Solidarity demonstrations in support of the youth protests in central Delhi over alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive examinations continued across the country on Friday.

The protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign began an agitation at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan for the alleged mismanagement of national competitive exams.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forced activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, into hospital. A march to Parliament on Monday was met with a brutal crackdown by the police. Dozens were injured by police lathis and had to brave tear gas.

The police action widened the support for the agitation, which soon spread to other parts of the country.

A spider man, young girls, masked boys, office goers. pic.twitter.com/sjlMOmLfAo

— Tabassum Barnagarwala (@tabassum_b) July 24, 2026

Amid the nationwide protests on Friday, three Muslim men were arrested in Assam for allegedly creating a WhatsApp group to mobilise support for the protests, while the police carried out a lathi-charge at a demonstration in Kolkata.

Assam

In Assam’s Lakhimpur district, the three men had created the WhatsApp group to mobilise support for the protests and allegedly urged members to create a “Nepal-like situation”, a senior police official told Scroll.

In September, youth-led anti-government protests were held in Nepal which led to violence and ended with the resignation of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli.

The three men were identified as Ashraful Islam, 21, Manjur Rahman, 23, and Abdul Kasem, 23.

They have been booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita pertaining to criminal conspiracy, criminal force to deter a public servant from discharging duty and offences related to endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India.

One of the arrested men told reporters that they had done nothing wrong and were being arrested only for creating the WhatsApp group. “We would have protested only if we were given permission,” he said.

West Bengal

In Kolkata, Left student organisations and members of the Cockroach Janta Party held a rally from Sealdah to Esplanade demanding Pradhan’s resignation, the dissolution of the National Testing Agency and action over the police crackdown in Delhi, The Telegraph reported.

Later in the evening, clashes broke out after some protesters blocked the Dorina Crossing intersection, PTI reported.

Protesters allegedly threw shoes and water bottles at the police, who responded with a lathi-charge and tear gas, the news agency quoted an unidenitified police officer as saying.

Thousands of supporters fill the streets of Kolkata’s Sealdah area as the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest march moves through the city in a massive show of support.

📹 @Shrabanawrites https://t.co/kpz1YBvQ2r pic.twitter.com/10jdq3rOmG

— The Hindu (@the_hindu) July 24, 2026

Maharashtra and Goa

The Cockroach Janata Party’s protest in Pune drew a large crowd which marched from the historical fort, Shaniwarwada, to the collector’s office despite steady spells of heavy rainfall. Students and supporters carried placards mocking Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pradhan and shouted slogans against both. There was heavy police deployment along the route as well.

Some of the protesters also submitted a memorandum to the district administration, Divya Marathi reported.

The youth of Pune have united like never before, calling for Dharmendra Pradhan to resign. @abhijeet_dipke @Cockroachisback @dpradhanbjp pic.twitter.com/r8JrEtTPdH

— Vaibhav Kokat (@ivaibhavk) July 24, 2026

Bhiwandi, Maharashtra protest - the entire country has come out on the streets today! pic.twitter.com/6nggakP1E2

— Cockroach is Back (@Cockroachisback) July 24, 2026

Huge protest in Mapusa, Goa

India Stands United against Dharmendra Pradhan pic.twitter.com/B6vjvkE2WG

— Cockroach is Back (@Cockroachisback) July 24, 2026

Student towns

Demonstrations were also held in Rajasthan’s Kota, a major coaching hub, and in the university town of Manipal in Karnataka.

कोटा की सड़कों पर युवा शक्ति... pic.twitter.com/y1diM6POjE

— Dinesh Dangi (@dineshdangi84) July 24, 2026

Manipal is a university town. Students from all over India study here. It's usually a party friendly, quiet town. Not today though. Manipal students decided to join the nation wide protests. And they had a few things to say. Thread. pic.twitter.com/BSAYKMmjKl

— G Vishnu (@geevishnu) July 24, 2026

Written by Sara Varghese. Inputs from Rokibuz Zaman and Divya Aslesha. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

• Follow updates about the youth protest here.

• Also read: Delhi hospital reports show pellet wounds on journalist covering students’ protests

Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Friday accused the Centre of misleading the country by denying that security personnel had used pellet guns on protesters during the march to Parliament on Monday.

The Congress leader addressed the media alongside a 19-year-old protester who sustained multiple wounds and lost vision in one eye after being hit by what doctors are reported to have confirmed were pellets.

“When this young man was peacefully protesting with the tricoluor of Hindustan in his hands, he was shot with a pellet gun,” Gandhi said. “The government says that pellet guns were not used during the protest, but the truth is right in front of you.”

He alleged that “thousands of such youths” had been hit with pellet guns and lathis while protesting against alleged irregularities in competitive examinations.

On Monday night, the Cockroach Janta Party also claimed that the police had fired pellet guns at the protesters. The Union government classifies pellet gun as a “non-lethal” weapon for crowd control. Its cartridge contains pellets made of rubber or plastic, which can damage sensitive parts like eyes when fired from a short range.

The Delhi Police has denied using pellet guns against the protesters. However, these weapons are reportedly carried by the Rapid Action Force, a unit of the Central Reserve Police Force that was also deployed at the protest, as part of its riot-control equipment.

Here’s more on this and other updates:

Allegations on use of pellet guns

• On Thursday, Scroll found medical records from Safdarjung Hospital that showed that a journalist covering Monday’s protest had 26 small, round wounds that doctors described as “consistent with pellets striking” the right side of his body. The journalist told Scroll that he saw security personnel deploying pellet guns and was hit while trying to move away.

Also read: Delhi hospital reports show pellet wounds on journalist covering students’ protests

• The Central Reserve Police Force was “verifying media reports” about the alleged use of pellet guns by the Rapid Action Force, The Hindu quoted an unidentified official as saying.

Union government, CJP meeting

• The Union government and Cockroach Janta Party political campaign held talks on Friday at the Constitution Club of India after the Centre agreed to the demand for a “neutral venue”, PTI reported.
• Union ministers JP Nadda and Jitendra Singh represented the government at the meeting, while the Cockroach Janta Party was represented by its spokespersons, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka.
• After the meeting, Das said the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan remained their “non-negotiable” demand, PTI reported. “The government has sought time till tomorrow afternoon to respond to this demand,” Ranka added.
• Nadda said the two sides would meet again on Saturday for further discussions, PTI reported.
• The government’s talks with the the Cockroach Janta Party followed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement in a video late on Thursday night that a bill providing for fast-track courts and stricter penalties for exam paper leaks will be discussed in a Cabinet meeting on Friday.
• Efforts will be made to make sure that the bill is passed in Parliament as soon as possible, Modi said. The prime minister said that several government departments “worked tirelessly late into the night” and submitted a draft proposal to him. On Thursday, Modi had said that the government has decided to set up fast-track courts to ensure swift punishment for those involved in paper leaks.

More strict actions against paper leaks to come in tomorrow’s Cabinet! pic.twitter.com/NRysBukk5U

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) July 23, 2026

• Modi made the statement even as young protesters continued their agitation against alleged irregularities in competitive examinations at Jantar Mantar in Delhi.
• Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi called Modi’s statement a “pathetic midnight video”. He asked Modi not to “insult the intelligence” of the students and put forth three demands: “Sack Pradhan, punish those who beat students and apologise.”

"This is just another empty promise," says a student protester, reacting to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's midnight video announcing a new law on paper leaks.

Report by @priyali_dhingra #Pmmodi #jantarmantarprotest #dharmendrapradhan pic.twitter.com/KxFwOAqgwr

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) July 24, 2026

Delhi metro stations partially reopen, Police issues advisory

• The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation reopened the entry gates at Mandi House and Central Secretariat stations on Friday evening. However, 16 stations in central Delhi remained shut for the third consecutive day because of security arrangements around the protests.
• New Delhi Metro station was shut on Friday afternoon. The station is connected to the New Delhi railway station and is used by thousands of passengers arriving in and departing from the national capital.
• It was added to the list of 17 stations that have remained shut since Thursday. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation said that it is being done for “security reasons”.
• On Wednesday, when the restrictions were first announced, the stations had reopened in the evening before being shut again the next morning. However, on Thursday night, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation announced that the closures would continue on Friday “till further instructions”.
• The affected stations were Lok Kalyan Marg, which is near the prime minister’s residence, Rajiv Chowk located at Connaught Place, and Patel Chowk and Janpath near the Jantar Mantar protest site.
• Central Secretariat, Seva Teerth, Mandi House, ITO, Ramakrishna Ashram Marg, Barakhambha Road, Supreme Court, Delhi Gate, Indraprastha, Khan Market, Jor Bagh, Shivaji Stadium and Jhandewalan were the other stations.
• The Delhi Traffic Police on Friday evening advised residents to avoid “unnecessary travel” to the notified protest area and use alternate routes, citing prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita.
• The advisory also asked app-based mobility, ride-hailing, food delivery, logistics and e-commerce platforms to regulate operations in the restricted area during the period of the restrictions.

🚨 Traffic Advisory

In view of the prohibitory orders under Section 163 BNSS, 2023, citizens are advised to avoid unnecessary travel to the notified area and use alternate routes wherever possible.

App-based mobility, ride-hailing, food delivery, logistics and e-commerce… pic.twitter.com/k3mYGU0I52

— Delhi Traffic Police (@dtptraffic) July 24, 2026

Jamia urges students to stay away from unlawful activities

• Jamia Millia Islamia on Friday urged students and stakeholders to “refrain from any activity that is not in keeping with the law”, saying they should “act responsibly and exercise caution” and “stay focused on your studies and academic responsibilities”.
• The university also referred to Modi’s assurance that students’ interests would be safeguarded and that “stern action will be taken against those who have played with the future of the students”.
• Jawaharlal Nehru University on Friday asked its students and staff to refrain from participating in the protests at Jantar Mantar. “Please exercise responsibility on social media,” the university stated. “Violations may invite legal consequences under applicable laws as well as disciplinary action under the University’s code of conduct.” The institution also told the students and staff to “uphold the values of academic responsibility”.
• This came a day after Delhi University urged students and faculty to “stay away” from demonstrations at Jantar Mantar. On Friday, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi asked on social media how the university could “dare to threaten students for exercising their democratic rights”. “Please note, you are the ones that will be held accountable when the time comes,” the Congress leader added.

Higher Education Secretary replaced amid protests

• The Union government on Thursday shifted Higher Education Secretary Vineet Joshi to the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, The Indian Express reported. Naresh Pal Gangwar has been appointed as the new Higher Education Secretary while TK Anil Kumar will be the secretary of Department of School Education and Literacy.

Written by Anamika Pathak and Sara Varghese. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande and Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• With elections perceived to be rigged, do Indians see protests as the only option?
• Delhi protests: Constitution demands that India’s judiciary check police excess

The Union Home Ministry on Thursday asked software platform GitHub to remove the repositories for Bitchat, a Bluetooth-based messaging application that can function without internet, citing security concerns, according to a notice shared by application developer Jack Dorsey.

Dorsey is a tech entrepreneur and the co-founder of Twitter, now known as X.

The notice came against the backdrop of reports that youth demonstrators at Jantar Mantar – who have been protesting against the alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive examinations – have been using such applications amid temporary internet restrictions in parts of central Delhi since Monday.

Dorsey shared the notice on social media on Friday, a day after it was issued, saying that “the government of India does not like technologies like Bitchat and wants it taken down”.

The Union government has yet to comment on the matter.

Bitchat is an open-source, decentralised messaging application that allows nearby users to communicate without mobile data, Wi-Fi, phone numbers or centralised servers. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy to connect nearby phones, with each device capable of relaying messages to others and thereby extending the network’s reach. Private messages are end-to-end encrypted, and the application does not require users to create accounts or provide persistent identifiers.

In its notice, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre said that “such decentralised communication platforms” could be exploited for “coordinating unlawful assemblies, violent protests, dissemination of misinformation, radicalisation, criminal conspiracies, and other activities prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India”.

The order was issued under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, and Rule 3(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. It directed GitHub to disable access to three repositories linked to Bitchat within three hours.

The provisions require intermediaries to remove or disable access to content after receiving government directions, failing which they risk losing the legal immunity or “safe harbour” protecting it from liability for user-uploaded content.

the government of india does not like technologies like bitchat and wants it taken down pic.twitter.com/gjzMg1NGCi

— jack (@jack) July 24, 2026

Tweet does not exist

Digital rights organisation, the Internet Freedom Foundation condemned the directive and said it stands “with the developers and the young protesters whose speech this order seeks to silence”.

The organisation noted that the government had not made the notice public and that its contents became known only after Dorsey shared it.

It argued that the order did not identify any specific unlawful content in the repositories and instead objected to the application’s ability to function during internet restrictions.

The organisation also questioned the legal basis of the action, arguing that the government’s concerns about possible misuse of the technology could not by themselves justify blocking access to the code.

Statement : The blocking of BitChat's code on GitHub is unconstitutional and authoritarian.

New Delhi, 24 July 2026

The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) condemns the order issued by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), Ministry of Home Affairs, directing GitHub… pic.twitter.com/s3wdJEOPK7

— Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) (@internetfreedom) July 24, 2026

Youth protests

The protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign began an agitation at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan for the alleged mismanagement of national competitive exams.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forced activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, into hospital.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with a brutal crackdown by the police. Dozens were injured by police lathis and had to brave tear gas.

The police action widened the support for the agitation, which soon spread to other parts of the country.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

• Follow updates about the youth protest here.

• Also read: Delhi hospital reports show pellet wounds on journalist covering students’ protests

Amidst a rise in electricity demand driven by warmer conditions in June, hydropower generation has declined, increasing India’s reliance on coal-fired power. The trend could intensify if El Niño conditions strengthen during the southwest monsoon.

An analysis published by S&P Global, an energy market intelligence firm, on July 3 said that India’s average hydropower generation in June declined by 6.3 aGW (average gigawatt) from a year earlier, even as average electricity demand increased by 24.3 aGW. The shortfall was largely offset by a 20.7 aGW increase in coal-fired generation, while solar and wind generation rose by a combined 9.4 aGW.

The trend is not confined to India.

According to the S&P Global analysis, Japan, South Korea, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Malaysia have also witnessed lower hydropower generation. However, India and Vietnam together accounted for nearly 80% of the regional decline in hydropower generation, making them the most affected countries in Asia.

“The June decline (in hydropower generation) is consistent with the expected impact of El Niño on rainfall patterns and reservoir inflows across Asia,” the analysis said and added that hydropower generation could remain below normal if El Niño conditions persist through the summer months.

The India Meteorological Department and several international weather agencies have projected the development of El Niño conditions during the southwest monsoon season.

During a meeting chaired by the Prime Minister’s Office on July 6, meterological officials said weak to moderate El Niño conditions are expected in July and August. Meanwhile, prolonged heatwave conditions across several parts of the country in recent months have already pushed electricity demand to record levels.

The decline in hydropower generation is significant because hydropower is among the most flexible sources of power generation. Unlike solar and wind, hydroelectric plants can rapidly adjust output to meet fluctuations in demand and variable renewable generation, helping maintain grid stability during peak demand periods, the analysis has said.

Another analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, an independent research organisation, said that El Niño will pose a double challenge. It will increase electricity demand due to warmer temperatures and reduce renewable power generation, particularly from hydropower and wind.

It estimated that India could face a generation gap of nearly 18 terawatt-hours due to reduced renewable output and higher electricity demand. It projects that the gap would largely be met by coal-fired generation, leading to an additional 17 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi accused the Union government of misleading the country by denying that security personnel had fired pellet guns at protesters during their march to Parliament on Monday. The Congress leader made the statement while speaking to reporters alongside a 19-year-old protester who lost vision in one eye after being hit by what doctors are reported to have said were pellets.

Meanwhile, Union ministers JP Nadda and Jitendra Singh met with representatives of the Cockroach Janta Party at Delhi’s Constitution Club of India. After the meeting concluded, Saurav Das, a spokesperson of the political campaign, said that the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan remained a non-negotiable demand. Ashutosh Ranka, another spokesperson, said that the Centre had sought time until tomorrow.

This followed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement in a video late on Thursday night that a bill providing for fast-track courts and stricter penalties for exam paper leaks will be discussed in a Cabinet meeting on Friday. Follow updates about the youth protests here.

Also read Ayush Tiwari’s report about pellet wounds on a journalist covering students’ protests

After Modi’s announcement, the Delhi and Bombay High Courts designated special fast-track courts to hear cases related to question paper leaks and other malpractices in public examinations. The special court in Delhi will function from the Rouse Avenue Court Complex and will be presided over by Judge Anu Grover Baliga.

In Maharashtra, the Bombay High Court has designated two special fast-track courts in Aurangabad and Nagpur to conduct trials under the 2024 Public Examinations Prevention of Unfair Means Act. The law mandates that trials must be completed within three months. Read on.

The Delhi High Court dismissed a petition seeking an inquiry by the National Investigation Agency into the youth protests in the national capital and the July 20 march to Parliament over alleged examination irregularities. The court said that any decision to transfer a case to the agency must be taken by the Union government.

The petition, filed by a former office bearer of the Hindutva organisation Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, alleged that the protests were part of a “larger conspiracy” involving “external funding”.

The court said that under Section 6 of the National Investigation Agency Act, only the Union government can decide whether a case should be transferred to the agency. “You are asking us to form an opinion that this is a fit case,” it said. “This job has been entrusted to the central government…If you want to refer investigation to NIA you can do so.” Read on.

The Delhi High Court questioned the Election Commission for deploying government school teachers for duties related to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the national capital. “Taking shade of Article 324, you do whatever you like?” asked the bench.

Article 324 empowers the Election Commission to supervise, direct and control elections for Parliament and state legislatures.

The court was hearing a petition alleging that the poll panel had deployed all regular teachers of some government schools as booth-level officers for the voter roll revision. While the poll panel countered this by saying that teachers have been told to do voter roll revision work after school, the bench asked if they “don’t need rest”. Read on.

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The Delhi High Court on Friday dismissed a petition seeking a probe by the National Investigation Agency into the youth protests in the national capital and the July 20 march to Parliament over alleged examination irregularities, Live Law reported. The court said that any decision to transfer a case to the agency must be taken by the Union government.

The petition, filed by a former office bearer of the Hindutva organisation Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, alleged that the protests were part of a “larger conspiracy” involving “external funding”.

On Friday, a bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia said that under Section 6 of the National Investigation Agency Act, only the Union government can decide whether a case should be transferred to the agency.

“You are asking us to form an opinion that this is a fit case,” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying. “This job has been entrusted to the Central government.”

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre, urged the court to issue notice in the matter, saying it involved questions under “public law”, Live Law reported.

However, the court said the government had the authority to take a decision if it considered an NIA investigation necessary.

“If you want to refer investigation to NIA you can do so,” the court said. “We are not curtailing your powers.”

The petitioner's counsel argued that the "gravity of the offence" and the alleged disruptions such as road blockages and Metro station closures, warranted an investigation by a specialised agency.

The court said that it was examining only the legal question before it and would not draw conclusions “merely by going through photos and videos”, Live Law reported.

It also declined a request to direct the Delhi Police to file a status report, noting that first information reports had been registered only a few days earlier and that the authorities were already aware of the allegations.

The plea was subsequently withdrawn.

The protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign began an agitation at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan for the alleged mismanagement of national competitive exams.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forced activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, into hospital. The protests soon spread to other cities.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with a brutal crackdown by the police. Dozens were injured by police lathis and had to brave tear gas.

The Delhi Police has said it registered 10 first information reports in connection with the Parliament march.

The petition had sought directions for the National Investigation Agency, or another specialised agency, to investigate the protests and take over all FIRs registered by the Delhi Police in connection with the demonstration. It also sought the identification and prosecution of those allegedly responsible for violence, vandalism and obstructing emergency services.

The petition also referred to media reports about Wangchuk’s alleged links to foreign organisations and argued that these claims should be investigated by the competent authorities.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

• Follow updates about the youth protest here.
• Also read: Delhi hospital reports show pellet wounds on journalist covering students’ protests

The Delhi High Court on Friday questioned the Election Commission for deploying government school teachers for duties related to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the national capital, reported Bar and Bench.

“Taking shade of Article 324, you do whatever you like?” a bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia asked the poll panel while hearing a petition challenging the move.

Article 324 empowers the Election Commission to supervise, direct and control elections for Parliament and state legislatures.

The poll panel is carrying out the special intensive revision exercise to revise electoral rolls through house-to-house enumeration and verification of old voter data.

On Friday, the court was hearing a petition filed by advocates Rajesh Kumar Gogna and Ashok Agarwal, who alleged that the poll panel had deployed all regular teachers of some government schools as booth-level officers for the voter roll revision.

Classes in such schools have been left to guest teachers or those who may not be familiar with the subjects, claimed the advocates. They submitted that the voter roll revision work was not confined to holidays or non-teaching hours, reported Bar and Bench.

The advocates also said that the practice was discriminatory, as only teachers from government schools, municipal schools and government-aided schools had been pulled out for the voter roll revision work.

Appearing for the poll panel, lawyer Sanjay Vashishtha told the court that the Election Commission had told the teachers to do voter roll revision-related work after school hours or on their holidays, reported Live Law.

“The exercise is almost over,” said Vashishtha. “All endeavour has been made to ensure that no regular assignment or teaching is hampered.”

However, the court asked the poll panel why teachers were not entitled to their holidays. “Don’t they need rest?” asked the bench.

It directed the Election Commission to file an affidavit by July 27 and posted the matter for July 28.

On July 15, the Election Commission extended the deadline for the house-to-house verification of voters in Delhi by 10 days. The process, which began on June 30, was scheduled to conclude on July 29, but will now continue till August 8.

Voter rolls are being revised in the national capital in the third phase of the special intensive revision exercise. With this phase, the exercise will cover the entire country except Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. The Election Commission said that the schedule for the revision in these regions will be announced later, considering the Census exercise and the adverse weather.

In 2025, the first phase of the voter roll revision exercise was conducted in Bihar and the second phase in 12 states and Union Territories.

Concerns have been raised that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll.

Several petitions were filed in the Supreme Court against the voter roll revision.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Delhi and Bombay High Courts have designated special fast-track courts to hear cases related to question paper leaks and other malpractices in public examinations, Live Law reported. The move comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that such courts would be set up, amid nationwide youth protests over alleged irregularities in the education system.

While the Delhi High Court issued its notification hours after Modi’s announcement on Thursday, the Bombay High Court followed with a similar order on Friday, Live Law reported.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that the government has decided to set up fast-track courts to ensure swift punishment for those involved in paper leaks.

“Have directed the concerned authorities and officials to take all necessary steps in this regard,” he had said.

The special court in Delhi will function from the Rouse Avenue Court Complex and will be presided over by Judge Anu Grover Baliga, Live Law reported.

In Maharashtra, the Bombay High Court has designated two special fast-track courts in Aurangabad and Nagpur to conduct trials under the 2024 Public Examinations Prevention of Unfair Means Act, the legal news outlet reported.

Under the 2024 law, trials of offences under the Act must be completed within three months.

The courts will be presided over by Judge SV Pawar in Aurangabad and Judge Gulshan Kolte in Nagpur.

This comes amid youth protests against alleged irregularities in competitive examinations at Jantar Mantar in Delhi.

The protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign started its demonstration to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, alleging that he was responsible for paper leaks in national competitive examinations.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with a brutal crackdown by the police. Dozens were injured by police lathis and had to brave tear gas. The police action widened the support for the agitation, which soon spread to other parts of the country.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The police in Bihar’s Jehanabad opened fire as protests against alleged irregularities in competitive exams turned violent on Thursday, reported ABP News.

In a video shared by the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation on social media, police personnel can be seen firing in the air and throwing stones at the protesters. Several gunshots can be heard in the background.

Kumar Parvez, a member of the party who was in Jehanabad, told Scroll that the police had fired 30 to 35 rounds of bullets. He also claimed that some protesters were injured and admitted to the hospital, but did not specify how many persons were hurt.

Scroll contacted Jehanabad District Magistrate Tshering Y Bhutia for a response. This story will be updated if we receive one.

Parvez told Scroll that the police action came after protesters damaged the gate of the district magistrate’s home. He said that there were also some incidents of protesters throwing stones at the police. Stones were also thrown at the district magistrate’s home, ABP News reported.

The police, meanwhile, stated that more than 100 persons have been arrested in connection with Thursday’s incidents.

“During student protests today, certain anti-social elements and outside miscreants attempted to damage government and public property – such as the district magistrate’s residence and roadside railings,” said the police.

It added that “miscreants” were being identified through video footage and strict action will be taken against those responsible for violence.

“Adequate police forces have been deployed at all sensitive locations, including the railway station,” it said.

Youth protests against exam irregularities

The demonstration in Jehanabad came as protests against alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive examinations spread across the country.

The youth protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign started its demonstration at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, alleging that he was responsible for paper leaks in national competitive examinations.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forcibly shifted activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, to hospital.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with heavy police action. Dozens of protesters were injured in lathi charges and had to brave tear gas.

The police action widened the support for the agitation, which soon spread to other cities.

In Mumbai, the police detained scores of demonstrators between Tuesday and Wednesday as they held solidarity protests with the Cockroach Janta Party’s agitation in Delhi.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Follow updates about the youth protest here.

The Mumbai Police on Thursday ordered an inquiry and removed a police driver from his post after a video showed him allegedly threatening youth protesters by saying he would “plant 50 grams of powder” on them, The Hindu reported.

The police said that “action will be taken after verifying the facts”. The police driver, who was posted at the Sion Police Station, has been shifted pending the inquiry, the Maharashtra Home Department said.

In the video, which was widely shared, including by the Cockroach Janta Party, the police driver can be heard warning two young persons against returning to the protest site and threatening to frame them in a drug case.

“If I see you around here again, then it will not be good for you,” he can be heard saying. “I will directly plant 50 grams of powder. Then your life is gone. You won’t get bail. We are in trouble because of you all.”

Police continue to threaten students across India from participating in protests!

Mumbai Police: is the NCB now being used to plant fake drugs into pockets of students? This will not be tolerated. pic.twitter.com/uBqjht8UKh

— Cockroach is Back (@Cockroachisback) July 23, 2026

The protests in Delhi began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign started its demonstration at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, alleging that he was responsible for paper leaks in national competitive examinations.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forcibly shifted activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, to a hospital.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with a brutal crackdown by the police. Dozens were injured by police lathis and had to brave tear gas.

The police action widened the support for the agitation, which soon spread to other cities, including Mumbai.

Also read: How Mumbai Police is using surveillance to stop youth from protesting

Bengaluru man booked for ‘abusive remark’ against Modi

The Bengaluru Police on Thursday registered a first information report against a man identified as Hudson for posting allegedly abusive remarks about Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Instagram, The Indian Express reported.

The action was taken on a complaint filed by the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Sarvagnanagar unit, The Hindu reported.

The complaint said that Hudson shared a video from the Instagram account “madonly” criticising the Union government’s response to the ongoing youth protests. The video contained allegedly abusive words referencing Modi.

The case has been registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyay Sahita pertaining to promoting enmity, intentional insult with intent to provoke a breach of the peace and transmitting obscene content electronically.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Follow updates about the youth protest here.

• With elections perceived to be rigged, do Indians see protests as the only option?

• Delhi protests: Constitution demands that India’s judiciary check police excess

Uttarakhand Technical University has cancelled two engineering examinations after their papers were allegedly leaked, reported The Indian Express on Friday.

The police on Thursday arrested Ashish Kumar Gupta, an assistant professor at the Shivalik College of Engineering, which is affiliated to Veer Madho Singh Bhandari Uttarakhand Technical University, in connection with the leak, according to ANI.

This came in the wake of protests against alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive exams spreading across the country.

The complaint against Gupta was filed by the examination controller of the university.

Gupta had set the question papers for the Machine Learning for Internet of Things and Electromagnetic Field Theory examinations scheduled for July 7 and July 8.

The university alleged that an internal inquiry found that Kumar shared the questions with students through the institution’s portal and WhatsApp before the examination, reported The Indian Express.

The leak will affect students of 12 institutes affiliated with the university. The re-examinations for both subjects will be held in the third week of August, the newspaper quoted an order by the university as saying.

It added that Kumar has been “debarred with immediate effect from all examination-related work of the university for the next seven years”.

The university’s examination controller also issued a warning to the Shivalik College of Engineering for not maintaining “adequate supervision and institutional control”, reported The Indian Express.

The director of the college, TS Sidhu, told the newspaper that Gupta had been terminated.

Follow updates about the youth protest here.

Youth protest against exam irregularities

The youth protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign started its demonstration at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, alleging that he was responsible for paper leaks in national competitive examinations.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forcibly shifted activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, to a hospital.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with a brutal crackdown by the police. Dozens were injured by police lathis and had to brave tear gas.

The police action widened the support for the agitation, which soon spread to other cities.

In Mumbai, the police detained scores of demonstrators between Tuesday and Wednesday as they held solidarity protests with the Cockroach Janta Party’s agitation in Delhi.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Fifteen of the 39 permanent posts in the National Testing Agency are vacant, the Union government told Parliament on Wednesday.

Seventy-three persons, including 44 consultants, have been engaged on contract, the education ministry told the Rajya Sabha. More than 120 roles, including data analysts and legal support, have been outsourced, the ministry said.

The data was provided in response to a question by an Opposition MP amid criticism of the government and the National Testing Agency over the alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive exams.

Youth protesters in Delhi and several cities have been demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in the matter.

In 2026, the agency has so far conducted 12 exams such as the undergraduate National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for medical college admissions and the Common University Entrance Test. Sixty-five lakh candidates had registered for the dozen exams.

In the financial year 2023-’24, the National Testing Agency had an income of Rs 1,116 crore and an expenditure of Rs 1,040 crore, the education ministry said.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Follow updates of the youth protest here.

The United States has imposed a 10% tariff on goods purchased from India and 16 other countries, citing inadequate measures to prevent the use of forced labour in production.

The announcement came on Thursday, a day before the expiry of the 10% temporary tariffs imposed by the US on all of its trade partners.

United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that the new tariffs on imports from 60 countries were imposed under a provision of the country’s Trade Act that affects “unfair trade practices” that affect US commerce.

The tariffs were imposed at US President Donald Trump’s direction on economies that had failed to prohibit or effectively prevent the import of goods produced using forced labour, Greer added.

In June, the US Trade Representative had proposed additional tariffs of 10% or 12.5% on imports from 60 economies, including India, citing allegations of forced labour.

The 10% tariff bracket applies to countries that have committed to “adopting and effectively enforcing” a ban on imports of goods produced using forced labour, while countries that have not adopted such a prohibition will face a 12.5% tariff, a statement by the US Trade Representative read.

On June 14, India had amended its foreign trade policy to prohibit the import of goods produced using forced labour.

The United States had launched the investigations into 60 economies on March 12, after the US Supreme Court struck down global tariffs imposed by Trump, ruling that he had exceeded his authority.

India has denied the allegations under the forced labour clause and has asked Washington to terminate the investigations, saying the matters should be addressed within the framework of ongoing trade negotiations rather than through unilateral measures.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Central Bureau of Investigation on Thursday said that there is no evidence to show that Sanjeev Mukhiya was involved in the theft or distribution of the 2024 undergraduate National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test question paper, The Indian Express reported.

Mukhiya, the main suspect in the paper leak case and several other interstate exam scams, was arrested last year on April 25 by Bihar’s Economic Offences Unit. He was arrested in a midnight operation in Danapur after evading arrest for about 11 months.

The case was transferred to the CBI on June 23, 2024.

However, the CBI did not file a chargesheet against Mukhiya. The central agency has, however, filed multiple chargesheets against 45 persons before a court in Patna, NDTV reported.

Allegations of question paper leaks and other irregularities in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, for admission to undergraduate medical courses, surfaced after the results of the examination were declared on June 4, 2024. The examination was conducted on May 5, 2024.

In a statement released on Thursday, the CBI explained why it had not filed a chargesheet against Mukhiya. It said that initially, suspicion had emerged about Mukhiya’s role as he had been found to have been involved in other paper theft and leak cases, The Indian Express reported.

“In the course of its investigation, CBI did not come across any evidence to establish the involvement of Mukhiya in the theft or distribution of the stolen NEET [UG] 2024 question paper,” the agency was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “Having conducted a detailed and thorough investigation into the case, CBI is satisfied that the entire conspiracy and the persons involved therein stand identified.”

On July 22, 2024, the Union government had said that there was no proof of any large-scale leaks of the question paper for the 2024 NEET-UG examination.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

On Thursday night, educator and environmental activist Sonam Wangchuk ended the hunger strike he had started more than three weeks ago in Delhi. He is well-known for peaceful protests, some of them fasts, demanding statehood for Ladakh and drawing attention to the ecological fragility of the Himalaya.

This time, though, the issue was different.

In May, the question paper for the NEET-UG, the national entrance exam for medical school, leaked. In June, more than two million students were made to redo the exam – one of the largest examination frauds in recent memory.

Wangchuk began fasting in solidarity with members of the Cockroach Janata Party, a youth movement only weeks old but already nationally known. They were demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, accountability for the leak and an overhaul of the entrance examination system itself.

India did not invent going hungry in protest, but it has clearly made the method its own. One could even fashion an alternative history of the Republic based on its major fasts – not just of marginal protests but some of the most significant confrontations between the Indian state and people.

Even the most basic of lists is long: Sant Fateh Singh, whose refusals of food in the 1960s helped carve a Punjabi-speaking state out of undivided Punjab; Sunderlal Bahuguna’s fasts, from the Chipko years of the 1970s to his 45- and 74-day fasts against the Tehri Dam in the 1990s; Medha Patkar’s fasts against the Narmada dams; Irom Sharmila’s 16 years on a feeding tube against Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act; Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption fast of 2011; GD Agarwal’s 111-day fast to save the Ganga in 2018.

Perhaps no protest proved more consequential in independent India than that of the Gandhian Potti Sriramulu, who in 1952 began a fast unto death in what was then Madras State, demanding a separate Andhra. He died on the 58th day, but his death set in motion the redrawing of the Indian map as we know it, along largely linguistic lines.

Despite this long history, the current strike has evoked much commentary about hunger strikes being an anachronism. Surely, sceptics say, a modern democracy offers better ways? Public amnesia and cynicism is not universal, but it is widespread enough to reconsider the history, the logic and popularity of fasts.

Arguably not just India’s but the world’s most famous fasting agitationist was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948). Even today, Gandhi is the method’s emblem. Early in the protests, supporters were calling Wangchuk a “modern Gandhi” and the government’s representatives vehemently opposed the comparison.

Gandhi’s belief that hunger could be an instrument of moral suasion evolved over time. It was bound up with his ideas about personal faith and diet, and began not in India but in South Africa where he spent two decades of his life from 1893 to 1914. From there, Gandhi’s fasts grew in widening, albeit interconnected, circles: first a discipline of the body, then a lever within his own household, then politics, and only later, in India, as national agitation.

In India, the first public test of the method came in 1918, and the target was not yet the colonial state but a friend. Gandhi fasted for three days in support of some 10,000 Ahmedabad mill workers demanding higher wages. The employers they were striking against were led by Gandhi’s own financial supporter and fellow Gujarati, the industrialist Ambalal Sarabhai.

The 25-day workers’ strike and the fast ended in compromise: the workers had wanted a 50% raise against the millowners’ offer of 20; Gandhi encouraged them to settle at 35.

The first of Gandhi’s landmark national fasts came a year later in 1919. This marked the beginning of what was also his first major nationwide call for a strike against the British empire. The provocation was the Rowlatt legislation, passed into law in March 1919, months after the First World War ended.

The Rowlatt Act allowed the government to detain people without trial and to try “seditious” cases without a jury. It also curtailed already limited press freedoms. For Indians, including Gandhi, who had supported Britain’s war efforts, these extensions of wartime controls on civil liberties were a grave betrayal.

Gandhi announced April 6, 1919, as a day of hartal – a suspension of work – and a national day of prayer and fasting. The response was spectacular: hundreds of thousands gathered in public locations across the country.

What made it particularly striking was that the day was largely choreographed through symbolic action rather than leaders’ speeches – a 24-hour nationwide fast; shops and markets closed; mourning emblems (black flags in Bombay, crêpe armbands in Allahabad); multifaith gatherings everywhere. This combination of symbolism and mass mobilisation inaugurated the template of Gandhian protests.

Looking back at Gandhian fasting and protests, more generally, there is a pattern that is easy to miss today. They required meticulous planning and organisation. Every fast and movement he launched had clear demands, included systematic public fund raising, and announced guidelines for participation. The authorities were always informed beforehand – Gandhi often wrote to the British Viceroy directly – and the press was kept in the loop.

Non-violence was always an essential condition. Even in the Rowlatt Satyagraha, the first of his major protests involving masses across India, these elements were present. While the main action was scheduled for April 6, Gandhi travelled across the country in February to connect with local Congress leaders.

Funding came from wealthy sympathisers and leaflets instructed people precisely how to observe the day, defining the fast as an act of “penance and purification”. Even the date was announced in advance, on March 28, giving the nation a week to prepare.

Not all Gandhi’s fasts were appeals to British power. Most, like the one in support of the Ahmedabad millworkers, were aimed at other constituencies. Gandhi fasted most often for Hindu-Muslim unity. These were among his longest fasts, and they addressed the Indian public, not the Raj.

In 1924, he fasted for 21 days in Delhi after communal violence at Kohat in the Northwest Frontier Province. At the end of his life came the fasts against the Partition killings: Calcutta in September 1947, where the violence ceased within days, and Delhi in January 1948, weeks before his assassination. Each time, order was restored. But the rift had spread beyond the reach of any fast, even Gandhi’s.

This brings us to the most important reason to think about Gandhi’s fasts in the current moment. Judged by their stated goals, they almost never succeeded, certainly not wholly. The Ahmedabad fast ended in a compromise on the textile workers’ wages. Even the Salt March of 1930, the defining image of the freedom struggle, did not lead to the abolition of the salt tax. Doesn’t this history prove exactly what today’s cynics are saying?

The answer is a self-evident no. Judging the fasts by their outcomes matters less than the context that surrounded them. From around 1916, the Gandhian freedom struggle ascended to being the main opposition to British rule in two short decades. He organised a party with millions of members, gathered a diverse following of very competent leaders around him, defeated other contenders in many small and big colonial era elections, and earned the right to be the party for the handover of power when the British left.

One need not be a Gandhian to accept the bald facts of this achievement.

Gandhi organised his way to being the movement’s central figure and at its heart was a clear vision of the choreography of mass protests. In this struggle, the success of Gandhi’s fasts can be measured not by how they changed British minds – they rarely did – but in broadcasting the issues to the Indian public, as well as where Gandhi and the Congress stood on them.

What about the coercive nature of fasts? The Gandhian argument would be that it was the weapon of the powerless against the powerful, meant to appeal to a “sleeping conscience” when all other methods fail. However, not every fast survives this bar or the judgment of history. Not even all of Gandhi’s.

When he fasted in Yeravda jail in 1932 against the separate electorates that the British prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, had awarded the Depressed Classes, the Dalit leader BR Ambedkar saw it as exactly that – coercion. The fast, he understood, was directed not at the British but at him; and if Gandhi died, it was Dalits across India who would face reprisal.

Ambedkar had no real choice but to negotiate. The result was a compromise: joint electorates with reserved seats. The history of that settlement is complex. But the critique does not depend on it: the fast bore down on a community with far less power than the Congress that stood behind Gandhi.

Fasts, then, can compel as much as they can persuade. However, a history of fasts shows that they have often accomplished something essential in the Indian public sphere: raising public consciousness against official or popular apathy. The method works by appealing to the audience (family, neighborhood, nation), not so much the authority who is the protest’s direct target.

And this is where the doubt cast on Wangchuk’s fast misses the mark. After all, what was ultimately salient about Gandhi’s protests was not that the powers that be refused to bow to him, it was that the people protested.

Many of his hunger strikes did not achieve their stated demands. Nor did many of his other iconic campaigns, the Salt Satyagraha and the Quit India movement among them, extract from the British what was actually demanded. But the Raj’s repeated dismissal of just demands, peacefully made, ultimately corroded the legitimacy of the colonial edifice.

After Wangchuk began his fast, supporters converged in the thousands at the protest site in Delhi, gathering in cities across the country, and registering their solidarity online and from abroad.

The hunger strike, in other words, is neither archaic nor obsolete. But could it move an unresponsive government? That, as Gandhi’s agitations show, is the wrong question. The real test is whether the public still cares about a just cause that has been silenced. By that measure, the fact that tens of thousands turned up at Jantar Mantar and added their voices says that the fast succeeded.

Aparna Kapadia is Professor of History at Williams College.

The spectre of climate change is upon us and its manifestations are there for all to see.

The public debate about climate change tends to focus on its more visible effects for adaptive (and not preventive) measures: increased frequency and intensity of heat waves, urban flooding and air pollution. However, many of the embedded sources of environmental harm remain unacknowledged. As a rapidly urbanising country, one such source that India can no longer ignore is carbon emissions emerging from its growing built environment.

Every building carries a carbon cost that far outlasts those who built it. Globally, the built environment accounts for nearly 34% of annual CO₂ emissions, the single largest share of any sector. In India, the buildings sector contributes a substantial and growing share of national greenhouse gas emissions.

Currently, the dominant discourse tends to focus mostly on “operational carbon” – the emissions from running a building, with the discussion confined to energy efficiency. What tends to be ignored is “embodied carbon” – the carbon emitted in the making of a building, from the extraction and production of materials to their transportation and construction on site.

Once a building is completed, its embodied carbon is locked in and cannot be reversed or reduced.

Since India is slated to add over 50 billion square metres of new building stock in the coming decades, how it handles the carbon emissions from new construction will become one of the most consequential environmental decisions of this century.

This explosion of built space presents a critical regulatory challenge: how should environmental law and urban planning govern and discipline the carbon intensity of India’s urban growth?

Environmental law

India’s environmental legal architecture was not designed to govern climate change or carbon emissions. Under the “dualist” framework of the Indian Constitution, international agreements like the Paris Agreement become enforceable only when Parliament passes a law under Article 253. This is the provision that gives Parliament the power to make laws to implement international treaties, conventions and the decisions of global conferences.

At the Global front, India has committed through its Nationally Determined Contribution to reducing the emissions intensity of its GDP by 45% by 2030 from 2005 level, and achieving “net-zero” emissions by 2070 – by transitioning to clean energy and building carbon sinks to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But there is no overarching legislation or statutory framework to enable, mandate or monitor this tall order.

India’s core environmental statutes – the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974, the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981, and the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 – were landmark enactments in their time. But these laws have not evolved to incorporate the challenges of carbon emissions and climate change.

The Environment Protection Act empowers the Central Government to set standards to regulate pollutants, but does not specifically address greenhouse gas emissions from buildings or construction. The Environmental Impact Assessment notification similarly requires no whole-life carbon accounting, whether embodied or operational.

The judiciary, too, has engaged only marginally with climate change in this context. In 2024, the Supreme Court recognised a constitutional right against the adverse effects of climate change. However, Indian environmental jurisprudence has largely focused only on the visible forms of pollution such as vehicular emissions and industrial contamination, with very little engagement with building construction-related emissions.

In this context, the Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022 marks a positive step forward. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency has already issued building energy codes such as the Energy Conservation Building Code and Eco Niwas Samhita. The 2022 amendment moves towards an Energy Conservation and Sustainability Building Code, incorporating embodied carbon, material efficiency, and net-zero considerations. Yet implementation remains dependent on state-level notification and has not yet been widely adopted.

Urban planning regulations

If environmental law has a blind spot for embodied carbon, urban planning instruments and regulations are no less culpable. The function of urban planning has traditionally been to enable economic growth while managing externalities through land-use regulation.

Across India, speculative real estate markets are driving deregulated or extremely high allowances for Floor Area Ratio, also known as Floor Space Index. This ratio defines the size of a building that can be built on a parcel of land. This increased allowance is being capitalised on to encourage high-rise development without an empirical scrutiny of its carbon implications.

The relationship between land-use intensity, building height, and carbon emissions remains almost entirely ignored in India’s urban regulatory regime. Research increasingly shows that beyond a certain threshold, higher Floor Area Ration and taller buildings generate disproportionately higher life-cycle carbon emissions and produce diminishing returns in population density.

Each additional floor increases embodied carbon and operational energy demand, while reducing rooftop solar potential and intensifying urban heat island effects.

Yet, climate considerations barely figure in state-level Town and Country Planning Acts and the planning instruments emerging from it. While some city-level master plans go beyond this limited framework, a study of 59 city plans across 24 states found that only 30% show any awareness of climate change and just 10% contain climate-relevant analysis.

Most development control regulations continue to determine Floor Area Ratio and building heights solely through market logic, with no reference to carbon emissions. National-level instruments like the Urban and Regional Development Plans Formulation and Implementation guidelines and the National Building Code do engage with sustainability to some degree. However, these instruments are advisory and not statutory and hence create no enforceable obligations.

Low-carbon cities

While India has ambitious carbon-reduction targets on paper, it lacks a statutory architecture with enforceable targets and accountability mechanisms to achieve this. For a comprehensive response to the climate crisis, India ideally needs an enforceable “framework law” on climate change.

This can be seen in countries like Denmark and the Netherlands that have enacted climate laws with binding emission reduction targets and enforceable instruments of accountability.

A Climate Change Act can establish binding medium and long-term carbon reduction targets and enforceable accountability mechanisms across sectors, including construction.

Beyond an overarching climate change law, the most immediately actionable step lies in updating existing environmental law and regulations. The Environment Protection Act should be amended to explicitly include greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment within its regulatory scope. The Environmental Impact Assessment clearance process should also be strengthened by requiring mandatory whole-life carbon assessments for major developments.

Planning regulations must also be reformulated to limit carbon emissions from the built environment. The archaic state-level Town and Country Planning Acts should be amended to make climate change adaptation and mitigation a legally mandated objective that needs to be incorporated in the master plan.

The ensuing master plans and development control regulations should incorporate explicit carbon limits and recalibrate Floor Area Ration and height norms as instruments of carbon governance.

India can learn from France’s RE2020 regulation that imposes lifecycle carbon thresholds for buildings, with Paris having reintroduced a statutory 37-metre height limit for all new buildings, treating building height as a carbon variable.

Given the scale of construction India is expected to undertake in the coming decades, it needs to weigh the per capita carbon footprint of what it builds and set a binding per capita limit for emissions from the built environment. Such a target should be laid down in the framework climate law and operationalised through environmental and planning regulations.

Without such regulatory discipline, India’s urbanisation will exceed its fair share of emissions and push the planet closer to irreversible climate change.

Mathew Idiculla is a legal consultant and a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow at the Faculty of Law & Justice, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Ashok Lall is the principal architect at Ashok B Lall Architects in New Delhi and an action researcher developing strategies for sustainable urban development.

Girisha Sethi is an architect and urbanist based in New Delhi and a consultant with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Activist Sonam Wangchuk on Friday ended his hunger strike after 26 days at Gurugram’s Medanta Hospital in the presence of Union ministers Jitendra Singh and JP Nadda.

A video by PTI showed Singh helping Wangchuk sit up on his hospital bed, and Nadda helping him sip from a cup.

“I am grateful and happy to break my fast,” the activist was heard saying in the video.

Wangchuk said that 65 members of Parliament from various parties had urged him to break his fast. “This was done after a long negotiation on various conditions and in view of possible violence in the country,” he said in a social media post. “I will explain the conditions in detail in a separate video very soon.”

VIDEO | Sonam Wangchuk breaks his hunger-strike in presence of Union Ministers JP Nadda and Jitendra Singh at the hospital.

(Source: Third Party) #SonamWangchuk #HungerStrike pic.twitter.com/JvPJjjTX3h

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) July 23, 2026

Wangchuk said that he received assurances from the government and MPs across political lines “that the issue of accountability in the failing examination system will be discussed on the floors of the Indian Parliament”.

The activist said he was also assured that the families of those who died by suicide in the wake of exam paper leak of the undergraduate National Eligibility cum Entrance Test will be given “adequate compensation” and that no cases will be registered against students and young persons protesting peacefully.

Abhijeet Dipke, the chief of the political campaign Cockroach Janta Party, said on social media that the group was relieved and grateful that Wangchuk had ended his hunger strike.

“Thank you, sir, for your extraordinary courage and sacrifice,” he said, addressing Wangchuk. “By putting your own life on the line, you awakened the conscience of an entire nation. Your life is far too precious to this country.”

Dipke said that the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar would continue till Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigns.

Wangchuk began his hunger strike on June 28. His fast was part of a protest led by the Cockroach Janta Party demanding Pradhan’s resignation on account of the alleged mismanagement of competitive examinations.

On Saturday morning, the activist was forcibly removed from the protest site at Jantar Mantar and taken to the Safdarjung Hospital by the police.

On Tuesday, Wangchuk was discharged from the Safdarjung Hospital and admitted to the Medanta Hospital in Gurugram. The Delhi High Court had allowed him to be shifted to the Medanta Hospital, saying that doing so was necessary to protect his fundamental right to life and liberty.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

A group of Opposition MPs, led by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, on Thursday night reached Gandhi Smriti in central Delhi to express solidarity with students protesting against alleged irregularities in competitive examinations.

The MPs were briefly stopped by security personnel on way to the memorial of MK Gandhi from the leader of Opposition’s home.

The Congress leader later said that the Opposition leaders had planned to go to India Gate but were not allowed to do so.

Before setting out from his home, Rahul Gandhi said they were peacefully heading to the memorial “to remember the students we lost – the children driven to take their own lives after the NEET paper leak”.

#WATCH | Delhi: Lok Sabha LoP and Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, along with INDIA bloc MPs, reach Gandhi Smriti as they continue their protest over the NEET paper leak. pic.twitter.com/fv3yxO0y7e

— ANI (@ANI) July 23, 2026

Earlier in the day, the Cockroach Janta Party called for nationwide protests on Friday, urging people to “stand in solidarity with victims of police brutality across India”.

Here’s more on this and other updates:

Those who harm future of youth won’t be spared: Modi

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said that “those who try to harm the future of our youth will not be spared”. The Union government has decided to set up fast-track courts “to ensure swift and stringent punishment for those involved in paper leaks”, Modi said on social media. “Have directed the concerned authorities and officials to take all necessary steps in this regard,” he said. “This continues our series of steps for safeguarding the interests of students.”
• In response, the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign reiterated its demand that Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan must resign over the alleged mismanagement of competitive examinations.
• Responding to Modi’s comment that persons harming the future of the youth “will not be spared”, Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi said that the prime minister was the one “who has harmed the future of our youth the most”.
• “You allowed and encouraged the total capture and destruction of our education system – and protected every person responsible for it,” Gandhi said on social media. He said that the students’ demands were clear: “1. Sack Dharmendra Pradhan. 2. Apologise to the students. 3. Take action against those who assaulted them.”
• Former education minister and veteran Bharatiya Janata Party leader Murli Manohar Joshi on Thursday said it was “painful” to see students protesting on the streets of Delhi. The students’ concerns about the examination system were “genuine and must be handled with empathy and a desire to find a lasting solution” he said. The BJP leader also said that it was “very painful” that young women had been “brutally mishandled”.

Also read: ‘People’s sympathy is now with the youth’: BJP workers worry about crackdown on protests

Ruckus in Parliament

• On Thursday, both Houses of Parliament were repeatedly adjourned amid protest by Opposition MPs against the police crackdown on protesters on Monday.
• Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said in the Rajya Sabha that the Union government was willing to discuss the alleged paper leaks matter in Parliament. However, the Opposition should not put forward conditions for the discussion, Rijiju said.
• Mallikarjun Kharge, the leader of the Opposition in the Upper House, reiterated the protesters’ demand that Pradhan must resign.

Police claim injuries, internet suspended

• On Wednesday night, clashes erupted at Delhi’s Sansad Marg between the police and protesters holding a demonstration. While the protest called by the Cockroach Janta Party is taking place at Jantar Mantar, some demonstrators had reportedly arrived at the nearby Sansad Marg in central Delhi that houses key government buildings. This prompted the police to fire tear gas at them, reported the Hindustan Times.
• The action came two days after the police used lathis and tear gas to disperse protesters during the march to Parliament called by the campaign. Protesters have since continued their sit-in at Jantar Mantar.

• The police claimed that some “miscreants” attacked them with bottles and stones at about 8.30 pm on Wednesday, reported India Today. Two assistant commissioners of police, two inspectors and another policeman were injured, the news channel cited a statement as having claimed. Two to three tear gas shells were fired in response, the police reportedly claimed.
• Following this, the Cockroach Janta Party claimed that mobile internet services were suspended in the Jantar Mantar area. The campaign’s founder Abhijeet Dipke asked on social media if this done because the government was “planning another brutal crackdown”.
• At around 2 am on Thursday, the campaign also claimed that the police had placed a damaged car outside the protest site at Jantar Mantar. Tagging the Delhi Police on social media, the Cockroach Janta Party asked why this had been done. “Everyone should remember this car has been brought here in this condition – important to record before they can blame it on peaceful protesters,” stated the campaign.

23rd July at 2:00 AM

Delhi Police has just brought in a totally damaged car and placed it outside the protest site at Jantar Mantar.

Why have you placed this car here @DelhiPolice? What do you intend to show with this car?

Everyone should remember this car has been brought… pic.twitter.com/egK2pfv2qR

— Cockroach is Back (@Cockroachisback) July 22, 2026

• The Mumbai Police ordered an inquiry and removed a police driver from his post after a video showed him threatening youth protesters by saying he would “plant 50 grams of powder” on them. In Bengaluru, police registered an FIR against an Instagram user accused of posting allegedly abusive remarks about Modi in connection with the protests. Read more about this here.
• In Nagpur, more than 100 young persons were detained on Thursday after holding a solidarity protest against the police crackdown on Monday’s march to Parliament, PTI reported.
• Protests also continued in several districts of Bihar, where police used lathis to disperse crowds after clashes and alleged throwing of stones by demonstrators in Katihar, Begusarai, Bhagalpur and Darbhanga, The Hindu reported.

16 metro stations shut again

• For the second day, 16 Delhi Metro stations were closed at 7.30 am on Thursday “until further instructions” for “security reasons”. The affected stations were Lok Kalyan Marg, which is near the prime minister’s residence, Rajiv Chowk located at Connaught Place, and Patel Chowk and Janpath near the Jantar Mantar protest site.
• Central Secretariat, Seva Teerth, Mandi House, ITO, Ramakrishna Ashram Marg, Barakhambha Road, Supreme Court, Delhi Gate, Indraprastha, Khan Market, Jor Bagh and Shivaji Stadium were the other stations.
• The campaign questioned the decision, saying that “people will come to Jantar Mantar anyway”.
• Shops, offices and restaurants in Connaught Place were directed to shut by 6.30 pm on Thursday, ANI quoted an advisory issued by the New Delhi Traders Association as stating. The traders’ body said the decision was taken after advice from civic body officials amid a “critical situation” in and around the area.
• Supreme Court lawyers on Thursday held a protest in the court premises in support of the student demonstrations at Jantar Mantar and read out the Preamble of the Constitution, ANI reported.

Nothing has stopped protestors from taking over Central Delhi for the third day in a row.

The demand has now extended to Narendra Modi, not just Dharmendra Pradhan.

But amid all this upheaval, where is the “Chanakya” of Indian politics, Amit Shah?@AnantGuptaAG asks in this… pic.twitter.com/qC2to5qpiD

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) July 22, 2026

Opposition reacts to Nadda’s press conference

• The Congress on Wednesday described Bharatiya Janata Party leader JP Nadda’s press conference as an “endless series of whataboutery”.
• Earlier in the day, addressing his first press conference since the Cockroach Janta Party called for protests demanding Pradhan’s resignation, Nadda said that any discussion on alleged irregularities in the education system should take place in Parliament. His remarks came hours after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi apologise for the police crackdown on protesters on Monday.

• Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said that although the protest is against the irregularities in the education system, it was the Union health minister who had held the press conference as the demonstrations continue. “This very fact reveals to what extent the Bharatiya Janata Party is indifferent to resolving this issue,” wrote Yadav on social media.
• Azad Samaj Party MP Chandra Shekhar Azad continued his sit-in protest inside the Parliament complex. He is protesting against the police action on the protesters on Monday.

Written by Sneha and Sara Varghese. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar and Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• How Mumbai Police is using surveillance to stop youth from protesting
• With elections perceived to be rigged, do Indians see protests as the only option?
• Delhi protests: Constitution demands that India’s judiciary check police excess
• ‘Government’s fitness plan – running from questions’: Protests spark humour amidst tear gas clouds
• ‘Students holding a mirror to all of us’: Actors, sportspersons extend support as protests continue

At Posto Dallas, a fuel station in northern Brazil’s Belém city, a car pulls in. The driver checks the price board, then picks a fuel. The 27-year-old station attendant, John, sees this happen all day. “Mostly flex-fuel vehicles come here,” he said. “People see the price and ask us to fill the fuel in their tanks accordingly.”

Posto Dallas fuel stations are supplied by the state-owned energy company Petrobras and operate under the brand. In Brazil, customers can choose between different percentages of ethanol blends or pure petrol depending on the price and usage. Most cars sold here are flex-fuel vehicles, built to run on different petrol-ethanol blends. Brazil has offered this choice for decades.

In another part of the world, nearly 15,000 km away, at a petrol pump in Bhopal’s Katara Hills, the scene looks similar. Vehicles come and go, attendants fill tanks, customers decide fast. But one thing is different: the choice on offer. In India, the government made 20% ethanol blended petrol, called E20, the default fuel across all fuel stations under its ethanol blending programme.

For Nicola Pamplona, a vehicle owner and a journalist by profession, choosing between petrol and ethanol in Rio de Janeiro is routine. Most Brazilians follow a simple rule. “Brazilian drivers know that ethanol is worth using when its price is below 70% of the petrol price,” Pamplona said.

However, unlike Pamplona, Priyanka Verma doesn’t get that choice in Bhopal. Verma moved to Bhopal from Delhi. In Delhi, her car ran about 15 km per litre in heavy traffic. In Bhopal, traffic is lighter, but the mileage has dropped to around 11.5 km per litre, a drop of about 23%. She blames E20 fuel for this drop.

Pamplona chooses ethanol, whereas Verma is forced to use it. That difference sits at the heart of the India-Brazil comparison. Brazil allowed enough time for non-compatible vehicles to phase out, built its system around flex-fuel vehicles, and allowed consumers to choose their fuel based on price. India is moving differently, with E20 becoming the default petrol while flex-fuel vehicles remain rare. Separate fuel choice at the pump too barely exists.

Brazil matters to India’s ethanol debate because India has often looked to Brazil’s long ethanol experience while expanding blending. India’s ethanol roadmap has referred to Brazil’s experience with ethanol and flex-fuel vehicles. The two countries have also discussed bioenergy cooperation, including ethanol, higher blends and flex-fuel technology. Brazilian ethanol representatives have engaged with Indian government and automobile-sector forums. India’s discussion around flex-fuel vehicles echoes parts of Brazil’s pathway, where ethanol moved from blending to direct use in flex-fuel vehicles.

However, the comparison of India’s and Brazil’s ethanol transition also shows the difference. Brazil built its ethanol system over decades through transition of vehicles, rigorous testing, competitive prices, logistics and consumer trust. India’s move from low ethanol blending to E20 has been rapid.

What India tested before E20

India’s ethanol transition has its own testing history, though many of the details are not as publicly available as Brazil’s long ethanol record.

In 2021, the NITI Aayog came up with a Roadmap for Ethanol which was prepared in just 75 days by an expert committee comprising representatives of petroleum and road transport ministries, oil marketing companies and Automotive Research Association of India.

India’s ethanol journey began with pilot projects in 2001 and the sale of 5% ethanol-blended petrol in selected states from 2003. Average blending was still around 5% in 2019-20, before the government accelerated the target from E10 to E20 and advanced the E20 deadline to 2025-26.

The roadmap also recognised vehicle compatibility as part of the transition, saying manufacturers should define and display whether vehicles can use fuels such as E20, E85 or E100. It also noted the need to address material compatibility and corrosion risks in ethanol-blended fuels.

The Automotive Research Association of India and the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, have publicly referred to E20 testing on older and newer two-wheelers and four-wheelers, including checks on emissions, fuel economy, durability and material compatibility.

According to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, India’s E20 adoption was a “calibrated, standards-backed journey”, while the Automotive Research Association of India has said studies covered performance, fuel economy, durability, long-term usage, accelerated ageing and material compatibility.

Mongabay-India could not find detailed vehicle-wise results in a public government repository.

The government has acknowledged that E20 can cause a marginal reduction in fuel efficiency in some vehicles. In a March 2025 reply to Parliament, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas said E20 results in a marginal reduction in fuel efficiency for four-wheelers designed for E10 and calibrated for E20. The reply also said SIAM had informed the committee that hardware changes and engine tuning could reduce this loss, and that the E20 roadmap did not find major issues in vehicle performance, engine wear or engine oil deterioration.

The Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers has said concerns about drastic mileage loss are misplaced, noting that mileage depends on several factors beyond fuel type.

Brazil’s long road

Luiz Augusto Horta Nogueira, a Brazilian bioenergy expert and former technical director of Brazil’s National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels, or ANP, told Mongabay-India that India’s ethanol transition appears strikingly fast when compared with Brazil’s long journey.

“We took almost a century to do that and India has done it in five years,” he said.

Brazil introduced mandatory ethanol blending in petrol in 1931, but ethanol’s roots in Brazil’s sugar economy go further into the country’s agricultural and industrial history. The major political push came after the oil shocks of the 1970s, when Brazil launched Proálcool, its National Alcohol Programme, to promote domestic ethanol production and reduce dependence on imported fuel.

Sindicom, Brazil’s National Union of Fuel and Lubricant Distribution Companies, described the country’s experience as one that “transcends five decades of accumulated learning” across technology, logistics, regulation and taxation. That learning included failures. In the early phase, car buyers had to choose between petrol and an ethanol-powered vehicle.

Nicola Pamplona has watched Brazil’s ethanol transition for around three decades, both as a journalist and as a vehicle user. He said that during the initial period, choosing between a petrol and an ethanol-powered car was not simple.

The turning point, he said, was flex-fuel technology. “The introduction of flex-fuel vehicles was the key driver behind the industry’s success,” he said. “Drivers gained the freedom to choose which fuel to use based on price or environmental considerations.”

This freedom changed how Brazilian drivers related to ethanol. They could use ethanol during the sugarcane harvest season, when it is cheaper, and shift to petrol during the off-season or for longer trips.

But Pamplona said his own choice is not only economic. “As a driver, I have always preferred ethanol over petrol for environmental reasons. I do not mind paying a little more in exchange for emitting fewer pollutants,” he said.

India’s move, by comparison, has been much faster. Indian government data shows ethanol blending in petrol was 1.53% in 2014. India reached 10% blending in 2022, five months ahead of schedule.

Public sector oil marketing companies had started selling E20 petrol from February 6, 2023. The pace has also been backed by expanded ethanol supply. The petroleum ministry said the National Policy on Biofuels, amended in 2022, advanced the 20% blending target from 2030 to Ethanol Supply Year 2025-26, along with expanded production and infrastructure.

The government said the E20 target had already been achieved in the current Ethanol Supply Year, the November-to-October cycle used to track ethanol supply and blending.

The missing bridge between fuel and vehicles

Horta said consumer confidence has to be treated as part of ethanol policy. “Consumer confidence is really an issue to be tackled seriously,” he said. Like India, Brazil also had to respond to scepticism and confusion around ethanol. “There is a permanent fight to clarify, to inform,” he said.

Brazil’s sugarcane and bioenergy industry association, UNICA, had participated in meetings in India with government and automotive-sector representatives during India’s ethanol discussions.

Evandro Herrera Gussi, the head of UNICA, who participated in meetings in India, spoke to Mongabay-India and said fears around ethanol blends are not new. He argued that ethanol is often blamed for problems that may come from vehicle age or poor maintenance. “The truth about ethanol, it’s better for engines. It’s better for cars,” he said.

Horta, speaking from his mechanical engineering background, also defended ethanol’s technical properties while also recognising that ethanol has lower energy content per litre. “In my opinion, I am a mechanical engineer, in many aspects, ethanol is a higher quality fuel compared with petrol,” he said.

A book on Brazil’s ethanol journey, Bioethanol: Fast track to mobility decarbonisation, coordinated, underlines why higher ethanol fuels require vehicle and fuel-system adaptation. Ethanol has different energy content, volatility and water affinity from petrol, and high-ethanol fuels such as E85 are usually discussed together with engine calibration, materials compatibility and cold-start performance.

That distinction matters for Indian consumers. A higher ethanol blend may have technical benefits, but if drivers experience lower mileage without a clear price advantage, the transition becomes a trust issue. In a market where E20 is becoming the default, consumers also need clarity on vehicle compatibility and warranties.

The larger lesson, both Horta and Gussi suggested, is that higher blends need testing before trust can follow. “A lot of tests,” Gussi said. “To achieve E20, to achieve E27, to achieve E30, to achieve E35, nothing without tests.”

The book, jointly published by the Brazilian development bank and Centre for Strategic Studies and Management, also describes how higher-blend decisions in Brazil were backed by institutional testing.

The move to E27 involved government, Petrobras/CENPES, automaker and motorcycle-industry participation. Brazil’s current standard petrol contains 30% ethanol and 70% petrol. This blend was announced only after technical tests showed its viability. The government also said the tests were monitored by multiple automotive-sector organisations who declared the E30 blend safe for two- and four-wheeled fleets. Brazil also put out these test reports in public domain to build consumer confidence.

In July 2026, Brazil’s National Energy Policy Council also approved a temporary increase from E30 to E32 for 180 days, citing fuel-price pressure and the need to reduce gasoline (petrol) imports.

In addition to E30 petrol, Brazil has a separate ethanol pump for its flex-fuel fleet. Sindicom put the flex-fuel share at about 75% of Brazil’s national fleet and said Proálcool helped finance research and development in flex-fuel engines. That vehicle transition is central to Brazil’s ethanol story because ethanol demand is not created only through a blending mandate, but also through vehicles that allow drivers to choose.

Sindicom told Mongabay-India that Brazil’s “Fuel of the Future Law” allows movement towards higher ethanol content only with tests and trials proving technical viability. For any increase, including up to E35, Sindicom said predictability is essential so that distributors can invest and plan logistics properly.

Horta advised India to stay with E20 for now, calling it a safer path because higher blends would require more preparation in vehicles, fuel supply and consumer readiness. “I feel that you (India) are safer. Go to E20, not beyond immediately,” he said.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Security forces demolished the homes of two alleged militants in south Kashmir on Thursday, a day after a police head constable was killed in a suspected terror attack in Anantnag, The Hindu reported.

The houses of Haroon Rashid Ganai and Adil Ahmad Thokar were demolished in the Hasanpora and Bijbehara areas of Anantnag, the newspaper reported.

Security officials said that both men were active Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists, The Hindu reported.

Residents told the newspaper that explosives were used during the demolitions and claimed that a mosque and a vehicle were also damaged.

Head constable Ashiq Hussain Qureshi, who was posted with the Indian Reserve Police and attached with the Special Operations Group, was shot dead on Wednesday while on Amarnath Yatra duty in Anantnag, The Indian Express reported.

Surveillance camera footage showed him being attacked at close range by a lone person suspected to be a terrorist.

The Kashmir Police on Wednesday warned against circulating the purported CCTV footage, saying “dissemination of such material may hamper ongoing investigations, compromise public security”.

Meanwhile, more than 2,500 young persons were detained in the Kashmir Valley after the attack in Anantnag , unidentified police officials told The Indian Express.

This included more than 700 from Srinagar, over 200 from Budgam, 178 from Baramulla and over 100 from Ganderbal. Persons were also detained in the south Kashmir districts of Anantnag, Shopian, Kulgam and Pulwama.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah criticised the detentions and demolitions, saying such measures would not help restore peace.

Referring to Supreme Court directions against such demolitions, he said, “This cycle will not end without taking the people along.”

Abdullah said the anger of the police after the policeman’s killing was understandable, but that large-scale arrests and demolitions could further strain the situation.

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 2024, the Supreme Court held as illegal the practice of demolishing properties of persons accused of crimes as a punitive measure. It said that processes must be followed before removing allegedly illegal encroachments.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said terrorism cannot be ended through house demolitions or mass detentions alone, stressing that public support is essential to restore lasting peace in Jammu and Kashmir. pic.twitter.com/sfYsl0bkca

— JKNC (@JKNC_) July 23, 2026

Former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti also criticised the action, saying that detaining people and demolishing the homes of families of alleged militants amounted to “collective punishment that has no place in a democracy”.

“If the government of India itself maintains that militancy has been reduced to near zero it must adopt a more humane and lawful approach towards innocent civilians instead of resorting to tit for tat for an entire community,” she added.

The killing of a police officer in the line of duty is a heinous & condemnable act. But detaining over a thousand people and demolishing the homes of families of two alleged militants amounts to collective punishment that has no place in a democracy. If the Government of India… pic.twitter.com/erlJs168of

— Mehbooba Mufti (@MehboobaMufti) July 23, 2026

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Editors Guild of India on Thursday said that biased reporting by media outlets cannot justify violence against journalists, adding that such attacks could have “disastrous implications for our tenuous society”.

The guild issued the statement after videos on social media showed reporters from television channels being attacked and heckled while covering the youth protests demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

The press body also condemned the “brutal suppression of the peaceful protest” by the security forces.

In the past few days, several videos have emerged showing protesters attacking reporters from television channels. One of them showed Times Now reporter Dev Kotak standing on a street in Delhi with his shirt torn.

Dev Kotak, a reporter with Times now, was attacked by a mob of protesters at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. This is absolutely disgraceful. You can request a reporter to leave the spot if you don't want him/her around but resorting to violence is absolutely unjustified. pic.twitter.com/wCsTEswJ8t

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) July 21, 2026

“I was slapped and punched from at least six directions, and was also hit with water bottles,” Kotak can be heard saying in the video. “They [protesters] even snatched my spectacles. They took away my mobile, watch and spectacles.”

The Times Network alleged that two more reporters, Shafali Nigam and Jyoti Mishra, were also attacked while covering the protests.

Zee News alleged that in Patna, protesters attacked its correspondent Prashant Jha and cameraperson Shahnawaz Alam, leaving both of them injured.

A video from Mumbai showed protesters heckling a reporter from Zee Media.

Yesterday, the protesters gave the Zee News reporter a reality check.

Prime-time journalists spread propaganda, hate, and lies, but it is the reporters on the ground who end up facing the public's anger. pic.twitter.com/SihZSMCO5f

— زماں (@Delhiite_) July 23, 2026

The Editors Guild also noted that the anger of protesters was directed at members of media outlets considered close to the Bharatiya Janata Party.

It said that “flawed and biased reporting” weakens the media’s position as one of the key pillars of a functional democracy.

“That position is accorded to the media by society thanks to hard-earned credibility built up over decades through considered, nuanced and unbiased reporting and rationally argued opinion,” the press body added. “Openly catering to the dictates of vested interests or even the government flies against the principles of responsible journalism the Guild advocates.”

Statement on Violence During Protests Against NEET Exam Paper Leaks pic.twitter.com/AVX6YyGaMk

— Editors Guild of India (@IndEditorsGuild) July 23, 2026

The guild, however, said that this “can never be the justification” for carrying out violence against members of the media organisations.

Condemning the police action on protesters, the press body said that using state power to suppress the right to dissent violates the freedom of expression.

“Caning, tear-gassing and even using electric prods cannot be justified against young protestors,” it said. “The right to dissent is fundamental to a democracy.”

The youth protests in Delhi began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign began to demonstrate at Jantar Mantar to demand Pradhan’s resignation for the alleged mismanagement of national competitive exams.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forced activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, into hospital. The protests soon spread to other cities.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with a brutal crackdown by the police. Dozens were injured by police lathis and had to brave tear gas.

Written by Neerad Pandharipande. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• How Mumbai Police is using surveillance to stop youth from protesting

• With elections perceived to be rigged, do Indians see protests as the only option?

• Delhi protests: Constitution demands that India’s judiciary check police excess

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that “those who try to harm the future of our youth will not be spared”. The Union government has decided to set up fast-track courts “to ensure swift and stringent punishment for those involved in paper leaks”, Modi added.

In response, the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign reiterated its demand that Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan must resign over the alleged mismanagement of competitive examinations. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that the prime minister was the one “who has harmed the future of our youth the most”.

Meanwhile, both Houses of Parliament were repeatedly adjourned amid protests by Opposition MPs against the police crackdown on protesters on Monday. Read on.

The Editors Guild said that biased reporting by media outlets cannot justify violence against journalists. The statement came after videos on social media showed reporters from television channels being attacked and heckled while covering the youth protests demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

One of the videos showed Times Now reporter Dev Kotak standing on a street in Delhi with his shirt torn, while a video from Delhi showed a crowd of protesters heckling a reporter from Zee Media. The perceived proximity of the media outlets to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party “can never be the justification” for attacks on its representatives, the Editors Guild said.

The press body also condemned police action against protesters, saying that using state power to suppress the right to dissent violates the freedom of expression. Read on.

The Delhi High Court has agreed to hear a public interest litigation seeking an inquiry by the National Investigation Agency into the youth protests in the national capital. The petition, filed by a former office bearer of the Hindutva organisation Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, has alleged that the demonstration was part of a “larger conspiracy” involving “external funding”.

The petition also referred to media reports about activist Sonam Wangchuk’s alleged links to foreign organisations and argued that these allegations should be investigated by the competent authorities. The matter will be heard on Friday.

The same bench is hearing a batch of public interest litigations alleging that the Delhi Police used excessive force against students during the march to Parliament. Read on.

Rescue teams recovered three more bodies from the site of a blast in a tunnel that was being constructed in Sikkim’s Namchi district, taking the death toll to 25. The four-day search and recovery operation has now concluded.

Twenty-seven persons were trapped inside the tunnel after the blast on Monday. Read on.

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

The Delhi High Court has agreed to hear a public interest litigation demanding an inquiry by the National Investigation Agency into the youth protests in the national capital and the march to Parliament held on July 20, Bar and Bench reported.

The petition, filed by a former office bearer of the Hindutva organisation Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, has alleged that the demonstration was not a genuine student movement, but was part of a “larger conspiracy” involving “external funding”.

A bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia has agreed to hear the matter on Friday, the legal news outlet reported.

The protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign began to demonstrate at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan for the alleged mismanagement of national competitive exams.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forced activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, into hospital. The protests soon spread to other cities.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with a brutal crackdown by the police. Dozens were injured by police lathis and had to brave tear gas.

“This pertains to the so-called student agitation”, Bar and Bench quoted the petitioner’s counsel as telling the court. He claimed that the protest had made Delhi “hostage”.

“The roads have been blocked and citizens of Delhi are suffering”, the counsel submitted.

The petition also alleges that the agitation was orchestrated by “anti-national and foreign elements” with the intention of “destabilising the country”, Bar and Bench reported.

The plea has sought directions from the court for the NIA or another specialised agency to investigate the protest and take over all first information reports registered by the Delhi Police in connection with the demonstration. It has also sought the identification and prosecution of those allegedly responsible for violence, vandalism and obstructing emergency services.

The petition also referred to media reports about Wangchuk’s alleged links to foreign organisations and argued that these claims should be investigated by the competent authorities.

The same bench is hearing a batch of public interest litigations alleging that the Delhi Police used excessive force against students during the march to Parliament.

On Wednesday, the court directed the Delhi Police and the Union government to file their responses in the matter within four weeks.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The toll due to a blast in a tunnel that was being constructed in Sikkim’s Namchi district has increased to 25 after rescue teams recovered three bodies on Thursday, bringing a four-day search and recovery operation to an end.

The tunnel was part of the Teesta Stage VI Hydroelectric Project of the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation in the Samardung area. It was being constructed to transport high-pressure water from the reservoir to the powerhouse.

The tunnel collapsed on Monday after a “sudden explosion of trapped or embedded suspected methane gas within the rocks, resulting in dense smoke and toxic gases”, the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation had said.

Twenty-seven persons were trapped inside the tunnel, of whom two managed to come out safely, Chief Minister Prem Singh Tamang said.

On Thursday, three bodies were recovered after which rescue teams conducted a “comprehensive inspection” of the tunnel and confirmed that no workers remained trapped inside after reconciling records of those reported missing, the district authorities said.

The National Hydroelectric Power Corporation has said that it will provide an ex-gratia payment of Rs 5 lakh to the next of kin of those who died.

Chief Minister Tamang had on Wednesday announced a compensation of Rs 4 lakh each for the families of the dead and Rs 50,000 for injured persons.

Personnel from multiple agencies, including the National Disaster Response Force, State Disaster Response Force, Sikkim Police, Fire and Emergency Services, National Hydroelectric Power Corporation officials and the Mines Rescue Team of Eastern Coalfields Limited Asansol, carried out the operation under the supervision of the Namchi district administration.

The Sikkim government has constituted a high-level committee to investigate the cause and circumstances of the incident and recommend measures to prevent similar accidents.

Written by Neerad Pandharipande. Edited by Sara Varghese.

The students of Delhi University should not become a “political tool” and must stay away from the youth protests, The Indian Express quoted an unidentified senior university official as saying on Wednesday.

The official said that while there was “no advisory in place” prohibiting students from participating in the demonstrations, doing so could have consequences, the newspaper reported.

“We just want our students to be safe and we are acting only in the best interest of our students,” The Indian Express quoted the official as saying.

The remarks came a day after the university said in a social media post that it recognised the “pain and anxiety” of its students, but alleged that “vested interests” were exploiting their fears instead of addressing them.

“The need of the hour is to calm the situation and reduce their distress, so that they can focus on what truly matters: their studies and their future,” the statement added.

We see the pain and anxiety of our students. It is unfortunate that vested interests are exploiting their fears instead of easing them. The need of the hour is to calm the situation and reduce their distress, so that they can focus on what truly matters: their studies and their…

— University of Delhi (@UnivofDelhi) July 21, 2026

Responding to the statement, the Democratic Teachers’ Front, a teachers’ union at the university, said on Wednesday that it remained “silent on both the causes for this pain and anxiety and of the violence suffered by these very students”, PTI reported.

The union argued that referring to “vested interests” sought to discredit the movement.

“The statement is dishonest, masking its apathy as empathy,” the teachers’ body said.

The protests in Delhi began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party started its demonstration at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, alleging that he was responsible for paper leaks in national competitive examinations.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forcibly shifted activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, to a hospital.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with heavy police action. Dozens of protesters were injured in baton charges and had to brave tear gas.

The police action widened the support for the agitation, which soon spread to other cities.

Follow updates about the youth protest here.

JNU students stopped from leaving campus, claims union

The Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union has alleged that students were prevented from leaving the campus to join the march to Parliament in central Delhi on Monday, The New Indian Express reported.

The union claimed that barricades were erected, gates were shut and police checked taxi-booking pick-up points when students attempted to leave the campus.

On Monday, The Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, warned students and employees against showing their “affinity with political movement like the one currently in public utterance and in public criticism”.

The institute later said that it was a routine advisory and “should not be misinterpreted or viewed out of context”.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• How Mumbai Police is using surveillance to stop youth from protesting

• With elections perceived to be rigged, do Indians see protests as the only option?

• Delhi protests: Constitution demands that India’s judiciary check police excess

With youth protests against alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive exams gathering steam in the country, several actors and sportspersons have supported the demonstrations and criticised the police action during the march to Parliament in Delhi on Monday.

Prominent actors such as Salman Khan and Alia Bhatt expressed solidarity with the students on social media, while others, including Shabana Azmi, Imran Khan and Huma Qureshi, joined protesters in Delhi and Mumbai.

The protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party started its demonstration at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, alleging that he was responsible for paper leaks in national competitive examinations.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forcibly shifted activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, to a hospital.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with heavy police action. Dozens of protesters were injured in baton charges and had to brave tear gas.

The police action widened the support for the agitation, which soon spread to other cities.

In Mumbai, the police detained scores of demonstrators between Tuesday and Wednesday as they held solidarity protests with the Cockroach Janta Party’s agitation in Delhi.

The detentions, along with the use of force by security forces, drew responses from several public figures.

R Madhavan – who starred in the popular Dhurandhar franchise that was widely considered to be propaganda for the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government – said that he admires the “grit and determination” of the protesters.

“As someone who has always believed in the limitless potential of India’s youth, I share the concern and disappointment felt by so many students and parents today,” he wrote on social media on Thursday.

View this post on Instagram

Madhavan added: “An education system must inspire confidence, fairness, and opportunity. Incidents such as examination paper leaks undermine that trust...”

He urged the Union government to ensure that all those found responsible for paper leaks are “brought to justice swiftly and decisively”.

Actor Alia Bhatt said that the resolve of the students who are protesting “is a mirror held up to all of us, asking whether we are truly listening to the very people who will inherit and shape this country’s tomorrow”.

Expressing her support, she added that the protesting students are “creating a better path for those who will come after them”.

View this post on Instagram

Actor Salman Khan said on Wednesday that it was “sad” that a peaceful movement against alleged irregularities in competitive exams “had to take a violent turn”.

“My heart goes out to the students and their families who were hurt,” he said on social media. “Paper leak is a very serious issue, and I am glad to know and see that the kids of our country have come together for a better educational system.”

Khan added that he appreciated the stand taken by students. The protest was the “right way to go about it, and the students have done this peacefully”, he said.

He added: “Education should be the next trend and fashion.”

It was such a peaceful movement, feel so sad that it had to take a violent turn. My heart goes out to the students and their families who were hurt. Paper leak is a very serious issue, and I am glad to know n see that the kids of our country have come together for a better…

— Salman Khan (@BeingSalmanKhan) July 22, 2026

Actors Imran Khan and Rasika Duggal were among the celebrities who joined the demonstrations held in Mumbai on Wednesday.

Bollywood actor Imran Khan marches with the CJP protesters in Mumbai

💪 pic.twitter.com/LGzBtVwBdd

— Cockroach is Back (@Cockroachisback) July 22, 2026

View this post on Instagram

Actor-producer siblings Saqib Saleem and Huma Qureshi also arrived at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on Thursday morning.

Bollywood actor Huma Qureshi shows up at Jantar Mantar in solidarity with the peaceful protesters.

This is a people’s movement, and we must all unite to fight for justice and accountability. pic.twitter.com/xl2am7CFLX

— Cockroach is Back (@Cockroachisback) July 23, 2026

Among those present at the Cockroach Janta Party’s march to Parliament on Monday were actors Shabana Azmi and Prakash Raj. Azmi said that peaceful protest was a constitutional right and urged the government to listen to the students’ concerns. Raj said that “when history is written tomorrow, they may forgive those who might have made the mistake, but they will never forgive those who were silent”, The Indian Express reported.

Azmi also helped end the 23-day hunger strike of three All India Students’ Association activists after appeals from social activists and political leaders.

Actor Swara Bhasker has also publicly supported the movement and visited the protest site at Jantar Mantar.

Actors Hrithik Roshan and Sonakshi Sinha were also among the first Hindi film personalities to express solidarity with the students after the police action in Delhi.

Sportspersons speak about education

Without mentioning the protests, Abhinav Bindra, India’s first individual Olympic gold medallist, wrote on social media that “regardless of where we stand”, education is a matter that “belongs to all of us”.

“The measure of a nation is found not only in its economy or its achievements, but in the opportunities it creates for its young people,” he said. “An education system that inspires confidence, rewards merit and nurtures curiosity is one of a nation’s greatest strengths.”

Bindra added: “I hope we can all unite and work together to continually strengthen our education system.”

I have never considered myself a political person. But I do believe that some issues belong to all of us, regardless of where we stand. Education is one of them.

The measure of a nation is found not only in its economy or its achievements, but in the opportunities it creates for…

— Abhinav A. Bindra OLY (@Abhinav_Bindra) July 23, 2026

Cricketer Shikhar Dhawan said that while it is essential to understand what the youth wants, “it is equally important to maintain patience in difficult times and keep faith in the country’s institutions and government”.

“I believe that the solution to every challenge emerges with patience,” he said. “India has always moved forward and will continue to progress.”

Humare youth humare desh ka future hain. Unke sapnon ko samajhna zaroori hai par saath hi, mushkil waqt mein patience rakhna aur desh ki institutions aur sarkar par bharosa banaye rakhna bhi utna hi zaroori hai.

Mera maanna hai ki har challenge ka solution patience se nikalta…

— Shikhar Dhawan (@SDhawan25) July 23, 2026

On Wednesday, World Cup winning cricketer cricketer Yuvraj Singh said in an Instagram story that “amicable solution for the sake of India’s future” can be found through dialogue.

“To every child, student, woman and man: you deserve the opportunity to learn in peace, grow with safety and chase your dreams,” he said. “Your well-being is the foundation of a brighter India.”

Boxer Nikhat Zareen had on Tuesday urged the Union government to hold a dialogue with the protesting students.

“Students are the future,” she wrote on social media. “Listen before they stop speaking. Nations don’t grow by silencing questions. They grow by answering them. Dialogue safeguards tomorrow. That is democracy.”

Students are the future. Listen before they stop speaking. Nations don't grow by silencing questions. They grow by answering them. Dialogue safeguards tomorrow. That is democracy. 🇮🇳#IStandWithStudents

— Nikhat Zareen (@nikhat_zareen) July 21, 2026

Written by Sneha. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Chief Justice Surya Kant said on Thursday that the Supreme Court will intervene if the metro station nearest to the court complex is not reopened by afternoon, Bar and Bench reported.

Kant made the comment after Supreme Court Bar Association chief Vikas Singh informed the bench that lawyers and the court staff were facing difficulties because of the station being closed.

The Supreme Court metro station had been closed by the operator citing “security reasons” for the second consecutive day. On Wednesday, the station was reopened in the evening.

This came amid youth protests in the national capital demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the alleged mismanagement of competitive examinations.

Follow updates about the youth protest here.

The Supreme Court station was among 16 stations mostly in central Delhi that had been shut. Many of the stations are near the Jantar Mantar protest site, Parliament and government offices.

Besides the Supreme Court station, the other ones that were closed were Lok Kalyan Marg, which is near the prime minister’s residence, Rajiv Chowk located at Connaught Place, and Patel Chowk and Janpath near the protest site.

Central Secretariat, Seva Teerth, Mandi House, ITO, Ramakrishna Ashram Marg, Barakhambha Road, Delhi Gate, Indraprastha, Khan Market, Jor Bagh and Shivaji Stadium were the other stations.

On Thursday, the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign questioned the decision to close the stations, adding that “people will come to Jantar Mantar anyway”.

On Wednesday, a bench headed by Kant refused to urgently hear a petition alleging that the police used excessive force against protesters who were marching to Parliament on Monday as part of a demonstration called by the Cockroach Janta Party. “Don’t waste our time and don’t waste your time,” legal news outlets had quoted Kant as having said.

A lawyer told the court that he can present video evidence of the police excesses. However, the bench had said that it was “not interested” in the videos. “We don’t have time to watch,” Kant was quoted as saying.

Edited by Anamika Pathak.

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that he would expect India to be “concerned” after US President Donald Trump announced that Washington would impose 200% tariffs on generic drugs from August 2028, Forbes reported.

Generics are non-branded medicines with the same active ingredients as other drugs already authorised for sale.

Rubio was asked whether India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had brought up the proposed tariffs during their meeting in the Philippines’ Manila.

“I mean, not with me, we did not get into depth on pharmaceuticals today,” Rubio told a reporter. “Obviously, I would expect them to be concerned about it, but they did not raise it today.”

On Tuesday, Trump announced that all generic drugs being ​brought into the US will continue not to attract any levies for two years starting from August 1. However, after the two-year period, the tariff rate will be raised ​to 100% for one year and to ​200% thereafter.

The move is expected to impact India adversely as the country supplies nearly half of the generic drugs sold in the US, according to the IQVIA Institute. This helps access to critical medicines at affordable prices.

India exported pharmaceuticals worth $8.7 billion to the US in 2024. This accounted for 31% of India’s pharmaceutical exports. Most of the drugs exported were generics.

In September, Trump announced a 100% tariff on the import of branded or patented pharmaceutical products into the US, unless the company was “building” a manufacturing facility in the country.

Trump said on Tuesday that the tariffs on generic drugs were being imposed to reshore “generic pharmaceutical production into America, with a penalty to those companies that decide not to build plant and equipment within the stated period of time given to them”.

He added that the objective of the policy was to “protect” Americans.

“Pharmaceutical facilities are being built, at a level never seen before, all over the United States of America,” said Trump.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The toll in flood-related incidents in Assam has risen to 41, said the state disaster management authority on Wednesday.

More than 6.4 lakh persons in over 900 villages, spread across eleven districts, have been affected by the floods. The districts are Karbi Anglong, Golaghat, Charaideo, Kamrup, Jorhat, Dibrugarh, Nagaon, Dhemaji, Hojai, Kamrup Metropolitan and Sivasagar.

Sivasagar was the worst-affected, with 328 villages being inundated.

Of the 10 deaths between Tuesday and Wednesday, three each were reported in Sivasagar and Jorhat, two in Charaideo, and one each in Dhemaji and Karbi Anglong, the authorities said.

More than 100 persons were reported missing, The Times of India reported. Rescue efforts had continued on Wednesday.

Several rivers, including the Burhidihing, Dikhou and Dhansiri, were flowing above the danger level on Wednesday morning. The Disang river was flowing above the highest flood level.

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that a cloudburst had triggered the “exceptionally heavy rainfall” in the upstream states of Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, “with precipitation of 141% and 181% above normal, respectively”.

“The resulting unprecedented discharge of floodwaters into Assam has inundated districts that have witnessed little to no flooding in recent history,” he said on Wednesday.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Inputs from Rokibuz Zaman. Edited by Sneha.

On Monday, social media was filled with images of the march to Parliament called by the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign. The Delhi Police said it had not given permission for the march. Some participants crossed barricades and allegedly threw stones.

The police and Rapid Action Force appear to be responding with disproportionate force. Videos show the men in uniform firing tear gas and raining baton blows upon protesters, many of whom were retreating, surrounded by the police and visibly not attacking anyone. These accounts require verification, but the imbalance is apparent.

In the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Chief Justice Surya Kant refused to urgently hear a petition alleging that the police had used excessive force against protesters. “Don’t waste our time and don’t waste your time,” Live Law quoted Chief Justice Surya Kant as saying.

The lawyer who sought that the plea be listed for hearing on Thursday told the court that he could present video evidence of the police excesses. However, Live Law quoted Justice Kant as saying, “We don’t have time to watch.”

A day earlier, on Tuesday, a public interest litigation alleging excessive force by the police forces was urgently mentioned before the Delhi High Court. “Don’t drag the court into all this,” the bench reportedly remarked. The next day, however, the court sought the Delhi Police’s response on the allegations of “brutalities”.

The response of the Supreme Court is unsettling because the Constitution tasks the judiciary with checking the abuse of power by the other branches of the government. The public interest litigation had merely asked the court to examine the constitutional limits on coercion exercised in the name of the Republic.

In the landmark 1952 decision in State of Madras vs VG Row, Chief Justice Patanjali Sastri described the Supreme Court as a “sentinel on the qui vive” – a vigilant guardian of fundamental rights against state overreach.

The court’s refusals brought back memories of another situation in Delhi when the police in 2011 descended upon Ramlila Maidan at midnight to evict thousands of citizens protesting against the corruption of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government.

At that time, the Supreme Court acted on its own. It found the police action to be unreasonable and excessive. It spoke of “least invasion”, requiring the state to choose the course that intrudes least upon rights and of “care perception”, recognising that the police remain responsible for the safety of a gathering even while dispersing it.

In Dr Ram Manohar Lohia v State of Bihar in 1965, Justice M Hidayatullah described law and order, public order and the security of the state as concentric circles. The judge warned against magnifying every disturbance into the gravest threat to political order.

Article 14 guarantees everyone equality before law and the equal protection of laws in India while under Article 21 guarantees protection of life and liberty. These constitutional provisions mean the state is obligated to distinguish between the violent and peaceful bystanders at the protest, as well as ensure that the actions of its security forces are fair and proportionate. A protest march that was denied permission does not invalidate these constitutional rights.

Supreme Court Bar Association condemns brutal lathi charge by the Delhi police on innocent students during CJP protests.

SCBA expresses solidarity with the injured, and seeks impartial inquiry into excessive use of force.#SupremeCourt #CJP #StudentProtests pic.twitter.com/s3o6HToLpf

— Live Law (@LiveLawIndia) July 22, 2026

Then there is the allegation that some members of the Delhi Police and other forces were on duty in Central Delhi without nameplates and were not in uniform. In DK Basu vs the State of West Bengal in 1996, the Supreme Court required police personnel making arrests to bear clear identification. The direction arose in the context of custody, but its animating principle that public force must be traceable.

A uniform and badge establishes that force flows from public authority, which is accountable. Otherwise, a citizen enters the world of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where authority is everywhere and responsibility nowhere.

After immense criticism on social media, the Delhi Police directed its personnel to report for duty in uniform, according to The Indian Express.

The first task after the events on Monday is to preserve the conditions in which the truth can be established. CCTV and body-camera footage, wireless communications, deployment charts, station diaries and orders authorising tear gas or baton charges should be secured before they are deleted or overwritten.

If plainclothes personnel participated in detentions or the use of force, their identities, units and orders must be placed in the public domain. A state that monitors its citizens cannot become anonymous the moment it exercises coercion.

Medical evidence relating to injured protesters and police personnel must also be preserved. Allegations of stone throwing and police excess must be investigated together. There must be an independent fact-finding team or judicial monitoring of the investigation. The judiciary must ensure that evidence survives, identities are traceable and that state force is answerable to the law.

In her essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, French philosopher Simone Weil notes that force injures but also turns a person with a voice and a claim upon the Republic into a body to be restrained or dragged away.

But Weil warned that force petrifies both those who suffer it and those who wield it. It dehumanises the wielder too, dulling judgment, eroding restraint and allowing lawful authority to slip into domination.

Constitutional law is safeguard against this “petrification”. Its purpose is not to prevent the state from maintaining public order, but to ensure that every exercise of force remains identifiable, necessary and capable of legal justification. The Republic does not weaken its authority by holding the police accountable; it proves that its authority is constitutional.

The author is a constitutional lawyer and an alumnus of the University of Delhi and NALSAR University of Law.

The author gratefully acknowledges the conversations with Divyansh Singh of Delhi School of Economics and Aishani Gupta of Indraprastha College for Women, whose experiences at the Delhi protest followed helped shape to the central argument of this piece.

Union minister JP Nadda on Wednesday said that any discussion on alleged irregularities in the education system should take place in Parliament and urged the Opposition not to politicise the matter.

“Tell us how much time you [the Opposition] want – 12 hours, 18 hours – the government is ready for a discussion,” the Bharatiya Janata Party leader said.

Nadda was addressing his first press conference since the Cockroach Janta Party called for protests demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged lapses in the conduct of competitive examinations.

His remarks also came hours after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi apologise for the police crackdown on protesters during Monday’s march to Parliament, when security personnel fired tear gas and carried out a lathi-charge to disperse demonstrators in Central Delhi. On Tuesday, the Leader of the Opposition, along with his sister, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, was detained while protesting outside the prime minister’s residence against the police action.

During the press conference, Nadda accused Gandhi of selectively highlighting paper leak cases and listed alleged irregularities in conduct of examinations in several states and Union Territories led by non-Bharatiya Janata Party governments. These included Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Punjab, Kerala and Karnataka.

The government in West Bengal has since changed to one led by the BJP.

Responding to Gandhi’s claim earlier in the day that more than 150 examination papers had leaked in the past decade, Nadda said the allegation would be investigated.

“... [But], taking political mileage out of this is not proper,” he said, urging the Opposition to “to address this [matter] together and move forward towards a lasting solution”.

Nadda said that Parliament should discuss where paper leaks had occurred, who was responsible, how the Union government had responded and what the state governments should do to prevent such incidents.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• ‘People’s sympathy is now with the youth’: BJP workers worry about crackdown on protests

• Follow updates about the youth protest here.

The Mumbai Police on Wednesday detained protesters across the city, including stand-up comedians Abish Mathew and Raunaq Rajani, actor Ayesha Khan and several students, as demonstrations against alleged examination irregularities spread across India.

The protests in Mumbai, held in solidarity with the Cockroach Janta Party’s agitation in Delhi, drew crowds to Chembur, Dadar and South Mumbai despite heavy police deployment and prohibitory orders, The Times of India reported.

The police also stopped senior Congress leaders, including the party’s state unit president Harshvardhan Sapkal, and legislature party leader and former minister Naseem Khan, as they were heading towards the Bharatiya Janata Party’s office, the newspaper reported.

The demonstrations came two days after the Delhi Police used lathis and tear gas to disperse protesters during the march to Parliament called by the Cockroach Janta Party.

Protesters have since continued their sit-in at Jantar Mantar, while Opposition parties have demanded a discussion in Parliament on the police crackdown and the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

Here’s more on this and other top updates:

Protests across India

• The police dragged away and detained several protesters during demonstrations in Mumbai, The Indian Express reported.
• More than 30 students, detained at the Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilizers Police Station in Chembur, were initially denied access to lawyers, alleged Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) leader Anish Gawande. He later said that the students had been released. Gawande also called for the release of those detained in Dadar.

"Dharmendra Pradhan Istifa Do"

Protesters brave rain and gather near Mumbai's Shivaji Park to demand the Union education minister's resignation and ask for justice for youth injured at the CJP protest in Delhi on July 20.

📷 Scroll Staff pic.twitter.com/XiuNwgRe7u

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) July 22, 2026

• NDTV journalist Sohit Mishra alleged that he had also been detained while reporting on the protests.

#Mumbai | More than 300 protesters have gathered in Mumbai's Chembur, where demonstrators are now demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

Police have detained several protesters, including a 15-year-old boy.… pic.twitter.com/goQWAx3Nvd

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) July 22, 2026

Also read: How Mumbai police is using surveillance to stop youth from protesting

• Protests spread to several others cities on Wednesday. In Patna’s JP Golambar area, police used water cannon, tear gas and lathi-charge to disperse students marching towards Raj Bhavan under the banner of the All India Students Association, The Indian Express reported.
• Congress workers were detained in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi, the party’s MLAs wore black bands in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly demanding a discussion on the issue, while demonstrators supporting the Opposition party clashed with police outside Lok Bhavan in Chhattisgarh’s Raipur, Dainik Jagran reported.
• Protests were also reported from Lucknow, Ahmedabad and Jalandhar, the newspaper reported.

Opposition protests in Parliament

• Both Houses of Parliament were repeatedly adjourned on Wednesday. This came amid protests by the Opposition demanding discussions on several matters, including the police lathi-charge on Monday. Several MPs wore black clothes as part of their protest.
• The MPs from the Congress, Samajwadi Party, the Left parties and other Opposition parties staged demonstrations inside and outside Parliament, seeking the education minister’s resignation.
• Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said that the government was ready to discuss the paper leak matter “as per rules” of the Houses.
• “When the discussion is to be held, the duration of the discussion and under what rule the discussion is to be held should be decided after speaking with floor leaders of all parties,” he told the Lok Sabha. “There should be a construction discussion for the future of the youth of this country – this is what the government wants.”
• Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said the Opposition must be “on the streets” if students were protesting and demanded an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the police action against demonstrators. Read more about this here.

Other developments

• The Supreme Court refused to urgently hear a petition alleging that the police used excessive force against the protesters on Monday. “Don’t waste our time and don’t waste your time,” said Chief Justice Surya Kant. When the petitioner said that he can submit video evidence of police excesses, the bench said that it was “not interested” and did not “have time to watch”. Read more about this here.
• However, the Delhi High Court on Wednesday sought responses from the Union government and Delhi Police on petitions alleging excessive force during Monday's protest, Live Law reported. It also directed the authorities to preserve surveillance camera footage and other electronic records relating to the incident.
• Meanwhile, Union Health Minister JP Nadda told The Indian Express that the government is “always open” to take the talks forward with the protesters.
• The campaign’s spokesperson Saurav Das said they would not go to a minister’s office again but were willing to meet at a “neutral venue” near Jantar Mantar if the government had “concerns about security at the protest site”, PTI reported. He also said there was “no point” in holding “meaningless discussions”.
• The Cockroach Janta Party’s Instagram account was briefly blocked on Wednesday, its founder Abhijeet Dipke claimed. He posted a screenshot on X which showed a message stating that the platform had “complied with a legal request to restrict this content”. Minutes later, Dipke said that the account had been restored. It was not immediately clear whether the account had been withheld.

Opposition MPs stopped from meeting Wangchuk

• A group of Opposition MPs were stopped from meeting activist Sonam Wangchuk at Medanta Hospital in Haryana’s Gurugram, ANI reported. The activist has been on an indefinite hunger strike since June 28 as part of the political campaign’s protest.
• The MPs, who had reached the hospital with a letter signed by 55 parliamentarians urging him to end his fast, later handed it over to his wife, Gitanjali Angmo.
• The Haryana Police claimed only family members were being allowed to meet him as per hospital protocol, The Hindu reported. However on Tuesday night, Nadda and Union minister Jitendra Singh had met Wangchuk at the hospital, after he was shifted there from Safdarjung Hospital following directions from the Delhi High Court.
• The Cockroach Janta Party on Wednesday appealed to Wangchuk to end his indefinite fast, saying his sacrifice had “inspired thousands of students across the country”. The campaign said it would continue the agitation until its demands for examination reforms and justice were met.
• Wangchuk said on Wednesday that he would end his protest if the Union government gives an “unequivocal assurance” that young protesters who took part in the agitation would not face any punitive or retaliatory legal action. He also sought an assurance against further use of excessive police force. He made the same demand in a video posted on social media.

ABHI BHI ZINDA HUN.... DAY 25 pic.twitter.com/SnwKXMfvOO

— Sonam Wangchuk (@Wangchuk66) July 22, 2026

Delhi metro reopens

• All 16 Delhi Metro stations that had been closed for “security reasons” on Wednesday were reopened for passengers by 6.34 pm, the metro authorities said.
• The affected stations were Lok Kalyan Marg, which is near the prime minister’s residence, Rajiv Chowk located at Connaught Place, and Patel Chowk and Janpath near the Jantar Mantar protest site. Central Secretariat, Seva Teerth, Mandi House, ITO, Ramakrishna Ashram Marg, Barakhambha Road, Supreme Court, Delhi Gate, Indraprastha, Khan Market, Jor Bagh and Shivaji Stadium were the other stations.

Frustration and anger among metro commuters after they were stranded as Delhi Metro on Wednesday announced that 16 stations, mostly in central Delhi, will remain shut today.

Scroll's @AnantGuptaAG reports from Central Secretariat metro station. pic.twitter.com/LP4TzirQKX

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) July 22, 2026

Aftermath of Monday protest

• The doctors at Delhi’s Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital said a 21-year-old woman who was critically injured during the police action on Monday has been taken off ventilator support, ANI reported.
• The Delhi Police said it has registered 10 first information reports in connection with Monday’s Parliament march, The Hindu reported. Four cases were registered at Parliament Street police station, three at Connaught Place, and one each at Mandir Marg, Barakhamba Road and Kartavya Path police stations. The cases relate to various incidents during the protest and alleged law-and-order violations, the police said.

Students deserve certainty over chaos, says Pradhan

• In a social media post on Tuesday night, Pradhan said that the Union government “remains 100% committed” to discussing the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test for medical admissions and “addressing every genuine concern of our youth” in Parliament.
• Criticising the Congress, the education minister said that the students of India “deserve far better than being treated as props in a political campaign”. “They deserve certainty over chaos, solutions over slogans and responsibility over disruption,” he added. “We owe our students more than outrage. We owe them answers, reforms and accountability.”
• His statements came after Rahul Gandhi, along with Congress MP and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav were detained by the Delhi Police as they protested outside the prime minister’s residence. They were released hours later.

Written by Sneha and Sara Varghese. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar, Neerad Pandharipande and Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: ‘People’s sympathy is now with the youth’: BJP workers worry about crackdown on protests

Protesting against the leaks of exam papers is serious business – until it is not. In the middle of police lathi-charges, tear gas and breathless news reporters, demonstrators at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar (and their supporters around the country) have found the time to get India to find dark humour in the situation.

Over the past few days, social media platforms have been flooded with memes and videos about the situation from parodies of the Hindi film Dhurandhar to sly digs at those who support the government’s every action blindly.

The protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign began to demonstrate at Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, claiming that he was responsible for the leaks of papers for national competitive exams.

On Sunday, thousands joined the protest in Delhi after the police forced activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike, into hospital. The protests soon spread to other cities.

A march to Parliament on Monday was met with a brutal crackdown by the police. Dozens were injured by police lathis and had to brave tear gas.

This made some who claimed they would like to attend the protests hesitant. Comedian Danish Sait took aim at them.

Tens of thousands of young people not only joined the demonstrations, some even uploaded snapshots of themselves getting ready to join the protesters.

More adventurous participants filmed themselves running from security personnel during a lathi-charge. While they were at it, some of them kept up their streaks on the Strava fitness app , and turned police barricades into obstacles from the mobile game Subway Surfers.

😭😭 pic.twitter.com/0tUaTKmu6i

— Ramsha Ghazal (@ramsha__g) July 21, 2026

The signs being carried at the demonstrations provided lots of fodder for posts.

Fitness plan 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/DU9gX4ci3J

— Veer BaBa 🙏 (@VeerArjey) July 22, 2026

This one poked fun at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s council of ministers.

Gen Z are probably the most creative protesters, bringing humor into protests while still being serious about the issues pic.twitter.com/FZlUNVlo0r

— Chai Met Toast (@bythewaynikhil) July 21, 2026

Scenes from Jantar Mantar !! pic.twitter.com/EgqRJKlCpj

— Nehr_who? (@Nher_who) July 19, 2026

But how did those exam papers leak? That is what the Hindi film franchise Dhurandar 3 will explain, it seems, just like Dhurandar 2 provided a rationalisation for Modi’s disastrous decision to demonetise 86% of India’s currency in 2016.

Citizens who find creative ways to find excuses for the government were also the butt of humour.

Saloni Gaur channelled the spirit of Bharatiya Janata Party MP, actress Kangana Ranaut, to explain the situation.

The nation’s cartoonist chipped in with biting observations. Rakesh Ranjan took aim at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s penchant for being given obscure awards in foreign countries.

Need more medals !@cartoonistrrs#JantarMantar #cjp #trending #PMModi pic.twitter.com/Fb7VkYawr2

— Molitics (@moliticsindia) July 22, 2026

Sandeep Adhwarya weighed in on Bollywood’s silence on the protests.

From the @timesofindia archives #Bollywood pic.twitter.com/qMvVGrtqkI

— Sandeep Adhwaryu 🇮🇳 (@CartoonistSan) July 16, 2026

The artist who goes by the name PenPencilDraw pointed out that the usual tactics employed to discredit protestors seemed to be ineffective.

Toolkit. pic.twitter.com/Wd2huQHY8V

— PenPencilDraw (@penpencildraw) July 22, 2026

Rachita Taneja reminded the protesters that India’s Constitution is the strongest weapon against injustice.

Be safe, be alert, stay hydrated ✊🏾 pic.twitter.com/4TjuKBxBim

— Sanitary Panels (@sanitarypanels) July 20, 2026

Follow updates about the youth protest here.

Protests over the alleged irregularities in competitive examinations and the police crackdown on demonstrators in Delhi continued across the country. Opposition MPs disrupted proceedings in Parliament, demanding a discussion on the police actions and the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

In addition to the sit-in at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, demonstrations were also reported from Lucknow, Mumbai, Patna, Raipur and Varanasi. In Patna, police used water cannon, tear gas and a lathi-charge to disperse the protesters. In Mumbai, Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) leader Anish Gawande claimed that the police had detained students from their homes without warrants.

Meanwhile, Union Health Minister JP Nadda said that the government is “always open” to talk to the protesters. Read on.

Why BJP workers are worrying about the crackdown on protests, explains Anant Gupta

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi expressed his support for the youth protests over alleged examination irregularities, saying the Opposition must be “on the streets” if students are protesting. He demanded an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the force used by the police during the Cockroach Janta Party’s march to Parliament on Monday.

Gandhi said students were asking for “what this country owes them” and backed demands for Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, accountability for the use of force. “What wrong have our students done to have security forces aiming weapons at them, beating them up?” Gandhi asked.

During Monday’s protest, security personnel fired tear gas shells and carried out a lathi-charge to disperse protesters in Central Delhi. Read on.

The Supreme Court refused to urgently hear a petition alleging that the police used excessive force against students during Monday’s protest march to Parliament. “Don’t waste our time," Chief Justice Surya Kant told the petitioner’s lawyer.

The advocate had offered to present video evidence of the alleged police excesses at the protest called by the Cockroach Janta Party. However, the bench said that it was “not interested in videos”. The Cockroach Janta Party was launched on May 16 in response to reports of remarks by Kant on the previous day comparing some unemployed youngsters to “cockroaches”.

Meanwhile, the Delhi High Court sought the Union government and the police’s response on a clutch of public interest litigations alleging excessive use of force during the youth protest. Read on.

Four factors explain why Gen Z toppled rulers in Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. Is India different, explains Dan Qayyum

The Madhya Pradesh Assembly has passed the Uniform Civil Code Bill to ban polygamy and introduce strict conditions for live-in relationships. Adivasi communities have been exempted from the bill to safeguard their customs and traditions.

With this, Madhya Pradesh became the fourth Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state to pass a Uniform Civil Code bill. Congress MLAs opposed the legislation and demanded that it be sent to a select committee for review.

During the discussion on the bill, Chief Minister Mohan Yadav said that the Opposition party was trying to appease the Muslim community and accused its legislators of being “anti-tribal”. Read on.

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Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said that the Opposition must be “on the streets” if the country’s students are protesting, amid demonstrations by young people as part of the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest over alleged examination irregularities and the police crackdown during the political campaign’s march to Parliament on Monday.

He also demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi apologise for “what has happened”. During Monday’s protest, security personnel fired tear gas and carried out a lathi-charge to disperse protesters in Central Delhi.

“Every single person who raised a finger on our students…the people who ordered it and people who executed it should be made accountable,” Gandhi said.

Referring to Modi, Gandhi added that “the man who is running this entire system…who is finally accountable for all this should have the decency to apologise to students for what has happened”.

The leader of the Opposition made the remarks at a press conference a day after he, Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav were detained by the Delhi Police outside the prime minister’s residence, while protesting against the police action against the demonstrators. They were released hours later.

Gandhi began the press conference by playing a compilation of videos purportedly from Monday’s protest which showed security personnel assaulting protesters, including a woman being slapped and another protester being beaten with a lathi. It also showed security personnel pointing weapons at demonstrators and injuries that a protester claimed had been caused by pellet guns.

The Cockroach Janta Party has also claimed that the police had fired pellet guns at the protesters. The Union government classifies pellet gun as a “non-lethal” weapon for crowd control. Its cartridge contains pellets made of rubber or plastic, which can damage sensitive parts like eyes when fired from a short range.

The Delhi Police has denied using pellet guns against the protesters. It also claimed that the protesters “resorted to large-scale violence” and vandalised public property.

On Wednesday, The Hindu quoted an unidentified person at Lady Hardinge Medical College as saying that at least one of the 80 protesters injured had sustained pellet gun injuries and was undergoing treatment at the hospital.

“What wrong have our students done to have security forces aiming weapons at them, beating them up?” Gandhi asked on Wednesday. “They are asking for what this country owes them.”

He said that the Opposition supports the students’ demand seeking resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

“Dharmendra Pradhan should be shown the door, he is incapable of holding the post,” the leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha said.

Gandhi claimed that 152 examination paper leaks had taken place over the last decade and affected around 7.5 crore students and their families.

“The best part is that there have been zero convictions in the last 10 years,” he claimed.

He also stated that the system is not just “rigged” but also made “unaffordable” for the students.

“One exam costs the families who take this exam the same amount of money as our entire education budget,” Gandhi said. “At the same time every year, Rs 1.32 lakh crore similar amount is spent by the families who are taking the NEET exam. This is pure theft from these families, nothing else.”

He said the Opposition had first approached Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla seeking a discussion on the matter, but no debate was held, prompting them to stage a protest outside the prime minister’s residence on Tuesday.

Gandhi also claimed that some police personnel who escorted him after his detention expressed support for the protest.

“The police personnel dragged me away and took me from the protest site,” he said. “But while doing so, many of them were telling me, ‘Please remove this government’.”

VIDEO | Delhi: At a press conference, Lok Sabha LoP Rahul Gandhi says, “The police personnel dragged me away and took me from the protest site. But while doing so, many of them were telling me, 'Please remove this government.' Some said they were from Rajasthan, others from… pic.twitter.com/ji1w6SYu19

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) July 22, 2026

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• ‘People’s sympathy is now with the youth’: BJP workers worry about crackdown on protests

• Follow updates about the youth protest here.

A policeman was killed after suspected terrorists opened fire on security personnel in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag district on Wednesday, NDTV quoted unidentified officials as saying.

The attack took place around 12.30 pm on the Anantnag-Kokernag road, where the policeman was deployed for Amarnath Yatra duty, The Hindu reported.

The policeman, identified as Head Constable Ashiq Hussain Qureshi from Budgam, was taken to hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.

Security has been intensified in Anantnag town amid the ongoing Amarnath Yatra, which has remained suspended for the past four days because of inclement weather in Jammu and Kashmir.

Lieutenant General Manoj Sinha condemned the attack and offered his condolences to Qureshi’s family.

“This heinous act will not go unpunished,” Sinha said on social media. “J&K Police and our security forces are on the ground and will bring those responsible to justice.”

I spoke with DGP Shri Nalin Prabhat to review the situation following the terror attack in Anantnag. My heartfelt condolences to the family of Head Constable Ashiq Hussain Qureshi, who sacrificed his life in the line of duty. The whole country stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the…

— Manoj Sinha (@manojsinha_) July 22, 2026

Edited by Sara Varghese.

In 1994, a US company and the United States Department of Agriculture secured a European patent for a method of using neem extracts to control fungi. The neem tree, however, was not a discovery.

Across the Indian subcontinent, it had long been used in traditional medicine, agriculture, and furniture making, with its pesticidal properties documented in Sanskrit texts and embedded in everyday agricultural practice.

After a six-year legal challenge led by an Indian organisation named the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, supported by international allies, the patent was revoked in 2000. Five years after that, the decision was upheld on appeal, with the board ruling that the method lacked novelty and an inventive step, given its long-documented use in India.

Now, three decades later, the neem case looks less like an aberration than a template. The frontier has moved from isolated plant compounds to the systems-level ecological knowledge that smallholder and Adivasi communities have developed over generations.

The next dispute may involve a soil microbiome product, an agroecological decision-support tool, or a machine-learning model trained on data from traditional preparations. India’s current legal architecture is not designed to respond to it.

Why is this knowledge different?

Most public discussion of biopiracy still focuses on the misappropriation of specific biological resources: a plant compound, a seed variety, or a fermentation culture. The legal response has focused correspondingly on access and benefit-sharing rules, prior art databases, and geographical indication protections. These instruments work, imperfectly, for that kind of theft.

The most valuable ecological knowledge in contemporary India is not of this type. It is systems knowledge: an understanding of how multiple biological, climatic, and social variables interact in a particular landscape.

The Odisha Millets Mission has identified 163 millet landraces (a locally adapted, traditional variety of a domesticated plant, etc) from across the state. After participatory varietal trials with farmers, 14 were shortlisted, and four were officially released. They were selected for traits such as drought tolerance, waterlogging response, and pest behaviour that no formal plant breeding programme has matched at comparable cost.

Similarly, farmers practising natural farming across Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have refined soil inoculant preparations over generations. Scientists are now studying the microbial communities in these preparations to better understand how they work.

None of this knowledge is secret. It is observable and accessible to any researcher willing to spend time in the field. That is precisely why it cannot be protected under the current law.

Three legal instruments, three structural gaps

The Biological Diversity Act of 2002 requires prior informed consent and benefit-sharing when biological resources (plants, microbes, etc.) are accessed for commercial use. But today’s research often derives value not just from the resource itself but from the community’s knowledge of how to cultivate, use, and manage it.

The Act does reach associated knowledge: benefit claimers include holders of knowledge relating to the use of biological resources, and benefit-sharing under Section 21 covers it. But that hook is tethered to accessing a physical biological resource. When value comes from the knowledge, or from the data derived from it, without the resource being accessed, the trigger does not engage.

The challenge becomes even more apparent when research on a traditional bio-input leads to commercial products. While the Biological Diversity Act regulates access to biological resources, it does not clearly address the traditional knowledge that underpins them.

The 2023 amendment further weakened these safeguards by removing the requirement for prior approval for Indian researchers. Instead, they are required to register only when a patent is granted. The amendment also exempted codified traditional knowledge and cultivated medicinal plants, even from informing state biodiversity boards. Although the first patent-linked benefit-sharing payment, around ₹43 lakh (₹4.3 million) to 16 state biodiversity boards, was made only in November 2025, the amendment has widened the gap.

The Patents Act, 1970, addresses the problem differently. Section 3(p) of the Act bars patents on traditional knowledge, while the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a database of more than 400,000 formulations from Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa, and Yoga, has helped block, amend, or withdraw over 370 patent applications across 17 patent offices worldwide. This has been an important safeguard against the misappropriation of traditional knowledge. However, it does not grant communities legal rights to that knowledge. Moreover, if traditional knowledge is sufficiently modified, the new version may still qualify for a patent because the modification is treated as the invention.

A traditional soil inoculant cannot be patented. However, a product developed by analysing and improving that inoculant may qualify for a patent. In effect, Section 3(p) protects traditional knowledge in its original form, but not the commercial products developed from it.

The Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006 recognised Adivasi communities’ rights to manage and use community forest resources. In principle, it could also provide a foundation for recognising their knowledge rights. In practice, however, that promise remains unrealised.

For example, implementation in tiger reserve buffer zones has been structurally constrained by the Wildlife Protection Act, with recognition of community forest rights pending or contested across multiple reserves. Communities whose land rights remain unresolved cannot credibly assert knowledge rights.

A faster pipeline

The urgency of the gap is driven by rapid advances in biotechnology. A decade ago, analysing the microbial composition of a traditional soil preparation required expensive DNA sequencing available to only a handful of research institutions.

Today, the same analysis has become relatively inexpensive and widely accessible through commercial DNA sequencing services. The resulting data can be analysed using free, open-source bioinformatics tools, and the results can train machine-learning models that predict soil health outcomes. As a result, the journey from traditional community practices to a commercially viable product can now take just a few years, at a cost accessible to small research groups.

The time between documenting community knowledge and developing a patentable commercial product from it has narrowed from decades to just a few years. Communities are often unaware that their practices are being analysed until products appear in markets. Unlike in the neem case, for which the TKDL was built, here the knowledge is not copied directly. It is being transformed into datasets and predictive models, and the resulting products bear no obvious fingerprint of their origin.

What is distinctive about India is the scale of its traditional ecological knowledge base and the sophistication of its legal instruments, though they are inadequately enforced.

Reforms within reach

Four reforms could begin to address the gap without new primary legislation.

First, extend the Biological Diversity Act’s benefit-sharing provisions to ecological knowledge derivatives, which means products derived from traditional ecological knowledge. The NBA could issue a clarification stating that algorithmic tools, datasets, and models that are demonstrably derived from traditional ecological knowledge are subject to benefit-sharing, regardless of whether physical material was accessed. Such a notification has interpretive rather than legislative power, particularly after the 2023 amendment, and would need to operate within the Act’s existing definitions. Documentation showing the origin of the data could serve as evidence to establish such links.

Second, replace the TKDL’s state-controlled model with community-held archives. Designed in 2001 as a defensive tool against foreign patent offices, the library has largely served that purpose. A successor framework should be community-held, updatable in local languages and, where appropriate, in oral formats and integrated into the minimum documentation lists of major patent offices. The critical distinction is that communities, not the state, should decide what is documented, who can access it, and in what form.

Third, anyone applying for a patent on an ecological technology should disclose the source of the underlying knowledge, biological material, or data. The Indian patent system already requires applicants to disclose the use of biological material in inventions and, in the case of AYUSH-related inventions, to address overlap with traditional knowledge. But it doesn’t contain any similar requirement for bioinputs, soil health tools, or agroecological decision systems.

When commercial value derives from community methods rather than from formally accessed biological material, applicants are not required to disclose their origins. Section 10(4)(d)(ii) of the Patents Act already requires applicants to disclose the source and geographical origin of biological material used in an invention.

Still, that duty is tied to the material itself. It does not reach an invention that uses no biological material, such as a dataset, a model, or a decision tool built from observations of community practice, and Section 3(p) bars only the unmodified knowledge, not a derivative built on it. Extending it to these categories would require applicants to declare whether traditional ecological knowledge was used, the community or region of origin, and whether benefit-sharing arrangements are in place.

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, adopted in May 2024, provides an international precedent for such an approach.

Fourth, integrate knowledge governance into tiger conservation plans prepared under the Wildlife Protection Act. The National Tiger Conservation Authority could require these plans to document active traditional ecological knowledge systems in the buffer zone, identify ongoing research, and specify attribution and benefit-sharing requirements.

From patent logic to biocultural rights

These reforms share a deeper assumption: that the patent model is inadequate for ecological innovations. Patents rest on the idea that inventions are discrete, attributable, and bounded in time. Ecological innovations are different. They are co-produced across human generations, across species, and across the slow feedbacks of managed and unmanaged ecosystems.

The efficacy of a millet landrace cannot be separated from the centuries of selection pressure under which it was maintained; the value of a soil inoculant cannot be separated from the soils, water regimes, and cropping systems in which it was developed. These are not background conditions to the invention; they are the inventions.

The framework of biocultural rights, developed most fully through the Colombian Constitutional Court’s 2016 Atrato River judgement recognises that communities hold rights not only to land and biological resources but also to the knowledge systems embedded in their relationship with those resources.

The judgement recognised the Atrato River as a rights-bearing entity and affirmed the biocultural rights of the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities along it. India’s constitutional provisions for scheduled tribes, combined with the substantive intent of the Forest Rights Act, are not inconsistent with this thinking. What is absent is the policy infrastructure to operationalise it.

The neem case took six years to resolve and required an international coalition. The next version of that dispute, involving a soil microbiome patent or an agroecological AI tool, will require a legal response that does not yet exist. It should be designed before the filing date, not after it.

Deepanjana Saha is a doctoral researcher at ATREE in Bengaluru, studying ecosystem services and land use.

Sarvesh JP is a research associate at BOBP-IGO, Chennai, working on coastal and marine social-ecological systems.

G Ravikanth is a senior fellow and Academy Convenor at ATREE.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to urgently hear a petition alleging that the police used excessive force against protesters who were marching to Parliament as part of a demonstration called by the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign on Monday, reported Bar and Bench.

“Don’t waste our time and don’t waste your time,” Live Law quoted Chief Justice Surya Kant as saying.

The petition was mentioned before a bench of Kant and Justice V Mohana by a lawyer, who sought that the plea be listed for hearing on Thursday.

The lawyer told the court that he can present video evidence of the police excesses.

However, the bench said that it was “not interested in videos”, Bar and Bench reported. “We don’t have time to watch,” Kant was quoted as saying.

The petition was filed after security personnel fired tear gas shells and carried out a lathi-charge to disperse protesters on Monday. While the police had stopped the protest leaders from proceeding, some demonstrators moved closer to Parliament and gathered at other locations in central Delhi.

The Cockroach Janta Party also claimed that the police had fired pellet guns at the protesters. The Union government classifies pellet guns as a “non-lethal” weapon for crowd control. Its cartridge contains pellets made of rubber or plastic, which can damage sensitive parts like eyes when fired from a short range.

The Delhi Police denied using pellet guns against the protesters. It also claimed that the protesters “resorted to large-scale violence” and vandalised public property.

Meanwhile, the Delhi High Court sought the Union government and the police’s response on a clutch of public interest litigations alleging excessive use of force during the youth protest.

Campaign launched after CJI’s remarks

The Cockroach Janta Party was launched on May 16 in response to reports of remarks by Kant on the previous day comparing some unemployed youngsters to “cockroaches”. Within a week, the campaign had garnered more than 22 million followers on social media platform Instagram.

Kant claimed on May 16 that he had been misquoted by sections of the media and that it was baseless to say that he criticised young people in general. He further claimed he had specifically criticised “those who have entered professions like the Bar [legal profession] with the aid of fake and bogus degrees”.

On June 6, the campaign held its first protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on account of alleged mismanagement in conducting competitive exams. It followed that with demonstrations in several cities.

The campaign started an indefinite sit-in demonstration at Jantar Mantar on June 20. On June 28, activist Sonam Wangchuk joined the protest with a hunger strike.

On July 9, the Cockroach Janta Party announced that protesters would march to Parliament on July 20, coinciding with the start of the Monsoon Session, if Pradhan does not resign by then.

On Tuesday, the Delhi High Court had also declined to urgently hear a petition alleging excessive use of force by security personnel during the protest march. “Don’t drag court into all this,” the bench had verbally observed.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• ‘People’s sympathy is now with the youth’: BJP workers worry about crackdown on protests
• Follow updates about the youth protest here.

Rajya Sabha MP and Advocate Kapil Sibal on Wednesday filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court raising concerns that the anti-defection law is being rendered ineffective, Bar and Bench reported.

He challenged the interpretation of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution that allows rebel legislators to avoid disqualification under the anti-defection law by merging with another political party.

The Tenth Schedule of the Constitution contains the anti-defection law, which provides for the disqualification of legislators who voluntarily leave their political party or vote, or abstain from voting, contrary to the party’s directions.

It aims to prevent leaders from switching parties for office, personal gain or other incentives.

However, it also exempts disqualifications in some cases. As per the law, “a member of a House shall not be disqualified if “his original political party merges with another political party”. This merger, in turn, only holds “if, and only if, not less than two-thirds of the members of the legislature party concerned have agreed to such merger”.

Sibal’s petition was mentioned before a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana for an urgent listing, Live Law reported.

Referring to recent defections by MPs and MLAs of several Opposition parties, Sibal contended that the Tenth Schedule was being rendered “moot”, Bar and Bench reported.

“We will list it,” the legal news outlet quoted Kant as replying.

Sibal also told the bench that similar matters are pending before the court.

On Tuesday, the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) approached the Supreme Court against Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla’s decision to approve the merger of six of its MPs with the Shiv Sena faction led by Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.

In the case of the Trinamool Congress, a delegation of 20 Lok Sabha MPs met Speaker Om Birla on June 14 and requested that their group be merged with the Tripura-based Nationalist Citizens’ Party, which is a part of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance.

TMC National General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee wrote to Birla on June 19, demanding that the rebel MPs be disqualified.

The TMC has been grappling with factionalism after its loss in the Assembly polls in May.

Its Rajya Sabha strength fell from 13 to nine after three of its MPs resigned from the Upper House in June and joined the BJP on July 9. The party nominated them to the Rajya Sabha hours later.

On June 3, nearly 60 of the TMC’s 80 MLAs rebelled against the party leadership to choose Ritabrata Banerjee as the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read: One nation, one party: Is the anti-defection law dead?

The Muslim side in the disputed Bhojshala-Kamal Maula mosque complex case on Wednesday alleged before the Supreme Court that the site identified by the Madhya Pradesh government for Friday namaz was nearly two kilometres from the complex instead of being adjacent to it, Bar and Bench reported.

It said that this was in violation of the court’s July 14 order.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant then directed the Union and Madhya Pradesh governments to implement its earlier order “in letter and spirit”, The Hindu reported.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Union and Madhya Pradesh governments, claimed that the site was about 900 metres away, The Hindu reported. However, he told the court that he would ask the authorities to look for another location.

Justice Joymala Bagchi told Mehta that the court had used the phrase “adjacent to” in its July 14 order. “The order has to be complied with in letter and spirit,” the court was quoted as saying by The Hindu.

On May 15, the Madhya Pradesh High Court ruled that the complex in Dhar district is a temple of Hindu deity Saraswati and quashed a 2003 order of the Archaeological Survey of India allowing Hindus to perform prayers on the premises on Tuesdays and Muslims to offer namaz in the complex on Fridays.

The High Court had allowed the Muslim side to seek alternative land within the district to build a mosque.

The Supreme Court, on July 14, declined to issue an interim order restoring the status quo that existed before the High Court’s verdict, under which both sides were allowed to pray inside the complex on designated days.

However, it ordered the Madhya Pradesh government to make available an open space adjacent to the complex for Muslims to offer namaz on Fridays between 1 pm and 3 pm. The arrangement would be temporary and subject to the final ruling in the matter, the court added.

The bench also directed the Archaeological Survey of India not to make structural changes to the complex without the court’s permission.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Gujarat High Court has held that removing a community from the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes list does not take away reservation benefits already secured by members of the social group.

A division bench of Justices NS Sanjay Gowda and JL Odedra, in a verdict on July 17, noted that as per Article 341 of the Constitution, Parliament has the power to include, modify or exclude a caste from the Scheduled Castes list. However, it held that such changes can only be prospective, and cannot be cited to deprive individuals of rights that have already been conferred upon them.

“The exclusion of a caste from the list of Scheduled Castes can only be prospective and the benefits that had accrued on a person who had been born into the caste when it was included in the list of Scheduled Castes would continue to adhere to him during his life time,” the bench held.

The court remarked that caste is “thrust upon a person” at the time of birth and continues till their death. “…As a consequence, any person who is born into a caste, which at that time was specified as a scheduled caste, will have to be considered as a person belonging to a Scheduled caste till his death,” it said.

However, the judges said that a person born into a caste after it was removed from the Scheduled Castes list would not be entitled to reservation benefits, even if the caste had been recognised as a Scheduled Caste earlier.

The case

The High Court was hearing a plea by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation, challenging an order of the Central Administrative Tribunal restoring the promotion of its employee, Ranjit Vasantlal Makwana.

Makwana, who belongs to the Mochi community, had joined the organisation as a lower division clerk under the Scheduled Caste quota in 1995. Back then, the members of the Mochi community across Gujarat were recognised as Scheduled Castes under the Constitution Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Orders Amendment Act, 1976.

In 2002, Parliament amended the Scheduled Castes list. After the amendment, Scheduled Caste status for the Mochi community was restricted to persons from Dang district and Umbergaon taluka of Valsad district.

In 2003, Makwana was promoted to the post of enforcement officer/accounts officer.

Nearly nine years later, in 2012, the organisation reverted him to his original post, arguing that he was no longer entitled to reservation benefits after the 2002 amendment.

Makwana challenged the decision before the Central Administrative Tribunal. The tribunal ruled in his favour and restored his promotion, holding that the vacancy against which he had been promoted had arisen before the 2002 amendment.

The organisation then moved the Gujarat High Court against the tribunal’s order.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Madhya Pradesh Assembly on Tuesday passed the Uniform Civil Code Bill to ban polygamy and introduce strict conditions for live-in relationships.

Adivasi communities have been exempted from the bill to safeguard their customs and traditions.

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

The bill had been introduced in the Assembly by the Bharatiya Janata Party government on Monday. It was passed a day later through a voice vote.

With this, Madhya Pradesh became the fourth BJP-ruled state to pass a Uniform Civil Code bill.

On Tuesday, Chief Minister Mohan Yadav began his remarks on the bill with the slogan “Jai Shri Ram”. He also said that only those who speak for the welfare of Hindus will rule Madhya Pradesh.

Congress MLAs opposed the legislation and demanded that it be sent to a select committee for review, The Hindu reported.

During the discussion, Yadav said that the Opposition party was trying to appease the Muslim community and accused its legislators of being “anti-tribal”.

Congress MLA Arif Masood had said that the Uniform Civil Code Bill had been brought “only to trouble” the Muslim community, reported The Hindu.

Describing the bill as “unconstitutional”, Masood alleged that his “valid points” against the legislation were not sent to the select committee.

Key provisions of the bill

The bill proposes to ban polygamy and declares practices such as triple talaq and nikah halala as illegal and punishable.

Triple talaq allows a Muslim man to divorce his wife by pronouncing “talaq” three times. In 2017, the Supreme Court held the practice of instant triple talaq to be unconstitutional.

Nikah halala is a practice that allows a divorced Muslim woman to remarry her husband. According to Islamic law, a Muslim man can divorce and remarry a woman twice. However, if the man dissolves the marriage for the third time, he can remarry the same woman if she first marries another man, consummates the marriage, and if that man dies or willingly asks for divorce.

The bill also seeks to make it mandatory for live-in couples to submit an affidavit to the local registrar within a month of entering into such a relationship. Legal action could be taken if the couple violates the provision.

The bill proposes that if either partner in a live-in relationship is below the age of 21, their parents or guardians will be informed, and records will be shared with the police.

A married person who gets into a live-in relationship would be liable for a punishment of up to five years in jail.

BJP and UCC

Introducing 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.

In January 2025, BJP-ruled Uttarakhand became the first state to implement the Uniform Civil Code after independence. The Gujarat Assembly cleared a similar legislation in March amid protests by the Opposition. A common civil code has been in place in Goa since the Portuguese Civil Code was adopted in 1867.

The Assam Assembly on May 27 passed the Uniform Civil Code bill seeking to ban polygamy and make the registration of live-in relationships compulsory. The Opposition had demanded that the bill be sent to a select committee for scrutiny.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Sneha.

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

At least 21 more persons were killed in Assam on Tuesday as the flooding in several districts worsened.

Thirteen of the deaths were reported in Sivasagar, five in Charaideo, two in Golaghat and one in Jorhat, taking the toll in the floods in the state to 31 in recent days.

More than 5.6 lakh persons were affected by the floods in 16 districts, the newspaper quoted the Assam State Disaster Management Authority as having said on Tuesday night. Sivasagar was the worst-affected district with nearly 3.6 lakh persons affected.

As of Tuesday night, more than 12,200 persons had been moved into 71 relief camps.

Several rivers, including the Brahmaputra, Disang and Dikhou, were flowing above the danger level.

The military, the National Disaster Response Force and security personnel were involved in the rescue efforts, said Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.

Edited by Sneha.

The toll in the collapse of a tunnel that was being constructed in Sikkim’s Namchi district has increased to 20, reported The Indian Express on Wednesday. Five more persons remained trapped inside.

The tunnel was part of the Teesta Stage VI Hydroelectric Project of the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation in the Samardung area. It was being constructed to transport high-pressure water from the reservoir to the powerhouse.

The tunnel collapsed on Monday after a “sudden explosion of trapped/embedded suspected methane gas within the rocks, resulting in dense smoke and toxic gases”, stated the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation.

Twenty-seven persons were trapped inside the tunnel, of whom two managed to come out, The Times of India quoted Chief Minister Prem Singh Tamang as saying.

Out of the 25 trapped inside, 20 are confirmed dead, said Namchi Superintendent of Police Sonam D Bhutia, according to The Indian Express.

Bhutia added that 12 bodies had been recovered during the search and rescue operations.

Rescuers fear that the toll may increase as operations are ongoing, Deccan Herald quoted unidentified police officials as saying.

Officials said on Monday that rescue workers had experienced dizziness and lost consciousness while trying to reach the trapped persons, hindering operations.

Tamang has announced a compensation of Rs 4 lakh each for the families of the dead and Rs 50,000 for injured persons.

“I am deeply saddened by the tragic incident,” he wrote on social media. “My heartfelt condolences go to the families of the workers who have lost their lives.”

The prime minister’s office announced a payment of Rs 2 lakh for the families of workers who were killed. The injured would be given Rs 50,000.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Three South Asian governments in four years have been dislodged by young people in the street. There was Colombo 2022, Dhaka 2024, Kathmandu 2025. Over the last week in Delhi, a satirical movement that took its name from a judge’s purported insult has drawn thousands of supporters to its protest to press for the resignation of the education minister, who is blamed for mismanaging a key public examination.

Describing this phenomenon as “generational” explains nothing. In Delhi, the movement’s most visible figure is 59-year-old Sonam Wangchuk, who has been on hunger strike since June 28. In Kathmandu, parents had marched with their children.

Age describes who is on the road. It does not explain why the road is full.

Four conditions do. India meets three.

The ladder

The first condition is educated unemployment at scale. India produces five million graduates a year and finds work for 2.8 million. The percentage of graduates among unemployed Indians aged 20 to 29 rose from 46% to 67% between 2017 and 2023.

The de-linking of education and employment reverses the bargain these states have sold for two generations, the one families paid for by selling land and taking on debt.

The Cockroach Janta Party has been demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation over the leak that cancelled May’s NEET-UG medical college exams after 2.27 million candidates had sat it. The The Indian Express counted 48 leaked papers across 16 states in five years, affecting 15 million applicants competing for 120,000 government jobs. Parliament passed a law to eliminate paper leaks in 2024. The 2026 paper leaked anyway.

For a family without money, that exam is the only way into a profession, and the paper keeps being sold to someone else first.

Scroll visited the protest over several days to find out why supporters of the #CockroachJantaParty campaign felt so invested in it and how they were keeping it going.https://t.co/jtR4iwdjJZ

Watch ⤵️

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) July 20, 2026

The measure

The second condition is that inequality became something you can watch on a phone screen. Everyone always assumed the children of ministers and industrialists took the college places and the jobs. Those lives are now published.

A young man reads about his rejection from a state university and, a scroll later on the same screen, a politician’s son posts from a ski trip and an industrialist’s daughter announces her place at an American university.

Nepal’s protesters called them nepo kids. The phrase crossed four borders in a year because it does more than insult – it measures the distance. The Cockroach Janta Party manifesto lists the favours the system does for its own: the government jobs waiting for judges when they retire, the legislators who defect without penalty, the broadcast licences held by two families.

The channel

The third condition is when normal remedies stop working. Complaints go nowhere. Courts delay decisions. Representatives ignore voters. Protests are suppressed. Elections change nothing. When institutions fail the people who elected them, the street is all that remains.

Sri Lanka had postponed its elections. Bangladesh had run a boycotted one. Nepal’s parties had become interchangeable enough that swapping them changed nothing.

India looks secure on this condition, for now. Its elections still remove governments, and the Bharatiya Janata Party lost its single-party majority two years ago.

The ground is narrowing, though.

India’s Opposition politicians face pressure from government agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate – though these cases seem to disappear into oblivion if these politicians join the ruling party. The special intensive revision of the electoral rolls underway since last year has drawn accusations that it is removing voters who are unlikely to support the ruling party.

On the street, the tolerance for dissent is waning. The Cockroach Janta Party’s account on X was blocked within five days, reportedly on an intelligence input citing threats to sovereignty. The movement’s sit-in in Delhi was ruled illegal and it was refused permission for a march on Parliament on Monday.

When the march went ahead, internet shutdowns were imposed. Scores of participants were injured in police action. Education Minister Pradhan calls the movement a B-team of terrorists trying to divide the country.

When Nepal shut down social media, Gen Z shifted to Discord and TikTok to expose nepo babies and mobilize mass protests. Here’s why Nepal has become a global model for youth-led movements. pic.twitter.com/b0PKUUQ2x1

— AJ+ (@ajplus) November 24, 2025

The insult

The fourth condition is that the state humiliates the people it has already failed, and the insult is never proportionate to what it sets off. Nepal banned 26 social media platforms on September 4 and lost its government within five days. Bangladesh’s uprising began with a court ruling on job quotas. India’s began with one word.

In each case the state confirmed what the young had already suspected it thought of them. That is what brought them out.

The hinge

Governments do not fall because a crowd gets large enough. They fall when the security forces decide not to act against it.

In Dhaka, on the night of August 4, 2024, the army chief and his generals resolved not to fire on civilians, and Sheikh Hasina was gone the next afternoon. In Kathmandu the army declined to defend Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli. In Colombo the security establishment would not defend the president’s House, and Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country.

Political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research is plain: whether the security forces refuse an order is the single largest factor in the success of a nonviolent campaign.

This is where India differs most sharply from the other three. Its army has never taken power and shows no sign of wanting to. Whatever happens will have to be settled by politicians.

That may be less reassuring than it sounds. Indian politicians from the ruling BJP have faced a decision at every stage of this and got it wrong at every time. Blocking the Cockroach Janta Party social media account turned a joke into a cause. Ruling the sit-in illegal filled it. Dragging a 59-year-old off a hunger strike into an ambulance, in daylight and on camera, produced the largest crowds the movement has seen.

Every escalation was the state’s own choice, and every one brought out more people than the day before.

Monday’s footage showed students beaten with batons in the capital and a police force denying it while the video ran. That footage outlives the movement.

At least two of the countries where these movements won have little to show for it. Balen Shah, the rapper carried into office on Nepal’s Gen Z vote, became prime minister in March. On July 9, the municipal police wheel-clamped the motorcycle of Ganesh Nepali, a 25-year-old app driver. He set himself alight in the street and died the next day. His family refused to bury him until the state declared him a martyr.

The generation that removed a prime minister in September was back in July demanding the resignation of the one it installed.

Bangladesh answered its own uprising by barring a party from elections. Toppling a government is the part these movements are good at. What comes after is not.

#Bangladesh: A police constable killed and at least 41 cops injured in clashes between law enforcers and BNP-Jamaat men in Dhaka’s Motijheel, Kakrail and Naya Paltan areas.

Main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party took out a grand rally in the Nayapaltan area of Dhaka to… pic.twitter.com/aAVMDuN3N3

— All India Radio News (@airnewsalerts) October 28, 2023

The name

On Monday, the protests stopped being a Delhi story, with detentions in Mumbai, crowds in Bengaluru and a vigil in Goa calling for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to resign. The chant changed as well. For two months this was about one minister and a leaked paper. On Monday it was Pradhan out and Modi with him.

India’s cockroaches have no owner. There is nobody whose agreement would end this, nobody who can be bought and no arrest that makes the paper un-leak. A movement built on a grievance can be conceded to or refused. It cannot be shut down.

The four conditions explain why this movement exists. What happens next is a much smaller question, and it has a name. Pradhan can resign or stay. Nothing being asked for is beyond the government’s power to give.

Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal each reached a point where a leader could have conceded something small but chose to clear the street instead. Each time the small thing stopped being enough and by then the demand was for the government itself.

On Monday, in Delhi, it stopped being only about Pradhan.

Dan Qayyum is a writer, media strategist, and long-standing advisor to government institutions and media organisations across the region. His work explores the intersections of geopolitics, military doctrine, and regional transformation. His upcoming book, The Other Side of Endurance, examines his own journey through crisis, resilience, and reinvention.

Hundreds of protesters gathered in central Delhi’s Connaught Place and adjoining areas on Tuesday evening, a day after security personnel used force to disperse the Cockroach Janta Party’s march to Parliament.

A police vehicle carrying tear gas shells arrived near the protest site, while some protesters threw water bottles at it.

JUST IN | Cockroach Janta Party protesters begin gathering at Delhi's iconic Connaught Place.

📷 @raghavKakkar30 pic.twitter.com/m5oS0L7tlL

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) July 21, 2026

As demonstrators spilled into Connaught Place, the police announced that Cockroach Janta Party spokesperson Saurav Das had “called off the protest”.

Earlier in the day, Das had said that he and other Cockroach Janta Party leaders would stage a sit-in outside the Delhi Police headquarters, alleging that those detained were not being allowed to meet their lawyers. He also alleged that the Cockroach Janta Party had not been provided a complete list of detainees.

However, in the evening, Das said that all the detainees had been released, following which the planned protest outside the Delhi Police headquarters was called off.

Cockroach Janta Party Spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka clarified that the campaign’s protest at Jantar Mantar would continue.

Protesters poured into #ConnaughtPlace on Tuesday evening, a day after security personnel used force to disperse the political campaign #CockroachJantaParty’s march to Parliament.

CJP's Ashutosh Ranka was also present at the site.

📷 @raghavKakkar30 pic.twitter.com/3SY1SNN3Lg

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) July 21, 2026

The Delhi Police had cleared the Jantar Mantar protest site on Monday and dismantled the stage from which organisers had been addressing the crowd. Protesters resumed their sit-in there on Monday night.

Here’s more on this and other updates:

Opposition leaders detained

• Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav were detained by the Delhi Police during a protest outside the prime minister’s house on Tuesday evening. Leaders from the party had arrived at the prime minister’s residence in the afternoon. By evening, the Delhi Police moved in to disperse the protest. 
• The Congress released a video of police personnel pinning down Rahul Gandhi during the protest. “Look at Modi’s dictatorship,” it said in a social media post. “This is the treatment being meted out to the leader of Opposition of the country.”

मोदी की तानाशाही देखिए।

देश के नेता विपक्ष के साथ ऐसा सुलूक किया जा रहा है।

शर्मनाक! pic.twitter.com/mPvojsUnbA

— Congress (@INCIndia) July 21, 2026

• Vadra was mistreated and forced inside a police bus, Congress leader Pawan Khera claimed in a video.
• The Congress said that Gandhi had been detained at Chhatrasal Stadium in north Delhi, while Vadra had been taken to the Mandir Marg Police Station. Party leader Sonia Gandhi was later seen entering the Mandir Marg Police Station where other MPs were also detained, according to visuals posted by ANI.
• Earlier in the day, Union Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office Jitendra Singh visited the protest site and spoke to the leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, ANI reported. Singh later said that Gandhi had initially demanded a discussion in Parliament on issues related to the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test and the associated protests, and that the government had agreed to it “within a few moments”. However, he alleged that Gandhi later added the demand for Pradhan’s resignation.

नरेंद्र मोदी कायर हैं pic.twitter.com/uZADXU68TR

— Congress (@INCIndia) July 21, 2026

• “For a senior leader like Rahul Gandhi to go back on his word is unfortunate and contrary to every norm of democracy,” Singh said.  The Opposition had earlier demanded a discussion in Parliament on the police’s lathi-charge on protesters during the Cockroach Janta Party's demonstration in Delhi on Monday.

#WATCH | Delhi: Union Minister Jitendra Singh engages in a conversation with Lok Sabha LoP Rahul Gandhi over Congress's ongoing protest at Lok Kalyan Marg. pic.twitter.com/D929hAzh8Q

— ANI (@ANI) July 21, 2026

• The Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha were being repeatedly adjourned on Tuesday amid ruckus as Opposition MPs raised the lathi-charge on the protesters.

Protesters, police personnel injured

• Das, a spokesperson of the campaign, shared videos of two persons on social media who were injured allegedly in the police action against protesters on Monday. “Alarming goondaism by the Delhi Police!” wrote Das. “They have used pellet guns against peaceful protesters!”
• The Delhi Police on Tuesday released a statement refuting the claims about the use of pellet guns. “The public is strongly advised not to share or circulate unverified content,” it said. “Appropriate legal action will be taken against individuals found spreading rumours or misinformation.”
• On Tuesday, the Cockroach Janta Party alleged that the police had on Monday slapped a boy, who the campaign claimed was a 10-year-old.
• The alleged action came during the campaign’s march to Parliament on Monday, coinciding with the start of the Monsoon Session. While police had stopped the protest leaders from proceeding, some demonstrators moved closer to Parliament and gathered at other locations in central Delhi. Security personnel fired tear gas shells at the protesters and lathi-charged them, Scroll reported.
• The police stated that 60 protesters were injured during the day. One of the injured protesters is in a critical condition, said Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke. “Why did the government unleash such brutal force against the youth?” he asked on social media.
• The police claimed that 118 security personnel had been injured after the “protesters displayed unruly, aggressive and violent behaviour”. It alleged that the protesters attacked them with stones and vandalised government vehicles.

The Delhi Police slapping and hitting a 10 year old boy during the protest. pic.twitter.com/OpKVRWg7oS

— Cockroach is Back (@Cockroachisback) July 21, 2026

A girl is in critical condition at RML after being injured during the brutal lathi-charge.

Why did the govt unleash such brutal force against the youth? https://t.co/Kr8NbTDCaH

— Abhijeet Dipke (@abhijeet_dipke) July 20, 2026

• Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, apologised to the political campaign’s supporters saying that the organisers of the protest “could have done better” to protect them from the “inhumane actions” of the police. He alleged that female protesters were “brutally beaten” by male police officers. “To protect one Dharmendra Pradhan, who is responsible for the deaths of more than 20 students, the government was willing to spill the blood of many more young students,” Dipke said on social media.

Protesters detained

• About 70 protesters have been detained, the police had said earlier, adding that a first information report was registered under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to rioting, assault on public servants, damage to public property and “other offences committed during the protest”.
• It did not clarify which other offences the protesters had allegedly committed.

Watch: Young protesters in Delhi face police lathi-charge and tear gas

Protest resumes at Jantar Mantar

• The campaign resumed the protest at Jantar Mantar on Monday evening, stating that the demonstration would not end until Pradhan resigns from his post.

The protest against the Education Minister continues at Jantar Mantar. We won’t stop until Dharmendra Pradhan is sacked. pic.twitter.com/i8t7Sx39MQ

— Cockroach is Back (@Cockroachisback) July 20, 2026

Opposition MP begins sit-in at Parliament

• Azad Samaj Party-Kanshiram chief and MP Chandra Shekhar Azad began a sit-in protest inside the Parliament complex against the “brutal treatment meted out” to the protesters.
• “In a democracy, every citizen has the constitutional right to express their views peacefully,” he said. “If that right is met with the use of force, it is not merely an assault on a few individuals, but on democratic values themselves.” He added that he was starting his demonstration with a “resolve to safeguard democratic values”.

Anger now against Prime Minister Modi?

Scroll's @AnantGuptaAG & @sighyush analyse the dramatic developments in Delhi after the protest march called by the Cockroach Janta Party took the national capital by storm and its wider impact. pic.twitter.com/Wk7Wb2Dw0J

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) July 20, 2026

• Solidarity protests were held in other Indian cities and in London on Monday.

Happening now! Hundreds of people have gathered outside the Indian High Commission, London in solidarity with the massive youth protests rocking India demanding the resignation of Modi and Education minister #DharmendraPradhan
##संसद_मार्च pic.twitter.com/hhUlBkouRS

— SouthAsia Solidarity (@SAsiaSolidarity) July 20, 2026

Written by Sneha, Neerad Pandharipande and Sara Varghese. Inputs by Priyali Dhingra and Raghav Kakkar. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar and Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Why angry young protesters in Delhi have turned against Modi
• Cockroach Janta Party protest: How liberal scepticism induces paralysis in oppositional politics
• Watch: What next as youth storm Delhi

The Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, on Monday warned students and employees against showing their “affinity with political movement like the one currently in public utterance and in public criticism”, The Indian Express reported.

In an advisory, the institute “politely reminded” students and employees that, under its notified conduct rules, they could not participate in political discussions or activities without permission.

It also said that they could not make statements or express opinions in the media or in public that were capable of “embarrassing the relations between the institute and the Union government or other organisations”.

Purported screenshots of the advisory were widely shared on social media, including by Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra.

And @iitroorkee our money funds you. Don’t you DARE tell our kids to forego their constitutional right to free speech & protest. Retract this email & apologise. Students ignore these bootlickers. pic.twitter.com/RwsSu13MyE

— Mahua Moitra (@MahuaMoitra) July 21, 2026

The advisory came on the day the Cockroach Janta Party led a protest march to Parliament demanding Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation over the alleged mismanagement of competitive examinations. Security personnel fired tear gas shells and carried out a lathi-charge to disperse protesters after they attempted to march towards Parliament. While the police stopped protest leaders from proceeding, some demonstrators moved closer to Parliament and gathered at other locations in central Delhi.

After the advisory drew criticism online, IIT Roorkee said that it was an internal communication circulated among students, faculty and staff at the start of every academic session, ANI reported.

“The communication should not be misinterpreted or viewed out of context,” the institute told the news agency.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

• Also read: Why angry young protesters in Delhi have turned against Modi

• Watch: Young protesters in Delhi face police lathi-charge and tear gas

• Follow the latest updates of the CJP protest here

The Uttarakhand High Court on Tuesday criticised the state police for detaining a political activist after he posted on social media that he would join the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest in Delhi, Live Law reported.

The state appeared to have engaged in “gundagardi”, or hooliganism, a bench comprising Justices Ravindra Maithani and Siddhartha Sah said.

On Sunday, Uttarakhand Parivartan Party chief Prabhat Dhyani was reportedly detained at Rishikesh railway station. A day earlier, he had uploaded a Facebook post expressing support for activist Sonam Wangchuk, who has been on a hunger strike as part of the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest and said he would participate in the march to Parliament.

The Cockroach Janta Party is demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the alleged mismanagement of competitive examinations. On Monday, many protesters attempted to march to Parliament, where security personnel fired tear gas shells at and lathi-charged them.

Follow updates on the Cockroach Janta Party protest here

After Dhyani’s detention, his associate, Lal Mani, approached the High Court seeking his release.

Dhyani was traced to the Ramnagar police station in Nainital and was released within 24 hours. This was conveyed to the High Court on Monday, Bar and Bench reported.

On Tuesday, the counsel for the state government sought to justify the activist’s detention by citing Section 172 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which requires citizens to obey lawful police directions.

However, Maithani asked the counsel for the state which direction Dhyani was said to have disobeyed.

“What is the lawful direction [that Dhyani disobeyed], sir?” the judge was quoted as saying by Bar and Bench. “What is the lawful direction to your police officer? ‘You don’t go to Delhi, you don’t go to join the march’.”

Maithani questioned whether anyone planning to go to Delhi to take part in the protest could be said to be preparing to be committing a cognisable offence.

The counsel for the Uttarakhand government said that orders prohibiting public gatherings are in force in Delhi , and that defying such orders would be a cognisable offence anywhere in the country. The court said that this was a matter for the Delhi Police to look into, not the authorities in Uttarakhand, Bar and Bench reported.

The counsel for the state government also cited “national security” and said that such actions were needed to protect the government’s image.

The court, however, did not accept this contention. “Are you there to protect the image of the government or the constitutional rights of an individual?” Maithani was quoted as asking by Bar and Bench.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was detained by the Delhi Police during a protest outside the prime minister’s house, his party claimed. The Leader of Opposition was staging a sit-in at the site, demanding the resignations of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, a day after police action against the Cockroach Janta Party-led protest in Delhi.

The Congress claimed that the Delhi Police arrived outside the prime minister's residence to clear the sit-in and detained several party workers.

Earlier, the Opposition demanded a discussion in Parliament on the police’s lathi-charge on protesters during demonstration on Monday. The Cockroach Janta Party alleged that the Delhi Police had fired pellet guns at the protesters. However, the police refuted the claim and alleged that the protesters had “resorted to large-scale violence”.

Protesters at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar have been demanding Pradhan’s resignation for the alleged mismanagement of competitive examinations, including the undergraduate National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, which had to be cancelled and conducted afresh after allegations of paper leaks.

On Tuesday, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju told reporters that Modi had called for the “strictest punishment” for those involved in the paper leak during a meeting of the National Democratic Alliance.

Modi also stated that the Union government has taken steps to prevent paper leaks in the future, Rijiju said. Read on.

Why angry young protesters in Delhi have turned against Modi, explain Anant Gupta and Ayush Tiwari

The Mumbai Police registered three cases against more than 50 protesters after a Cockroach Janta Party solidarity demonstration at Chaityabhoomi in Dadar. The police said the protest was held without permission and that restrictions on public gatherings were in force.

The cases were registered at Mahim and Shivaji Park police stations. Several people, including students, were detained during the protest.

The Mumbai protest followed police action during the CJP’s Parliament march in Delhi. Read on.

Hundreds of farmers from Punjab were stopped at the Shambhu border between Punjab and Haryana while trying to enter Delhi for a Kisan Mahapanchayat against the proposed India-United States trade deal. The day-long gathering was scheduled to be held at Kisan Ghat in Delhi on Tuesday.

However, the authorities in Bharatiya Janata Party-led Haryana placed concrete barricades and cement blocks at the border, following which protesters staged a sit-in.

Farmer groups have opposed the trade deal saying cheaper agricultural imports could adversely affect farmers, labourers and small businesses. They have demanded that the deal be “completely scrapped”. Read on.

India on Tuesday summoned Russia’s chargé d’affaires to convey its “grave concerns” about an attack on a cargo ship near Ukraine’s Odesa port that killed four Indians and left one critically injured. New Delhi emphasised that “such attacks undermine the safety, security and stability” of international maritime commerce.

The Guinea-Bissau-flagged vessel Golden Leo was attacked on Sunday while leaving the port. The five Indians were among the 17 crew members on board.

Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, triggering the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. Read on.

At least 10 workers were killed in the collapse of a tunnel being constructed in Sikkim’s Namchi district. Around 27 workers were trapped after a landslide blocked the tunnel entrance.

The tunnel is part of the Teesta Stage VI Hydroelectric Project.

Rescue operations were hampered by a suspected gas leak inside the tunnel, with some rescuers reportedly feeling dizzy and losing consciousness. The gas is believed to be leaking from underground strata or rock formations disturbed by the landslide. Read on.

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

As frontier artificial intelligence becomes increasingly centralised in the hands of a few Western companies, India is betting that innovation doesn’t have to come only from the biggest labs.

The country has launched a hackathon inviting startups, researchers, students, and academic institutions to build affordable, multilingual AI devices that work offline and run on open-source models.

The goal is to create AI tools for classrooms, farms, clinics, and villages where cloud connectivity is unreliable, data privacy is critical, or English-language models fall short.

Bhashini, the Indian government-backed AI language platform; French nonprofit Current AI; and Kalpa Impact, a Mumbai-based social impact consultancy, have partnered to create the initiative. It reflects a broader vision of AI as public infrastructure rather than a proprietary product.

“Cloud-based AI systems have enabled significant advances, but there are many situations where citizens operate in environments with limited connectivity, where privacy considerations are important, or where local language support remains critical,” Amitabh Nag, CEO of Bhashini, told Rest of World in an interview over email.

“By running models locally, we reduce dependence on continuous cloud connectivity, lower recurring compute and transmission costs, improve responsiveness, and provide greater control over data,” he said.

Organisers of the hackathon will shortlist 20 teams, which will receive AI hardware kits, technical support, and mentorship to move beyond prototypes. Qualifying teams will get to pitch their ideas to senior government officials, and winners will deploy their tech inside government departments.

AI as digital public infrastructure

At a time when OpenAI tightly guards its trade secrets, Microsoft runs the world’s largest private corporate hackathon, and Anthropic restricts its ultra-advanced Claude Mythos model over cybersecurity concerns, Bhashini and Current AI are opening up their AI infrastructure to the public to fill a critical innovation gap.

The world’s biggest AI firms make products at lightning speed. But these companies often lack the incentive to create public infrastructure, Ayah Bdeir, CEO of Current AI, told Rest of World.

“With AI treated as a proprietary product, and the majority of these models informed by the English-speaking, internet-connected world, we see AI technology that is neither designed for nor accessible to the majority of the world,” Bdeir said.

High-income countries account for more than 80% of notable AI models, AI startups, venture funding, and data center capacity despite representing just 17% of the global population. As a result, many AI systems are optimised for English-speaking, always-online markets where companies can generate commercial returns.

The hackathon is a small attempt to tip the scales, the organisers said.

Current AI is a public-private partnership that has $400 million in pledges from government and philanthropic sources. It aims to raise a total of $2.5 billion over five years. Bhashini has partnered with 50 ministries, and powers more than 500 government websites. It collects language data across more than 500 districts.

“These kinds of investments matter because they fund the parts of the ecosystem that markets often underinvest in – things like public data sets, support for low-resource languages, safety and safeguards, and community-level training and digital literacy,” Priya Vora, CEO of Digital Impact Alliance, a nonprofit that advises African governments on digital development, told Rest of World.

Can this actually work?

The hackathon may generate ideas, but turning them into products is a much tougher challenge.

Experts question whether enough developers working in India’s many low-resource languages have the time and expertise to participate. Even if they do, promising prototypes would still need long-term funding, engineering talent, government support, and customers.

“Hackathons are an effective way to surface grassroots innovation and identify solutions tailored to local languages, affordability, and accessibility challenges. But breakthrough ideas alone are not enough,” Sagar Vishnoi, director and co-founder of think tank Future Shift Labs, told Rest of World. “The critical enablers are continued research, patient capital, and market access. Without these, promising ideas rarely translate into real-world impact.”

India is hardly alone in trying this approach, Astha Kapoor, co-founder of the Aapti Institute, a Bengaluru-based research and policy think tank, told Rest of World. Chinese companies have released open-weight models; the U.N.-backed Africa AI Hub supports local AI ecosystems; and Masakhane, a pan-African grassroots organisation, is building data sets for African languages. What remains unclear across all of these efforts, Kapoor said, is whether they can achieve meaningful scale.

“It’s impossible to say at this early stage, without clear demand, business models, or incentives, how any of this will scale,” Kapoor told Rest of World. “Use cases and linguistically diverse data sets are not the only considerations for scale. The realities of India’s land, water, talent, and governance must also be considered for replicability.”

Chrissy Martin Meier, director of products and practices at Digital Impact Alliance, emphasised the need to set up the “unglamorous infrastructure work” – consent frameworks, interoperability standards, continuous language data collection, government coordination – to make hackathons impactful. Without these systems, they remain “siloed, fragile, and ultimately dependent on whoever built them,” Meier said.

West versus the rest?

The organisers insist the hackathon is not an attempt to compete with OpenAI or replace Western frontier models. Instead, they see it as an effort to broaden who gets to build AI – and what problems it is designed to solve.

“Commercial actors do not have to be in opposition to DPI [digital public infrastructure]. They can also adopt its principles in lower-cost and more inclusive deployments,” Jonathan Dolan, senior director of strategic alignment and learning at Dial, told Rest of World.

That is already happening, Kentaro Toyama, a professor at the University of Michigan and the author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology, told Rest of World. Models like Google’s Gemma and Microsoft’s Phi-4 offer “cheap, open, offline, and decentralised” systems for researchers and nonprofits. And their deep pockets help sustain these initiatives.

“Working products require not only sustained engineering, but ongoing maintenance – and all of that requires an organisation, usually a company, that is willing to keep investing in the technology,” said Toyama, who helped set up Microsoft Research India, leading interdisciplinary research on tech and socioeconomic development.

The ecosystem is deeply intertwined at the infrastructure level: The hackathon relies on Nvidia hardware.

Pilots from hackathons “rely on the underlying compute infrastructures, which are built, in the end, by a few US-based tech firms,” Abhineet Nayyar, senior associate for research and policy engagement at IT for Change, Bengaluru-based nonprofit, told Rest of World.

Ananya Bhattacharya is a reporter for Rest of World covering South Asia's tech scene. She is based in Mumbai, India.

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