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Type: Op-ed

  • The BRICS Summit allows India to advance its global ambitions

    Why in the News

    India hosts the BRICS Summit at the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, with leaders and representatives of 11 BRICS countries opening deliberations on the future of global governance. Forging a joint statement is never easy at a multilateral conference whose members are themselves parties to ongoing conflicts. The grouping was a five member body at India’s earlier hostings, where managing consensus was easier, and enlargement since 2024 has changed that. The largest share of the host’s difficulty comes from the United States, which has accused the bloc of working against the dollar and has threatened tariffs on every member over its payments agenda. India is at the same time seeking to restore ties with that administration on trade and on its Indo-Pacific strategy, so hosting the bloc risks the relationship the hosting is partly meant to balance.

    Why is consensus harder than at India’s earlier hostings?

    1. The scale of the responsibility: Hosting BRICS is the second time in recent years, after the G-20 Summit in 2023, that India has had to shoulder a major multilateral conference.
    2. The earlier hostings were smaller: India hosted the coalition of emerging economies in 2012, 2016 and virtually in 2021, when it was a grouping of just five major powers.
    3. Who joined: The expansion in 2024 added Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and Indonesia was inducted in 2025.
    4. What the enlargement did and did not do: BRICS’ identity has evolved with the new membership. A common focus remains elusive.

    Which conflicts among members block a common text?

    1. Conflicts involving members have multiplied: Global conflicts involving BRICS members have grown alongside the enlargement.
    2. The war involving Iran is the sharpest case: Iran is a victim of the United States and Israeli strikes, and the UAE was attacked by Iran in retaliation. Both are members of the grouping.
    3. Neither will accept a shared account: Iran and the UAE have been unwilling to agree to a common narrative on the problem, which is precisely what a joint statement requires.
    4. India’s own position has divided the grouping: India’s position on Israel came into conflict with other members earlier this year, since the grouping has traditionally taken a much more critical line on Israel’s actions.

    Why does the United States pose the largest problem for the host?

    1. The accusation is about the dollar: The United States President has accused the grouping of plotting to overthrow the United States dollar’s domination of the global economy.
    2. The threatened instrument: He has been threatening tariffs on all members for planning to increase intra-BRICS payments and trade.
    3. What India is attempting in parallel: The government is seeking to restore ties with the United States administration on trade and on its Indo-Pacific strategy.
    4. The risk is not proportionate to the conduct: Hosting BRICS risks invoking American displeasure however irrational that displeasure is, so the host cannot manage the risk simply by adjusting the agenda.

    Why is a grouping that refuses the anti-western label still a counter to the G-7?

    1. The label the bloc rejects: The grouping prefers not to be called anti-western.
    2. What it functions as: It is a powerful counter to the G-7 and to western-led thinking.
    3. The scale behind the counter: BRICS accounts for half the world’s population, two fifths of the global economy and a fourth of global trade.
    4. Its energy position: It includes many of the world’s top energy producers and its biggest consumers, which gives it weight in energy markets that requires no declaration to exercise.
    5. The rise that produced this: BRICS was first conceptualised 25 years ago and convened a summit in 2009, and its countries have risen in global stature and economic heft since, with intra-BRICS trade benefitting.

    What does the presidency deliver for India?

    1. Heft on the global high table: Being part of BRICS gives India more weight in advancing its ambitions in global forums.
    2. Visibility from the chair: The presidency has ensured India prominence on the world stage.
    3. What a successful summit would signal: A presidency that reconciles the grouping’s competing strands would demonstrate the bloc’s capacity to act, and would count as a significant achievement for Indian diplomacy.
    4. The cost side of the same presidency: The prominence comes with exposure, since the host is read abroad as the author of whatever the bloc’s declaration says.

    Challenges to India’s BRICS presidency

    1. Consensus gives every member a veto over the text: A declaration requires all eleven members to agree, so the member with the narrowest interest sets the ceiling on what the document can say. Eg. The bloc’s Rio declaration of 2025 ran to 126 points, which is what accommodating every member’s preferred language produces.
      The Fix: Move contested political language into a chair’s statement issued alongside the declaration, so a single dispute does not shrink the agreed economic text.
    2. Enlargement raised the number of bilateral disputes inside the room: Every admission adds that member’s quarrels to the set the chair must accommodate in one document. Eg. The grouping now contains both Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose diplomatic relations were restored only in 2023.
      The Fix: Publish admission criteria requiring a candidate to hold working diplomatic relations with every existing member, so enlargement does not import an active rupture.
    3. The forum has no secretariat to carry work between summits: BRICS has no treaty and no permanent staff, so each chair rebuilds the agenda and the follow up machinery for a single year. Eg. Ministerial and working group outcomes are recorded in a declaration with no standing body tracking their implementation.
      The Fix: Create a small permanent secretariat funded by member contributions, mandated only to track commitments made in past declarations.
    4. The dollar question is a liability the bloc cannot settle: Members disagree on currency arrangements and the disagreement is read abroad as a shared plan, so the bloc absorbs the cost of a policy it has not adopted. Eg. Tariff threats have been aimed at every member over intra-BRICS payments, including at members that oppose a common currency.
      The Fix: State in the declaration that payment interoperability is a transaction cost measure and that no common currency is under consideration, so the agenda and the accusation are separated on the record.
    5. A chair’s agenda outlives the chairship only if the successor adopts it: A one year presidency sets themes that lapse where the next chair’s priorities differ. Eg. The sustainability agenda India is building on was the centrepiece of Brazil’s chairship the previous year.
      The Fix: Record a three year rolling work programme in the declaration, so an incoming chair inherits commitments rather than restating themes.

    Conclusion

    The presidency’s difficulty is not the agenda but the arithmetic. A grouping of eleven operating by consensus produces the text its least flexible member will accept. India’s gain from the chair is visibility, and visibility is also what attaches the bloc’s positions to the host. The two objectives this summit is being judged against, a document every member can sign and a relationship with Washington that survives it, pull in opposite directions and neither has been given up. What to watch is how the declaration handles the payments question, since that single paragraph is where the summit’s diplomatic cost will be set.

    Back2Basics: how BRICS takes decisions

    1. It is an informal grouping: BRICS has no founding treaty, no charter and no permanent secretariat, so it operates as a coordination forum rather than as an international organisation.
    2. The chair rotates annually: One member holds the chairship for a calendar year, hosts the leaders’ summit and sets the year’s agenda and meeting calendar.
    3. Decisions are taken by consensus: Every outcome document is adopted by agreement among all members, so no member can be outvoted and any member can withhold language.
    4. Outputs are political, not binding: A summit declaration records agreed positions and commitments with no enforcement mechanism, and implementation rests with each member’s own government.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2025, GS2, 10 marks] With the waning of globalization, post-Cold War world is becoming a site of sovereign nationalism. Elucidate.”

  • Brazil to Iran: Why you can’t put all of BRICS in the anti-West box

    Why in the News

    India presides over the BRICS summit in Delhi with a two fold task: to convey the forum’s shared objective of democratising the international system, and to dispel the widespread impression that it seeks to overthrow the United States led order. Both the forum’s champions and its detractors read it through an anti-Western lens. Supporters celebrate BRICS as a vehicle for resisting Western dominance, and critics warn that it is becoming a counter-bloc led by China and Russia. Neither reading survives contact with the membership, which is divided over whether its national aim is accommodation with the West, autonomy from it, parity within it, or direct confrontation. Delhi’s burden at this summit is to keep the forum from conflating autonomy from America with antagonism towards it.

    Why does one anti-Western label not fit eleven members?

    1. Four national aims, not one: Members differ over whether their national aim is accommodation with the West, autonomy from it, parity within it, or direct confrontation, so the forum’s political orientation is a spectrum rather than a position.
    2. The confrontational pole: Iran sits closest to an anti-Western pole, since resistance to United States power is central to its state ideology and its recent history.
    3. The other end of the spectrum: At the opposite end sit members with deep economic, security and institutional ties to the West, which they maintain while pursuing greater autonomy.
    4. Where the two largest powers sit: Russia and China lie between the extremes. Both are in strategic competition with the West, and neither can be understood apart from its desire for status, influence and a seat at the Western high table.

    Why does Brazil break the West versus Global South opposition?

    1. Its standing in the grouping: Brazil is Latin America’s largest power and a strong advocate for reforming global institutions.
    2. Its institutions are Western in origin: Its geography, language, religion, legal tradition, political institutions and elite reference points are rooted in the Iberian and Euro-Atlantic worlds.
    3. Its diplomatic tradition reinforces this: Brazil is a constitutional democracy whose diplomatic tradition privileges international law and multilateralism.
    4. What it is actually dissatisfied with: Brazil is not seeking to overthrow the West from outside. It is a Western power dissatisfied with how authority is distributed within the order it inhabits.
    5. What that produces in practice: Brasilia rejects automatic alignment with Washington, and is equally uncomfortable with systematic anti-Western mobilisation.
    6. Distance from Eurasia shapes the position: Brazil sits far from Eurasia and, unlike Delhi, is not emotionally invested in Moscow.
    7. China is an economic partner rather than a security problem: Brazil has no direct conflict with Russia or China, and does not share India’s security challenges with Beijing. Beijing is a leading economic partner of Brazil.

    What is Brazil’s position on de-dollarisation and a common currency?

    1. What it supports: Brazil supports cheaper and faster bilateral settlement mechanisms, including trade in national currencies where that is useful.
    2. What it rejects: Brazil has rejected the notion that BRICS must promote de-dollarisation or develop a common currency to displace the dollar.
    3. The stated reason: A shared currency would require political trust, economic convergence and institutional integration that BRICS does not have.
    4. What the position reveals: Brazil’s engagement with the great powers rests on national interest rather than on ideology, and its payments position is the clearest instance of that.

    How is India’s non-Western position different from an anti-Western one?

    1. The identity claim: The External Affairs Minister has consistently underlined India’s non-Western identity, which rests on India being a post-colonial state and a developing country.
    2. Where the distinction lies: India shares political values with the West. It does not want to become a geopolitical appendage to the United States and Europe.
    3. The record of Western partnership: India’s partnerships with the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia have deepened across trade, technology, defence and diaspora.
    4. Two memberships held at once: Delhi’s participation in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) sits alongside its membership of BRICS.
    5. What makes the forum useful, and what would end that: BRICS is useful to India precisely because of its diversity. It ceases to serve Indian interests if it becomes a China-led alliance against the West.
    6. Why the anti-Western framing is also poor analysis: Delhi knows that Moscow and Beijing, despite their confrontations with Washington, remain interested in negotiating a new balance with it.

    Why are Russia and China not seeking an exit from the Western order?

    1. Russia’s break is structural: Russia’s contradiction with the West is now deep and structural, shaped by the Ukraine war, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) role in European security, and sanctions.
    2. Yet Moscow wants recognition inside it: Russia is also eager for Western recognition as a great power, and for a say in managing European and global security.
    3. What China challenges: China challenges American primacy in Asia, reduces its exposure to Western technology restrictions, and presents BRICS as part of a more representative order.
    4. Why it cannot exit: China’s rise was inseparable from access to Western markets, capital and technology, and it retains strong economic interdependence with the United States.
    5. What Beijing is actually seeking: China is not seeking an exit from the United States led world. It wants to be America’s co-equal in shaping it.

    Where do the newer members and Iran sit on the spectrum?

    1. Egypt: Egypt remains tied to Washington on security.
    2. The United Arab Emirates: The UAE has extensive commercial and strategic links with the United States and Europe.
    3. Indonesia: Indonesia’s “free and active” diplomacy is designed to retain manoeuvring room among the major powers.
    4. What the three have in common: They seek autonomy, closer ties with China and a stronger voice for the Global South. None seeks membership of a unified anti-Western camp.
    5. Iran is the nearest exception: Resistance to the United States and Israel is central to the Islamic Republic’s political identity, and BRICS offers Tehran legitimacy and a means to counter the American effort to isolate it.
    6. Even Iran is not settled internally: Iran’s domestic debate continues to pit advocates of resistance against those favouring diplomacy and reconciliation with the United States.

    Challenges to India’s position that BRICS is non-Western rather than anti-Western

    1. A consensus text is attributed to every signatory: Language agreed with members at the confrontational end of the spectrum is read abroad as the position of all eleven, including the host. Eg. Tariff threats were aimed at every BRICS member over an alleged collective plan against the dollar, not only at the members proposing one.
      The Fix: Insist that any payments or currency language in a declaration name the specific mechanism and its purpose, so a settlement arrangement cannot be read as currency displacement.
    2. The forum has no charter to bound what it commits members to: BRICS has no treaty and no defined competence, so nothing limits the subjects a declaration may cover. Eg. The grouping’s declarations have expanded from development finance into positions on conflicts in West Asia and in Europe.
      The Fix: Adopt a standing framework document defining the forum’s subject areas, so an item outside them needs an explicit decision rather than a paragraph.
    3. Expansion imports the members’ own quarrels: Each admission adds a set of bilateral disputes the forum must now accommodate inside a single text. Eg. Iran and the United Arab Emirates are both members, and the UAE was attacked by Iran during the current war in West Asia.
      The Fix: Handle conflict language through a separate chair’s statement rather than the consensus declaration, so one dispute cannot hold the economic agenda hostage.
    4. Hedging is cheap only while both sides decline to price it: Simultaneous membership of the Quad and of BRICS is sustainable while neither partner charges for it, and a partner that does charge converts India’s balance into a cost. Eg. The tariff round on India last year followed disagreements in trade talks alongside its Russian oil purchases.
      The Fix: Separate India’s BRICS agenda from its security alignments in public terms, so each partner judges a defined economic programme rather than an alignment.

    Conclusion

    The anti-Western reading of BRICS is wrong as description and useful as politics, which is why it survives. It lets a critic in Washington treat eleven different national calculations as one bloc, and it lets a member at the confrontational end claim the weight of the other ten. India’s difficulty is that the second use invites the first, and the forum has no rule that stops either. What to watch is whether the Delhi declaration describes the reform of institutions its members intend to remain inside, or the displacement of an order most of them depend on.

    About BRICS

    1. How it began: The acronym BRIC was coined in 2001 by a Goldman Sachs economist to identify four high growth emerging economies. The first meeting of their foreign ministers took place on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in 2006.
    2. How it became a summit body: The first formal leaders’ summit was held at Yekaterinburg in Russia in 2009, and South Africa joined in 2011, which gave the grouping its present acronym.
    3. How it expanded: The 2023 Johannesburg summit decided on enlargement. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joined in 2024 and Indonesia in 2025, with Saudi Arabia’s formal status remaining nuanced.
    4. The partner tier: A “Partner Country” category was introduced in 2024 to engage states such as Malaysia, Thailand and Nigeria without granting full membership.

    Initiatives and Institutions under BRICS

    1. New Development Bank: Established in 2015 and headquartered in Shanghai, it lends for infrastructure and sustainable development in emerging economies, and had approved over $35 billion in infrastructure loans by 2025.
    2. Contingent Reserve Arrangement: A $100 billion fund created in 2015 to provide short term liquidity support to a member under balance of payments pressure.
    3. BRICS Pay: A cross-border payment system in pilot stage, intended to let members settle trade without routing instructions through SWIFT.
    4. Research and technology bodies: The grouping has set up a Vaccine Research and Development Centre for technology transfer, a Partnership on New Industrial Revolution covering artificial intelligence and green technology, and a Space Council created in 2025 to coordinate deep space and lunar research.

    Key Facts about BRICS

    1. Membership: Eleven full members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
    2. Share of population and output: The grouping represents over 45% of the world’s population and accounts for roughly 37% of global GDP measured at purchasing power parity, which is above the G7’s share.
    3. Energy weight: Members together control roughly 42% of global oil production and exports.
    4. How it is organised: BRICS works through an annually rotating chairship, with the chair hosting the leaders’ summit and setting the year’s agenda. Decisions are taken by consensus among all members.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS2, 10 marks] “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.”

  • Eyes on the road

    Why in the News

    A Supreme Court Bench has asked the Road Transport Ministry to consider a petition seeking a reduction in road traffic deaths through habituating the use of seat belts and helmets. The Court referred the petition to the Centre rather than issuing directions itself, a departure from the interventionist posture it took on road safety in 2019. India carries about 1 per cent of the world’s vehicular fleet and about 11 per cent of the world’s road traffic fatalities, and widespread non-compliance with seat belts and helmets is part of the reason. The measures the petition turns on protect occupants of enclosed vehicles, and the largest share of India’s road deaths is among people who are not inside one. A strategy built on restraint use therefore reaches a minority of the mortality it is meant to reduce.

    What is the ‘Safe System’ approach?

    1. Its starting assumption: The approach assumes that road users will not behave perfectly, so the road environment is designed to absorb error rather than to punish it.
    2. What it acts on: It works on both the probability of a crash occurring and the severity of the crash when one does occur.
    3. Where it places responsibility: Responsibility is shared between the user and the agencies that design, build and manage roads, rather than resting on the user alone.

    Why does enforcing restraint use reach only a third of road mortality?

    1. The fatality mix is dominated by unenclosed users: Road Transport Ministry data for 2024 recorded two-wheeler riders at 46.2 per cent and pedestrians at 20.6 per cent of road deaths.
    2. The arithmetic of the enforcement case: Seat belts and child restraints protect only occupants of enclosed vehicles, so better enforcement of their adoption addresses the reasons underlying one-third of total mortality.
    3. What restraint use does prevent: Post-crash investigations have repeatedly found victims ejected from vehicles, or killed in secondary collisions against the vehicle’s own interior.
    4. Children are the exception within the enclosed group: Child vulnerability is raised by the patchy use of child restraint systems and of rear-seat belts.

    Where does the enforcement and compliance model fall short?

    1. Policing capacity is the binding constraint: Actual policing is wanting, including because of chronic shortages in traffic police cadres.
    2. The vehicle is a lever that is not being used: Manufacturers can be required to fit tamper-proof seat belt reminders, and modification of those systems after purchase can be blocked.
    3. The statute already provided the machinery: The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 instituted or scaffolded various mechanisms to prevent road traffic deaths, and national data so far show no evidence of improvement at the scale India needs.
    4. The social reinforcement is missing: India lacks a public culture that reinforces safe behaviour and deters unsafe behaviour, so compliance depends on the presence of an enforcer.

    Does responsibility for a crash rest with the user or with the road?

    1. The user side is real but bounded: Individual responsibility matters, and so does the duty of care owed by schools and similar institutions.
    2. The design duty does not transfer: Governments are still expected to design roads on the assumption that not everyone will behave perfectly, which is a standard no individual user can satisfy on the state’s behalf.
    3. The dominant violation points away from habit: Speeding has been found to be the dominant recorded violation associated with fatalities, and a national strategy aimed at removing the opportunities for vehicles to reach high speeds may yield greater gains than a further compliance drive.
    4. Neither level of government has taken the design route: The ‘Safe System’ approach has not been systematically employed by the Union government or by State governments.

    What would a Safe System require governments to do?

    1. Identify and fix the locations that concentrate deaths: Accident-prone locations are identified and then rectified, so the same site stops producing crashes.
    2. Build environments that compensate for error: Physical design absorbs a mistake instead of converting it into a fatality.
    3. Reduce children’s exposure to two-wheeler traffic: The exposure itself is treated as the risk, rather than the child’s compliance with a restraint.
    4. Improve timely access to trauma care: Survival after a crash depends on the speed with which definitive care is reached.
    5. Act on severity as well as frequency: The two objectives are distinct, and a measure that lowers crash numbers without lowering impact forces leaves mortality where it was.

    Challenges to adopting the Safe System approach in India

    1. A single corridor has several road owners: A highway passing through a city changes hands between the national authority, the State works department and the municipal body, each with its own design standard. Eg. Urban stretches of national highways inside municipal limits are maintained by the local body, and the corridor itself remains a national highway.
      The Fix: Assign one accountable road owner per corridor, with a statutory duty to rectify identified black spots, meaning locations carrying a recorded cluster of fatal crashes.
    2. Vehicle safety regulation is built around the car: Crash protection standards and consumer ratings cover enclosed vehicles, and the largest share of deaths is among riders. Eg. Crash test ratings under the Bharat New Car Assessment Programme apply to cars and not to two-wheelers.
      The Fix: Extend a crash protection rating and mandatory anti-lock braking across the two-wheeler fleet, and separate rider space on high speed corridors.
    3. Black spot rectification is treated as a works item: Fixing a fatal cluster is funded and measured as civil construction rather than as a safety outcome. Eg. Black spots are carried on a rolling ministry list and closed on completion of the works, not on a subsequent fall in fatalities.
      The Fix: Make an independent road safety audit a condition for opening and for reopening a corridor, with the audit report published.
    4. Trauma care is not built to the clock that decides survival: The referral chain is organised by administrative geography rather than by response time. Eg. Cashless treatment for road accident victims during the first hour after a crash was provided for in the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019, and the scheme giving effect to it was notified only in 2025.
      The Fix: Map every high fatality corridor to a designated trauma facility within a stated response time, and fund the ambulance network against that map.
    5. Children travel on two-wheelers under rules nobody checks: The safeguards for a child pillion exist on paper and form no part of routine enforcement. Eg. The Central Motor Vehicles Rules were amended in 2022 to require a crash helmet and a safety harness for a child aged nine months to four years, with a speed cap of 40 kmph.
      The Fix: Enforce the harness and the speed cap through school transport regulation and checks at school gates, where the exposure is concentrated and repeated daily.

    Conclusion

    The referral leaves the design question with the executive, which is where the power to answer it sits. A programme built on habituating restraint use can raise measured compliance without moving the fatality curve, because the users dying in the largest numbers are not inside a vehicle at all. The unresolved question is whether safety is treated as a behaviour problem, which makes the citizen the variable, or as a design problem, which makes the road authority the variable. What to watch is whether the Road Transport Ministry’s response to the petition commits to speed management and corridor redesign with State-level targets, or to another enforcement drive.

    Back2Basics: Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019

    1. What it amended: It amended the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, the central statute governing licensing, registration, permits, traffic regulation and third party insurance.
    2. Penalties: It raised the penalties for offences including over-speeding, drunken driving, driving without a licence, and failure to wear a helmet or a seat belt.
    3. Institutions it provided for: It provided for a National Road Safety Board to advise the Centre and the States on road safety and traffic management standards.
    4. Victim support: It provided for a Motor Vehicle Accident Fund to give compulsory insurance cover to all road users in India, and for protection of a Good Samaritan who assists an accident victim.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2014, GS3, 12 marks] National Urban Transport Policy emphasises on ‘moving people’ instead of ‘moving vehicles. Discuss critically the success of the various strategies of the Government in this regard.”

  • On caste census & NPAs, same reluctance to make privilege publicly visible

    Why in the News

    A reported miscommunication between the office of the Registrar General of India (RGI), which conducts the Census, and the Ministry of Social Justice, which maintains the lists of Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes, has established that the Ministry had in fact offered to supply those lists to the RGI. That matters because the stated ground for putting an “open-ended” caste question into the Census, in place of drop-down lists with an “Others” option for unlisted names, was that caste lists were not available. The sequence runs further back. The Union government reversed its position on counting caste before the 2024 general election, then postponed the Census well beyond its due cycle, with the pending delimitation exercise the operative reason. The same state that refuses to publish a caste tabulation also refuses to name the borrowers whose large loans public sector banks have written off. What is contested is therefore not the feasibility of either count, but whether the state will make privilege publicly visible at all.

    What is the open ended caste question?

    1. The design at issue: An open-ended question records whatever caste name a respondent states, as free text, with no list offered on the schedule.
    2. The alternative it displaced: A drop-down list offers the notified caste names for that State, with an “Others” field capturing any name the list does not carry.
    3. Why the two diverge at tabulation: Free text returns have to be matched to notified caste names after enumeration, and a name that matches no entry cannot be counted against any category.

    What does the reported miscommunication establish?

    1. The stated excuse does not hold: The ground given for the open-ended question was the unavailability of caste lists, and the Ministry of Social Justice had offered the Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Class lists to the RGI.
    2. The delay had a separate driver: The Census was postponed beyond reasonable limits, with the impending delimitation exercise the reason.
    3. The obstruction is not new, only more open: Governments have avoided, prevented or diluted a caste count across administrations, the Congress in 2011 and the Bharatiya Janata Party now.
    4. Opposition has been continuous since 2001: Every proposal to count caste since the 2001 Census has attracted immediate and insistent opposition.

    Who opposes a caste count, and on what interest?

    1. Anti-reservation organisations: Youth for Equality, which opposes reservation, was the primary petitioner against the Bihar caste survey, and the Akhila Karnataka Brahmana Mahasabha petitioned against a similar survey in Karnataka.
    2. Dominant caste beneficiaries of reservation: The Akhila Bharata Veerashaiva Lingayat Mahasabha and the Rajya Vokkaliga Sangha petitioned the Karnataka High Court to stay the 2025 caste survey, on the apprehension that a count would reduce their existing share.
    3. The legal arguments were recycled: Petitioners in Bihar and Karnataka invoked grounds already rejected by the Supreme Court or superseded by constitutional amendments, including the 105th Amendment.
    4. The elite response is about status, not quota share: For those in the so-called General Category who occupy the highest positions, being asked their caste is treated as implicating them in something connected to reservation, which is why some technology proprietors, film actors and other prominent individuals dissociated themselves from these surveys.
    5. A partial softening after 2019: Reservation for Economically Weaker Sections, introduced in 2019 and in effect available to the upper castes, softened attitudes to a degree, and beneficiaries of reservation have long attracted resentment from the General Category.

    Why is a caste count conceded in principle and blocked in design?

    1. The electoral bind: An elected government must accommodate the rich and the powerful, and must also seek votes from the mass of people who are neither, so it concedes the principle of a caste count and then designs the count so that it does not produce one.
    2. The debate assumes one kind of benefit: Most participants treat a caste census as being about reservation, so opposition to reservation converts directly into opposition to counting caste.
    3. The spectrum of positions is therefore truncated: A frame built only around reservation leaves out the array of benefits the state confers on those who count but are never counted.

    What does the refusal to name written off defaulters show?

    1. Disclosure was judicially authorised: Reserve Bank of India v. Jayantilal N. Mistry (2015) held that information on wilful defaulters owing large sums to public sector banks is liable to be released under the Right to Information Act, 2005.
    2. Banks and the regulator have not complied on write-offs: Both the banks and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have refused to provide details on loans written off.
    3. The 2024 Directions stop short of write-offs: The RBI’s Wilful Defaulters and Large Defaulters Directions, issued in 2024, require individual banks to list on their websites the instances of default where suits have been filed.
    4. Only aggregates are released: No information beyond aggregate amounts is provided on loans written off. Right to Information applicants have asked for those details repeatedly.
    5. The most recent refusal: Bank of Baroda declined to name the defaulters on loans totalling Rs 35,715 crore, written off between 2020-21 and 2025-26, on which average recovery was 28 per cent.

    What links a caste tabulation to a defaulters’ list?

    1. The same state behaves differently on these two datasets: An administration that collects personal data extensively is reluctant to collect or release data in both these instances.
    2. The common root is visibility of privilege: The reluctance stems from an unwillingness to make privilege publicly visible, so the case against the caste census rests on an aversion to counting the privileged and to putting inequality on record.
    3. Neither dataset would reveal anything new: Neither a caste tabulation nor a defaulters’ list would disclose anything about the privileged that is not already known in a general way.
    4. What is being defended is a claim, not a secret: An official and public count or list is resisted because it breaches an implicit right of the privileged to control their own social visibility.

    Challenges to counting caste in the Census

    1. Stated caste names do not map to a fixed list: A respondent’s own term can be a synonym, a sub caste or a spelling variant that matches no entry in any notified list. Eg. The Socio Economic and Caste Census of 2011 threw up roughly 46 lakh distinct caste and sub caste returns.
      The Fix: Publish the enumeration schedule with State specific drop-down lists mapped to a standard code, retaining a free text field for returns outside the list.
    2. There is no single national list to count against: Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Class lists are notified State by State, so one caste can be listed in one State and absent in the next. Eg. The Jat community sits in the central list of Other Backward Classes for some States and not for others.
      The Fix: Publish a concordance mapping every State list entry to a central code before enumeration begins, so a return is classifiable at the point of entry.
    3. Enumeration records a declaration, not an entitlement: The count captures what a household states, with no check against a caste certificate. Eg. Bihar’s caste survey of 2022-23 recorded caste on the respondent’s own declaration.
      The Fix: Record the stated caste name and the existence of a certificate as separate fields, so the two are tabulated apart rather than conflated.
    4. The count’s timetable carries a seat allocation stake: The Census schedule determines when readjustment of constituencies can begin, which gives the timing an interest independent of enumeration. Eg. The freeze on readjustment of Lok Sabha seats under the Constitution (Eighty-fourth Amendment) Act, 2001 runs until the first Census taken after 2026.
      The Fix: Separate publication of the caste tabulation from the readjustment exercise, so the count’s release does not wait on a seat allocation decision.
    5. Collecting a return does not commit the state to publishing it: Enumeration and publication are distinct decisions, and the second can be withheld indefinitely. Eg. The caste data of the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census was referred to an expert group and never released.
      The Fix: Release the caste tables on the same notified schedule as the Census’s other tables, so publication is not a separate discretionary step.

    Conclusion

    Two disclosure questions now sit with the executive at the same time. One is whether the Census schedule will carry notified caste lists or free text, which decides whether the enumeration produces a usable tabulation at all. The other is whether the regulator will extend its default disclosure requirement from suits filed to loans written off, which is where the larger sums sit. What to watch is the final form of the Census caste question and any amendment to the RBI’s Directions covering write-offs, since both are administrative decisions that need no legislation and neither has been taken.

    What is transparency and accountability?

    1. Transparency: Public officials and institutions have a duty to act visibly and to provide clear, accessible information about their decisions and actions.
    2. Accountability: Public authorities are obliged to explain their actions, justify them, and take responsibility for them.
    3. Why the pair exists: Information held by the state is the precondition for a citizen questioning its use, so disclosure converts a grievance into a claim the state must answer.
    4. The open government standard: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines open government as transparency in government actions, accessibility of government services and information, and responsiveness of government to new ideas, demands and needs.

    Laws and Rules Governing Transparency and Accountability

    1. Right to Information Act, 2005: Entitles any citizen to seek information from a public authority without stating a reason for the request.
    2. Section 4(1)(b): Requires a public authority to publish specified categories of information on its own motion, so that fewer requests need to be filed.
    3. Section 7: Sets 30 days for a reply, and 48 hours where the information concerns the life or liberty of a person.
    4. Section 8: Lists the exemptions, and Section 8(2) permits disclosure where the public interest outweighs the protected harm.
    5. Section 20: Allows a penalty of Rs 250 a day, to a ceiling of Rs 25,000, on an officer who wrongfully refuses information.
    6. Right to Information (Amendment) Act, 2019: Removed the fixed five year tenure of Information Commissioners, leaving the term to be prescribed by the Centre, and ended the parity of their salaries with those of Election Commissioners.
    7. Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014: Provides a mechanism to receive disclosures of corruption or misuse of power and to protect the person making them.

    Challenges in Transparency and Accountability

    1. Information Commissions run behind their own caseload: Appeals accumulate faster than commissions dispose of them, so a delayed disclosure loses its use. Eg. Over four lakh appeals were pending across 29 Information Commissions as of 2024.
      The Fix: Fix a statutory disposal limit for appeals, as the Second Administrative Reforms Commission recommended, and report disposal against it.
    2. Commissions sit without heads: A commission lacking a Chief Information Commissioner cannot constitute benches, so its docket stops moving. Eg. Nine Information Commissions were without a chief in late 2025.
      The Fix: Begin the appointment process a fixed period before a vacancy arises, with the shortlist published.
    3. The penalty provision is rarely used: The power to fine an officer for wrongful refusal is exercised in a small fraction of the cases that attract it, so refusal carries no cost. Eg. Penalties are imposed in about 4 per cent of the cases where they are warranted.
      The Fix: Require a commission to record written reasons whenever it declines to impose a penalty after finding wrongful refusal.
    4. Exemptions are read wide and the public interest override narrow: The exemption grounds are invoked routinely and the override that answers them almost never is. Eg. Section 8(2)’s public interest override is invoked in under 1 per cent of cases.
      The Fix: Harmonise the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 with the disclosure regime so the public interest override, not the personal information exemption, settles a request naming individuals.
    5. Requesters carry personal risk: Seeking records on local contracts, land and licences exposes the applicant to retaliation. Eg. Over 100 Right to Information users have been killed since 2005.
      The Fix: Notify the rules under the Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014 and extend its machinery to information applicants, so a threatened applicant has a statutory route.

    Back2Basics: The Constitution (One Hundred and Fifth Amendment) Act, 2021

    1. What it did: Restored the power of States and Union Territories to prepare and maintain their own list of socially and educationally backward classes.
    2. Why it was needed: An earlier reading of the Constitution (One Hundred and Second Amendment) Act, 2018 had left the power to notify backward classes with the Centre alone.
    3. Provisions touched: It amended Article 342A and clarified Article 366(26c), so a State list and the central list operate separately.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2020, GS2, 10 marks] “Recent amendments to the Right to Information Act will have profound impact on the autonomy and independence of the Information Commission”. Discuss.”

  • Good governance is when state, society and markets deliver together

    Why in the News

    Cities ranked highest in the Swachhata Sarvekshan cleanliness survey attribute their results to the same two things, decentralised community action and collaborative governance. The argument built on that record is that six factors, rather than additional schemes, decide whether outcomes improve at scale, and that the state, society and markets have to deliver together. The sectors where delivery still fails are described as “wicked problems”, meaning problems with too many interacting variables for one agency to control on its own. The claim that follows runs against the way the system is organised. Centralisation is the default in precisely those sectors, and the reform that would displace it, an elected authority below the ward with funds and functionaries attached, has not been made.

    What is a wicked problem, and what do they look like in practice?

    1. A problem with no settled definition: A wicked problem is one where the parties cannot even agree what the problem is, because how it is framed already implies who is responsible and what the fix should be. Malnutrition framed as a food shortage produces a ration; framed as a sanitation and maternal health failure it produces something else entirely.
    2. Too many interacting variables for one agency: The causes sit across departments that each control one lever and none of the others, so no single authority can act on the problem as a whole. Eg. School learning outcomes turn on teacher deployment, nutrition, household income and distance to school at once.
    3. No stopping rule and no clean test of success: Work ends when money or attention runs out rather than when the problem is solved, and every intervention changes the situation it was measuring.
    4. The sectors the article places here: School education, health and nutrition, the systems it says have been expanded and must now be opened to citizen centric governance.

    Why do wicked problems resist conventional governance?

    1. Administrative structure cuts the problem into pieces: A department is built to deliver one function well and is accountable for that function alone, so a problem spanning four departments has no owner and four partial answers.
    2. Centralisation removes the people who can see the whole: The variables interact locally and differently in each place, and the tier that can observe that interaction is the one furthest from the decision.
    3. The measurement system rewards the wrong thing: Targets are set on what a single department can count, meaning inputs and coverage, so a scheme reports success while the outcome it was meant to move does not shift.
    4. Standard delivery assumes a known solution: Conventional administration is organised to execute a fix that is already decided, and a wicked problem has no such fix to execute, which is why the article argues for decentralised action and collaboration rather than a better scheme.

    Which six factors decide whether outcomes change at scale?

    1. Decentralised community action: Delivery improves where planning and management move down to the smallest viable unit, reaching below the block to the cluster level.
    2. Collaborative governance: The state, community organisations and market actors work on one outcome together rather than through parallel programmes.
    3. Women’s agency: Women’s collectives supply the standing local presence that holds a public service to account between elections.
    4. Technology as enabler: Digital systems are treated as support for local decision making rather than as a substitute for it.
    5. Accountability and public trust: Results improve where citizens hold a consensual decision making role and where data is validated by the community it describes.
    6. Professionals and community resource persons: Trained professionals and locally resident resource persons together carry the technical load that elected representatives cannot.

    What does the delivery record show, and why have social indicators moved slowly?

    1. The largest instance: The National Rural Livelihood Mission organised a hundred million women into 10 million self help groups, with decentralised management running down to the cluster level below blocks.
    2. Administrators converge on one explanation: Over a hundred chief executive officers of zila parishads gave the same answer as the research, that decentralised community action and collaborative governance deliver better where a problem carries too many variables for quality outcomes.
    3. Where the approach has already worked: The Green and White revolutions, the Rural Livelihoods Mission, the Swachh Bharat Mission Grameen, the total literacy campaigns, and collaborative work in watershed development and livelihoods diversification all rest on professionals combined with citizen centric accountability.
    4. The States that show the gains: Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh, Goa and Sikkim report improvements in multidimensional poverty and human development indicators where local governments and women’s collectives work together.
    5. Poverty fell without becoming durable: Extreme poverty declined sharply over the past two decades, and many households remain vulnerable to slipping back into it.
    6. The quality of work is the gap: Productivity gains and wages of dignity have been elusive in many employment opportunities, which slows the rate of improvement in social indicators.
    7. The new rails are in place: Digital public infrastructure, women’s bank accounts, direct benefit transfers and access to retail credit have all created new opportunities for growth and development.
    8. Rails are not outcomes: The persistent wicked problem sectors have not responded to those gains, which is what makes a different approach necessary rather than optional.

    Why does centralisation remain the default, and what is the binding constraint now?

    1. Electoral compulsions: The demands of democratic electoral processes push decisions upward to the level where visible credit is assigned.
    2. A bureaucracy built for other work: The administrative machinery is not geared to the qualitative outcomes these sectors require.
    3. Institutions and processes that do not function: Systems of institutions and management processes are inadequate, and in places dysfunctional.
    4. Accountability without community validation: Accountability stays weak wherever data is never validated by the community it purports to describe.
    5. The first task is largely complete: The heavy lifting of community mobilisation and social capital has been achieved in most parts of rural India.
    6. What is needed next: Higher order education and skills that raise productivity and allow the effort to scale.
    7. The systems now to be opened up: School, health and nutrition systems have been expanded, with real gains in social participation, and are the ones to be subjected to citizen centric impactful governance.
    8. What makes that possible locally: Untied and adequate funds, professionals posted below the block level alongside local governments, and a large body of community resource persons.
    9. The countervailing presence: Local government institutions standing alongside women’s collectives and their social capital create the conditions for accountable governance.
    10. A cadre that changed its own role: ASHA workers, the accredited social health activists based in villages, have made primary healthcare facilities more accountable, and improvements in their capabilities have moved many of them toward the work of community health workers.
    11. The transferable lesson: Accountable public systems need well trained frontline workers who live in the locality they serve.
    12. The effect on hired expertise: Where community resource persons exist, professionals recruited from the market also become more accountable and gain the scale to implement new approaches.

    What would change with an elected tier and full devolution?

    1. An elected tier below the ward: Direct elections at the basti level, below the large ward level, would create a legitimate accountable authority close to the community.
    2. Authority without resources fails: Those who carry the responsibility must also hold the resources.
    3. Collectives working with elected leaders: Women’s and youth collectives working with elected basti level leaders can provide accountable governance at the doorstep, with funds, functions and functionaries in place.
    4. Interconnected sectors need one authority: Given the interconnectedness of the wicked problem sectors, the responsibilities listed for local governments in the Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules should be accepted in full.
    5. The effect it produces: Such an adoption generates community convergent action from below rather than convergence ordered from above.
    6. A ranking already exists: The Panchayat Advancement Index, which ranks local governments, can be made better by community validation of every outcome it records.
    7. Financing should follow the deficit: The financing of local governance must be commensurate with the size and the shape of the deficit the Index reveals.

    Challenges to collaborative governance

    1. Devolution stops at the list: States accept the schedules in name and retain the functions in practice. Eg. Fewer than ten States have transferred all 29 subjects listed for panchayats, and the overall devolution index stands at about 44 percent.
      The Fix: Require activity mapping for every transferred subject, naming the tier that plans, the tier that spends and the tier that answers for the result.
    2. There is nobody below the block to collaborate with: Local governments lack the staff to hold a professional cadre to account. Eg. Panchayats average well under one secretary each, and in some large States the figure is close to a third of one per panchayat.
      The Fix: Create a dedicated local government cadre, recruited and paid at district level, with untied funds attached to each sanctioned post.
    3. Elected city leadership has no executive power: Urban collaboration fails where the elected head is ceremonial and the executive is appointed by the State. Eg. Parastatal agencies run water supply and transport in most large cities, leaving the municipal body answerable for services it does not control.
      The Fix: Transfer parastatal functions to municipal bodies together with the staff and the revenue streams that fund them.
    4. Community validation is missing where it matters most: Accountability tools collapse where the community never sees the record made in its name. Eg. Ward committees and area sabhas are non functional or absent in most States, and only a handful have legally mandated participatory bodies.
      The Fix: Make a social audit by the gram sabha or area sabha a condition for releasing the next tranche of performance linked grants.

    Conclusion

    The gap in these sectors is not a shortage of programmes or of community capacity. It is the absence of an elected authority small enough to be answerable and resourced enough to act, sitting next to the people who use the service. Every proposal in this space arrives at the same precondition, that a State has to give up functions, funds and staff it currently holds, and no State has yet faced a cost for declining to. What to watch is whether any fiscal transfer to a State is ever made conditional on measured devolution to its local governments, since nothing else makes retention expensive.

    Participatory Governance in India

    1. What it means: Governance is participatory where citizens hold a decision making role in planning, execution and audit, rather than only receiving a service designed elsewhere.
    2. The two values it rests on: Local institutions are justified on efficiency in public service delivery and on the deepening of democracy through proximity to citizens.
    3. The architecture on the community side: Self help groups are federated upward into village organisations and then into cluster level federations at panchayat or block level, which gives very small groups scale.
    4. The scale of women’s representation: Over 14.5 lakh elected women representatives sit in local bodies, and 21 States provide 50 percent reservation for women.

    Constitutional Framework Governing Local Self Government

    1. Article 243G: Empowers a State legislature to endow panchayats with the powers and authority to function as institutions of self government, with reference to the subjects listed in the Eleventh Schedule.
    2. Article 243W: Does the same for municipalities, with reference to the subjects listed in the Twelfth Schedule.
    3. Article 243I and Article 243Y: Require a State Finance Commission every five years to review the financial position of panchayats and municipalities and recommend the devolution of taxes, duties and grants.
    4. Article 243ZD: Provides for a District Planning Committee to consolidate the plans of panchayats and municipalities into a draft development plan for the district.

    Government Initiatives for Community Institutions

    1. Lakhpati Didi: Aims to enable 3 crore women members of self help groups to earn over ₹1 lakh a year through livelihood diversification, skilling and enterprise scaling.
    2. Namo Drone Didi: Provides drones to women’s self help groups for agricultural rental services, creating a new income stream and a route into technology use.
    3. Kudumbashree, Kerala: A State network of over 45 lakh members in more than 3 lakh groups, integrated with local self government and treated internationally as a benchmark.

    Key Facts about Participatory Governance

    1. The bank linkage programme: The Self Help Group Bank Linkage Programme was launched in 1992 and was pioneered by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).
    2. Its standing: It is the world’s largest microfinance programme by volume, with a loan repayment rate above 96 percent.
    3. The People’s Plan Campaign: Kerala’s campaign gives local bodies control over roughly 40 percent of the State’s plan budget.

    Challenges in Community Institutions

    1. Most groups never reach credit: A majority remain at the savings stage, and full credit linkage stays incomplete decades after bank linkage began. Eg. A significant share of groups are recorded as defunct, formed but inactive in meetings, savings and lending.
      The Fix: Make bank linkage, rather than group formation, the reported output against which a district’s performance is assessed.
    2. Weak market linkage caps incomes: Products lack quality, branding, packaging and access to organised markets, so most groups sell only locally. Eg. Public procurement routes such as the Womaniya initiative on the Government e Marketplace reach only a small share of producers.
      The Fix: Attach branding, logistics and quality certification support to cluster level federations rather than to individual groups.
    3. Entry capital is too small to build an enterprise: The revolving fund and community investment fund provided at formation cannot finance a business beyond subsistence. Eg. A revolving fund of ₹20,000 to ₹30,000 per group is the standard starting support.
      The Fix: Move to a credit plus model that adds technical consultancy and business incubation instead of only enlarging the loan.
    4. Women’s time is the unpriced constraint: Domestic responsibility limits the hours available for meetings and for enterprise work. Eg. Women spend upward of seven hours a day on unpaid domestic work against roughly one and a half hours for men.
      The Fix: Fund childcare and drudgery reducing shared infrastructure at federation level as part of livelihood spending rather than as welfare.

    Back2Basics: Panchayat Advancement Index

    1. Who publishes it: The Ministry of Panchayati Raj.
    2. What it ranks: Gram panchayats, on measured progress toward development outcomes rather than on expenditure incurred.
    3. How it is built: It is organised around nine themes of the Localised Sustainable Development Goals, covering poverty, health, water, infrastructure, social justice and governance among others.
    4. How panchayats are graded: Each is placed in a performance category, ranging from Achiever at the top down to Beginner.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2023] Consider the following statements: 1. The Self-Help Group (SHG) Programme was originally initiated by the State Bank of India by providing microcredit to the financial deprived. 2. In an SHG, all members of a group take responsibility for a loan that an individual member takes. 3. The Regional Rural Banks and Scheduled Commercial Banks support SHGs. How many of the above statements are correct? (a) Only one (b) Only two (c) All three (d) None ANSWER: (b)”

  • Rude lessons

    Why in the News

    Trade relations between the United States (US) and Canada have fallen to a new low despite decades of deep integration. Canada pulled out of negotiations over a new tariff deal, citing last minute insertions by the US side, and the US has made the same allegation in return. Statements by the US President have not been conciliatory. The breakdown raises the question of what a signed trade agreement is actually worth to a partner such as India.

    How deep was the integration that has now broken down?

    1. Automobile trade: Free trade in automobiles and their parts was established between the two countries in 1965.
    2. Free Trade Agreement: A comprehensive free trade agreement followed in 1989.
    3. NAFTA: That agreement was expanded into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) about five years later.
    4. Mutual benefit: Integration continued steadily and by most accounts served both economies well.
    5. Economies of scale: Canada’s aim was to achieve economies of scale by producing very large volumes of a few products.

    What does Canada’s place in US supply chains show about the stakes?

    1. Crude oil supply: Canada accounts for 70% of the oil refined in the American Midwest, on an estimate by the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman.
    2. Aluminium supply: Canada supplies 60% of American aluminium requirements.
    3. Lumber supply: Canada supplies nearly all the types of lumber used in American residential construction.

    How far has the relationship actually been rolled back?

    1. Reciprocal tariffs: Canada levied reciprocal tariffs of up to 50% in answer to the 50% tariffs the US imposed on imports from Canada.
    2. Outright import bans: From 29 September the US will ban certain Canadian alcoholic spirits, some dairy goods and motorcycles.

    What are the three lessons the episode holds for India?

    1. No assured preference: The country being treated this way is a neighbour, an alliance member and a trade partner of long standing, so India has no stronger claim to preferential handling.
    2. Speed of negotiation: Malaysia backed out of an agreement it had already signed with the US, arguing that once the reciprocal tariff system was held illegal, the gains no longer covered the cost of opening its market.
    3. Reversal after signature: A concession is only as durable as the other side’s continuing willingness to honour it.

    Why is an agreed tariff number not the end of the pressure?

    1. The February 2026 agreement: The February 2026 agreement set tariffs of 18% on imports from India, and the US has pressed on with forced labour and excess capacity investigations that could take the effective level past it.
    2. India’s negotiating condition: India’s stated position is that no deal will be struck until its advantage over competing suppliers is clear.
    3. Record of other pacts: India’s recent trade pacts have worked, and the same weighing of gains against costs still has to be applied to this partner.

    Challenges to India’s bilateral trade strategy with the United States

    1. Trade remedy investigations sit outside the deal: A negotiated tariff line does not restrain separate inquiries that can raise the effective duty on the same goods. Eg. Antidumping and countervailing duty cases against Indian steel and shrimp exports have run independently of tariff talks.
      The Fix: Insist on a standstill clause covering fresh investigations for the life of any agreed tariff schedule.
    2. Agriculture and dairy access is the concession India cannot give: Opening those markets touches a very large number of small producers, so what the other side wants most is the hardest thing to offer. Eg. Dairy market access was the sticking point that kept India out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in 2019.
      The Fix: Offer tariff rate quotas on a narrow list of products instead of broad access, so the exposure stays bounded and measurable.
    3. No working appellate remedy: A bilateral dispute has nowhere binding to go for as long as the multilateral appeal mechanism stays non functional. Eg. The World Trade Organization’s Appellate Body has been unable to hear appeals since 2019 for want of members.
      The Fix: Write a standing bilateral arbitration panel with fixed timelines into the text of every new agreement.
    4. Concentration in one market magnifies a reversal: A large share of exports going to a single destination turns one tariff decision there into an economy wide shock. Eg. The US is India’s largest single destination for merchandise exports.
      The Fix: Front load market access negotiations with other large blocs, so the export base is not hostage to one partner’s politics.

    Conclusion

    The durability of a trade agreement rests on the other party’s continuing interest in it rather than on its text. For India that argues for negotiating slowly, keeping concessions reversible, and measuring any offer against what a competing supplier is being given. The tension stays unresolved, because a deal is the only route to predictable access and the deal itself has become the least predictable part of the arrangement. The thing to watch is whether the investigations still running against Indian goods close within the tariff level already conceded.

    Back2Basics: North American Free Trade Agreement

    1. Formation: NAFTA came into force in 1994 among the United States, Canada and Mexico.
    2. Mandate: It removed trade barriers and eased the cross border movement of goods and services among the three.
    3. No institutional seat: It is a trade agreement rather than an organisation, so it has no permanent headquarters.
    4. Successor: It was replaced by the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2020.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2025, GS3, 10 marks] What are the challenges before the Indian economy when the world is moving away from free trade and multilateralism to protectionism and bilateralism? How can these challenges be met?”

  • The murder of a musician, and a familiar unease

    Why in the News

    A guitarist from Manipur who had spent close to twenty years working and teaching in Delhi died after being assaulted by a group of people in his building, with the immediate dispute recorded by the police as one over noise. The death follows the 2014 killing of an Arunachal Pradesh student in Lajpat Nagar, which drew national attention to violence against people from the Northeast and led the Delhi Police to set up the Special Police Unit for the North East Region (SPUNER), a dedicated unit with helplines and nodal officers for complaints from Northeastern residents. More than a decade after that unit was created, an investigation this year found that one in four Police Control Room (PCR) calls from Northeastern residents was linked to landlord harassment. The tension is that a remedy built around policing violent incidents has left untouched the everyday transactions, tenancy above all, in which the vulnerability actually shows up.

    What does the record of the past decade show?

    1. The 2014 case set the institutional response: An Arunachal Pradesh student was killed in Delhi in 2014 after an altercation with shopkeepers in Lajpat Nagar, and the Delhi Police subsequently created SPUNER, with other measures opening avenues to seek help.
    2. The exposure has relocated rather than closed: An investigation this year found that one in four PCR calls received from Northeastern residents was linked to landlord harassment.
    3. The pattern extends past Delhi: A 24 year old student from Tripura died in Dehradun last December after being attacked.
    4. Motive itself is contested in the record: In that case the victim’s brother alleged that racial slurs preceded the assault, and the police said their preliminary investigation found no evidence of a racial motive and described the incident as a confrontation that escalated in the heat of the moment.

    Why has the existing remedy not closed the gap?

    1. A unit built for incidents does not reach a relationship: SPUNER responds to a complaint after an act. Tenancy harassment is continuous, deniable and rarely produces a single reportable offence. Eg. The concentration of PCR calls in landlord disputes is the measure of that gap.
    2. Establishing motive is left to the investigating officer: Whether an assault was racially motivated is a finding recorded during investigation, and a finding of no racial motive closes the question without an independent test.
    3. Availability is not the same as use: Avenues to seek help were created after 2014, and the sense of vulnerability has not disappeared from everyday life more than a decade later.

    Does length of residence settle the question of belonging?

    1. The record of residence was long: The musician moved to Delhi nearly two decades ago, spent around 17 years working and teaching in the capital, established a music school, mentored students from home and taught at the Delhi School of Music.
    2. The life was locally rooted: By the time of his death he had built a profession, made friends, raised a family, and walked the same streets for years, while continuing to teach the music he had begun playing in Manipur.
    3. The question the death leaves open: How many years a person has to live in a city before he is simply of that place, rather than someone from somewhere else, is a difficult irony for people from one part of India negotiating safety, recognition and belonging in its capital.
    4. A single night displaces the preceding life: The account of such a death reduces easily to the noise outside the home, the argument, the blows in the stairwell and the journey to hospital, and drops the two decades that came before them.

    Challenges to the Special Police Unit for the North East Region

    1. Its jurisdiction is one city: The unit is a Delhi Police creation, so a resident of any other city has no equivalent point of contact. Eg. The Dehradun death last December fell outside any comparable unit’s remit.
      The Fix: Require every State police force with a significant Northeastern student and worker population to designate a nodal officer with the same published helpline and reporting duty.
    2. It has no remit over housing: Landlord harassment is a civil tenancy matter until it becomes an offence, so the single largest reported grievance sits outside the unit’s powers. Eg. One in four PCR calls from Northeastern residents concerns exactly this.
      The Fix: Bring refusal to let or eviction on grounds of region or ethnicity within a rent authority’s jurisdiction, with a penalty attached to a proved refusal.
    3. Racial motive is not an aggravating factor in law: Where a statute does not treat racial motivation as aggravating, an investigating officer recording no such motive changes neither the charge nor the sentence. Eg. The Dehradun case was closed on the record as an escalation rather than a racially motivated attack.
      The Fix: Insert racial or ethnic motivation as a statutory aggravating circumstance at sentencing, so the finding carries a consequence and is therefore investigated.
    4. Reporting depends on the complainant’s confidence: A unit reached only by a call from the person affected undercounts precisely those most reluctant to approach the police. Eg. Students and short term migrant workers dependent on a landlord for accommodation carry a direct cost for complaining.
      The Fix: Route complaints through college and university grievance cells with a mandatory onward referral, so the first contact is not the police station.

    Conclusion

    The institutional answer built after that killing was designed for the kind of event that produced it, a violent incident with an identifiable offender and a police response. What the intervening decade has documented is a different and more ordinary exposure, concentrated in housing, where no criminal complaint is filed and no unit has jurisdiction. Until refusal and harassment on grounds of ethnicity carry a defined legal consequence, the record will keep registering the incidents and missing the condition. The measurable thing to watch is whether the PCR call category that is already being counted is ever converted into a reportable enforcement statistic.

    Discrimination against Northeastern Indians in the cities

    1. What the term covers: It refers to differential treatment of people from the eight Northeastern States in housing, employment, education and public spaces in metropolitan India, resting on appearance, language and food practices rather than on caste.
    2. The population it affects: Large student and working populations from the region live in Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune, most of them outside the State in which their community holds Scheduled Tribe status.
    3. The legal position of that status: Scheduled Tribe status is notified State by State, so a person from a Northeastern Scheduled Tribe usually does not hold that status in the city they migrate to, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 therefore does not apply to them there.
    4. The institutional response so far: It has been organised around policing and helplines rather than around anti discrimination law.

    Laws and Rules Governing Racial and Ethnic Discrimination

    1. Constitution of India, Article 15: It prohibits discrimination by the State on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and Article 19(1)(e) protects the right to reside and settle in any part of India.
    2. Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023: It penalises promoting enmity between groups on grounds of race, language, place of birth or residence, and it does not recognise racist motivation as an aggravating circumstance in an offence against the person.
    3. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989: It provides enhanced penalties and special courts for offences against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and its protection follows the State specific notification of that status.
    4. The Bezbaruah Committee, 2014: Set up by the Ministry of Home Affairs after the Lajpat Nagar killing, it recommended a dedicated penal provision against racial discrimination and fast track courts for such cases, and the penal provision has not been enacted.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS1, 10.0 marks] Unity in diversity remains the defining feature of Indian society despite the challenges from communalism and regionalism. Comment.”

  • India has to act on its ‘sugar’ problem

    Why in the News

    The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), the statutory food regulator, has proposed that packaged foods high in fat, salt or sugar carry a bold red warning on the front of the pack rather than in fine print on the back. The proposal follows prodding by the Supreme Court. It arrives against a childhood disease load that the World Obesity Atlas 2026 puts at 41 million overweight or obese Indians aged 5 to 19. The tension is that a warning label works on disclosure. The demand it targets is set by price, and India’s tax design currently charges a sugared drink and its zero sugar counterpart the same rate.

    What is the proposed front-of-pack warning label?

    1. What it marks: A bold red warning is placed on the front of a pack that is high in fat, salt or sugar, so the classification is visible at the point of choosing.
    2. What it replaces: The same information currently sits in the back of pack nutrition declaration, which is read after purchase rather than before it.
    3. What it is for: A person picking up instant noodles, a breakfast cereal or a health drink is told at a glance that the product is not as wholesome as its advertising claims.

    How large is the childhood problem?

    1. The headline count: 41 million Indian children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 are now overweight or obese.
    2. The clinical trend: The number of children presenting with morbid obesity and diabetes has climbed sharply within a few years.
    3. The driver is composition, not appetite: The rise is not only a matter of children eating more, it is a matter of what they are being sold.

    How is the market shaping what children eat?

    1. Products are sold as filling a dietary gap: Breakfast cereals, sweetened yoghurts and health drinks are marketed to parents as making up shortfalls in a child’s diet, emphasising energy and vitamins while saying little about sugar content.
    2. The same product is formulated differently by market: In 2024 a leading multinational was found adding sugar to infant food sold in India and other lower income countries, with sugar left out of the same product in Europe.
    3. Correction came from publicity, not regulation: A health drink popular in Indian homes turned out to be flavoured sugar syrup, and it took a social media storm rather than a regulator to force a 15 per cent cut in its added sugar.
    4. Unhealthy calories are priced to pocket money: An energy drink popular among teenagers is priced at Rs 20 and packs close to 17 grams of sugar, caffeine and artificial colour into a single bottle, and its label saying it is not meant for children stops nobody from buying it.
    5. Proximity to schools compounds it: Studies show that around schools and colleges the cheapest and most easily available snacks are also the least healthy.

    Where does the label stop short?

    1. School canteen norms are advisory: The FSSAI and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) have long recommended what schools should not sell, optional rules get treated as optional, and canteens stock whatever sells cheapest.
    2. The rule ends at organised retail: Most of India’s sugar, salt and trans fat is eaten unbranded from street stalls, dhabas and sweet shops, none of which is required to declare anything.
    3. The unregulated half of the plate is untouched: A red label on a biscuit packet does nothing about the jalebi sold loose beside it.
    4. Enforcement, not knowledge, is the missing input: A red warning label works only if it is actually enforced, and none of the underlying evidence about these products was ever secret.

    What does the United Kingdom’s levy show that India’s Goods and Services Tax slab does not?

    1. The United Kingdom taxed in tiers by sugar content: The soft drinks industry levy set thresholds by sugar concentration, so a manufacturer could lower its tax bill by changing the product.
    2. The response was reformulation, not repricing: Manufacturers reformulated their drinks to slip below the tax threshold rather than raise prices, and sugar consumption fell among both children and adults.
    3. India taxes the category, not the sugar: Since September 2025 aerated and sweetened beverages, sugar free versions included, have been folded into one 40 per cent Goods and Services Tax (GST) slab.
    4. The design removes the incentive it should create: A normal cola and its zero sugar counterpart pay the same tax, so a manufacturer has no reason to cut sugar.

    Does the objection that a sugar tax hits the poor hardest hold?

    1. The objection is not wrong: A consumption tax on a cheap product takes a larger share of a poorer household’s spending, and that is the standard case against it.
    2. It is only half the argument: Unregulated cheap sugar already extracts a heavy price from the poor, who bear the brunt of the diabetes, hypertension and childhood obesity that sugar heavy diets drive, with the least means to treat it.
    3. Inaction is itself a charge: Doing nothing is not neutral, it is a slower and costlier tax paid in ill health rather than in rupees at the till.
    4. The design answers the objection: A tax calibrated to sugar content nudges reformulation, and part of the revenue set aside to make healthy food cheaper offsets the burden on the households least able to absorb it.

    Challenges to the front-of-pack warning label

    1. A binary threshold invites formulation just below the line: A single high in fat, salt or sugar cut off rewards a product that sits marginally under it as much as one that is genuinely reformulated. Eg. The United Kingdom’s tiered levy was designed precisely to reward movement between bands rather than a single pass or fail.
      The Fix: Publish the underlying nutrient values on the front of the pack alongside the warning, so the distance from the threshold is visible rather than collapsed into one mark.
    2. Loose and cooked food carries no declaration duty: The disclosure obligation attaches to a package, so the food sold without one falls outside the rule entirely. Eg. Sweet shops, dhabas and street stalls supply a large share of India’s added sugar and declare nothing.
      The Fix: Extend a simplified menu board declaration to registered food service outlets above a turnover threshold, starting with chains that already standardise recipes.
    3. Advisory school norms carry no consequence: A recommendation to schools on what not to sell creates no liability for a canteen that ignores it. Eg. FSSAI and CBSE guidance on school canteens has stood for years without changing what canteens stock.
      The Fix: Make the school canteen standards a condition of affiliation, so non compliance is enforced by the board that already inspects the school.
    4. Marketing to children is not restricted alongside the label: A warning on the pack competes with advertising that positions the same product as a nutritional supplement for a growing child. Eg. Health drinks and sweetened cereals are advertised to parents on energy and vitamin content.
      The Fix: Set enforceable limits on the promotion of products carrying the warning mark to audiences under eighteen, rather than relying on industry self regulation.

    Conclusion

    A warning label changes what a buyer knows and leaves untouched what a buyer pays. The regulator is correcting a disclosure failure, and the tax code is holding the composition incentive flat; the two are pulling against each other inside the same policy. What has to change is the tax base: calibrating the levy to sugar content is what turns a consumer nudge into a producer obligation, and the label alone will not do it. The markers to watch are whether the labelling regulation is notified as mandatory rather than advisory, and whether the single beverage slab is broken into sugar linked tiers.

    Non-Communicable Diseases in India

    1. What they are: Non communicable diseases are long duration conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and chronic respiratory illness, driven by diet, tobacco, alcohol and physical inactivity rather than by infection.
    2. Their share of mortality: They account for about 66 per cent of total deaths in India, with cardiovascular diseases at 28 per cent and chronic respiratory diseases at 12 per cent.
    3. The scale and the age profile: An estimated 6.1 million Indians die of a non communicable disease each year, and roughly one in four Indians faces the risk of dying from one before the age of 70.
    4. The economic cost: India is projected to lose 4.58 trillion dollars by 2030 to non communicable diseases and mental health disorders.

    Laws and Rules Governing Non-Communicable Disease Prevention

    1. Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006: It replaced the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954 and created a single regulator for food standards, labelling and safety across the food chain.
    2. Food Safety and Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, 2020: They set the mandatory nutrition declaration and per serve information that the front of pack proposal is built on top of.
    3. Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003: It bans advertising, restricts sale to minors and mandates pictorial health warnings, and it is the domestic precedent for a graphic warning driving consumption behaviour.

    Government Initiatives for Non-Communicable Disease Prevention

    1. Eat Right India: An FSSAI campaign to promote safe, healthy and sustainable food, working through certification of workplaces, campuses and eateries.
    2. National Programme for Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases: It funds population level screening for hypertension, diabetes and common cancers through district and community health centres.
    3. Fit India Movement and POSHAN Abhiyaan: The first targets physical inactivity through schools and workplaces, the second targets undernutrition and anaemia in children and mothers.

    Challenges in Non-Communicable Disease Prevention

    1. Surveillance is event based rather than predictive: Data for communicable disease, non communicable disease and animal health is collected in separate vertical silos, so a risk trend is visible only after it becomes a caseload. Eg. Childhood obesity data reaches policy through a periodic survey rather than a continuous registry.
      The Fix: Merge the vertical disease reporting streams into a single district level dashboard with a fixed reporting cycle.
    2. Primary care cannot sustain lifelong treatment: A non communicable disease requires uninterrupted medication, and the network closest to the patient is the least reliably supplied. Eg. Only 60 per cent of Ayushman Arogya Mandirs reported a dependable supply of essential non communicable disease drugs.
      The Fix: Tie the facility’s drug budget to its registered patient load rather than to a flat allocation, so supply scales with the panel it serves.
    3. Three disease burdens compete for the same budget: India simultaneously carries infectious disease, rising non communicable disease and emerging zoonotic threats, and health spending is allocated against outbreaks first. Eg. Prevention programmes are routinely reprioritised when an epidemic draws staff and funds.
      The Fix: Ring fence a fixed share of the health budget for prevention that cannot be reallocated to outbreak response within the year.
    4. Fiscal tools are used on tobacco but not on diet: Higher taxation is accepted as a public health instrument for tobacco and is treated as a revenue question for sugar and salt. Eg. India’s beverage taxation was reorganised in September 2025 without any sugar content differential.
      The Fix: Earmark a defined share of any diet related levy for subsidising fruit, vegetables and pulses, so the instrument is visibly a health measure rather than a revenue measure.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2018] Consider the following statements: 1. The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 replaced the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954. 2. The Food Safety and Standard Authority of India (FSSAI) is under the charge of Director General of Health Services in the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Which of the statements given above is/are correct? (a) 1 only (b) 2 only (c) Both 1 and 2 (d) Neither 1 nor 2 ANSWER: (a)”

  • SIR violates promise made by Constituent Assembly

    Why in the News

    The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is being challenged as a constitutionally and legally flawed exercise that operates as an exclusion rather than a revision, on the ground that 13 crore citizens stand removed from the rolls. The argument rests on Article 326, on Article 14, and on the safeguards in Sections 16, 21 and 22 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, which permit deletion only after inquiry and a hearing. The Supreme Court endorsed the exercise by its 27 May decision, and that endorsement is itself contested. The tension is between an electoral authority’s power to purify the roll and the citizen’s constitutional entitlement to remain on it until disqualified on a stated ground.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision?

    1. The exercise: SIR is a focused, time bound house to house enumeration in which Booth Level Officers physically visit households to verify every entry on the electoral roll.
    2. How it differs from the annual exercise: The routine summary revision updates the roll on the basis of claims received. SIR verifies each existing entry through door to door checking.
    3. What it is meant to remove: Its stated objectives are to confirm the residence of every registered voter, to remove deceased, duplicate and permanently shifted entries, and to register citizens who have newly turned 18.

    What is the constitutional entitlement the exercise is measured against?

    1. Adult suffrage is the constitutional foundation: Under Article 326, every person who is a citizen of India and not less than 21 years of age, now 18, is entitled to be registered as a voter.
    2. The grounds of exclusion are closed: Article 326 permits disqualification only on grounds of non residence, unsoundness of mind, crime or illegal practice, under the Constitution or a law made by the legislature.
    3. Voting is therefore not merely statutory: A right whose grounds of denial are fixed by the Constitution itself is not a right that an administrative process may extinguish.
    4. Equality applies to the process, not only the outcome: Equality guaranteed to “any person” under Article 14 makes an arbitrary and discriminatory exercise open to challenge, since those removed were electors already on the roll as per law.

    Which statutory safeguards are said to have been bypassed?

    1. The roll must be prepared under the Act: Part III of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 governs preparation of the electoral roll, and the Election Commission of India (ECI) must prepare it in accordance with that Act.
    2. Section 16 fixes the disqualifications: It bars registration where a person is not a citizen of India, is of unsound mind, or is disqualified for corrupt or other practices.
    3. Section 21 keys revision to the Census: Revision of rolls proceeds on the existing Census, the last available being that of 2011.
    4. Section 22 requires inquiry before deletion: The Electoral Registration Officer may correct an entry only if satisfied after such inquiry as he thinks fit, and only on finding the entry erroneous or defective.
    5. A hearing precedes removal: Section 22 gives the person the right to be heard before deletion, and deletion is available where a person is dead or has ceased to be a resident of the constituency.

    What is the claimed scale of exclusion, and who carries its cost?

    1. The headline number: 13 crore citizens are stated to have been excluded from the rolls.
    2. Two States account for a large share: 48 lakh electors were removed in Delhi and 2 crore in Maharashtra.
    3. The burden has shifted to the citizen: Booth Level Officers deleted names and the ECI put up lists, leaving the excluded person to establish the claim rather than the authority to establish the ground.
    4. Citizenship is not a plausible explanation: The ECI cannot maintain that 13 crore people are foreigners when they were not identified as non citizens over more than a decade.
    5. Exclusion travels beyond the ballot: Loss of entitlements such as passports, ration cards, free rations and other benefits follows from the uncertainty over status.
    6. Two elections have already been held: Elections to the Bihar and West Bengal assemblies took place in the interim, and the effect of the exclusions on those outcomes can be ascertained only by experts.

    What did the Constituent Assembly settle about the franchise?

    1. The question was debated directly: The Constituent Assembly took up the integrity of elections on 15 and 16 June 1949.
    2. Fairness was treated as beyond argument: R K Sidhwa said he did not think there were two opinions that elections should be fair, pure, honest and impartial.
    3. Corruption was not assumed to be a candidate’s monopoly: K M Munshi said the sovereign people must be able to elect their representatives in a manner above suspicion, and that corrupt practices may be committed by the government.
    4. Exclusion by official discretion was ruled out: B R Ambedkar said franchise is a most fundamental thing in a democracy, and no person entitled to be brought onto the rolls should be excluded merely by the prejudice of a local government or the whim of an officer.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. Documentary proof falls hardest on those least likely to hold it: Requiring legacy documents or a birth certificate excludes citizens whose lives were never recorded in formal registers. Eg. Landless labourers and migrant workers frequently hold no document tying them to a single constituency.
      The Fix: Accept a wider range of residency proofs, including utility bills and community certificates, so absence of a specific document is not treated as absence of entitlement.
    2. Grievance redressal runs slower than the deletion it answers: Claims and objections are filed against a deadline the roll itself is racing, so an unresolved claim becomes a deletion by default. Eg. Only a fraction of about 60 lakh claims in West Bengal were resolved before the roll was frozen for polling.
      The Fix: Establish year round appellate tribunals for electoral rolls, so a claim is not extinguished by an election calendar.
    3. Field verification carries unreviewable discretion: A Booth Level Officer’s judgement that a household has shifted is recorded without a stated ground and is rarely revisited. Eg. Entries are marked “shifted” on a single visit at which no member of the household was present.
      The Fix: Require geo tagged verification with a recorded reason for each adverse marking, so an official decision is traceable to a place and a date.
    4. Fear of a citizenship test suppresses cooperation: Households that read the exercise as a screening of nationality withhold documents, which itself produces the deletion they feared. Eg. Residents in border districts have declined to submit papers on the view that the exercise is a stealth register of citizens.
      The Fix: State in the enumeration form itself that the exercise determines registration alone and creates no finding on citizenship.

    Conclusion

    The exercise and the Constitution are answering two different questions. The ECI is asking who can prove entitlement, and Article 326 asks who can be disqualified on a stated ground; those are not the same test. Until that is resolved, an administrative default operates as a disqualification the Constitution does not list. The marker to watch is whether the deletion process is required to record a ground and a hearing for each name, since that is where a revision separates from an exclusion.

    What is the current status of the right to vote in India?

    1. The age threshold: Universal adult suffrage applies at 18, lowered from 21 by the Constitution (Sixty-first Amendment) Act, 1988.
    2. The right is exercised through registration: Section 19 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 conditions registration on being 18 or above and ordinarily resident in the constituency.
    3. Its legal character is settled: The right to vote is a constitutional and statutory right rather than a fundamental right, so it is enforced through the electoral law rather than under Article 32.
    4. Two categories sit outside the ordinary rule: Section 20A provides for overseas electors to be registered, and proxy voting is confined to classified service voters such as members of the armed and paramilitary forces.

    Constitutional Provisions Related to Elections and Electoral Rolls

    1. Article 324: Vests the superintendence, direction and control of elections to Parliament, the State legislatures and the offices of President and Vice-President in the ECI.
    2. Article 325: Mandates one general electoral roll for every constituency, and bars exclusion on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.
    3. Article 327: Empowers Parliament to make laws on all matters relating to elections, which is the source of the Representation of the People Acts.
    4. Article 328: Empowers a State legislature to make election laws where Parliament has not provided for the matter.
    5. Article 329: Bars courts from interfering in electoral matters such as delimitation, except through an election petition.

    Major debates surrounding electoral roll revision

    1. The character of the right: Whether the right to vote should be read as a facet of Article 21 and Article 19(1)(a) rather than as a purely statutory entitlement remains contested in litigation.
    2. Whether the ECI may test citizenship: Article 324 confers plenary superintendence, and the question is whether that extends to determining nationality, which is otherwise decided under the Citizenship Act, 1955 and by tribunals.
    3. Where the burden of proof sits: One position treats an existing entry as presumptively valid until disproved, and the other treats every entry as unverified until re-established.
    4. The judicial review bar: Article 329(b) limits challenges once the election process has begun, which pushes disputes over the roll into the narrow window before notification.
    5. Timing relative to polls: An intensive revision immediately preceding an election compresses the claims and objections period, and whether such an exercise should be barred within a fixed period before polling is unsettled.

    Laws and Rules Governing Electoral Rolls

    1. Representation of the People Act, 1951: Governs the actual conduct of elections, the qualifications and disqualifications of candidates, corrupt practices and election petitions.
    2. Sections 80 and 81: An election may be questioned only by an election petition filed in the High Court within 45 days.
    3. Registration of Electors Rules, 1960: Lays down the procedural framework for house to house enumeration and verification, and is the subordinate legislation an intensive revision is conducted under.
    4. Section 31, Representation of the People Act, 1950: Penalises false declarations made in connection with electoral rolls.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2017] Right to vote and to be elected in India is a (a) Fundamental Right (b) Natural Right (c) Constitutional Right (d) Legal Right ANSWER: (c)”

  • At BRICS, India’s task is to keep the Ukraine peace process moving

    Why in the News

    The Prime Minister has again urged the Russian President to end the war in Ukraine, at their meeting in Bishkek on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit. Two envoys of the U.S. President travelled to Moscow and Kyiv over the same weekend carrying fresh peace proposals, and the guns briefly fell silent during that visit. The U.S. President has followed with a call to the Russian President asking for a swift end to the war so that U.S.-Russia ties can be restored. After more than four and a half years, the war is edging towards the negotiation of an endgame. India chairs BRICS this year, the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa now expanded to eleven members, and hosts its summit in New Delhi this weekend. The settlement itself will be written elsewhere.

    Where does the American peace track stand?

    1. The 2025 process paused rather than ended: The Alaska process of 2025 produced the Anchorage summit, successive plans and counter-plans, and negotiating rounds at Geneva and Abu Dhabi.
    2. Six months of lost momentum: The American initiative stalled as Washington’s attention was taken up by Iran. The U.S. was drawn into the West Asian theatre as a belligerent.
    3. The file has been reopened: The U.S. President’s follow-up call to the Russian President confirms the return to Ukraine. A plan or at least a ceasefire may now emerge from a trilateral seating the U.S., Russian and Ukrainian Presidents in one room.

    Why did the last bargain collapse?

    1. The reported “3+2” formula: Circulating accounts described the Russian President reducing Moscow’s demands to Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, with Zaporizhzhia and Kherson beyond that.
    2. The Donbas is the sticking point: Russia holds Crimea and insists on the whole of the Donbas, including ground it has not taken.
    3. The trade that was offered: Russia offered to let Kyiv keep the parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia it could not capture, against an easing of sanctions.
    4. Kyiv refused: The U.S. Secretary of State has admitted that Ukraine would not agree. Washington can keep the parties in the room. It cannot make Kyiv cede the Donbas, nor make Moscow accept less than it believes it has won.

    What has India actually done, and on what reasoning?

    1. A shuttle inside the American track: The External Affairs Minister travelled from Moscow to Kyiv days before the American envoys set out, urging dialogue and diplomacy and carrying a message between the two capitals.
    2. No branded Indian plan: China, Switzerland and Turkey each proposed peace frameworks of their own and each effort stalled. India worked inside the existing U.S. peace track instead, offering to help only if both belligerents asked and keeping the Americans informed.
    3. The energy position: India holds that cutting oil imports will not stop the war, that its citizens’ energy security is not negotiable, and that sanctions for their own sake are no substitute for diplomacy.
    4. The growth argument: Conflict anywhere threatens the growth trajectory on which India expects to reach developed economy status within two decades.

    Why does the Global South claim a stake in ending this war?

    1. Energy and food costs travelled outward: The war raised energy prices and struck the security of food and fertiliser supplies well beyond the theatre.
    2. Balance sheet damage in uninvolved states: It fed inflation and sovereign debt stress in countries with no part in the fighting.
    3. Institutional erosion: It frayed the multilateral institutions that smaller states depend on for dispute settlement and finance.
    4. Peace as a global public good: Nations with no soldiers near the Dnieper have paid a heavy price, and that gives them standing to press for a settlement.

    What can a BRICS chair actually deliver?

    1. India will not be in the room: The settlement will be authored in Washington, Moscow and Kyiv, and sealed in a trilateral of the three Presidents.
    2. Representation rather than mediation: India’s nudge is an act of representation for a constituency that is watching, is affected, and wants the guns silenced. It is not a claim to a mediator’s role.
    3. The summit seats belligerents and no mediator: The New Delhi summit will seat Russia from the European war and Iran from the West Asian one, and neither the United States nor any other mediator.
    4. The deliverable is a text: India’s task is to steer a summit declaration that reflects the reality of these conflicts, does not echo the case of any single party, and carries a collective call for peace.

    Challenges to the Ukraine peace process

    1. A ceasefire needs monitoring that nobody has agreed to provide: A line of contact running over a thousand kilometres cannot be policed by a declaration. Eg. The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 were monitored by an unarmed Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) mission that logged violations without being able to stop them.
      The Fix: Settle the verification mechanism, its mandate and its funding in the same document that fixes the ceasefire line.
    2. Security guarantees for Kyiv have no agreed form: A guarantee that is political rather than legal collapses at the moment it is needed. Eg. The Budapest Memorandum of 1994 gave Ukraine assurances in exchange for surrendering Soviet-era nuclear weapons, and those assurances carried no enforcement obligation.
      The Fix: Write any guarantee as a treaty with named guarantors and a stated trigger for action.
    3. Sanctions relief and territory move on different clocks: Sanctions can be reimposed and ceded territory cannot be recovered, so the sequencing decides who carries the risk. Eg. Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action of 2015, relief was staged against verified nuclear steps, and the U.S. exit in 2018 showed how fast staged relief reverses.
      The Fix: Tie each stage of relief to a verified and reversible step, with a dispute mechanism agreed before the first stage begins.
    4. Europe funds the outcome without negotiating it: The party carrying reconstruction and refugee costs has no seat in the trilateral that would settle them. Eg. European Union states have hosted over four million Ukrainians under temporary protection since 2022.
      The Fix: Seat the parties that will fund reconstruction and enforce sanctions in the negotiation that creates those obligations.

    Conclusion

    Wars end at a table, and the immediate question is whether one is kept standing. The chair of a plurilateral grouping cannot summon belligerents, and India has not claimed that it can. What a chair can do is put the cost borne by uninvolved states on the record of a summit that both a European and a West Asian belligerent will attend. Watch whether the New Delhi text speaks for the affected rather than for a party.

    About BRICS

    1. What it is: BRICS is a plurilateral grouping of major emerging economies that coordinates positions on global governance. It began as an investment category and became a geopolitical bloc.
    2. Origin and evolution: The acronym “BRIC” was coined in 2001 by a Goldman Sachs economist. Foreign Ministers first met on the margins of the UN General Assembly in 2006, and the first Leaders’ Summit was held at Yekaterinburg in 2009.
    3. Membership: South Africa joined in 2011. Expansion was agreed at the Johannesburg summit of 2023, with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joining in 2024 and Indonesia in 2025, taking full membership to eleven. Saudi Arabia participates with its formal status left nuanced, and a “Partner Country” category was introduced in 2024 for states such as Malaysia, Thailand and Nigeria.
    4. Weight: The grouping holds over 45 percent of the world’s population, about 37 percent of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms, ahead of the G7’s share, and roughly 42 percent of global oil production and exports.

    Institutional Initiatives of BRICS

    1. New Development Bank: Headquartered in Shanghai, it lends for infrastructure and sustainable development in member and partner states, and has approved over $35 billion in loans.
    2. Contingent Reserve Arrangement: A $100 billion facility that provides short-term liquidity support to a member under balance of payments pressure.
    3. BRICS Pay: A cross-border payment system in pilot stage, intended to settle trade outside the SWIFT messaging network.
    4. Partnership on New Industrial Revolution: A cooperation track on artificial intelligence, digitalisation and green technology. A BRICS Space Council was added in 2025 to coordinate deep-space and lunar research.
    5. BRICS Vaccine Research and Development Centre: Set up during the pandemic to support technology transfer and vaccine access across members.

    Challenges in BRICS

    1. Internal rivalries block strategic cohesion: Two of the largest members carry an unresolved bilateral dispute into every common position. Eg. The India-China boundary dispute has kept security cooperation within the grouping nominal.
      The Fix: Prioritise health, space and education cooperation, where a common position is available without settling the political disputes first.
    2. Members run incompatible political systems: Joint declarations cannot carry a common position on human rights or democratic norms. Eg. India and Brazil sit as electoral democracies alongside Russia, China and Iran.
      The Fix: Confine declarations to areas where a shared position genuinely exists, and record differences rather than negotiating the text down to nothing.
    3. Slow de-dollarisation: The shift to local currency trade is far behind the rhetoric around it. Eg. The U.S. dollar still settles over 80 percent of global trade.
      The Fix: Deepen bilateral local currency settlement in trade flows that are already balanced, such as rupee-rouble and rupee-dirham arrangements, before attempting a common unit.
    4. Expansion risks a talk shop: A wider membership lowers the common denominator of any agreed text. Eg. The Non-Aligned Movement widened steadily and lost the ability to produce decisions.
      The Fix: Formalise admission criteria for Partner Countries, so entry follows economic synergy rather than geopolitical alignment.
    5. No charter and no permanent secretariat: The grouping runs on an annual rotating chair and its summit declarations, with nothing tracking implementation between them. Eg. The European Union operates through standing institutions and binding instruments, and BRICS has neither.
      The Fix: Create a small standing secretariat to carry implementation of declarations across chairs.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS2, 10.0 marks] “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.”