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Type: Op-ed

  • [9th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: India-Japan defence cooperation breaks new ground

    [9th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: India-Japan defence cooperation breaks new ground

    Question (2019, GS2 – 10 Marks): “‘The time has come for India and Japan to build a strong contemporary relationship, one involving global and strategic partnership that will have a great significance for Asia and the world as a whole.’ Comment.
    Linkage: This question directly evaluates the transition of India-Japan ties into a robust “Special Strategic and Global Partnership”. It challenges candidates to analyze whether political mechanisms (like the 2+2 Ministerial Dialogues and institutional agreements) are producing meaningful regional and global security outcomes

    Mentor comment

    India and Japan have announced a new maritime cooperation framework, joint work on naval shipbuilding and design, and early implementation of the transfer of Japan’s UNICORN integrated communications antenna system. The agreements came out of a visit to India by Japan’s Defence Minister in August 2026. They follow more than a decade of institution building through annual dialogues, the 2+2 mechanism that brings the two countries’ foreign and defence ministers to a single table, joint exercises, logistics arrangements and defence technology discussions. That machinery has not produced matching operational or industrial output. The contest is whether a relationship rich in declarations of strategic convergence can now deliver usable capability.

    Why do further declarations of convergence add little?

    1. The convergence is already established: Both countries share concerns about coercive attempts to alter the status quo, the security of the maritime commons and the growing militarisation of the Indo-Pacific.
    2. Declarations now carry diminishing returns: The partnership has been more developed institutionally than operationally, so another statement of shared assessment changes nothing about what the two forces can do together.
    3. The test is joint operating capacity: The unmet task is converting shared assessments into arrangements that improve the two countries’ ability to operate together.

    What does the new maritime framework try to fix?

    1. Information sharing is the core: The framework places its emphasis on information sharing and Maritime Domain Awareness, the continuous picture of shipping, naval movement and activity in a maritime area assembled from radar, satellite, aircraft and vessel tracking inputs.
    2. The two sit at opposite ends of one theatre: Japan’s immediate security concerns are concentrated in the East China Sea and the waters surrounding Taiwan. India’s geographical position gives it a central role in the Indian Ocean maritime space.
    3. A single picture across two spaces: A closer information sharing architecture would build a more continuous strategic picture across these interconnected maritime spaces.
    4. The stated objective is operational: The aim is greater awareness, interoperability and operational familiarity between the two major maritime powers.

    What is being attempted in defence industry?

    1. Joint work on naval shipbuilding: The two sides are exploring joint development in naval shipbuilding and design, combining Japanese technological expertise with Indian production capabilities.
    2. Japanese use of Indian capacity: There was agreement to deepen discussions on Japan’s use of Indian production capabilities under the ‘Make in India’ framework.
    3. Reciprocal ship repair: The two sides agreed to move towards reciprocal arrangements for ship repair facilities.
    4. This is the weakest leg of the relationship: Defence industrial cooperation has consistently lagged behind strategic and political convergence.

    Why does the UNICORN transfer matter, and why is it not new?

    1. What the system is: UNICORN is an integrated communications antenna system that houses a warship’s antennas within a single composite mast, which reduces the ship’s radar signature.
    2. Described as a first, but already under way: Japan’s Ministry of Defence describes UNICORN as the first defence equipment transfer project between the two countries. A memorandum of understanding for the co-development of UNICORN masts, involving Bharat Electronics Limited, was signed in November 2024.
    3. The meeting advanced implementation: The August meeting represented a further step towards implementation rather than the initiation of a new project.
    4. The record it has to beat: New Delhi and Tokyo have struggled to convert their 2015 agreement on defence equipment and technology transfer into concrete outcomes.
    5. Research agencies are being linked: There are plans to deepen cooperation between India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Japan’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency (ATLA), the Japanese Defence Ministry body that runs procurement and technology development.
    6. Credibility now rests on delivery: The commitment to early implementation reflects a recognition that credibility depends on delivering projects rather than identifying possibilities.

    What do the exercises signal?

    1. Japanese fighters are flying in India: Japan’s fighter aircraft are participating in the Veer Guardian exercise in India from 9 to 22 September 2026, for the first time.
    2. Greater complexity by agreement: The two sides agreed to increase the complexity of bilateral exercises and to integrate unmanned systems.
    3. Short notice activation: They agreed to explore exercises organised at short notice, which tests readiness rather than choreography.
    4. Beyond the navies: They discussed cooperation between special operations forces, and with India’s future integrated theatre commands.

    Why does the western seaboard visit matter?

    1. The itinerary moved west: Before travelling to New Delhi, Japan’s Defence Minister visited the Western Naval Command in Mumbai and INS Chennai.
    2. Past the usual geography: The visit extended beyond the familiar strategic geography of the Bay of Bengal and the Strait of Malacca.
    3. What the western seaboard carries: It is central to India’s wider maritime interests, encompassing critical sea lanes, energy flows and India’s growing responsibilities in the western Indian Ocean.

    Is this a China-centric partnership?

    1. The message was sent without the name: The joint statement reiterated opposition to unilateral actions that impede freedom of navigation or seek to alter the status quo through force or coercion. Neither country named China.
    2. The value lies in going past China: The significance of India-Japan cooperation lies in its ability to move beyond a China-centric agenda.
    3. A wider agenda is already forming: Maritime security, resilient supply chains, defence industrial capacity, logistics and third country cooperation are becoming components of a wider regional security architecture.
    4. The civil side moved first: The July 2026 Annual Summit expanded cooperation across economic security, critical technologies and resilient supply chains, and the defence engagement followed it.

    Challenges

    1. Transfer agreements have not produced serial equipment flows: Named projects have repeatedly stalled between agreement and production. Eg. Negotiations on the US-2 amphibious search and rescue aircraft ran for years without producing a contract.
    2. Japan’s export control framework limits what can move: Japan’s post-war pacifist constitutional settlement and its restrictive export rules keep advanced and dual-use defence technology outside most transfer categories. Eg. The Three Principles on Transfer of Defence Equipment and Technology, adopted in 2014, replaced a near-total export ban but still confine transfers to defined categories.
    3. Habitual joint operation is still shallow: Interoperability is built by repetition, and the bilateral exercise tempo remains thin against the range of services involved. Eg. Japan first joined the Malabar naval exercise in 2007 and became a permanent participant only in 2015.
    4. Defence industrial cooperation remains below potential: Defence industrial cooperation has consistently lagged behind strategic and political convergence.
    5. Strategic alignment is not identical: Japan’s Indo-Pacific approach is closely coordinated with the United States and the G7. India retains strategic autonomy and stays in groupings Japan is not part of. Eg. India’s participation in the Vostok exercises in Russia sits awkwardly with Tokyo’s position.

    Way Forward

    1. Convert agreements into deliverables: Attach dated production milestones and named Indian production partners to defence transfers so that agreements move from signing to implementation.
    2. Work within Japan’s export framework: Concentrate joint projects on permitted categories such as sensors, communications, surveillance and rescue platforms.
    3. Build sustained interoperability: Establish a standing annual calendar covering naval, army and air exercises, with a short-notice activation slot.
    4. Deepen defence industrial cooperation: Move from individual technology transfers towards joint development, co-production and reciprocal maintenance, combining Japanese technological expertise with Indian manufacturing capacity.
    5. Strengthen maritime information sharing: Develop a more integrated Maritime Domain Awareness architecture and improve information sharing between the two countries’ maritime forces.
    6. Institutionalise strategic consultation: Establish a standing consultation mechanism on third-country engagements so that differences arising from India’s strategic autonomy do not become unexpected diplomatic surprises.
    7. Measure the partnership by outcomes: The ultimate benchmark should be delivered equipment, operational capability and functioning industrial partnerships, rather than another round of declarations.

    Back2Basic: About India-Japan Relations

    1. A Special Strategic and Global Partnership: The relationship was upgraded to this status in 2014, covering political, economic and security cooperation.
    2. Indo-Pacific convergence: India’s Act East Policy and its Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI) align with Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) vision, and the two also work together within the Quad.
    3. Economic weight: Japan is the fifth largest investor in the Indian economy, with 6.6 per cent of India’s total foreign direct investment inflows. Bilateral trade stood at USD 25.17 billion in 2024-25.
    4. Development footprint: The Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail project is the flagship connectivity work, and Japan is the only country undertaking development work in India’s Northeast, through the India-Japan Act East Forum.

    Initiatives and Agreements in India-Japan Cooperation

    1. Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), 2011: It covers trade in goods and services, investment and intellectual property rights.
    2. India-Japan Industrial Competitiveness Partnership, 2021: It works on India’s manufacturing base and on supply chain resilience.
    3. Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement, 2020: It allows reciprocal provision of supplies and services between the two countries’ defence forces.
    4. Agreement for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, 2017: It provides the legal basis for Japanese civil nuclear cooperation with India.
    5. Supply Chain Resilience Initiative: Run with Australia, it seeks to diversify supply chains away from dependence on a single country.
    6. Asia-Africa Growth Corridor: It aims to link East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia more closely with Africa.

    Key Facts about India-Japan Relations

    1. Joint exercises: JIMEX is the bilateral naval exercise and Dharma Guardian the army exercise. Both countries also take part in the Malabar and Milan multilateral exercises.
    2. The G4 grouping: India and Japan work with Brazil and Germany in the G4 to press for expansion of the United Nations Security Council.
    3. India Vision 2025: It frames the development of India’s Northeast as the convergence point between the Act East Policy and Japan’s Indo-Pacific vision.

  • Disaster preparedness must put communities at centre

    Why in the News

    The catastrophe unfolding across Nepal is being read as a warning for the Himalaya and for mountain regions worldwide rather than as one country’s disaster. The reading rests on field research with disaster-affected communities in Nepal, including flood-affected elders, women, men and local leaders in Kharapani in the Pokhara Valley after the Seti River flood, and on separate field research on earthquake recovery in Kathmandu. Those communities reported inadequate warning, limited preparedness and delayed recovery support. They did not reject science or technology, and asked instead for warnings that function and for the equipment and training to act on them. The contest is between a preparedness system measured by its ability to detect the next hazard and one measured by whether the detection reaches a household with the authority and the means to move.

    Why does a mountain disaster become a regional problem?

    1. Mountains hold the water other regions live on: They store snow and ice, feed major rivers and sustain societies far beyond their own slopes.
    2. The physical base is changing across all mountain systems: From the Hindu Kush Himalaya to the Andes, the Alps and the Rocky Mountains, warming is altering glaciers, snowpack, permafrost and water flows.
    3. The consequences land downstream: Environmental change in the highlands cascades into social, economic and health crises in the plains that depend on those flows.

    What did flood-affected communities report?

    1. The loss was continuing rather than momentary: Residents described a long relational disaster covering the loss of relatives, homes, livestock and businesses.
    2. The damage extended past property: They described grief, disrupted livelihoods and frustration with the institutions meant to respond.
    3. Three failures were named: They reported inadequate warning, limited preparedness and delayed recovery support.

    What do affected communities ask for?

    1. Working warnings, not more instruments: Communities asked for functioning warnings, local flood-information centres, communication technologies, rescue equipment and preparedness training.
    2. An unread warning protects nobody: A warning that does not reach people, is not trusted, or is disconnected from evacuation and response plans provides no protection.
    3. The people at risk hold usable knowledge: Affected populations are knowledge holders and leaders in their own right, not recipients waiting for expert instruction.

    What five responsibilities does mountain preparedness now carry?

    1. Transboundary monitoring and data sharing: Glaciers, rivers, landslides and flood pathways cross political borders, so Nepal, India, China, Bhutan and other Himalayan countries need faster exchange of upstream observations, satellite information, river conditions and warnings. Scientific cooperation of this kind is life-saving regional infrastructure.
    2. Community-centred warnings: Information must reach people in trusted languages and forms, warnings must be tested, communities must know where to go, and women, elders, youth and marginalised groups must hold meaningful authority in preparedness decisions.
    3. Preparedness as a permanent public responsibility: Local information centres, evacuation plans, shelters, community response teams, health-system continuity and rescue equipment all require sustained investment rather than post-disaster allocation.
    4. Ecosystem-sensitive mountain development: Roads, tourism, hydropower and mining bring benefits, and poorly planned versions of each amplify exposure to the hazard.
    5. International climate responsibility: Nepal has contributed a tiny share of historical emissions and faces profound risk from a changing cryosphere, so climate finance, loss and damage support, scientific capacity and locally controlled adaptation are questions of justice rather than charity.

    Challenges to community-centred disaster preparedness

    1. The first responder tier is the least resourced: Panchayati Raj Institutions and urban local bodies carry the immediate response duty without matching funds, trained staff or defined roles. Eg. Relief work and maintenance of community assets sit with panchayats under the Eleventh Schedule, and States have devolved neither dedicated disaster staff nor untied funds against that entry.
      The Fix: Earmark a fixed share of the State Disaster Response Fund for village-level preparedness and train elected representatives through the National Disaster Management Authority and National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj modules.
    2. Spending is tilted towards relief rather than prevention: The disaster fund architecture keeps response funds far larger than mitigation funds, so preparedness competes for the smaller pool every year. Eg. India’s mitigation funds were created only after the response funds had been operating for years, and the tilt towards relief persists.
      The Fix: Move early warning systems, retrofitting and nature-based works into the National and State Disaster Mitigation Funds with a published annual drawdown target.
    3. Warnings fail at the last mile: Alerts are generated centrally and lose their audience before reaching the household, which is where the decision to move is actually taken. Eg. Real-time disaster information systems and last-mile dissemination remain uneven between States.
      The Fix: Test each warning chain through a drill that measures how many households received and acted on an alert, rather than how many messages were dispatched.
    4. Himalayan hazard data stops at the border: Glacial lakes, landslide dams and river surges form upstream of national boundaries, where the agencies that will face the flood have no observation rights. Eg. The South Lhonak lake outburst flood in Sikkim in October 2023 destroyed the Teesta III dam downstream and killed dozens of people.
      The Fix: Convert existing bilateral hydrological exchanges into a standing Himalayan hazard data protocol with fixed transmission times and a named receiving authority in each country.

    Conclusion

    Preparedness is being judged by the wrong instrument. Detection capacity has improved across the Himalaya; the authority to act on a detection still sits several administrative tiers above the people who must move. The unresolved tension is that the tier holding the legal duty to respond holds neither the money nor the staff to prepare, and the tier holding both is too distant to run an evacuation. Whether that changes is visible in one measurable thing over the next monsoon: whether any Himalayan State publishes household-level reach data for its warning system, instead of counting alerts issued.

    Disaster Management in India

    1. Where the mandate sits: The Ministry of Home Affairs oversees disaster management through its Disaster Management Division, which coordinates response, relief and preparedness for natural and human-made disasters, excluding drought and epidemics.
    2. A four-tier institutional structure: The National Disaster Management Authority is chaired by the Prime Minister, State Disaster Management Authorities by Chief Ministers and District Disaster Management Authorities by District Collectors, with primary responsibility resting on State governments.
    3. A fund architecture with four pillars: The National and State Disaster Response Funds finance relief, and the National and State Disaster Mitigation Funds finance risk-reduction projects.
    4. How resilience is defined: The Hyogo Framework for Action, 2005, defines disaster resilience as the capacity of a system or community exposed to hazards to adapt, by resisting or changing, so as to maintain an acceptable level of functioning.

    Laws and Rules Governing Disaster Management

    1. Disaster Management Act, 2005: It establishes structures and processes for disaster management at national, State, district and local levels, and mandates the creation of the National, State and District Disaster Management Authorities.
    2. Disaster Management (Amendment) Act, 2025: It modernises the 2005 framework for urban risk, climate extremes and data-driven response.
    3. It allows States to set up Urban Disaster Management Authorities in State capitals and Municipal Corporation cities. Eg. Karnataka’s authority for the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike.
    4. It mandates national and State disaster databases covering risk assessments and real-time disaster data.
    5. It gives statutory status to the National Crisis Management Committee and the High-Level Committee.
    6. Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992: Article 243G empowers Panchayati Raj Institutions to prepare plans and implement schemes, and the Eleventh Schedule places relief work and maintenance of community assets among their functions.

    Government Initiatives for Disaster Preparedness

    1. National Disaster Management Plan: Issued in 2016 and revised in 2019, it is India’s first all-hazard plan aligned to the Sendai Framework.
    2. Disaster Management Plan of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj: Framed under Section 37 of the Disaster Management Act, 2005, it builds community-based planning from the village to the district panchayat.
    3. Aapda Mitra: It trains community volunteers in first response, search and rescue in disaster-prone districts.
    4. SACHET and the Common Alerting Protocol: They push multi-hazard alerts to every phone in an affected geography from one standardised feed.
    5. Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure: Launched by India in 2019, it is an international organisation of over 50 countries working on disaster-proofing critical infrastructure.

    Key Facts about Disaster Risk Reduction

    1. Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015-2030: Adopted at Sendai in Japan, it carries four priorities for action and seven global targets.
    2. The United Nations custodian: The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction anchors global disaster risk reduction and runs the Sendai Framework Monitor for reporting against the seven targets.
    3. India’s stated vision: The Prime Minister’s Ten-Point Agenda on Disaster Risk Reduction was announced in 2016 at the Asian Ministerial Conference.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS3, 15.0 marks] What is disaster resilience? How is it determined? Describe various elements of a resilience framework. Also mention the global targets of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030).”

  • Perilous retreat: Gram sabhas must have a veto on issues relating to tribal land

    Why in the News

    The Committee on Public Undertakings has suggested that a project require the consent of only most, rather than all, of the gram sabhas affected by it. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 is framed in spirit to require the consent of every affected village assembly before forest land is diverted. The Tribal Affairs Ministry has declined to claim jurisdiction over the question, leaving the reading of that requirement to the Centre and the State governments. The contest is between a consent rule that protects the specific village losing its land and a counting rule under which the villages losing least can decide for the village losing most.

    What is the Forest Rights Act, 2006?

    1. What it recognises: The Act recognises individual and community rights over forest land for Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have depended on that land.
    2. Why it was passed: It was enacted to undo the “historical injustices” meted out to forest-dependent communities whose occupation of forest land had never been recorded.
    3. Where the authority sits: The gram sabha is the body that initiates the determination of the nature and extent of individual and community forest rights.
    4. What it does to land diversion: The consent of the affected gram sabhas is the barrier a project must clear before forest land is diverted for non-forest use.

    What would a majority consent threshold change?

    1. Assemblies become stakeholders: A regime deeming the acquiescence of 70 to 75 per cent of affected gram sabhas to suffice would reduce them from democratic bodies protecting the constitutional rights of their specific inhabitants to corporate stakeholders.
    2. The village that loses most can be outvoted: A project developer may bypass the consent of a village located directly within a proposed reservoir, once less affected villages provide their no-objection certificates.
    3. The change is jurisprudential, not procedural: A right held by a particular community because of its dependence on a particular forest cannot be surrendered by the agreement of other communities, so the threshold alters what the consent requirement is for.
    4. Classification disputes feed the same result: The political fight over classifying tribal communities alters who qualifies as a community member, which makes it easier to split a village assembly and engineer consent.

    What does the Tribal Affairs Ministry’s recusal produce?

    1. A regulatory vacuum: The refusal of the Tribal Affairs Ministry to claim jurisdiction leaves the Centre and the State governments unchecked in rewriting the rules by which forested land is diverted for non-forest use.
    2. The recusal rests on a technicality: The Ministry has located the question between the Forest Rights Act and the Environment Ministry’s rules in order to recuse itself.
    3. The consequence is substantive: That bureaucratic manoeuvre could strip forest-dependent communities of their most potent legal instrument.

    What is the legal position on consent as it stands?

    1. No express clause for every gram sabha: The Forest Rights Act does not include a clause requiring a no-objection certificate from every affected gram sabha.
    2. That does not make consent optional: The claim that no legal requirement presently exists, and that gram sabha decisions can be bypassed, is untrue.
    3. The route to any change is legislative: A government that wishes to move to a majority rule must change the relevant rules or legislation openly and democratically, rather than through an administrative reading of the existing text.

    Why do energy targets and forest rights collide?

    1. Infrastructure is being scaled rapidly: The government has been scaling up energy infrastructure, including the long-stalled Teesta-IV project, to meet macroeconomic goals.
    2. The same state wrote the protection: The Forest Rights Act was passed by that state to undo historical injustices, so the consent requirement is a commitment it made against its own future convenience.
    3. The chosen path avoids the argument: Proceeding on the notion that the consent requirement was never part of the Act settles the conflict by denying that it exists, rather than by weighing the claims on either side.

    What does land carry for forest-dependent communities?

    1. It is the base of everything else: Land is the foundation of these communities’ livelihoods, culture, identity and political autonomy.
    2. The struggle has been over dispossession: Communities have fought to resist displacement and dispossession and to secure customary collective ownership.
    3. They also supply public goods: Scheduled Tribe communities render social and environmental services and contribute to national development, including by helping meet India’s climate commitments.
    4. The recommendation follows from that: The Centre and the States should strengthen the powers conferred on gram sabhas in Scheduled Areas by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 and the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996.

    Challenges to gram sabha consent under the Forest Rights Act

    1. Community forest rights lag individual titles: Most titles distributed under the Act are individual. Community forest resource rights, which are what a gram sabha exercises against a diversion, are recognised in a small share of eligible villages. Eg. Recognised community forest resource titles are concentrated in Maharashtra, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, with minimal recognition in several other States.
      The Fix: Complete community forest resource mapping and vesting in a village before any diversion proposal over its forest is processed.
    2. The consent requirement rests on executive instruction: It operates through Ministry circulars in the forest clearance process rather than through an express section of the Act, so it can be narrowed without going to Parliament. Eg. A 2009 circular of the Ministry of Environment and Forests made a gram sabha consent certificate part of the forest clearance record.
      The Fix: Write the consent requirement into the Act itself, so that any dilution requires an amendment debated in Parliament.
    3. Statutory exemptions have been widening: The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 removes categories of land from the forest clearance process, and the consent step travels with that process. Eg. Land within 100 km of an international border proposed for a strategic linear project falls outside the clearance requirement.
      The Fix: Retain the gram sabha consent step for every exempted category where forest rights have been recognised, independent of the clearance exemption.
    4. A refusal has no protected life: Nothing bars a fresh proposal over the same forest after a gram sabha has rejected one, so refusal delays a project rather than settling the question. Eg. In Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forests (2013) the Supreme Court referred the bauxite mining question in the Niyamgiri hills to 12 gram sabhas, and all of them rejected it.
      The Fix: Bar a fresh diversion proposal over the same land for a fixed period following a gram sabha rejection, as land acquisition law already does.

    Conclusion

    The consent requirement is the one instrument that makes a village’s refusal legally consequential, and the change under discussion replaces refusal with arithmetic. Two positions cannot both hold: that the right belongs to a particular community because it depends on a particular forest, and that other communities may supply the consent on its behalf. The Environment Ministry can settle which of the two governs, and the honest route to that is an open amendment rather than a fresh reading of existing rules. Until it does, the strength of a village assembly’s veto depends on which ministry is willing to claim jurisdiction over it.

    Back2Basics: Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996

    1. What it does: It extends Part IX of the Constitution, on panchayats, to the Fifth Schedule areas with modifications.
    2. The gram sabha’s status: It makes the gram sabha, rather than the elected panchayat, the primary body competent to safeguard traditions, customs, cultural identity and community resources.
    3. Consultation before acquisition: It requires consultation with the gram sabha before land is acquired in Scheduled Areas and before displaced persons are resettled.
    4. Control over resources: It vests ownership of minor forest produce in the gram sabha and gives it a role in preventing land alienation and in granting minor mineral concessions.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2013] Under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, who shall be the authority to initiate the process for determining the nature and extent of individual or community forest rights or both? (a) State Forest Department (b) Distrit Collector/Deputy Commissioner (c) Tahsildar/Block Develoment Officer/Mandal Revenue Officer (d) Gram Sabha ANSWER: (d)”

  • Safety in Delhi needs a regulatory reset

    Why in the News

    A building collapse in Satya Niketan has reopened the question of who is answerable for building safety in Delhi. Comparable failures have occurred at Saidulajab, Hauz Rani, Tughlakabad Extension, Palam and Vivek Vihar. Delhi already runs an online single window system for building proposals, built on Automated Development Control Regulations (Auto DCR) software, and that system reached none of these structures. The contest is between a regulator that examines the plans submitted to it and a city where the dangerous construction is precisely the construction that submits no plan.

    How does Delhi’s single window building approval system work?

    1. Online filing and document verification: Building proposals are submitted online. The Auto DCR software and the Building Plan Approval Management System verify the mandatory documents.
    2. Fee and site visit: The system issues a scrutiny fee challan for online payment. It then sends an SMS to the building inspector and the architect carrying the details of the site visit.
    3. Automated reading of the drawing: Auto DCR creates entities such as plots, building layouts and roads from the submitted drawings, using layers, geometrical mapping and reports.
    4. Rule checking and status: AutoCAD and allied software analyse the plans against the development control regulations and the building bye-laws, and the compliance status is available online before the plans are examined for approval.

    Which laws does illegal construction breach?

    1. Planning and municipal law: Illegal construction violates the Master Plan for Delhi, the Unified Building Byelaws, the Delhi Development Act and the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957.
    2. Fire law: It also violates the Delhi Fire Service Act, 2007, which is the source of the fire safety clearance a building is required to hold.
    3. The city absorbs the cost: Unapproved construction adds load to transport, services and civic amenities that were planned for a lower density.
    4. The failures are recurrent: Frequent fire incidents and structural failures in illegal constructions have endangered lives.

    Why is Delhi’s exposure larger than the collapses suggest?

    1. Seismic exposure: Delhi falls in Seismic Zone IV, where earthquakes may be severe, so unengineered construction carries a citywide risk rather than a single owner’s risk.
    2. Two cities with one problem: Planned development coexists with informal growth in slums and unauthorised colonies. Both are plagued by building violations along with a lack of oversight and enforcement.
    3. Safety is not conditional on tenure: The city cannot afford unsafe buildings irrespective of the type of development, the land ownership or the land use.

    Why has repeated official attention changed so little?

    1. The findings already exist: Courts, the commissions headed by G T Nanavati and by Baleshwar Prasad, and the high level committee headed by Tejendra Khanna have all underlined building safety, with very little impact.
    2. Monitoring is the weak link: Haphazard development and weak monitoring systems produce inefficiencies, delays and a loss of accountability.
    3. Non-compliance carries no standing consequence: Every building without a structural and fire safety certificate should be sealed and should display a safety related warning, and no such automatic consequence operates today.

    Why does approving plans not produce safe buildings?

    1. The department sees only what is filed: Building departments mainly deal with the plans they receive, so massive illegal and risky constructions are left out of the process altogether.
    2. The digital reform did not widen the net: The single window system improved the handling of submitted proposals. It brought no unauthorised construction into any approval or inspection stream, which is why the reform has not been successful.
    3. The software trails the city it regulates: The system needs updating to handle redevelopment, green buildings, transit oriented development and approvals under mixed land use.

    What would demunicipalising building regulation mean?

    1. Separating the regulator from the political apparatus: The proposal is to make the regulatory function for buildings independent of the municipal and political structure that currently houses it.
    2. One structure performs two conflicting roles: The same municipal apparatus both sanctions construction and polices it, so enforcement competes with local political interest.
    3. Bringing in the settlements now left out: Radical reform is required so that structures in informal settlements, urban villages and resettlement colonies receive regulatory attention.

    What can technology detect that inspection does not?

    1. Remote detection of new construction: Geospatial artificial intelligence, using high resolution satellite imagery and LiDAR (laser based remote sensing that measures distances to build a three dimensional model of a surface), can monitor and detect unauthorised construction.
    2. Continuous tracking in place of periodic visits: Spatial data driven Real-Time Morphological Tracking can change how building and layout plans are approved, and improve compliance with the building bye-laws, the Fire Services Act and land use stipulations.
    3. Less discretion, less rent: Automated detection reduces the human interface in approval and enforcement, and reduces the corruption that discretion creates.

    Challenges to an independent building regulator for Delhi

    1. Authority over building control is already split: Sanction and enforcement are divided among the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the New Delhi Municipal Council, the Delhi Development Authority and the Delhi Cantonment Board, so a new regulator adds a layer unless it absorbs theirs. Eg. The Delhi Development Authority prepares the Master Plan, and the municipal bodies sanction individual building plans under it.
      The Fix: Vest building safety certification in one statutory authority for the whole National Capital Territory, with the municipal bodies acting as its field arms.
    2. Unauthorised construction carries statutory protection: Punitive action against unauthorised colonies has repeatedly been suspended by law, so a regulator inherits a built stock it cannot act against. Eg. Successive National Capital Territory of Delhi Laws (Special Provisions) Acts have protected specified categories of unauthorised construction from demolition and sealing.
      The Fix: Convert that protection into a time bound retrofitting and certification requirement, so regularisation buys structural safety rather than immunity alone.
    3. Detection is not structural assessment: Satellite imagery and LiDAR identify a new or altered footprint, and they cannot read load bearing capacity, foundation integrity or the quality of materials. Eg. A failure triggered by excavation under an existing building leaves no external signature beforehand.
      The Fix: Pair remote detection with a mandatory structural audit by empanelled engineers for every building above a defined height or age.
    4. Certification capacity does not exist at that scale: Sealing every building without a structural and fire safety certificate presumes a supply of qualified structural engineers and fire auditors the city does not have. Eg. Fire safety clearance is required only above a prescribed building height, and even that stock is audited irregularly.
      The Fix: Licence and empanel private structural auditors under statutory personal liability, with random state verification of the certificates they issue.

    Conclusion

    Building regulation in Delhi is organised around a transaction, the filing of a plan, and the buildings that kill people are the ones that never generate that transaction. Better software and further audit requirements leave that structure untouched. The reform with any prospect of changing outcomes starts from the built stock rather than from the file, detects change on the ground, and carries the authority to act on what it finds without asking an elected municipal body first. Whether the proposal for a regulator of that kind moves past commentary is the thing to watch.

    Urban Governance in India

    1. Cities carry the economy: Cities house about 37 per cent of the population and generate close to 70 per cent of India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
    2. The urban share keeps rising: Urban India is projected to reach about 60 crore people, or 40 per cent of the population, by 2036.
    3. Authority is fragmented by design: Municipal functions are split across urban local bodies, development authorities and parastatal agencies, so no single body answers for a city.
    4. Cities raise almost nothing of their own: Urban local bodies raise under 0.6 per cent of GDP as own revenue, of which property tax accounts for about 0.15 per cent.

    Constitutional Framework Governing Urban Governance

    1. Part IXA, Articles 243P to 243ZG: Inserted by the Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act, 1992, it gives municipalities constitutional status and fixes their composition, duration and elections.
    2. Twelfth Schedule: Lists 18 functions a State may devolve to municipalities, including urban planning, regulation of land use and construction of buildings, and fire services.
    3. Article 243W: Empowers State legislatures to confer powers and responsibilities on municipalities as institutions of self government and for the Twelfth Schedule functions.
    4. Article 243Y: Requires the State Finance Commission to review municipal finances and recommend the sharing of State taxes with municipalities.

    Laws and Rules Governing Urban Development

    1. National Building Code of India, 2016: A model code issued by the Bureau of Indian Standards setting requirements for structural safety, fire and life safety and building services. States give it force through their own bye-laws.
    2. Model Building Bye-Laws, 2016: A template issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs for State and municipal bye-laws, covering sanction procedure, setbacks, parking and fire safety.
    3. Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016: Requires registration of projects and agents with a State regulatory authority, and fixes promoter liability for structural defects for five years from possession.
    4. Disaster Management Act, 2005: Provides the statutory basis for disaster management plans and for safety and retrofitting norms in hazard prone areas.

    Challenges in Urban Governance

    1. Devolution under the Seventy-fourth Amendment is incomplete: Many States have not transferred the listed functions or empowered mayors, so the body closest to a building is not the body that controls it. Eg. Urban planning and land use regulation sit with State owned development authorities in most large cities.
      The Fix: Complete activity mapping for the Twelfth Schedule functions and provide for directly elected mayors with a fixed tenure.
    2. Municipal finances cannot fund enforcement: Weak own revenue leaves cities without the technical staff to inspect, audit or prosecute. Eg. Successive Finance Commissions have tied municipal grants to property tax reform and audited municipal accounts.
      The Fix: Shift property tax to capital value with periodic revision, and make audited accounts a condition for central mission funds.
    3. Most urban land is not planned at all: Only about 30 per cent of urban land is properly planned, so the majority of growth happens outside any development control regime. Eg. Census towns cross the urban thresholds without having any urban local body.
      The Fix: Extend statutory planning coverage to census towns and peri urban areas before they are built out.
    4. Urban disaster risk is outrunning municipal capacity: Flooding, fire and heat concentrate on the least regulated built stock and on the poorest occupants. Eg. The Disaster Management (Amendment) Act, 2025 provides for Urban Disaster Management Authorities in large cities.
      The Fix: Make the city disaster authority the owner of building safety audits, with the power to seal non compliant structures.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2023, GS2, 10.0 marks] “The states in India seem reluctant to empower urban local bodies both functionally as well as financially.” Comment.”

  • Reclaiming universities through trust, student voice

    Why in the News

    The Supreme Court has stayed the Bar Council of India (BCI)’s order against the graduating batch of the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR), Hyderabad. The same intervention quashed all first information reports (FIRs) against the protesting students. It declared that the BCI has no disciplinary control over students. It also reduced the three year practice condition for writing the judicial services examination to one year. The order follows a protest by law students seeking a say in their own convocation, widely attributed to an oral remark by the Chief Justice of India that was quickly clarified. The contest is over whether campus unrest is a failure of student discipline or a failure of a governance model that leaves students out of the decisions binding them.

    What is academic freedom?

    1. The freedom to teach, research and question: Academic freedom is the entitlement of those engaged in scholarly teaching and research to decide what to study, what to teach and what to challenge, without direction from the government or the university administration.
    2. No express Indian guarantee: The Constitution of India does not mention academic freedom. Article 5(3) of the German Basic Law guarantees scientific freedom (Wissenschaftsfreiheit) as a right of everyone engaged in scholarly teaching and research.
    3. A recognised right elsewhere: The Constitutions of Japan, South Africa, Portugal and Spain contain a comparable freedom. Article 137 of the Basic Law of Hong Kong provides that educational institutions may retain autonomy and enjoy academic freedom.
    4. Its limit is conduct, not speech: The freedom carries no right to defame or to engage in anti-national activity. Where an academic activity involves conduct rather than speech, the state is entitled to regulate that conduct.

    Why is curriculum the sharp edge of the dispute?

    1. Curriculum is set without the people it binds: University curriculum should be decided by the stakeholders, including students. Eg. Delhi University dropped a paper on the Delhi Sultanate along with some other papers.
    2. Students read such changes as political: Curriculum changes of this kind are seen as having ideological reasons rather than academic ones, which turns an academic decision into a governance grievance.
    3. The direction of restraint runs both ways: Government is not to dictate to universities what to teach, how to teach and what not to teach. Universities owe the same freedom to their departments and faculties.
    4. The campus exists for the contested question: Universities are meant to be a special place for reflection, inquiry and discussion, which is the function a closed curriculum process removes.

    What do experiences abroad show about academic freedom under pressure?

    1. The United States has used funding as leverage: Federal funding has been weaponised to reshape campus culture. Diversity programmes have been dismantled and research funding in areas such as climate change has been reduced.
    2. Permitting protest has itself invited pressure: Universities have faced pressure for allowing student protests, including those over Gaza.
    3. Neither ideological side is exempt: Right wing and left wing regimes have both, at times, sought to control universities.
    4. The pattern is old: Arnold Toynbee resigned from King’s College London in 1924 over his writings on the Greek army’s atrocities. Professors were persecuted during the McCarthy era.
    5. Funders now shape the research agenda: Declining public funding has left research agendas increasingly influenced by funders, corporations and pharmaceutical companies.

    What is the control model of university governance?

    1. Authority sits in one office: Most universities remain Vice-Chancellor centric. Students, who are the reason universities exist, have little say in their governance.
    2. Grievances have no route upward: Vice-Chancellors rarely hold open houses and are often inaccessible to ordinary students. Unaddressed grievances leave students feeling ignored, and some then take extreme steps.
    3. Control substitutes for dialogue: Administrations adopted the control model as governments increasingly sought to control universities. A community of highly educated faculty and young people requires dialogue, trust and openness rather than surveillance.
    4. Knowledge creation needs the opposite conditions: Universities exist to innovate and create knowledge, which requires the freedom to question everything and challenge existing ideas.

    How does under-investment compound the control problem?

    1. The policy target has not been met: The National Education Policy 2020 promises public investment of 6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in education. Public investment has steadily declined and hovers around 4 to 4.1 per cent.
    2. Higher education gets the smallest share: Within that spending, higher education receives the smallest allocation, so the system is over-regulated and grossly underfunded at the same time.
    3. Autonomy is not alien to the system: The ancient Gurukul system was entirely autonomous, and the present arrangement regulates far more and funds far less.
    4. The shortfall is visible on campus: Public university infrastructure has deteriorated and hostels are in acute shortage, which produced the recent deaths in New Delhi. Faculty positions remain vacant and guest faculty are poorly paid.
    5. Teaching and examinations both fail the student: Poor teaching frustrates students. Repeated examination paper leaks add to their stress.

    What do Vice-Chancellor appointments reveal?

    1. Natural justice is overlooked: In one case a Vice-Chancellor changed the composition of the selection committee, chaired it and voted in the selection of his wife. She was appointed as Vice-Chancellor.
    2. The courts did not correct it: The judiciary declined to follow its own precedents of quashing such appointments.
    3. An adverse record is not a bar: Individuals with questionable records and adverse Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) reports have been appointed, and some State universities face allegations of bribery.
    4. Recruitment rewards leaning over merit: Faculty recruitment over-emphasises ideological leanings rather than merit. Ideological governments may prefer candidates with particular leanings, and merit should not be completely undermined on that account.
    5. Examination integrity follows appointment integrity: No examination system can be foolproof where paper setters, moderators or testing officials are appointed for reasons other than absolute merit and integrity.

    Who actually absorbs the blame for campus unrest?

    1. The anger travels past the administration: Student frustration erupts against the government rather than against university administrations. The government received the criticism for the actions of the Vice-Chancellor in the appointment case.
    2. Much of it is avoidable on campus: The backlash could largely be avoided where administrations engage students in meaningful dialogue and provide timely relief.
    3. The government is not a bystander either: Administrations adopted the control model because governments sought control of universities, so the incentive that produced the model is a governmental one.

    What does the liberty model change?

    1. Trust is the operative mechanism: The liberty model of governance was implemented across three universities over 16 years. Students who are trusted act more responsibly in turn.
    2. Access without gatekeeping: Students met the Vice-Chancellor without appointments and raised personal concerns and difficulties. That access made frank conversations possible when difficult or unpopular decisions had to be taken.
    3. Unpopular ideas are protected: The model treats the university as a space where even the most unpopular ideas can be freely debated, which is the opposite of the top-down model.
    4. Students sit inside the decisions: Students are given a meaningful role in academic, administrative and financial decisions, including faculty appointments, procurement, curriculum design and the drafting of university regulations.
    5. A statutory precedent already exists: Students at Aligarh Muslim University have a statutory role in selecting the Vice-Chancellor.

    Challenges to the liberty model of university governance

    1. Participation rights can be captured by party politics: Campus unions aligned to national parties can convert a participation right into a channel for external political control. Eg. Delhi University Students’ Union elections are contested by the student wings of national parties.
      The Fix: Tie student participation to reserved seats on academic and finance bodies with fixed terms, so it runs through statutory channels rather than street mobilisation.
    2. A Vice-Chancellor cannot devolve powers that are not his: Faculty appointments and university finances are governed by University Grants Commission (UGC) regulations and State legislation, so student participation in them rests on the incumbent’s discretion. Eg. The Vice-Chancellor is himself selected by the Chancellor or Visitor from a search committee panel.
      The Fix: Amend university statutes to create student membership on selection and finance committees, so participation has a legal basis rather than a personal one.
    3. The model lapses with the person who ran it: A governance style adopted by one Vice-Chancellor ends when that office changes hands, since nothing in the statute compels a successor to continue it. Eg. Open house access is an administrative practice and not a rule.
      The Fix: Write grievance redressal timelines and open house frequency into university ordinances so the practice survives a change of office.
    4. Trust cannot supply what money supplies: Dialogue does not create hostel seats, permanent faculty or laboratory funding, which are the material grounds of much campus unrest. Eg. Sanctioned faculty posts in central and State universities stay vacant regardless of the governance style adopted.
      The Fix: Link central grants to filled sanctioned posts and audited hostel capacity, so funding follows the deficits that generate protest.

    Conclusion

    The Supreme Court’s order settles who may discipline a law student. It does not settle who governs a campus. Curriculum decisions, convocation arrangements and appointments all turn on whether students hold any formal seat in university decision making, and at present they hold almost none. The measure worth watching is whether university statutes are amended to give students standing on academic and selection bodies, since a governance practice resting on the person in office leaves with that person.

    Higher Education in India

    1. Second largest system in the world: Total enrolment is estimated at 4.65 crore in 2026, up from 3.42 crore in 2014-15.
    2. Institutional spread: India hosts over 1,168 universities and 45,473 colleges, against 760 universities in 2014-15.
    3. Participation is short of the target: The Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education, meaning enrolment at that stage as a share of the population in the corresponding age group, stands at 28.4 per cent against the National Education Policy 2020 target of 50 per cent by 2035.
    4. Women now enrol marginally more than men: The Gender Parity Index stands at 1.01, indicating slightly higher female than male participation for the first time.

    Constitutional Framework Governing Higher Education

    1. Entry 25, List III: Education, including technical and medical education and universities, is a Concurrent List subject after the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976.
    2. Entry 66, List I: Coordination and determination of standards in institutions of higher education and research is reserved to the Union.
    3. Entry 63, List I: Banaras Hindu University, Aligarh Muslim University and Delhi University are institutions of national importance under Union competence, along with any other so declared by Parliament.
    4. Article 30(1): Religious and linguistic minorities have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.
    5. Article 19(1)(a): Free speech on campus is protected, subject only to the restrictions Article 19(2) itself permits.

    Laws and Rules Governing Higher Education

    1. University Grants Commission Act, 1956: Establishes the UGC to coordinate and determine standards in university education and to disburse grants to universities and colleges.
    2. All India Council for Technical Education Act, 1987: Creates the statutory regulator for technical education, covering planning, norms and approval of technical institutions.
    3. National Council for Teacher Education Act, 1993: Creates the regulator for teacher education programmes and the institutions that run them.
    4. Anusandhan National Research Foundation Act, 2023: Establishes the National Research Foundation to seed and fund research across higher educational institutions, including State universities.

    Government Initiatives for Higher Education

    1. National Education Policy 2020: Replaces the National Policy on Education, 1986, and is built on access, equity, quality, affordability and accountability.
    2. Academic Bank of Credits: A digital repository holding course credits, which enables multiple entry and exit within a degree programme.
    3. Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry (APAAR): A single student identifier linking academic records, skills and transfers in one portal.
    4. Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship: Doctoral fellowships for research scholars, expanded to award 10,000 new fellowships.

    Challenges in Higher Education Governance

    1. Fragmented regulatory structure: Multiple bodies issue overlapping and sometimes conflicting guidelines to the same institution, which delays academic decisions. Eg. A technical department inside a university answers to the All India Council for Technical Education and the UGC at the same time.
      The Fix: Consolidate approvals under a single higher education regulator with separate verticals for funding, standard setting and accreditation.
    2. Quality is unmeasured across much of the system: Over 30 per cent of Indian higher educational institutions remain unaccredited as of early 2026. Eg. Accreditation by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council is not a precondition for most colleges to award degrees.
      The Fix: Make one completed accreditation cycle a condition for degree granting status and for central grants.
    3. Research spending is stagnant: Research and development expenditure stands at 0.64 per cent of GDP, against about 2.4 per cent in China and 3.4 per cent in the United States. Eg. India contributes under 5 per cent of global research publications.
      The Fix: Route National Research Foundation funding towards State universities, which carry most enrolment and almost none of the research grant.
    4. Employability does not follow the degree: Curricula are not aligned to hiring requirements, so enrolment growth does not convert into work. Eg. Only about 4 per cent of higher education carries formal skill training.
      The Fix: Embed apprenticeship credits inside degree programmes under the National Credit Framework.

    Back2Basics: Bar Council of India

    1. A statutory body under the Advocates Act, 1961: It regulates the legal profession and legal education in India.
    2. Standard setting: It lays down standards of professional conduct and etiquette for advocates, and prescribes the conditions on which a law degree is recognised for enrolment.
    3. Composition: Its members are elected by the State Bar Councils, with the Attorney General of India and the Solicitor General of India as ex officio members.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2014, GS2, 12.5 marks] Should the premier institutes like IITs/IIMs be allowed to retain premier status, allowed more academic independence in designing courses and also decide mode/criteria of selection of students. Discuss in light of the growing challenges.”

  • Punjab stand on judge sets disturbing precedent

    Why in the News

    Justice Ashwani Kumar Mishra has taken oath as Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, with the front-row chair reserved for the Punjab Chief Minister left empty. A day earlier the State Cabinet had asked the Punjab Governor to hold off the oath-taking. Its stated ground was that the Centre notified the appointment without the State’s consent, in breach of the Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) that governs judicial appointments. The Supreme Court Collegium had recommended Justice Mishra and three other judges as chief justices of four High Courts on 6 August, and the Centre notified the appointment on 5 September. The contest is between a State’s right to be consulted on a High Court appointment and a consultative process that fixes no deadline for the State to answer.

    What is the Memorandum of Procedure?

    1. The rulebook for judicial appointments: The MoP sets out the sequence by which judges of the higher judiciary are recommended, consulted upon and appointed.
    2. It requires the States to be consulted: Before a High Court appointment is notified, the Centre must consult the State concerned.
    3. It fixes no time limit on the State: The document sets no deadline for a State to send its response.
    4. It is an executive document, not a statute: The MoP is settled between the Centre and the judiciary, and a revised version sought after the National Judicial Appointments Commission was struck down in 2015 remains unfinished.

    What is Punjab’s case?

    1. Consent was not obtained: The Cabinet’s position is that the Centre notified the appointment without the State’s concurrence, which it treats as a breach of the MoP.
    2. No deadline binds the State: Punjab is correct that the MoP prescribes no deadline for a State’s response, so a delayed reply violates nothing on the document’s own terms.
    3. The flexibility has a purpose: That absence of a deadline exists because judicial appointment is designed as a consultative process rather than a clearance queue.

    Why does the case not hold?

    1. Weeks were available and went unused: If the State government had reservations about Justice Mishra, it had weeks in which to put them on file, where they could have been examined on their merits.
    2. The silence blocked three other courts: The delay in Punjab’s response held up all four chief justice appointments recommended in the same Collegium resolution.
    3. The court had recently ruled against the State: As Acting Chief Justice, Justice Mishra’s bench pulled up Punjab in August for withholding dearness allowance dues and for finding ample money for advertising. His court also heard a Mohali case in which allegations were made against the Chief Minister’s wife, which the ruling party has described as politically motivated.

    Is this an isolated episode?

    1. The same move was attempted in Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party earlier sought to have Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma taken off the appeal in the excise policy case in which its leaders are arraigned as accused.
    2. The precedent this sets: Treating an adverse order as a personal affront converts a judicial outcome into a ground for obstructing an appointment, which is a template no political party should be able to rely on.

    What reform does the episode point to?

    1. Defined timelines belong in the MoP: The episode makes the case for writing fixed response periods into a document that currently has none.
    2. A benchmark already exists on the other side: The Supreme Court has set the Centre a benchmark of three to four weeks for clearing names reiterated by the Collegium.
    3. Deemed consent closes the gap: A comparable window for State responses, after which consent is treated as given, would remove the ambiguity this episode exposed.

    Conclusion

    Disagreement between the Centre and a State over an appointment is ordinary constitutional business, and nothing about it is improper. Withholding a reply is not disagreement; it is the absence of one, and it quietly converts a consultative step into a veto that no rule ever granted. A written objection with reasons can be examined and answered; silence can only be waited out. What remains unresolved is whether the duty to consult carries a corresponding duty to respond, and the present arrangement supplies no answer either way.

    Back2Basics: The Collegium

    1. What it is: The Collegium is the body of senior judges that recommends appointments and transfers in the higher judiciary. It finds no mention in the text of the Constitution.
    2. Its composition: For Supreme Court appointments it consists of the Chief Justice of India and the four seniormost judges of the Supreme Court.
    3. Where it came from: It emerged from the Second Judges Case (1993), which read “consultation” in Articles 124 and 217 as concurrence, and was expanded by the Third Judges Case (1998).
    4. Its binding force: The government may return a recommendation once, but a name reiterated by the Collegium is binding on it.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2025, GS2, 15.0 marks] Discuss the evolution of collegium system in India. Critically examine the advantages and disadvantages of the system on appointment of the Judges of the Supreme Court of India and that of the USA.”

  • [8th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: India can cut steel emissions before coal plants lock them in

    [8th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: India can cut steel emissions before coal plants lock them in

    Question (2025): “Write a review on India’s climate commitments under the Paris Agreement (2015) and mention how these have been further strengthened in COP26 (2021). In this direction, how has the first Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) intended by India been updated in 2022?
    Linkage: Since steelmaking alone accounts for roughly 12% of India’s national greenhouse gas emissions, the investment choices made during this relining cycle will decide whether India can successfully honor its updated NDCs and progress toward its long-term Net-Zero targets

    Mentor Comment

    Indian steelmakers are approaching a replacement cycle in which more than 43 million tonnes per annum of blast furnace capacity falls due for relining before 2030. Relining is a capital intensive overhaul carried out roughly every two decades that extends a plant’s working life by another 15 to 20 years. A study published in Nature Climate Change finds that avoiding new blast furnaces, declining to reline young ones, and redirecting that money to electric arc furnaces could almost halve globally committed steel emissions. India’s steelmaking emissions are about 32% above the global average and account for nearly 12% of national greenhouse gas emissions. The tension is that the decision is not a technology problem but a timing problem: the furnaces chosen in this cycle fix the sector’s emissions until the 2040s, well before any of the promised hydrogen supply exists.

    How is steel made, and where do the emissions come from?

    1. The blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace route: Coking coal is burned in a blast furnace to smelt iron ore and strip its oxygen, producing a carbon rich liquid iron. That liquid is then blown with pure oxygen in a basic oxygen furnace to burn off impurities and yield steel.
    2. Why that route is carbon intensive: Coal here is not only the heat source but the chemical agent that removes oxygen from the ore, so the carbon dioxide is produced by the chemistry itself and not merely by combustion.
    3. The scrap and electric arc furnace route: An electric arc furnace melts steel scrap using electricity, skipping the ore reduction step entirely. Its emissions intensity is less than half that of the coal route.
    4. The direct reduced iron route: Direct reduced iron (DRI) strips oxygen from ore using a gas rather than coal, and the resulting solid iron is then melted in an electric furnace. Run on natural gas it emits around 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne of steel, and run on green hydrogen it is close to zero.

    How large is India’s steel emissions problem?

    1. Intensity above the world: India’s steelmaking emissions are roughly 32% higher than the global average, meaning each tonne produced here carries more carbon than a tonne produced elsewhere.
    2. Share of national emissions: The sector accounts for nearly 12% of India’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
    3. Scale and growth: India produced around 160 million tonnes of crude steel in FY 2025-26, the second highest in the world after China. Demand is driven by infrastructure development, construction and automotive manufacturing.
    4. Scrap scarcity limits the easy route: A developing economy that has not yet accumulated a large stock of old steel cannot recycle its way to lower emissions, because there is little scrap to feed electric arc furnaces.

    What does the National Mission on Green Steel actually promise?

    1. The intensity target: The Mission aims to bring steelmaking emissions intensity down from the current 2.55 to 2.65 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) per tonne of crude steel to 2.2 tCO2e by 2029-30.
    2. The money behind it: A Rs 5,000 crore scheme to accelerate steel sector decarbonisation was announced last year and is set to launch in the coming months.
    3. The certification threshold: A certification scheme launched under the Mission in 2024 treats any steel made below 2.2 tCO2e as green, with the greenest band extending up to 1.6 tCO2e.
    4. The threshold sits above the world average: Global steelmaking averages around 1.85 tCO2e, so steel certified as India’s greenest can still be more carbon intensive than the world’s ordinary output.

    What does India’s furnace mix look like, and where is it headed?

    1. The current split: 43% of India’s crude steel comes from blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace plants, 22% from electric arc furnaces and 35% from electric induction furnaces, which use electromagnetic fields to process small batches of scrap or direct reduced iron.
    2. The projected drift: Blast furnace capacity is projected to rise to 56% of the mix by 2030 on the strength of planned new plants.
    3. The global picture: 70.4% of world steelmaking still uses the coal based route, with the remainder on electric arc furnaces.
    4. India’s mix is unusually heterogeneous: More than half of Indian output already comes from electricity based furnaces, which is a starting position most large producers do not have.

    Why does the relining decision lock in emissions for decades?

    1. Relining resets the clock: A blast furnace overhauled today keeps operating on coal for another 15 to 20 years, and more than 43 million tonnes per annum of capacity falls due for that overhaul before 2030.
    2. The plants are still on paper: The majority of new basic oxygen furnace plants planned in India have not broken ground, so switching them to direct reduced iron and electric arc furnace designs is a redirection of committed money rather than a fresh demand for capital.
    3. Sunk cost makes reversal politically hard: Once large sums are invested in a coal based asset, closing it early becomes a fight over stranded value rather than an engineering decision.
    4. The abatement is cheap only now: Emissions avoided at the investment stage cost far less than emissions removed later through bioenergy with carbon capture and storage or carbon dioxide removal technologies.

    What do the modelled transition pathways show?

    1. What was modelled: Two global steel sector pathways consistent with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, allowing an overshoot of up to 1.7 degrees Celsius.
    2. Who drives the outcome: China and India dominate the dynamics of the fast transition scenario, because their near term coal based investments far exceed those of every other region.
    3. The cost of moving slowly: In the slow transition scenario young blast furnaces are relined and announced plants are built as planned, which forces heavier reliance on carbon dioxide removal technologies that remain immature, plus deeper cuts in other sectors.
    4. The fuel sequence India would follow: The model has India running direct reduced iron and electric arc furnace plants mainly on natural gas until 2040 to 2045, switching to hydrogen once it becomes cost competitive.
    5. The reframing: Steel is described less as a hard to abate sector than as a sector facing a hard to abate investment barrier, since the technology already exists and only the green premium stands in the way.

    Is India’s certified green steel actually green?

    1. The brackets are wide: The certification bands are broad enough that steel qualifying as green can still be more carbon intensive than ordinary steel made elsewhere, which weakens the label as a signal.
    2. India defined the term first: No other country has set out a formal definition of green steel, so the taxonomy itself is an initiative rather than a copy.
    3. The demand side was never built: Certification creates a supply of labelled steel without creating any buyer obliged to prefer it, so the premium has no market to be recovered in.
    4. Uptake so far: ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India became the first integrated steel producer to receive green steel certification in February this year, and 89 steel units held the certification as of 31 March, covering 12.34 million tonnes of production.

    What is pushing steelmakers to move now?

    1. The export penalty: The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism came into effect in January, imposing steep penalties on carbon intensive imports including India’s high emission steel.
    2. The commercial response: India has been seeking alternative markets and boosting domestic consumption, while compliance obligations push producers to reconsider which furnace technology to invest in.
    3. Public money for hydrogen: The Union Ministry of New and Renewable Energy funded three pilot green hydrogen projects in March totalling more than Rs 400 crore, to validate the technical feasibility of using 100% green hydrogen in furnaces.
    4. The first commercial link: JSW Energy commissioned India’s largest commercial scale green hydrogen plant at Vijayanagar in Karnataka last year to supply 100% green hydrogen to the adjoining JSW Steel direct reduced iron unit.

    Challenges to steel decarbonisation in India

    1. The bridge fuel carries its own lock in: Natural gas based direct reduction substitutes an imported fuel for a domestic one, exposing the sector to supply shortages, price shocks and gas infrastructure that is stranded once hydrogen arrives. Eg. India imports roughly half its natural gas, and delivered prices swung sharply through the European supply crisis.
    2. The thermal power precedent: Once heavy capital sits in a coal asset, the owner resists closure in order to recover the investment, which is how India acquired thermal plants that are uneconomic yet politically impossible to retire. Eg. Several state generating stations continue running below viable plant load factors rather than shutting down.
    3. Electricity based steel is only as clean as the grid: An electric arc furnace shifts emissions from the furnace to the power station, so in a coal heavy grid the accounting gain outruns the physical one. Eg. Coal still supplies the majority of India’s generation, so an induction furnace running at night draws largely thermal power.
    4. Green hydrogen is not yet affordable at steel scale: Running a direct reduction plant on hydrogen today costs far more than running it on gas, and a steel plant needs hydrogen in volumes no pilot has demonstrated. Eg. Existing Indian projects supply a single adjoining unit rather than a cluster of plants.
    5. Iron ore quality constrains the switch: Direct reduction needs high grade iron ore or pellets, and much of India’s ore is not of that grade, so the route requires beneficiation capacity that does not yet exist. Eg. Indian producers rely on lower grade ore fines that suit blast furnaces but not shaft furnaces.

    Way Forward

    1. Make gas based DRI hydrogen ready: Design gas based direct reduction plants as hydrogen ready at the outset, so the shaft furnace does not need replacing at the point of switching.
    2. Plan for coal asset retirement: Attach a stated retirement date and a transition financing package to every new coal based approval, so the exit is priced when the asset is sanctioned.
    3. Link steel decarbonisation with clean electricity: Tie decarbonisation scheme support to a round the clock renewable supply contract for the plant rather than to the furnace type alone.
    4. Aggregate green hydrogen demand: Aggregate demand across neighbouring plants into a single hydrogen offtake contract, so an electrolyser project can be financed against assured volume.
    5. Build beneficiation and pelletisation capacity: Include ore beneficiation and pelletisation capacity within the decarbonisation scheme’s eligible expenditure, not only the furnace itself.

    Conclusion

    The steel sector’s emissions are being decided by a maintenance schedule rather than by a climate policy. Every furnace relined in this cycle removes a plant from the reachable set for two decades, and every plant still on paper can be redirected at no extra cost. The unresolved tension is that India has defined green steel and funded the technology without creating a single buyer obliged to pay for it, so the supply side moves while the demand side does not. The measurable thing to watch is how much of the 43 million tonnes per annum falling due before 2030 is relined rather than replaced.

    Back2Basics: Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism

    1. What it is: A levy charged by an importing jurisdiction on the greenhouse gases embedded in an imported good, set at the carbon price the importing jurisdiction’s own producers already pay.
    2. Why it exists: It is intended to prevent carbon leakage, meaning the shifting of production to countries with weaker climate rules rather than an actual reduction in emissions.
    3. What it covers: The European Union’s version applies to iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen, the goods with the highest embedded emissions per unit of trade value.
    4. How it is contested: Developing country exporters argue the levy shifts the cost of the importing country’s climate policy onto producers who bear no comparable historical responsibility.

  • India’s opportunity to put BRICS back together

    Why in the News

    The 18th BRICS Summit is to be held in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September 2026 under India’s chairship. The grouping now carries 11 members and 10 partner countries after an expansion India and Brazil both resisted. Its founding practice of adopting documents only by consensus has been bypassed more than once since 2020, most recently at the BRICS Foreign Ministers’ meeting held in New Delhi in May 2026. The contest is over what the group is for: a reform coalition of emerging economies working inside existing institutions, or a bloc defined by opposition to the West. The summit is the point at which the chair can push that choice one way or the other.

    What is BRICS?

    1. What it is: BRICS is a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, formed to give the emerging economies a greater voice in global governance and institutions, particularly financial and economic ones, and to work towards a more equitable multilateral order.
    2. How it works: It has no treaty and no binding decision procedure. It operates by consensus, and its output is a summit declaration adopted by all members.
    3. What it has built: Its principal institution is the New Development Bank, the multilateral development bank established by the members to lend for infrastructure and sustainable development.

    What did India originally want from BRICS?

    1. A vehicle for reform: India was an enthusiastic early participant, treating the group as a means of securing genuine reform of multilateral institutions.
    2. The first Indian-hosted summit: The fourth BRICS summit, held in India in 2012, took the theme “Global Stability, Security and Prosperity”, which tacitly reflected a much broader geopolitical canvas than economics alone.
    3. What the Indian presidency produced: It helped lead to the establishment of the New Development Bank. Other Indian initiatives followed, including the integration of a counter-terrorism architecture into the group’s work.
    4. The current chairship’s framing: This year’s theme rests on four pillars, Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability, and draws on the Prime Minister’s “Humanity First” vision and a “people-centric” approach to BRICS cooperation.

    How did China’s use of BRICS diverge from the reform agenda?

    1. A different purpose from the start: China saw the group as a counterpoise to Western domination, a view India also shared initially in the specific context of reform.
    2. Why China needed the platform: A group of emerging economies accounting for nearly 20 per cent of world GDP in 2010 could amplify Chinese global ambitions in a way China could not do alone.
    3. The outreach mechanisms carried the design: BRICS-Plus and BRICS Outreach were used to reach the Global South and consolidate its profile as a second pole in a future bipolar world.
    4. Reform support proved selective: China resisted supporting the bids of India, Brazil and South Africa for permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. India then shifted its own effort towards consolidation and intra-BRICS matters to resist Chinese grandstanding.

    What has happened to the consensus principle?

    1. Consensus is what held the group together: It is the practice that prevents a majority from binding the rest, and its erosion changes what membership is worth.
    2. The 2019 summit was the high point of restraint: The Brasilia summit was held with no invited guest countries at all, only the five original members.
    3. The first breach came in 2020: Under the Russian presidency a chair’s statement on COVID-19 was issued without consensus, probably the first such document in the group’s history.
    4. It has become routine: Non-consensus documents were resorted to again at the Foreign Ministers’ meeting in May 2026, because the new members could not agree.
    5. The failure model already exists: The danger is that BRICS goes the way of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), where a majority can bulldoze its view through.

    What has expansion done to the group’s cohesion?

    1. China pushed it and India resisted: China pressed first for expansion of the New Development Bank and then for expansion of BRICS itself. India and Brazil both resisted and were overruled.
    2. The size now: The group has 11 members following the addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia, along with 10 partner countries.
    3. The original five manage their differences: Some of those differences are serious, and the five handle them with the maturity that keeping the group intact requires.
    4. The new members do not: They carry their bilateral conflicts into the group and are subverting it through them.
    5. The regional precedent: The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is the case of a grouping paralysed by the bilateral disputes of its own members.

    Is BRICS non-West or anti-West?

    1. India’s line is “non-West”: India has worked to keep the group non-West against pressure from some members to turn it explicitly anti-West.
    2. Events push the other way: China is competing with the United States for global leadership, Russia is at war with Ukraine with the full backing of Europe, and Iran is being bombarded by the United States and Israel.
    3. Two members are under direct pressure: Brazil and India have both been subjected to punitive tariffs by the U.S. President, and the U.S. Congress is considering legislation empowering the President to levy punitive tariffs on countries importing Russian oil.
    4. India’s other options are weakening at the same time: The Quad is being emasculated by the United States, India-U.S. relations are under great pressure, Pakistan is being courted by the United States at India’s expense, and global institutions are being made dysfunctional by the West.
    5. The restraint has support inside the group: Many members share India’s effort to prevent an anti-Western drift, since they gain from engaging actors in different camps in their own national interest. They want change without geopolitical realignment behind China and Russia.

    Why is de-dollarisation not moving as China wants?

    1. The parallel currency proposal has stalled: The push for de-dollarisation through the establishment of a BRICS currency is receiving a lukewarm response.
    2. The reason is who would dominate it: Members are uncomfortable with a currency dominated by the renminbi.
    3. What they will accept instead: The preference is for interlinking payment systems, central bank digital currencies and transactions settled in national currencies.
    4. China is proceeding on its own track: After a successful pilot, it is formally launching mBridge, an alternative cross-border financial payment system.
    5. What India is guarding against: An alternative Bretton Woods system dominated by China is the outcome India least wants.

    What parallel orders are being built outside BRICS?

    1. Both major powers are writing their own rules: The United States and China are enunciating parallel visions of the world and playing by rules of their own rather than internationally negotiated ones.
    2. The contested areas are new ones: Parallel structures and standards are being set in artificial intelligence, digital and Internet governance, data ownership, state control, 5G and 6G telecom, satellite navigation and electric vehicles.
    3. China has added an institution: It has set up a World AI Cooperation Organisation in Shanghai.
    4. The financial architecture already has a rival: The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative and the Digital Silk Road challenge the Bretton Woods institutions and their governance and financing models.
    5. Neither power wants reform: Both are building around the existing institutions rather than seeking to change them, and both see BRICS as one vehicle for those broader goals.

    What is “reformed multilateralism” and why does India want it back?

    1. Where it came from: The Prime Minister first articulated the vision of “reformed multilateralism” at the leaders’ retreat of the 2018 BRICS Summit in South Africa.
    2. How it became group language: By 2019 it had found its way into the summit document at Brasilia, with India, Brazil and South Africa pushing for it.
    3. What it commits the group to: Changing the governance of existing institutions rather than replacing them, which is the opposite of building parallel structures.
    4. Why it matters now: Reviving it makes BRICS a strong voice for the non-West middle powers and, by extension, for the Global South.

    Can BRICS be an organisation of Global South middle powers?

    1. A Global South middle power is a different thing: The middle powers described at Davos by the Canadian Prime Minister are broadly West-centric, and a Global South middle power does not share that anchoring.
    2. BRICS is the only credible platform: If there is a credible organisation of Global South middle powers, it is BRICS.
    3. Its largest member does not fit the description: China is hardly a middle power and holds disproportionate influence within the group.
    4. The India-China relationship is the constraint: The two need greater synergy on emerging global issues even as their bilateral differences are being contained.
    5. The composition is incomplete: Some middle powers that ought to be in the group are not represented in it, which limits what it can claim to speak for.

    Challenges to BRICS

    1. De-dollarisation is rhetorical rather than operational: The share of world trade actually settled outside the dollar has barely moved despite a decade of declarations. Eg. The US dollar is still used in over 80 per cent of global trade settlement.
      The Fix: Set a measurable target for local-currency settlement of intra-group trade and report performance against it at each summit.
    2. Intra-group trade is thin: Members trade far more with the G7 than with each other, so the group’s combined economic weight does not convert into bargaining leverage. Eg. Most members still rely on G7 markets for high-technology imports and services exports.
      The Fix: Negotiate a tariff-preference arrangement covering a limited list of goods, rather than a full trade agreement the membership cannot agree on.
    3. There is no permanent secretariat or charter: Work does not carry between summits, so each chair restarts the agenda and commitments lapse without anyone recording that they have. Eg. The New Development Bank remains the only permanent institution the group has built since its first summit.
      The Fix: Create a small standing secretariat with the single mandate of tracking summit commitments and reporting compliance.
    4. Sanctions constrain the group’s own bank: Western sanctions on Russia limit the New Development Bank’s ability to lend for certain projects, which weakens the alternative it was built to be. Eg. The bank put new transactions in Russia on hold in 2022.
      The Fix: Raise the share of local-currency lending and widen the capital base to more Global South members, so exposure to one jurisdiction’s sanctions falls.
    5. The political systems diverge too far for common positions on norms: The membership spans established democracies and autocracies, so joint declarations cannot carry commitments on rights or governance standards. Eg. Group declarations avoid the language on domestic governance that G7 communiqués routinely carry.
      The Fix: Confine collective positions to the areas where interests genuinely converge, namely institutional reform, development finance and technology standards.

    Conclusion

    BRICS is now being asked to do two jobs that pull against each other. One is to press for reform of institutions that its largest member has no interest in reforming. The other is to hold an enlarged membership carrying live bilateral quarrels inside a body that can only decide unanimously. The Delhi outcome will indicate which job the group has chosen. The specific marker is whether the summit closes on a declaration adopted by every member or on a chair’s statement issued over the heads of some.

    Global South Plurilateral Groupings in India’s Foreign Policy

    1. About: A plurilateral grouping is a small, issue-focused coalition of states that operates outside a formal treaty organisation. Its instruments are summit declarations and working groups rather than binding law.
    2. Why India uses them: They allow India to pursue different interests with different partners at the same time, which is what multi-alignment means in operation.
    3. The spread in practice: India sits in BRICS and the SCO alongside Russia and China, and in the Quad and the I2U2 grouping alongside the United States, without either set of memberships cancelling the other.
    4. What they are measured by: Their output is agenda-setting and coalition building, not enforceable commitment, so their value lies in shifting what larger institutions are willing to discuss.

    Key Facts about BRICS and Global South Groupings

    1. The name: The acronym BRIC was coined in 2001 by a Goldman Sachs economist to group high-growth emerging economies. The first Foreign Ministers’ meeting was held on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in 2006.
    2. The first summit: The first leaders’ summit was held at Yekaterinburg in Russia in 2009, and South Africa joined in 2011 to make the grouping BRICS.
    3. Current weight: The enlarged grouping accounts for over 45 per cent of the world’s population, about 3.6 billion people, and roughly 37 per cent of global GDP measured at purchasing power parity, ahead of the G7 share.
    4. Energy: It controls roughly 42 per cent of global oil production and exports.
    5. New Development Bank: Headquartered at Shanghai, it has approved over $35 billion in infrastructure lending since it began operations.
    6. Contingent Reserve Arrangement: A $100 billion pool providing short-term liquidity support to members facing balance of payments pressure.
    7. Other Global South platforms: IBSA, the India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum, was formed in 2003. The G-77 was formed at the United Nations in 1964 with 77 founding members and now carries over 130.

    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.”

  • What flu surge can teach us about next pandemic

    Why in the News

    Different parts of India have reported 2 to 10 times more influenza cases this year than last year. The official position is that the circulating strain has not changed, and public advisories ask people to remain vigilant without becoming alarmed. That instruction states no action a reader can take. The detection layer built after Covid-19 is working, and the layer that must convert a detection into a decision is not. A surge of this size is the period in which that gap can be closed, since a pandemic is the worst time to learn.

    Pillars of outbreak management

    1. Surveillance: The ability to detect an outbreak early and to initiate action on that detection. For influenza it also covers genomic surveillance to identify the strain or variant behind the rise, which is what allows its virulence and the population’s susceptibility to be gauged.
    2. Prevention: Issuing advisories to high-risk individuals to avoid crowded places, promoting mask use, and vaccinating high-risk individuals and health workers.
    3. Control: Ensuring that those already infected receive proper medical care.

    What does the current surge actually show?

    1. The size of the rise: Reported influenza cases across different parts of the country are 2 to 10 times last year’s level.
    2. Hospital positivity has risen: Among patients admitted with severe acute respiratory infection (an acute respiratory illness severe enough to require hospitalisation), the positivity rate in selected hospitals was 16 per cent this year against 12 per cent last year.
    3. An unchanged strain is not by itself the answer: A well-established virus does not warrant serious concern on virological grounds alone. The scale of transmission still decides how many avoidable deaths occur.

    Why does surveillance not convert into action?

    1. No alert threshold is defined: A rise in influenza positivity past a defined threshold should trigger an alert. No such thresholds exist.
    2. The data is not public: There is no publicly available dashboard on which positivity trends can be seen, so no one outside the system can tell when a threshold would have been crossed.
    3. Responsibility is split three ways: Laboratory surveillance sits with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), response coordination with the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), and implementation with State health systems.
    4. No one holds authority to act on the signal: No integrated command structure exists with clear authority to coordinate and implement a response during a disease upsurge. This was the specific lesson Covid-19 offered and it was not learnt.

    Where is the line between an appropriate response and one that causes panic?

    1. The stated fear is panic: Governments hesitate to issue advisories on the ground that a public warning will itself cause alarm.
    2. The line is genuinely thin: Governments across the world struggle to place it, and the WHO has itself been accused of overreacting.
    3. The asymmetry decides it: Where the primary concern is to save lives, overreaction is the better error of the two.
    4. The current position sits on the wrong side: The response is too cautious and too bureaucratic for the scale of the surge.
    5. This is a professional capability, not a temperament: Situations of this kind require trained risk communication and named experts speaking, rather than a general advisory.

    Why does influenza vaccine use stay low even among high-risk groups?

    1. Poorly perceived threat: Influenza is treated as an ordinary seasonal illness, so the risk it carries for the elderly and the immunocompromised is discounted.
    2. Non-affordability: The vaccine is largely an out-of-pocket purchase for those outside institutional programmes.
    3. Doubtful effectiveness: Protection varies by season and by strain match, which weakens the case a physician can make for it.
    4. The annual injection requirement: Immunity does not carry over, so the decision has to be taken and paid for again every year.

    What should the response to this surge prioritise?

    1. Preventing avoidable deaths: At the current scale the objective is not to stop transmission but to keep high-risk people out of severe illness.
    2. A specific advisory rather than a general one: The advisory should tell high-risk people to avoid crowded places and to wear masks, in those terms.
    3. Immunising high-risk groups during the surge: The case for routine immunisation is debatable and the case during a major seasonal surge is not. Skipping it leaves the system unpractised for the next pandemic.
    4. Low antiviral use needs examination: Antiviral use stays low even in peak influenza season, which calls for a relook at the influenza management guidelines.
    5. The private sector has to be inside the response: Private providers and professional bodies deliver most outpatient care and cannot be reached through public system instructions alone.

    Challenges to India’s outbreak surveillance and response system

    1. Influenza carries no statutory duty to notify: Reporting rests on administrative instruction rather than legal obligation, so private-sector cases stay outside the national count. Eg. Most States have no public health Act listing notifiable conditions, and the Kerala Public Health Act, 2023 is among the few that do.
      The Fix: Enact a public health law fixing the list of notifiable conditions and placing the reporting duty on private providers as well as public ones.
    2. Vaccine composition is set for the wrong season: Supply follows the Northern Hemisphere formulation while influenza in much of India peaks with the monsoon. Eg. The WHO issues separate Northern and Southern Hemisphere composition recommendations each year.
      The Fix: Procure the Southern Hemisphere formulation for monsoon-peak States and fix the public procurement calendar to that cycle.
    3. Surveillance is an additional charge, not a post: District surveillance duties are given to serving clinical or programme officers on top of their own work, so analysis is done last. Eg. Rural Community Health Centres run at about an 80 per cent shortfall of specialists, which is the pool such officers are drawn from.
      The Fix: Create a separate public health cadre with dedicated district epidemiologist posts filled on their own recruitment line.
    4. Antiviral supply is not pre-positioned: Oseltamivir was moved from Schedule X to Schedule H1 in 2017, and the prescription-record duty that follows keeps retail stocking low outside declared alerts. Eg. Shortages appear at the retail counter in the same weeks that hospital positivity rises.
      The Fix: Stock antivirals at district hospitals ahead of the seasonal peak rather than relying on retail availability during the surge.
    5. Sequencing capacity is concentrated in a few laboratories: Sequencing volumes are set by laboratory capacity rather than by case load, so variant detection lags the epidemic curve. Eg. Sequencing effort fell sharply between Covid-19 waves and had to be rebuilt each time activity rose.
      The Fix: Fix a minimum sequencing share of positive samples per State per week as a standing requirement rather than an outbreak-time instruction.

    Conclusion

    An outbreak response is judged by the interval between a signal and a decision. India has built the layer that produces the signal and has not built the layer that must act on it, which is a governance problem rather than a scientific one. The next seasonal peak will test the same gap. The markers to watch before it arrives are whether a numeric alert threshold has been fixed and whether positivity data is published where the public can see it.

    Outbreak Surveillance and Pandemic Preparedness in India

    1. About: Disease surveillance is the continuous collection and analysis of health data to detect unusual disease activity early enough to act on it. Preparedness is the standing capacity to respond once that detection is made.
    2. The zoonotic load: Over 60 per cent of emerging infectious diseases in India are zoonotic, so animal and human surveillance cannot be run separately. Eg. Nipah virus, avian influenza, rabies and brucellosis.
    3. The triple burden: India faces infectious disease, rising non-communicable disease and emerging zoonotic threats at the same time.
    4. The standing weakness: Surveillance remains event-based rather than predictive, with communicable disease, non-communicable disease and animal health data held in separate vertical silos.

    Government Initiatives for Outbreak Surveillance and Pandemic Preparedness

    1. Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme: Collects district-level disease data and has been upgraded to carry animal health indicators for integrated surveillance.
    2. National One Health Mission: A cross-ministerial effort involving 13 departments to coordinate pandemic preparedness across human, animal and environmental health.
    3. National Institute for One Health, Nagpur: The anchor institution for research, training and policy integration on zoonotic disease.
    4. National Joint Outbreak Response Team: A multi-disciplinary team of human, animal and wildlife experts constituted for rapid outbreak investigation.
    5. BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratory network: A national grid of high-security biosafety laboratories, with a new BSL-4 facility in Gujarat foundation-laid in January 2026.
    6. One Health Governance Framework: Released in December 2025 as a roadmap for States and Union Territories to set up State One Health Cells.

    Matching Previous Year Question

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

  • Draft SIR list shows anomalies, absurdities. Independent audit is needed

    Why in the News

    An analysis of the Election Commission of India’s draft rolls finds that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has removed 13.37 crore names at the draft stage. The revision began as a pilot in Bihar, where 65 lakh names were deleted, and has since run across the country in three phases. Deletion rates have risen with each phase rather than falling. India’s electorate stood at about 98 crore at the 2024 Lok Sabha election, against an adult voting-age population of about 99 crore. The electorate is projected to fall to about 88 crore against a projected adult population of 103 crore. Either the population projection or the electoral roll is badly wrong.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?

    1. A house-to-house verification: The Special Intensive Revision is a time-bound enumeration in which Booth Level Officers visit each household and verify every existing entry on the roll.
    2. Different from the annual revision: The routine summary revision only processes claims and objections that voters themselves file. The intensive revision re-verifies the entire roll on the ground.
    3. The sequence: Enumeration produces a draft roll. Claims and objections against that draft are then decided before a final roll is published.

    What do the national numbers show?

    1. The expected final figure: Publication of a draft roll is usually followed by more additions than deletions. Final deletions are estimated at over 11.5 crore once the remaining States are counted in.
    2. What is still outstanding: Draft rolls have not been released for Nagaland and Tripura. The revision has not begun in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.
    3. The scale against the early warning: An early projection that a nationwide revision could delete up to 10 crore names was dismissed when it was made. The draft-stage figure has already passed it.

    What explains the gap between the electorate and the adult population?

    1. Only two readings are available: Either the official population projection is far too high, at under 125 crore rather than the projected figure above 145 crore. Or close to 15 crore voting-age Indians are absent from the roll.
    2. Correct deletions do not settle it: The pre-revision roll carried accumulated errors and spurious names, so a majority of the deletions may well be correct. A wrongful share of even one third still leaves an unacceptable number of voters removed.
    3. Under-enfranchisement is the other half: Eligible voters who never appeared on the pre-revision roll, those struck off before the revision started, and young voters who should have been added during it are all outside the count. The revision was not designed to find any of them.

    How have the three phases differed?

    1. Phase one, Bihar: Deletions of 65 lakh amounted to a fall of under 8 per cent in the elector-to-population ratio (the electorate expressed as a share of the adult population). Judicial scrutiny brought the final figure down to 45 lakh.
    2. Phase two, 13 States: Deletions reached nearly 13 per cent of the roll, totalling 6.5 crore. Public attention concentrated on the targeted removal of Muslim voters in West Bengal.
    3. Phase three, the rest of the country: Deletions in the draft rolls crossed 17 per cent, totalling 6.1 crore. The phase followed a Supreme Court order that left the Commission free to proceed.
    4. The direction of travel: Each phase recorded a higher deletion rate than the phase before it, and each attracted less scrutiny than the phase before it.

    Which States account for the largest deletions?

    1. Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra lead: Uttar Pradesh recorded 2.9 crore deletions and Maharashtra 2.1 crore.
    2. The next tier: Karnataka recorded 1.08 crore, Tamil Nadu 97.4 lakh, Gujarat 73.7 lakh and West Bengal 58.2 lakh.
    3. Mid-sized States: Delhi recorded 47.6 lakh, Andhra Pradesh 44.9 lakh, Jharkhand 43.6 lakh, Madhya Pradesh 42.7 lakh, Rajasthan 41.9 lakh and Haryana 33.9 lakh.
    4. Smaller totals: Chhattisgarh recorded 27.1 lakh, Kerala 24.1 lakh, Punjab 20.7 lakh, Odisha 20.1 lakh and Uttarakhand 8.3 lakh.
    5. Where the rate is abnormal: Haryana, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana and Delhi recorded deletion rates well above the pattern for their phase.
    6. What the table excludes: Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya and the Union Territories are left out because population projections are unavailable for them. The projections used are drawn from the Report of the Technical Group on Population Projections of July 2020.

    Why are the deletion categories the core of the problem?

    1. Deaths are a small and stable share: Voters marked “dead” held steady at around 3 per cent of total deletions across all three phases.
    2. The two large categories are undefined: Most deletions were recorded as “absent” or “shifted”. Neither term has been defined so far, and local electoral officials have applied both at their own discretion.
    3. A further fifth is flagged rather than resolved: About one-fifth of the remaining electors face further scrutiny as “unmapped” or under “logical discrepancy”. No standard operating procedure states how such a flag is to be decided.
    4. The flag clusters oddly: Odisha, Jharkhand and Telangana show unusually high shares of “logical discrepancy”. A uniform software check applied across States would not produce that distribution.

    What happens to a voter deleted before the revision starts?

    1. No enumeration form is ever issued: A voter removed before the revision formally begins never receives an enumeration form. That removal is not counted as a revision deletion at all.
    2. The scale of pre-revision removals: Over 14 lakh such deletions took place between 12 May, when the third phase schedule was announced, and the day that phase formally began. Over 8 lakh of them were in Maharashtra.
    3. Delhi is the clearest case: Delhi lost more than 11 lakh voters before the revision was launched, counting from its assembly election in February the previous year. Its roll then fell from 1.56 crore to 98 lakh after the draft was published.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. The burden of proof sits on the voter: The exercise requires an elector to establish entitlement rather than requiring the state to establish ineligibility. Eg. Electors in Bihar were asked to produce legacy documents such as a parent’s entry in an earlier intensive revision roll.
      The Fix: Place the burden on the electoral registration officer to record a written ground and serve notice before any name is struck off.
    2. Field officers carry unworkable targets: Verifying every household within a few weeks exceeds the staff assigned to the task. Eg. Deaths and suicides among Booth Level Officers were reported during the West Bengal phase.
      The Fix: Fix a maximum number of households per officer and extend the enumeration window instead of compressing verification into the deletion window.
    3. Grievance redress runs slower than the roll: Claims and objections are decided after the deadline that freezes the roll for an approaching election. Eg. Only a fraction of the claims filed in West Bengal were disposed of before the roll was frozen.
      The Fix: Bar publication of a final roll until every claim against the draft carries a written and appealable order.
    4. Deletion data is not published in usable form: Rolls are released as image files, so any independent count of deletions has to be reconstructed by hand. Eg. The national deletion total here had to be assembled State by State from separately published draft rolls.
      The Fix: Publish booth-level deletion lists carrying the recorded ground for each name, in a downloadable machine-readable format.

    Conclusion

    The revision was justified as a clean-up and is producing a shrinking electorate. A roll that removes names far faster than it adds them cannot be defended as an accuracy exercise, and the Commission cannot certify its own accuracy. What is contested is not whether errors existed on the old roll but whether their correction followed any stated rule. An audit by a body outside the Commission is the only thing that would settle that, and nothing in the current process provides for one.

    Constitutional Framework Governing Electoral Roll Revision

    1. Article 324: Vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of elections in the Election Commission of India.
    2. Article 325: Mandates one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency and bars exclusion from it on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.
    3. Article 326: Provides for universal adult suffrage, with the voting age lowered to 18 by the Sixty-first Amendment.
    4. Article 327: Empowers Parliament to legislate on all matters relating to elections, including the preparation of electoral rolls.
    5. Article 329: Bars courts from questioning an electoral law or a completed election except through an election petition.

    Laws and Rules Governing Electoral Roll Revision

    1. Representation of the People Act, 1950: Provides for the allocation of seats and for the preparation and revision of electoral rolls.
    2. Section 19: Sets the conditions for registration, being 18 years of age and ordinarily resident in the constituency.
    3. Section 21: Authorises the Commission to order a special revision of a roll at any time, for reasons recorded in writing.
    4. Section 16: Lists the disqualifications for registration, including non-citizenship and unsoundness of mind.
    5. Section 31: Penalises a false declaration made in connection with the preparation or revision of a roll.
    6. Registration of Electors Rules, 1960: Lay down the procedure for house-to-house enumeration, publication of the draft roll, and disposal of claims and objections.
    7. Representation of the People Act, 1951: Governs the conduct of elections and confines a challenge to a completed election to an election petition before the High Court.

    Government Initiatives for Electoral Roll Management

    1. ECINET: A single digital interface launched in 2026 that consolidates more than 40 separate Commission applications used by voters and officials.
    2. National Voters’ Services Portal: Allows a voter to register, correct and verify roll details online without visiting a registration centre.
    3. Electors Photo Identity Card delivery standard: A revised operating procedure requires an updated identity card to reach the elector within 15 days of an update.
    4. Common electoral roll proposal: A single roll for parliamentary, assembly and local body elections, intended to end the parallel rolls maintained separately by State Election Commissions.

    Key Facts about Electoral Roll Revision

    1. National Voters’ Day: Observed on 25 January each year, marking the founding of the Election Commission in 1950.
    2. Frequency of intensive revision: An intensive revision of this kind has been carried out about 14 times, with earlier rounds in 1983, 1995, 2002 and 2004.
    3. The first rolls: The first intensive revisions ran between 1952 and 1956 to build the country’s first reliable voter database.
    4. Qualifying dates: Since the 2021 amendment to the election laws, a person turning 18 may register with reference to any of four qualifying dates in a year, 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October.

    Way Forward

    1. Link the roll to the civil registration system: Automatic removal of deceased electors through the death register would take the largest legitimate deletion category out of field discretion entirely.
    2. Permanent electoral tribunals: A standing tribunal for roll disputes would replace the temporary appellate arrangements assembled around each revision.
    3. Geo-tagged field verification: Recording each house visit with a location and time stamp would make a claimed visit checkable after the fact.

    Matching Previous Year Question

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