Scheduled Tribes list is “politically motivated” in view of the state polls, expected to be held in the first half of 2026.

They have also argued that adding more communities to the Scheduled Tribes list would hurt the rights of the tribes already on the list.

On Friday, tribal students of Science College in Kokrajhar held a demonstration at the entrance of the institution against the Cabinet’s move, reported India Today.

They alleged that the decision to expand the Scheduled Tribes list would negatively impact their educational and employment opportunities.

A day earlier, tribal students of Bodoland University held a protest outside the main gate of the campus, forcing all third-semester examinations to be cancelled for the day, reported The Telegraph.

They reportedly shouted slogans against Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.

On Thursday evening, organisations representing the Bodo, Rabha and Garo communities, part of the Scheduled Tribes list, held a torchlight rally in Kokrajhar to express their opposition to what they said was a “detrimental political move”.

They alleged that the state government was including “advanced and populous” communities to the Scheduled Tribes list, according to The Telegraph.

The six communities named in the report are currently part of Assam’s Other Backward Classes list and comprise about 27% of the state’s population.

The demand to be included in the Scheduled Tribes list increased in recent weeks ahead of the Assembly elections.

Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, a bill proposing to include the six groups in Assam’s Scheduled Tribes list was introduced in the Rajya Sabha. However, it was not taken up for discussion or passed. The Group of Ministers was constituted based on the directions by the Union home ministry that year.

Ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised the six communities that they would be granted the Scheduled Tribes status.

Following the delimitation exercise of 2023-’24, the number of seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes in the 126-member Assam Assembly increased from 16 to 19. Delimitation is the process of fixing boundaries of territorial constituencies.

Also read: BJP claims to protect ‘indigenous’ groups in Assam. But they are protesting against its government

The Delhi Police on Friday re-arrested eight students, soon after they were granted bail in connection with another case pertaining to a protest against air pollution in the national capital, reported The Indian Express.

After the protest on Sunday, 23 students were detained from India Gate, Kartavya Path and later from outside the Parliament Street police station.

Two first information reports were registered – one against six persons at the Kartavya Path police station and another against 17 persons at the Parliament Street police station.

The cases were initially filed under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to assault, obstruction of public servants and outraging the modesty of women. On Tuesday, the police also added charges pertaining to making assertions prejudicial to national integration to the FIR registered at the Kartavya Path police station.

On Friday, Judicial Magistrate First Class Sahil Monga granted bail to nine of the protesters booked in the FIR registered at the Parliament Street police station, reported The Indian Express.

“The concerns regarding absconding or tampering with evidence can be addressed by imposing reasonable conditions,” Monga was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

He added that the investigation does not require the persons accused in the matter to be in jail.

However, soon after, the police re-arrested eight of those who were granted bail. The ninth student had already been arrested in the FIR at the Kartavya Path police station.

The eight persons were sent to seven days of judicial custody, according to Hindustan Times.

Seven others, who were in judicial custody in connection with the Parliament Street police station FIR and had not been granted bail, were also arrested in the second case, reported The Indian Express.

The students were accused of using criminal force against police personnel and shouting pro-Maoist slogans at the protest at India Gate on Sunday.

Some of the protesters had allegedly used pepper spray on police personnel while being removed from the site, while some had allegedly displayed posters and shouted slogans hailing Maoist leader Madvi Hidma, who was recently killed in a gunfight with security forces.

The protest on November 23 was mainly organised by an environmental research and action collective called Himkhand, student group Bhagat Singh Chatra Ekta Manch and the discussion forum Scientists for Society.

Scientists for Society, however, said on November 24 that it joined the protest only on the subject of pollution, and that the agitation was “not the appropriate forum” to discuss Hidma’s killing.

A booth-level officer engaged in the special intensive revision of electoral rolls died of cardiac arrest in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district, PTI reported on Friday.

Zakir Hossain, a primary school teacher, complained of severe chest pain and collapsed within minutes, his family said. He died on Thursday night, The Telegraph reported.

Hossain’s family alleged he had been under “tremendous pressure” balancing voter roll revision duties alongside regular teaching work. They also alleged that the school had not relieved him of classroom responsibilities despite repeated requests, The Telegraph reported.

West Bengal is among 12 states and Union Territories where the Election Commission began the enumeration phase of the exercise on November 4.

This is the fourth death of a booth-level officer reported in the state since the exercise began.

Earlier this month, a booth-level officer in the Purba Bardhaman district died of a heart attack, PTI reported.

One official was found hanging in her home in Jalpaiguri district on November 19, while another was found hanging at her home in Krishnanagar in the Nadia district on November 22. The families of both the women alleged that they had been under severe pressure because of the revision workload.

The deaths have sparked a political row in the state.

The Trinamool Congress, led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, has accused the Election Commission of burdening BLOs with an “inhumane” and “unplanned” workload.

On November 20, Banerjee urged the poll panel to suspend the revision of electoral rolls in the state, saying “the human cost of this mismanagement is now unbearable”.

The Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, however, rejected the allegations, saying that the stress that the officers faced stemmed not from the Election Commission’s directives but from political and administrative pressure exerted by the state’s ruling Trinamool Congress.

Amid the ongoing special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the country, at least seven suicides by booth-level officers and two deaths due to stroke have been reported.

The task of preparing voter lists before elections is typically assigned to primary school teachers and anganwadi or health care workers, who are employed by state governments. They are required to go door-to-door and check the identities of new voters and verify the details of those who have died or permanently moved out of an area.

In the commission’s parlance, they are called booth-level officers. Each booth-level officer is responsible for maintaining the voter list for one polling booth, which can sometimes have as many as 1,500 registered voters.

The draft electoral rolls for the 12 states and Union Territories will be published on December 9, while the final ones will be published on February 7.

Several petitions have been filed before the Supreme Court against the exercise over concerns that the special intensive revision of voter rolls could disenfranchise eligible voters.

The voter list revision in Bihar was announced by the poll panel in June and completed ahead of the Assembly elections in November. In the final electoral roll published on September 30, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded.

In an act of unprecedented haste, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has granted clearance for a mega project to build an International Container Transhipment Port at Galathea Bay in Great Nicobar Island. The Detailed Project Report, prepared by Kamarajar Port Ltd, is complete.

However, at the time of writing, it has not yet been submitted to the Union Shipping Ministry for the necessary final approval. The project will only proceed to the tender stage, where private players can participate, once this ministerial approval is secured. The port is planned in phases, over decades, finally acquiring an annual handling capacity of more than 16 million TEUs or Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units, the standard unit of measurement for shipping container capacity.

Euphemistically titled the “Holistic Development of Great Nicobar Island”, the mega project spearheaded by NITI Aayog entails severe and irreversible environmental consequences. The plan involves constructing an international transhipment port at Galathea Bay, an international airport, a 450-MVA gas/solar power plant, and a 160-sq km township on this tectonically sensitive and ecologically unique island.

The promoters aim to develop an urban landscape that rivals Singapore’s and Hong Kong’s, utilising the island’s strategic location on the Malacca Strait. The proposed built environment, covering approximately 80% of the project area, is intended to include hospitals, shopping and entertainment centres, luxury tourism infrastructure and residences for an estimated population of 350,000 people.

Fundamental transformation

This scale of development represents a fundamental transformation to an urban landscape. The island’s current population of approximately 8,000 would increase by an unprecedented 4,000%. In essence, this is not merely a development project; it is a plan to convert a globally significant biosphere reserve – a haven of unique biodiversity – into a sprawling commercial and strategic hub, raising critical questions about the true meaning of “holistic” and “sustainable”.

The proposed Holistic Development of Great Nicobar Island has generated significant opposition from a broad coalition of scientists, environmentalists, and social experts, who cite grave concerns over its potentially irreversible ecological, social, and geological impacts. This critical perspective has been extensively documented in leading media outlets such as The Hindu, Frontline and The Wire, as well as in Pankaj Sekhsaria’s book, The Great Nicobar Betrayal. These analyses argue that labelling the initiative as “holistic development” is a profound misnomer, contending that it will effectively convert a vital tropical forest into an urban concrete jungle.

The debate intensified most recently on October 27, when over 70 prominent experts issued an open letter directly responding to Union Minister Bhupender Yadav’s defence of the project. In their collective response, they urgently called on the minister and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change to prioritise a scientific assessment of the project’s grave and irreversible implications over political considerations.

A shipping hub is coming up in Great Nicobar.

The environmental costs are staggering.

At risk – a million trees, if not 10, and tribal communities who have little say in the great disruption of their lives.@_Vaishnavi_R reports from ground zero. https://t.co/qc21kM59tZ

— Amrita Dutta (@damrita) November 8, 2024

Economic rationale

The Indian government’s push for the Great Nicobar project is driven by a strategic ambition to recapture 75% of India’s transhipped cargo currently handled by foreign ports such as Colombo, Singapore and Klang. The vision is to transform the island into a free-trade zone akin to Hong Kong or Singapore to attract multinational corporations.

Indonesia and India are jointly planning another transhipment port in Sabang, Indonesia, located just 190 km away, which could directly compete for the same maritime traffic and undermine Great Nicobar’s economic viability.

As Union Home Minister Amit Shah stated at the India Maritime Week 2025, the project is positioned as a major boost to India’s global trade, with a 30-year implementation timeline expected to draw nearly 400,000 people – a figure equivalent to the current population of the entire Andaman and Nicobar archipelago.

Great Nicobar is being drummed up as a deep draft and a strategically located port that could outpace its competitors. But this vision is fraught with logistical and economic contradictions that challenge its feasibility.

As pointed out by Retired Rear Admiral Kapil Gupta, many of India’s previous attempts to develop transhipment terminals (for instance, Vallarpadam in Kochi, Mundra in Gujarat, and Vizhinjam in Thiruvananthapuram) have not been a success in terms of their ability to attract sufficient traffic due to the draft limitations, limited hinterland connectivity, and competition from other international players.

A critical, understated factor is that Great Nicobar is fundamentally unsuitable for a major transhipment hub. Unlike Singapore or Hong Kong, it is an isolated, thickly forested island located more than 1,000 km from the mainland with no supporting hinterland for cargo generation or consumption.

This internal contradiction is starkly evident in the project’s own documentation. A 2021 technical report by M/S AECOM India Limited paints an optimistic picture of a “greenfield city” with a diverse economy. Yet, a July 2016 technical note from the same consultant to the Ministry of Shipping concluded that a Free Trade Zone and transhipment hub “may not be a favourable option due to insufficient hinterland demand and supply”.

Furthermore, the project faces stiff external competition. Indonesia and India are jointly planning another transhipment port in Sabang, Indonesia, located just 190 km away, which could directly compete for the same maritime traffic and undermine Great Nicobar’s economic viability.

Ecological and social cost

The promoters of the Great Nicobar project systematically downplay the immense, irreversible cost of destroying natural assets and ecosystem services – a critical loss for a country already facing severe environmental degradation. India’s ambition to become a maritime leader comes at an incredible ecological price, threatening one of its most unique and protected landscapes.

The project area is part of a protected forest within the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, a Unesco-recognised site covering 85% of the island. This area provides a sanctuary for approximately 24% of all local species. The government’s plan to clear approximately one million trees from this tropical rainforest will devastate a critical ecosystem that regulates the regional monsoon cycle through evapotranspiration. The proposal for compensatory afforestation in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh is scientifically meaningless, as these areas cannot replicate the unique, evolved ecology of the Great Nicobar Islands.

The proposed port at Galathea Bay will directly devastate extensive coral reefs and marine habitats. The Environmental Impact Assessment report suggests translocating these organisms, a method with unproven success. This proposal is especially alarming given that corals worldwide are at a tipping point due to ocean warming and bleaching; translocation would add further stress, likely resulting in widespread mortality.

The island’s forests host 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, and bryophytes, many of which are endemic. Its unique fauna includes: 11 species of endemic mammals, 32 species of endemic birds and seven species of endemic reptiles. Critically, Galathea Bay is a vital nesting ground for the globally endangered leatherback turtle, whose habitat would be irrevocably lost.

The island is home to the indigenous Nicobari and Shompen communities, the latter classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group with a history spanning over 10,000 years. More than three-fourths of the 900-sq-km island is designated as a tribal reserve under the Andaman and Nicobar Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation (1956). Anthropologists and social experts unanimously argue that the project brazenly bypasses the Forest Rights Act and other legal safeguards, proceeding without the free, prior, and informed consent of the tribal communities, thereby threatening their very survival and cultural integrity.

This project represents not merely an ecological miscalculation but a profound ethical and legal failure.

2020: govt map shows corals.
2021: updated map, corals gone.
No natural event explains it. Except perhaps the Great Nicobar Project, whose proposed port happens to be right where the corals “no longer exist.”https://t.co/iEWNfrB0b1 pic.twitter.com/09qoYXcTFK

— Vaishnavi Rathore (@_Vaishnavi_R) October 23, 2025

Permanent tectonic strain

Unlike the stable geology of Singapore and Hong Kong, the Great Nicobar Island region is under permanent tectonic strain, rendering it highly vulnerable to seismic activity and constant land-level changes in an area that is also predicted to witness a climatically driven sea-level rise. This fundamental geological reality poses an existential threat to any large-scale, permanent infrastructure extending out onto the sea.

The island is located perilously close to Banda Aceh, Indonesia—the epicentre of the catastrophic 2004 magnitude 9.2-9.3 megathrust earthquake. In response to that event, the Great Nicobar region itself experienced a sudden coseismic subsidence of 3 metres to 4 metres. This is not an isolated event but part of an ongoing tectonic cycle.

The region undergoes a predictable yet hazardous cycle of strain build-up and release. GPS data show the land slowly uplifting over the years during the interseismic interval as tectonic strain accumulates. This built-up stress is released during major earthquakes (coseismal phase), causing the land to subside abruptly.

This cyclical movement of “slow uplift and sudden subsidence” along an active subduction zone inherently destabilises engineered structures along the coast over the long term, making the integrity of a port, airport, and city fundamentally untenable.

Scientific studies confirm that the megathrust fault abutting the Sumatra-Andaman plate boundary is segmented, with each segment capable of generating great earthquakes independently. The historical record reveals a pattern of major seismic events affecting the region, including: the 1861 Nias-Simeulue earthquake (M~8.5); the 1881 Nicobar Islands earthquake (M 7.9); the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake (M 9.2-9.3), and the 2007 Sumatra earthquake (M 8.4).

This history demonstrates not isolated incidents, but a recurring pattern of great earthquakes along various segments, confirming the high and continuous tectonic strain variability around Great Nicobar.

The proposed mega infrastructure, including the International Container Transhipment Port and the new township, would be located directly in one of the world’s most seismically active and climatically hazardous zones. The geological and climatic evidence clearly indicates that the region poses a significant and permanent threat to the safety of any building stock, cargo, and the project itself, challenging the very logic of its proposed location.

Replug | Dr Rahmani emphasises the only way to ensure the protection endemic species on the islands was to demarcate strictly protected areas and enforce restrictions within them. https://t.co/QXzv8TzYHx
However, the denotification of Galathea Bay National Park “does show the…

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) November 20, 2025

Rhetoric and reality

While defending the Great Nicobar Island project before the National Green Tribunal on October 30, the Union government asserted it is “fully aware” of the project’s likely impact on biodiversity and has a mitigation plan. This legal submission, however, raises a more profound question: if the government is aware, why do the detailed and collective concerns of independent scientists, environmentalists, and social experts remain systematically unaddressed?

The message the Union environment ministry is sending by issuing its order dated October 30 – which waives, from the period of validity of an already granted environmental clearance, any time when a project is stalled due to litigation – is clear: the ministry seeks to assist projects that are facing court cases. By removing the stalled period from the project’s environmental clearance validity, the government ensures that legal challenges do not shorten the approval’s effective duration, making it easier for controversial projects to proceed despite ongoing court battles.

This pattern of disregarding expert warnings is tragically familiar. The letter to the Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change rightly draws a parallel to the so-called developmental programmes in the Himalayan states, where projects like the strategic road-widening in the state of Uttarakhand – defended in court as essential for defence, much like the International Container Transhipment Port is now– were pushed through the courts, despite expert objections, leading to an unsustainable influx of pilgrim tourists, massive death tolls and devastation from subsequent disasters.

The experts’ letter to the minister describes the Great Nicobar project with stark clarity, labelling it “an exploitative commercial proposal with a dubious and unviable economic future, as well as destructive of rich and diverse ecosystems, [which] is unwarranted and irresponsible”.

This reality stands in jarring contrast to the environmental commitments expressed by India’s leadership on the global stage. On October 2, 2018, while receiving the United Nations’ Champions of the Earth Award, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated, “Climate and calamity are directly related to culture; if climate is not the focus of culture, calamity cannot be prevented. When I say ‘sab ka saath’, I also include nature in it.”

Such statements rightly generate hope and outline a national commitment to a “green development model”. This makes the pursuit of the Great Nicobar project all the more paradoxical. Given our country’s professed dedication to sustainability, why do we end up executing such unrealistic projects that sound the death knell for an irreplaceable natural asset? The chasm between stated principle and concrete action has never been wider or more consequential.

CP Rajendran is a geoscientist and adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.

This article first appeared on The India Forum.

The Uttar Pradesh Planning Department has directed all government departments not to accept Aadhaar cards as proof of birth, reiterating that the unique identity document cannot be used for this purpose, ANI reported.

The order, issued on November 24 by Special Secretary (Planning) Amit Singh Bansal, was sent to all additional chief secretaries, principal secretaries and secretaries in the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state.

The Planning Department is the nodal body for implementing directions related to Aadhaar, the most widely held identity document in the country.

The directive followed a Unique Identification Authority of India regional office letter dated October 31, which stated that Aadhaar is not a proof of birth, The Indian Express reported. The letter was issued by Deputy Director Aditya Prakash Bajpai.

Instead of Aadhaar, birth certificates, high school mark sheets and other prescribed documents can be used instead to verify date of birth for official purposes, The Indian Express quoted unidentified officials as saying.

Colonel Prashant Kumar Singh, Deputy Director General of UIDAI’s Lucknow region, told The Times of India that Aadhaar cannot serve as proof of birth because of how enrolment was conducted.

“Since Aadhaar was commissioned in 2010, we enrolled individuals based on three categories of date of birth: approximate, declared without documents and documentary evidence,” The Times of India quoted Singh as saying. “For approximate dates, we defaulted to January 1 of the stated year.”

He added that since February 2020, the Registrar General of India has stopped issuing manual birth certificates and now provides barcode-enabled certificates, which can be used to authenticate information digitally.

“We only accept birth certificates with barcodes because scanning verifies authenticity,” The Times of India quoted Singh as saying.

He added that Aadhaar is a digital identity proof generated after combining biometrics and demographic details and neither a birth certificate or a nationality document.

The Indian economy grew by 8.2% year-on-year in the July-September quarter, up from 7.8% in the previous quarter, data released by the National Statistics Office showed. The economy had recorded 5.6% growth in the same period last year.

Growth in the secondary sector (8.1%) and tertiary sector (9.2%) helped push real Gross Domestic Product above 8% in the second quarter of 2025-’26, the data showed.

The secondary sector refers to industries such as manufacturing and construction, while the tertiary sector encompasses services such as finance, real estate, trade and professional services.

Within the secondary sector, manufacturing grew by 9.1% and construction by 7.2%, both registering growth above 7% at constant prices. Read more.

The Supreme Court told the Maharashtra government not to exceed the 50% reservation ceiling in local body elections that are yet to be notified. While elections that have already been notified can be held as per schedule, their results will be subject to the final judgement in the case, the court said.

Local body elections in Maharashtra have been stalled since 2021 on account of pending petitions that have challenged the implementation of the Other Backward Classes quota.

The state election commission told the court on Friday that elections to 246 municipal councils and 42 nagar panchayats are scheduled for December 2, with counting on December 3. Of these, there are two municipal corporations, 17 nagar panchayats and 40 municipal councils where the extent of reservation exceeds 50%, the commission said. Read more.

United States President Donald Trump said that he will “permanently pause migration from all third-world countries”. The remark came a day after an individual believed to be an Afghan citizen shot two members of the National Guard in Washington DC.

The US president alleged that his predecessor Joe Biden had illegally allowed millions of migrants from third-world countries to settle in the country. He said that his administration would now “remove anyone who is not a net asset” to the nation, “or is incapable of loving our country”.

It was unclear how Trump would enforce the pause in migration. His previous actions to limit migration have been challenged in the courts.

Trump’s comments came hours after one of the two National Guard members, Sarah Beckstrom, succumbed to her injuries on Thursday. The second member is being treated in hospital. Read more.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit India from December 4 to December 5, in what will be his first trip to the country since Moscow’s war on Ukraine began. Putin will hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and participate in the 23rd India-Russia Annual Summit, the Ministry of External Affairs said.

The visit comes at a time when Indian entities are facing a threat of Western sanctions for purchasing oil from Russia. Read more.

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There are no provisions mandating only halal-certified meat in non-vegetarian meals on trains, the Railway Board has told the National Human Rights Commission, according to PTI.

The human rights body had sought the Railways’ response to a complaint alleging that only halal-certified meat was being used in meals served on trains.

The complaint had also alleged that Hindu and Sikh passengers also do not get food options that match their religious beliefs, which violated their rights to equality, non-discrimination, freedom of profession, right to life with dignity and religious freedom under the Constitution.

Halal is an Arabic term that means “lawful”. In the dietary context, where it is most commonly used, it refers to food that is permissible according to Islamic regulations.

A bench led by NHRC member Priyank Kanoongo had claimed that only using halal meat prima facie amounted to a violation of human rights, adding that this also affected the livelihoods of scheduled Caste Hindu communities and other non-Muslims who worked in the meat trade.

The commission took cognisance of the matter under Section 12 of the 1993 Protection of Human Rights Act, which outlines its functions.

The commission said that the Railways must respect the food choices of all religious groups as per the secular spirit of the Constitution. It also sought an Action Taken Report within two weeks.

In its response to the NHRC, the authorities said that the Indian Railways and Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation follow guidelines set by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, PTI reported.

The Railway Board added: “There is no official provision for serving halal-certified food on Indian Railways.”

The Railways also referred to an earlier query over the same issue and shared its reply at that time, ANI reported.

“The issue of service of halal meat over Indian Railways has been raised through social media posts in the past, seeking information,” ANI quoted the Ministry of Railways as saying. “This was replied explicitly that IRCTC serves non-vegetarian food [chicken] conforming to standards laid down in Food Safety and Standards Act 2006 and additions and alterations thereto from time to time.”

The Kerala Police have registered a first information report against Palakkad MLA and former Congress leader Rahul Mamkootathil after a woman accused him of repeated sexual exploitation on the false promise of marriage, forcing her to terminate the pregnancy, verbal abuse, death threats and violations of the Information Technology Act, The Hindu reported.

The case was expedited after the woman and her family met Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at his office on Thursday. Following this, a team led by Thiruvananthapuram Rural Police chief KS Sudarshan recorded her statement.

The FIR was registered at the Valiamala police station early on Friday and later transferred to the Nemom police station in Thiruvananthapuram city.

Thiruvananthapuram City Police Commissioner Thomson Jose told The Hindu that the charges against Mamkootathil include rape, obtaining sexual consent through deceitful means and coercing a woman to terminate her pregnancy.

Police are also investigating allegations that Mamkootathil procured miscarriage-inducing medicines without a prescription, asked an acquaintance to deliver the pills to the woman, and pressured her to consume them while he allegedly remained on a video call to ensure that she took the medicines, the newspaper reported.

The acquaintance, Joby Thomas, a businessperson from Pathanamthitta, has been named as the second accused person

Provisions of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act and the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act have also been invoked in the case. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act allows only registered medical practitioners to administer abortion pills after required tests, including an ultrasound.

The Congress had suspended Mamkootathil from its primary membership in August and removed him from the post of Youth Congress president, following multiple allegations from women of misconduct, The Indian Express reported.

The Supreme Court on Friday restrained the Maharashtra State Election Commission from exceeding the 50% reservations ceiling in local body elections that are yet to be notified, reported Live Law.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi also stated that while it would allow the polls that have been notified to be conducted as per schedule, the result will be subject to the final judgement in petitions challenging the implementation of Other Backward Classes quota in the state’s local bodies, according to Bar and Bench.

The court referred the matter to a three-judge bench and listed it for further hearing on January 21.

Local body elections in Maharashtra have been stalled since 2021 amid court proceedings about OBC reservations.

Appearing for the state election commission, advocate Balbir Singh told the court on Friday that elections to 246 municipal councils and 42 nagar panchayats are scheduled for December 2, with counting on December 3.

Of these, there are 40 municipal councils and 17 nagar panchayats where reservations are exceeding 50%, Singh said.

The ceiling on the reservation is also exceeding in two municipal corporations, the court noted.

Elections are yet to be notified in 29 municipal corporations, 32 zilla panchayats and 346 panchayat samitis, Singh told the court.

“Let the elections be held and results shall be subject to the outcome of these proceedings,” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying. “Wherever reservation is not exceeding 50%, those results shall also be subject to the proceedings of this case.”

In December 2021, the Supreme Court stayed the OBC quota, holding that it could be implemented only after the state satisfied the “triple-tests” requirement laid down in earlier judgements.

The test requires state governments to establish a commission for empirical inquiry, determine proportional reservations based on findings and ensure that the quota for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes together does not exceed 50%.

The 50% ceiling was set by the Supreme Court in the 1992 Indra Sawhney vs Union Of India ruling.

To meet the “triple test” requirement, the state constituted the Jayant Kumar Banthia Commission in March 2022.

The commission recommended a 27% OBC quota but said that it must remain within the overall 50% ceiling, Live Law reported.

As its report was challenged, the Supreme Court in August 2022 directed that the status quo be maintained.

In May 2023, the court allowed elections to be held with the OBC quota restored to the percentage that existed before the Banthia Commission’s July 2022 report.

However, during last week’s hearing, the bench verbally observed that state authorities appeared to have misconstrued this order as permitting reservations to breach the 50% cap.

The court clarified that this was not the case and that the ceiling continues to apply.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit India between December 4 and December 5, the Ministry of External Affairs said on Friday.

Putin will hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and participate in the 23rd India-Russia Annual Summit, the ministry added.

This will be the Russian president’s first visit to India since Moscow’s war on Ukraine began in February 2022. The invasion triggered the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II.

Putin’s visit comes at a time when Indian entities are facing a threat of Western sanctions for purchasing oil from Russia.

The External Affairs Ministry stated that the visit will provide an opportunity for New Delhi and Moscow to review progress in the bilateral relations, set the vision for strengthening the “Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership” and exchange views on regional and global issues of mutual interest.

President Droupadi Murmu will host a banquet for her Russian counterpart at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

United States President Donald Trump has repeatedly alleged that the import of Russian oil by countries, including India, was fuelling Moscow’s war.

In August, the Trump administration doubled the tariffs on goods imported from India to 50% for purchasing Russian oil. A 25% so-called reciprocal tariff had already taken effect.

At the time, New Delhi said it was “extremely unfortunate” that the US had chosen to impose the additional levies on India “for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest”.

Modi had last met Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin, China on August 31 and September 1.

The Nepali central bank on Thursday issued new currency notes of the Rs 100 denomination showing the country’s map comprising the Kalapani, Limpiadhura and Lipulekh territories, which Kathmandu claims, PTI reported.

India has rejected the territorial claims made by Kathmandu.

The new note issued by the Nepal Rashtra Bank bears the signature of Maha Prasad Adhikari, whose tenure as the governor ended in April. The date of issuance of the note is 2081 BS, according to the Nepali calendar. It corresponds to 2024 in the Common Era.

The map used in the earlier version of the note did not include the Kalapani-Limpiadhura-Lipulekh area.

PTI quoted a spokesperson of the Nepali central bank as saying that the map was updated as per the government’s decision.

Notes of other denominations, such as Rs 10, Rs 500 and Rs 1,000, do not have the map of Nepal.

रुपैयाँ १०० दरको बैंकनोट प्रचलनमा ल्याउने बारेको सूचना ! pic.twitter.com/Wlzw6spXGM

— Nepal Rastra Bank (@NepalRastraBank) November 27, 2025

The border issue began in 2019 after Kathmandu objected to a new map released by India, which showed the Kalapani area, where Lipulekh Pass is located, as part of Indian territory.

In response, New Delhi said that it had not made any change to its border with Nepal and that the new map depicts Indian territory accurately.

The tensions escalated in May 2020 when Defence Minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated a new route for the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra through the Lipulekh Pass.

Nepal has repeatedly claimed that India’s decision to build the road was a breach of an agreement between the two countries. It claims the Lipulekh Pass on the basis of a treaty signed with British colonisers in 1816.

In June 2020, the Nepali Parliament amended its Constitution to include a new political map of the country featuring the Kalapani-Limpiadhura-Lipulekh area as its territory.

New Delhi had said at the time that Nepal’s “artificial enlargement” of claims is “not based on historical fact or evidence and is not tenable”.

Also read: Territoriality amidst Covid-19: A primer to the Lipu Lek conflict between India and Nepal

India on Wednesday rejected Pakistan’s remarks about Prime Minister Narendra Modi hoisting a flag at the Ram temple in Ayodhya, saying that Islamabad has “no moral standing” to comment on the matter.

Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that New Delhi rejected the remarks “with the contempt they deserve”.

Modi on Tuesday hoisted a saffron flag at the temple, marking the completion of its construction.

On the same day, Islamabad said it had noted the development with “deep concern”, adding that the structure was constructed on the site where the Babri mosque stood.

The mosque was demolished on December 6, 1992, by Hindutva extremists because they believed that it stood on the spot on which the deity Ram had been 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 constructed.

In January 2024, the temple was inaugurated in a ceremony led by Modi.

On Tuesday, Pakistan claimed that this reflected “deliberate attempts at eroding Muslim cultural and religious heritage under the influence of majoritarian Hindutva ideology”.

The Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that it was urging New Delhi to “uphold its responsibilities” by ensuring the security of all religious communities and “by protecting their places of worship in accordance with international human rights obligations”.

Responding to the statement, Jaiswal on Wednesday said that Pakistan, with its “deeply stained record of bigotry, repression and systemic mistreatment of its minorities”, is in no position to lecture others.

“Rather than delivering hypocritical homilies, Pakistan would do better to turn its gaze inwards and focus on its own abysmal human rights records,” he added.

The police in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad have booked 21 booth-level officers for alleged negligence in carrying out their duties related to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the state, The Indian Express reported on Friday.

“Negligence is being shown in digitisation and full cooperation/contribution is not being given in election-related work,” the newspaper quoted the first information report as stating.

The revision exercise is underway in 12 states and Union Territories, including Uttar Pradesh. Booth-level officers began distributing enumeration forms on November 4.

Booth-level officers are typically primary school teachers and anganwadi or health care workers, who are employed by state governments. They are responsible for distributing and collecting enumeration forms as part of the ongoing exercise.

They are required to go door-to-door, check the identities of new voters and verify the details of those who have died or permanently moved out of an area.

Ghaziabad District Magistrate Ravindra Kumar Mandar was quoted as saying by The Indian Express that there are 3,089 booths in Ghaziabad with more than 28 lakh voters.

Only 30% of the work related to the voter roll revision had been completed, said Mandar, adding that an FIR was registered against the booth-level officers for their “carelessness”.

He stated that the FIR would be withdrawn if the work is completed, as it was registered only “to teach sincerity” to the booth-level officers.

The FIR was registered on the complaint of Alok Kumar Yadav, the station house officer of Sihani Gate Police Station in Ghaziabad.

It stated that some booth-level officers were “not providing the required cooperation in election-related work” and “deliberately obstructing the election process”.

The voter roll revision process is scheduled to take place until December 4.

On Monday, reports stated that more than 60 booth-level officers and seven supervisors were booked in Noida for allegedly failing to comply with orders from senior officials during the revision process.

In Bahraich district, the administration has ordered FIRs against five booth-level officers, withheld salaries of 42 personnel and suspended a village-level revenue officer for alleged negligence.

In addition to Uttar Pradesh, the voter rolls are also being revised in West Bengal, Kerala, Rajasthan, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Goa, Puducherry, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Lakshadweep.

The draft electoral rolls for the 12 states and Union Territories will be published on December 9. Voters can file claims and objections from December 9 to January 8, while hearings and verifications will take place from December 9 to January 31. The final electoral rolls are to be published on February 7.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll. Several petitioners also moved the Supreme Court against it.

The new season of the Netflix series Delhi Crime explores the issue of missing women who have been trafficked. The series draws attention to the very real problem of women being trapped under the guise of being offered jobs and then sold to clients.

However, many viewers do not realise that the official data fail to specifically recognise a significant category of women who are classified as missing: those whose whereabouts may not be known because they have eloped to get married to partners of their choice.

If their families do not approve of these unions, they often register a missing person’s complaint.

As a consequence, the law labels women who have eloped as victims even though they are actually autonomous individuals.

That is evident from the National Crimes Records Bureau data for 2023. It shows that 113,564 women were abducted and kidnapped but does not list how many women have been classified as missing because they have eloped.

In researcher Neetika Vishwanath’s 2018 study on fast track courts and 15 police stations in Lucknow, she found that in most cases where a woman elopes, an FIR of kidnapping and abduction is lodged against the man.

Vishwanath points out that it is not the consent of the girl that matters, but rather that of her parents, who attempt to prove that she was a minor eloping for marriage.

Symbols of ‘izzat’

Historian Uma Chakravarti, in her work, “From fathers to husbands: of love, death and marriage in North India” notes that women who elope for inter-caste marriages are seen as violating social and familial codes of honour or izzat.

This is why relatives often threaten women who want to exercise their right to marry partners whom they choose. If such women begin the process of getting married under the Special Marriage Act, the law mandates that their details must be publicly notified, leaving them vulnerable to violence. As a consequence, women are forced to “go missing” to register their marriages in places other than their home towns.

These social attitudes are contrary to the judgment of the Supreme Court judgment in the Lata Singh vs State of UP in 2006, which reaffirmed the right of two adults to marry partners of their choice.

“This is a free and democratic country, and once a person becomes a major, he or she can marry whomever he/she likes,” the court said.

Nonetheless, exercising their right to choice is often a struggle for women marrying for love.

Families often claim that such women gone missing after being kidnapped as a minors, making their consent to a marriage invalid. The authorities sometimes force women to undergo a medical procedure known as an ossification test to cast doubts on the fact that they are actually adults.

Legal scholar Pratiksha Baxi writes that families try to claim a right over women who have eloped by using Article 32 of the Constitution – habeas corpus, a remedy aimed at protecting an individual against illegal detention. In such cases, families usually argue that adult women eloping to marry are minors or are of unsound mind and so cannot make autonomous decisions for themselves.

Under pressure

My PhD research on runaway marriages among inter-caste and inter-faith couples in Delhi and Lucknow shows that women violating the social sanctions of religion and caste face the prospect of being questioned by the state authorities or communal vigilante groups.

Over the last decade, the implementation of anti-conversion legislations in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan has shown that women converting to their husband’s religion to marry face the prospect of the state stepping act as the “parens patriae” – acting as a guardian on the assumption that the woman is not able to care for herself.

Another layer has been added to the narrative because of the claims of love jihad, the Hindutva conspiracy theory that maintains that Muslim men have been luring Hindu women into marriage solely with the intention of converting them to Islam. The state treats them as gullible individuals who have been duped.

The state must move decisively beyond the outdated notion of treating all women as victims. Official data must clearly distinguish between women who have been abducted and those who have made marriages of choice. Consensual marriages must be protected.

This would be helped by applying the category of missing women judiciously, avoiding conflation with cases that do not involve actual disappearance.

Manisha Chachra is a political scientist specialising in gender, marriage, and political studies, with a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University focused on inter-faith and inter-caste runaway marriages.

The Punjab Police has said that the prime accused in the murder of a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh member was killed in a gunfight on Thursday, The Indian Express reported.

The gunfight took place in a village in Fazilka district, where the police took the man to recover a weapon.

Naveen Arora, the son of RSS leader Baldev Raj Arora, was shot dead by two motorcycle-borne assailants at about 7 pm on November 15 when he was walking home from his shop. The attackers reportedly fired at him from point-blank range.

He was taken to the hospital, where the doctors declared that he had been brought dead.

On November 17, pro-Khalistan group Sher-e-Punjab Brigade claimed responsibility for the murder, accusing the RSS of “assimilating Sikhs into Hinduism in Punjab”. The police have not confirmed the authenticity of the claim.

The newspaper quoted Arora’s family as saying that despite several arrests in the matter, the police have not revealed the suspects’ motive behind the murder.

On Thursday, the Ferozepur Police said that the prime accused, identified as Badal, was taken to the Mamu Joya village by a police team when two of his accomplices, who were hiding at the spot, opened fire at them.

Deputy Inspector General (Ferozepur Range) Harmanbir Singh said that Head Constable Balaur Singh got injured when a bullet hit his arm.

“The police also fired in retaliation, in which Badal was injured,” The Indian Express quoted Singh as saying. “Both Balaur Singh and Badal were admitted to Fazilka Civil Hospital, where Badal succumbed to his injuries.”

It was unclear if Badal was hit by the shots fired by his accomplices or those fired by the police in retaliation.

The two shooters fled the area, The Indian Express quoted unidentified police officers as saying. The police are searching for them and have widened their investigation into the murder case.

The police had on November 20 arrested Gursimran Singh alias Jatin Kali, another main suspect in the murder case, in a separate gunfight in Arifke village. Earlier that day, the police also detained two persons, Harsh and Kanav, India Today reported.

A Delhi court on Wednesday remanded six college students who were arrested after a protest against air pollution to police custody for three days.

Judicial Magistrate Arindam Singh Cheema of the Patiala House Court said that police custody was warranted in view of the seriousness of the allegations, the need to “unearth the larger conspiracy” and the need for effective investigation.

The students were accused of using criminal force against police personnel and shouting pro-Maoist slogans at the protest at India Gate on November 23.

Some of the protestors had allegedly used pepper spray on police personnel while being removed from the site, while some had allegedly displayed posters and shouted slogans hailing Maoist leader Madvi Hidma, who was recently killed in a gunfight with security forces.

Five of the demonstrators were sent to judicial custody for two days on November 24, while one was sent to an observation home under the Juvenile Justice Act while his age was being verified.

On Wednesday, the six persons were produced before the court again as their judicial custody period ended. During the hearing, the investigating officer produced documents showing that the sixth accused person was also an adult.

The prosecution argued that police custody was needed to interrogate the accused students about the alleged pro-Maoist slogans, examine their call records, identify other conspirators, look into funding sources, identify the source of the pepper spray and analyse mobile chats on planning and coordination.

The police said that Maoist violence is a serious threat and contended that the students’ actions could encourage such activities and demoralise security forces.

The additional public prosecutor, representing the state, said that a lenient view could not be taken of the students just because they are young and educated. He noted that those who are accused of having carried out the bomb blast near the Red Fort in Delhi on November 10 are also “young, educated and allegedly brainwashed”.

The police claimed that the students’ allegations of having been subjected to torture in custody were false and were meant to “overawe the police officials not to take legal action against such illegal activity”.

The lawyers for the students opposed police custody, saying that the students had no links to banned organisations, that no new evidence was produced in 48 hours to justify police custody and that the police were making exaggerated claims.

Some lawyers argued that their clients “did not even know Hindi” and that chanting slogans critical of the government is protected under the right to free speech.

The judge, however, said that the videos shown by the police showed the students pushing over barricades despite being told that India Gate was not a designated protest site, and that the videos showed slogans being shouted in support of Hidma.

“In view of the recent attacks in New Delhi, the right of the investigating agency cannot be curtailed at a recent stage when there are allegations regarding the raising of slogans which jeopardise the sovereignty, integrity and security of India,” the court said.

The protest on November 23 was mainly organised by a environmental research and action collective called Himkhand, student group Bhagat Singh Chatra Ekta Manch and discussion forum Scientists for Society.

Scientists for Society, however, said on November 24 that it joined the protest only on the subject of pollution, and that the agitation was “not the appropriate forum” to discuss Hidma’s killig.

Participants said the protest centred on air pollution for the first hour, but subsequently, some demonstrators crossed police barricades and shouted slogans about the killing of Hidma on November 18. The police then began detaining people.

By late evening, 23 individuals had been detained from India Gate, Kartavya Path, and later from outside the Parliament Street police station. One case was registered against six persons at the Kartavya Path police station, and another first information report was filed against 17 persons at the Parliament Street police station.

The cases were initially filed under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to assault, obstruction of public servants and outraging the modesty of women. On Tuesday, the police also added charges pertaining to making assertions prejudicial to national integration to the FIR registered at the Kartavya Path police station.

The 17 persons named in the case filed at the Parliament Street police station were on November 24 sent to three days’ judicial custody.

The Srinagar Police said that it carried out inspections at mosques and madrasas on Thursday as part of a crackdown on “individuals and networks associated with terrorist organisations”.

The intensified checks come in the aftermath of the blast near Delhi’s Red Fort metro station on November 10, which left 13 persons dead.

The doctor believed to have been driving the car that exploded was identified as Umar Nabi, a resident of Kashmir.

Two days after the explosion, the Union government described it as a “terrorist incident”.

Hours before the blast, the police said that it had cracked an “inter-state and transnational terror module” in Faridabad and Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur.

The case, along with the recent detection of the alleged terror module, has prompted multiple rounds of checks in the Valley.

On November 12, the Jammu and Kashmir Police conducted raids at more than 300 locations in the Kashmir valley allegedly linked to persons affiliated with the banned Jamaat-e-Islami. The actions came after intelligence that elements linked to the Jamaat-e-Islami, banned under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, were trying to revive the organisation under different names, the police had said at the time.

On Thursday, the Srinagar Police said that search teams accompanied by executive magistrates and independent witnesses inspected several premises to collect evidence related to “terror-linked or radical activities inimical to the security and integrity of the nation”.

Officers examined digital devices, documents and other material during the searches.

👉𝙎𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙧 𝙋𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙘𝙚 𝘾𝙤𝙣𝙙𝙪𝙘𝙩𝙨 𝘾𝙞𝙩𝙮𝙬𝙞𝙙𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙨 𝙤𝙣 𝙈𝙖𝙙𝙧𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙖𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙈𝙖𝙨𝙟𝙞𝙙𝙨 𝙏𝙤 𝙋𝙧𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙐𝙣𝙡𝙖𝙬𝙛𝙪𝙡, 𝘾𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙥𝙞𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙍𝙖𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝘼𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙚𝙨
As part of an ongoing crackdown against… pic.twitter.com/ApkNkBVa3p

— Srinagar Police (@SrinagarPolice) November 27, 2025

The searches were part of efforts to dismantle the “terror support ecosystem” in the city and to prevent any conspiracies aimed at disturbing peace and public order, the police said.

The operations were conducted in line with legal procedures “ensuring transparency and accountability at every stage”, the statement added.

The police said similar actions would continue wherever credible inputs indicate the presence of individuals or material linked to terror or radical activities.

It also urged citizens to cooperate with ongoing investigations and report suspicious activity.

Indian roads are increasingly becoming more dangerous for its most vulnerable users, an IndiaSpend analysis of national data shows. In a decade to 2023, road accident deaths increased 24% to about 173,000, but pedestrian deaths nearly tripled, those of two-wheeler riders nearly doubled, and cyclist deaths rose 13%.

In particular, two-wheeler deaths rose from accounting for 30% of all deaths in 2014 to 45% by 2023. Overall, every hour in 2014, India saw about five deaths of two-wheeler riders on average. This rose to about nine deaths per hour by 2023, the latest year for which data are available from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways.

In contrast, every other category of road users – cars and jeeps, trucks, buses and autorickshaws – saw fewer deaths in 2023 when compared to 2014.

This decrease signifies some improvement overall, considering that the number of highways and vehicles keeps increasing, said Ranjit Gadgil, Program Director at Parisar. “But this puts a sharper focus on vulnerable road users like pedestrians and motorcyclists,” he explained.

Gadgil pointed to three factors for the increase in two-wheeler fatalities: First, the sheer number of people relying on two-wheelers. In 2022, the latest year for which data are available, two-wheelers accounted for 74% of vehicles registered across India. “The WHO [World Health Organization] has actually pointed out that countries should try to reduce dependence on risky modes of transport like this,” he added.

Secondly, helmet use is still a major gap. “To be fully protected, the rider and pillion both need good-quality, ISI-marked helmets that are properly strapped on. Most people don’t tick all three boxes,” Gagdil explained.

And third, speed is a huge factor. “Once a two-wheeler crosses 40 or 50 kilometres per hour, any crash is likely to cause severe injury or worse. A crash at that speed could easily be fatal,” he said.

Lack of public transport options

India’s rising incomes and inadequate public transport options have accelerated private vehicle use, as per a 2021 study in the journal Springer Nature. Two-wheelers, as we said, accounted for 74% of all registered vehicles in 2022, up from 71% two decades ago.

Registered two-wheelers increased from about 139 million in 2014 to 263 million in 2022. Concurrently, the number of registered four-wheelers rose from 26 million to 49 million.

This surge in two-wheeler ownership reflects persistent gaps in affordable and reliable public transit, forcing millions–especially in rural and peri-urban areas–to depend on two-wheelers for daily mobility, according to experts like Gadgil. The resulting increase in unprotected road users combined with rising congestion has heightened safety risks across both urban and rural road networks.

“The use of two-wheelers to carry children is increasing because affordable bus transport for long distances is often unavailable,” said Geetam Tiwari, Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre, Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. “If safe bicycle and pedestrian paths to schools are not provided, parents tend to rely on two-wheelers to transport their children. For school-going children, bus transport should ideally be free, given the significant social benefits it provides.”

Another cohort that has seen the rise of two-wheeler use is gig workers and delivery partners for India’s booming online food and grocery industry. As of March this year, quick commerce platforms Blinkit and Swiggy together had an estimated 724,000 delivery partners.

Drivers are under constant pressure to meet delivery time limits, Tiwari said, explaining, “that’s why we see them taking shortcuts just to meet deadlines.” These unrealistic time targets are a huge safety concern and need to be regulated, she added.

We reached out to Zomato and Swiggy for comment on how they ensure driver safety. “Our processes are designed to prioritise safety over speed,” Shweta Dutt, corporate communications manager at Zomato, told IndiaSpend.

Riders complete a mandatory road safety module, are told not to overspeed or break traffic rules, and are not penalised for delays, she added. Partners are provided health and accident insurance and have access to ambulance assistance and rest points nationwide.

Rural India

Rural India accounts for a majority of road accident deaths (69%) – up from 59% a decade ago, our analysis of Ministry of Road Transport and Highways data shows. This is associated with a rise in the share of accidents – from 54% in 2019 to 61% in 2023.

Higher death rates in rural regions are driven by faster driving speeds, poor helmet compliance, weaker enforcement, and limited access to trauma care. On the other hand, the lack of adequate public transport in cities leads to crowding in the bus and rail systems, and people are forced to choose auto rickshaws, two-wheelers, private taxis and cars leading to congestion on roads, as per a 2023 study from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

These contrasting risk patterns underline the need for differentiated road safety strategies – enhancing trauma response and enforcement in rural areas while addressing congestion management and gig-worker safety in urban environments, according to this World Bank report from 2020.

Disaggregated data on type of vehicle for rural and urban areas are not available, but since 2019, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways reports include classification of road accidents in 50 Indian cities with populations of more than 1 million. Here too, the trends are similar: In 2023, two-wheeler riders, cyclists and pedestrians accounted for 74% road accident deaths, up from 59% in 2019.

Enforcement gaps

Of about 75,000 Indian two-wheeler riders or pillion riders who died in 2023, 73% did not wear a helmet, data show. “Unlike four-wheelers, the only globally recognised safety measure for two-wheeler users is wearing a helmet – and not just any helmet, but one that is of good quality and correctly strapped,” Geetam Tiwari said.

“Wearing an improperly strapped or poor-quality helmet is almost as risky as not wearing one at all,” she added. “Even with a properly worn helmet, its effectiveness reduces risk of fatal injury only by about 30% to 40%; the rest of the body remains unprotected, making two-wheeler travel inherently high-risk, especially at higher speeds.”

Ideally, helmet mandates should apply to bicyclists too, she said, but at the very least, any electric two-wheeler or small engine bike should require helmets.

In 2023, about 10% of accidents involved drivers without a valid license or those holding a learner’s license. Many licensed riders, however, still lack adequate road safety training due to weak enforcement and minimal skill-based evaluations.

“India’s current two-wheeler licensing system prioritises procedural issuance over competence and safety readiness,” said Piyush Tewari, founder and CEO of SaveLIFE Foundation, an independent non-profit focussed on improving road safety and emergency medical care. “Most licence holders have never undergone formal rider training, and existing tests are limited to basic manoeuvres conducted in controlled environments.”

Unlike countries such as Singapore, which follow multi-tiered licensing with graded training based on engine capacity India’s one-size-fits-all approach leaves novice and untrained riders highly vulnerable, he explained.

In 2023, 66% of road deaths were on straight highway stretches–where vehicle speeds tend to be high. Over half the deaths occurred in “open” areas, which “normally do not have any human activities in the vicinity”.

Overspeeding was indicted in 68% of road accident deaths, and wrong-side driving or lane indiscipline led to 5% deaths, data show. “Over-speeding often happens because people drive at speeds they feel comfortable with rather than following limits,” Geetam Tiwari said.

In order to enforce lower speeds – like 30–50 kmph – roads themselves need to be designed differently, especially near schools, with narrower lanes, textured surfaces, and speed humps, she explained. “Simply putting up speed limit signs isn’t enough, since wide, smooth, straight roads encourage speeding.”

In rural and peri-urban areas, the surge in traffic volume, particularly at access-controlled expressways intersecting with villages, raises conflict points and subsequently the number of crashes near villages increases, says Karuna Raina, director of public policy & research at SaveLIFE Foundation, told us in January 2025. “Moreover, while the design speeds for these roads are high, the corresponding road infrastructure – such as safety features, signage, lane markings, lighting and barriers – is often inadequate.”

Single-vehicle crashes are a major issue for two-wheelers, often caused by slipping or hitting roadside objects, and account for about 20%-22% of two-wheeler fatalities, highlighting the need to rethink road design, Geetam Tiwari said.

The way forward

Gadgil pointed to several gaps in road safety data. “For one, there’s a big delay – just look at the 2023 report; it’s only coming out now, even though the government has been digitising data for years.

“There’s also limited flexibility in the way the data is released. Right now, reports give fixed categories, like fatalities for ages 0–18, but if you want to break it down further – say, 0-4, 5-12, or 12-18 – you can’t. This matters for policy, like child restraint laws, where knowing exact age groups is critical. The data exists when accidents are recorded, but it isn’t shared in a usable way. There’s also the bigger issue of reliability – if what’s recorded is wrong, the output will be wrong,” he continued.

Working-age adults continue to be the most affected demographic in two-wheeler fatalities. In 2023, individuals aged 18-45 accounted for 66.4% of all road deaths. The vast majority of victims (85%) were male, reflecting the profile of commercial riders, gig workers, and young commuters who rely on two-wheelers for livelihood and mobility. This concentration of deaths among productive age groups translates into significant socio-economic losses, highlighting the urgency of targeted road safety interventions for these high-risk populations.

Reducing road-accident deaths and injuries by 50% and sustaining it over a period of 24 years could generate an additional flow of income equivalent to 14% of India’s 2014 gross domestic product (Rs 125 lakh crore or $2.03 trillion), as IndiaSpend reported in February 2020 based on a January 2018 study by the World Bank.

The government uses only police data to report road accident fatalities, ignoring sources such as hospitals, state and district level transport departments, as IndiaSpend reported in 2021. This makes it lopsided, experts say, because of the human and infrastructure resource shortages in police departments and biases among officials.

IndiaSpend reached out to Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and the Transport & Road Safety department for comment. We will update this story when we receive a response.

This article first appeared on IndiaSpend, a data-driven and public-interest journalism non-profit.

The Assam government on Thursday passed a bill in the Assembly to ban polygamy.

The Assam Prohibition of Polygamy Bill, 2025, had been introduced on Tuesday. It proposes up to seven years of imprisonment for persons convicted of polygamy, the practice of having more than one wife. Further, those found guilty of having concealed their previous marriage can face punishment of up to ten years’ imprisonment.

It also states that if parents, priests or village heads hide a polygamous marriage from the police, or “unreasonably” delay providing such information to the authorities, they would also be held liable for abetting the offence.

Further, a priest who knowingly solemnises a polygamous marriage can be punished with imprisonment of up to two years.

Before the Assembly passed the bill, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma contended that the legislation was not against Islam, adding that several Muslim-majority countries had also prohibited polygamy, ANI reported.

“If this bill passes, then you will get a chance to be a true Muslim,” ANI quoted him as saying. “Countries like Turkey have also banned polygamy, there is an arbitration council in Pakistan.”

However, Sivasagar MLA Akhil Gogoi told ANI that the bill undermines constitutional protections pertaining to freedom of consience and the freedom to manage religious affairs.

All India United Democratic Front MLA Aminul Islam said that his party opposed the bill’s preamble, adding that the legislation violates several provisions of the Constitution, ANI reported.

Meanwhile, Sarma added that if he returns as chief minister, he will introduce a Uniform Civil Code in the first session of the Assembly, ANI reported.

Assembly elections in Assam are expected to be held in the first half of 2026.

A Uniform Civil Code involves a common set of laws governing marriage, divorce, succession and adoption for all citizens. Currently, different religious communities are governed by their own codes of personal law.

The introduction of a common personal law has for long been on the Bharatiya Janata Party’s agenda and several states ruled by the party have been making advances towards implementing it. The BJP claims that the aim of the proposed law is to ensure equality and justice for women in particular, who are often denied their rights in marriage, divorce and inheritance.

Kerala’s Labour Minister V Sivankutty has said the state will not implement the Centre’s new labour codes. He said that the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment had convened a meeting of all states last month, during which Kerala reiterated its position against adopting the codes.

The Centre notified the implementation of four labour codes – which replace 29 labour laws – on November 21.

The Centre claims the new codes are aimed at extending coverage of statutory protection to platform workers. This includes need-based minimum wages, non-hazardous working conditions and universal social security entitlements.

However, critics have argued that the codes fail to extend social protection to the vast majority of informal sector workers. Read more.

The Assam government on Thursday passed a bill in the Assembly to ban polygamy. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma contended that the bill is not against Islam, and said that several Muslim-majority countries have also prohibited the practice.

However, Opposition leaders argued that the draft law violated constitutional provisions pertaining to the freedom of religion and the freedom to manage religious affairs.

The Assam Prohibition of Polygamy Bill, 2025, had been introduced on Tuesday. It proposes up to seven years of imprisonment for persons convicted of polygamy. Further, those found guilty of having concealed their previous marriage can face punishment of up to ten years’ imprisonment.

Sarma on Thursday also said that if he returns as chief minister, he will introduce a Uniform Civil Code in the first session of the Assembly. Read more.

The Supreme Court has said that it does not have a “magic wand” to solve the air pollution crisis in Delhi. Chief Justice Surya Kant said that there are several causes for the deteriorating air quality, and it is up to scientists and experts to find a solution to the problem.

“I know this [pollution] is hazardous for Delhi-NCR,” Kant told amicus curiae Aparajita Singh. “...Tell me, what can we direct so that there is clean air immediately.”

The court made the remarks on a day when Delhi’s air quality index was recorded at the higher end of the “very poor” category. A day earlier, the Commission for Air Quality Management withdrew the Stage 3 restrictions, citing improved air quality.

The restrictions under the GRAP 1 and GRAP 2 remain in force. Read more.

Former AIADMK leader KA Sengottaiyan has joined actor Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, a day after resigning as the Gobichettipalayam MLA. The nine-time MLA had been with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam for nearly 50 years, but was removed on October 31 following internal differences.

In September, Sengottaiyan had publicly urged AIADMK chief Edappadi K Palaniswami to consider reinstating expelled leaders, including O Panneerselvam, TTV Dhinakaran and VK Sasikala, arguing that wider reconciliation would strengthen the organisation.

He was relieved of his responsibilities in the organisation at the time and later expelled for violating party discipline.

On Thursday, Sengottaiyan was appointed as the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam’s secretary for four districts – Coimbatore, Erode, Tiruppur and the Nilgiris. Read more.

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The Supreme Court on Thursday directed comedians Samay Raina, Vipul Goyal, Balraj Paramjeet Singh Ghai, Sonali Thakkar and Nishant Jagadish Tanwar to telecast programmes in their shows highlighting success stories of persons with disabilities, Live Law reported.

The comedians were directed to do so as reparation for allegedly insensitive jokes they made on their shows about persons with disabilities.

The court said the shows should also aim to raise funds for the treatment of disabled persons, especially those with Spinal Muscular Atrophy.

The directions were issued in a petition filed by Cure SMA Foundation seeking guidelines against jokes that violate the dignity of persons with disabilities.

The petition was prompted by a joke made by Raina about a child with Spinal Muscular Atrophy. The comedians had earlier appeared before the Court and were directed to publish public apologies on their platforms.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi said that the comedians must host such programmes at least twice a month and may invite persons with disabilities to their platforms to raise awareness and support for those suffering from rare diseases such as Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Live Law reported.

The comedians’ counsel requested that the frequency be reduced, arguing that they do not host shows regularly and that events are usually organised by sponsors.

The bench declined to modify the order. “This is a social burden we are putting on you,” the judges said, suggesting the comedians could use their YouTube channels if needed, Live Law reported. The counsel then agreed.

Kerala Labour Minister V Sivankutty on Thursday said the state will not implement the Centre’s new labour codes, PTI reported.

He said that the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment had convened a meeting of all states last month, during which Kerala reiterated its position that it would not adopt the codes, PTI reported.

On November 21, the Union government notified the implementation of four labour codes.

The Parliament had cleared the Code on Wages in 2019 and the rest of the three codes – Industrial Relations Code, Code on Social Security, and Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code – in 2020.

After their implementation, the four codes replaced 29 labour laws.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government has claimed that the reform is aimed at extending coverage of statutory protection, including need-based minimum wages, non-hazardous working conditions and universal social security entitlements, to platform workers.

However, critics have argued that the codes fail to extend social protection to the vast majority of informal sector workers, including migrant workers, self-employed workers and home-based workers.

Trade unions had in 2020 protested against the codes, stating that they allow employers to hire and fire workers more easily, arguing that they have no safeguards for workers, make it harder for workers to negotiate better terms and wages with employers and make strikes more difficult.

On Thursday, the minister also said that any future steps on the labour codes would be taken only after consultations with trade unions, The New Indian Express reported.

Sivakutty’s statement came a day after a joint forum of 10 central trade unions, farmers’ body Samyukt Kisan Morcha and members of the All India Power Engineers Federation held nationwide protests against the four labour codes.

On November 22, the 10 central trade unions in a statement had described the new labour codes as being “anti-worker and pro-employer”.

The Supreme Court on Thursday said that it does not have a magic wand to solve the air pollution crisis in Delhi, Bar and Bench reported.

Chief Justice Surya Kant said that there are several causes for the deteriorating air quality in the national capital and it is up to scientists and experts to find a solution to the problem.

“Then we have to see what can be the solutions in each region,” Kant said. “Let us see what the government has constituted in terms of committee.”

“What magic wand can a judicial forum exercise?” Live Law quoted Kant as saying. “I know this is hazardous for Delhi-NCR...Tell me, what can we direct so that there is clean air immediately.”

The comment came after amicus curiae Aparajita Singh mentioned the matter for listing, saying that the air pollution in the national capital was a “health emergency”.

An amicus curiae is a person who is not a party to the case but provides advice or information to the court.

Kant said that the matter needs to be monitored regularly. The bench will hear it next on Monday.

Air quality deteriorates sharply in the winter months in Delhi, which is often ranked the world’s most polluted capital.

Stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, vehicular pollution, along with the lighting of firecrackers during Diwali, falling temperatures, decreased wind speeds and emissions from industries and coal-fired plants contribute to the problem.

Delhi has been recording air quality in the “poor” or worse categories since mid-October, leading to Stage 3 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan being imposed on November 11.

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

On Wednesday, the Commission for Air Quality Management withdrew the Stage 3 restrictions, citing improved air quality. The restrictions under the GRAP 1 and GRAP 2 remain in force.

At 2.05 pm on Thursday, Delhi’s average Air Quality Index stood at 373, placing it at the higher end of the “very poor” category, as per the Sameer application, which provides hourly updates from the Central Pollution Control Board.

The AQI at 13 of the 39 monitoring stations in Delhi recorded readings above 400, categorised as “severe”, the data showed.

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

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

Expressing dissatisfaction with the efficacy of self-regulatory mechanisms, the Supreme Court on Thursday emphasised the need for a neutral, independent and autonomous body to regulate obscene, offensive or illegal content on online platforms, Live Law reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi was hearing petitions filed by podcaster Ranveer Allahabadia and others challenging the first information reports against them for making sexually explicit remarks during an episode of the YouTube show India’s Got Latent in February.

The bench had expanded the scope of the matter to consider guidelines against obscenity on online platforms.

Attorney General R Venkataramani and Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the court that the Union government has proposed to introduce new guidelines, Live Law reported. The government is consulting the stakeholders, they submitted.

Mehta was quoted as saying that the matter was not only about obscenity but perversity in user-generated content that is posted on persons on platforms such as their own YouTube channels.

The chief justice expressed surprise that there is no regulation of content creators. “So I create my own channel, I am not accountable to anyone...somebody has to be accountable!” Live Law quoted Kant as saying.

The counsel representing the Indian Broadcast and Digital Foundation said that regulations are in place in the form of the 2021 Information Technology Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules.

The rules have been challenged before the Delhi High Court.

The counsel said that despite the stay of some of the provisions of the rules, the video streaming platforms had been voluntarily following the Digital Media Ethics Code by labelling the nature of content and giving age classifications, Live Law reported.

There is also a body headed by retired Justice Gita Mittal to deal with complaints against content, he added.

The chief justice expressed reservations about the self-regulatory model and said that there is a need for statutory regulations.

“Self-styled bodies will not help…” Kant was quoted as saying. “Some neutral autonomous bodies, which are free from the influence of those who exploit all of this and the state also, is needed as a regulatory measure.”

Kant questioned how there were repeated instances of violations if self-regulation was indeed effective.

Bagchi asked whether the creator would take responsibility if the content is “perceived as anti-national or disruptive of society’s norms”.

“Will self-regulation be sufficient?” he was quoted as having asked. “The difficulty we are facing is the response time. Once the scurrilous material is uploaded, by the time the authorities react, it has gone viral, to millions of viewers, so how do you control that?”

During the hearings earlier this year, the court had said that it intended to do something to regulate allegedly obscene content on YouTube and social media platforms. It had in March urged the Union government to formulate guidelines.

Kant had told the attorney general during an earlier hearing that guidelines framed by the government to regulate online content must balance freedoms and duties.

Also read: Why the Supreme Court’s new push to regulate social media threatens free expression

As winter in North India arrives with a persistent sting in the throat, the Union Health Ministry has issued an advisory to states and Union territories on air pollution. It explains who is most at risk, how hospitals should prepare and what the public ought to do.

On the face of it, it may simply seem like a routine governmental circular. However, on closer examination, it tells a deeper story about how the Indian state imagines health, risk and responsibility.

The document defines key pollutants, lists vulnerable groups and explains India’s Air Quality Index, It points to early-warning systems and app and tells health systems how to prepare for the seasonal spike in respiratory diseases.

It attaches model messages for social media and advisories for schools and construction sites, quietly revealing that the Indian state likes to govern health crises through advisories, invocations of behavioural change and through an alliance of experts and bureaucrats that rarely has to sit in the same room as those who live with the consequences.

The document walks through each level of the Air Quality Index, highlights what symptoms might worsen and suggests what is to be done at each step. It directs state health authorities to the Sameer app which provides provides hourly updates on the National Air Quality Index and to early-warning systems that forecast pollution levels a few days in advance. States are told to watch the AQI numbers and to prepare health facilities accordingly. Individuals are told to change their behaviour.

Health Ministry issues Advisory on Air Pollution. Health impacts of air pollution vary with pollution levels, exposure duration, and individual vulnerability. Age, pre-existing health conditions, and other demographic factors can influence risk.@MoHFW_INDIA #HealthAdvisory pic.twitter.com/XbprKuuVK8

— DD NEWS JAMMU | डीडी न्यूज़ जम्मू (@ddnews_jammu) November 12, 2025

The advisory acknowledges that economically disenfranchised families using biomass for cooking, people who sweep streets or work at construction sites and people who live in cramped, poorly ventilated housing are more exposed and therefore more at risk. Yet, when it comes to recommendations, the burden of protection falls on individuals and households.

It recognises that a worker on a construction site is exposed to dust all day. It suggests masks and health check-ups, but it does not directly tie this to labour law and workplace safety regulation. Vulnerability is acknowledged, but responsibility is quietly shifted downwards.

The advisory asks states to integrate air-pollution risks into climate and health action plans, to designate sentinel hospitals to track pollution-related illness, to prepare facilities for seasonal spikes, and to strengthen respiratory care. This framing reveals the limits of how the health system is being imagined.

Health facilities and staff are framed as responders. They monitor, they treat, and they counsel. However, if the health sector only adapts without becoming a strong institutional voice against polluting industries, weak enforcement and inequitable urban planning, then the underlying drivers of the crisis remain intact.

Anyone middle class who can work from home should, because for 50% of Delhi to WFH, we need to make the space for 100% of the Safai karamcharis, gig workers, domestic workers, waste workers, tailors, doodhnath walas and sabji walas- all those who can’t WFH.

The privileged need…

— Bharati Chaturvedi (@Bharati09) November 24, 2025

The advisory sketches a political arrangement in which decisions about air, health, and risk sit firmly in the hands of a small circle of ministries and expert institutions, while everyone else is asked to adjust their lives around those choices.

There is a quiet bargain on offer, with the state giving citizens more information, more warnings and more advisories. In return, citizens are expected to accept that this is how the situation is for now. This is a system that is learning how to live with chronic harm rather than insisting that such harm is intolerable and more importantly, avoidable.

The advisory’s language of solidarity and cooperation, that “…together, we can work towards a healthier, cleaner and more resilient ecosystem…”, hides the fact that people are not equally placed in this crisis.

A family with multiple air purifiers and a worker who must sweep a main road early morning in December do not share the same choices. Yet the advisory speaks to them almost in one breath. That is where the politics lies: in presenting unequal exposure as if it were a shared, neutral condition, while the arrangements that made the air toxic in the first place stay largely untouched.

Stubble burning has dropped after reaching its peak this season. But the air in Delhi is still toxic. Gentle reminder that the city's own sources, especially vehicular emission, is behind this. And yet, Delhi doesnt do enough to combat it.https://t.co/NBChTr1fP7

— Vaishnavi Rathore (@_Vaishnavi_R) November 24, 2025

What would it mean for the state to respond differently?

It would mean taking the advisory’s recognition of vulnerable groups and following that logic all the way through. If certain segments of the population are at higher risk, then minimum standards for workplace safety, labour protections and access to clean cooking fuels have to become central to air-pollution policy.

The health ministry’s own advisory could explicitly demand that other ministries and state departments act on this evidence, rather than simply stopping at awareness.

It would also require the state and the scientific community to engage with these vulnerable groups as partners to map exposure and think through solutions. Imagine health advisories co-written with those who endure the worst of bad air.

None of this is easy. It is slower than issuing an advisory. But it is also more in line with the idea of a democratic health system that sees people as citizens whose knowledge and experience matter.

This is Mumbai, India’s financial capital, covered in a thick layer of pollution. Worli is no more visible from the sea link. We are no better than Delhi NCR as far as pollution is concerned. What is our govt doing to protect us from inhaling poison?@Dev_Fadnavis @CMOMaharashtra pic.twitter.com/0cyfs43CEG

— Nidhi Jamwal (@JamwalNidhi) November 24, 2025

I live with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the kind of chronic breathlessness that does not wait for a “severe” AQI day to show up. It sits in the chest like a tightness that can be managed and worked around on most days until the air changes.

It is a strange thing to be writing about a public health concern and, at the same time, being reduced to a statistic on an advisory. So, when I read an advisory that tells people like me to “stay indoors” on very polluted days, or to “avoid exertion”, there is a quiet helplessness at play.

There are days when it feels as if the responsibility for survival has been passed down to those of us with broken lungs.

There is still, however, the possibility that our shortness of breath can be a starting point for demanding a politics of air that is less about enduring and more about changing the conditions that made breathing this hard in the first place.

Rishabh Kachroo is an independent researcher working on the public understanding of science and the larger knowledge politics questions that surround it.

The Supreme Court has directed the Union government, state governments and the University Grants Commission to submit details of the functioning, governance and regulation of all private and deemed universities, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices Ahsanuddin Amanullah and NV Anjaria passed the order on November 20 while hearing a writ petition by a student who had changed her name from Khushi Jain to Ayesha Jain in 2021.

She alleged that when she applied for an MBA course at Amity University, Noida, in 2024, officials at the institution refused to recognise her legal name change. Due to this, she could not fulfil the minimum attendance criteria, causing loss of an academic year.

She also alleged that the university officials harassed her for changing to a “Muslim name”, reported Live Law.

The court had earlier ordered the university to pay compensation to the petitioner. After the university paid her Rs 1 lakh, the bench on October 14 stated that the compensation amounts to a “mockery of the court’s sentiments”.

On November 20, it converted the case into a public interest litigation concerning the regulation of private universities.

The bench sought information regarding the provisions of law under which private and deemed universities functioning in the country were established, the circumstances surrounding their approval, any concessions or benefits granted, including land allotments or preferential treatment, and the conditions of such benefits, Live Law reported.

It also asked for full disclosure of the societies or trusts managing the universities, their aims and objectives, and the composition and selection process of the top decision-making bodies.

In addition, the University Grants Commission was ordered to submit an affidavit detailing its statutory and policy mandates, as well as the mechanisms it employs to monitor compliance, covering admissions, faculty recruitment and regulatory checks, Live Law reported.

The court highlighted three key areas for scrutiny: whether the institutions operate on a genuinely “no-profit, no-loss” basis, the grievance redressal mechanisms available for students and staff, and compliance with minimum salary standards for faculty and employees.

“If there is any attempt to withhold/suppress/misrepresent/misstate facts in the affidavits called for, this court will be compelled to adopt a strict view,” the order stated.

On February 29, 2024, the Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved three semiconductor units as part of the government’s push to build a domestic semiconductor industry. Two units were led by the Tata Group.

As part of a scheme to incentivise semiconductor production, the Centre agreed to underwrite half the cost of building the units. For the two units of the Tata Group, this subsidy comes to Rs 44,203 crore.

Four weeks after the Cabinet approval, the Tata Group donated Rs 758 crore to the Bharatiya Janata Party. This makes it the party’s biggest donor in the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, surpassing any political donation made in 2023-’24, based on the disclosures made to the Election Commission so far.

In all, 15 firms of the Tata Group gave away nearly Rs 915 crore in political donations in 2024-’25. The donations were transferred to political parties via the group’s Progressive electoral trust. The highest amount came from the holding firm, Tata Sons Private Limited, which gave Rs 308 crore.

After the BJP, the second-highest recipient of the donations was the Congress party, which received Rs 77.3 crore – about one-tenth of the amount the BJP got. Eight other political parties received Rs 10 crore each from the group.

The Tata Group’s donation fits a larger pattern of corporations that bagged government incentives for semiconductor projects funding the BJP.

The third semiconductor unit approved by the government in February is being set up by the Tamil Nadu-based Murugappa group, with 50% of the cost – Rs 3,501 crore – being underwritten by the government.

As Scroll had reported earlier this year, days after the approval, the Murugappa group had donated Rs 125 crore to the BJP.

Ramesh Kunhikannan, the managing director of Kaynes Technology, also donated Rs 12 crore to the BJP in 2023-’24, according to the party’s contribution report. In September 2024, his firm, Kaynes Semicon Private Limited, received an approval to set up a semiconductor unit in Sanand, Gujarat.

The Tata Group’s Progressive electoral trust did not make any donations to political parties between 2021 and 2024 – until the Rs 758 crore-transfer in April 2024, days ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.

Scroll sent questions to a spokesperson of Tata Sons about the timing of the donations to the BJP but had not received a response at the time of publication. Questions sent to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which oversees India’s semiconductor industry, also went unanswered. This report will be updated if there is a reply.

Modi government’s semiconductor push

In 2021, the Modi government announced a host of schemes under the India Semiconductor Mission to encourage companies to set up semiconductor units. It was a push to create a local semiconductor industry, especially after the Covid pandemic disrupted India’s automobile sector – including firms such as Tata Motors. The sector relies heavily on semiconductor imports from China and Taiwan.

The mission offered thousands of crores of rupees in government subsidies to corporations that would enter this key sector. This included 50% central subsidy on capital expenditure to build semiconductors units, with additional financial support from state governments.

The 157-year-old Tata Group’s semiconductor ambitions are at least as old as the government mission. In 2021, Tata Sons acquired a telecom firm that months later bought a majority stake in an Indian semiconductor design firm.

In 2022 and 2023, it announced strategic partnerships with Japan’s Renesas Electronics Corporation and US-based Micron Technology – both significant global players in the semiconductor industry.

When the Union cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Modi approved state support for three semiconductor units (two in Gujarat and one in Assam, both governed by the BJP), the Tata Group bagged two of these units.

The first was a facility to turn raw silicon wafers into finished integrated circuits in Dholera, Gujarat, in partnership with Taiwan-based Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. The second was a unit to assemble, test and package chips in Morigaon, Assam.

According to the government, the Tata Group will invest Rs 1.18 lakh crore in the two units and create up to 46,000 direct and indirect jobs. A part of its investment is covered by the 50% central government subsidy, which according to an Indian Express report comes to Rs 44,203 crore.

Earlier, the Economic Times had reported that the Assam government would also be giving additional incentives to the Tata Group for the facility it was setting up in the state.

“This marks the beginning of a new era for India,” said Randhir Thakur, CEO and MD of Tata Electronics, on the day of the cabinet decision. “Tata Electronics is proud to play a prominent role in strengthening the global semiconductor ecosystem.”

BJP rakes in crores

Just a month after the Union Cabinet’s approval of its semiconductor units, the Tata Group donated Rs 757.6 crore to the BJP.

These transactions were made through the Progressive electoral trust. One of the directors of the trust, Jehangir Nariman Mistry, also sits on the boards of several Tata trusts, the organisations that hold a majority stake in Tata Sons.

The trust’s latest disclosure to the Election Commission shows that 15 firms of the Tata Group – including Tata Sons, Tata Consultancy Services and Tata Steel – contributed Rs 915 crore to Progressive on April 2, 2024.

The same day, the trust donated Rs 914.9 crore to 10 political parties. The largest cheque of Rs 757.6 crore, that is 82% of total donations, was cut for the BJP.

The Congress party received Rs 77.3 crore. Eight other political parties – All India Trinamool Congress, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Shiv Sena, Biju Janata Dal, YSR Congress, Janata Dal (United), Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi – received Rs 10 crore each.

The date for contributions and donations in the trust’s disclosure statement is recorded as October 24, 2025. But the trust clarified that the date had been incorrectly recorded because of a glitch in the Election Commission’s system.

An unprecedented donation

The BJP has been the largest beneficiary of political finance in the last decade. The Tata Group’s donation to the party on April 2, 2024, is larger than any other donation made to a political party in 2023-’24, based on the information available so far.

The 2024-’25 donations of the Prudent electoral trust, which has a history of making large donations to the BJP, are yet to be made public.

The Tata Group had last made political donations through the Progressive trust in 2018-’19. That year’s disclosure is not available with the Election Commission, but contribution reports of the Trinamool Congress, the Shiv Sena, the Congress and the BJP show that the group donated at least Rs 478 crore that year. Of this, Rs 356 crore went to the BJP.

Between 2014-’15 and 2017-’18, disclosures made to the Election Commission do not record any donations by the trust. The trust’s disclosure for 2019-’20 is not available in the public domain. Contribution reports of political parties do not reveal any donations by the trust during that year either. Between 2021-’22 and 2023-’24, the trust did not make any donations.

India’s immensely respected economist and public intellectual Prabhat Patnaik masterfully assembles in the pages of a short monograph the sweep of India’s post-colonial economic history. This is in his forthcoming Socialism and the Indian Constitution (part of a series of short volumes that Neera Chandoke and I are editing for the Centre for Equity Studies on the principal ideas of the constitution, published by Speaking Tiger).

He begins with unpacking India’s constitutional idea of socialism. He explains what drives this idea of socialism, what promises it contains, and how this varies from Marxist notions of socialism.

In this volume, he evaluates (not unfavourably) the partial accomplishments of socialism in the early decades of the republic, the jettisoning of the socialist ideals amid the juggernaut of neo-liberalism, and its consequences of staggering inequality and furthering the impoverishment of the Indian peasant and worker.

He persuasively uncovers the necessary alliance of monopoly capital today with neo-fascism in Modi’s India. He concludes with an assessment of the profound dangers of the Trumpian global order, and speaks of both the imperative and prospects of reclaiming and rebuilding socialism for a more egalitarian country.

Marxist, anti-colonial notions of socialism

The Congress in India laid out a socialist agenda in the Karachi conference of 1931. India, Patnaik observes, was not alone among countries across the Global South that waged anti-colonial struggles, in placing socialism high in its imagination for countries freed from colonial bondage. We see socialism high in the agenda of many Arab and African freedom struggles. The fundamental difference with the Marxist-Leninist conceptions of socialism was that Marxists saw socialism to be a historical necessity with the focus on changes in the ownership and the building of a community of the working classes.

For post-colonial countries, including India, socialism was a normative idea, of building out of the ravages of colonialism a country that was more egalitarian; to end exploitation and poverty, and to secure for every citizen of every class, caste, gender, religion equality of opportunity. For those who came together to debate and write the Indian Constitution, democracy, secularism and socialism were inextricably conjoined in their imagination of a more equal and just country.

But in recent years, supporters of the BJP-led ruling regime have raised the demand that the words “secular” and “socialist” be deleted from the constitution, because they were added later, during India’s Emergency. However, turning down a petition to remove the word “socialist” from India’s constitution, India’s Chief Justice in November 2024 rejected this plea. He enunciated the features of constitutional socialism to be to secure equality of opportunity for all citizens through building a welfare state.

This, Patnaik underlines, differs from Marxist socialism insofar as while both Marxist and post-colonial socialism seek to accomplish equality of opportunity, Marxists believe that this is possible only with the social ownership of the means of production. India’s post-colonial socialism focussed on the results of an egalitarian order and not questions of ownership.

Patnaik observes that it was only Ambedkar among the leaders of the freedom struggle who saw in socialism not just the goal of greater egalitarianism but also the building of a new community. When he called for the annihilation of caste, he believed that only this would build the foundations of the new “community” in free India. This too is a goal neglected in the building of socialism in free India.

Practice of Indian socialism

Indian socialism in the early decades of the republic accorded space for the private corporate sector, while installing the state in the commanding heights of the economy. What India achieved in this phase, Patnaik points out, was a relative autonomy from imperialism. The regime confronted metropolitan capital mainly through the agency of the public sector. This manifested itself in the nationalisation of natural resources and finance that had earlier served the colonial pattern of the international order, and the building of self-reliance in both production and technology.

The nationalisation of 14 private banks in 1969, observes Patnaik, was a very significant step for Indian advancing the goals of Indian socialism. It was not fashioned as a decisive blow to finance capital but to ensure that India’s farm sector and petty producers could access bank credit which until then was mostly cornered by corporate private capital.

Patnaik also feels that the oft-repeated critique of the “quota-license-permit-raj” is somewhat misplaced. India chose to bar foreign capital inflows as these would impose conditions on state policy that would vary vastly from the socialist goals of the country. As a result, since foreign exchange reserves were limited, the state needed to regulate private industry to ration foreign exchange reserves.

Patnaik also answers critics of India’s choice of “self-reliance” over export-led growth. Export-led growth would have prioritised industry over agriculture. Self-reliant growth, on the other hand, ensured that agriculture and industry grew in tandem. Second, colonialism had ravaged India’s economy by a regime of forced trade, in which India produced primary commodities and imported manufactures. India needed to rebuild its production structure outside of and independent of trade, before a more egalitarian engagement with trade could become possible. These choices, Patnaik argues, were in conformity with anti-colonial nationalism.

So, too, was India’s education policy in the early decades. Borrowing Gramsci’s phrase, its objective was to create “organic intellectuals” of free India.

There were many achievements of this period that Patnaik points to. India’s per capita availability of food rose after half a century of decline under colonialism. Terrible famines became a thing of the past. The magnitude of absolute poverty stabilised, but did not increase. The share of the top 1% in the national income which was 12% in 1947 fell to 6% in 1982 (and it has risen greatly since then, as we shall see). Therefore, India did make some progress to a more egalitarian order, despite limitations that Patnaik identifies.

Even before the advent of neo-liberalism, Patnaik points to several limitations in accomplishing equality of opportunity even during the first decades of the Indian republic in which the executive proclaimed its commitment to advance socialism. India’s growth rate was much higher than in colonial times, but tied as it was to a slow-growing agriculture, it was not high enough to make a sufficient dent to the massive unemployment inherited from colonialism. Sufficient public resources were not invested in agriculture, as compared to industry.

One major failing of this phase, according to Patnaik, was the failure of land reforms. It made some headway in states like West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir, Kerala, Karnataka and Telangana. But for the country as a whole, it did little to reduce the concentration of land ownership.

Another paramount failing in securing the goal of equality of opportunity was the continuance of significant levels of unemployment, or what Marx called the reserve army of labour. The second was untaxed inheritance. As Patnaik points out, a worker’s son could hardly have the same opportunities as the son of a billionaire who inherits millions. Differences in wealth also needed to be more effectively controlled if we were to achieve even a modicum of equal opportunities.

Further, we did not invest in a public education system that ensures free and equal educational opportunities to all, irrespective of wealth, income, caste and gender. The same applies to the failure to establish a public health system that assures free or affordable quality health care to all persons.

The neo-liberal age

But still, the first decades of the Indian republic were rooted in anti-colonial nationalism, despite many missed chances. However, this regime of partial, imperfect but still significant commitment to socialism as defined in India’s constitution was rapidly dismantled from the mid-1980s by a new regime of neo-liberalism. This gave way from the mid-1980s to what Patnaik calls “GDP nationalism”, very far from Gandhiji’s vision of wiping every tear from every eye. The rising bourgeoise and middle classes sought an accelerated growth strategy shorn of socialist and egalitarian aspirations. Instead, the aspiration was to accomplish high GDP growth elevating India to the high table of major economic powers.

This entailed opening barriers and incentivising international capital, and encouraging domestic corporate-financial oligarchy even with budgetary transfers and concessions that moved resources away from social goods like public education and public health. This ushered in the neo-liberal order, which was a regime that enabled the free movement of goods, services, capital and above all finance across international borders.

This effectively marked, according to Patnaik, a move away from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of international capital, with deleterious implications for democracy. This was because the fear of the “flight of capital” made economic policy beholden not to the wishes of the people but to the demands of international capital. This resulted in a sharp decline in welfare services, in public healthcare and education, and in the capacity of the state to tackle unemployment through rises in public spending. This regime shifted the burden of taxation from the rich to working people.

He also describes the reasons for the persisting crisis of employment under neo-liberalism, even as global capital shifted production to the global south to take advantage of the lower wages resulting from a massive reserve army of labour. This still does not lead to a rising graph of employment in the global south, partly because of the massive crisis of petty production and agriculture that threw millions of workers into unemployment, and partly because of the incentive built into corporate profit-maximisation to resort to labour-saving technologies. The cumulative result of massive and stubborn levels of unemployment was that real wages in the global south did not rise, because the reserve army of labour does not diminish.

The result also was a massive growth in inequality. Patnaik points to the World Inequality Data base that showed that the share of the top 1% in the national income rose from a low of 6% in 1982 to nearly 23% in 2023. This entailed a burgeoning shift in income from the working classes – from peasants, informal labour, petty producers – to the richer classes. The large reserve army of labour and the worsening of chronic unemployment also led to an increase in the incidence of absolute poverty even as GDP continued to rise sometimes dizzyingly.

In effect, Patnaik says, neo-liberalism entails an acceptance of the hegemony of capital over labour and of capitalists over the rest of society. It negates the equality of opportunity that is the cornerstone of socialism as an aspiration for egalitarianism, that we saw to be a necessary complement to democracy. Internationally, it also eroded the solidarity between nations of the global south of the Non-Aligned Movement into a Darwinian competition between each other.

Complementary rise of neo-fascism

Patnaik also outlines importantly the rise of neo-fascism in recent years as a necessary complement to neo-liberalism. He points to Javer Milei in Argentina, Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Narendra Modi in India.

Waiting in the wings almost everywhere are far-right parties like the AfD in Germany and Marine Le Pen in France. They all troublingly share important characteristics with the fascists of the 1930s: authoritarianism, the “othering” of certain vulnerable minorities, the rise of violent youth groups, a disdain for reason in the public discourse, the rise of the “supreme leader” and a close relationship with monopoly capital.

Fascism rises in contexts of the crisis of capitalism; and Patnaik believes that contemporary neo-fascism is the outcome of the crisis of neo-liberalism. When monopoly capital is threatened, they finance fascists groups and bring the media under their control. These build a discourse of the alleged harms done by the “othered” minority on the dominant majority, and demand violent vengeance. The mass unemployment also makes it easy for the fascist groups to find recruits to carry forward the hate-filled, violent and divisive agenda.

The Indian version of fascism – Hindu supremacism – is, Patnaik believes, the closest to the classic description of fascism. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh made no secret at the time of its formation of its admiration for European fascism, and it has not retracted from this. It has specially expressed admiration for the fascist youth wings, echoed today in India in the Bajrang Dal and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.

Modi’s rise, he observes, was explicitly planned by monopoly capitalists, and Modi in turn has been an unstinting backer of the corporate-financial oligarchy and international capital. This has also made the BJP the richest political party in the world. Modi has weakened labour rights with a new code of highly repressive labour laws, and tried to extend corporate control even over agriculture, a move powerfully resisted by Indian farmers.

With the manifest failures of neo-liberalism to “trickle down” to the working poor, the Hindutva-corporate alliance resorts to diversionary polarising policies of Hindu supremacism, with a discourse that the Hindu majority at last is able to live with its head high, even as the regime persists with its neo-liberal anti-worker, anti-farmer, anti-minority, anti-Dalit, anti-Adivasi, anti-poor policies.

Patnaik points to important differences between the old fascism of the 1930s and neo-fascism. The old fascism was characterised by national finance capitals in mutual rivalry, resulting in the world wars. Neo-fascism on the other hand is characterised by international capital, which is opposed to the division of the world into rival spheres of influence. This makes neo-fascism much harder to dislodge as compared to the old fascism. The old fascism was accommodative of fiscal deficits to finance enhanced public spending, including on armaments, in a way that neo-fascism is not. The old fascism was therefore able to address to a degree the extreme job crises in the Great Depression. The nation state today does not feel free to expand deficit financing even to deal with burgeoning unemployment. This failure requires them to whip up hate against the “other” even more decisively.

The rise of neo-fascism rapidly culminates the decimation of democracy and the principles of the constitution that is spurred by neo-liberalism. What begins with the hegemony of international capital has now grown in Indian into a full-fledged assault on democracy, including the ruthless targeting of minorities, suppression of dissent, jailing for years without trial of young dissenters, the control of the university so as to not allow young minds to develop critical thinking and the targeting of the intelligentsia. Policy is designed to fully to serve the interests of chosen segments of the crony capitalists. The public sector including banks give credit now not to petty producers and peasants but to big capital, which they rarely return.

The result is that democracy, socialism, egalitarianism, federalism and secularism are all sacrificed on the later of the march of Hindutva and the interests of chosen crony capitalists. Without formally repudiating the constitution, the Hindutva- crony capitalist combine has done everything to destroy the basic features of the constitution.

Universal economic rights

Patnaik ends his compelling, even magisterial treatise by lighting the pathways to reclaim the values and pledges of the Indian Constitution that was born out of the anti-colonial struggle, particularly socialism.

This requires first a regime of fundamental economic rights, which he lists as the rights to food, employment, school education and universal public health care. He calculates that this would not cost more than 10% of the gross domestic product, which could be fully financed by a wealth tax of 2% and an inheritance tax of one-third. However, this would require the political will to tax the rich. In times of the comprehensive capture of public policy by big business and majoritarian impulses, building this political will would be immensely challenging.

The restoration of socialism in India, Patnaik rightly observes, would require the same steely public resolve of the people of the global south as characterised the anti-colonial struggle.

Harsh Mander is a peace and justice worker, writer, teacher who leads the Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to fight hate with radical love and solidarity. He teaches part-time at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, and has authored many books, including Partitions of the Heart, Fatal Accidents of Birth and Looking Away.

November 26 is Constitution Day.

Three booth-level officers in Uttar Pradesh have died in the past two days because of alleged work pressure related to the revision of voter rolls in the state.

While two died by suicide, one collapsed on duty.

The revision exercise is underway in 12 states and Union Territories, including Uttar Pradesh. Booth-level officers began distributing enumeration forms on November 4.

Gonda

Assistant Teacher Vipin Yadav died by suicide in Gonda district on Tuesday, The Hindu reported. His family alleged that the booth-level officer was under pressure because of the voter list revision exercise.

Yadav consumed poison and was taken to a local hospital. He was later transferred to a hospital in Lucknow, but was declared dead on arrival, The Times of India reported.

A video recorded by Yadav’s wife before his death showed him alleging that he was under extreme pressure from officials assigned to supervise the voter list revision exercise.

He also alleged that the sub-divisional magistrate and the block development officer routinely misbehaved with him, according to The Times of India.

District Magistrate Priyanka Niranjan rejected the allegations, saying that there was no pressure related to the revision exercise. Niranjan told the newspaper that Yadav’s work was progressing as normal.

She added that Yadav may have been instigated to make the allegations and that the video was being investigated.

Niranjan also formed a panel led by the assistant superintendent of police and the chief revenue officer to probe Yadav’s death.

Yadav’s family claimed that he had been asked to delete names of members of the Other Backward Classes community, The Hindu reported.

“The SDM and the BDO threatened him and asked him to remove the names of OBC voters,” the newspaper quoted his relative as having alleged in a video widely shared online. “Before dying, he told me over the phone that the officers were threatening to suspend him.”

The district administration rejected the allegation, The Hindu reported.

"SDM, BDO and lekhpal were pressuring him (BLO Vipin Yadav) to delete OBC votes. They were threatening him with suspension and police action," said relative of BLO Vipin Yadav who allegedly killed himself by consuming poison in Gonda district of Uttar Pradesh. https://t.co/0D4Ugx4rnr pic.twitter.com/44vkuQwdkC

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) November 26, 2025

Fatehpur

Revenue clerk Sudhir Kumar died by suicide at his home in Fatehpur district’s Bindki on Tuesday, a day before he was to get married, The Indian Express reported.

The 35-year-old’s family alleged that he was threatened with dismissal for not completing his work as a supervisor of the revision exercise, the newspaper reported. The police have filed a first information report against senior officials on the charge of abetment to suicide.

His family said that Sudhir had secured the Lekhpal job in 2024 after years of struggle and was still on probation.

On Wednesday, the Lekhpal Association called for a boycott of work related to the voter roll revision from Thursday unless action was taken against those responsible for Kumar’s death, the newspaper reported.

Hemant Kumar Mishra, the station house officer of the Bindki police station, told The Indian Express that a case had been filed against the revenue officer and unnamed officials.

Ravendra, the district secretary of the Lekhpal Association, told the newspaper that the electoral registration officer organised a meeting on Sunday and all persons involved in the exercise were told to attend.

Kumar was unable to attend the meeting as he was busy with his wedding preparations. Ravendra alleged that the electoral registration officer said during the meeting that he was recommending Kumar’s suspension, The Indian Express reported.

Kumar’s sister told the police that he had been upset since Sunday after hearing about this.

On Tuesday morning, a revenue officer, who has been booked in the matter, allegedly told Kumar that he must complete his work before the deadline or that he would be suspended as the senior officers had instructed.

The revenue officer repeatedly threatened Kumar after the 35-year-old said that he was busy with his wedding preparation and that he would complete the work after the rituals were over, his sister was quoted as having alleged.

Bareilly

Primary school teacher Sarvesh Kumar Gangwar on Wednesday collapsed while on duty at his school in Bareilly district’s Pardholi village, The Indian Express reported. He was taken to hospital where the doctors declared him dead. He was a resident of Karmachari Nagar.

His family alleged that the 47-year-old, working as a booth-level officer, “was under immense [work] pressure” because of the voter list revision exercise, the newspaper reported.

His elder brother Yogesh Gangwar said that Sarvesh Kumar Gangwar had told him on Tuesday that “he was stressed due to the BLO duty”. Yogesh Gangwar is also a teacher and deployed as a supervisor in the revision exercise.

The newspaper quoted Pramod Kumar, the sub-divisional magistrate (Sadar), as saying that there has been no excessive pressure on the booth-level officers. “…As far as work pressure is concerned, this is not the case,” he was quoted as saying.

BLO suicides

The draft electoral rolls in the 12 states and Union Territories will be published on December 9. Voters can file claims and objections between December 9 and January 8, and hearings will be held until January 31. The final electoral rolls are to be published on February 7.

The task of preparing voter lists before elections is typically assigned to primary school teachers and anganwadi or health care workers, who are employed by state governments. They are required to go door-to-door and check the identities of new voters and verify the details of those who have died or permanently moved out of an area.

In the commission’s parlance, they are called booth-level officers. Each booth level officer is responsible for maintaining the voter list for one polling booth, which can sometimes have as many as 1,500 registered voters.

Besides Uttar Pradesh, several suspected suicides during the revision process have been reported in West Bengal, Kerala and Rajasthan.

More than 60 booth-level officers and seven supervisors were booked in Noida for allegedly failing to comply with orders from senior officials during the revision process, reports said on Monday.

In Bahraich district, the administration has ordered FIRs against five booth-level officers, withheld salaries of 42 personnel and suspended a village-level revenue officer for alleged negligence.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll. Several petitioners also moved the Supreme Court against it.