The Congress on Monday accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in Rajasthan of conspiring to fraudulently remove voters who support the Opposition from the electoral rolls using allegedly forged forms during the special intensive revision in the state.

Addressing a press conference, Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Tikaram Jully and Congress’ state chief Govind Singh Dotasra demanded a forensic investigation into the forms that had been used to seek the deletion of voters’ names.

Dotasra said that the draft voter rolls published on December 16 in Rajasthan showed that about 45 lakh persons had been found to be absent, shifted or deceased.

The persons who had been removed from the voter list could file their claims and objections till January 15 and the deadline was on Thursday extended by the Election Commission to January 19.

“Until January 3, there was no chaos, and the entire system was running smoothly,” he alleged. “However, on January 3, BJP’s National General Secretary (Organisation) BL Santosh visited Rajasthan, held a meeting there, and then the process of fraudulently adding and removing votes began.”

The BJP has not commented on the allegations. But BJP leader and state minister Gautam Dak said on Monday that if a voters’ name is proposed to be removed, the person gets time to be heard. The Congress merely wants an issue to create dispute, First India News quoted Dak as saying.

Citing data from the Election Commission website, Dotasra claimed on Monday that between December 17 and January 14, the BJP submitted applications through 937 booth-level agents to add 211 names and delete 5,694 voters.

During the same period, the Congress submitted applications through booth-level agents to add 185 names and delete two voters, Dotasra said.

“We had already expressed our apprehension that the BJP and the Election Commission, in collusion, would extend the date to strike off the names of people aligned with the Congress ideology,” he alleged. “And in the end, that’s exactly what happened.”

Dotasra added: “In Jhunjhunu, 13,882 form 7s were taken for name deletions in a single day. In Mandawa, 16,276. In Udaipurwati, 1,241. In Khetri, 1,478 were taken. Meanwhile, 1,40,000 forms were even registered.”

Form 7 is an application submitted to the Election Commission to remove names from the electoral rolls.

The Congress leader told reporters on Monday that Union Home Minister Amit Shah visited the state on January 13 and stayed at the chief minister’s residence. Dotasra claimed that a “secret operation” had taken place within the BJP between January 3 and January 13.

“In every Assembly constituency, 10 thousand to 15 thousand fake computerised forms are printed,” he claimed. “All MLAs and MLA candidates are summoned, including ministers.”

He claimed that on January 13, January 14 and January 15, thousands of forms were submitted in every Assembly constituency to strike off names from the voter lists. “These efforts are especially targeted at those Assembly areas where the Congress had won the election,” Dotasra alleged.

The forms were distributed to remove the names of persons associated with the Congress ideology, he claimed. Additionally, forms were hastily distributed to remove the names of groups “angry with the double-engine government and those above 60 years of age”, he alleged.

“The rule book states that after draft publication, a single booth-level officer can submit only 10 forms in one day, no more,” Dotasra noted. “…the tally of forms submitted up to January 14 is right in front of you.”

The Congress leader claimed that BJP MLAs, ministers and party candidates had “forged” signatures of booth-level agents and submitted thousands of forms to every sub-divisional magistrate.

“In my own Assembly constituency, 627 forms were submitted, and when they took 2,000 more forms again, the SDM [sub-divisional magistrate] refused to accept them,” Dotasra claimed.

He added that several booth-level agents had given statements to the media that they had not signed these forms, and that the signatures were forged and the applications were incomplete.

The Congress leader said that his party had informed Rajasthan Chief Electoral Officer Naveen Mahajan about the alleged fraud. “We have told him that immense pressure is being put on the officers, telling them that they have to accept our forms if they want to keep their jobs,” Dotasra alleged.

He added: “We have demanded lists from several district collectors…by January 15, the BJP has managed to register nearly 1,40,000 names.”

अमित शाह जी 13 तारीख को राज्य में जाते हैं, CMR में रुकते हैं। फिर 3 से 13 तारीख के बीच BJP में गुप्त रूप से खेला चलता है।

• हर विधानसभा में 10-15 हजार फर्जी कंप्यूटराइज़ फॉर्म प्रिंट होते हैं। सभी विधायक और विधायक प्रत्याशियों को बुलाया जाता है, जिसमें मंत्री भी शामिल होते हैं… pic.twitter.com/xvHcfSTPbs

— Congress (@INCIndia) January 19, 2026

Dotasra also said that the BJP leaders claimed that they were removing the names of Bangladeshis and Rohingyas from the voter lists when asked about the deletions.

The Congress will “not allow a murder of democracy in the state”, he added.

Earlier too, the Opposition party had accused the ruling BJP of orchestrating mass deletion of voters during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the state, The Indian Express reported on Sunday.

This came after a video, showing a booth-level officer alleging that he was being pressured to delete hundreds of voters from the rolls of his Hawa Mahal Assembly constituency in Jaipur, was widely shared on social media.

In the video, Kirti Kumar, a government teacher deployed as a booth-level officer as part of the exercise, can purportedly be heard saying on a call: “I will visit the collector’s office and will kill myself there.”

Kumar told The Indian Express that he was speaking with the councillor of the area, “who was pressuring me to delete the names”.

He has alleged that he was being “threatened and pushed beyond capacity” to look into the BJP’s objections seeking the deletion of 470 voters, mostly Muslims, from the draft electoral rolls, reported Newslaundry on Thursday.

Hawa Mahal is a Muslim-majority constituency that BJP MLA Balmukund Acharya won in the 2023 Assembly elections.

Suresh Saini, the councillor of the ward, denied Kumar’s allegations, claiming that there was large-scale fraud in the voter list of the area, according to the newspaper.

“Fake addresses are being used to register fake voters,” he was quoted as having said. “I raised objections and applied for the removal of such names with supporting evidence. This amounts to voter fraud by the Congress.”

The special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 12 states and Union Territories, including Rajasthan. The exercise is currently in the claims and objections stage in the state.

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

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

In Belém, Brazil, the spectacle of COP30 diplomacy has already faded. While the global leaders gathered to trade new promises on climate action, the real crisis raged on the ground.

India, a key player in this fight, is currently battling a confluence of climate-driven disasters. This year’s punishing extreme heatwave, one of the earliest and most severe on record, scorched vast swathes of the subcontinent.

Simultaneously, the recent unprecedented floods in Punjab, India’s essential “food bowl”, have submerged huge tracts of farmland, destroying crops and jeopardising the nation’s food security.

A new global assessment done by the UN now identifies India as one of the world’s largest methane emitters, driven largely by agriculture, crop-residue burning and overflowing dumpsites adding fuel to an already accelerating crisis.

This is the grim reality of climate change – extreme heat and flooding directly cause massive food loss at the farm gate, which in turn intensifies the climate threat when it rots in landfills.

Food rotting in landfills releases methane, a Short-Lived Climate Pollutant that is up to 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 20 years.

India is caught in a disastrous loop, where its colossal food waste problem is both a symptom and a significant accelerator of the climate crisis.

We are, quite literally, feeding our garbage dumps instead of our people, creating a downward spiral where wasted food heats the planet, and a hotter planet struggles to grow food.

Paradox of hunger and waste

The United Nation’s latest report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025, states a fundamental, painful truth: millions are malnourished because safe, nutritious food is often not affordable. This global paradox finds its sharpest echo in India. While we strive for food self-sufficiency, we rank a serious 105th out of 127 countries on the 2024 Global Hunger Index. Our failure isn’t a lack of food, but a monumental crisis of waste.

The numbers are staggering. The average Indian household discards 55 kg of food annually, totalling a national loss of 78.2 million tonnes, valued at a crippling Rs 92,000 crore. This waste is more than an economic failure; it’s an environmental time bomb.

Supply chain of neglect

An estimated 30%-40% of total food production gets wasted, amounting to a loss of Rs 2 lakh crore per annum, and this happens at various points along the supply chain:

The “First-Mile” Crisis (Farm): The journey of neglect begins here. Up to 16% of fruits and vegetables wilt in fields due to a critical lack of affordable cold storage and refrigerated transport. Small farmers are forced into distress sales to avoid total loss, a situation exacerbated by climate-driven crop damage from extreme weather events like the recent Punjab floods.

The “Middle-Mile” Chaos (Logistics): Produce that survives the farm hurdle faces an inefficient logistics network. Further wastage occurs due to poor infrastructure and, notably, “cosmetic filtering” – the arbitrary rejection of perfectly good produce by supermarkets for superficial blemishes.

The “Last-Mile” Disconnect (Consumption): In urban India, a growing detachment from food’s origins leads to profligate consumption. Enormous amounts of food from homes and lavish social events end up in landfills, where they are a primary source of the harmful methane emissions.

Current national food security policies like the National Food Security Act and the PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, while successful in distributing staples like rice and wheat, have a blind spot: they largely overlook the colossal quantities of perishable, nutrient-rich fruits, vegetables, and dairy products. These are the very items essential for fighting malnutrition and yet, tragically, remain undistributed.

Resilient India

Tackling food waste is a dual imperative: it can simultaneously enhance food security and build national climate resilience by curbing potent greenhouse gas emissions. This demands a multi-pronged, policy-driven response.

While the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has published regulations for surplus food distribution, they don’t fully shield businesses from potential lawsuits under the broader Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006. This fear of litigation deters many restaurants and supermarkets from donating. A nationwide “Good Samaritan Law” is critical to protect donors from liability, empowering a robust food-rescue ecosystem.

Fragmented supply chains demand urgent, mission-mode investment. A dedicated national initiative must establish farm-level pack-houses, refrigerated transport, and modern storage facilities. This infrastructure will not only slash food wastage and curb harmful methane emissions but also provide a massive boost to farmer incomes, a triple win for the economy, environment, and society.

The final policy response must be to strictly enforce the Solid Waste Management Rules, requiring bulk generators to segregate and divert organic waste from landfills. Simultaneously, the government must act as the anchor customer for this diverted waste.

Schemes like SATAT (Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation) can guarantee the purchase of Bio-CNG produced from organic waste. This creates the necessary market demand, as successfully demonstrated by Indore’s pioneering Bio-CNG plant under the GOBAR-Dhan scheme, which is already generating 77,400 km/day of equivalent transport fuel that is being produced for 430 buses.

Tackling food waste is not merely waste management; it is a strategic climate and food security imperative for a nourished and resilient India. The path to achieving our climate goals and feeding our population begins on our farms and ends with responsible consumption.

Pranjali Chowdhary is a Research and Policy Associate at the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, India, focusing on advancing climate goals by strengthening the integration of waste management and state-level policy frameworks.

Shivang Agarwal is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, Washington DC. He is an environmental engineering professional with six years of experience in air pollution and climate science, policy development, and project leadership.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

The Delhi High Court on Monday rejected a petition filed by expelled Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar seeking the suspension of his 10-year jail term in a matter pertaining to the custodial death of the complainant’s father in the Unnao rape case, Live Law reported.

This came nearly a month after the High Court on December 23 suspended Sengar’s life sentence in the rape case during the pendency of his appeal against his conviction in the matter. Despite the order, Sengar was to remain in jail as he was also serving the 10-year sentence in connection with the custodial death case.

However, the Supreme Court stayed this High Court order on December 29.

On Monday, Justice Ravinder Dudeja noted that Sengar had spent nearly seven and a half years in custody out of the total punishment of 10 years in the custodial death case and that there had been a delay in deciding his appeal against his conviction, Bar and Bench reported.

However, the judge said that the delay was partly because of Sengar, who has filed several applications.

Dudeja, while rejecting the expelled BJP leader’s petition, took into account his criminal antecedents and also said that there had been no new development in the case, Live Law reported.

The case

In December 2019, a trial court in Delhi convicted Sengar and sentenced him to life for raping a woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao in 2017. She was a minor at the time.

In March 2020, Sengar and his brother, among others, were also sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment for the killing of the woman’s father in judicial custody.

The killing had taken place after the father had been arrested in April 2018 allegedly at Sengar’s behest under the Arms Act. He died in custody on April 9, 2018.

In June 2024, the High Court rejected the petition filed by Sengar for the suspension of his sentence in the custodial death case, Live Law reported.

The petition rejected on Monday was his second attempt to secure interim relief in the matter.

The Supreme Court told the Election Commission to publish the names of 1.2 crore persons against whom the poll panel had raised “logical discrepancy” objections during the special intensive revision in West Bengal. The names should be displayed in gram panchayats, block offices and ward offices, the court said.

Logical discrepancies include a mismatch in parents’ names, low age gap with parents and cases where parents have more than six children.

The court said that persons who had received notices from the Election Commission can submit their documents or objections through booth-level agents. If the documents submitted as proof are found to be unsatisfactory, the persons should be given an opportunity to be heard, the court said.

The court also verbally observed that the Class 10 admit card issued by the state education board must be accepted as a proof in the enumeration process. Read on.

The Supreme Court told the Madhya Pradesh government to decide within two weeks on granting the sanction to prosecute Bharatiya Janata Party leader and state minister Vijay Shah for his remarks allegedly targeting Colonel Sofiya Qureshi. The court noted that the Special Investigation Team it formed in May had filed its report and had been awaiting the approval from the state government.

Colonel Qureshi was among the spokespersons during the Union government and the military's media briefings about Operation Sindoor.

Shah had said that those who had widowed the daughters of India in the Pahalgam terror attack had been taught a lesson by Prime Minister Narendra Modi “by sending the sister from their own community”. While the BJP leader had not named any person at the time, Opposition parties alleged that the minister was alluding to Qureshi. Shah had apologised, saying that “Sofiya Qureshi ji has worked rising above caste and society while fulfilling her national duty”. Read on.

The Delhi High Court quashed income tax reassessment notices issued to NDTV founders Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy in 2016 in connection with alleged interest-free loans advanced to their company RRPR Holdings Private Limited, the promoter company of the broadcaster. The court penalised the Income Tax department Rs 2 lakh for issuing the notices.

The reassessment proceedings stemmed from allegations relating to interest-free loans advanced to RRPR Holdings. The tax department had alleged that a loan of Rs 403.8 crore from Vishvapradhan Commercial Private Limited to RRPR, along with a series of share transfers between RRPR and the Roys, were “colourable transactions” intended to evade tax.

The Roys had approached the court in 2017, arguing that the reassessment amounted to a second reopening for the same assessment year. They contended that reopening the matter amounted to a “change of opinion”, which is not permitted under the law.

The bench held that the department cannot revisit matters that had already been examined during an earlier reassessment. Read on.

The Delhi High Court rejected a petition filed by expelled Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar seeking the suspension of his 10-year jail sentence for the custodial death of the father of the complainant in the Unnao rape case.

The court said that while Sengar had spent nearly seven and a half years in custody out of the 10-year period, the delay in deciding his appeal against his conviction had been partly because of the former MLA as he had filed several applications. It also took into account Sengar’s criminal antecedents and observed that there had been no new development in the case.

In March 2020, Sengar and his brother, among others, were convicted for the death of the woman’s father in judicial custody in 2018. The killing took place after the father had been arrested allegedly at Sengar’s behest under the Arms Act. Read on.

A fisherman from Gujarat who had been in a jail in Pakistan’s Karachi died in custody on Friday even as his sentence had ended in 2022, journalist and activist Jatin Desai told Scroll. In early 2022, the fisherman inadvertently crossed into Pakistani waters. About seven or eight others who were caught with him remain in jail in Karachi, Desai said.

The activist noted that a 2008 bilateral agreement on consular access states that arrested persons should be released and repatriated to each other’s countries within one month of their nationality being confirmed and their sentences being completed. Read on.

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The Supreme Court on Monday told the Election Commission to publish the names of about 1.2 crore persons against whom the poll panel had raised “logical discrepancy” objections during the special intensive revision exercise in West Bengal, Bar and Bench reported.

Considering the large number of such notices, the court directed that the names of the persons in the logical discrepancy list be displayed in gram panchayats, block offices and ward offices.

Logical discrepancies include a mismatch in parents’ names, low age gap with parents and the number of children of the parents being above six. Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen was among those who got such a notice, with the Election Commission citing a gap of less than 15 years between him and his parents.

The draft electoral rolls for West Bengal under the special intensive revision exercise were published on December 16. The names of over 58 lakh voters were removed from voter lists in the state as they had either died, migrated outside the state or did not submit their enumeration forms.

Voters with “logical discrepancies” in their forms are separate from those whose names were removed, and from about 30 lakh “unmapped voters”, who could not establish a familial link with the voters’ list of 2002.

The Supreme Court on Monday said that those who received notices from the Election Commission can submit their documents or objections through authorised agents, who can be booth-level agents, Live Law reported.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant also directed that the offices where documents and objections can be submitted should be set up within panchayat or block offices, so that voters do not have to travel far for the purpose.

If the documents are found to be unsatisfactory, poll officials should give the persons an opportunity for a hearing, which the agent should be able to attend, the court said.

The court also verbally observed that the Class 10 admit card issued by the state education board must be accepted as a proof in the enumeration process, Live Law reported.

Earlier on Monday, lawyer Kapil Sibal, representing Trinamool Congress leaders, said that only 300 venues had been approved for hearings, while 1,900 were actually needed, Bar and Bench reported. He also questioned the nature of objections raised by the poll panel.

“They say if Ganguli is spelled differently... They omit the name,” Sibal said. “My lord knows that Datta is spelt differently. They are issuing notice with only the aim to exclude the names.”

Lawyer Rakesh Dwiwedi, representing the Election Commission, said that there were cases where the age difference between the parents and child was only 15 years.

However, the court asked how this could be a logical discrepancy, Live Law reported.

“How can 15 years age gap between mother and son be logical discrepancy?” Justice Joymalya Bagchi asked. “…It is not as if we don’t have child marriages in the country.”

Kant also objected to the Election Commission issuing directions through WhatsApp rather than an official circular. “There is no question of running everything through WhatsApp,” he said, according to Bar and Bench. “Circular has to be issued.”

Trinamool Congress National General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee welcomed the court’s directions, saying that the “much-needed intervention” had dealt a decisive blow to the “cruel, politically motivated and deeply unjust SIR process”.

“This is a judicial slap across the face of the Election Commission, and the people of Bengal will deliver an even sharper democratic slap to the BJP at the ballot box,” Banerjee said on social media.

We wholeheartedly welcome the landmark direction of the Supreme Court to the Election Commission. This much-needed intervention has dealt a decisive blow to the CRUEL, POLITICALLY MOTIVATED and deeply UNJUST SIR process.

The SC has rightly ordered that the names of those…

— Abhishek Banerjee (@abhishekaitc) January 19, 2026

The court has been hearing a batch of petitions against the validity of the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in several states, including West Bengal. The exercise is underway in 12 states and Union Territories.

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

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll.

Former Chief Justice DY Chandrachud on Sunday said that bail before conviction should be a matter of right, but added that courts need to examine cases in depth when national security is involved, PTI reported.

Chandrachud made the remark at the Jaipur Literature Festival after he was asked by the debate moderator about his views on the Supreme Court denying bail to activist Umar Khalid in the 2020 Delhi riots larger conspiracy case.

“They’ve been inside for five years,” ANI quoted Chandrachud as saying. “I’m not criticising my court...you can impose conditions to ensure that the conditions for bail are not abused, but you must necessarily take into consideration that they have the right to an expeditious trial. And if an expeditious trial is not possible under present conditions, then bail should be the rule and not the exception.”

However, the former chief justice said that bail can be denied if there is a possibility of the accused person committing another crime, tampering with evidence or escaping.

“If these three grounds are not present, then bail must be granted,” PTI quoted Chandrachud as saying. “I think that where national security is involved, it is the court’s duty to examine the case in depth. Otherwise, what is happening is that people remain imprisoned for years.”

#WATCH | Jaipur, Rajasthan: On Umar Khalid, former Chief Justice of India, DY Chandrachud says, "They've been inside for five years. I'm not criticising my court...you can impose conditions to ensure that the conditions for bail are not abused, but you must necessarily take into… pic.twitter.com/rbmfeoxDyM

— ANI (@ANI) January 18, 2026

Chandrachud said that during his two-year tenure as the chief justice, the Supreme Court disposed of about 21,000 bail applications. “There are cases which people don’t think about when they criticise the Supreme Court for not granting bail,” he said.

On January 5, a Supreme Court bench comprising Justices Aravind Kumar and NV Anjaria denied bail to Khalid and Sharjeel Imam – both activists and former Jawaharlal Nehru University students. The court, however, allowed the bail applications of Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Shadab Ahmed and Muhammad Saleem Khan.

The bench said that Khalid and Imam can file bail applications after all protected witnesses are examined or after one year.

The court said that the material on record showed that Khalid and Imam were the “masterminds” of the alleged conspiracy to spark violence in Delhi, and that there was a prima facie case against them under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

Also read: Five years later: Delhi Police’s riots conspiracy case is built on sand

Commenting on the case during an interview in September, Chandrachud had said that Khalid’s counsel had sought adjournments at least seven times in his bail petition, and subsequently withdrew the plea.

However, an analysis by Alt News showed that of the 12 adjournments that were sought between May 2023 and February 2024, only two were sought by the petitioner’s side alone. The rest were either sought by the respondent, requested jointly by the prosecution and defence or by the bench itself.

The Supreme Court on Monday told the Madhya Pradesh government to decide within two weeks on granting the sanction to prosecute Bharatiya Janata Party leader and state minister Vijay Shah for his remarks allegedly targeting Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, Live Law reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Deepankar Datta and Joymalya Bagchi noted that the Special Investigation Team the court had formed in May had filed its report and was awaiting sanction from the state government.

The sanction from the state government is necessary for the court to take cognisance of the offence under Section 196 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which pertains to promotion of communal hatred and ill will.

The matter pertains to remarks made by the BJP leader at an event in Mhow on May 13.

Shah had said that those who had widowed the daughters of India had been taught a lesson by Prime Minister Narendra Modi “by sending the sister from their own community”. He repeated the remark immediately after saying it the first time.

While the BJP leader did not name a person, Opposition parties had alleged that the minister was alluding to Qureshi, one of the spokespersons during the media briefings relating to Operation Sindoor held by the external affairs ministry and the defence ministry.

On May 14, the Madhya Pradesh High Court took suo moto cognisance of the matter and ordered the registration of a case against Shah. The High Court had also observed that Shah’s remarks referred to “none other but” Qureshi.

Shah was subsequently booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India, an act hurting harmony between communities and for making statements about a member of a community in a manner that could adversely affect communal harmony.

The BJP leader had moved the Supreme Court.

On May 13, Shah apologised and said that his remark should not be viewed “in a different context”.

“I want to tell people that my speech is not in that context,” The Indian Express had quoted him as saying at the time. “They are our sisters, and they have taken revenge with great strength along with the armed forces.”

Shah had said that he was ready to apologise “10 times” if his remark had hurt “society and religion”.

The minister had also issued another apology the next day, saying that he was “ashamed and saddened” by his comments. “Our country’s sister Sofiya Qureshi ji has worked rising above caste and society while fulfilling her national duty,” he added.

Rejecting Shah’s apology, the Supreme Court on May 19 ordered the formation of the Special Investigation Team to look into the matter. The bench had also stayed his arrest and ordered him to join the investigation.

In August, the investigating team submitted its request to the state government for a sanction to prosecute the minister, The Hindu reported.

In the Supreme Court on Monday, the chief justice told advocate Sridhar Pottaraju, representing the state government, that “we are in January 2026 now”.

In response, Pottaraju said that the delay in granting the sanction may be because Shah’s petition seeking the quashing of the first information report filed against him was pending before the Supreme Court.

Advocate Maninder Singh, representing Shah, noted that the minister had apologised, adding that he was also cooperating with the investigation.

“You keep on cooperating,” The Hindu quoted Kant as having responded.

The Supreme Court noted that no apology had been filed on record, Live Law reported.

“It is too late to tender any apology,” the legal news portal quoted the bench as saying. “We had earlier commented on what kind of apology is submitted.”

At the earlier hearing on May 13, the Supreme Court had described the remarks made by Shah as “crass” and “completely thoughtless”, and added that it was not ready to accept his public apology.

“What kind of apology?” Live Law had quoted the bench as saying at the time. “What is that apology? Sometimes people apologise to wriggle out of legal liabilities. Sometimes crocodile tears. What kind of apology is yours?”

The court on Monday added that the report submitted by the Special Investigation Team had cited other instances where Shah had made allegedly objectionable remarks, Live Law reported. The investigation team has been asked to submit a report on the action proposed to be taken about these instances as well.

The police in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi have filed first information reports against eight persons for allegedly posting misleading content on social media about redevelopment at the city’s Manikarnika Ghat, The Indian Express reported.

The eight have been accused of sharing images, purportedly created by artificial intelligence, about the work on social media platform X, the construction agency tasked with carrying out the redevelopment alleged in its complaint to the police.

The complainant alleged that some of the posts sought to link the Union government with Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, sparking public anger.

Some of the persons accused in the matter are linked to the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party, PTI quoted Assistant Commissioner of Police (Dashashwamedh Ghat) Atul Anjan as saying.

The Manikarnika Ghat, one of 84 ghats in Varanasi, is believed to be one of the city’s most sacred cremation grounds. A demolition drive under a redevelopment project at the site sparked protests over the past week.

Protesters have alleged that a century-old idol of 18th-century Malwa ruler Ahilyabai Holkar was damaged during the demolition drive, PTI reported. The district administration has denied the claim.

Nevertheless, Opposition parties have accused the state’s Bharatiya Janata Party government of destroying Varanasi’s heritage and demanded that work at the Manikarnika Ghat be halted.

The first information reports against the eight persons were filed under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to promoting enmity between groups, defiling a place of worship, acts intended to outrage religious feelings and statements conducing to public mischief, The Indian Express reported.

The United States has invited India and Pakistan to join President Donald Trump’s proposed Board of Peace, which Washington has described as a global initiative aimed at resolving global conflicts, initially focusing on Gaza.

It was not clear whether New Delhi has agreed to join the initiative.

A contribution of $1 billion secures permanent membership on the board instead of a three-year appointment, AP reported quoting an unidentified US official. The three-year appointment does not require any contribution.

The Board of Peace will be part of the second phase of a US-backed ceasefire proposal between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. A United Nations Security Council resolution in November authorised the Board of Peace to oversee Gaza at least until the end of 2027.

Trump has extended invitations to about 60 countries, Al Jazeera reported. This includes Turkey, Egypt, Argentina, Indonesia, Italy, Morocco, Britain, Germany, Canada and Australia.

Sharing Trump’s letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on social media on Sunday, the US ambassador to New Delhi, Sergio Gor, said that the board “will support effective governance to achieve stability and prosperity”.

In the letter dated Friday, Trump said the board was a “critically historic and magnificent effort to solidify peace” in West Asia and to embark on a “bold new approach to resolving global conflict”.

The US president also said that the initiative “will be established as a new International Organization and Transitional Governing Administration”.

“Our effort will bring together a distinguished group of nations ready to shoulder the noble responsibility of building LASTING PEACE, an honour reserved for those prepared to lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come,” the letter added.

Honored to convey @POTUS invitation to Prime Minister @narendramodi to participate in the Board of Peace which will bring lasting peace to Gaza. The Board will support effective governance to achieve stability and prosperity! pic.twitter.com/HikLnXFFMp

— Ambassador Sergio Gor (@USAmbIndia) January 18, 2026

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also received an invitation from Trump to join the board, a spokesperson for the country’s foreign ministry was quoted as saying by Reuters on Sunday.

“Pakistan will remain engaged with international efforts for peace and security in Gaza, leading to a lasting solution to the Palestine issue in accordance with United Nations resolutions,” the statement added.

According to a draft charter of the Board of Peace obtained by The Times of Israel, the preamble declares that “durable peace requires pragmatic judgment, common-sense solutions, and the courage to depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed”.

Participating countries would initially serve three-year terms without a financial contribution. However, countries seeking permanent membership will be required to contribute more than $1 billion within a year, which would be used to fund the board’s activities.

The initiative would be chaired by Trump and supported by a multi-tier structure, including a Palestinian technocratic body tasked with administering Gaza, alongside an international security arrangement, Al Jazeera reported.

The Executive Board members of the peace initiative include US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, billionaire businessman Marc Rowan, World Bank President Ajay Banga and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to Al Jazeera.

Israel’s military offensive in Gaza began in October 2023 after Hamas killed 1,200 persons during its incursion into southern Israel and took hostages. Israel has been carrying out unprecedented air and ground strikes on besieged Gaza since then, leaving more than 67,000 persons dead.

Trump’s peace plan was approved by the United Nations Security Council in November, with Russia and China abstaining over concerns about the lack of clarity on how the Board of Peace would function and whether it would pave the way for Palestinian statehood.

The Delhi High Court on Monday quashed income tax reassessment notices issued to NDTV founders Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy in 2016 in connection with alleged interest-free loans advanced to their company RRPR Holdings Private Limited, the promoter company of the broadcaster, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Justices Dinesh Mehta and Vinod Kumar also imposed costs of Rs 2 lakh on the Income Tax department, directing it to pay Rs 1 lakh each to Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy for issuing the notice.

“No amount of cost can be treated as enough for these cases,” the bench was quoted as saying by Bar and Bench. “However, we cannot leave these cases without imposing any.”

The detailed judgement is yet to be made public.

The reassessment proceedings stemmed from allegations relating to certain interest-free loans advanced to RRPR Holdings Private Limited.

The tax department had alleged that an interest-free loan of Rs 403.85 crore from Vishvapradhan Commercial Private Limited to RRPR, along with a series of share transfers between RRPR and the Roys, were “colourable transactions” intended to evade tax, Business Standard reported.

The Roys had approached the High Court in November 2017, arguing that the reassessment amounted to a second reopening for the same assessment year.

They submitted that the Income Tax department had already reopened the assessment in July 2011 and examined the same issues during those proceedings, which concluded with a reassessment order in March 2013.

They contended that once a reassessment is initiated, the entire under-assessed income can be examined, and that reopening the same matter amounted to a “change of opinion”, which is not permitted under the law, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench agreed with the petitioners and held that the department could not revisit issues that had already been examined during an earlier reassessment.

A fisherman from Gujarat who had been languishing in a jail in Pakistan’s Karachi, despite his sentence having ended in 2022, died in custody on January 16, journalist and activist Jatin Desai told Scroll.

In early 2022, the fisherman inadvertently crossed into Pakistani waters. About seven or eight others who were caught with him remain in jail in Karachi, Desai said.

Desai, a peace activist who has for several years been taking up the cause of Indian fisherfolk arrested in Pakistan, did not disclose the name of the fisherman who died.

However, he noted that a 2008 bilateral agreement between India and Pakistan on consular access states that arrested persons should be released and repatriated to each other’s countries within one month of their nationality being confirmed and their sentences being completed.

“As per this document, the fisherman should have been released long ago,” Desai told Scroll. “But for that to happen, the agreement has to be implemented in letter and spirit.”

The journalist-activist claimed that three to four Indian fishers die in Karachi’s Malir Jail every year. “In the first place, such persons should not be arrested at all,” he said. “If they are arrested, a situation should certainly not arise in which they die in prison.”

Desai said that India and Pakistan should follow a no-arrest policy for fisherfolk who inadvertently cross the maritime border, and should instead push them back to their own countries.

“The International Maritime Border between India and Pakistan is a notional line, and so, it is always possible for fishers to accidentally cross over to the other side,” he said. “Fisherfolk come from marginalised communities, and are usually not very well-educated. So, instead of putting them through legal processes, their cases should be seen through a humanitarian lens.”

A delegation of women from fisherfolk families had recently met External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in Delhi, and had urged him to expedite the process to release and repatriate Indian fishermen in Pakistani jails, The Indian Express reported.

They also sought that medical care be ensured for the arrested persons, and that a Joint Judicial Committee on Prisoners, which last met in October 2013, be revived. Further, the delegation demanded that confiscated Indian fishing boats should be returned and mechanisms for family distress support be set up, according to The Indian Express.

Also read: Caught for crossing invisible ocean borders, Indian and Pakistani fishermen are languishing in jail

Six suspected Maoists were killed between Saturday and Sunday in a gunfight with security forces in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district, PTI quoted the police as saying.

While two of the suspected Maoists were killed on Sunday morning, four others were shot dead on Saturday in the forested hills of the district’s northwestern region, Bijapur Superintendent of Police Jitendra Yadav was quoted as saying.

Those who were killed on Sunday were active members of the National Park Area Committee of the Maoists, said Yadav.

They were identified as Dilip Vedja, a divisional committee member of the committee, and Madvi Kosa, Lakkhi Madkam and Radha Metta.

The identities of those killed on Sunday are yet to be established, the police said.

A joint of the Special Task Force, the District Reserve Guard, and the Central Reserve Police Force’s Commando Battalion for Resolute Action, or the CoBRA unit, has been carrying out a search operation in the district based on intelligence inputs about the presence of Vedja and other armed Maoists, PTI reported.

Security forces have recovered six weapons from the site of the gunfight, including an Avtomat Kalashnikova-47 rifle, an Indian Small Arms System rifle, a carbine and a .303 rifle.

Search operations continued in the region on Monday, with security officials searching for Papa Rao, a senior Maoist leader believed to be operating in the Bastar region, The Indian Express reported.

Rao is a member of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee, the highest state-level body of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), and serves as secretary of the South Bastar Zonal Bureau Committee as well as in charge of the West Bastar Division Committee.

On Saturday, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Vishn Deo Sai said the killing of the suspected Maoists was a “decisive blow to Naxalism”.

“The message of our government is clear – abandon violence, connect with the mainstream of development,” Sai said on social media. “The government is fully committed to rehabilitation with justice, security and dignity.”

नक्सलवाद पर निर्णायक प्रहार, बस्तर में शांति, समृद्धि और प्रगति की दिशा में तेजी से आगे बढ़ रही सुशासन सरकार

बीजापुर के उत्तर-पश्चिमी क्षेत्र के दुर्गम जंगल–पहाड़ी इलाकों में डीआरजी, कोबरा और एसटीएफ के साहसी जवानों ने सघन सर्च ऑपरेशन के दौरान महत्वपूर्ण सफलता हासिल करते हुए एक…

— Vishnu Deo Sai (@vishnudsai) January 17, 2026

With the latest deaths, at least 20 suspected Maoists have been killed in separate gunfights in Chhattisgarh so far this year, PTI reported.

On January 3, 14 suspected Maoists were killed in two separate gunfights with security forces in the state’s Sukma and Bijapur districts.

On January 15, 54 Maoists surrendered before security forces in Bijapur. Forty-nine of them carried a cumulative bounty of Rs 1.4 crore.

On December 16, the Union government told Parliament that 335 “Left-wing extremists” had been killed, while 2,167 others had surrendered in 2025. Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai told the Lok Sabha that 942 Left-wing extremists had been arrested this year.

Overall, 1,841 such persons had been killed, over 16,000 had been arrested, while 9,588 others had surrendered since 2014.

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

In October, the Union home ministry said that the number of districts across states affected by “Left-wing extremism” has come down to 11 from 18 in March.

In 2025, the number of “most affected” districts came down from six to three, it added. These are Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh.

In the course of the Union government’s anti-Maoist offensive in 2025, key Maoist leaders like Uike and Madvi Hidma have been killed, while others like Vikas Nagpure, alias Anant, and Mallojula Venugopal Rao, alias Bhupathi, have surrendered.

A report by Malini Subramaniam for Scroll on Hidma’s killing noted that in the Andhra Pradesh village closest to where he was killed, no one heard gunfire.

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

Civil liberties groups and Opposition parties have also questioned some of these killings, alleging that they constitute “fake encounters”.

Music composer AR Rahman on Sunday addressed the criticism about his recent comments about a possible “communal” bias in the Hindi film industry in the past eight years, saying he never intended to hurt anyone’s sentiments.

In a video shared on Instagram, the 59-year-old Oscar-winning composer said that while intentions can sometimes be misunderstood, his purpose has always been to “uplift, honour and serve through music”.

The clarification follows his recent comments to BBC Asian Network in which Rahman said that the Hindi film industry has changed over the past eight years, attributing it to a shift in power and possibly to “a communal thing”.

His remarks sparked a political row, with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party rejecting his claims and Opposition leaders expressing concern.

View this post on Instagram

On Sunday, he said: “I have never wished to cause pain and I hope my sincerity is felt.”

Rahman added that he feels fortunate to be Indian as it allows him to “create a space which always allows freedom of expression and celebrates multicultural voices”.

In his comments to BBC Asian Network, he had said that people “who are not creative have the power now to decide things, and this might have been a communal thing also, but not in my face”.

“[It comes to me] as Chinese whispers that they booked you…but the music company went and funded the movie and got their five composers [hired],” he added.

He also said that audiences are capable of judgement and are not influenced by “divisive” movies.

Activist Sonam Wangchuk’s detention under the National Security Act is “illegal” and has “no merit”, which is why the Union government was repeatedly seeking fresh court dates in the appeal against it, his wife Gitanjali Angmo was quoted as alleging by PTI on Sunday.

“The solicitor general of India, who represents the Union [government], always keeps taking dates after dates, employing delay tactics, because I think they have realised that there is no merit in the case,” she said in an interview to the news agency.

Angmo added that Wangchuk should already be out of prison due to what she described as serious “procedural lapses” by the authorities.

Police firing and violence had broken out in Leh on September 24 during protests seeking statehood for Ladakh and its inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. Demonstrators clashed with and threw stones at the police, and set fire to the Bharatiya Janata Party office and a police vehicle.

Wangchuk was arrested in Leh on September 26, two days after four persons were killed in the police firing. He was later taken to a jail in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur.

The Union government has claimed that the violence was incited by Wangchuk’s “provocative statements”.

In October, Angmo filed a petition before the Supreme Court challenging his detention and seeking his immediate release. She has contended that the detention order relied on “stale, irrelevant and extraneous” first information reports, many of which did not name Wangchuk.

She told PTI that the matter was an “open and shut case” and said the detention reflected the “state of democracy in the country”, where power was being used to illegally detain “people who have been working for this country”.

“If it can happen to Sonam, it can happen to anybody else,” she added.

Angmo said that obtaining the detention order and meeting her husband had also required approaching the court, and that even accessing his handwritten notes was difficult.

On October 15, the Union government told the Supreme Court that it had no objection to Wangchuk sharing the notes he had prepared while in jail to challenge his detention with his wife.

She also highlighted that under the National Security Act, all documents forming the grounds of detention must be supplied to the detainee within “five or a maximum of 10 days”. However, she alleged that four videos relied upon by the authorities were provided to Wangchuk only after 28 days, which she said amounted to a major procedural lapse that should render the detention void from the outset.

“In a way, it is an open and shut case just on this alone because it violates Section 8 of the National Security Act,” she said. “Corollary to this is that because he did not get these videos, he was denied a chance to make an effective representation.”

Angmo also said that the grounds of detention were “stale” and some of them “rely on videos that are one and a half years old or one year old”.

She said that three of the five first information reports cited by the authorities did not name Wangchuk, while one of the two that did, dated back to August, had not been followed by any notice or inquiry.

She further alleged that the district magistrate’s detention order was largely a “copy-paste” of the proposal submitted by the superintendent of police, without independent application of mind.

On the issue being raised in Parliament, Angmo said she was grateful to those who spoke about it, including Ladakh MP Mohmad Haneefa, but expressed disappointment that it had not been pursued more forcefully.

Angmo also said the detention had highlighted growing polarisation in society and appealed to people to think beyond party or sectarian lines and “become a true citizen of independent India, you know, with a mind and wisdom of our own”.

“Let us not lose our wisdom and discernment and be swayed by narratives and party ideologies,” she added.

Also read: Nine false claims about Sonam Wangchuk – and why they fall flat

Can media organisations use the work of independent artists without credit or payment? Does it not amount to a violation of an artist’s copyright?

In recent years, several independent photographers, filmmakers and writers have accused mainstream media organisations of using their photographs, videos and writings without proper attribution, and sometimes even presenting them as their own content.

The issue came into sharp focus in December when Emmy-nominated filmmaker and photographer Ronny Sen filed a civil suit against Zee News seeking Rs 18 crore in damages. He accused the channel of a deliberate act of copyright infringement, alleging it had used his exclusive cinematographic work documenting the transport of cheetahs from Africa to India without authorisation.

A commercial court in Kolkata admitted the suit and will hear the matter.

Sen told Scroll that what had happened was “quite outrageous”. He alleged that Zee didn’t only “steal the work but have claimed it as exclusive and suggested that only they had access to it”.

Zee News did not respond to Scroll’s email seeking a response to the allegation.

Sen said that he hopes that “courts will do something so that the rights of photographers like me can be secured”.

For Sen, this was not an isolated incident involving Zee News. He has pointed out that, as far back as 2014, one of his photographs was used by Zee News’s Bengali channel during coverage of protests in Jadavpur University without his consent.

One of Sen’s main arguments in his suit is that Zee News cannot rely on “fair use” because the photograph was not used “incidentally or just for brief news reporting”. Instead, the channel used the entire photograph “repeatedly, without giving him credit, and even falsely claimed it as their own with exclusive access”.

At the heart of the debate lies a phrase that is frequently invoked but rarely understood, “fair use” – or as Indian law calls it, “fair dealing”.

What is fair dealing?

While the term “fair dealing” is widely used in India, the doctrine itself is distinct from the concept of “fair use” in the United States.

Fair use, a feature of American copyright law, is considered relatively “open-ended and flexible”, said Mumbai-based copyright law advocate Pankhuri Upadhyay. Under US law, courts apply a four-factor test that looks at the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect of the use on the potential market for the original work.

In India, the governing framework is Section 52 of the Copyright Act, which lists specific situations where the use of copyrighted material “does not amount to infringement”.

These include limited use for “criticism or review” and for “reporting current events and current affairs”, including public lectures. However, the law does not define fair dealing in clear terms, instead provides circumstances where it may be used as a defence if an instance of use is challenged.

Explaining how courts approach this, Pankhuri said that “commercial use is not automatically disqualified in India, but it does warrant greater scrutiny” and often weighs against a fair dealing claim.

Another key factor, she noted, is the “amount and substantiality of the work used”, warning that even short excerpts can count against fair dealing if they capture the most significant part of a creative work.

These factors, she said, are applied together, “not as a rigid checklist”.

Section 52 also makes author attribution mandatory in news reporting, while Sections 51 and 57 protect copyright and moral rights.

Advocate Prashant T Reddy, who practises in Delhi, added that even permitted uses cannot cross into “misrepresentation or distortion” that harms an author’s reputation.

Pankhuri emphasised that fair use is “not a rule but a defence”, and can only be determined by courts on a case-by-case basis.

‘Photographers have no rights?’

Media organisations are increasingly exploiting the work of photographers, Sen argued, because of a key structural shift within newsrooms.

“Media publications that used to hire photographers in the past don’t really hire anymore because there is a sense that images can be produced by anyone,” he said. However, when a story becomes important, “there is tremendous pressure on publications to generate some kind of visual material, and then there is a tendency by large media groups to use other people’s work without any due process”, he added.

Sen pointed out that photographers remain a “largely unorganised community, which makes it difficult for them to enforce their rights”.

“The crisis we see today is because photographers have been completely sidelined, and under pressure, big media organisations run photographs without consent,” Sen said. “Photographers, like any other creative professionals, put in just as much work. How is it that photographers have no rights?”

Photographer Gauri Gill echoed similar concerns. She said she was “disheartened” last year to discover that her photographs had been used “without permission by media organisations”.

Brilliant Gauri Gill took these viral photos of @MiraPagliNair and @ZohranKMamdani. She's being ripped off, they're being circulated without credit. These have her name on, let's share these and fix it. pic.twitter.com/hGsylPSKXY

— Karuna Nundy (@karunanundy) November 9, 2025

She recalled that in November 2025, major media organisations had taken her unpublished, older photographs of Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor, with his mother Mira Nair, from her private Instagram account, without her permission. The images were subsequently made viral on social media.

Gill said she was upset that “major profit-making publications” had used her work without permission, credit, or payment, and chose to “let the matter go” instead of taking legal action.

“It has definitely given me pause to think and consider what to do in the future,” she added. “I was freely putting out original content on my Instagram account, just for the pleasure of sharing, and trusting people not to share without asking, but now, I don’t know.”

Gill said the problem has two sides – companies using images without permission or credit and individuals sharing photos online. “I wonder about the distinction in law as it applies to companies and individuals, print, TV and social media,” she said. “The internet has introduced a whole new dimension to the concern.”

Kolkata-based photographer Subhrajit Sen told Scroll that in May 2025, a major television network had “used his original photographs” while crediting itself as the source. The images were part of his work and had earlier been published with attribution by another publication.

Subhrajit raised the issue on Instagram, calling it “alarming and deeply irresponsible” to reuse his images without permission or credit, and said it violated his rights and reflected poorly on editorial ethics.

He said he took a stand publicly by posting about the issue on Instagram and tagging the news channel. It contacted him and “attempted to offer compensation”, which he declined. Subsequently, “they issued a public apology on LinkedIn”, he said.

Subhrajit said he chose not to approach the courts “as legal action is costly and time-consuming, especially against a large media house”. He also said the “lack of accessible contact details” left him with no option but to flag the issue on Instagram.

Another photographer, Ishan Banerjee, said he had a similar experience with the same television channel. After Subhrajit’s Instagram post, Banerjee said the channel used his photo and told him, “It’s just a photo. Why are you making a big issue?”

He said his credit request was refused, and the image was later quietly removed.

In its LinkedIn apology, the television channel said there was “absolutely no intention to misuse anyone’s work or to take credit for it”.

In April 2025, Delhi-based artist Anita Dube faced copyright allegations after using lines from poet Aamir Aziz’s poem Sab Yaad Rakha Jaayega in works shown and sold at Vadehra Art Gallery. Aziz accused her of theft, saying, “This is not conceptual borrowing. This is theft. This is erasure.”

View this post on Instagram

Aziz told Scroll that while the gallery came to a settlement with him, Dube did not. Aziz said that Dube tried to convince him that the use amounted to “fair dealing, claiming it was promoting his work”.

On legal action, he said approaching the court would itself require around Rs 2 lakh in court fees. “How struggling artists could afford such costs,” he said.

Mumbai-based photographer Prarthna Singh summed up the wider problem, saying the theft of creative work is rampant in India. Even when images are publicly available, she said, “that is not the way it should be used; even if it’s out in public, you should still reach out to the artist for permission”.

Burden of implementation

Speaking to Scroll, Delhi-based intellectual property lawyer Anshumaan Sahni explained that individuals often lack the resources needed to enforce their own copyright.

“Large corporations typically have strong systems in place to track copyright infringement and actively pursue violators,” he said. “However, when it comes to independent artists, photographers and writers, this system is against them because it requires constant vigilance.”

Sahni noted that even among individuals, there is a clear hierarchy. Since damages claimed in court have to be based on potential earnings lost by an artist, new artists are at a disadvantage.

“Someone who has goodwill and is already famous, there is a clear value attached to their work,” he said. “But for someone who is just starting, how do you value their work?”

While an established artist may be able to claim damages based on prior sales, “to pursue such a claim, the artist would often have to spend a significant amount on legal costs”, which Sahni said “strongly discourages independent artists” from seeking legal remedies.

Another Delhi-based intellectual property lawyer, Nishchal Anand, said that in many cases, a legal or takedown notice is sufficient. “Big organisations are also very conscious about their image, so they try to settle the matter outside court,” he said.

Anand stressed the need for artists to have “collective management organisations” to enforce their rights.

Advocate Reddy emphasised that “collective societies are important” because they will help reduce the high costs of enforcing copyright.

Once infringement occurs, advocate Upadhyay said, “the burden shifts entirely onto the artist”, and “the costs involved are insane”.

“Big organisations have power and money, and in many ways, the battle is already lost before it begins,” she added.

The police in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly district detained 12 Muslim men for allegedly offering namaz in an empty home “without permission”, PTI reported.

The 12 persons were challaned under legal provisions pertaining to breach of peace and subsequently produced before a magistrate, who granted them bail.

Superintendent of Police (South) Anshika Verma said that the authorities took precautionary action after getting information that a vacant home in the Mohammedganj village was being used as a temporary madrasa, PTI reported.

“Conducting any new religious activity or gathering without permission is a violation of the law,” Verma said. “Strict action will be taken if such activities are repeated.”

The matter came to light after a video purportedly showing a group of people offering namaz in a home was shared on social media.

In UP's Bareilly, a video of 12 people offering prayers had surfaced on social media. All 12 were arrested. pic.twitter.com/DM8OYUToiJ

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) January 18, 2026

A preliminary inquiry revealed that the house belongs to a man named Hanif, and that it was being used temporarily for Friday namaz, PTI quoted the police as saying.

Some villagers had objected to prayers being held regularly at the man’s home and informed the authorities, after which the police stopped the gathering.

For many years, I lived in the Indian city of Chennai where the summer temperatures can reach up to 44 degrees celsius. With a population of 4.5 million, this coastal city is humid and hot.

Its suburbs are home to 600 Hindu temples and there’s a wildlife reserve called Guindy national park in the heart of the city. Trees line some of the streets but green parks are few and far between – as is the shade.

As urbanisation accelerates across India and the rest of the developing world, urban forests become more vital. These clusters of trees in parks, gardens, public spaces and along roads and rivers in urban areas have multiple benefits – from cooling the surrounding air to providing homes for wildlife and creating space for people to enjoy nature. Yet they are often overlooked by city developers.

My research shows that, in Chennai, there are 26 square miles of tree and other vegetation cover, mainly accounted for by formal green spaces such as Guindy wildlife reserve. On the outskirts of this city, an area of nine square miles of unused land is ideally suited to creating more urban forest. Similarly, there is more potential space for urban forests in other fast urbanising Indian cities like Coimbatore and Tiruchirapalli.

Global urban planning guidelines recommend having at least 30% tree cover in urban areas. The World Health Organization suggests that cities should allow for nine square metres of urban tree cover per person. Most Indian cities don’t meet this requirement.

Improving urban forests in India has been a challenge for many years due to high land prices, lack of urban planning and little public participation in tree-planting initiatives.

Policies introduced by the Indian government to “green” urban areas often equate tree planting with cooling cities and building climate resilience. But it’s not that simple. The success of urban forests depends on factors such as rainfall, understanding interactions with local wildlife and people’s needs.

A recent study warns that in hot, dry cities with limited water availability like Chennai, trees slow the cooling process by water evaporation from leaves and instead contribute to urban heat. Urban heat comes from the reflection and absorption of sunlight by buildings and land surfaces. This is particularly high in growing smaller Indian cities with populations of 1 to 5 million.

Planting trees with the sole aim of cooling cities could negatively affect wildlife too. Not all birds, bugs and mammals depend on trees for food or shelter. A study from researchers in Bengaluru, India, shows that non-native tree species contribute little to bird richness. Meanwhile, urban grasslands and marshlands that are often misclassified as “waste land” support wildlife and help regulate flooding.

In India, cities and villages have open “common” land where people graze their cattle or harvest fuelwood from trees that grow naturally there – tree-planting initiatives in these open land areas can displace poorer communities of people who rely on open lands for grazing and fuel wood collection.

Design with nature

Urban forests can be planned to meet the needs of people, birds and other wildlife.

In 1969, Ian McHarg, the late Scottish landscape architect and urban planner came up with the concept of “design with nature”, where development has a minimal negative effect on the environment. His idea was to preserve existing natural forests by proposing site suitability assessments. By analysing factors such as rivers and streams, soil type, slope and drainage, McHarg’s approach still helps planners to identify which areas suit development and which are best preserved for nature.

This approach has advanced with new technology. Now, geographic information systems and satellite imagery help planners integrate environmental data and identify suitable areas for planting new trees or conserving urban forests.

Using the principles of landscape ecology, urban planners can design forest patches in a way that enhances the connectivity of green spaces in a city, rather than uniformly planting trees across all open spaces. By designing these “ecological corridors”, trees along roads or canals, for example, can help link fragmented green spaces.

Planting native tree species suited to dry and drought-prone environments is also crucial, as is assessing the local community’s needs for native fruit-bearing trees that provide food.

Growing urban forests

By 2030, one-third of India’s electricity demand is expected to come from cooling equipment such as air conditioning. Increasing urban forests could help reduce this need for more energy.

National-level policies could support urban forest expansion across India. In 2014, the government of India released its urban greenery guidelines and flagship urban renewal programmes such as the Smart Cities Mission have tried to increase tree cover. But guidelines often overlook critical considerations like ecological connectivity, native species and local community needs.

In 2020, the government of India launched Nagar Van Yojana (a scheme to improve tree cover in cities) with a budget of around US$94 million (£70 million). It aims to create urban forests through active participation of citizens, government agencies and private companies. But there is little evidence that urban forest cover has improved.

Urbanisation reduced tree cover in most Indian cities, and much of it was rather unplanned. But by protecting and planting more trees, citizens can live in greener, cooler cities. By shifting urban forest policy from counting trees to designing landscapes, plans that enhance climate resilience, nature conservation and social equity can be put into practice.

Dhanapal Govindarajulu is Postgraduate Researcher, Climate Adaptation, University of Manchester.

This article was first published on The Conversation.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation on Saturday imposed a penalty of Rs 22.2 crore on IndiGo following an investigation into widespread flight disruptions in December, finding that the airline overstretched its flight crew and failed to adequately implement revised pilot duty and rest norms, The Hindu reported.

The aviation regulator said its four-member inquiry committee found that there was “an overriding focus on maximising utilisation of crew, aircraft, and network resources, which significantly reduced roster buffer margins”.

Crew rosters were designed to maximise duty periods, with increased reliance on dead-heading, tail swaps, extended duty patterns and minimal recovery margins, which “compromised roster integrity and adversely impacted operational resilience”, the statement added.

The penalty relates to large-scale cancellations and delays between December 3 and 5, when 2,507 flights were cancelled and 1,852 delayed, affecting more than three lakh passengers.

The fine includes Rs 1.8 crore for multiple violations of Civil Aviation Requirements and Rs 20.4 crore as a cumulative penalty of Rs 30 lakh for continued non-compliance with revised Flight Duty Time Limitation norms over 68 days.

The probe also identified deficiencies in software systems, shortcomings in management structure, and weaknesses in operational control, The Hindu reported.

The regulator noted that following the December crisis, IndiGo was found to have 65 fewer captains than required to comply with the revised duty and rest norms, which came into effect on November 1.

The DGCA issued a warning to IndiGo’s Chief Executive Officer Pieter Elbers, and Chief Operating Officer Isidre Porqueras, after serving them show-cause notices.

It also ordered the removal of Senior Vice President, Operational Control Centre, Jason Herter from his current position, citing failure in systemic planning and timely implementation of the revised norms, The Hindu reported.

Further, IndiGo has been directed to pledge a bank guarantee of Rs 50 crore to ensure compliance with the regulator’s directives and long-term systemic correction.

The aviation regulator said the amount will be released after verification of corrective measures across leadership and governance, manpower planning, rostering and fatigue-risk management, digital systems and operational resilience.

The regulator also said it will conduct an internal inquiry, following instructions from the Ministry of Civil Aviation, to examine how IndiGo was to increase flights in the winter schedule by 10% without assessing its ability to comply with the revised duty norms.

The disruptions in December came amid the rollout of stricter work hour norms introduced in November. The revised rostering norms, issued by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation in January 2024 after concerns about pilot fatigue, were meant to take effect on June 1.

However, airlines asked for delayed implementation because of staffing shortages and operational challenges, and the key changes were eventually introduced on November 1.

The new rules required longer weekly rest, restricted night landings, extended the definition of night hours and limited consecutive night duties.

IndiGo used to operate about 2,300 flights daily and held about 60% of India’s domestic civil aviation market, making it the country’s largest airline.

Also read:

• IndiGo disruption reflects the crisis in India’s aviation sector
• Flyers can seek damages from IndiGo. But most will skip that route

A 20-year-old Kuki woman who was gang-raped in Manipur in May 2023 died on January 10 of a prolonged illness linked to her injuries, Newslaundry reported on Saturday.

Her family said she never fully recovered from the physical and psychological trauma of the assault.

The woman was abducted on May 15, 2023 in Imphal while trying to withdraw money from an ATM. She said that over the course of several hours, she was assaulted at multiple locations in the city and forced into vehicles by groups of men, some allegedly affiliated with the radical Meitei outfit Arambai Tenggol. She later escaped with the help of an auto-rickshaw driver.

The woman was first taken to relief camps in Kangpokpi district and later received medical treatment in hospitals in Manipur and Nagaland. A medical report from Kohima, which Scroll independently verified, recorded her injuries as “alleged case of assault and rape”.

The case was first reported to the National Commission for Women in June 2023, Newslaundry reported.

She filed a police statement in July 2023, and a zero first information report was registered before the case was transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation. A zero FIR can be filed at any police, irrespective of where the offence occurred. It subsequently has to be transferred to the police station that has jurisdiction over the matter.

More than two years later, no arrests have been made in the woman’s case.

Her mother, Lhingnei Haokip, said the trauma left her daughter with severe injuries, breathing problems, insomnia and mental health problems, Newslaundry reported.

“For the last two years, she lived in constant fear,” Haokip told the news outlet. “She used to tell me that she did not want to live anymore. Once, she told me that everyone knew what had happened to her and that she felt extremely vulnerable because of it.”

The Kuki-Zo community held a candlelight vigil in Churachandpur in her memory on Saturday.

At least 260 persons have been killed and more than 59,000 persons displaced since the ethnic clashes broke out between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities in May 2023. There were periodic upticks in violence in 2024 and 2025.

In 2023, Scroll travelled to Manipur to interview Kuki women who faced extreme violence at the hands of the mobs, including the complainant who died.

Also Read: ‘Everyone should know what happened to us’: Four Kuki women recount brutal assaults they survived

The Enforcement Directorate has alleged that Faridabad-based Al-Falah University had appointed three doctors identified as suspects in the November 10 blast near Delhi’s Red Fort without police verification, reported PTI on Saturday.

Two of the doctors – Muzammil Ganaie and Shaheen Saeed – were arrested by the National Investigation Agency, while the third – Umar Nabi – is alleged to have been driving the car that exploded and killed 15 people.

On Friday, the ED said it has filed a chargesheet before a Delhi court against the university’s Chairperson Jawad Ahmed Siddiqui and the Al-Falah Charitable Trust, which controls the group’s educational institutions, in a money laundering case.

The court is yet to take cognisance of the ED chargesheet, PTI reported.

The Al-Falah group has been under scrutiny in an investigation linked to the November 10 blast.

Siddiqui was arrested on November 18 and is in judicial custody.

The central agency also provisionally attached assets worth about Rs 140 crore belonging to Al-Falah University, which is owned by the Al-Falah group.

According to the ED chargesheet, the university employed doctors “on paper” and listed them under a “22-day punch” or “two days per week” clause, to represent them as regular faculty and obtain approvals from the National Medical Commission, PTI reported, quoting unidentified officials.

Bhupinder Kaur Anand, the vice-chancellor of the university, reportedly confirmed to the ED that the three doctors had been appointed based on recommendations from the human resources head and approvals by Siddiqui. Anand added that “no police verification or scrutiny” was conducted.

The central agency has alleged that some doctors were hired temporarily to meet regulatory requirements and others were on the payroll without attending classes or seeing patients.

These “on paper staff” were aware of their status and were provided with “fake” work experience certificates, the agency alleged, according to PTI.

The ED also alleged that fake patients were admitted shortly before inspections and that the hospital was largely non-functional weeks before National Medical Commission assessments.

The commission is a regulatory body for medical education and practice.

The chargesheet alleged that Siddiqui and the Trust misrepresented the university’s National Assessment and Accreditation Council accreditation and University Grants Commission recognition to “deceive” students, generating illicit funds of Rs 493.24 crore from fees paid for tuition and examinations.

Certificates for courses were obtained from the Haryana government through fraudulent means, The Indian Express quoted the agency as saying.

The case

The blast near the Red Fort metro station left 13 persons dead. Umar Un Nabi, a doctor, was believed to have been driving the car that exploded. Two days after the explosion, the Union government described it as a “terrorist incident”.

Since then, the National Investigation Agency has arrested at least nine persons linked to the blast.

Hours before the blast, the police also said that it had cracked an “inter-state and transnational terror module” in Faridabad and Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur. The police said at the time that it had recovered 2,900 kg of improvised explosive device-making material in raids in several states.

During its investigation, the police had alleged that the key suspects in the case, including Nabi, who was a faculty member, used a room on the Al-Falah Medical College campus in Haryana’s Faridabad to plan logistics for transporting ammonium nitrate for multiple blasts in the National Capital Region.

The college is part of Al-Falah University.

The vehicle used in the blast had also been parked inside the campus for nearly 20 days, the police had said at the time.

Siddiqui, who has also been the chancellor of Al-Falah University since 2014, had been taken into custody under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act after investigators examined material seized during searches conducted on November 18.

The case filed by the Enforcement Directorate was based on two first information reports filed by the Delhi Police, which alleged that Al-Falah University had falsely claimed accreditation by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council and misrepresented its eligibility under the University Grants Commission Act.

One night in October, Saluram Kargal was sleeping near his goats outside his home in the village of Wadgaon Borwadi, around 100 km from Pune. The one-room brick home is situated in an enclosure surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence. Suddenly, Kargal’s sleep was broken by the sound of the animals yelping. He opened his eyes and saw a blur of orange near the goats.

It was two leopards.

One swiftly grabbed a 6-kg goat by its neck and jumped out of the enclosure over the fence, then disappeared into the sugarcane fields that surround the house. The second grabbed another goat and also tried to escape, but its paw got stuck in the fence.

Each goat cost between Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000. Desperate to save at least one of them, Kargal attacked the leopard.

“The leopard dug its teeth into my thigh,” Kargal told Scroll in mid-December. “I screamed and my son ran out with a stick and began to hit it.” The leopard fled, only to return minutes later and attack Kargal again.

The animal bit the 40-year-old farmer on his stomach, hand and left leg, tearing through his flesh. Kargal fell unconscious – his stomach and thigh were bleeding profusely. The leopard next attacked Kargal’s 15-year-old son, Santosh. But now, the family’s four dogs pounced on the leopard from all sides, and bit it to death.

By this time, Kargal and Santosh were unconscious – they woke up four hours later in a hospital, where forest guards had rushed them.

Three months on, Kargal is able to walk, but with a limp and some pain. “I can never forget that leopard and that night,” he said.

This story is part of Common Ground, our in-depth and investigative reporting project. Sign up here to get the stories in your inbox soon after they are published.

Kargal’s village, Wadgaon Borwadi, is located in Junnar taluka in Pune district.

Junnar, which is spread over 5,826 sq km, is nestled at the northern end of the Western ghats. The surrounding region is dotted with lakes, waterfalls and picturesque valleys. On one of the mountain peaks in Junnar sits the Shivneri fort, where Shivaji, the founder of Maratha empire, was born. The site attracts a steady stream of tourists through the year, mostly from Mumbai and Pune.

This striking locale is also the site of a complex human-animal conflict – between leopards and people like Kargal, who live in small villages.

One reason this conflict has arisen is the high density of leopards in the area.

Although the last count of leopards in Junnar dates back to 1920, when a survey found between 420 and 500 leopards in the area, officials estimate their numbers have dramatically risen. “Now we estimate their population to be 800 to 1,000. Maybe more,” said Smita Rajhans, assistant conservator of Junnar forest division.

Ankit Kumar, a senior researcher at the Wildlife Institute of India, who is working under the senior scientist Bilal Habib on leopard behaviour and population estimation in Junnar, said that they found that the region had a density of around six or seven leopards in every 100 sq km. Kumar explained that in other parts of Maharashtra, such densities are typically found in protected areas, like the Tadoba-Andhari tiger reserve, which has around seven leopards for every 100 sq km, and the Sahayadri tiger reserve which has six for every 100 sq km.

Considering that Junnar is not a protected area and has heavy human habitation, Kumar said, he considered its leopard population density “towards the higher number”.

The high density in the region is closely linked to changes in patterns of land use over decades in the districts of Pune, Solapur and Nashik. Since the 1970s, at least five dams have come up in the region, in response to which farmers began to grow the water-intensive cash crop of sugarcane. The dense fields offered leopards the ideal habitat to breed, while the presence of humans ensured good prey availability in the form of dogs and goats.

Experts noted that conflict was almost inevitable in such a situation. “A low-density large carnivore population and low-density human population can co-exist. But when both become high, then that’s a recipe for conflict,” said YV Jhala, former dean of the Wildlife Institute of India, and a biologist who has worked extensively with tigers, leopards and cheetahs.

Indeed, these factors have resulted in a high number of “chance encounters” with humans, Rajhans noted, often leading to fatal attacks.

Between 2002 and this year, 56 people, most of them children, have been mauled to death and another 156 have been injured, according to data that the Junnar forest department shared with Scroll. Last year, while Kargal survived, five others lost their lives in leopard attacks in Junnar. At least 26,979 cattle have been killed.

Since 2002, the forest department has paid residents of Junnar a total of Rs 26.62 lakh for deaths and permanent disabilities that have resulted from leopard attacks. “But the compensation means nothing when you lose a family member,” said Maya Sonawane, a farm labourer.

The problem has even had some political ripples: to draw attention to locals’ frustrations and fears over the problem, in December, Junnar member of the legislative assembly Sharad Sonawane attended a session of the assembly in a leopard costume and mask.

Even as the problem persists, Junnar’s residents do whatever they can to avoid encountering leopards, which they refer to by the Marathi word “bibtiya”. When Scroll visited three villages in late December, locals advised us not to move around alone. Cages to trap the big cats were a common sight and we found fresh pug marks at multiple locations in two of the villages. Locals shout loudly while walking to scare any possible leopards in nearby fields, and shut themselves indoors by 8 pm.

In all these villages, locals guarded us and made whistling noises as we walked around sugarcane fields, meeting families. We were prepared to flee whenever a tiny rustle in farms was heard. “We live in fear all the time,” Kargal said. “Imagine you have to keep looking behind your back even when you sit on your porch.”

Sixty-two-year-old Laxman Mandlik remembers Junnar’s barren, undulating landscape before sugarcane was introduced in the region. At the time, the major crops grown in the region were wheat and maize, both sown on limited cultivable land. Leopards were present then too, he recounted, but conflicts were rare because “their numbers were less”, he said.

In 1972, the government built five dams on the Kukadi river, to provide water in Pune, Ahmednagar and Solapur. Along with these dams, located in and around Junnar, the government also created an extensive canal system that made water easily available for thirsty crops, such as sugarcane.

“A sugar factory came in 1982 which increased demand for sugarcane and made it lucrative for farmers to grow the crop,” said Mandlik, a retired schoolteacher and a farmer. Between 2000 and 2010, the area in Junnar under sugarcane cultivation doubled from 8,000 hectares to 16,000 hectares.

The crop is typically harvested once between every 12 months and 18 months. In this period, it can grow into a dense foliage more than 15 feet tall, which offers shelter to leopards to give birth to and raise cubs. Furthermore, the animals are usually left undisturbed because farmers in this region rely on drip irrigation, and so rarely need to venture into the farms to water the crop.

“This gave leopards privacy,” said Feroz Pathan, a “rescue member” with the Junnar forest department, whose job is to trap, relocate and rescue leopards, as well as raise awareness among residents on ways to protect themselves. “Unlike forests where predators could kill their cubs, in sugarcane farms they had no enemies. Cubs began to survive better on farms.”

Kumar explained that the cats also diversified their diets – while in forests, they typically eat animals such as deer and wild boar, his team’s photographic evidence showed leopards feeding on rats in farms, as well as dogs and livestock like goats and sheep. “We could not have predicted it, but we seemed to have created a perfect habitat for the leopard,” he said.

Indeed, the team’s camera traps showed that Junnar’s leopards had made the fields their home. “There was always a notion that leopards come here from some place and attack and then leave,” he said. “But, our study showed that this was not the case.” Their research, which is yet to be published, revealed that 70% of the leopards the team documented persisted in the area for at least three years. Based on this, the team informed locals that the animals were living “in their very own backyards”, Kumar said.

As the animal’s population grew, so did conflicts with it. A 2023 study that looked at data from 2001 to 2019 found that the number of attacks on livestock had increased sharply since 2015, ranging from 400 to 900 a year – in contrast, the region had seen between 200 and 400 such attacks a year between 2001 and 2014.

The threat to human lives also increased. Sakubai Kakade, a 65-year-old farmer in Kalwadi village, experienced the tragic consequences last year, when her eight-year-old grandson Rudra was killed by a leopard in their sugarcane field. After that she stopped going to the farm alone. “To cut the sugarcane, we ask sugar factory owners to send workers. Nobody wants to risk their lives anymore,” she said.

Locals in Junnar have also started to rely on migrant workers to cut their harvest. Vaishali Wagh is one such migrant worker, who travels from Jalgaon to Junnar every year for four months to harvest sugarcane. She, too, lives with the fear of leopards. “I keep looking back to make sure she is there,” said Wagh about her eight-month-old baby who was playing in the dry grass as Wagh cut the tall-stemmed cane metres away. “There is nothing else I can do. We have heard of leopards and we are scared. But I have to earn money to pay off a loan of Rs 1 lakh.”

In Kalwadi, farmers have been advised to avoid sugarcane cultivation close to borders of the village, to minimise the risk that leopards will stray in. The sides of the village’s roads are kept clean of shrubs or bushes to ensure that leopards do not have easy hiding places. Further, to ensure their safety, children in the village are not allowed to leave their homes alone at any time. “If they do, there is always an elder,” said Tushar Waman, the sarpanch of the village.

The forest department has approved Rs 13 crore for measures to tackle the leopard problem in Junnar for 2025-’26.

As part of this work, it has identified 650 isolated houses, and aims to provide residents with 75% of the cost of erecting solar fences around them, which deliver mild electric shocks to animals that might intrude. The department has also set up around 400 cages across Junnar to trap leopards, though, Kalwadi’s sarpanch Waman noted, this number is proving insufficient as the number of distress calls climbs every day.

In addition, the department has designed and distributed spiked collars to 3,300 farmers – worn around the neck, the area leopards often bite first, these devices can protect farmers who are attacked.

Among the most prominent long-term strategies that the government has resorted to in Junnar is translocating animals. Since the early 2000s, the forest department has sought to mitigate the problem by moving animals from human-habited areas into forested regions of Junnar, or other forested areas in the state.

But experts note that this approach is ultimately unlikely to be successful. “Such translocations only solve the problem for a while in the location from where they are translocated,” Jhala said. “But it translocates the problem elsewhere.”

This was borne out by a 2010 paper by the ecologist Vidya Athreya, which examined a programme to translocate leopards in Maharashtra that began in 2001. As part of the programme, initially 29 leopards were captured from human habitats and released in the slopes of the Western Ghats, primarily in Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary, and Malshej Ghat, parts of both of which are within 40 km of Junnar. The study found that translocation led to an increase in the frequency of leopard attacks on humans in the Junnar forest division by a staggering 325%.

“The release sites already contained resident leopards, thus, leopard movements out of the release sites were inevitable,” the authors wrote, since “the two small areas could not support the influx of large numbers of leopards.”

Kumar’s more recent research also indicates that translocation is a flawed strategy. His team radio-collared 13 leopards that had been moved from various villages in Junnar to forested areas between 15 and 70 km away. The researchers found that the animals would almost always come back to the original sites within 30 days to two months. Further, Kumar explained that as the animals explored routes to return to their original homes, they would look for prey in an unfamiliar area, “which will lead to more interactions with humans”.

Jhala noted that translocations “could also mess with the social dynamics of where the animals are taken from”. For instance, he said, if a dominant leopard, which had perhaps been coexisting with humans, was shifted, other younger leopards less familiar with human presence could take over the territory. This “could exacerbate the problem”, Jhala said.

Forest department staffers said that the failure of these strategies can leave locals deeply angry, particularly after a village sees a fatal attack. “We are scared to even enter villages at such times,” Pathan said. “Recently, locals set a forest van and outpost on fire.”

In response, the forest department has for the moment halted translocations. Instead, it is housing captured leopards permanently in a centre in Manikdoh, initially meant for lost or injured animals. Another centre is being constructed in Junnar to accommodate the growing numbers of captive leopards.

But this approach is inherently limited. The Manikdoh centre has 50 enclosures, each of which is 25 square feet wide and can house one leopard. But currently, the centre houses 130 leopards, many in tiny trap cages where they can hardly move. “We are expanding our centre to build more enclosures and we will soon send 50 leopards to Vantara,” a senior official from the rescue centre told Scroll, referring to the Reliance Foundation’s animal centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat.

The forest department is also attempting to use new technology to tackle the problem.

On a crisp December afternoon, forest helper Rushi Gaikwad inspected a cage trap that he had set up the previous day for a leopard found lurking in the village. He showed us an application on his mobile phone, developed by the forest department. The app is linked to 55 AI-powered cameras in Junnar, set up in villages where leopards are spotted frequently. The cameras are programmed to recognise leopards and capture images of the animals, as well as set off alarms on phones that have the app installed. “We receive a notification from it on our phone when it captures an image of a leopard. We immediately rush to the spot,” Gaikwad said.

Additionally, the forest department also relies on a more general warning system called the “animal intrusion detection and repellent system”, or “anider”, set up near several villages in Junnar. The system detects the intrusion of an animal into a human settlement and makes a loud sound to drive away the animal. “We have 75 anider machines that detect wildlife movement and set off an alarm,” Rajhans said.

Further, she explained, the department has installed 16 simpler alarm systems that make loud noises at regular intervals, such as of lions roaring, elephants trumpeting and firecrackers exploding. “This scares a leopard away,” Rajhans said.

But the sheer population of leopards in Junnar means that such measures cannot go very far towards tackling the problem. Every village that has a sugarcane field – and most do – report leopard sightings regularly. “If we spot a leopard today, the forest team comes tomorrow,” Waman said. “They are short on staff and cages to trap leopards.”

Other new proposals that the forest department is considering to manage the conflict have also been met with criticism. One of these entails moving leopards from Schedule I of the Wildlife Protect Act, 1972, to Schedule II, which would in effect reduce the level of protection they enjoy. This would make it easier to catch “maneater” leopards, the government has claimed.

However, experts claim this will be a disastrous step.

Jhala explained that under the act, the chief wildlife warden has the power to make decisions to remove an animal if they deem it harmful to humans. Changing the protection status would “make it easier for the chief wildlife warden since the onus of decision making would not come to him”, said Jhala. But, he argued, it would spell disaster for the animal. “The leopards are still in the trade, their skin is valuable,” Jhala said.

Another strategy being implemented entails giving immuno-contraceptives to wild female leopards to prevent reproduction and thus control the animal’s population. In November, the union environment ministry granted the state forest department permission to proceed with a pilot test involving five female leopards.

Experts caution that this method might be inefficient and expensive, since each vaccine shot costs between $100 and $150, and interrupts the animal’s reproduction cycle for only around two years, after which it needs to be injected again.

The sterilisation project was initiated in 2015 when Jhala was working at the Wildlife Institute of India. “We had set up experimental cages at the institute but soon after the ministry refused to release any money for this project,” he said.

This hampered progress on studying the approach closely, he noted. “Science cannot operate at a finger snap,” he said. “You have to have your science done before the problem comes up. If you do it when it comes up, it is too late.”

Officials involved with the process are also worried about the possible hormonal changes that the shot may induce in the leopards. “We are taking help from African authorities who have undertaken contraception for animals there,” Rajhans said. “They reported a change in animal behaviour. We want to make sure contraception does not make a leopard more aggressive. That is why we are starting with just five leopards and we will observe them for three years.”

Jhala argued that other long-term strategies would be more effective, such as “changing of cropping pattern which provides cover, or reducing vulnerability of livestock to predators, and total elimination of free-ranging feral livestock and dogs, which provide the food base to sustain leopard population”. He added, “Everything else is all eyewash. It’s a matter of stalling the problem. But some hardcore decisions need to be taken.”

Meanwhile locals resort to extreme measures to protect their families. Maya Sonawane, a farm labourer, locks her three children indoors for the entire day when she is on farms working. “The leopard comes and sits under that tree,” she said, pointing to a tree in the courtyard. “My children watch it from the window.”

The toilet is located outside the house. “At night, we all wait outside if one person has to use it,” she said.

Some find humour in their grim circumstances. Laughing, Gaikwad said that the one silver lining was that thefts in Junnar had reduced, because “Even thieves are scared to go out alone at night.”

The Congress in Rajasthan has accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of orchestrating mass deletion of voters during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, reported The Indian Express on Sunday.

This came after a video, showing a booth-level officer alleging that he was being pressured to delete hundreds of voters from the rolls of his Hawa Mahal Assembly constituency in Jaipur, was widely circulated on social media.

In the video, Kirti Kumar, a government teacher deployed as a BLO amid the SIR, can purportedly be heard saying on a call: “I will visit the collector’s office and will kill myself there.”

Kumar told The Indian Express that he was speaking with the councillor of the area, “who was pressuring me to delete the names”.

He has alleged that he was being “threatened and pushed beyond capacity” to look into the BJP’s objections seeking the deletion of 470 voters, mostly Muslims, from the draft electoral rolls, reported Newslaundry on Thursday.

Hawa Mahal is a Muslim-majority constituency that BJP MLA Balmukund Acharya won in the 2023 Assembly elections.

“How am I supposed to do that without following the procedure?” Kumar was quoted as saying by The Indian Express. “After my video went viral, senior officials intervened and told me to follow the rulebook.”

Suresh Saini, the councillor of the ward, denied Kumar’s allegations, claiming that there was “large-scale fraud” in the voter list of the area, according to the newspaper.

“Fake addresses are being used to register fake voters,” he was quoted as saying. “I raised objections and applied for the removal of such names with supporting evidence. This amounts to voter fraud by the Congress.”

On the other hand, the Congress claimed that Kumar’s allegations reflect a broader pattern of voter deletions in Rajasthan, reported The Indian Express.

The party also alleged that on January 15, the final day of filing claims and objections, “pressure was exerted through EROs [electoral roll officers] on BLOs to strike off the names of voters aligned with Congress ideology”.

“Pre-filled Form-7 data was even thrust upon BLOs, which is a direct assault on the impartial election process,” claimed Rajasthan’s former Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on social media.

He added: “In many places, when administrative officials and BLOs refused to partake in this murder of democracy, they were threatened with transfers by people from the ruling party.”

Gehlot claimed that such attempts were also made in Sardarpura, which is his constituency, and accused the BJP of insulting the “public and democracy”.

During a press conference, Acharya, the Hawa Mahal MLA, dismissed the Congress’ allegations as “baseless” and said the party leaders “have lost their mental balance”, reported The Indian Express.

“The Election Commission is an independent constitutional body meant to keep the democratic process alive,” he added. “The commission is working efficiently. The Congress won a seat in Rajasthan during the recent bypolls, why didn’t they object then? Congress needs to fight on real issues.”

The special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 12 states and Union Territories, including Rajasthan. The exercise is currently in the claims and objections stage in the state.

In Rajasthan, the draft voter rolls published on December 16 showed that the names of 41.85 lakh voters were deleted. The State Election Commission stated that of the total, 8.75 lakh had died, 29.6 lakh had shifted from their registered addresses and 3.44 lakh were enrolled at multiple places.

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

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

A delegation of the Communist Party of China this week met office-bearers of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, in Delhi. This was the first interaction between the two entities since the Galwan clashes in 2020.

The BJP said that they discussed how to enhance communication with China’s ruling party.

Monday’s meeting came at a time when the Chinese government has been reiterating its territorial claims on the Shaksgam Valley. New Delhi says that the region is Indian territory and historically a part of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan ceded it to China in 1963 in an agreement not recognised by India.

While New Delhi has repeatedly objected to infrastructure projects undertaken by Beijing there, the Chinese foreign ministry on Monday said that the programmes were “beyond reproach”.

While the BJP-RSS and the Chinese Communist Party have maintained contacts since at least the late 2000s, the contrasting rhetoric from New Delhi and Beijing perhaps illustrates the knotty China problem the BJP is facing.

A tangled relationship

There was a time not too long ago when the BJP repeatedly accused Congress of signing a “secret” Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese Communist Party in 2008. It also alleged that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had met with Chinese officials during the 2017 Doklam standoff between India and China.

The Congress rejected the allegations and the events this week gave it the political ammunition to clap back at the BJP. It reminded the Hindutva party that China had supported Pakistan during Operation Sindoor in May.

The Indian military has publicly described China as one of its adversaries during the four-day conflict, saying that Pakistan was receiving real-time intelligence from the Chinese military about important Indian deployments.

The Congress also reminded the BJP that Indian soldiers had been killed in Galwan and that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army was “sitting there after encroaching in Ladakh”.

“[China] is settling villages in Arunachal Pradesh,” Congress leader Supriya Shrinate added. “And here, hugs are being exchanged.”

Border tensions between India and China escalated in June 2020 when a violent face-off between Indian and Chinese soldiers took place in Ladakh’s Galwan valley along the Line of Actual Control. It led to the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers. Both countries had deployed thousands of soldiers and heavy artillery in the region, creating a prolonged stand-off.

In October 2024, a patrolling arrangement, “leading to the disengagement” of the two militaries in eastern Ladakh, was announced. But it is unclear whether the status quo ante, or the situation before the clashes, has been restored.

Broader concerns remain about Beijing’s growing sway in South Asia, a region India considers its sphere of influence.

A rapprochement

There is a crucial reason why India’s BJP-led government is turning a blind eye to these impediments.

With United States President Donald Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy, so-called reciprocal tariffs, punitive levies and repeated claims of having mediated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan having all but sunk the burgeoning India-US partnership, New Delhi has had to hasten to recalibrate its relationship with Beijing.

However, as we noted in an earlier edition of Slow Lane, Trump’s actions are viewed as an accelerant of and not the catalyst for the India-China rapprochement.

Over the past half year, there have been several high-level bilateral engagements between India and China. This has proceeded along with measures such as resuming direct flights between the two countries, restarting the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra and reopening visa services.

The Chinese foreign minister said in December that New Delhi and Beijing had picked up “good momentum”, citing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Tianjin in August for a multilateral summit.

India seems eager to take a bigger step in economic cooperation. Reuters reported on January 9 that in view of “reduced border tensions”, the Union government is planning to scrap restrictions introduced after the Galwan crisis that required Chinese firms seeking Indian government contracts to register with a committee, and secure political and security clearances.

The push by both India and China to rebalance their relationship despite the challenges has been so striking that even the US has taken note of this changed mood.

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

Maharashtra politics. The Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies won most of the 29 municipal corporation elections in Maharashtra on Friday, a day after polling took place.

In Mumbai, the country’s richest civic body, the BJP and Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena faction 118 seats of the 227 in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

The victory margin was slimmer than predicted by exit polls. The Opposition alliance mainly comprising the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena group and Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena won 72.

The BJP also won in Nagpur, Nashik and Navi Mumbai, and defeated the alliance of the two Nationalist Congress Party factions in their Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad strongholds. The Shinde Sena won in Thane and Kalyan-Dombivali.

The state’s six major political parties had contested the polls in varying combinations of tie-ups in different cities. In several cities, the civic polls took place after a four-year delay.

Bloodshed in Iran. About 2,000 persons, including security personnel, have been killed during the anti-government protests in Iran, an official told Reuters on Wednesday.

India issued a fresh travel advisory urging its citizens to avoid travelling to Iran. The country’s embassy in Tehran also asked Indian citizens in Iran to leave at the earliest. There are about 10,000 Indians in Iran, including a large number of students.

The protests, which began on December 28, initially focused on discontent about rising inflation. However, they later expanded in scope as protesters in more than 100 towns demanded an end to clerical rule. On January 8, the government snapped internet access and telephone lines, largely cutting off the country from the outside world. The authorities in Iran have accused the United States and Israel of inciting the unrest.

What led to Zubeen Garg’s death? The Assamese singer was “severely intoxicated” and not wearing a life jacket when he drowned during a yacht trip in September, the Singapore Police told a coroner’s court. Assistant Superintendent of Police David Lim said Garg had refused to wear a life vest despite repeated reminders and swam away from the yacht before becoming motionless and floating face down.

Garg died in September during a yacht trip in Singapore, a day before he was scheduled to perform at the North East India Festival there.

He was pulled back on board and given cardiopulmonary resuscitation before being taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead. An autopsy found 333 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of blood in his system. The police said there was no evidence of suicide, duress or coercion.

Also on Scroll last week

• Assam’s nowhere people: 24 hours to leave India, tossed back and forth across Bangladesh border
• Are blanket bans on VPN use in India legal?
• Single mother, BJP MLA, Marwari trader: The Bengal voters on EC’s SIR radar
• Why Haryana wants cameras in hospitals before settling insurance claims
• How sugarcane farming fuelled a rise in leopard attacks in Maharashtra
• Why hundreds of H-1B visa holders are stuck in India after the winter break
• Across South Asia, leaders are promoting hate to distract citizens from economic insecurity
• Why Indian laws fail to protect women online
• Shakti Samanta centenary: ‘There wasn’t a moment when he wasn’t thinking of films’
• ‘Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos’ review: In scattershot comedy, anything goes and little lands

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The Commission for Air Quality Management on Saturday imposed Stage 4 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan to control pollution in Delhi and the National Capital Region, as the air quality slipped to the “severe” category.

A day earlier, the commission had invoked Stage 3 measures.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in the Delhi-NCR region. The commission is a statutory body formed in 2020 to address pollution in the NCR and adjoining areas.

It stated on Saturday that the Air Quality Index of Delhi was 400 at 4 pm and deteriorated to 428 by 8 pm due to “calm winds, stable atmosphere and unfavourable meteorological conditions resulting into trapping of the pollutants”.

The India Meteorological Department and the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras have forecast further deterioration of air quality, the commission added.

“Accordingly, in an effort to prevent further deterioration of the air quality, the sub-committee on GRAP hereby decide to proactively invoke all actions under Stage 4,” it stated.

An AQI in the “severe” category signifies hazardous pollution levels that can pose serious risks even to healthy individuals.

Stage 4 restrictions under GRAP include a ban on trucks entering the region and halting construction activities for public and private projects. All schools, except for classes 10 and 12, also shift to hybrid mode.

Stage 3 measures, which were already in place, include a ban on non-essential construction work and the closure of stone crushers and mining activities.

Additionally, the use of BS-III petrol and BS-IV diesel cars is restricted in Delhi and the NCR.

BS norms, or Bharat Stage Emission Standards, are regulations set by the Indian government to control air pollutants from motor vehicles. The higher the BS norm, the stricter the standard and the lower the permissible emissions.

The commission’s decision on Saturday came as the overall AQI in Delhi rested at 400, according to the Sameer application, which provides hourly updates from the Central Pollution Control Board.

On Sunday, the AQI in the national capital was 439 at 7.05 am.

Watch: Delhi’s pollution crisis needs drastic action

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

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

Delhi and the neighbouring cities have recorded air quality in the “poor” or worse categories since mid-October.

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

On December 24, the commission revoked Stage 4 restrictions that had come into force on December 13 after the air quality slipped into the “severe plus” category.

Also read:

• India’s car-first cities should prioritise walking to help tackle smog

• How Delhi’s rich are escaping air pollution

I have never woken up with an armour-like back and many tiny legs as Gregor Samsa did in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. But I know for sure that I am a cockroach – the disgusting species that Charles Bukowski writes in a poem about killing with a subtle pleasure for living rent-free in his home. Maybe it is not just about the rent. It could be the insect’s audacity to flaunt its existence. The crime is its visibility.

How dare it leave the sewage, even momentarily, for a place where it does not belong?

Samsa, the salesman in Kafka’s novel, met the same fate at the hands of his helpless family when he left his room.

I am acutely aware of this. I know what would happen to me if I dared to breach boundaries. That is why I tend to isolate myself in places that conceal my visibility, hoping that this situation might end one day – the day I metamorphose into a human being.

Mind you, don’t pity me. Never. I remind you of what Babasaheb Ambedkar said in his essay Waiting for a Visa, “Though my condition was pitiable I did not like to be pitied.”

Perhaps, it isn’t pity. You are kind enough to empathise with me. But I don’t want you to be kind either. I remember complaining to my DPhil supervisor about how her kindness was overwhelming, and how I was not used to being treated in such a manner.

Humiliation? Yes. It is painful, yet familiar.

But kindness drags me into a world of unfamiliarity. It disorients me and confronts the comfort that I have known so far of being a cockroach.

“Can’t you see that I am a cockroach?” That is what I want to say to anyone who tries to be kind to me.

You are probably wondering where I am going with all this. Will this end with a hint of hope? Maybe, maybe not. But isn’t hope a tricky thing? It is easy to confuse it with delusion.

It is possible to think that I am being delusional when I say that I am a cockroach. You may say, “It is just in your mind” or that I am making it up, something similar to what Justice Brown of the US Supreme Court said in the Plessy vs Ferguson case in 1896 when he held that segregation of races does not treat the Blacks as inferior unless they want to construe it in such a manner.

But my mind doesn’t operate in a vacuum. What am I supposed to think when I constantly read that my fellow Dalits are being killed – not only for marrying non-Dalits but for actions such as sporting a moustache, for sitting cross-legged, for riding a horse, or dressing up. In short, for breaching society’s idea of how a Dalit should be?

How am I supposed to feel when my fellow Dalit students are forced to clean bathrooms in schools, humiliated as “quotawallas” or even driven to suicide in colleges?

I myself was expelled from my previous university without any inquiry for demanding scholarships. Not to mention the humiliation I have faced since my school days. In every nook and corner, I am reminded that I am a cockroach that must never come out of the sewer. I have internalised these reminders.

But that’s only half the story. Being a cockroach is familiar, but there is also the violence that I commit upon myself, as my therapist once put it. I do want to be a human being with dignity, for I am not made for the sewer. So far, I have outsourced the task of recognising me as human to others. When others appreciate or validate me for the things I do, I feel like a human – at least until the feeling fades away.

I continued chasing such validation, only to realise that it never made me feel completely human. It was a conditional recognition that I imposed upon myself. I got into Oxford University! Yes, you are a human now, but you must prove that you deserve to be here.

I completed my MPhil in law with distinction! Yes, you are a human now, but that’s not enough. Perhaps my examiners were kind and liked doing charity work. Nothing killed the cockroach to give birth to the human.

It is ironic that since my undergraduate days my research area has centred on human rights. Several moments of deep breathing, hours of therapy sessions, the constant support of my loved ones and reading philosophical texts gave me the courage to entertain the possibility that I could be wrong.

What if I am not a cockroach?

What if I deserve self-respect irrespective of what I do?

Yes, the time has come to rebel.

Albert Camus says that to rebel is to say no and yes at the same time: “no” to existing conditions, an awakening to the realisation that they cannot continue like this. And “yes” to certain parts of one’s self that must be preserved. I have started saying no to the thought that I am a cockroach and began to think for myself, as a rebel initially does.

I know this is not a linear process, and I may be forced to return to my sewer whenever I say yes. But I will still come out again and again. I don’t think I have any other option, for I, “a glorious thing made up of stardust”, do not belong to the sewer.

Do I like doing this? Am I happy? I am – or at least I imagine that I am, and perhaps, you could imagine it too.

Bhimraj M is a DPhil student in Law at the University of Oxford. He currently coordinates the Oxford South Asian Ambedkar Forum, an anti-caste society at Oxford.

January 17 marks the death anniversary of Dalit student Rohith Vemula, who died by suicide on this day in 2016.

Music composer AR Rahman in an interview to BBC Asian Network said that the Hindi film industry has changed over the past eight years, attributing it to a shift in power and possibly to “a communal thing”.

His remarks sparked a political row, with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party rejecting his claims and Opposition leaders expressing concern.

In the interview on Thursday, the Oscar-winning composer said he often hears about projects falling through indirectly.

“People who are not creative have the power now to decide things, and this might have been a communal thing also, but not in my face,” Rahman said. “[It comes to me] as Chinese whispers that they booked you…but the music company went and funded the movie and got their five composers [hired].”

Asked whether he had faced prejudice when he began working in Hindi cinema in the 1990s, Rahman said: “Maybe I didn’t get to know all this stuff…maybe God concealed all this stuff.”

“But for me, I never felt any of those [in the 1990s],” he said. “But the past eight years, maybe, because the power shift has happened.”

Rahman also said that as an artist, he tries to avoid movies that are “made with bad intentions”.

He added that audiences are capable of judgement and are not influenced by “divisive” movies.

“I definitely think people are smarter than that,” Rahman said. “Do you think people are going to get influenced by movies? They have something called internal conscience which knows what the truth is and what manipulation is.”

The BJP on Friday rejected Rahman’s remarks, saying that the Hindi film industry continues to function on talent and merit, not religion.

Union minister Ramdas Athawale said that he disagreed with Rahman’s statement, IANS reported.

“The Hindi film industry has many artists from the Muslim community, including Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan, who are loved by people in Maharashtra and across India,” he was quoted as saying.

Mumbai, Maharashtra: On Singer AR rahman statement, Union Minister Ramdas Athawale says, "I believe there is no truth to AR Rahman's allegations, as the film industry has many artists from the Muslim community, including Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, and Aamir Khan, who are loved… pic.twitter.com/aKGsohZ4YE

— IANS (@ians_india) January 16, 2026

BJP Minority Morcha president Syed Bhasha also dismissed Rahman’s claims, saying that opportunities in the film industry depend on a project’s success rather than the ruling party.

“Rahman reportedly said he has not received opportunities under the BJP government, but that is not true,” IANS quoted Bhasha as saying. “Since 1992, he has delivered major hits such as Slumdog Millionaire and Madras Cafe, and has earned awards.”

Bhasha also cited the example of Shah Rukh Khan, who won the National Film Award for Best Actor in 2025 for his film Jawan.

However, leaders from Opposition parties expressed concern over Rahman’s remarks.

Congress leader Husain Dalwai described the issue as unfortunate and concerning.

“Rahman is a great musician and an Oscar winner who is known all over the world,” Dalwai said. “If he is facing difficulties because he is a Muslim, then it is very sad and wrong. Sidelining someone of his stature is a loss not only for the film industry but for the country.”

Congress MP Tariq Anwar also urged the government to take note of the matter.

Mumbai, Maharashtra: On Singer AR rahman statement, Congress leader Husain Dalwai says, "This is very sad. A.R. Rahman is a great musician and has even won an Oscar. People around the world know him. If he is facing such difficulties because he is Muslim, then in my view, it is… pic.twitter.com/tut2843wk7

— IANS (@ians_india) January 16, 2026

The Indian Embassy in Tehran on Saturday urged Iranian authorities to grant consular access to 16 Indians who were part of a ship’s crew and were detained by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on December 8.

The detained persons were aboard the vessel MT Valiant Roar, which is owned by Glory International FZ LLC / Prime Tankers LLC, Dubai, also referred to as Global Tankers in India.

The crew members were detained while the vessel was in international waters off the Dibba port near Dubai, PTI quoted their family members as saying. They added that the vessel was carrying Very Low Sulphur Fuel Oil, but Iranian authorities have accused the crew of smuggling diesel.

In a statement posted on X, the embassy said: “Around mid-December 2025, the mission was informed about the detention of the vessel MT Valiant Roar by Iranian authorities, with 16 Indian crew members on board.”

It added that the Consulate of India in the port city of Bandar Abbas had written to the Iranian government on December 14 seeking consular access.

Regarding detention of a Merchant Vessel (MT VALIANT ROAR) with Indian Crew members, by Iranian Authorities.@MEAIndia @IndianDiplomacy pic.twitter.com/9h1YV1rGd6

— India in Iran (@India_in_Iran) January 17, 2026

The embassy said that access had not been granted despite repeated requests since then. It added that the Indian Consulate in Dubai was also pressing the UAE-based ship-owning company for legal support for the crew, having first contacted the company on December 15.

“The Iranian authorities were also requested to allow the crew to communicate with their families in India,” the statement added.

It said that the consulate had been in touch with the Iran-based agents of the company to ensure the provision of food, water and fuel for the ship, and to arrange legal representation for the crew in Iranian courts.

The embassy added that the case would follow Iran’s legal process. “However, the mission and the consulate continue to press the Iranian authorities to grant early consular access to the crew and to ensure expeditious completion of the judicial proceedings,” the statement said.

The embassy’s statement came after family members of the 16 Indians approached the Delhi High Court, seeking directions to the Union government to provide consular access to the detained persons and ensure the timely completion of the investigation, as well as their repatriation to India, PTI reported.

On Thursday, the High Court issued notice to the Union government. The matter has been listed for hearing on January 21, PTI quoted the counsel for the petitioners Gurinder Pal Singh as saying.

The parents of one of the detained crew members, Ketan Mehta, have also appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to intervene and secure their son’s release.

Also read: Cases of seafarers being abandoned by employers are soaring – and Indians are among the worst hit

The Opposition All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam on Saturday released the first phase of its manifesto for the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections, promising a monthly assistance of Rs 2,000 for women and free bus travel for men, The Hindu Business Line reported.

The elections for the 234-seat Assembly are likely to be held in April or May.

Addressing a press conference, party general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami announced five promises under the first phase of the manifesto, The New Indian Express reported.

The first is a monthly allowance of Rs 2,000 each under the Kula Vilakku scheme to women-headed families holding ration cards, The Hindu Business Line reported. The party said that the amount will be transferred to the head of the family’s bank account.

The free bus travel scheme, currently available only to women, will be extended to men travelling on city buses, Palaniswami added.

The state government will also purchase land and construct concrete houses for those without homes in rural areas under the Amma Illam Yojana scheme, the party said.

It added that in urban areas, land would be purchased and apartments built and provided free of cost to those who do not own homes.

The manifesto also noted that the Union government had announced that the 100-day employment Scheme would be extended to 125 days. This scheme for the development of rural areas will be enhanced to provide 150 days of employment in the state, it added.

The party further promised two-wheelers to five lakh women with a subsidy of Rs 25,000 each under the Amma Two-Wheeler scheme, The New Indian Express reported.

சட்டமன்றப் பொதுத் தேர்தல் - 2026

அனைத்திந்திய அண்ணா திராவிட முன்னேற்றக் கழக முதல்கட்ட தேர்தல் வாக்குறுதிகள்!#AIADMKManifesto #EPSfor2026 @EPSTamilNadu pic.twitter.com/IMoUasvOib

— AIADMK - SayYesToWomenSafety&AIADMK (@AIADMKOfficial) January 17, 2026

During the press conference, Palaniswami was asked how a monthly allowance of Rs 2,000 to women-headed families would be possible without increasing the burden of debt on the state government.

“They [the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam] were incompetent,” the newspaper quoted the party general secretary as saying. “We demonstrated our capability.”

He noted that the debt burden of the state government was just Rs 5.18 lakh crore when the AIADMK was in power despite the Covid-19 pandemic leading to no revenue earnings.

“However, we handled that situation efficiently,” The New Indian Express quoted him as saying. “But the DMK said an expert committee would be formed to reduce the debt burden of the state, and the revenue would go up.”

However, the debt burden has increased, he added.

Palaniswami also said that further promises would be announced after the party’s manifesto committee completes its meetings across the state, The New Indian Express reported.

Also read: Tamil Nadu 2026 elections: Will the dawn of coalition politics end the era of Dravidian parties?

Asiatic lions in Gujarat are increasingly occupying a variety of different landscapes as their population grows, a census exercise by the Gujarat Forest Department found.

Between 2020 and 2025, the population of Asiatic lions increased from 674 individuals to 891, the census, published as a paper in the Global Ecology and Conservation journal, says. However, of these, only 394 were found in the core areas comprising the Gir National Park, Gir Wildlife Sanctuary, and its adjoining areas. A majority of lions formed satellite populations in several other regions outside the core zone.

Asiatic lions are found in Gujarat’s Saurashtra region, which is a semi-arid landscape hosting six protected areas and a diverse range of habitats, including grasslands, dry deciduous forest, and coastal ecosystems. As the population grew, the spatial distribution range of lions also increased, from 30,000 square kilometres in 2020 to 35,000 sq km in 2025, marking a 16.67% increase. “What we’re seeing is lions reclaiming their original habitats,” said Mohan Ram, a senior forest officer with the Gujarat Forest Department, and lead author of the study.

The growth of satellite populations parallels the recovery of other large carnivores from other parts of the world, such as wolves in Europe and cougars in North America, the paper notes. However, the implications of a growing lion population in India are different, particularly in the rapidly developing Saurashtra region. Emerging habitats “require a holistic management approach encompassing community engagement, conflict-safe cropping systems, awareness programs, and beneficiary-oriented schemes to foster coexistence,” says the paper.

Changing habitats

The Gujarat Forest Department study credits the increase in population to a mix of law enforcement, habitat protection, prey availability, political will, and scientific input. The revival of Asiatic lions in India led the International Union for Conservation of Nature to reclassify the species from “critically endangered” to “endangered” in 2008.

The Gir Protected Areas – comprising the Gir National Park, Gir Wildlife Sanctuary – are the [core] region where lions have always occurred. The study found the development of nine satellite lion populations outside this core zone. Outside the Gir Protected Area, the most number of lions were found in the Savarkundla-Liliya region of Amreli (125 lions), and Bhavnagar – both human-dominated landscapes.

Lion populations have also increased along the coasts of Bhavnagar, southwest of Saurashtra, between Sutrapada and Veraval, and southeast, covering Rajula, Jafrabad, and Nageshree. “This growth can be attributed to the availability of dense vegetative cover in the form of Prosopis juliflora thickets and Casuarina plantations, coupled with the presence of prey species such as nilgai and wild pig, as well as relatively low levels of human disturbance in these forest patches,” says the paper.

Of note is the “recolonisation” of Barda Wildlife Sanctuary by lions, which were last spotted there in 1879. Today it hosts a population of 17 lions. “This suggests improved ecological conditions, especially in terms of protection, prey availability (including nilgai and wild pig), and potential corridors, which have facilitated natural dispersal into Barda Wildlife Sanctuary.”

New populations also were recorded for the first time in the Jetpur and Babra-Jasdan regions, with six and four lions respectively. “Understanding whether satellite populations represent stable demographic units or transient sink areas will be important for forecasting future population structure and dispersal pathways,” the paper says.

According to Ravi Chellam, a lion expert and CEO of the Metastring Foundation, satellite populations cannot be viewed as being distinct from the core population of Gir. “There’s not much geographical distance between these sites. Lions are very mobile, and their presence at a site doesn’t necessarily mean they stay confined to these sites,” he said.

The dispersal of lions from Gir area “indicate almost saturation of core habitats,” the paper notes. A number of experts, including Chellam, have called for lions to be translocated out of the region to support the long-term sustenance of lions in India.

Population increase

Lions primarily preferred forest habitats, says the paper, followed by “wastelands,” an administrative term used to describe a variety of land types not hosting dense forest. Such lands are preferred because “they offer relatively reduced human disturbance and provide prey species like nilgai and feral livestock, making them suitable for lions both during day and night,” says the paper. Lions were also found in landscapes like agricultural fields, and to a lesser degree in built-up areas.

As lions increasingly occupy mixed-use habitats, particularly human-dominated landscapes, it risks “elevating the potential for human-lion interactions,” says the paper. Higher densities of lions “could lead to reduced territory sizes, increased overlap among prides and male coalitions, and greater competition for access to breeding females and high-density prey patches,” it goes on to say.

Human conflicts with lions are already on the rise in Gujarat, a 2024 study by researchers from Wildlife Institute of India found. Between 2012 and 2017, the cumulative number of villages reporting attacks on livestock increased by 105 per year, “suggestive of an expanding lion population.” Fear of lions and economic loss were the leading factors for intolerance towards lions.

“The expanding distribution of lions is pushing them into sub-optimal human-dominated habitats, because they now have to navigate barriers like highways, railway lines, open wells, and illegally electrified fences. Poor people often bear the brunt of these unwanted interactions,” said Chellam.

In March, the government revealed in Parliament that 669 lions had died between 2020 and 2025, due to old age, illnesses, injuries from fights, cub mortality, falling into open wells, electrocution and accidents, among other issues.

When asked, Ram of the Gujarat Forest Department said “conflict is a different issue from the census,” adding, “Based on this exercise, health monitoring and mitigation measures can be specifically targeted to reduce impacts. All of these factors can be helped with proper planning.”

Methodology concerns

The lion census exercise used the minimal total count method to identify individual lions. The Forest Department drew maps of 13 administrative divisions where lion presence had been previously recorded, which were divided into 735 sampling units. Each sampling unit had an enumerator – a beat guard or forester – two assistant enumerators and a volunteer, who were in charge of collecting field data over a 24-hour period. This included recording sightings via photographs and a form specifying gender, markings, cub presence among others. The exercise included over 3,000 people.

Sightings were then cross verified at regional and zonal levels, and when required, artificial intelligence was used to ensure no duplicate findings.

However, this method is also prone to human error, said Chellam. “Unlike tigers and leopards, lions don’t have distinctive body markings that will enable identification of individual lions from camera trap photos. If a guard is to stay awake continuously for 24 hours, what guarantee is there that there will be no errors?” he said, adding, “Most wildlife population estimates provide a range, but this method provides a single specific number through an inexact method.”

Researchers have proposed other methods of calculating lion populations accurately, including capture-recapture methods, which includes capturing images of some animals, marking them, and recapturing the image to see what proportion were previously identified to estimate total populations. Lions can also be distinguished by their whisker spot marks.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Fresh unrest was reported in West Bengal’s Murshidabad on Saturday, a day after violence broke out in the district following the death of a migrant worker in Jharkhand, PTI reported.

Tensions have been reported in the district since Friday following the death of 36-year-old Alauddin Sheikh, a migrant worker from Beldanga area who died in Jharkhand.

Sheikh’s family members alleged that he was beaten to death and later hung to make it appear as a suicide, The Telegraph reported. Protests erupted after his body was brought back to the village.

On Saturday, protesters blocked National Highway 12, disrupting traffic for several hours. They also damaged a railway gate and attempted to disrupt train services on the Sealdah-Lalgola section of the Eastern Railway, the news agency reported.

Protesters claimed that migrant workers from Murshidabad face repeated attacks and unsafe conditions in other states because they are Bengali speakers, The Times of India reported.

Police intervened to clear the blockade, resorting to lathi charge at some locations, PTI quoted Kumar Sunny Raj, the superintendent of police of Murshidabad as saying.

He added that around 15 to 20 people had been detained in connection with the violence over the past two days.

More than 12 people have sustained injuries and at least two journalists were assaulted since the violence broke out on Friday.

A woman journalist, Soma Maity, from a local television news channel sustained injuries while covering the unrest and cameraperson Ranjit Mahato was admitted to Murshidabad Medical College and Hospital with head injuries and internal haemorrhage, The Times of India reported.

Meanwhile, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday said that she did not support the violence but added that it is “not in her hands”, The Wire reported. She also urged persons to stay away from the mob.

“I did not cause the incident,” Banerjee was quoted as saying. “I did not ask people to go into the mob.”

Alleging a political conspiracy, Banerjee claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party was instigating unrest in the state.

“Migrant workers are being tortured,” she was quoted as saying. “The BJP is instigating riots, and behind this, there are agencies of the [Union] government of India.”

BJP leader Sambit Patra accused Banerjee of attempting to divide Bengal on the “foundation of appeasement politics”, PTI reported.

“Violence is currently happening in Murshidabad,” Patra was quoted as saying. “NH 12 has been blocked, and all train services have been suspended…and Mamata Banerjee is justifying it, saying it is happening due to the minorities’ anger.”

The Ganga Sabha, which administers the Har-ki-Pauri ghat in Uttarakhand’s Haridwar, on Friday installed hoardings and banners prohibiting the entry of non-Hindus at the religious site, the Hindustan Times reported.

Nandan Kumar, town commissioner of the Haridwar Municipal Corporation, told the newspaper that the matter had come to the notice of the authorities, but no directive had yet been issued. He added that action would be taken once instructions were received from the state government.

Ganga Sabha chief Nitin Gautam, however, cited a municipal bylaw enacted in 1916 under the guidance of Congress leader Madan Mohan Malviya, which reportedly restricted the entry, residence and commercial activities of non-Hindus in the Har-ki-Pauri area.

“Given the increasing influx of visitors and instances of non-Hindus entering this holy site, we are merely adhering to these provisions,” the newspaper quoted Gautam as saying.

He added that the regulation should be extended to the remaining ghats, The Indian Express reported.

“We had earlier demanded a ban on the entry of non-Hindus not only at Har-ki-Pauri but also at all 105 Ganga ghats in Haridwar to preserve the sanctity and spiritual significance of this ancient Hindu pilgrimage site,” the Hindustan Times quoted him as saying.

He said that the managing body had put up boards informing visitors about the prohibition on Friday.

On Thursday, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said that the state government was deliberating on the matter as “Haridwar holds deep historical, religious, and cultural significance”, The Indian Express reported.

“We are in ongoing talks with all stakeholders there, including members of the Ganga Sabha, representatives of religious organisations, and revered saints,” the newspaper quoted Dhami as saying.

The Bharatiya Janata Party leader added that the state government was carefully reviewing all existing laws and regulations related to Haridwar and other pilgrimage sites, after which a decision would be taken.

Several posters with "Entry of non Hindus prohibited" has come up at several places in and around Har-ki-Pauri in Haridwar. pic.twitter.com/3G9cyq4hrG

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) January 16, 2026

The posters at Har-ki-Pauri triggered a row on Friday, with Opposition parties describing the move as unconstitutional.

Samajwadi Party leader ST Hasan said that the country was for everyone and not just one particular community, The Indian Express reported.

“It is not anyone’s private property,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. Hasan added that any Indian could travel from one place to another in the country as per the Constitution.

“Such discussions should be stopped and prohibited,” the Samajwadi Party leader said. “They are spreading hatred in our society.”

Satpal Brahmachari, former Haridwar municipal committee chairperson and the Congress MP for Sonipat, said that the ghats of the Ganga and the site of the Kumbh Mela extended up to Roorkee, where many non-Hindus reside, the Hindustan Times reported.

“In today’s multi-religious society, how feasible is such a blanket prohibition?” the newspaper quoted him as asking.

Congress MLA Qazi Nizamuddin said that while bylaws should be respected, the issue was being politicised. He claimed that the ruling BJP government in the state was using the controversy to “divert attention” from “governance issues”.

However, Uttarakhand BJP chief Mahendra Bhatt said that “sanatan” sentiments should be respected on the issue of the entry of non-Hindus in the religious site, The Indian Express reported.

Sanatana Dharma is a term some use as a synonym for Hinduism.

Bhatt claimed that the objections raised by the Opposition were motivated by appeasement politics.

“This rule has already been self-established there, and therefore everyone should follow the traditions of religious heads and the local priest community,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

The Enforcement Directorate on Friday said it has filed a chargesheet against Jawad Ahmad Siddiqui, the chairperson of the Al-Falah group, and the Al-Falah Charitable Trust in a money-laundering case, The New Indian Express reported.

The Al-Falah group has been under scrutiny in an investigation linked to the November 10 blast near Delhi’s Red Fort.

The central agency also attached assets worth about Rs 140 crore belonging to Al-Falah University, which is owned by the Al-Falah group.

The case pertains to the alleged generation and laundering of funds linked to the trust, Al-Falah University and other associated institutions and entities owned by the Al-Falah group.

Siddiqui was arrested on November 18 and is in judicial custody.

The Enforcement Directorate on Friday said it had quantified the alleged proceeds of the alleged crime in the case to be Rs 493.2 crore, The Hindu reported.

The case

The blast near the Red Fort metro station left 13 persons dead. Umar Un Nabi, a doctor, was believed to have been driving the car that exploded. Two days after the explosion, the Union government described it as a “terrorist incident”.

Since then, the National Investigation Agency has arrested at least nine persons linked to the blast.

Hours before the blast, the police also said that it had cracked an “inter-state and transnational terror module” in Faridabad and Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur. The police said at the time that it had recovered 2,900 kg of improvised explosive device-making material in raids in several states.

During its investigation, the police had alleged that the key suspects in the case, including Nabi, who was a faculty member, used a room on the Al-Falah Medical College campus in Haryana’s Faridabad to plan logistics for transporting ammonium nitrate for multiple blasts in the National Capital Region.

The college is part of Al-Falah University.

The vehicle used in the blast had also been parked inside the campus for nearly 20 days, the police had said at the time.

Siddiqui, who has also been the chancellor of Al-Falah University since 2014, had been taken into custody under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act after investigators examined material seized during searches conducted on November 18.

The case filed by the Enforcement Directorate was based on two first information reports filed by the Delhi Police, which alleged that Al-Falah University had falsely claimed accreditation by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council and misrepresented its eligibility under the University Grants Commission Act.

The National Assessment and Accreditation Council is an autonomous body under the University Grants Commission that assesses and accredits higher educational institutions such as colleges and universities to determine their “quality status”.

The University Grants Commission had also said that the Al-Falah University is recognised only as a state private university and has never been eligible for central grants.

The Enforcement Directorate has alleged that Siddiqui played an active role in the “fraudulent misrepresentations to regulators/stakeholders and consequential admissions and fee collections”, The Hindu reported on Friday.

Siddiqui “exercised dominant control over Al-Falah Charitable Trust, Al-Falah University (including Al-Falah School of Medical Sciences and Research Centre) and related entities, and is found a key beneficiary of the unlawful proceeds”, it claimed.

The central agency alleged that as the managing trustee and chancellor, he exercised “complete administrative, financial and operational control, with other office-bearers functioning as nominal or proxy persons”.

More than Rs 110 crore was routed to family-controlled firms, it added.

The ED listed several alleged violations, including misrepresentation of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council status and false claims under the University Grants Commission, The Hindu reported.

“The establishment/functioning of the medical college involved violations of NMC [National Medical Commission] norms and procurement of approvals/certifications through misrepresentation and suppression of material facts,” the news agency quoted the central agency as having said.

The commission is a regulatory body for medical education and practice.

The Commission for Air Quality Management on Friday invoked Stage 3 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan in Delhi and the National Capital Region after the air quality deteriorated.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in the Delhi-NCR region. The commission is a statutory body formed in 2020 to address pollution in the NCR and adjoining areas.

Stage 3 measures include a ban on non-essential construction work and the closure of stone crushers and mining activities, in addition to the measures already imposed under Stage 1 and Stage 2.

They also include the shifting of primary school up to Class 5 to hybrid mode. Parents and students have the option to choose between offline and online classes wherever available.

At 8.05 pm, Delhi’s air quality index stood at 346, placing it in the “very poor” category, according to the Sameer application, which provides hourly updates from the Central Pollution Control Board.

Weather forecasts by the India Meteorological Department and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology indicate that slow wind speeds, a stable atmosphere and unfavourable meteorological conditions are likely to prevent the dispersal of pollutants, an unidentified official told PTI.

As a result, Delhi’s average AQI is expected to breach the 400-mark and enter the “severe” category in the coming days, the news agency reported.

• Watch: Delhi’s pollution crisis needs drastic action

A value of 201 and 300 means “poor” air quality, while between 301 and 400 indicates “very poor” air. Between 401 and 450 indicates “severe” air pollution, while anything above the 450 threshold is termed “severe plus”. An AQI in the “severe” and above category signifies hazardous pollution levels that can pose serious risks even to healthy individuals.

On January 2, Stage 3 restrictions had been revoked in the national capital after air quality improved, though measures under Stage 1 and Stage 2 remained in force.

Delhi and the neighbouring cities have recorded air quality in the “poor” or worse categories since mid-October.

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

Also read:

• Delhi records most polluted December since 2018

• Why air quality numbers in Delhi vary widely

The Ministry of External Affairs on Friday urged Indian citizens to leave Iran amid the anti-government protests in the country.

The ministry said it had issued advisories asking Indians to avoid travelling to Iran and citizens already residing in the West Asian country to leave “by available means, including commercial flights”.

Speaking at a press briefing, Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal emphasises that commercial flights were still operating out of Iran and Indians leaving the country “should make use of those”.

New Delhi added that it is monitoring the situation in Iran and will take steps for the welfare of Indian citizens “if the need arises”.

The comments were made in response to reporters’ questions about the ministry’s assessment of the situation in Iran and if there were plans to evacuate Indians from there.

The ministry said that there are about 9,000 Indians in Iran. “They are mostly students, people connected with business, some professionals as well, pilgrims and seafarers,” Jaiswal added.

The protests, which began on December 28, initially focused on discontent about rising inflation.

However, they later expanded in scope as protesters in more than 100 towns demanded an end to clerical rule.

On January 8, the Iranian government snapped internet access and telephone lines, largely cutting off the country from the outside world. The authorities have accused the United States and Israel of inciting the unrest.

The restrictions were eased on Tuesday, AP reported. However, text messaging services were still down and internet users were only able to connect to government-approved websites locally.

On Friday, the United States-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said that the toll had risen to 3,090. This would make the ongoing protests the deadliest among all the unrest in Iran in several decades.

While Iranian state media reported that 3,000 persons had been arrested in connection with the violence, the Human Rights Activists News Agency said that the number was more than 18,400.

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump claimed that he had been told that the killing of protesters in Iran had stopped and that “there is no plan for executions”.

Trump’s claim came hours before Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Fox News that “there is no plan” to hang people, when asked about the crackdown on the protesters.

Trump had on Tuesday told the protesters that help was on the way and warned Tehran of “strong action” when he was asked about potential executions.

The suggestion in court hearings and in recent media coverage that community dogs are a menace has come as a surprise to many of us working in international dog welfare and public health.

After years of measurable public-health progress, human-canine interactions in India appear to be as compassionate and tolerant as they have ever been.

Yet India is now being told it has a growing “dog problem”

This is not to suggest that there are no challenges – until there are zero human rabies deaths, no one can claim the job is done. But the tone of the debate does not reflect the data nor reality.

Rabies deaths and dog bites in India have declined substantially over the past two decades. A study published in The Lancet: Infectious Diseases in 2025 found that rabies deaths had fallen to around 5,700 per year in 2022 and 2023 as compared to 20,000 deaths per year reported in 2003.

The same study reported a dog bite incidence of 5.6 per 1,000 persons in 2022 and 2023, which is approximately three times lower than the incidence of 15.6 per 1,000 persons reported in 2003 using the same community survey methodology.

The Lancet study also called for accelerated action in India to reach the goal of eliminating rabies infections by 2030. The infection is caused by the rabies virus and transmitted through bites from infected dogs.

There are two key factors to consider.

First, there has been an apparent retreat from implementing the Indian government’s Animal Birth Control Rules – capturing community dogs, sterilising and vaccinating them and then returning them to their habitats.

Second, there is a growing – misplaced – conviction that creating shelters for dogs on a large scale is a viable alternative to animal birth control measures.

The work of our organisation Humane World for Animals India in cities such as Vadodara, Dehradun and Lucknow over the past nine years has shown that sterilising 80% of the local stray dog populations led to a noticeable reduction in complaints about dog bites and aggression on helplines.

Similarly, Abodh Aras of the Mumbai-based The Welfare of Stray Dogs wrote in Scroll in August that consistent sterilisation has led to a stable and decreasing population of non-rabid street dogs in the city.

There is certainly a larger conversation to be had about the risks and fears arising from dog bites on passersby but abandoning the proven method of animal birth control in favour of sheltering is impractical and unsustainable.

I empathise with citizens demanding greater action. Nobody wants to fear being bitten by community dogs or rabies, to watch public money being wasted or see animals suffer. But sheltering is being presented as a false solution.

Shelters are governed by a harsh arithmetic of “input” and “output”. Intake into shelters does not stop when animals are rounded up for the first time. Dog populations rebound rapidly through breeding, immigration and abandonment: remove some dogs from the street and others soon take their place, overwhelming shelters quickly.

It also explains why culling is endless and ineffective, and demonstrates how animal birth control measures disrupt this cycle of continual replacement through sterilisation and return to prevent rebound.

Shelter economics

The United States offers a sobering lesson in shelter economics. It spends over $3 billion a year on more than 4,000 shelters, serving around six million animals each year. Despite the dedicated efforts of staff and volunteers, over 600,000 dogs and cats are killed annually to make space for more animals relinquished by owners or offloaded by authorities who have removed them from the streets.

Britain is no better. The country has a history of the mass killing of stray dogs, like in the mid-18th century in London. This legacy lingers on in some Commonwealth countries where culling laws persist.

In India, too, the mass killing of stray dogs was regarded as the only viable solution until the introduction of animal birth control rules in 2001. These rules aimed to reduce population size by limiting birth rather than increasing death and followed the epidemiological principle of herd immunity, using the vaccination of dogs as the most effective weapon against rabies virus.

The Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023, strengthen the existing framework while also addressing concerns raised by the Supreme Court.

India’s animal birth control measures have inspired similar animal-welfare movements worldwide.

South Asian countries like Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh follow animal birth control measures, like in India. Bhutan has gone further, with royal leadership and an army of youth workers taking the lead, by claiming to have sterilised and vaccinated 100% of the country’s community dog population.

Bhutan had previously tried to shelter stray dogs, which proved expensive and cost the lives of the animals. Culling dogs sporadically also clashed with the country’s cultural emphasis on non-violence. The country turned to animal birth control, implementing it nationwide with success.

Where animal birth control is implemented professionally and at sufficient scale, it works.

In India, the challenge lies not in the method but in its inconsistent execution. In some Indian cities, animal birth control is applied reactively, in response to isolated complaints, or ignores entire neighbourhoods.

Other Indian cities have shown that animal birth control measures can reduce dog populations, dog bites and human rabies deaths when implemented comprehensively.

Like in Jaipur, where the efforts of an organisation called Help in Suffering have halved the community dog population since 1996, establishing herd immunity and significantly reducing rabies. A 2013 study found that in Jaipur, dog bites had also declined by more than half over the previous decade, not only because of lower dog numbers but because sterilisation reduces aggressive behaviour.

Seasonal bite analysis showed that many incidents were associated with mothers defending puppies from perceived threats and that widespread sterilisation sharply reduced these situations.

Evidence, ethics, economics

Putting away all stray dogs in shelters ignores the scale, cost and consequences of such an exercise. In the US, the minimum cost of sheltering and adopting a dog starts at around $380, or Rs 34,000, and it rises steeply with length of stay, behavioural and medical needs.

In contrast, most Indian municipalities spend less than Rs 2,000 per dog to sterilise, vaccinate and return a community dog, like in Lucknow, where the municipal corporation got 11,527 dogs sterilised and vaccinated between January-October 2025, paying about Rs 1,250 per dog.

Attempting to shelter India’s vast population of community dogs living in public institutions such as schools, hospitals, and temples, is logistically and financially unfeasible, and risks leading to immense animal suffering.

India stands at a point where evidence, ethics and economics converge. The animal birth control framework, imperfectly implemented in some places yet undeniably successful where taken seriously, offers a proven, culturally-aligned public health intervention.

Sheltering is an illusory alternative: financially prohibitive, operationally unmanageable at scale, and unavoidably cruel.

The path forward is not to abandon animal birth control but to professionalise it by ensuring consistent city-wide coverage, sufficient intensity, rigorous monitoring and accountability from municipal authorities.

With political will and proper execution, India can strengthen and surpass the successes already achieved in India and abroad, protecting both people and animals, while staying true to the compassionate principles that inspired animal birth control measures in the first place.

Elly Hiby is the director of the International Companion Animal Management Coalition. Views expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of ICAM.

The counting of votes in the 29 municipal corporation elections in Maharashtra, including for the Mumbai civic body, was underway on Friday.

Pune, Nagpur, Thane, Nashik and Navi Mumbai are among the 29 cities.

The six major political parties in the fray in the elections were the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Congress, and the two factions each of the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party. The parties had entered into several combinations of alliances for the 29 municipal polls.

As of 5.30 pm on Friday, the Bharatiya Janata Party and Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena faction were leading in 119 seats in Mumbai, crossing the halfway mark, The Times of India reported.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has 227 seats, with 114 needed to win the election.

The BJP has won 27 seats and the Shinde Sena 10 seats, Mid-Day reported.

The Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena group has won 19 seats and its ally, Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman, has won one. The Congress has won six seats.

In Pune, the BJP has won 29 seats and is leading in 43 others, PTI reported.

In Nagpur, the BJP was leading in 84 seats and the Congress in 41. A party needs 76 seats to win in the city municipal corporation.

In Thane, the Shinde Sena has won 33 seats and the BJP five, PTI reported. A party needs 66 seats to win the election.

In Navi Mumbai, the BJP was leading in 70 seats, followed by Shinde Sena’s 36. A party needs 56 seats to win.

In Jalna, Shrikant Pangarkar, an accused in the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh, won as an independent candidate from a ward.

VIDEO | Jalna, Maharashtra: Journalist Gauri Lankesh murder accused Shrikant Pangarkar celebrates his victory with supporters after winning the Jalna Municipal Corporation elections as an independent candidate.

#Jalna #MaharashtraCivicPolls2026

(Full video available on PTI… pic.twitter.com/slFETxVN1w

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) January 16, 2026

The polling took place on Thursday. State Election Commissioner Dinesh Waghmare estimated that the overall voter turnout would be between 46% and 50%, which would be higher than the 2017 polls, The Hindu reported.

Several exit polls have predicted that the constituents of the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance will win the elections for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, which were held after a four-year delay.

Pollster Axis My India predicted that the coalition of the BJP and the Shiv Sena faction led by Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde will win 131 to 151 seats out of a total of 227 in Mumbai. The rival alliance of the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman Sena and Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) may win 58 to 68 seats, it said.

The third major alliance – comprising the Congress, Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi and Rashtriya Samaj Party – could win 12 to 16 seats, Axis My India predicted.

BMC - Exit Poll – Seat Share - Vote Share (%)#BMCElections2026#ExitPoll2026#AxisMyIndia pic.twitter.com/xE535uMm3B

— Axis My India (@AxisMyIndia) January 15, 2026

Another pollster, JVC, tipped the BJP and Shinde Sena to win 138 seats, the alliance headed by the Uddhav Sena to emerge victorious in 59 places and the coalition led by the Congress to win 23 seats, India Today reported.

Nearly two weeks before polling took place, 68 candidates of the Mahayuti coalition were elected unopposed as several Opposition candidates withdrew their nominations. Of these, 44 belonged to the BJP and 22 to the Shinde Sena. The remaining two were won by Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar’s NCP group.

The wins themselves were not enough for the ruling alliance to clinch control of any municipal corporation. However, the Maharashtra State Election Commission sought reports from the municipal corporations amid the Opposition’s allegations of irregularities in the filing of the poll nominations.

The polls in Mumbai assume significance because the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is India’s richest civic body with an annual budget of over Rs 74,400 crore.

Also read: ‘Money and muscle’: Why Opposition workers are crying foul in Maharashtra civic polls

Shrikant Pangarkar, an accused in the 2017 murder of activist-journalist Gauri Lankesh, won the Jalna Municipal Corporation election on Friday as an Independent candidate in Maharashtra, PTI reported.

Pangarkar defeated Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Raosaheb Dhoble from electoral ward number 13. He secured 2,661 votes, while Dhoble secured 2,477, the news agency quoted an election official as saying.

Counting of votes for 29 civic bodies in Maharashtra, which went to polls a day before, is underway.

Other than Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena, most major political parties fielded candidates in the Jalna civic polls.

Ahead of the November 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections, Pangarkar had briefly joined the Shinde-led Shiv Sena. Following widespread criticism, Shinde had put Pangarkar’s induction into the party on hold.

Lankesh, the editor of a periodical named Gauri Lankesh Patrike and a prominent critic of Hindutva groups, was shot dead outside her home in Bengaluru’s Rajarajeshwari Nagar by a group of men on the night of September 5, 2017, as she was returning home from work.

Pangarkar was accused of arranging firearms and attending a training camp in the murder case.

In September 2024, the Karnataka High Court granted bail to him, along with Bharat Kurane, Sujith Kumar and Sudhanva Gondhalekar.

Pangarkar was a member of the undivided Shiv Sena. He was the Jalna municipal councillor between 2001 and 2006. He joined the Hindutva organisation Hindu Janjagruti Samiti after being dropped by the party during the 2011 civic elections.

He was also accused of plotting to bomb the Sunburn music festival in Pune in 2017 and was arrested by the Anti-Terrorism Squad in Mumbai in 2018.

In August 2024, the Bombay High Court granted bail to Pangarkar, noting that the alleged conspiracy to bomb the festival was never executed.

VIDEO | Jalna, Maharashtra: Journalist Gauri Lankesh murder accused Shrikant Pangarkar celebrates his victory with supporters after winning the Jalna Municipal Corporation elections as an independent candidate.

#Jalna #MaharashtraCivicPolls2026

(Full video available on PTI… pic.twitter.com/slFETxVN1w

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) January 16, 2026

Also Read: Maharashtra civic polls: BJP, allies lead in Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur

The Supreme Court rejected Justice Yashwant Varma’s petition challenging the legality of the inquiry committee constituted by the Lok Sabha speaker to look into corruption charges against him. The bench held that Varma is not entitled to any relief and that “no interference is called for”.

Cash that was unaccounted for was allegedly recovered at Varma’s official residence in Delhi when emergency services responded to a fire there on March 14. He was a judge at the Delhi High Court at that time. The judge said he was in Bhopal when the cash was discovered and claimed that it did not belong to him or his family.

Varma had argued in his petition that although impeachment notices had been submitted in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla constituted the committee unilaterally without waiting for the chairperson of the Upper House to admit the motion. Read on.

The Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies were leading in Mumbai, Pune, Thane and Nagpur as counting of votes is underway for 29 civic bodies in Maharashtra, which went to polls the previous day. In Mumbai, the BJP has won 21 seats and Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena faction has secured 10 seats.

Together, they were also leading in 119 seats out of 227 of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, crossing the halfway mark.

In Pune, the BJP has won 29 seats and is leading in 43 others. In Nagpur, the BJP was leading in 84 seats and the Congress in 41. In Thane, the Shinde Sena has won 33 seats and the BJP five.

Shrikant Pangarkar, an accused in the 2017 murder of activist-journalist Gauri Lankesh, won the Jalna Municipal Corporation election as an Independent candidate. Read on.

A day after marker pens were used on electors’ fingers instead of indelible ink in the municipal corporation polls in Maharashtra, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that the Election Commission’s gaslighting of citizens was “how trust has collapsed in our democracy”. “Vote chori is an anti-national act,” he said about a report about the poll panel’s response to concerns raised by the Opposition parties on the matter.

The State Election Commission on Thursday said that it would investigate the quality of the indelible ink in the marker pens used for the municipal polls. Read on.

‘Money and muscle’: Why Opposition workers are crying foul in Maharashtra civic polls

The Supreme Court has given two weeks to the speaker of the Telangana Assembly to decide on pending disqualification petitions against MLAs who defected from the Bharat Rashtra Samithi to the ruling Congress. The speaker is yet to decide on petitions against three of the 10 BRS MLAs who switched over to the ruling party after the 2023 Assembly elections.

On November 17, the Supreme Court issued a contempt notice to the speaker for refusing to act within the timeline and was hearing the matter on Friday. Read on.

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Lurh Tlang Vavu Sanctuary in Farkawn village of Champhai district has become Mizoram’s first community-led forest dedicated to the sole conservation of Mrs. Hume’s pheasant, the state bird of Mizoram. This initiative marks a rare instance of an entire village proactively setting aside forest land for the conservation of a species.

Mrs. Hume’s pheasant (Syrmaticus hymiae) was scientifically discovered in 1881 from Manipur by Allan Octavian Hume, a British naturalist. He named the bird after his wife, Mary Ann Grindall Hume.

The male Mrs. Hume’s pheasant has a chestnut brown plumage, red patch around the eyes and metallic blue neck feathers with distinct and long, banded tail feathers. The female is patterned in shades of brown, with smaller red patches around the eye.

The species is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Habitat loss and hunting are major threats to the population. Globally there are between 6,000 and 15,000 individuals, mainly found in Mizoram and Manipur in India apart from Myanmar and Thailand.

Protecting a rare bird

A joint survey by the local people and Conservation Mizoram, an NGO working on environmental issues, recorded a healthy population of the bird in the region. The survey found 20 breeding pairs, a concentration that is considered high for this rare species.

The people then decided to formally conserve the area to better protect the rare bird as well as generate employment opportunities through tourism. They converted eight square kilometre forest into a protected sanctuary in collaboration with Conservation Mizoram.

Lalawmaia Sailo, Secretary, Conservation Mizoram, told Mongabay-India that Mrs. Hume’s pheasant is a rare bird. “After seeing the resident population of these birds in their village, people of Farkawn decided to dedicate this land for conservation of the state bird of Mizoram,” he added. “Our survey found there is a good population of vavu (Mizo name for Mrs. Hume’s pheasant) in Farkawn. We found more than 20 breeding pairs in a forest area of seven-eight square kilometers, which is a very healthy number. In consensus with local people, the area was demarcated as a sanctuary for vavu.”

The Lurh Tlang Vavu Sanctuary, located on Tlang mountains, was officially opened for tourists on November 21 this year.

As seen in many northeastern states in India, the forest department has minimal control over community-owned forest land.

“Luit Tarh Vavu Sanctuary is entirely a community project, which the forest department is just monitoring and supporting,” Lalbiakchama Chawngthu, Divisional Forest Officer (DFO), Champhai, told Mongabay-India., “It has been put under (categorised as) a Non-Notified Tree Forest, which is community-managed but protected under The Forest Conservation Act 1980. We have an active range office in Farkawn from where we monitor the forest, but it is managed by the locals of Farkawn.”

Apart from Mrs. Hume’s pheasant, the forest has a rich biodiversity. “We found 275 species of birds in this forest,” Sailo said. “The forest also has animals such as serow (Capricornis sumatraensis), grey goral (Naemorhedus goral), civet (Viverricula indica), golden jackal (Canis aureus), dhole (Cuon alpinus), barking deer (Muntiacus muntjak), porcupine (Hystrix indica) etc.”

For now, these efforts to protect the bird and associated species limits the threat of hunting. Camera traps are also installed in the area to help monitor the bird. As the government-mandated protected forests cover only a small portion of the bird’s potential habitat, these kinds of community-led protection efforts can lead to the conservation of these birds in the long term.

Conservation and livelihood

Farkawn, one of the largest villages in Champhai district has a population of 4,000, along with 800 households. Its location along the India-Myanmar border also makes it a strategically important village.

Jhum or shifting cultivation remains its main occupation, with locals growing crops such as rice, brinjal, ladies finger, ginger, chillies etc. Mithuns (Bos frontalis) are mainly reared for meat. Now, tourism in the sanctuary can generate livelihoods and open up a new avenue of income.

The sanctuary received its first visitors, two tourists from Bengaluru, on the day of the inauguration in November 2025.

“They were actually going to Murlen National Park in Champhai, but drove here after hearing about our sanctuary,” said Lalneihsanga, a resident of the village and a member of the sanctuary’s management committee. Farkawn currently has a tourist lodge and a travellers’ inn to accommodate tourists.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The Supreme Court on Friday stayed a Calcutta High Court verdict from November that disqualified Trinamool Congress leader Mukul Roy from the West Bengal Assembly for defecting from the Bharatiya Janata Party, reported Bar and Bench.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi said that the electronic evidence against Roy, which showed him attending a Trinamool Congress press conference, has yet to be proven.

“See there is AI [artificial intelligence] etc, we do not know whose face etc is there,” the court said. “Electronic evidence has to be tested.”

The court passed its interim directions on a petition filed by Mukul Roy’s son, Subhranshu Roy, Live Law reported.

It also directed Suvendu Adhikari, the leader of Opposition in West Bengal Assembly, and BJP MLA Ambika Roy to respond to the matter within four weeks, Bar and Bench reported.

In June 2021, Mukul Roy defected to the Trinamool Congress months after winning the Krishnanagar Uttar Assembly constituency on a BJP ticket.

Mukul Roy was one of the earliest members of the Trinamool Congress when it was founded in 1997, but joined the BJP in 2017. However, soon after the Trinamool Congress returned to power in the state in May 2021, he rejoined the party.

The BJP has been demanding Mukul Roy’s disqualification as a legislator since he was made the chairman of the public accounts committee in July 2021.

In November, the Calcutta High Court disqualified Mukul Roy from the West Bengal Assembly and set aside his nomination as the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee.

The court also set aside an earlier order by Speaker Biman Banerjee, where he had refused to act on a disqualification petition filed by the BJP.

The court had said he incurred disqualification under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, which states that a member of the House shall be disqualified if, after getting elected, they give up the membership of their party or join another political party.

Adhikari and Ambika Roy had approached the High Court challenging Banerjee’s decision, claiming that there was a press conference to prove Roy had defected.

In November, the High Court highlighted that Mukul Roy had “not denied the contents of the press conference,” Bar and Bench reported.

In 2021, the Modi government unveiled its plan to build a mega infrastructural project on the Great Nicobar Island, the southernmost island of India. In the run-up to the announcement, a crucial government map of the island changed. Corals that hugged Great Nicobar’s coastline disappeared on the map – only to reappear in the middle of the sea.

In this episode of True Story, Scroll’s Executive Editor Supriya Sharma speaks to environment reporter Vaishnavi Rathore about how she broke the story and why it is significant.

Also read: Our coverage of the Great Nicobar Project

The Supreme Court on Thursday directed the speaker of the Telangana Assembly to decide within two weeks on pending disqualification petitions against MLAs who defected from the Bharat Rashtra Samithi to the ruling Congress, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and AG Masih was hearing a compliance petition in the matter, following its July 31 order directing the speaker to decide within three months on the disqualification of the MLAs.

On November 17, the Supreme Court issued a contempt notice to the speaker for refusing to act within the timeline. The matter was heard again on Thursday.

During Thursday’s hearing, the court was informed that seven of the 10 petitions have been disposed of. The counsel for the state government sought two weeks to decide on the remaining three, Live Law reported.

“Two weeks more and we will do it,” Advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi appearing for the state was quoted as saying. “The speaker went to the hospital for eye surgery and the secretary general also changed. It is little bit of an overlap.”

The Bharat Rashtra Samithi had appealed to Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar between March 2024 and April 2024 against the 10 MLAs, who had defected after being elected on the party’s ticket in the 2023 Assembly election.

The tenth schedule states that a member of the House shall be disqualified if, after getting elected, they give up the membership of their party or join another political party.

The Bharat Rashtra Samithi had approached the Supreme Court alleging that the speaker was not initiating any action against the defected MLAs despite repeated petitions.

In July, the Supreme Court had said that if political defections are not curbed, it has the potential to disrupt democracy.

The bench had also set aside a Telangana High Court ruling at the time, which held that courts cannot impose a time limit on the speaker to decide disqualification pleas.

Those who had defected to Congress after winning from a Bharat Rashtra Samithi ticket in the 2023 Telangana Assembly elections are: Danam Nagender, Kadiyam Srihari, Tellam Venkat Rao, Pocharam Srinivas Reddy, Kale Yadaiah, M Sanjay Kumar, Krishnamohan Reddy, Mahipal Reddy, Prakash Goud and Arekapudi Gandhi.

Petitions against Kadiyam Srihari, Danam Nagendar and M Sanjay Kumar are pending before the Speaker, The Hindu reported.

On Thursday, the speaker dismissed petitions against two legislators – Chevella MLA Kale Yadaiah and Banswada MLA Pocharam Srinivas Reddy – while five others had been dismissed in December.

Two persons were detained on Friday in connection with clashes in Odisha’s Sundargarh district a day earlier that left 12 persons, including police personnel, injured, PTI reported.

Following the violence, the authorities in the district banned public gatherings and suspended internet services till 6 pm on Friday.

The violence occurred in the Regent Market area at about 2.30 pm, the news agency quoted the police as saying. While reports said that the clash started following an argument between two persons about a food item, it was not clear what the argument was about.

Within minutes, the argument escalated into a fight in the market area, The Indian Express reported. A meat shop and some vehicles were vandalised, and a van was set on fire.

The two groups reportedly used sharp weapons and threw stones at each other, and the police had to use force to disperse them.

Odisha’s Deputy Inspector General of Police was quoted as saying that the situation had been brought under control by 5 pm.

Sundargarh Collector Subhankar Mohapatra said that schools, colleges and other educational institutes in the town will be closed on Friday as a safety measure, PTI reported.

Brijesh Rai, the deputy inspector general of police in the western range, told PTI that raids are underway in the district to detain more persons involved in the violence, based on CCTV footage.

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected Justice Yashwant Varma’s petition challenging the legality of the inquiry committee constituted by the Lok Sabha speaker to look into corruption charges against him, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Satish Chandra Sharma held that Varma “is not entitled to any relief” and that “no interference is called for”.

The court was hearing a petition filed by Varma seeking to quash Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla’s decision to constitute the committee under the 1968 Judges Inquiry Act to investigate the impeachment proceedings against him in the unaccounted cash row.

Unaccounted cash was allegedly recovered at Varma’s official residence in Delhi when emergency services responded to a fire there on March 14. He was a judge at the Delhi High Court at that time. The judge said he was in Bhopal when the cash was discovered and claimed that it did not belong to him or his family.

Amid the row, he was transferred to the Allahabad High Court.

In his petition, Varma had argued that although impeachment notices had been submitted in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, Birla constituted the committee unilaterally without waiting for the chairperson of the Upper House to admit the motion.

He contended that this was contrary to Section 3(2) of the Judges Inquiry Act, which requires both Houses of Parliament to admit the motion for impeachment.

On January 8, the Supreme Court reserved its verdict in the matter.

The bench had said at the time that it had “to balance the rights of the judge to be proceeded against as well as the members who have an independent right under the law to move a motion and get it admitted”, The Indian Express reported.

A report of the in-house inquiry committee into the matter, released on May 3, concluded that there was “sufficient substance” in the charges against Varma. It held that the judge’s misconduct was “serious enough to call for initiation of proceedings for removal”.

To impeach a judge in Parliament, a removal motion is required to be signed by 100 Lok Sabha MPs or 50 Rajya Sabha MPs. If the motion is admitted in both Houses, a three-member judicial committee investigates the matter. Parliament votes on the impeachment if the committee finds misconduct. If the motion gets two-thirds of the votes, the president is advised to remove the judge.

On July 25, Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said that the decision to impeach Varma was unanimous and that 152 MPs from the ruling coalition and the Opposition parties had signed the motion.

There is consensus that the removal of Varma should be a joint effort, he had said, adding that the Lok Sabha will take up the proceedings before they move to the Rajya Sabha in line with the Judges Inquiry Act.

On August 12, the Lok Sabha speaker formed a three-member committee, comprising Supreme Court Justice Aravind Kumar, Madras High Court Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and advocate B Vasudeva Acharya, to look into the matter.

In November, the committee sought a written statement from Varma on the charges against him. In response, the judge sought authenticated copies of the motions before both the Houses in July and any orders passed in connection with them.

However, the Lok Sabha’s secretary general said that the Rajya Sabha had not admitted the impeachment motion

Earlier, Varma had also challenged the in-house committee report that indicted him in the matter, as well as the recommendation made by Sanjiv Khanna, who was the chief justice of India when the report was submitted to the president and the prime minister to initiate impeachment proceedings against him.

In August, the Supreme Court dismissed both the petitions.

A Muslim man died after being assaulted by alleged cow vigilantes in Odisha’s Balasore district on Wednesday, The Telegraph reported.

Sheikh Makandar Mohammed, a resident of Astia village, worked as a helper for a cattle pickup van.

On Wednesday, a group of alleged cow vigilantes tried to stop the van Mohammed was in. The van overturned on the outskirts of a town.

While the driver escaped, Mohammed was caught by the mob, The Telegraph reported.

A video widely shared on social media, alleged to be that of the incident, shows the group assaulting Mohammed with pipes and forcing him to shout “Jai Shri Ram” and “Gau Mata Ki Jai”. The mob continued to beat him up even as he complied with their demand.

Balasore, Odisha
A Muslim man, Sheikh Makarand Mohammad, was allegedly beaten to death by a Hindutva mob. Reports say he was first forced to refer to the cow as “mother,” then compelled to chant “Jai Shri Ram.” He was brutally assaulted with plastic pipes, and the injuries… pic.twitter.com/Pd6BTajqBJ

— Team Rising Falcon (@TheRFTeam) January 15, 2026

The police took Mohammed to hospital, but on Thursday, he succumbed to injuries he had suffered during the attack.

The police have registered a case under a section of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita that pertains to lynching by a group motivated by prejudice based on religion, race or caste. Mohammed’s brother had filed a police complaint and named five persons as suspects.

Three suspects were arrested on Thursday in connection with the killing, The Times of India reported.

Rabi Behera, the head of the Odisha Milk Farmers’ Association, was quoted as saying by The Telegraph that the activities of cow vigilantes had increased since the Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Mohan Majhi was elected to power in the state in June 2024.

“The government must ensure stern action in such cases,” Behera said.

Fifty-two Maoists surrendered before security forces in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur on Thursday, The Hindu reported. Forty-nine of them carried a cumulative bounty of Rs 1.4 crore.

The persons, including 21 women, belong to the South Sub Zonal Bureau of the banned the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

The Maoists who surrendered include Lakkhu Karam, alias Anil, a divisional committee member, and platoon party committee members Laxmi Madvi and Chinni Sodhi, alias Shanti, The Hindu quoted the police as saying. They carried a reward of Rs 8 lakh each.

On Wednesday, 29 Maoists surrendered in neighbouring Sukma.

On January 7, 26 Maoists surrendered in Sukma followed by 63 in Dantewada a day later.

All surrendered members will be given immediate assistance of Rs 50,000 each and rehabilitated, the Hindustan Times quoted Bijapur Superintendent of Police Jitendra Kumar Yadav as saying.

On December 16, the Union government told Parliament that 2,167 “Left-wing extremists” had surrendered and 335 had been killed in the first 11 months of 2025. More than 940 had been arrested.

Overall, more than 1,800 such persons had been killed and over 16,000 had been arrested between 2014 and December 1, 2025. More than 9,580 had surrendered during the period.

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

In 2025, the number of “most affected” districts came down from six to three. These are Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh.

More than 9,200 persons died in the national capital because of respiratory illnesses in 2024, increasing from 8,800 in 2023, PTI quoted data released by the Delhi government as saying on Thursday.

Common respiratory diseases include asthma, pneumonia, lung cancer and tuberculosis.

The overall death rate in Delhi also showed an increase, PTI reported. More than 1.39 lakh deaths were recorded in 2024 compared to 1.32 lakh in 2023.

About 3.06 births were recorded in Delhi in 2024, 8,628 less than the previous year.

The data showed that cardiovascular illnesses such as coronary artery disease, stroke, hypertension and heart failure were the top cause of deaths in Delhi during the year. More than 21,200 persons died in 2024 because of such diseases.

In 2023, more than 15,700 persons had died because of cardiovascular illnesses, India Today reported.

Infectious and parasitic diseases caused by the spread of bacteria and viruses were the second biggest case of deaths, PTI reported. About 16,000 persons died because of such illnesses compared to 20,781 deaths in 2023.

The infant mortality rate in the national capital showed marginal improvement, falling to 22.4 per 1,000 live births from 23.6 in 2023, the news agency reported. The rate measures the probability of a child dying before reaching the age of one.

India’s wool economy is a reminder that trade policy is rarely linear.

In the late 1980s, India had one of the world’s largest populations of sheep and a wool economy valued at an estimated Rs 4,500 crore at today’s prices. Wool sustained an entire ecosystem of shepherds, spinners, sorters, dyers and weavers.

This landscape changed abruptly in 1991, when India’s structural adjustment policies slashed tariffs and dismantled decades of protectionism. The changes opened the country to global trade. While this fuelled a boom in sectors such as software, Indian wool was devastated as imports flooded in.

Three decades later, a new twist has emerged. The global economy, taking its cues from US President Donald Trump, has shifted back toward protectionism.

The few Indian producers who had carved out export niches, especially those working with high-quality fleece, now find themselves squeezed out of their most lucrative market. In a striking echo of the 1990s, the same industry that was undercut by the removal of tariffs three decades ago is now threatened by their re-imposition abroad.

What remains constant is the pastoralist origin of the fibre: the households that continue to rear sheep, even as the wool they shear each year often has no buyers. Whether tariffs fall or rise, the first impact of policy lands on these households.

Structural adjustment policies

When India restructured its economy in the 1990s, among the sectors that benefitted enormously was the country’s software industry: tech firms accessed imported hardware more easily, the devalued rupee attracted global clients and exports soared to over $12 billion in 2004 from $128 million in 1990-’91.

However, the same policies dealt a devastating blow to the wool sector.

Most of the country’s wool was coarse, suited for carpets and blankets rather than fine apparel. But it was a coherent economy, built on breeds adapted to dry landscapes and a network of small users who depended on steady access to local fibre.

For India’s pastoralists, wool provided a predictable annual cash flow – even though a larger share of income came from meat and the sales of live animals

Before liberalisation, Indian mills had already preferred imported fine wool but high duties – often 45% – kept domestic fleece competitive. Once tariffs dropped to as low as 4%, cheaper and better quality imports flooded the market.

It wasn’t just imports that changed demand. Synthetic fibres, also newly affordable, spread quickly. Domestic users shifted almost overnight to imported alternatives.

Rajasthan’s carpet industry, for instance, began importing entire containers of finer, cleaner fleece from Australia instead.

In 1991, Indian wool produced was valued at Rs 4,000 crore at today’s prices. By 2001, it had fallen to Rs 2,800 crore.

For Indian shepherds and small artisans, the impact was swift. The price of Indian wool, which was Rs 300 per kg (at today’s prices) in the early 1990s, began to plunge, stagnating at around Rs 40 per kg from 1995.

Today, this price remains at Rs 45 per kg-Rs 50 per kg, so low that herders in Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Rajasthan often make a loss on every sheep sheared. Many have stopped transporting wool to markets altogether – it is burned, buried, or left to rot because disposal is cheaper than selling it.

The wool produced in India today is valued at close to Rs 600 crore.

The paradox of liberalisation was stark: a policy meant to make India globally competitive ended up crippling one of its oldest and most geographically widespread rural industries.

Global protectionism

In 2025, the new era of global protectionism has been prompted by the policies of Trump in the US – India’s largest market for textiles and apparel. New duties introduced last year have raised effective tariffs on some Indian goods to 50%-60%.

For woollen garments and niche exports such as fine organic wool, the rates are high enough to knock Indian producers out of the US market entirely. Competitors like Australia and New Zealand face lower duties, giving them a pricing edge.

Meanwhile, India’s own policies remain uneven. The government has recently reintroduced protections for synthetic fabrics, imposing a minimum import price to deter cheap polyester. But raw wool imports continue to enter at a duty of just 4%, preserving a long-standing tilt in favour of man-made fibres.

This imbalance amplifies the structural disadvantage created in the 1990s, making it even harder for domestic wool to regain viability.

Lost in policy swings, first toward openness, then toward protectionism, is the simple fact that wool production begins far from ports and mills. It begins with pastoralists moving flocks across drylands, shearing animals adapted over generations to local climates.

For them, though wool was never the main source of income, it was an essential seasonal cash payment that helped sustain their households.

When tariffs fell in the 1990s, the first people to feel the collapse were not mill owners but shepherds walking down from summer pastures to find that nobody wanted their fibre. When tariffs rise in the US today, the immediate effect is absorbed by the handful of herders and processors who built a small but promising export channel, one suddenly rendered unviable.

India has now experienced both extremes: the harm of removing protections too quickly and the harm of facing protectionism elsewhere. The victims, in both cases, are rural producers who operate on thin margins and have little bargaining power in distant markets.

As India debates the future of its textile sector, 2026 is in sharp focus, since it is the International Year for Rangelands and Pastoralism. The story of pastoralist wool offers a cautionary tale. Policies designed for one part of the economy can reshape another in ways that are neither intended nor easily reversible.

The challenge now for India is to rebuild and strengthen a domestic system that values natural fibre and the people who produce it, before another generation of shepherds finds wool too burdensome to carry at all.

Aniruddh Sheth is the research coordinator at the Centre for Pastoralism, New Delhi. Data on the wool economy is based on research being conducted at the institution.