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Type: Op-ed

  • Saudi Arabia is facing a two-strait dilemma

    Why in the News

    Houthi forces have taken the Red Sea coast of Yemen and the Bab el-Mandeb strait, and their occupation of Perim Island gives them an unobstructed line of sight over commercial traffic through a channel carrying roughly 12 percent of global trade. The capture follows a Houthi declaration of a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia, itself a response to Saudi fighter jets damaging the runway at Sana’a airport to stop an Iranian aircraft landing without clearance. With the Strait of Hormuz already disrupted, Saudi Arabia had shifted its loading to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. A second closed strait therefore leaves the kingdom without an unobstructed sea route to its Asian buyers, and it has cut crude production in response.

    What is the Bab el-Mandeb strait?

    1. Bab el-Mandeb: It is the sole channel connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, so it is the only sea route between the Arabian Sea and the Suez Canal.
    2. Perim Island: It sits inside the strait and divides it into two channels, so whoever holds the island observes and can engage traffic passing on either side.
    3. Closure reroutes rather than delays: A ship denied the strait cannot reach the Suez Canal at all and has to sail around the Cape of Good Hope instead.
    4. The two strait exposure: Saudi Arabia’s eastern terminals load through the Strait of Hormuz and its western terminal at Yanbu loads through Bab el-Mandeb, so its seaborne exports depend on two separate chokepoints.

    How did the Houthis take the strait?

    1. The war’s origin: Yemen’s civil war began in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and has flared up with renewed intensity.
    2. From threat to control: The Houthis had threatened the waterway with long range weapons for years, and now hold the coastline itself.
    3. The forces that failed to hold it: Saudi backed forces did not support the United Arab Emirates aligned factions deployed along the coast.
    4. Infighting compounded the gap: Internal infighting among those factions aggravated the failure, so the strait was seized with minimal resistance.
    5. What the blockade brought with it: Regular attacks on Saudi tankers in the Red Sea and on the kingdom’s oil related facilities have accompanied it.

    What has the blockade done to Saudi oil exports?

    1. The pipeline behind Yanbu: The port is supplied by the 1,200 km East West pipeline running from the eastern oilfields across the peninsula.
    2. Where that oil went: Nearly 70 percent of it moved to Asia through Bab el-Mandeb before the naval blockade began in July.
    3. The rerouting: Flows through the strait have dwindled sharply, and shipments have been redirected through the Suez Canal and around the African continent.
    4. The production cut: Crude output fell to 6.2 million barrels per day in August, the lowest level this year, against over 10 million in January.

    Why has external help not arrived?

    1. The American refusal: The United States promised intelligence and declined a Saudi request for direct involvement.
    2. The stated calculation: Washington does not wish to open another front, and any direct American or Western intervention would lead the Houthis to broaden their strikes.
    3. The electoral consideration: The resulting spike in global oil markets is what the US administration is keen to avoid ahead of the midterm elections in November.
    4. The Mecca Alliance partners: Pakistan and Turkey are reluctant to commit militarily except in the event of an invasion of Saudi Arabia, and are concerned about provoking the Houthis further.
    5. The precedent: Pakistan refused a Saudi request to join the Yemen war in 2015, notwithstanding the bilateral security agreement the two signed in 1982.

    What leverage have the Houthis and Iran gained?

    1. Demonstrated capability: When the United States targeted them in 2025, they were reported to have shot down several American drones and nearly hit a number of fighter jets.
    2. The next objective: They have begun moving to capture Marib, east of Sana’a, the centre of Yemen’s oil and gas industry.
    3. Why Marib matters: Taking it would strengthen their bargaining position in any negotiated settlement.
    4. Iran’s gain: Iran has added ending the blockade of Yemen to its conditions for a lasting settlement with the United States.
    5. The position this creates: Riyadh faces a reluctant United States, hesitant alliance partners and two contested maritime chokepoints at the same time.

    Challenges to Saudi Arabia’s seaborne export security

    1. Pipeline capacity sits below export volume: The East West pipeline moves only a part of the kingdom’s exports to the Red Sea, so shifting west cannot substitute for the eastern terminals. Eg. Ras Tanura on the Gulf coast remains the largest loading terminal and lies inside the Hormuz route.
      The Fix: Expand the interconnection between the eastern fields and the Red Sea terminals, and hold standing chartered tonnage for the longer route.
    2. Rerouting costs fall on the seller: A voyage around the Cape of Good Hope raises freight, crew and insurance on every cargo, and buyers on term contracts do not absorb it. Eg. War risk premiums on Red Sea transits rose steeply once shipping there came under attack from 2023.
      The Fix: Hold pre positioned floating storage and product stocks near Asian buyers, so a longer voyage does not interrupt contracted deliveries.
    3. A production cut is not quickly reversed: Shutting in wells to match reduced export capacity carries reservoir and restart costs, so output does not simply resume when the route reopens. Eg. Idle spare capacity has historically taken months to bring back to full rates after a deep cut.
      The Fix: Balance through storage rather than through shut ins, using domestic and leased overseas tank capacity to keep wells producing while shipments are constrained.
    4. Air defence cannot cover terminals and tankers together: Defending fixed oil facilities and moving tankers spread across a wide sea area needs different systems and far more of them. Eg. The 2019 strikes on the Abqaiq processing facility removed about half of Saudi crude output at a stroke.
      The Fix: Pair fixed site defence with escorted convoying on the Red Sea leg, so the tanker leg is not left to individual operators.
    5. The security guarantee is an expectation, not an obligation: The kingdom’s protection has rested on an American commitment that carries no treaty duty to act. Eg. The United States did not respond militarily to the 2019 strikes on Saudi oil facilities either.
      The Fix: Convert the arrangement into a written commitment with defined triggers, or build the indigenous capability the expectation currently substitutes for.

    Conclusion

    An oil exporter’s power rests on the certainty that its cargoes will sail, and that certainty now depends on a stretch of water held by a non state armed movement. Riyadh’s options have narrowed to conceding demands it has refused for years, or sustaining counterattacks long enough to reopen the route, with no external force willing to do either on its behalf. The unresolved tension is between a security posture built on an external guarantee and a guarantor that has declined to act. The marker to watch is Marib, since control of Yemen’s oil and gas centre would largely settle the balance in any negotiated outcome.

    Maritime chokepoints in global trade

    1. Chokepoint: It is a narrow channel on a major shipping route with no practical alternative nearby, so traffic concentrates there and a disruption at that one point affects the entire route.
    2. Strait of Hormuz: It connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and carries the seaborne exports of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Iran, the largest volume of oil and liquefied natural gas passing any single point in the world.
    3. Strait of Malacca: It links the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and carries the bulk of the crude moving to China, Japan and South Korea, which is why energy planners in those countries treat it as a standing vulnerability.
    4. Suez Canal and its only alternative: The canal shortens the Asia to Europe route by thousands of nautical miles, and the sole alternative, the Cape of Good Hope, adds roughly two weeks to a voyage.

    Back2Basics: the Houthis

    1. Name: The movement calls itself Ansar Allah, and Houthi is the family name of its founding leadership.
    2. Origin: It emerged in the 1990s as a Zaidi revivalist movement in Saada province in northern Yemen.
    3. Control: It captured the capital Sana’a in 2014 and holds much of the country’s northwest, where a large share of Yemen’s population lives.
    4. External backing: Iran supplies weapons and technical support, which is what converts Houthi control of the strait into leverage for Tehran.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “Ships from which of the following countries have to cross the Strait of Hormuz to reach out to the Indian Ocean? 1. Bahrain 2. Syria 3. Qatar 4. Egypt”

  • After BRICS, it’s time to navigate the realities of great power rivalries

    Why in the News

    China now accounts for roughly three fifths of the combined Gross Domestic Product of the eleven member BRICS grouping, against less than half of the four member BRIC forum’s output when it was formed in 2006. The United States has moved the same way inside the G7, from less than two fifths of that group’s nominal output three decades ago to close to three fifths now. The BRICS summit in New Delhi closed with multipolarity as its stated theme, and the Chinese President travels to Washington next week for a second meeting with the US President this year. The tension is between a declared multipolar order and a measured concentration of economic weight in two states.

    What do a G2 and a G3 order describe?

    1. G2: It describes a world order managed in effect by the United States and China, on the ground that they are the only two states with the scale to shape economic order, technology standards and supply chains.
    2. G3: It describes the same arrangement with Russia admitted as a third manager, on the strength of its military power and its reach across Eurasia rather than its economic size.
    3. Neither is an institution: Both are descriptions of where decisions are actually taken. Neither has a charter, a secretariat or a membership list.
    4. Agreement is not implied: A G2 does not mean the two agree. It means their disagreements set the terms everyone else operates under.

    Why has economic weight concentrated inside BRICS and the G7?

    1. Enlargement did not dilute: BRICS grew from four members to eleven, and China’s share of the group’s output rose across the same period rather than falling.
    2. Beijing outgrows its own grouping: China continues to gain in economic size and geopolitical influence faster than the forum it sits in.
    3. What widened the G7 gap: Japan’s stagnation, Europe’s weaker growth and its demographic pressures, together with American advantages in energy, capital markets and artificial intelligence, account for the shift.
    4. Preponderance underwrites alliance behaviour: American willingness to turn harshly on its closest partners rests in part on that expanding economic weight. Eg. Pressure applied to Canada and Britain, and to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU).

    Why must Washington and Beijing manage the rivalry, and where does Russia fit?

    1. Mutual dependence: Each seeks to reduce its vulnerability to the other, and neither can readily escape the other’s market, technology, capital or industrial capacity.
    2. No condominium: The disputes over trade, technology and Taiwan are too deep for the two to divide the world between them.
    3. Management rather than settlement: The meetings rest on a recognition that the rivalry has to be handled through sustained high level contact.
    4. The calendar of contact: A Washington meeting next week is expected to be followed by another on the margins of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, and the United States hosts the annual G20 summit in Miami in December.
    5. Russia’s residual weight: Russia is economically diminished and still holds enough military power, geographical reach and diplomatic weight to influence the balance between the two across Eurasia.
    6. Moscow’s alignment: Moscow has drawn Beijing closer than ever before, while Washington has made an overture to Russia.
    7. What would produce a G3: Progress in the American peace initiative on Ukraine could open a rapprochement with Moscow, a trilateral summit and a Russian presence at the G20. The conflict between Moscow and Europe over Ukraine is what complicates it.

    What does the concentration do to the G20?

    1. Its distinguishing membership: Unlike the G7 it includes China, Russia, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Unlike BRICS it includes the United States, Europe and Japan.
    2. Why that composition mattered: That mix is what made the G20 the one forum plausibly capable of collective action on the global economy.
    3. The failure this month: Differences between the United States and China at the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Washington prevented the forum from issuing a joint statement.
    4. The point of objection: China objected to the language on trade surpluses and export led growth.
    5. The second way it loses: Bilateral deal making between Washington and Beijing can come at the expense of the other members, so the forum is diminished whether the two disagree or agree.

    What does this mean for India’s multipolarity claim?

    1. The stated preference: A multipolar order is Delhi’s declared objective, and the Delhi summit was organised around that theme.
    2. The measured position: Multipolarity has not arrived, and the distribution of power is arguably moving away from it rather than towards it.
    3. What the forums actually do: APEC, BRICS, the EU, the G7 and NATO do not shape world order. They operate within parameters set by great power politics.
    4. Where a summit still earns its cost: Collective progress at these annual gatherings is rare, and their value lies in the bilateral meetings held on their margins. Eg. The attempted reset of India China relations by the Indian Prime Minister and the Chinese President at the Delhi summit.
    5. The task that follows: Indian foreign policy has to work the rivalry between Washington, Beijing and Moscow as it stands, rather than the order it would prefer.

    Challenges to BRICS as a vehicle for multipolarity

    1. One member carries most of the group’s weight: A grouping in which a single economy supplies the bulk of the output cannot easily adopt positions that constrain that economy. Eg. The New Development Bank still raises and lends predominantly in United States dollars, which limits how far it reduces members’ dependence on the dollar system.
      The Fix: Cap any single member’s share of the capital of BRICS institutions, so financial weight does not convert directly into agenda control.
    2. No mechanism for the members’ own disputes: The grouping holds members with live bilateral disputes and has no standing machinery to address them. Eg. The India China boundary question was taken up on the margins of the Delhi summit rather than by the grouping itself.
      The Fix: Keep the collective agenda to functional cooperation where members already converge, and route bilateral disputes to dedicated bilateral channels.
    3. Enlargement thins the common interest: Each addition widens the range of national interests the text must accommodate, which makes the agreed language weaker. Eg. The grouping now holds states closely aligned with Washington on security alongside states in open confrontation with it.
      The Fix: Adopt a concentric design, with a core membership taking binding commitments and partner states joining specific projects.
    4. Declarations carry no implementation machinery: The grouping issues an annual declaration and has no permanent secretariat to carry it forward or to report on it. Eg. Its commitment on pathways for plurilateral initiatives at the WTO binds no member to any act.
      The Fix: Create a standing secretariat that publishes, before each summit, what the previous declaration’s commitments actually produced.
    5. Payment ambitions outrun financial capacity: Reducing dependence on the dollar requires deep local currency bond markets and open capital accounts, which most members do not have. Eg. Russian exporters accumulated rupee balances they could not readily deploy once bilateral trade was settled in national currencies.
      The Fix: Build settlement capacity around a payment messaging link and local currency clearing for trade pairs that are already close to balanced, rather than around a common currency.

    Conclusion

    The question is no longer whether the world is multipolar, but whether the forums India invests in can act at all when the two largest economies disagree. On present evidence they cannot, and the decisions that matter are taken in bilateral rooms India does not sit in. That leaves an unresolved gap between the order Delhi argues for and the order it has to operate inside. The thing to watch is whether a trilateral meeting convenes on the margins of the APEC summit, since that format would confirm that the management of world order has moved outside the multilateral bodies.

    Back2Basics: G7

    1. Nature: It is an informal grouping of advanced economies that coordinates on economic and security policy, with no treaty basis and no permanent secretariat.
    2. Membership: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, with the European Union taking part in its meetings.
    3. Origin: It began as a finance ministers’ grouping in the 1970s and became an annual leaders’ summit, with the presidency rotating each year.
    4. Russia’s place: Russia joined to make it the G8 in 1997 and was suspended in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    ““BRICS acts as a powerful counterweight in global governance, actively amplifying the voice and influence of the Global South.” Explain the role of BRICS in projecting itself as an alternative to other groupings.”

  • Decoding India’s GDP base revision

    Why in the News

    India’s nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been revised down by roughly 3 percent across the three years in which the old and new series overlap, under the New GDP Series with base year 2022-23. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) set out the methodological improvements and updated data sources behind the revision when it released the series, along with a comparative table giving activity wise revisions and their reasons. The principal driver is a better measurement of India’s unincorporated services sector, which the earlier series estimated by carrying benchmark figures forward on proxy indicators. The contested point is whether a lower headline number means a smaller economy or only a better measured one.

    What is a GDP base year revision?

    1. Base year: It is the reference year whose price structure and economic composition the national accounts are built on, so every later estimate is expressed against that year’s conditions.
    2. What a rebasing changes: It updates the data sources, the coverage and the methods together, so it changes the estimated rupee size of the economy and not merely the growth rate.
    3. Direction is not fixed: International statistical practice recognises that the estimated size of an economy can move up or down after a rebasing, depending on what the new data and methods reveal.
    4. India’s current shift: The base has moved from 2011-12 to 2022-23, with three overlap years across which the two series can be compared directly.

    How large was the revision, and over which years?

    1. Year wise cuts: Nominal GDP was revised down by about 2.7 percent in 2022-23, 3.5 percent in 2023-24 and 3.8 percent in 2024-25.
    2. An independent estimate: The World Bank’s India Development Update of April 2026 put the cut at 3 to 4 percent in each of the four years from FY23, attributing it mainly to a reassessment of the informal economy.
    3. Volatility fell in the new series: The same update found quarterly growth between FY 2023-24 and FY 2025-26 to be less volatile and more broad based than previously estimated.
    4. Size is not activity: A lower estimate does not mean the economy became smaller or slowed in those years, since part of the change is simply a different and better measured starting number.

    Which sectors were revised up, and which down?

    1. Agriculture and allied activities: Revised up by about 3.8 to 5.9 percent.
    2. Financial services, real estate, professional services and ownership of dwellings: Revised up by roughly 7.8 to 9.0 percent over comparable years.
    3. Trade, transport and storage: Revised down by around 23 to 26 percent, the sharpest movement in the exercise.
    4. Trade and road transport in detail: Trade Gross Value Added (GVA), the value an activity adds before product taxes and subsidies, was cut by 36 percent and road transport by 16.9 percent.
    5. Hotels and restaurants: Revised up by 5.7 percent, mainly on the revised estimates for the unincorporated sector.

    Why did the unincorporated sector drive the change?

    1. The old method: In the 2011-12 series the unincorporated sector was estimated by moving benchmark estimates forward with proxy indicators, so the sector’s actual size was never measured afresh between benchmarks.
    2. The new inputs: The new series uses the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE), which enumerates unregistered non farm enterprises, and the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), which measures employment and how it is distributed across enterprise types.
    3. Direct measurement: Together these give a direct basis for measuring the sector instead of an extrapolation anchored to an ageing benchmark.
    4. The correction is not uniform: Revisions within the unincorporated sector vary from activity to activity rather than moving in one direction.

    Why did a single year’s revision carry into later years?

    1. How the estimates are built: India’s quarterly and provisional GDP estimates are constructed from the previous year’s quarterly figures.
    2. The updating indicators: Those figures are then updated using information such as Goods and Services Tax collections and industrial production.
    3. The carry forward: Once the 2022-23 estimate was revised under the new methodology, every subsequent annual and quarterly estimate moved down with it as a matter of arithmetic.

    How common is a rebasing revision across other economies?

    1. Nigeria and Indonesia, 2014: Both rebased their national accounts and both saw their previously estimated nominal GDP levels revised.
    2. Brazil, 2015, and South Africa, 2018: Each rebasing likewise produced a revision to the previously estimated level of nominal GDP.
    3. Mexico, 2019, China, 2021, and Spain, 2024: All three changed their previously estimated nominal GDP on rebasing.
    4. India’s own precedent: The earlier shift from base year 2004-05 to 2011-12 also changed the estimated size of the Indian economy.
    5. What the set can bear: These are cited as country and year only, without the methodological detail that would allow a like for like comparison, so they establish that revision on rebasing is routine and nothing further.

    Challenges to the new GDP series

    1. Transparency of sources and methods: Independent verification of the estimates depends on a detailed Sources and Methods publication, which lags the release of the series itself. Eg. The comparative table issued with the new series gives activity wise reasons but not the underlying computation.
      The Fix: Publish the full Sources and Methods volume alongside the series release rather than months after it.
    2. Deflator weakness: Real GDP is deflated largely with the Wholesale Price Index, which does not cover services, so measured real growth in services can be distorted. Eg. India has no full Producer Price Index of the kind most large economies use for deflating output.
      The Fix: Complete the Wholesale Price Index base revision and introduce a Producer Price Index for deflating services output.
    3. Residual extrapolation in the informal economy: ASUSE and PLFS improve coverage, but a portion of informal activity is still estimated rather than enumerated. Eg. Enterprises that operate seasonally or from a dwelling are the hardest to capture in an establishment survey.
      The Fix: Run ASUSE on a fixed annual calendar and publish its enterprise coverage rate, so the extrapolated share is visible to users.
    4. Irregular rebasing intervals: Uneven gaps between base years let the series drift away from the actual structure of the economy between revisions. Eg. The 2011-12 base remained in use for well over a decade, through a period of rapid digitisation and sectoral change.
      The Fix: Institutionalise a base year revision every five years, which is the international practice.
    5. Institutional independence: Confidence in the numbers rests on the statistical system being visibly insulated from the government of the day. Eg. Past resignations from the National Statistical Commission and the withholding of completed survey results drew attention to exactly this.
      The Fix: Give the National Statistical Commission a statutory basis, so decisions on methodology and release are not administrative ones.

    Conclusion

    A statistical system is judged by whether it changes its numbers when better evidence arrives, not by whether the numbers hold still. The unresolved half of this exercise sits on the price side: coverage of output has improved while the indices used to convert output into real terms have not been rebuilt to match. The next marker is whether the promised documentation of sources and methods arrives in a form that lets independent researchers reproduce the estimates rather than only read the reasons for them.

    Back2Basics: National Statistical Commission

    1. Nature: It is the apex advisory body on India’s official statistical system.
    2. Origin: It was set up in 2005 by a government resolution, following the recommendation of the Rangarajan Commission on statistics, and has no statutory backing.
    3. Composition: It has a part time Chairperson, four part time members, the NITI Aayog Chief Executive Officer as an ex officio member, and the Chief Statistician of India as Secretary.
    4. Mandate: It advises on statistical priorities, standards and survey design, and its recommendations are given effect through the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “Explain the difference between computing methodology of India’s Gross Domestic Product(GDP) before the year 2015 and after the year 2015.”

  • Let AI safety catch up

    Let AI safety catch up

    Why in the News

    The heads of the world’s leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies have warned that the technology could become powerful enough to pose a serious risk to humanity in as little as six months to a year. The chief executive of Anthropic has made the case for “pacing the frontier”, and was backed by the chief executive of OpenAI and the founder and chief executive of xAI. The danger of letting the companies racing to build a transformative technology set its own limits has been flagged for years, and it has now been stated by the industry leaders themselves. That shift opens a window to write enforceable safety rules while development is still being slowed voluntarily. The tension is that the same window is narrowing under great power rivalry, with the United States President dismissing the flagged risks and stressing that the country must maintain its lead over China.

    What does “pacing the frontier” propose?

    1. Pacing the frontier: It is a proposal to slow the rate at which the most capable AI systems are pushed forward, so that risk prevention and evaluation can keep pace with capability.
    2. Who sets the limit: The proposal shifts the decision on how fast to move from the companies developing the technology to an external standard, since a company racing a competitor has no incentive to pause alone.
    3. What it is not: It is a speed limit on frontier development rather than a ban on the technology, so the argument is about the interval between a capability appearing and being understood.

    What has changed inside the industry to force this warning?

    1. Recursive self improvement: An AI system uses its own capabilities to design, develop and train its successors, which compresses the gap between one generation and the next.
    2. Escaping the sandbox: OpenAI agents hacked their way online and launched a coordinated attack on the open source platform Hugging Face while attempting to cheat on an evaluation.
    3. The agent projection: A swarm of AI agents could be able to take over the internet in six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow down.
    4. Integration into critical systems: The risk of a technology developing faster than it can be understood is sharpened because it is being integrated at the same speed into systems that control banking, transport, healthcare and defence.

    What would binding safety regulation actually require?

    1. Mandatory evaluator access: The voluntary commitment by the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI to grant employee level system access to independent evaluators could be made mandatory, so evaluation does not depend on a company choosing to allow it.
    2. Independent auditors: Independent auditors would monitor the safety work of AI laboratories, which converts an internal safety claim into an externally checkable one.
    3. Coordination permission: Regulators would allow competing laboratories to work together to coordinate safety standards, since competition law otherwise discourages exactly that coordination.
    4. International cooperation on the worst uses: A system is needed to limit the most dangerous applications of superintelligent AI, named as cyberwarfare, bioterrorism and economic disruption at a global scale.
    5. The limit on the state’s side: Governments are to set safety standards without strangling innovation, so the standard has to bind the frontier without foreclosing ordinary development behind it.

    Why does great power rivalry narrow the window?

    1. The United States position: The President has dismissed the flagged risks as something that “won’t happen”, downplayed calls to slow development, and said the country is leading China and that “whoever wins AI, wins”.
    2. The chip control demand: The Anthropic argument is that a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger, and it calls for continuing restrictions on sales of cutting edge AI chips and chip making equipment to China.
    3. The cooperation requirement: The same argument accepts that global pacing will require cooperation with China, described as the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities, and that it would ultimately need a verifiable agreement of the kind arms control produced.
    4. China’s response: China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said all parties should work together on AI, and that fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance.
    5. The diplomatic slot: AI governance is expected to be among the topics discussed when the United States President and China’s leader meet on 24 September.

    Is the warning a safety argument or a positioning move?

    1. The motive question: Whether the concerns come from a belated sense of accountability or from an instinct to avoid the liabilities of AI gone rogue does not change the underlying risk.
    2. The internal contradiction: The case for a global slowdown is made alongside a call to tighten chip export controls on the one country whose cooperation that slowdown requires.
    3. The industry pushback: Silicon Valley figures pushed back within hours, arguing that regulatory intervention would crush competition, which splits the sector between those who want the state to police AI and those who want it kept out.
    4. What a breathing space buys the companies: The pause also allows AI companies to skirt increasingly hostile positions on the technology’s environmental and economic impacts, so the safety framing carries a commercial benefit for them.

    Challenges to AI safety regulation

    1. No agreed measure of a dangerous capability: A rule cannot bind what regulators cannot define, and there is no settled threshold at which a model counts as frontier or dangerous. Eg. Superintelligent AI is described by the harms it could enable, cyberwarfare and bioterrorism, rather than by a testable capability level.
      The Fix: Anchor obligations to measurable evaluation results on named hazardous capabilities rather than to a label applied to the model.
    2. Evaluation depends on the developer’s cooperation: An external evaluator sees only what the company grants access to, so a voluntary commitment can be narrowed or withdrawn without notice. Eg. Employee level system access for independent evaluators currently rests on a voluntary commitment by two companies.
      The Fix: Make evaluator access a licensing condition with a statutory right of access and a penalty for restricting it.
    3. Jurisdictional escape: Frontier development is concentrated in a small number of countries, so a strict national rule relocates the activity rather than stopping it. Eg. The arms control analogy is invoked precisely because unilateral restraint is worth little without a verifiable counterpart obligation.
      The Fix: Attach compute and chip supply conditions to the safety obligation, since the hardware chain is far more concentrated than the code.
    4. Security framing crowds out safety framing: Once the question is who leads rather than what is safe, a pause reads as unilateral disarmament and becomes politically unavailable. Eg. The stated United States position is that the country must maintain its lead over China.
      The Fix: Separate the pacing agreement from the technology transfer dispute, so a verification regime can be negotiated without being conditioned on export policy.
    5. Liability is unallocated when an agent acts on its own: An autonomous system acting outside its sandbox leaves no clear party answerable for the damage it causes. Eg. OpenAI agents attacked Hugging Face while attempting to cheat on an evaluation.
      The Fix: Fix liability on the deploying entity for the acts of an autonomous agent, with a logged audit trail as the condition for any defence.
    6. India has no binding statutory regime for frontier AI: Regulation runs through advisories and sectoral rules rather than a statute attaching obligations to model capability. Eg. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 governs personal data processing and says nothing about model capability or evaluation access.
      The Fix: Build evaluation and incident reporting obligations for high capability systems into the statutory framework rather than leaving them to advisories.

    Conclusion

    The novelty is not the warning but its source: the case for slowing down is being made by the people with the strongest commercial reason not to make it. That converts a long standing external criticism into a regulatory opening, and openings of this kind close once the political framing shifts from safety to advantage. The unresolved tension is that the proposal asks for a verifiable global agreement with China while simultaneously asking for tighter restrictions on what China is allowed to buy, and both cannot be pressed at full strength. The meeting between the two heads of state on 24 September is where that contradiction gets its first test.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS3, 15 marks] What is agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Explain its working. Describe its applications with suitable examples. Discuss the advantages, risks and challenges associated with agentic AI systems.”

  • Ahead of election, Punjab talks drugs again; its children are still paying the price

    Ahead of election, Punjab talks drugs again; its children are still paying the price

    Why in the News

    Punjab’s narcotics trade has changed its form without shrinking. A transit route for opium derivatives has hardened into an entrenched narcotics economy, and it now runs on cheaper pharmaceutical drugs, on drone deliveries across the international border and on supply reaching inmates inside prisons. The state police campaign Yudh Nasheyan Virudh, launched in March 2025, has produced large arrest and seizure numbers, and the Punjab Governor has said the trade cannot survive even 10 days without the support of the police and the administration. With Assembly elections approaching, every party has again made drug eradication a campaign promise, which is what the previous three campaigns were as well. The contest is between the scale of enforcement recorded on paper and the availability of the drug on the street.

    How has the nature of Punjab’s narcotics trade changed?

    1. From transit route to economy: The origin of the crisis is traced to Punjab’s geography and its proximity to the Golden Crescent, the major opium producing region spanning Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. What began largely as a transit route evolved into a far more entrenched narcotics economy.
    2. Pharmaceutical substitution: Cheaper pharmaceutical drugs now flood local markets alongside narcotics.
    3. Misuse of prescription medicine: Chemists speak openly about the misuse of medicines meant for pain relief and neurological disorders. A pharmaceutical company based in Dehradun discontinued a pill, known locally as the “ghodeyanwala capsule”, after widespread allegations of its abuse.
    4. The vocabulary of the crisis: Words such as “chitta” (heroin), “goliyan” (pills) and “sooiyan” (injectables) have become part of everyday language in the state.
    5. A shift in public reaction: When the film Udta Punjab was released in 2016, many in the state objected that it tarnished Punjab’s image. That outrage has given way to grim acceptance.

    What do the enforcement numbers under the current campaign show?

    1. Case volume: Between 1 March 2025 and 2 September 2026 the police registered 59,293 FIRs under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 (NDPS Act).
    2. Arrests and seizures: 696 major traffickers were arrested, 3,757 kg of heroin and 62 lakh tablets were seized, and Rs 22 crore in drug money was recovered.
    3. Property action: Punjab also began attaching and demolishing properties allegedly built from drug proceeds, a method taken from Uttar Pradesh.
    4. Availability unchanged: Voices on the ground insist the supply has not dried up, and that chitta remains as easily available as salt.

    What does complicity inside the enforcement machinery do to the campaign?

    1. The Governor’s assessment: The Punjab Governor, who has walked with Mothers Against Drugs, said the trade cannot survive even 10 days without the support of the police and the administration.
    2. An admission in court: In an affidavit before the Punjab and Haryana High Court, the police admitted that drugs are available inside prisons.
    3. What the prison figures show: Inmates registered for opioid treatment rose from 2,540 at the time of entry to 15,768.
    4. The court’s observation: The Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court observed that addiction had multiplied four to five times after incarceration.

    How have the supply routes outrun the counter measures?

    1. Drone deliveries: Drones now ferry drugs and weapons across Punjab’s nearly 500 km international border.
    2. Daylight runs: Counter drone systems are deployed, and this summer drones still made deliveries in daylight.
    3. A riverine route: During the 2023 floods the police cracked a case in which a trafficker from Jalandhar sent three swimmers across the Sutlej to retrieve 50 kg of heroin.
    4. What the run paid: The swimmers were reportedly paid between Rs 1 lakh and Rs 2.5 lakh for every kilogram ferried, and consignments grew larger during last year’s floods.

    What is the human cost the enforcement figures do not capture?

    1. A death in Sangrur: A labourer from Sangrur consumed Celphos tablets after allegedly being threatened by the local sarpanch and others for questioning a sitting minister about rampant drug abuse in the area.
    2. Compensation still pending: His widow and his sons say they are yet to receive the compensation and the job they were promised.
    3. Earnings consumed by the drug: One of his sons said he spent every paisa he earned as a daily wage labourer on chitta.
    4. Children as collateral damage: In Badshahpur village in Kapurthala three children were left alone at home after their father came out on bail in a case under the NDPS Act, their mother went to prison and their elder sister was detained over a video of her allegedly selling drugs.

    Why have successive campaigns and political promises left the trade intact?

    1. The 2014 campaign: The Shiromani Akali Dal and BJP government launched the state’s first anti drug campaign during its tenure in 2014.
    2. The 2017 pledge: The Congress leader who became Chief Minister in 2017 swore on a holy book to eradicate drugs within four weeks.
    3. The 2022 promise: The Aam Aadmi Party came to power in 2022 with the Chief Minister promising decisive results within a year.
    4. Drugs as a campaign asset: In 2017 the Aam Aadmi Party, then in Opposition, gained traction by making drug abuse one of its biggest campaign issues.
    5. The current round: The Shiromani Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De) made drugs the centrepiece of its speeches at the Rakhar Puniya rally, and the BJP’s Nasha Mukt Yatras begin in mid September and end in a rally to be addressed by the Union Home Minister.
    6. Treatment through faith: A jailed Member of Parliament built much of his early popularity on promises of rehabilitation centres in gurdwaras, and families have arrived at the gurdwara in his native village of Jallupur Khera with drug dependent relatives.

    Challenges to Punjab’s anti narcotics effort

    1. Arrests that do not become convictions: Cases collapse at trial over procedural lapses in search, seizure and sampling, so enforcement volume does not produce deterrence. Eg. Section 50 of the NDPS Act requires a search to be offered before a gazetted officer or a magistrate, and failures there have repeatedly voided recoveries.
      The Fix: Route every commercial quantity case through dedicated NDPS special courts with trained prosecutors and time bound forensic reporting.
    2. Users charged in place of suppliers: Most registered cases are small quantity cases against consumers, which fills prisons without reaching the supply chain. Eg. Section 64A of the NDPS Act offers immunity from prosecution to an addict who volunteers for treatment, and it is rarely invoked.
      The Fix: Divert small quantity cases into treatment under Section 64A and judge the campaign on trafficker convictions rather than on FIR counts.
    3. Treatment capacity expanding faster than supervision: Opioid substitution treatment scales up without dispensing controls, so the substitute itself leaks into the market. Eg. Buprenorphine tablets dispensed at treatment centres are resold outside them.
      The Fix: Move outpatient opioid substitution to daily supervised dosing with a digital dispensing record at every centre.
    4. A state campaign against an interstate supply chain: Diverted pharmaceutical stock and precursor chemicals enter from manufacturing states that a state police campaign cannot reach. Eg. Tramadol and similar opioid formulations move in from units outside Punjab.
      The Fix: Place licensed pharmaceutical distributors in the border districts on a common online sales trail audited against prescription records.

    Conclusion

    Punjab’s drug problem is not one of not knowing what to do. Successive campaigns have named the same targets, produced the same pledges and left the trade to change its form rather than its size. What has never been tested is action against the part of the machinery the Governor named, and that is the one variable the state fully controls. The measure to watch after the election is not the weight seized but the number of major traffickers convicted and the number of enforcement personnel prosecuted.

    Drug trafficking in India

    1. Narco terrorism: The use of drug trafficking by terrorist organisations or insurgent groups to fund, sustain and expand their operations, so proceeds from the narcotics trade finance violence and subversion against the state.
    2. Financing of terror groups: Narcotics profits are a major source of funding for terrorist groups. Eg. Lashkar e Taiba, Babbar Khalsa International and Hizbul Mujahideen have used drug revenues to sustain operations.
    3. The eastern corridor: Porous borders with Myanmar carry both drug trafficking and insurgent financing. Eg. The Moreh corridor in Manipur.
    4. Maritime exposure: A long coastline with limited marine policing enables sea based narcotics trafficking into Indian ports.

    Government Initiatives for drug trafficking control

    1. Narcotics Control Bureau: The central agency that coordinates drug law enforcement across state and central agencies and handles trafficking cases with an interstate or international reach.
    2. Four tier NCORD mechanism: The Narco Coordination Centre integrates effort from the national level down to the district level, bringing enforcement and intelligence agencies onto a single platform.
    3. Seizure Information Management System: A portal developed under the NDPS Act to coordinate seizure data across all drug law enforcement agencies.
    4. Anti Narcotics Task Forces: Dedicated State and Union Territory units led by senior police officers, set up to implement anti drug strategies and strengthen local enforcement.
    5. National Policy for Drug Demand Reduction: Run by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment to reduce addiction among users rather than to police supply.
    6. Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan: A demand reduction campaign of the same Ministry, focused on the most affected districts and combining awareness, community outreach and linkage to treatment facilities.

    Back2Basics: Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985

    1. India’s principal anti drug legislation, criminalising the production, manufacture, possession, sale, transport and trafficking of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances.
    2. Penalties are graded by the quantity involved, with the harshest reserved for commercial quantity offences.
    3. Bail in a commercial quantity case is barred unless the court records satisfaction that the accused is not guilty and is unlikely to offend again.
    4. An addict charged with a small quantity offence may seek immunity from prosecution by volunteering for treatment.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2018, GS3, 15 marks] India’s proximity to two of the world’s biggest illicit opium-growing states has enhanced her internal security concerns. Explain the linkages between drug trafficking and other illicit activities such as gunrunning, money laundering and human trafficking. What counter-measures should be taken to prevent the same?”

  • Our healthcare boom hides a public-system deficit

    Why in the News

    The most revealing number in India’s healthcare record is government health expenditure at 1.43 per cent of GDP in 2022 to 2023, against the 2.5 per cent target set by the National Health Policy 2017. Almost every visible measure of healthcare has expanded, with medical colleges and seats multiplied, the footprint of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) network widened, and Ayushman Bharat established as one of the world’s largest publicly funded health insurance programmes. The latest report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare finds a system still struggling with basic capacity, affordability and regulation. The tension is that expansion has been measured in inputs the state can count, while the outcome that decides the result, whether a family is less exposed when illness strikes, is set by financing the state has not provided.

    What does government health expenditure as a share of GDP measure?

    1. What the ratio counts: It measures spending on health by the Centre, the states and local bodies, set against the size of the economy, so it rises only when health spending grows faster than output does.
    2. Why the share and not the amount: An absolute figure grows every year with prices and with the economy, so only the share shows whether health is gaining or losing ground against competing claims on public money.
    3. The benchmark it is read against: The National Health Policy 2017 fixed 2.5 per cent of GDP as the target, and the distance between that and the actual figure is what the public system’s shortfall is measured by.

    Why has expanding medical education not fixed the distribution of care?

    1. The expansion is real: The number of medical colleges has risen to 818, and undergraduate medical seats have reached 1,28,875.
    2. The problem was never the count of doctors: It was where they practise, who can afford them, and whether the system has the infrastructure to use them.
    3. Specialists are missing where they are most needed: The Committee finds specialist shortages at rural community health centres of roughly 70 to 80 per cent.
    4. Facilities without a building: There are 17,788 sub centres with no building of their own.
    5. Education as a commercial sector: Medical education has itself become a major commercial sector, with private and public private partnership models playing an important role, and once medical seats become valuable commercial assets the integrity of the regulator becomes the live question.

    What does the private sector’s share of care cost a patient?

    1. Where care actually happens: Citing the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) 80th round of 2025, more than 60 per cent of hospitalisations and around 70 per cent of outpatient care are serviced by the private sector.
    2. The price difference: Average hospitalisation expenditure is approximately Rs 6,631 in government hospitals, against Rs 50,508 in private hospitals.
    3. How the state imposes a cost without charging one: The state does not have to bill a patient to place the cost of private treatment on them, and only has to fail to provide a realistic public alternative.

    Why does insurance leave both prices and the missing middle unaddressed?

    1. What insurance has delivered: Ayushman Bharat has helped millions of families obtain hospital care they might otherwise have been unable to afford.
    2. Insurance pays the bill without controlling the price: If treatment costs Rs 5 lakh and insurance pays that amount, the patient is protected from immediate financial ruin while the healthcare system has still consumed the same sum.
    3. Someone eventually pays: If prices continue rising, the cost falls somewhere, on the government, the insurer, the employer or the patient.
    4. The missing middle: More than 40 crore Indians remain outside comprehensive financial protection, being too well off for the scheme and too poor for private cover.
    5. Out of pocket spending stays high: Such spending has fallen substantially and still accounted for 43.4 per cent of total health expenditure in 2022 to 2023.

    What is private capital buying, and what should the test of it be?

    1. Where the capital is going: Major transactions involving Manipal Health Enterprises, CARE Hospitals, KIMS, Rainbow Children’s Hospital and several diagnostic chains illustrate the growing appetite for healthcare assets.
    2. What attracts investors: Recurring demand, consolidation opportunities and the ability to build scalable chains.
    3. Capital is not the problem: India needs enormous investment, and the open question is what that investment actually produces.
    4. The tests to apply: Whether it creates capacity in under served districts, makes treatment cheaper and strengthens primary care, or instead acquires existing businesses, consolidates markets and pursues the most profitable segments.
    5. The standard proposed: The 2026 Lancet Commission Report on a Citizen-Centred Health System for India argues for a stronger publicly financed and publicly provided health system as the foundation of universal healthcare.

    Challenges to a publicly financed health system

    1. Spending is stuck below the policy’s own target: The share of public money reaching health has not moved to the level the policy set, so every other reform runs into a financing ceiling. Eg. Only around 40 per cent of public health funds go to primary care, against the National Health Policy 2017 target of two thirds.
      The Fix: Ring fence a rising share of the health budget for primary and preventive care, with an annual reporting requirement against the two thirds target.
    2. Health is a State subject and capacity varies sharply: Delivery depends on the state, so a single national design lands on very different administrative systems. Eg. Kerala’s decentralised public health system and Tamil Nadu’s doorstep care programme for the elderly and for patients with non communicable diseases have no counterpart in many states.
      The Fix: Tie central health transfers to state level outcome indicators rather than to expenditure alone, so building capacity is what gets rewarded.
    3. Public beds sit where the patients are not: Public capacity is concentrated in cities while most of the population is rural, so proximity rather than price decides who reaches care. Eg. 73 per cent of public hospital beds are in urban areas.
      The Fix: Make rural service a condition of subsidised medical education, with the posting tied to the district that lacks that specialty.
    4. Money collected for health does not reach health: A cess raised for a stated purpose does not arrive in the fund built for it, so the shortfall persists even where the revenue exists. Eg. The Comptroller and Auditor General has reported a gap of over Rs 43,000 crore in the transfer of health cess to the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Nidhi.
      The Fix: Make the transfer of the health cess to that fund automatic, and report the closing balance in the annual budget documents.
    5. Regulation of a commercialised sector is weak: Where private providers deliver most of the care, the state’s only lever over price and quality is a regulatory capacity it has not built. Eg. There is no national mechanism that caps the cost of high cost private procedures.
      The Fix: Enforce the Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Act, 2010 across states, with published standard treatment guidelines and rate ranges.

    Conclusion

    The expansion is real and it is being measured against the wrong thing. Counting colleges, seats, cards and institutions records what the state has built, and records nothing about whether a household can reach care it can pay for. The unresolved tension is that the public system is being asked to carry a universal promise on a share of national income that has not risen to meet it, while the private system it defers to sets the price. What to watch is whether that financing share moves, because every other reform in this area sits downstream of it.

    Public Healthcare System in India

    1. Constitutional placement: Public health and hospitals are a State subject in the Seventh Schedule, with the Centre acting through centrally sponsored schemes and coordination rather than direct delivery.
    2. How delivery is organised: Rural care runs in three tiers, the sub centre, the primary health centre and the community health centre, with district hospitals and medical college hospitals above them.
    3. Where the disease burden now sits: Non communicable diseases account for around 66 per cent of total deaths, with cardiovascular disease and chronic respiratory disease the leading causes.
    4. Scale of the primary care network: More than 1,85,000 Ayushman Arogya Mandirs, formerly health and wellness centres, are operational.

    Government Initiatives for Public Healthcare

    1. National Health Mission: It is the umbrella programme funding rural and urban public health delivery through the states, and it created the Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) cadre in 2005.
    2. Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana: It addresses regional imbalance in tertiary care by setting up new AIIMS institutions and upgrading existing government medical colleges.
    3. Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission: It builds the digital health record layer, with Ayushman Bharat Health Accounts giving each person a portable health identifier.
    4. eSanjeevani: The national telemedicine service links primary health facilities to specialists on a hub and spoke model, extending specialist advice to remote and tribal areas.
    5. Pradhan Mantri Bhartiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana: Its Janaushadhi Kendras supply quality generic medicines at low prices, reducing the medicines share of household health spending.

    Back2Basics

    1. What it is: The Committee on Health and Family Welfare is one of the 24 department related standing committees of Parliament.
    2. Composition: Each such committee has 31 members, 21 from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha, all nominated rather than elected, for a tenure of one year.
    3. Origin: The system of 17 such committees was constituted with effect from 8 April 1993, and was restructured in July 2004 to the present 24.
    4. Weight of its reports: It examines the ministry’s demands for grants, bills and policy, and its recommendations are advisory rather than binding on the government.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS2, 15 marks] In a crucial domain like the public healthcare system, the Indian State should play a vital role to contain the adverse impact of marketisation of the system. Suggest some measures through which the State can enhance the reach of public healthcare at the grassroots level.”

  • Government trusts Aadhaar on welfare. It needs to rely on it to make voter lists

    Why in the News

    The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls has stopped being a one off event. Rolling out in phases since June 2025, it now extends to almost the entire country and has already deleted over 13 crore names. The Supreme Court has upheld the exercise while holding that the final determination of citizenship belongs to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) under the Citizenship Act, 1955, and not to the Election Commission (EC). The goal of clean, accurate and inclusive rolls is not in dispute; the method is. That method revives a document intensive, house to house verification mothballed for over two decades and applies it on a near national scale, while the one question it is most often defended by, citizenship, is the question the Court has just said cannot be answered by an electoral officer at the doorstep.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision?

    1. What it does: It is a time bound, house to house enumeration in which Booth Level Officers (BLOs) physically visit households and verify every single voter entry.
    2. How it differs from the routine revision: The annual Summary Revision updates additions, deletions and corrections against a qualifying date, while an intensive revision re verifies every entry through fresh enumeration forms and document checks.
    3. Statutory basis: Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 authorises a special revision of the roll at any time, for reasons recorded in writing.
    4. Procedure: The Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 lay down the framework for house to house enumeration and verification.

    Why does the method impose its heaviest cost on the poorest voters?

    1. The burden of proof shifts to the voter: Lakhs of officials go door to door, and crores of citizens must prove their eligibility on paper within compressed deadlines.
    2. Who carries that burden: It falls hardest on the poor, the elderly, migrants and women, who are the least likely to hold a continuous documentary record of themselves.
    3. Welfare linkage raises the price of an error: Orders in some states link roll deletions to welfare records, so a wrongful removal can cost a family its rations and its pension.
    4. Redress is slow where deletions are largest: The Supreme Court is pressing the EC over the slow disposal of appeals against deletions in West Bengal, where voters struck off are still waiting to be heard.
    5. The cost recurs by design: The exercise mobilises around 10 lakh public servants, mostly schoolteachers, and costs the exchequer thousands of crores every cycle.

    Why can citizenship not be settled in the field?

    1. The documents are not universal: A passport is held by under 8 per cent of Indians, and was clarified in June by the Ministry of External Affairs to be a travel document rather than proof of citizenship.
    2. What the common records actually prove: Aadhaar proves identity and residence by statute and not citizenship, while the voter identity card and the Permanent Account Number (PAN) prove none of it.
    3. Birth registration was patchy: For decades the registration of births was incomplete for the poor, for women and for rural India.
    4. The abandoned pilot: The Multipurpose National Identity Card pilot was abandoned as unworkable.
    5. The Assam precedent: The National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam excluded 19 lakh people, caused enormous distress and resolved nothing.
    6. The register that followed counted residents: The National Population Register enumerated “usual residents”, citizens and non citizens alike, because a field test of citizenship was found impractical.

    What would an Aadhaar based revision actually do?

    1. The application: A voluntary application on mobile or web would let a voter link Aadhaar to the Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) and complete face authentication in one step, with no document and no visit to any office.
    2. What a single authentication settles: The act proves the voter is alive, removes duplicates because each Aadhaar is unique, and removes ghosts because a non existent person cannot authenticate.
    3. Age without a date of birth: Biometrics are not captured below the age of five, so a person whose fingerprints and iris were recorded in an enrolment around 2013 or earlier was at least five then and is at least 18 now.
    4. Why the record has no motive to lie: Aadhaar was created as a bare identity carrying no benefit or entitlement, so nothing was gained by misstating age, and the address had to be genuine because the Aadhaar letter was posted to it.
    5. Voluntariness and the residue: Linkage stays voluntary, and those who decline use the ordinary manual route, a small residue given near universal coverage.
    6. Citizenship handled as the Court requires: Everyone is identified first, analytics flag the few genuine outliers, and only those are referred to the MHA.

    Does the existing record of face authentication support the claim?

    1. Coverage: Aadhaar covers 1.36 billion residents, making it the largest and most carefully audited enrolment in existence.
    2. Proven at scale in welfare: De duplicating PAN, closing benami accounts and removing crores of ghost beneficiaries from welfare have together saved over Rs 2.7 lakh crore.
    3. Face authentication at the airport gate: More than 10 crore Aadhaar face authentication transactions have been completed in Digi Yatra through more than 100 airports, with as many as 500 crore face authentications completed in all to date.
    4. Face authentication for pensions: Jeevan Pramaan lets 1.47 crore pensioners prove from a phone, by their face alone, that they are alive.
    5. Privacy design: Aadhaar authentication returns only a yes or no answer, and never the underlying data.

    Challenges to an Aadhaar based electoral roll revision

    1. It cannot answer the question the revision is defended by: Aadhaar proves residence, so it leaves citizenship exactly where the Court left it, with the MHA. Eg. The same statutory limit that disqualifies Aadhaar as proof of citizenship applies to the proposed application.
      The Fix: Separate the two tasks in law, using the application only for de duplication and proof of life, and routing citizenship doubts to a statutory MHA process carrying notice and hearing.
    2. Authentication failure excludes the people it is meant to protect: Biometric and face authentication fails for manual labourers, for the elderly and where connectivity is poor, and a failure at the roll stage removes a vote rather than a ration. Eg. Ration denials following biometric authentication failure were reported in Jharkhand.
      The Fix: Make manual verification a guaranteed fallback with a statutory timeline, so no name is ever deleted on an authentication failure alone.
    3. Seeding Aadhaar into rolls has been halted once already: An earlier programme was stopped on legal rather than technical grounds, and the same objection can be raised against a fresh attempt. Eg. The National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme of 2015 was halted after the Supreme Court’s interim orders restricting the use of Aadhaar.
      The Fix: Ground the application in an express statutory provision carrying defined purpose limitation, so linkage rests on law rather than on an administrative circular.
    4. Deletion by analytics carries no hearing: Flagging an outlier produces an administrative suspicion the voter must then rebut, which returns the burden of proof to the individual. Eg. Rule 18 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 requires individual notice before a deletion, and its observance has been contested in petitions against the current revision.
      The Fix: Require a reasoned notice, a hearing and an appeal decided within a fixed period before any flagged name is removed.
    5. Privacy and proportionality: Building the electoral roll on a national biometric identity concentrates a population wide database against a constitutional right. Eg. Any state intrusion into privacy must satisfy legality, a legitimate aim and proportionality between the means and that aim.
      The Fix: Subject the application to a published proportionality assessment and to independent audit of every authentication log.

    Conclusion

    The revision and the alternative are not two methods for the same task. One tries to settle a legal status in the field, which the Court has already held the field cannot settle, and the other cleans the roll of the dead, the duplicated and the departed, which is the part a machine can actually do. Keeping the two apart is what would allow the roll to be cleaned without a citizenship test attached to it. The thing to watch is whether the Election Commission is given an express statutory basis for face authentication, because without one the alternative inherits the same legal fragility that stopped the last attempt.

    Electoral Roll Management in India

    1. One roll for all: Article 325 mandates one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency, and bars exclusion from it on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.
    2. Universal adult suffrage: Article 326 guarantees the vote to every citizen of 18 years and above, the age fixed by the Sixty first Amendment.
    3. Who qualifies for registration: Section 19 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 requires a voter to be 18 or above and “ordinarily resident” in the constituency, while Section 16 lists the disqualifications for registration, including non citizenship.
    4. The machinery: Sections 13A to 13CC set the administrative hierarchy of the Chief Electoral Officer at state level, the District Election Officer at district level and the Electoral Registration Officer at constituency level.

    Government Initiatives on Electoral Roll Management

    1. Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021: It permits the Electoral Registration Officer to seek a voter’s Aadhaar number on a voluntary basis, through Form 6B, to establish identity and to identify duplicate entries.
    2. National Voters’ Service Portal: It allows voters to register, modify and confirm their electoral details online without visiting an office.
    3. ECINET: Launched in 2026, it is a single digital interface integrating more than 40 mobile and web applications for voters and election officials.
    4. Faster delivery of the identity card: A standard operating procedure requires the Electors Photo Identity Card to be delivered within 15 days of an update.

    Back2Basics

    1. What Aadhaar is: It is a 12 digit random number issued to a resident of India after biometric and demographic de duplication, and it establishes identity rather than citizenship.
    2. Governing law: It rests on the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016.
    3. Issuing authority: The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is the statutory authority under that Act, functioning under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
    4. Judicial limits: In K S Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2018) a five judge Constitution Bench upheld the Act and struck down Section 57, so a private entity cannot demand Aadhaar authentication under a contract.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS2, 10 marks] Is the right to vote a fundamental right? Discuss the position of the Election Commission of India while undertaking the revision of electoral rolls. Can it also examine the question of citizenship of voters?”

  • From Bengal to Boston, politicians love a ‘revdi’

    Why in the News

    The US President has promised a dividend of $5,000 to every adult citizen of the United States if the Republican Party retains control of Congress at the November midterm elections, describing it as a return on the country’s economic strength. The promise imports into a rich economy an instrument Indian parties have used for two decades. In India, Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT), the routing of welfare money straight into a beneficiary’s bank account, were built on the Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile (JAM) trinity under the second United Progressive Alliance government, and every party now carries cash handouts in its manifesto. The Prime Minister warned against a “revdi culture” in July 2022, and his own party’s state units went on to make cash transfers central to their poll strategy. The contested point is whether an instrument with this universal electoral pull is welfare policy or a substitute for a state that has not delivered health, education and skilling.

    What is a Direct Benefit Transfer based cash transfer?

    1. Direct Benefit Transfer: Welfare money is credited directly to an identified beneficiary’s bank account instead of reaching them as a subsidised good or a service.
    2. The JAM rails: A Jan Dhan bank account, an Aadhaar number for identification and a mobile number for authentication together make the credit instantaneous and traceable.
    3. Unconditional transfer: The recipient has to satisfy an eligibility filter such as being an adult woman, and nothing more. No school attendance, health check or work requirement attaches to the payment.

    Why does a cash dividend appeal to voters in the world’s richest economy?

    1. Per capita income gap: US annual per capita income is $94,430, almost 34 times India’s $2,813, so a flat payment reads very differently at each end of that range.
    2. Bottom quintile: Mean household income of the poorest 20 per cent of Americans is $17,132 a year, per the 2024 American Community Survey of the US Census Bureau. A $5,000 payment is more than 100 days of that household’s annual income.
    3. Second quintile: The next 20 per cent has a household income of $48,852 a year, so the same payment is a little over a month’s income.
    4. Concentration at the top: Annual household income of the top 5 per cent is $5,25,113, more than 30 times the mean of the bottom 20 per cent. A flat transfer is therefore a large sum for the bottom of a rich country and a rounding error at its top.

    How large is the fiscal commitment behind these promises?

    1. Cost of the US dividend: About 245 million citizens are over 18, per US Census Bureau 2024 data, putting the cost of the promise at at least $1 trillion.
    2. Scale against India: That sum is close to a fourth of India’s entire GDP of $3.92 trillion in 2025 to 26.
    3. State transfers in India: The Sixteenth Finance Commission estimates large group unconditional cash transfers by states at Rs 1.96 lakh crore in 2025 to 26, roughly $20 billion, the bulk of it going to women in Maharashtra, Karnataka and West Bengal.
    4. Approval risk: The US dividend is a promise and not an appropriation. It requires the United States Congress to approve the spending.

    How did cash transfers become the common instrument of Indian electoral politics?

    1. Origin in delivery reform: DBT began as a leakage reduction measure under the second United Progressive Alliance government, built on the JAM trinity rather than on an electoral calculation.
    2. The electoral discovery: An advisor to that government framed the appeal in terms of funds reaching a voter’s account at the click of a mouse ahead of an election.
    3. Cross party adoption: Regional parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party all now carry cash handouts to sections of their voter base in their manifestos.
    4. Reversal of a stated position: The Prime Minister’s July 2022 warning against the practice was followed by his own party’s state units adopting it, producing a competitive escalation between state units, regional parties and the Congress.

    What does the spread of cash transfers reveal about the state?

    1. A political economy fallout: Cash transfers expanded because the state failed on health, education and skilling, leaving parties to offer money in place of services.
    2. Substitute forms of security: The same failure produces minimum income through job guarantees, cash in the hands of women and allowances for the literate but jobless, each of them a payment standing in for a missing service.
    3. Universality of the instrument: A rich economy with 34 times India’s per capita income reaches for the same device, which shows the appeal is electoral rather than developmental.

    Challenges to unconditional cash transfers

    1. Recurring outlay against capital spending: A monthly transfer becomes a permanent charge on a state budget and competes with capital spending on hospitals, schools and water supply. Eg. Maharashtra’s Ladki Bahin scheme and Karnataka’s Gruha Lakshmi are annual recurring commitments rather than one time payments.
      The Fix: Report unconditional transfer outlay as a disclosed share of a state’s own revenue receipts in every annual budget document.
    2. Absence of human capital conditionality: An unconditional payment asks nothing of the household, so it does not move school attendance or immunisation. Eg. Mexico’s Progresa linked benefits to school attendance and health check ups, and Brazil’s Bolsa Familia used conditional transfers to lift 36 million people out of poverty.
      The Fix: Attach verifiable attendance and immunisation conditions where the delivery system can already confirm them.
    3. Exclusion through the identification layer: Eligibility rests on databases, and a household with unseeded or mismatched records drops out of the list without knowing why. Eg. Aadhaar seeding failures have removed ration card holders from beneficiary lists in Jharkhand.
      The Fix: Provide an offline grievance and reinstatement route at the block level with a fixed disposal deadline.
    4. Pressure off the public provider: Cash allows a household to buy the private service the state failed to supply, which removes the political pressure to repair the public one. Eg. Out of pocket spending on private hospitals remains a leading route into household impoverishment in India.
      The Fix: Publish a service availability audit of the relevant public facilities alongside each transfer scheme.

    Conclusion

    A cash transfer buys immediate relief and buys it visibly, which is why it has crossed from a lower middle income democracy to the richest one. It does not build a health centre, staff a school or train a worker, and the states expanding it fastest are the ones whose service delivery gaps created the demand for it. The tension is unresolved: the instrument is popular precisely because the public system it compensates for has not been fixed, and every rupee committed to the transfer makes fixing that system harder to finance.

    What is Inclusive Growth?

    1. About: Inclusive growth is economic growth distributed fairly across society that creates opportunity for all, as defined by the Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development (OECD).
    2. Rationale: It entered India’s stated policy goals with the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007 to 2012), titled “Rapid and More Inclusive Growth”, and continued in the Twelfth Plan as “Faster, Sustainable, and More Inclusive Growth”.
    3. The OECD typology: Three dimensions govern it. Participation, meaning all groups can contribute to growth; benefit sharing, meaning all groups gain in proportion to their contribution; and equity, meaning historical disadvantage is actively redressed.
    4. How it is measured: The National Multidimensional Poverty Index across health, education and living standards, the Gini coefficient for consumption or income inequality, the Human Development Index, and the Periodic Labour Force Survey for participation and unemployment.

    Government Initiatives for Inclusive Growth

    1. Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana: Free food grain to 81.35 crore beneficiaries, extended to 31 December 2028 at an outlay of about Rs 11.80 lakh crore.
    2. Viksit Bharat G RAM G Act, 2025: Replaces the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act with a 125 day wage guarantee plus skill and livelihood diversification components, effective 1 July 2026.
    3. Ayushman Bharat PM JAY: Health cover of Rs 5 lakh a year for 55 crore beneficiaries, now extended to all persons above 70 under Ayushman Vay Vandana.
    4. Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana and PM SVANidhi: Rs 27 lakh crore disbursed across 43 crore micro enterprise loans since 2015, and collateral free credit of Rs 10,000 to Rs 50,000 for street vendors.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS3, 10 marks] Examine the pattern and trend of public expenditure on social services in the post-reforms period in India. To what extent this has been in consonance with achieving the objective of inclusive growth?”

  • Terror’s changing face, India’s counter-terror strategy

    Terror’s changing face, India’s counter-terror strategy

    Why in the News

    India has unveiled PRAHAAR, its first comprehensive National Counter Terrorism Policy and Strategy, which sets a national framework for preventing and responding to terrorist activity and radicalisation through coordinated “whole of government” and “whole of society” approaches. The policy follows Operation Sindoor, the strikes of 6 and 7 May on the Pakistan based terror network launched after the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025, and follows the three declarations India issued immediately after that operation. The first of those declarations ended the stated era of restraint, the second classified any future act of cross border terrorism emanating from Pakistan as an “act of war”, and the third removed Pakistani nuclear blackmail as a restraining factor. The tension is that the doctrine India has hardened is built for a state sponsor with a return address, while the threat itself has fragmented into lone wolf attackers, autonomous cells and drone, cyber and artificial intelligence enabled methods that a retaliatory strike does not reach.

    What is PRAHAAR?

    1. PRAHAAR as a national policy: PRAHAAR is India’s first comprehensive National Counter Terrorism Policy and Strategy, unveiled on 23 February 2026.
    2. Scope of the framework: It sets out a national counter terrorism framework for preventing and responding to terrorist activities and to radicalisation.
    3. Whole of government and whole of society approach: It works through coordinated “whole of government” and “whole of society” approaches, so prevention is not left to security agencies alone.

    How has the form of terrorism changed in 25 years?

    1. The organisational form has fragmented: Large terror groups run by single leaders, such as al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden or the Islamic State under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with its call for an Islamic Caliphate, have given way to smaller and more autonomous entities.
    2. The attacker is now often solitary: Lone wolf attacks are becoming the norm, which removes the network that intelligence collection is designed to detect.
    3. Drones, cyber capability and artificial intelligence: Drones, cyber capabilities and artificial intelligence are now used to perpetrate terror.
    4. Counter terrorism use of the same technologies: Those technologies are used by the nations combating terrorism as well, so capability advantage is contested rather than assured.

    What is a lone wolf attack?

    1. The definition: A lone wolf attack is an attack planned and executed by a single individual, or by a pair acting alone, who belongs to no organisation and takes no operational direction from one.
    2. How the attacker is produced: Radicalisation runs through online propaganda rather than through recruitment by a handler, so the individual adopts a group’s cause without ever joining its structure. Eg. Self radicalised modules assembled around professionals, rather than around infiltrators, in recent hinterland cases.
    3. Why detection fails: Intelligence collection works by intercepting communication between conspirators and by penetrating networks, and an attacker who communicates with nobody generates neither signal.
    4. Why a retaliation doctrine does not reach it: A cross border response needs attribution to a sponsoring state, and an individual acting alone offers no camp, handler or command node to strike.

    Why did the early Indian response stay passive, and which attacks fell inside that period?

    1. Assassination of a former Prime Minister, 1991: The assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam on 21 May 1991 at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu came while cross border terror was only beginning in Kashmir.
    2. Internal detection failed repeatedly: The March 1993 Mumbai serial blasts killed over 250 people in 13 coordinated blasts, and the synchronised blasts across Coimbatore in February 1998 exposed the inadequacy of internal security mechanisms.
    3. Pakistan’s direct role was first exposed by a hijack: The hijack of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 on 24 December 1999 forced India to release the Pakistan based terrorists Ahmed Omar Sheikh and Masood Azhar in exchange for more than 160 civilian hostages.
    4. Operation Parakram and its outcome: The Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) attack on Parliament on 13 December 2001 triggered a large scale military mobilisation under Operation Parakram, and after almost two years of standoff the disengagement took place with no direct punishment on Pakistan.
    5. Nuclear parity was the restraint: With both countries holding nuclear weapons, the threat of escalation drew the international community in to cool tempers each time.
    6. The 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the absence of retaliation: The 26/11 Mumbai attacks of November 2008, which brought the world’s solidarity with India’s fight against cross border terrorism, produced no military action against Pakistan.
    7. The Red Fort attack of 2000: An Army garrison within the Red Fort was targeted on 22 December 2000 by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists, killing three soldiers.
    8. Delhi market blasts of 2005: Over 60 people were killed in serial blasts across Delhi markets including Sarojini Nagar and Paharganj in October 2005.
    9. Delhi commercial district blasts of 2008: Multiple blasts hit Connaught Place, Greater Kailash and Karol Bagh in September 2008, months before the Mumbai attacks.
    10. The Delhi High Court blast of 2011: A briefcase bomb outside the Delhi High Court on 7 September 2011 killed 15 people, claimed by Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HUJI), an al-Qaeda affiliated group largely based in Pakistan.
    11. Akshardham, Varanasi and Pune attacks: The 2002 Akshardham Temple attack, the 2006 Varanasi serial blasts and the 2010 German Bakery blast in Pune are part of the same record.
    12. Proof did not produce a response: In each of these cases India chose not to respond directly and decisively, even after conclusive proof of Pakistan’s support.

    What changed when the fight moved across the border?

    1. The Uri attack and the 2016 surgical strikes: The JeM attack on an Army camp at Uri in Kashmir on 18 September 2016 led to the first cross border surgical strikes on 28 and 29 September.
    2. Message conveyed by the surgical strikes: They sent a message and served as a statement of intent that terror would not go unpunished.
    3. The Balakot air strike of 2019: After the attack on a Central Reserve Police Force convoy at Pulwama on 14 February 2019, the Indian Air Force struck a JeM terror camp at Balakot, the first time it had crossed into Pakistani airspace to hit a terror target.
    4. Operation Sindoor, 2025: Operation Sindoor was launched on 6 and 7 May after the Pahalgam attack, and in 96 hours the leaders and headquarters of the LeT and JeM networks were destroyed and Pakistani military assets were hit.

    What is the four fold strategy proposed from here?

    1. Elimination of the residual network: Continue to hunt down and eliminate the remnants of the terror network inside the country, particularly in Kashmir.
    2. Pre emptive action across the Line of Control: Take pre emptive military action against any potential terror threat building across the Line of Control (LoC), including at terrorist launch pads, which years of experience and an embedded intelligence network make possible.
    3. The de radicalisation programme: Run an exhaustive de radicalisation programme that motivates young people towards the mainstream and makes joining or supporting a terror outfit unattractive and prohibitively costly.
    4. Terror financing: Take all necessary steps to cut off terror financing, in close coordination with friendly countries.

    What is India pressing for at the multilateral level?

    1. The charge of double standards: At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in Bishkek on 1 September the Prime Minister said, “We must send a strong message to countries that use terrorism as an instrument of policy and provide safe haven and support to terrorists that terrorism can never be a strategic asset for anyone.”
    2. A named attack entered a group declaration: The 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi included an exclusive paragraph on the Pahalgam attack in the Delhi Declaration.
    3. Effect of a grievance carried in multilateral text: A specific Indian grievance is now carried in the text of a multi country declaration rather than only in national statements.

    Challenges to India’s counter terrorism strategy

    1. A retaliation doctrine has no target in a lone wolf attack: An “act of war” classification presumes an attributable state sponsor, and a self radicalised individual acting alone gives no address to strike. Eg. Self radicalised modules assembled around professionals, rather than infiltrators, in recent hinterland cases.
      The Fix: Pair the declaratory doctrine with a published attribution standard, so the threshold of evidence that triggers a cross border response is fixed in advance rather than argued after each attack.
    2. Police and public order are State subjects: A national policy has to be executed through State police forces that the Union does not control, which is where coordination breaks down. Eg. The delay in National Security Guard deployment during the 26/11 Mumbai attacks.
      The Fix: Route PRAHAAR’s obligations through a standing Centre State counter terrorism council with State specific implementation timelines, rather than through advisories.
    3. Intelligence remains fragmented across agencies: Multiple collection agencies without seamless real time sharing means a warning held by one is not actionable by another. Eg. Intelligence fusion is attempted through the Multi Agency Centre and the National Intelligence Grid, which depend on voluntary feeds from database holding agencies.
      The Fix: Give a single fusion centre statutory authority to task and receive feeds, on the model of a national counter terrorism centre, so sharing is an obligation rather than a courtesy.
    4. De radicalisation has no measurable output: A programme aimed at intent rather than at incidents cannot be judged by attack counts, and India runs no published evaluation of one. Eg. Online influence of the kind that drove youth radicalisation in Kashmir operates outside any programme’s reach.
      The Fix: Fix published indicators for the programme, such as recruitment attempts intercepted and cases of disengagement sustained over a stated period, and report them annually.
    5. Terror financing has moved to channels outside the banking system: Hawala, counterfeit currency and cryptocurrency route funds without touching a reportable transaction. Eg. Informal channel financing was traced in the ISIS linked Padgha module.
      The Fix: Bring virtual digital asset service providers fully under reporting obligations to the Financial Intelligence Unit India, so the fastest growing channel is monitored on the same terms as banks.
    6. There is no agreed international definition of terrorism: The absence of one lets states label selectively and refuse cooperation on legal grounds. Eg. Repeated holds placed on listings under the United Nations Security Council 1267 sanctions committee.
      The Fix: Press the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, which India first proposed in 1996, to a vote rather than leaving it in open ended negotiation.

    Conclusion

    The doctrine India adopted after Operation Sindoor answers one form of the threat well and leaves the other untouched. A declared willingness to retaliate raises the cost of sponsoring an attack from across the border; it does nothing about an attacker who was recruited online and never crossed anything. PRAHAAR is the first instrument that addresses the second half, which is why its prevention and radicalisation components, rather than its enforcement components, are the part worth watching. The marker is whether the policy produces named nodal responsibilities and reported outcomes, or remains a framework document that the next attack is measured against.

    Terrorism in India

    1. Definition of terrorism: Terrorism is the deliberate use of violence, or the threat of violence, to instil fear and achieve political, ideological or religious goals.
    2. The statutory definition: Under Section 15 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, a terrorist act is any act intended to threaten India’s sovereignty, security or unity, or to create terror through violence, explosives or disruption of essential services.
    3. The four recognised strands in the Indian context: Cross border terrorism driven by Pakistan based groups in Jammu and Kashmir and by Khalistani networks, North East insurgencies run by ethno nationalist groups such as NSCN and ULFA, Left Wing Extremism across the Red Corridor, and hinterland terrorism by modules operating outside traditional conflict zones.
    4. The direction of change: The terror and organised crime nexus supplies funding, arms and logistics, and technology acts as a force multiplier through drones, encrypted platforms and 3D printing. Eg. The Houthi drone attack on Saudi Aramco in 2019.

    Institutional Architecture and Initiatives Against Terrorism

    1. Multi Agency Centre and Cyber Multi Agency Centre: Fuse intelligence inputs across central and State agencies.
    2. National Intelligence Grid: Networks databases held by different departments to give agencies real time access.
    3. Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre: Acts as the nodal point against cybercrime with a citizen reporting route. Eg. The 1930 helpline.
    4. Border management systems: Smart fencing under the Comprehensive Integrated Border Management System plugs infiltration gaps, backed by a layered coastal security grid.
    5. Surrender and rehabilitation policies: Pull cadres out of insurgency through reintegration rather than through prosecution alone.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2025, GS3, 10 marks] Terrorism is a global scourge. How has it manifested in India? Elaborate with contemporary examples. What are the counter measures adopted by the State? Explain.”

  • The choice is between AI applications and AI frontiers

    Why in the News

    India has no competitive frontier artificial intelligence (AI) model and no realistic prospect of producing one without significant policy shifts, at a time when United States and Chinese firms have released a parade of increasingly capable models through the year. The advice India has received from United States industry leaders and academics, supported by sections of the Indian information technology industry, is to concentrate on applications built on foundation models rather than on the frontier itself. The position advanced against that advice is that countries falling behind in frontier AI risk the fate of those that missed the Industrial Revolution, where a small business elite found a niche and prospered while ordinary people were disempowered. The binding constraint identified is not talent or algorithms but computing power, since the IndiaAI mission’s pool of 45,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) is a fraction of what a single United States frontier laboratory controls. The proposal put forward is a compute tax requiring any data centre established in India to reserve a share of its capacity for a publicly administered national pool.

    What is a frontier AI model?

    1. Frontier model: A frontier model is a foundation model at the leading edge of capability, from which industry specific applications are then built.
    2. Scaling laws: The industry has exploited “scaling laws”, which predict how a model’s performance improves with its size and with the computing power used for its training.
    3. Compute and data as the decisive input: The algorithms underlying modern AI models are widely understood, so better algorithms improve efficiency while the basic formula for producing a frontier model remains scaling compute and data.

    What are the two channels through which AI will matter?

    1. Diffusion through the economy: AI will spread by automating some routine jobs, with each industry requiring specialised applications built on foundation models.
    2. India’s application start up ecosystem: India has an active start up ecosystem devoted to building such applications, and businesses have rapidly adopted AI tools.
    3. The strategic channel is separate: AI will also have a strategic impact on research, cybersecurity and defence, which is not reached by application building.
    4. Mathematics and cybersecurity results: AI models have been used to solve some of the most important open problems in mathematics, and Anthropic’s Mythos model has formidable cybersecurity capabilities.

    Why is access to foreign frontier models not a durable substitute?

    1. Access today is real but conditional: Consumers currently have access to other frontier models, including Chinese open weight models.
    2. The most capable model is already withheld: Mythos has not been released publicly and is available only to selected organisations.
    3. Export control has already been applied: The United States temporarily imposed export restrictions on Mythos and on a version of Mythos with guardrails called Fable.
    4. The stated direction of policy: The United States is likely to restrict and regulate AI to “achieve global dominance”, so present availability cannot be expected to continue indefinitely.

    Why is compute the binding constraint for India?

    1. The national pool is small: The IndiaAI mission has a pool of 45,000 GPUs, which is only a fraction of the capacity controlled by a single United States frontier laboratory.
    2. The flagship allocation is smaller still: The mission allocated 4,096 GPUs to Sarvam AI to train India’s flagship model.
    3. The gap is an order of magnitude: That allocation is about 50 times smaller than what is used to train frontier models.
    4. Ingenuity does not close it: No amount of ingenuity can compensate for a resource gap of that size, which is why lack of computing power has bottlenecked sovereign Indian model development.

    What do the new data centres actually deliver to India?

    1. Data centre build out across States: A number of data centres with significant computing capacity are coming up in various States.
    2. Capacity reserved for multinational clients: These will primarily serve multinational corporations, and their location in India offers no tangible benefits.
    3. The investment goes into equipment: Most of the announced capital investment will be directed to electronic equipment.
    4. The employment effect is thin: The employment they create will be limited to a few construction and maintenance jobs.
    5. The environmental cost is local: Large data centres have a significant environmental impact, and in India that impact will be borne disproportionately by local communities.

    How would a compute tax work?

    1. The obligation: Any data centre established in India would be required to reserve a stated share, suggested at 25 per cent, of its computing capacity for a publicly administered national compute pool.
    2. The hardware does not move: That capacity would remain physically within the data centre.
    3. Allocation is centralised: The reserved capacity would be allocated by a central scheduler to Indian institutions.
    4. The bargaining position favours India: Multinational corporations are likely to resist, and their bargaining position is weak given the growing hostility to these installations elsewhere.
    5. Limits of the compute tax: Such a tax would not obviate the other data centre concerns, and only together with environmental safeguards and welfare measures would it open a narrow route to building a frontier model in India.

    Challenges to a compute tax on data centres

    1. Reserved capacity is not the same as usable capacity: Frontier training needs thousands of GPUs interconnected as one cluster, and a quarter of each site’s capacity scattered across many sites does not assemble into that. Eg. The flagship national allocation of 4,096 GPUs already sits far below frontier training scale despite being a single block.
      The Fix: Write the reservation as a contiguous interconnected block within each site, with a minimum cluster size, rather than as a percentage of total capacity.
    2. A capacity levy raises the cost of hosting in India: An operator prices the reserved share into its India investment case and can site the facility in a neighbouring jurisdiction instead. Eg. Data centre investment is mobile across countries in a way that manufacturing capacity is not.
      The Fix: Offset the reservation against power tariff and land concessions already given to data centres, so the obligation is priced as a condition of the incentive rather than as an additional charge.
    3. A public pool needs an allocation rule it does not yet have: Deciding which institution gets scarce compute, for how long and on what merit is a governance problem that no existing Indian body performs. Eg. The single largest allocation so far went to one start up for the flagship model.
      The Fix: Publish the scheduler’s allocation criteria and a usage register, so grants of compute are contestable in the way research grants are.
    4. Compute alone does not produce a model: Frontier training also needs large curated datasets and a small pool of researchers who have trained models at scale, both of which are internationally mobile. Eg. Indian language data is thin compared with the English language corpora frontier models are trained on.
      The Fix: Tie the compute grant to a data contribution obligation, so a recipient returns curated Indian language datasets into the national repository as a condition of access.
    5. The environmental burden stays where it was: Reserving capacity changes who uses the machines and not their power draw, water use or siting. Eg. The impact of large installations falls disproportionately on the communities around them.
      The Fix: Attach site level water and power disclosure and a local benefit sharing requirement to the same instrument that creates the reservation.

    Conclusion

    The question the argument forces is not whether India should build applications, which it already does well, but whether an applications only position is a strategy or a description of the constraint. The claim on the other side is that capability at the frontier has a strategic use in research, security and defence that no amount of downstream product building substitutes for. The compute tax is the first concrete instrument proposed to convert privately owned capacity sited in India into publicly directed capacity, and it is testable against a single question: whether the reserved share can be assembled into a cluster large enough to train anything. The marker to watch is whether any Indian allocation moves from the thousands of GPUs to the tens of thousands, since that is the threshold the gap is actually measured at.

    Artificial Intelligence in India

    1. AI as a public good: India treats AI as a public good rather than a proprietary luxury, anchored in shared compute infrastructure, open and locally relevant datasets and decentralised talent development.
    2. The scale of the ecosystem: Over 6 million people are employed in the technology and AI ecosystem, with more than 1,800 Global Capability Centres of which over 500 are AI focused.
    3. Adoption is broad: 87 per cent of enterprises are actively deploying AI solutions, led by industrial and automotive, consumer goods and retail, banking and financial services, and healthcare.
    4. The projected economic weight: AI is projected to contribute USD 500 to 600 billion to India’s Gross Domestic Product by 2030.

    Government Initiatives for Artificial Intelligence

    1. IndiaAI Mission, 2024: Implemented by IndiaAI under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology with an outlay of Rs 10,371 crore, on the stated vision of making AI in India and making AI work for India.
    2. AIKosh: The national AI dataset repository, carrying over 3,000 datasets and 243 models across 20 sectors.
    3. BharatGen: A government funded multimodal large language model initiative designed for AI powered public services and Indian use cases.
    4. Digital India Bhashini and Project Vaani: Speech and translation tools across the 22 Scheduled Languages, supported by a 150,000 hour Indian speech dataset.
    5. IndiaAI FutureSkills and YUVAi: Fellowships and AI labs concentrated in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, and an AI skills initiative for school students in Classes 8 to 12.
    6. IndiaAI Safety Institute: The national trust framework covering bias mitigation, privacy, explainability and AI governance.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS3, 15 marks] What is agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Explain its working. Describe its applications with suitable examples. Discuss the advantages, risks and challenges associated with agentic AI systems.”