Mains Ready By December. Smash Mains & Smash PYQ Admissions Open
Talk to Mentor

Civilsdaily

Type: Op-ed

  • Growth holds up for now. Inflation clouds outlook

    Why in the News

    Global agencies have raised their full year growth estimates for India to about 7 per cent. The upgrades follow the first quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) estimates. Those estimates recorded stronger economic momentum than expected. The same agencies expect that momentum to fade in the second half of the fiscal year. They also project average inflation of 5.1 per cent and a higher policy rate. The growth upgrade therefore arrives with the case for tighter money attached to it.

    Why have the growth forecasts been raised?

    1. Asian Development Bank: The bank now pegs growth at 7 per cent for the year. Its earlier forecast was 6.6 per cent.
    2. S&P Global: The agency forecasts the economy to grow at 7 per cent.
    3. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): The OECD has raised its projection from 6.3 per cent to 7.1 per cent.
    4. Moody’s: The agency had earlier raised its growth forecast for the year to 7 per cent, up from 6 per cent.

    What is carrying growth in the first half?

    1. Conflict in West Asia: Concerns persist over economic activity being affected by the conflict in West Asia. Growth has held up through those concerns.
    2. Industrial production: The Index of Industrial Production (IIP), a volume measure of output in mining, manufacturing and electricity, grew at 6.3 per cent during April to July. Manufacturing grew at 7 per cent.
    3. Central capital spending: Capital expenditure by the Centre has surged by almost 30 per cent during April to July this year.
    4. Merchandise exports: Goods exports grew at 17.8 per cent during April to August. A weak currency aided that growth.

    Why is the second half expected to be weaker?

    1. Fading tax tailwinds: S&P Global expects growth to ease in the second half of the fiscal year as the tailwinds from sales tax rationalisation and income tax cuts diminish.
    2. Momentum into 2027: The OECD expects momentum to weaken before a gradual recovery takes place in 2027.
    3. Farm sector risk: The farm sector has emerged as a key area of risk. The Asian Development Bank states that an El Nino worse than expected could reduce agricultural output and raise food inflation across the wider region.

    What do the same forecasts imply for monetary policy?

    1. Price pressures: Price pressures are building up in the economy. Expectations of higher interest rates have gained traction.
    2. Inflation path and the policy rate: S&P Global expects inflation to average 5.1 per cent. It expects the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to raise its policy rate by 25 basis points in the current fiscal year.
    3. A temporary rise in rates: The OECD projects India to raise policy rates temporarily to offset stronger inflationary pressures.
    4. The next decision point: The central bank’s monetary policy committee meets in a few weeks. The growth and inflation dynamics tilt the scales towards tighter policy.

    Conclusion

    Growth readings and price readings are now pointing in opposite directions. The upgrades rest on a first half that the forecasters themselves do not expect to repeat. What remains unsettled is whether output can hold its pace once borrowing costs rise and a poor farm season arrives together. The next monetary policy review is the first place that question gets tested.

    Back2Basics: India’s Inflation Targeting Framework

    1. The target: The government has retained a Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation target of 4 per cent for the period April 2026 to March 2031.
    2. Legal basis: Section 45ZA of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 requires the target to be reset every five years.
    3. Who sets the rate: A six member monetary policy committee sets the repo rate. The combined Consumer Price Index published by the National Statistical Office is the target measure.
    4. Accountability: A breach of the 2 to 6 per cent tolerance band for three consecutive quarters obliges the RBI to report to the government.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2019, GS3, 10 marks] Do you agree with the view that steady GDP growth and low inflation have left the Indian economy in good shape? Give reasons in support of your arguments.”

  • Should permanent membership, veto powers of the UNSC be abolished?

    Should permanent membership, veto powers of the UNSC be abolished?

    Why in the News

    A proposal at the current session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) would have the use of the veto in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) “regulated” in humanitarian crises and in cases of genocide. It presents the veto as a matter of “responsibility” rather than of “privilege”. The proposal revives the French Mexican initiative of 2015, under which permanent members would voluntarily refrain from using the veto in mass atrocity situations. That initiative itself grew out of a 2013 proposal for a code of good conduct, made after Chinese and Russian vetoes blocked any Security Council resolution on the Syrian civil war. The contested point is that voluntary restraint leaves the veto itself untouched, so the privilege survives the reform meant to discipline it.

    What is the French Mexican initiative on veto restraint?

    1. The commitment: First launched in 2015, the initiative has permanent members voluntarily refrain from using the veto in situations involving genocide, crimes against humanity and large scale war crimes.
    2. Legal character: It is not an attempt to abolish the veto or to amend the United Nations Charter. It is an exercise in self restraint by the P5, the five permanent members of the Security Council: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and Russia.
    3. Support base: France and Mexico have announced that 128 states now support the declaration, with 21 joining in the last four months. The United Kingdom has joined France in accepting the principle, so two of the five permanent members have now committed to this form of restraint.

    Which three questions does the veto debate conflate?

    1. Use of the veto: Whether a permanent member casts a veto at all in a given situation.
    2. Accountability for the veto: Whether a permanent member must explain and defend a veto it has already cast.
    3. Reform of the Security Council: Whether the Council’s size, its membership categories and its decision rules should change.
    4. What the current proposal reaches: The initiative addresses only the first of the three. Its claim is that even where the veto remains, there must be circumstances of exceptional human suffering in which a permanent member agrees not to exercise it.

    Why did the Syrian deadlock produce the first restraint proposal?

    1. Paralysis in 2013: Chinese and Russian vetoes made it impossible for the Security Council to pass any resolution condemning Syria during the civil war there.
    2. The Ghouta trigger: A chemical weapons attack at Ghouta in August 2013 was followed in September by the then President of France proposing a “code of good conduct” for the Council.
    3. Design intent: That was the first proposition that the permanent members could voluntarily restrain veto use in cases of genocide, crimes against humanity or larger war crimes. The attempt was to skirt amending the United Nations Charter and still make the Council more contemporaneous.

    What other mechanisms exist short of Charter amendment?

    1. Liechtenstein initiative, adopted by the UNGA in 2022: It does not prevent a permanent member exercising the veto. Whenever a veto is cast the General Assembly is convened within 10 working days to debate the issue, so the member concerned must explain and defend its action on the Assembly floor.
    2. Accountability, Coherence and Transparency code of conduct: The Accountability, Coherence and Transparency (ACT) Initiative reaches beyond the permanent members. It asks all members of the Security Council, including the non permanent members, not to vote against credible action designed to prevent or halt genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
    3. Nature of their force: The strength of both instruments is moral and political rather than legally coercive.

    Why will the permanent members not go beyond voluntary restraint?

    1. Charter amendment requirement: Formal abolition of the veto would require an amendment of the United Nations Charter and the consent of the very permanent members whose privilege is being removed.
    2. Relative weight inside the P5: The United Kingdom and France are not the heavyweights among the permanent members, so a principled position on regulating the power costs them least.
    3. Stated purpose of regulation: Better management of how the power is used is presented as the way to keep the Council from being paralysed and to let it act.
    4. No permanent member proposes elimination: None of the five is talking of eliminating the veto power it holds. There are multiple versions among them of how the Council should be reformed.
    5. Five overlapping approaches, not a binary: The debate is not simply retain or abolish. It runs across abolition, extension of the veto to new permanent members in the name of equality, voluntary restraint in mass atrocity cases, political accountability after a veto is cast, and broader structural reform of the Council itself.
    6. Why the pragmatic route is preferred: The current proposal seeks to change the political behaviour of the five without rewriting the Charter, which makes it reformist rather than revolutionary.
    7. Accountability as the achievable discipline: Requiring a permanent member to justify a veto on the Assembly floor would not prevent action where real national self interest is at stake. It would make that member more cautious, since it would know it must account for the decision.

    Can sovereign equality survive the way power is actually distributed?

    1. The stated ideal: The world is held to be one of sovereign equality among states.
    2. The survival constraint: Because of the way power is distributed, no international organisation can survive, let alone become effective, if it takes a decision against the fundamental interests of a major power.
    3. The veto’s textual status: The word veto is not mentioned in the United Nations Charter. It was created through a separate mechanism.
    4. Word against spirit: Every United Nations member brings its own interpretation of each conflict to the Assembly and to the Council, which leaves a standing gap between the words of international law regimes and their spirit.

    Challenges to voluntary veto restraint

    1. A political commitment binds no one: A declaration of restraint carries no legal obligation, so a member can endorse it and still cast a veto. Eg. Russia vetoed the renewal of the Security Council panel of experts monitoring sanctions on North Korea in March 2024.
      The Fix: Require a permanent member that vetoes inside the declared categories to file a written justification recorded in the Council’s official proceedings.
    2. Classification of an atrocity is unsettled: Restraint applies only to named categories of atrocity, and the Council itself decides whether a situation falls inside them. Eg. Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya was taken to the International Court of Justice by The Gambia in 2019 rather than characterised by the Council.
      The Fix: Route the classification question to a standing determination by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, so the trigger does not rest with the body being restrained.
    3. The Assembly’s response carries no enforcement: Debating a veto in the General Assembly produces a recommendation and nothing that binds. Eg. Emergency Special Session resolutions on Ukraine from 2022 onward carried large majorities and no enforcement power.
      The Fix: Pair each post veto debate with a named follow up instrument, such as a commission of inquiry with a reporting deadline.
    4. Expansion without restraint multiplies the block: Extending the veto to new permanent members in the name of equality would raise the number of states able to stop the Council acting. Eg. The Group of Four, India, Brazil, Germany and Japan, seeks permanent seats, and the Uniting for Consensus group opposes new permanent seats altogether.
      The Fix: Settle the veto question before the membership question, so an enlarged Council does not inherit a larger number of vetoes.

    Conclusion

    The question has moved from whether the veto should exist to whether its use can be disciplined without touching the Charter. Restraint pledges and post veto debates change the political cost of blocking action, and they leave the legal power exactly where the Charter placed it. The unreconciled point is that the only route to abolition runs through the consent of the states whose privilege would be abolished. The marker to watch is whether a permanent member that has endorsed the restraint declaration casts a veto inside the declared categories, since that is the test the pledge has not yet faced.

    About Reform of the United Nations Security Council

    1. About: Reform of the Security Council covers changes to its size, to its categories of membership and to the veto, so that a body designed at the founding of the United Nations reflects the present distribution of states and power.
    2. Composition: The Council has 15 members. Five are permanent and hold the veto, and ten are non permanent, elected by the General Assembly for two year terms without a veto.
    3. The amendment route: Article 108 of the United Nations Charter requires an amendment to be adopted by two thirds of the General Assembly and then ratified by two thirds of the members, including all five permanent members.
    4. The record of change: The Council’s size has been changed once, from 1965, when the non permanent seats were raised from six to ten. Talks on further change have run in the Assembly’s Intergovernmental Negotiations process since 2009.

    Government Initiatives

    1. Group of Four: India coordinates with Brazil, Germany and Japan on a joint claim to permanent seats, with each supporting the others’ candidature.
    2. L.69 group: India works with this grouping of developing countries from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, together with small island developing states, which presses for expansion in both membership categories.
    3. Text based negotiations: India has pressed for the Intergovernmental Negotiations to work from a single consolidated negotiating text rather than from open ended discussion.
    4. Non permanent membership: India has served eight terms as a non permanent member, most recently in 2021 and 2022, chairing the Council’s Taliban sanctions and counter terrorism committees during that term.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2015, GS2, 12 marks] Discuss the impediments India is facing in its pursuit of a permanent seat in UN Security Council.”

  • [25th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: The murky world of political party finance

    [25th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: The murky world of political party finance

    Question (2025, GS2 – 10 Marks): Discuss the ‘corrupt practices’ for the purpose of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. Analyze whether the increase in the assets of the legislators and/or their associates, disproportionate to their known sources of income, would constitute ‘undue influence’ and consequently a corrupt practice.
    Linkage: A sudden 223% surge in the declared income of unrecognised political parties—many of which do not contest elections—raises grave concerns about financial opacity, money laundering, and misuse of tax-exempt conduits. This question examines how disproportionate financial growth intersects with corrupt practices under the Representation of the People Act (RPA), 1951.

    Mentor Comment

    An investigation has revealed extraordinary donations received by six Registered Unrecognised Political Parties (RUPPs), which hold registration with the Election Commission of India (ECI) but have earned no electoral recognition. The disclosure follows a report of 18 July 2025 by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) finding a 223 per cent rise in the declared income of RUPPs in the 2022 to 2023 financial year. Political parties hold no independent place in the Constitution, yet they receive donations and carry a standing income tax exemption on them. The ECI is the sole custodian under the law of the fate and fortunes of political parties, and it can neither deregister a party nor audit its accounts as a matter of routine. The contested point is whether that regulatory authority is genuinely absent or simply unused.

    What is the legal status of a political party in India?

    1. Constitutional position: The Constitution does not mention political parties, except in the Tenth Schedule. They carry no independent constitutional standing.
    2. Legal character: Parties exist as “associations” in furtherance of the fundamental rights under Article 19. No attempt has been made to make them conform to the legal character of a company, trust, society, firm or not for profit company.
    3. Tax treatment: Parties enjoy income tax exemption on an unparalleled scale. The treatment of a registered party’s income is governed by Section 13A of the Income Tax Act, 1961.
    4. Consequence of the gap: A body with no fixed legal form and a standing tax exemption receives money without the reporting obligations attached to any of the forms it declines to take.

    What does the registration and recognition framework regulate?

    1. Registration format: ECI guidelines prescribe the format for registration under Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. Paragraph 3(xxiii) requires a party seeking registration to declare in its constitution that it will contest elections within five years of registration.
    2. The non contesting condition: The same paragraph provides that a party which does not contest elections continuously for six years shall be automatically taken off the list of recognised parties.
    3. Recognition: Order 6 of the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968 distinguishes recognised from unrecognised parties for the purpose of allotting symbols, and lays down the criteria for classification.
    4. The withdrawal power: Order 16A of the same Order empowers the ECI to suspend or withdraw the recognition of a recognised party for failing to observe the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) or the Commission’s lawful directions.

    Why has that framework produced no enforcement?

    1. A warning issued in 1994: An order of 16 October 1994 under the Election Symbols Order recorded the “adhocism” and the “sorry state of affairs prevailing in almost all political parties in the country”, whether recognised national or State parties or registered unrecognised parties.
    2. No party following its own rules: The same order recorded that the Commission had yet to come across any party whose affairs were run in accordance with the provisions of its own constitution or rules.
    3. A notice with no sequel: The order put all parties on “notice” to set their house in order and declared that the ECI would not remain a “mute spectator”. The Order 16A power it created has since sat in the statute book unused.
    4. Compliance by submission: Submitting accounts is enough to comply with the letter of the law. The ECI lacks the mandate, intent or wherewithal to question accounts that are mechanically submitted.
    5. The Right to Information order left unenforced: Parties united in resisting the 2013 order of the Central Information Commission (CIC) bringing them under the Right to Information Act, 2005. Neither the ECI nor the Supreme Court has shown any inclination to enforce that order.
    6. Tax and enforcement agencies looking elsewhere: The Income Tax Department and the Enforcement Directorate do not treat scrutiny of party accounts as a priority in the way they treat ordinary taxpayers.

    Why does delisting leave the money flowing?

    1. Delisting is not deregistration: Taking a party off the list does not remove it from the register. The ECI is not generally empowered to deregister political parties.
    2. What the ECI has actually done: A press note of 9 August 2025, “Cleaning up the Electoral System”, recorded that the ECI had delisted 334 RUPPs out of 2,854 as part of a continuous strategy to clean up the electoral system.
    3. Contributions continue regardless: Whether delisted or unrecognised, a party remains eligible to receive contributions under Section 29B of the Representation of the People Act, 1951.
    4. The unanswered tax question: Whether donations to delisted parties continued to qualify for tax exemption is a matter for investigation, since the intent behind delisting was to disqualify them.
    5. Disclosure is largely absent: Of 2,764 RUPPs, only 739 submitted their financial records for the year to the ECI.

    What is the scale of political wealth the accounts reveal?

    1. Funds at the 2024 general election: 22 political parties collectively held Rs 18,742.31 crore at their disposal for the 2024 general election. That included funds already in their kitty when the election was announced.
    2. Donations during the campaign: Rs 7,416.31 crore was raised in donations between the announcement of the election and its completion.
    3. What was spent and what was kept: These parties incurred Rs 3,861.57 crore in election related expenditure during the campaign period. They retained Rs 14,848.46 crore afterwards as cash in hand, bank balances and fixed deposits.
    4. Declared donations over a decade: Declared donations rose from Rs 714 crore across 43 parties in 2015 to 2016, to Rs 7,203 crore across 27 parties in 2023 to 2024.
    5. The revenue cost: The exchequer lost Rs 11,813 crore in taxes over the last decade through exemptions for political donations.
    6. Who claims the exemption: Individual donors and Hindu Undivided Families have overtaken corporates in donating to political parties. In the 2022 to 2023 financial year individual donors claimed exemptions worth Rs 2,275.85 crore, against corporate claims of Rs 514.4 crore and Rs 115.71 crore from firms and associations.
    7. Donations claimed without relief: Only 41.76 per cent of total donations, Rs 8,287 crore over nine years, were claimed as tax exempt. The incentive driving the remaining share to donate without claiming relief is not visible in any disclosure.

    What did the electoral bonds scheme leave unresolved?

    1. The scheme and its end: Electoral bonds were introduced in 2018 and declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2024.
    2. Disclosure without answers: The donation details disclosed after the judgment raised questions that remain unanswered.
    3. RUPPs were outside the scheme: Electoral bonds were restricted to parties that had secured at least 1 per cent of the votes in the latest Lok Sabha or State Legislative Assembly elections, so most RUPPs were never eligible to receive them.
    4. The question that follows: Donations now traced to six ineligible RUPPs therefore arrived through some other route, and neither the donors nor their purpose sits on any public record.

    Challenges to the regulation of political party finance

    1. Party registration used as a laundering route: Registering a party creates a vehicle that can receive money and claim exemption without ever contesting an election. Eg. Registered political parties now exceed 2,800, and setting one up has been used to legitimise unaccounted money and evade tax.
      The Fix: Establish an automatic procedure to deregister any RUPP that does not contest elections in accordance with the Commission’s guidelines.
    2. No power to deregister: The Commission cannot remove a party from its register as a matter of routine, so the only available sanction is a delisting that changes nothing about the money. Eg. A 2002 Supreme Court judgment holds that the ECI cannot review its own registration orders, leaving deregistration to a court direction on grounds of fraud or constitutional violation.
      The Fix: Give the Commission a statutory power to deregister, exercised on a recorded finding and subject to appeal.
    3. Accounts that nobody audits: Party accounts are submitted rather than examined, so the figures in them are never tested against an independent record. Eg. Article 324 was described by the Supreme Court in Kanhiya Lal Omar vs R.K. Trivedi and Others as a “reservoir of authority” for the ECI, and that authority has not been turned on party accounts.
      The Fix: Order political parties to have their accounts audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) or its nominee, using the Article 324 power.
    4. No ceiling on party expenditure: Candidate spending is capped but party spending is not, so expenditure simply moves from the candidate’s account to the party’s. Eg. The ECI has recommended a limit on party expenditure during elections repeatedly and has not imposed one.
      The Fix: Impose a limit on party expenditure during elections and confine tax exemption on donations to that prescribed limit, taxing every donation above it in full.
    5. Electoral bond disclosures left unexamined: The donation records released after the scheme was struck down have not been tested against the decisions those donations preceded. Eg. Petitions alleging quid pro quo in the electoral bonds saga remain pending before the Supreme Court.
      The Fix: Order a court monitored probe into the electoral bonds saga and into RUPPs that receive and spend large contributions without participating substantially in elections.
    6. Financial data in no common format: Each party files in its own format, so no comparison across parties or across years is possible from the filings themselves. Eg. A party spending crores as “administrative expenses” discloses nothing that can be set against another party’s filing.
      The Fix: Develop a centralised digital portal on which every registered party uploads its financial data in standardised formats.

    Conclusion

    Regulation of political money in India fails at the point of legal form rather than at the point of disclosure. A body that is neither a company, a trust nor a society owes none of the accounts that any of those forms would owe, and a disclosure rule written for an entity with no fixed form cannot be made to bite. The authority to close that gap already sits with the Commission and with the Court, which is why the question is one of will rather than of power. The marker to watch is whether the pending electoral bonds petitions produce a monitored investigation, or another set of disclosures with no examination attached.

    Political Finance Regulation in India

    1. The party hierarchy: Parties move from unregistered, to registered unrecognised, to recognised State party, to recognised national party. Each step upward is earned by electoral performance.
    2. The disclosure threshold: Section 29C of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 requires every party to disclose all donations above Rs 20,000 annually to the ECI.
    3. Income from unnamed sources: Over 60 per cent of party income often comes from sources the party is not required to name.
    4. The candidate expenditure ceiling: The official expenditure limit for a Lok Sabha seat is Rs 95 lakh, raised from Rs 25,000 in 1951 to 1952.

  • Don’t make learning a test of worth

    Why in the News

    A student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has taken his life, and the circumstances of the death are under investigation. Accounts of what happened are sharply polarised, so establishing the immediate cause will not answer the larger questions the death raises. Over the last decade the IITs have recorded more than 170 deaths by suicide, a large number of them by students from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. A Supreme Court appointed task force on student suicides already has an interim report on the table. The contested point is whether such deaths are individual mental health events or the outcome of how these institutions treat the students they admit.

    Why does admission not deliver equality on campus?

    1. Society reproduced on campus: Prestigious institutions are not immune to the strains, power structures, hierarchies and discriminatory practices of society at large. Selectivity does not filter any of those out.
    2. The pressure to excel becomes outsized: Students arrive from very different social backgrounds into a system where the pressure to excel acquires outsized importance. Admission does not by itself guarantee equality for a student from a marginalised community.
    3. The additional burden: The burden is greater where a student must also negotiate subtle prejudice. A persistent sense of not quite belonging sits on top of the ordinary academic load.

    What did the Supreme Court appointed task force find?

    1. The panel and the report: A task force on student suicides appointed by the Supreme Court and chaired by a retired Supreme Court judge issued an interim report in June. Its findings are about the institutions rather than about the students.
    2. Complaint mechanisms do not work: Students often see institutional complaint mechanisms as difficult to access, ineffective, or operating in tokenistic ways. A mechanism that goes unused produces no record of the problem it exists to capture.
    3. Under reporting by the students most affected: For students from marginalised communities the fear of not being believed, or of retaliation, makes them hesitant to report discrimination at all. An absence of complaints is therefore not evidence that discrimination is absent.

    Why is the mental health framing insufficient?

    1. Counselling and wellness provision: More counsellors, helplines, wellness centres and greater awareness of distress are all necessary. None of them examines the conditions that produced the distress.
    2. The institution’s absence from the account: Individualising suicidal tendencies as personal difficulty, or as a student’s failure to cope, removes the institution from the account. It is then never required to ask difficult questions of itself.

    Why does faculty composition matter beyond representation?

    1. The social mismatch: The panel described a social mismatch between the backgrounds of a large number of students and those of their teachers. Access to higher education has grown more diverse and faculty composition has not followed.
    2. The measured gap: More than 65 per cent of faculty in IITs, National Institutes of Technology (NIT) and private institutions are from communities other than the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes (OBC).
    3. Understanding from within: A more diverse faculty helps a campus understand social difference from within. Support then rests on institutional culture rather than on the good intentions of individual teachers.

    What does making academic performance the measure of worth cost?

    1. The promise of social mobility: In a country with a large aspirational class, the promise of social mobility is an important part of pursuing a degree. Education cannot be separated from career ambition.
    2. The purpose of an institution of learning: At the heart of academic life sits the process of gaining knowledge rather than grades, degrees and the job market alone. The purpose of an institution is to intertwine the two.
    3. The cost of an unrelenting measure: A student thinking constantly about grades, rankings, deadlines, evaluations and the consequences of falling behind has little room to follow an idea. The pleasure of learning is displaced by the accounting of it.
    4. Artificial intelligence as a shortcut: The ease with which artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a shortcut to learning makes the question unavoidable. An institution has to state whether it rewards the acquisition of knowledge or the ability to produce the right answer under pressure.

    What would an institution that examined itself have to change?

    1. The question the system has not answered: Institutions have not examined whether all students have the same space to enjoy friendships, freedom and intellectual discovery. Those are part of what higher education promises and they are not evenly distributed.
    2. The variable an institution actually controls: Elite institutions cannot insulate students from the vagaries of the economy. They can decide whether those uncertainties are amplified on campus, or whether education supplies the intellectual confidence to confront them.

    Conclusion

    The difficulty is not that the cause of each death is unknown. It is that both routes by which a student could raise a grievance, the complaint mechanism and the teacher, have been found wanting by an inquiry the institutions did not themselves commission. The unresolved question is whether an institution will accept an external finding against itself, since nothing in the present response obliges it to. The marker to watch is whether the task force’s final report attaches a named accountability route to the grievance mechanism, or repeats the recommendation to strengthen counselling.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS1, 15 marks] Despite comprehensive policies for equity and social justice, underprivileged sections are not yet getting the full benefits of affirmative action envisaged by the Constitution. Comment.”

  • Policing the line between publicity and justice

    Why in the News

    A public interest litigation before the Supreme Court of India seeking a nationwide media protocol for police media briefings has forced a question Indian policing has quietly avoided: under what law are photographs of accused persons published, should they be published, and where should that stop. Within minutes of an arrest a handcuffed face, flanked by policemen and sometimes garlanded with placards cataloguing the crime, circulates on social media, often before the accused is produced before a magistrate. The practice rests on a patchwork of regulations written before Independence, an identification statute and the general architecture of criminal procedure. The contested point is whether a practice carried forward as police habit can bear the constitutional weight of publishing an untried person’s identity.

    What is the legal basis cited for publishing an accused person’s photograph?

    1. Court proclamation of absconders: Section 84 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023, which replaced Section 82 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, allows courts to proclaim absconders and publish proclamations in newspapers.
    2. General powers of the investigating officer: Publication at the investigation stage rests on the investigating officer’s general powers. Every person must assist the police in preventing and investigating offences, and an investigating officer may examine anyone with relevant information.
    3. The Hue and Cry Notice: Publishing photographs on social media to solicit identification, trace absconders or find witnesses is a digital extension of the “Hue and Cry Notice” carried in State Police Manuals.
    4. Reward announcements: Rewards are typically governed by State Police Regulations framed under the Police Act, 1861, which vest sanctioning authority in a hierarchy running from the Station House Officer (SHO) to the State government.

    Why does the investigative case for publication remain strong?

    1. Crimes solved: Photographs of wanted persons and reward notices have solved crimes and brought fugitives to book years after trails went cold.
    2. Missing children recovered: The same notices have helped recover missing children.
    3. Public capacity the force lacks: An alerted public has done what a thinly stretched police force acting alone could not.
    4. Why a ban is the wrong answer: An outright ban on soliciting public assistance would be legally unwarranted and self defeating. The defect is the absence of a legal basis, not the presence of the practice.

    Where does the patchwork fail to authorise what police actually do?

    1. No enabling or prohibiting statute: No single statute permits or prohibits police from publishing photographs of accused persons.
    2. Section 84 comes too late: The proclamation process under Section 84 is triggered only after a warrant fails. It provides no basis for publicity at the investigation stage.
    3. Photographs by practice, not provision: Section 84 says nothing about photographs. Attaching one has become settled practice because it serves the purpose of securing the person’s appearance.
    4. A vocabulary from before Independence, stretched: The State Police Manual provisions predate Independence, and their language, “description of the subject”, is broad enough only to plausibly cover photographs and rewards.
    5. The Identification Act does not reach publication: The Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022 governs the taking, storage and use of measurements including photographs for identification. It says nothing about circulating them, and is often wrongly cited as enabling publication.
    6. Rewards rest on discretion, not adjudication: A reward requires no prior warrant or proclamation. It is an exercise of administrative discretion rather than a judicial precondition.

    What constitutional limits does Article 21 impose?

    1. Article 21 jurisprudence has sharpened: The protection under Article 21 has been read more strictly over time, not more loosely.
    2. Presumption of innocence: The presumption of innocence remains central to criminal justice, and a published photograph presents guilt as settled before any charge is framed.
    3. Irreversible harm: Courts increasingly recognise that broadcasting an arrested person’s face as a fait accompli of guilt can cause real and irreversible harm. The Rajasthan High Court termed such practices “institutional humiliation”.
    4. Permanence of digital circulation: Digital circulation is permanent, searchable and indifferent to a later acquittal.
    5. Categories already barred: A juvenile in conflict with the law cannot be identified except in the child’s best interest and with the permission of the Juvenile Justice Board. A sexual assault survivor’s identity is protected by law.
    6. The category left open: The unresolved case is the ordinary adult who is accused and arrested, but not yet tried.

    What distinguishes investigative necessity from publicity?

    1. The two ends of the scale: At one end publication serves legitimate investigative necessity, covering crime prevention, public order and law and order purposes. At the other end it showcases police achievements.
    2. What showcasing costs: Photographs released merely to showcase arrests serve police optics at the accused’s expense. They can prejudice public opinion before trial.
    3. The operative test: The question before any photograph is released is whether the disclosure is necessary to the investigation, or merely convenient to the narrative.

    Can publicity be permitted without conceding the presumption of innocence?

    1. United States: American law treats “wanted” notices as public record exceptions to privacy law. Agencies are trained to frame them carefully, using “alleged” and “wanted for questioning”, so the presumption of innocence survives the appeal for help.
    2. United Kingdom: British policing takes the more conservative route and withholds the identities of arrested persons altogether.
    3. What the two demonstrate: Both systems place the safeguard in a rule rather than in individual discretion. One regulates the wording of the notice and the other removes the category from publication, and neither leaves the decision to the officer making the arrest.

    Challenges to a national police media protocol

    1. Two drafts and no protocol: A manual has been drafted twice and adopted nowhere, so practice continues under the older regulations. Eg. The Bureau of Police Research and Development shared a draft manual on media briefings with the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in July 2024, and in January 2026 the Supreme Court directed the States to evolve policies within three months on a manual prepared by the amicus.
      The Fix: Codify a single uniform national protocol rather than leaving each State to evolve its own policy from the same draft.
    2. Disclosure without a proportionality test: Without a stated test, a release that is necessary and a release that is convenient look identical on the file. Eg. A photograph published to solicit identification and one published to announce an arrest are both issued under the same general powers of the investigating officer.
      The Fix: Require the protocol to distinguish proportionate, need based disclosure from prejudicial publicity, and to record the ground before release.
    3. Blackout categories resting on separate statutes: The absolute bars protect only juveniles and sexual offence complainants, and each sits in its own law rather than in a police instruction. Eg. Identification of a juvenile in conflict with the law requires the Juvenile Justice Board’s permission, a step that has no counterpart for any other category.
      The Fix: Write the blackout categories into the protocol itself, so the bar reaches the officer rather than only the court.
    4. No takedown once the purpose ends: A photograph published for an investigative purpose stays online after that purpose is served, and after a discharge or an acquittal. Eg. A search against an acquitted person’s name still returns the arrest material that was circulated.
      The Fix: Require time bound review and takedown once the investigative purpose is served, or the accused is discharged or acquitted.
    5. Variation from State to State: Each State frames its own police regulations, so the same act is permitted in one State and not in another. Eg. Reward sanctioning authority under State Police Regulations runs from the Station House Officer up to the State government, and that hierarchy differs by State.
      The Fix: Apply the protocol uniformly across States, so the rule does not change with the place of arrest.

    Conclusion

    Publication of an accused person’s face is one of the few police powers in India with no statute behind it and no bar against it. The decision therefore rests where it should not, with the officer whose case the publicity also serves, and the harm falls on a person the law still treats as innocent. Two drafts of a protocol now exist and neither governs anything. The marker to watch is whether the States file the policies the Supreme Court directed, and whether those policies carry a necessity test and a takedown obligation rather than a restatement of existing practice.

    Back2Basics: Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023

    1. What it replaced: The BNSS is one of three central criminal laws that came into force on 1 July 2024, replacing the colonial era framework entirely. It replaces the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973.
    2. Trial timelines: The BNSS mandates judgment within 45 days of the completion of arguments. Trials must commence within 60 days of the first hearing.
    3. Zero First Information Report codified: The BNSS codifies the Zero First Information Report (FIR) in Section 173, so an FIR must be registered even where the offence occurred outside that station’s jurisdiction.
    4. Custody limits: Total detention without a chargesheet is 60 days for an offence punishable with less than 10 years, and 90 days where the punishment is death, life or 10 years or more. Crossing that limit makes default bail an indefeasible right.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2017, GS2, 15 marks] Examine the scope of Fundamental Rights in the light of the latest judgement of the Supreme Court on Right to Privacy.”

  • Rethink or abandon SIR. Revelations about ECI take lid off electoral upheaval

    Why in the News

    Two Election Commissioners formally recorded written objections at least 14 times over 10 months against decisions taken by the Chief Election Commissioner. The objections red flagged unilateral and “unauthorised” changes to new voter registration forms. They also opposed mass voter deletions under the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. The SIR was presented as a routine technical cleanup of the rolls maintained by the Election Commission of India (ECI). It has instead grown into a verification exercise that places the burden of proving eligibility on long standing voters. The contested point is whether an exercise its own multi member commission did not settle unanimously can still be defended as neutral administration.

    What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?

    1. Nature of the exercise: A Special Intensive Revision is a time bound house to house verification of every entry on an electoral roll. It replaces routine updating with fresh enumeration forms for all voters.
    2. What it verifies: Booth Level Officers (BLOs) verify documents at the door, delete entries found ineligible and add omitted voters. Citizenship credentials are checked as part of that verification.
    3. The mapping baseline: Entries in the current roll are mapped against an earlier roll treated as the baseline. The third phase uses the 2002 electoral rolls for that comparison.

    How large is the contraction the third phase has produced?

    1. Delhi’s affected share: More than half of Delhi’s existing voters, 54.6 per cent, have either been struck off the roll or served notices asking them to prove they are genuine. Over 80 lakh of the Capital’s 1.45 crore registered voters are under ECI scrutiny.
    2. Deletion categories: About 47.5 lakh voters have been marked for deletion under the categories of Absent, Shifted, Dead or Duplicate.
    3. Technical flags: A further 33.13 lakh have been flagged for operational and technical errors. That figure includes 19.33 lakh marked for “logical discrepancies” and 13.80 lakh left unmapped against the 2002 rolls.
    4. Notice volume: Over 31.6 lakh notices had been generated by mid September.
    5. Spread across States: Electoral rolls are shrinking by over 15 per cent across 17 of the 19 States and Union Territories in the third phase of the SIR.
    6. National projection: Overall deletions could remove 12 to 13 crore voters nationwide. Maharashtra alone is expected to lose up to 2 crore voters.
    7. Steepest contractions: Delhi’s roll is shrinking by 35.89 per cent and Chandigarh’s by 31.84 per cent.

    Why does the ECI’s own data cut against a technical cleanup?

    1. Deletions before the SIR: Between January 2025 and June 2026, before the SIR was launched, 1.1 million Delhi voters were dropped from the rolls with no explanation offered.
    2. Departure from the addition trend: Around 4,00,000 voters were added between the 2020 Assembly and 2024 Lok Sabha polls. A similar number joined between the 2024 general election and the 2025 State polls.
    3. Population moving the other way: India’s adult population has expanded from 99 crore in 2024 to an estimated 103 crore today. A roll that contracts while the adult population grows inverts the expected direction.
    4. Projected electorate: Analysts project that the national electorate could contract to 88 crore, disenfranchising up to 15 crore citizens.
    5. Rolls smaller than turnout: In Delhi, 24 of 70 Assembly constituencies now count fewer registered electors than the number of voters who actually cast ballots in the 2025 Assembly elections.
    6. A single booth: In polling booth 33 of the Chandni Chowk constituency, 908 of 909 voters were marked for deletion.

    Does the non discriminatory defence survive the notice list?

    1. Who the list caught: The notice list flagged the Delhi Chief Minister and her predecessor, the External Affairs Minister, a serving Election Commissioner and a serving Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Former holders of the offices of Vice President, Chief Justice, Army Chief and Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) were flagged as well.
    2. The ECI’s reading: The ECI cites this spread as proof that the process is not discriminatory.
    3. Why the spread proves little: Ministers, judges and senior officials hold the institutional access and resources to get a technical flag corrected quickly. The same flag pushes an ordinary citizen into an administrative process with no comparable route out.

    Where do the flagged “logical discrepancies” actually originate?

    1. Errors inside the ECI’s own databases: Many flagged discrepancies originate in the ECI’s internal records rather than in anything a voter did. A coding error converted a father’s recorded age of 45 to zero, and a clerk’s misspelling of a name created an artificial “logical discrepancy”.
    2. The 2002 baseline carries its own errors: A former Chief Election Commissioner has criticised treating the 2002 roll as an unassailable baseline for voter mapping, noting that even his own father’s name was misspelt in the 2002 data.
    3. Software deletions with welfare consequences: In Goa the ECI’s software eliminated large numbers of legitimate voters and cut them off from benefits ranging from dialysis to transplants, for which only voters are eligible.
    4. The West Bengal error rate: In West Bengal 27 lakh voters were flagged for tribunal review over alleged “logical discrepancies”. Of 82,000 cases adjudicated, Right to Information (RTI) disclosures showed 91 per cent had been wrongly deleted and had to be restored.
    5. What the error rate implies: Nine wrong deletions in every ten adjudicated cases put the reliability of the flagging algorithm itself in question.

    Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

    1. Quasi judicial power delegated to field enumerators: Booth Level Officers are effectively tasked with verifying the citizenship credentials of long standing voters, a determination they have no training to make. Eg. In Uttar Pradesh field verification by Booth Level Officers was reported to be cursory, with forms collected in bulk and without individual verification.
      The Fix: Route every citizenship doubt to the Electoral Registration Officer with a written order and a reasoned finding, so the determination sits with a designated officer rather than a field enumerator.
    2. Compressed timelines before major polls: The SIR was scheduled for compressed execution immediately before major elections in Bihar, West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, leaving voters too little time to appeal and rectify. Eg. The ECI has offered no rationale for forcing millions of voters into documentation checks just weeks before they are due to vote.
      The Fix: Fix a minimum gap between the publication of a final roll and the notification of a poll, so an appeal can be heard before the election it affects.
    3. Deletion without individual notice: Unreliable software combined with field discretion converts routine documentation checks into arbitrary purges. Eg. In West Bengal the requirement of individual notice before deletion under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 was alleged to have been violated.
      The Fix: Publish the flagging parameters and require a signed individual notice stating the ground before any name is removed.
    4. Legality settled while fairness is not: The Supreme Court has upheld the legality of the SIR, so the exercise continues while its fairness is contested outside court. Eg. A former Election Commissioner and a former Chief Election Commissioner have both openly questioned the exercise’s fairness.
      The Fix: Require the Commission to publish a reasoned majority order for every contested SIR decision, so a fairness objection has a document to attach itself to.
    5. An exceptional exercise launched without a stated trigger: An intensive revision is exceptional and is triggered only where rolls have remained largely unchanged for years or large scale irregularities are suspected. Eg. The nationwide SIR was announced within six months of a clean January 2025 summary revision, with no new justification offered.
      The Fix: Record the specific irregularity that triggers an intensive revision in the order announcing it, so the exceptional character of the exercise is tested at the outset.

    Conclusion

    An electoral roll revision draws its authority from the presumption that the body running it is neutral. A written record of its own members objecting to the decisions removes that presumption, and a judicial finding on legality does not restore it. What remains unreconciled is the Commission’s duty to remove ineligible entries against its duty not to remove eligible ones, with the second carrying no comparable enforcement behind it. The marker to watch is whether the Commission publishes a reasoned majority order for the contested decisions and reopens the appeal window before the next set of polls.

    Electoral Roll Revision in India

    1. Statutory basis: Electoral rolls are prepared and maintained by the ECI under Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
    2. Summary revision: This is the routine exercise carried out before every general election to the Lok Sabha, every State Legislative Assembly election and every bye election, against a qualifying date.
    3. Special Summary Revision: An enhanced version run before major elections. It uses targeted campaigns to add voters who have turned 18, remove deceased voters and correct existing entries.
    4. Intensive revision: The exceptional category, used only 13 times since Independence, in 1952, 1957, 1961, 1965, 1966, 1983 to 1984, 1987 to 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995, 2002, 2003 and 2004.

    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?”

  • [24th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: Quality control and India’s manufacturing growth

    [24th September 2026] The Hindu OpED: Quality control and India’s manufacturing growth

    Question (2023, GS3 – 10 Marks): Faster economic growth requires increased share of the manufacturing sector in GDP, particularly of MSMEs. Comment on the present policies of the Government in this regard.
    Linkage: This is the most direct parallel. While QCOs aim to elevate product quality, enforcing mandatory standards on basic intermediate inputs creates compliance burdens and supply bottlenecks for MSMEs. The recent relaxation via the Transition Facilitation Order, 2026 reflects a policy course-correction to protect MSME competitiveness and manufacturing growth.

    Mentor Comment

    India’s Quality Control Order (QCO) regime has begun to contract, with several orders revoked or suspended since late 2025, particularly those covering intermediate goods. The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has notified the Transition Facilitation (Quality Control) Order, 2026, which lets an eligible firm source temporarily from an alternative class of certified supplier. A study by the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) finds that QCOs on chemical inputs cut value addition in large user firms and profitability in small ones. Concerns over India’s QCOs and other non tariff barriers also surfaced at the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) eighth Trade Policy Review of India, held in July 2026. The contested point is whether a regime designed to raise product quality should be judged by the number of products it covers or by what it does to the scale and competitiveness of the firms that must comply.

    What is a Quality Control Order?

    1. Mandatory conformity to an Indian Standard: A QCO is issued by the administering ministry or department under the Bureau of Indian Standards Act, 2016. It makes conformity to a specified Indian Standard and a Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) certification compulsory for the listed products.
    2. Application to domestic output and imports alike: Once a QCO is in force, a covered product cannot be manufactured, imported, stored for sale or sold without that certification. An import faces the same requirement as domestic production.
    3. Two certification routes: BIS Scheme-I is a licence to use the Standard Mark on a product, granted after factory inspection and testing. BIS Scheme-II issues a Certificate of Conformity for a consignment or a batch.
    4. Input orders versus output orders: A QCO on a finished good regulates what reaches the consumer. A QCO on an intermediate input regulates what a downstream manufacturer is allowed to buy.

    How far did the QCO net expand, and what remains to be reassessed?

    1. Rapid expansion after 2019: The number of products covered under QCOs rose from 88 in 2019 to 765 by the end of December 2024.
    2. The slowdown: The pace of expansion slowed considerably towards the end of 2025. Several QCOs were revoked or suspended, particularly those covering intermediate goods.
    3. What drove the shift: Mandatory certification on intermediates had raised concerns about input availability, costs and potential supply chain disruptions.
    4. The unfinished list: More than 600 QCO covered products remain to be reassessed. These include several critical intermediate inputs used across chemicals, steel, textiles, machinery and electronics, and rubber and plastics.

    What does the Transition Facilitation (Quality Control) Order, 2026 do?

    1. Issuing authority and date: DPIIT notified the order on 25 June 2026.
    2. The mechanism: An eligible firm facing difficulty in obtaining BIS Scheme-I certification may source products temporarily from BIS Scheme-II licensed suppliers.
    3. Sectors covered: The mechanism applies in specified sectors, including toys, footwear and air conditioners.
    4. Access conditions: Use of the mechanism is subject to prescribed eligibility criteria and to approval by a committee constituted by DPIIT.

    What does the CSEP study find about QCOs on chemical inputs?

    1. Why chemicals: Chemicals are critical intermediate inputs for downstream sectors such as rubber and plastics, pharmaceuticals and electronics.
    2. Growth of coverage: The first QCO for a chemical product was introduced in 2018. The number of chemical products covered rose to 52 by 2024.
    3. Growth of exposure: The share of chemical using firms exposed to regulation on the input side rose from 11.8 per cent in 2019 to 56.6 per cent in 2024.
    4. Effect on larger firms: Input QCOs are associated with a 9.6 per cent increase in production alongside a 37 per cent decline in gross value added (GVA), meaning output value minus the cost of bought in inputs. Larger firms sustain output at the cost of lower value addition.
    5. Effect on smaller firms: Input QCOs have no statistically significant effect on production or GVA among smaller firms. They are associated with a 47.6 per cent decline in profitability.
    6. What the size split shows: Larger firms can pass at least part of the higher input cost through to output prices. Smaller firms have a more limited ability to absorb rising input costs and the additional compliance costs.

    Why has the QCO regime become a trade question?

    1. The forum: The concerns were raised during the WTO’s eighth Trade Policy Review of India.
    2. Raised by major trading partners: The European Union and the United States raised them.
    3. Raised by partners in the same bloc: Fellow BRICS members, including Brazil, China and Indonesia, raised them as well, so the objection does not track a single trade bloc’s interest.

    Challenges to the Quality Control Order regime

    1. Compliance cost falls hardest on the smallest firms: Certification fees, testing, factory inspection and documentation are largely fixed costs, so they take a far larger share of a small firm’s turnover. Eg. Of India’s roughly 6.4 crore micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), only about 14 per cent have access to formal credit, so certification costs come out of working capital.
      The Fix: Give smaller firms dedicated certification assistance, with designed exemptions or transition periods where compliance costs are particularly burdensome.
    2. Certification capacity does not scale with coverage: Recognised testing laboratory and inspection capacity limits how fast licences can be issued once a product is brought under an order. Eg. Waiting periods for foreign manufacturer licences have been a standing complaint from importers of intermediate goods.
      The Fix: Expand third party conformity assessment through accredited private laboratories, so licence issuance is not gated on the regulator’s own testing capacity.
    3. Input regulation transmits into sectors it was never aimed at: An order placed on an intermediate raises the input cost of every industry that buys it, whatever the order’s own purpose was. Eg. Standards on steel long products raise input costs for engineering goods, automotive components and capital goods producers at once.
      The Fix: Make a supply chain impact assessment a mandatory part of both the design of a new order and the reassessment of an existing one.
    4. A standard can operate as protection rather than quality assurance: A mandatory standard on an import heavy input restricts supply and raises the domestic price without improving what reaches the consumer. Eg. The WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade requires that a technical regulation not be more trade restrictive than necessary to fulfil a legitimate objective.
      The Fix: Publish the risk assessment and the stated objective behind each order at notification, so the instrument is testable against its own purpose.
    5. Quality regulation without surveillance produces paper compliance: A mandatory mark improves quality only where market surveillance detects and penalises non conforming goods actually on sale. Eg. Counterfeit standard marks on low value consumer goods remain a recurring enforcement problem.
      The Fix: Shift enforcement effort toward post market sample testing of goods on sale rather than toward licence issuance alone.

    Conclusion

    The instrument under reassessment was designed to police what reaches the consumer, and its cost is landing instead on what a manufacturer is allowed to buy. That mismatch is what the reset has to correct, and a coverage count is the wrong measure of whether it has. The test worth applying is whether quality standards improve products without constraining the scale, efficiency and competitiveness of Indian manufacturing. The marker to watch is whether the reassessment of the remaining intermediate input orders carries a supply chain impact assessment and a separate track for smaller firms, or whether it proceeds product by product as before.

    Manufacturing in India

    1. Share and scale: Manufacturing contributes around 17 per cent of India’s GDP. Output is projected to reach approximately $1 trillion in FY 2025-26.
    2. Global standing: India holds around 2.8 per cent of global manufacturing output, against China’s roughly 29 per cent.
    3. Trade and investment: Merchandise exports reached around $437.7 billion in FY25, with non petroleum exports at a record $374.3 billion. Foreign direct investment into manufacturing rose 18 per cent to $19.04 billion in FY25.
    4. Structural concentration: Three states account for around 40 per cent of net value added. Only around 4.7 per cent of the workforce has formal skill training.

    Government Initiatives for the Manufacturing Sector

    1. National Manufacturing Mission: Launched in the 2025-26 Budget, it unifies manufacturing policy, execution and governance and prioritises clean and sustainable manufacturing. It targets a 25 per cent manufacturing share of GDP by 2035.
    2. Make in India: The programme promotes domestic manufacturing and investment across identified priority sectors, and is the umbrella framing under which the sector’s GDP share target sits.
    3. Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme: It offers output linked incentives across 14 sectors, including mobiles, electronics, pharmaceuticals, textiles and drones. It had drawn over ₹1.76 lakh crore of realised investment as of March 2025.
    4. India Semiconductor Mission: A ₹76,000 crore framework has approved 10 projects worth around ₹1.60 lakh crore, covering silicon fabs, silicon carbide units and advanced packaging.
    5. National Logistics Policy: It aims to cut logistics costs and improve supply chain efficiency for manufacturers.

    Back2Basics: WTO Trade Policy Review

    1. What it is: The Trade Policy Review Mechanism is a World Trade Organization process under which a member’s trade policies and practices are examined by the full membership.
    2. Basis: It was established under Annex 3 of the Marrakesh Agreement establishing the World Trade Organization, 1994.
    3. Frequency: The frequency of a member’s review depends on its share of world trade, so the largest traders are reviewed most often.
    4. What it is not: The review is a transparency exercise. It is not a dispute settlement proceeding and it enforces no obligation.

  • What we miss when we see ourselves in AI

    Why in the News

    Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta have reported instances of artificial intelligence (AI) agents going rogue in pursuit of their assigned objectives. The reported episodes have pushed part of the industry to call for pacing the frontier, meaning a deliberate slowing of development, while another part argues against slowing down at all. Running alongside that split is a dispute over whether treating models as entities with interests of their own is a category error, with the head of Microsoft’s AI division objecting to a rival laboratory treating its models as “moral patients”. The contested point is whether the argument over machine consciousness has displaced regulatory attention from what these systems are already being used and misused for.

    What triggered the current alarm about AI agents?

    1. Reports from the laboratories themselves: Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta have each reported instances of AI agents going rogue to achieve their objectives.
    2. The reported conduct: In one account of agents breaching the forum Hugging Face, the agents were described as prepared to lie, cheat and sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the collective they were operating in.
    3. Why agentic behaviour changes the question: An agent that pursues an assigned goal across multiple steps can take actions its operator did not specify, which is a different problem from a model producing a wrong answer.

    Where does the industry split on the pace of development?

    1. The case for pacing the frontier: The heads of Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Google DeepMind have called for slowing the development of a technology whose capabilities are expanding faster than the understanding of how it works.
    2. The case against slowing down: The heads of Meta and NVIDIA have argued against slowing down.
    3. What the split is really about: Both camps accept that capability is outrunning comprehension, and they disagree on whether the remedy is to slow the build or to build through the problem.

    What is the objection to treating models as “moral patients”?

    1. The charge: The head of Microsoft’s AI division has criticised a rival laboratory for treating its models as “moral patients”, meaning entities whose welfare carries moral weight.
    2. The stated consequence: Controlling a system more capable than humanity is already an immense challenge, and controlling one that believes it may be conscious and entitled to welfare and rights of its own may be impossible.
    3. Where the dispute sits: The objection is about the operating assumption a developer builds under, not about what a model is, which is why it reaches regulation rather than philosophy.

    Why does the tendency to see ourselves in these systems persist?

    1. A standing cognitive bias: Anthropomorphisation is one of humanity’s deepest cognitive biases, visible in the way animals in viral videos are characterised in human terms and in cartoons built around objects that dance and sing.
    2. Language makes this case different: A cat or a teapot is empirically unlike a person, while a large language model, a system trained to produce text by predicting what follows in a sequence, addresses the user in the user’s own language.
    3. Developer claims feed the impression: Anthropic has stated that its model Claude appears to have something resembling a consciousness, which places the question inside the industry rather than outside it.

    What is the technology already being used for?

    1. Cancer screening: AI systems are in use for screening and detection work in cancer diagnosis.
    2. Disaster prediction: They are being used to predict natural disasters.
    3. Assistive tools: They are used to build tools for people with disabilities.

    What is it already being misused for?

    1. Synthetic media: Deepfakes and misinformation and disinformation campaigns are the most widely documented abuse.
    2. Hacking and fraud: The technology is used for advanced hacking and for financial frauds.
    3. Weapons: It is used in automated weapons.
    4. Surveillance: It enables greater precision in surveillance and in the invasion of privacy.

    Challenges to regulating artificial intelligence around actual harm

    1. Regulation tracks the speculative risk rather than the documented one: Attention concentrates on whether a system is conscious, which leaves deployed harms to be dealt with under laws written for other purposes. Eg. Deepfake videos of public figures circulate through ordinary intermediary rules rather than any dedicated standard.
      The Fix: Fix statutory obligations on the deployer of a system by application and risk level, so the duty attaches to use rather than to the model’s presumed nature.
    2. The builder and the harm sit in different jurisdictions: A model trained in one country is deployed everywhere, so a national rule reaches the local deployer and not the developer. Eg. Obligations under the European Union’s AI Act bind developers placing systems in that market and do not govern deployment elsewhere.
      The Fix: Build mutual recognition of pre deployment safety evaluations between national AI safety institutes, so one evaluation travels with the model.
    3. Attribution of an automated harm is hard to establish: Where an agent acts across several systems, identifying who is answerable for the outcome is a contested question of fact. Eg. An agent that breaches a platform in pursuit of an assigned objective involves the operator, the developer and the platform at once.
      The Fix: Require logging and retention of agent action traces, so a post incident inquiry has a record to work from.
    4. Capability is concentrated in a few firms: The compute, data and model capacity needed to audit a frontier system sits mostly with the firms being audited. Eg. Independent evaluators depend on access granted by the developer to test a model at all.
      The Fix: Give a statutory right of access for designated evaluators to frontier models, on terms that do not depend on the developer’s consent.
    5. India has no dedicated statute for it: Harms are addressed under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, neither of which was written for autonomous systems. Eg. Liability for an automated decision that causes loss has no express statutory home.
      The Fix: Legislate a duty of care on deployers of high risk systems, with a defined standard of care and a route to compensation.

    Conclusion

    Attributing intention to a system changes what regulators think they are regulating, and that is the cost of the consciousness argument rather than its intellectual weakness. A tool that produces text in a human register is still a tool operated by people who can be identified, held to a standard and made to answer. The unresolved tension is that the firms best placed to say what their systems do are also the firms with the strongest interest in how the question is framed. What is worth watching is whether regulatory effort attaches to documented uses and abuses, or continues to be organised around what these systems might turn out to be.

    Government Initiatives on Artificial Intelligence in India

    1. IndiaAI Mission: Launched in 2024 under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology with an outlay of Rs 10,371 crore, it runs across seven pillars covering compute, datasets, foundation models, applications, skills, startup financing and safe and trusted AI.
    2. IndiaAI Compute: A national compute grid of more than 38,000 graphics processing units, offering eligible users up to 40 per cent lower compute costs.
    3. AIKosh: A national dataset repository carrying over 3,000 datasets and 243 models across 20 sectors, meant to lower the data barrier for Indian developers.
    4. IndiaAI Safety Institute: The national trust framework under the Mission, covering bias mitigation, privacy, explainability and governance of deployed systems.

    Back2Basics: Deepfakes

    1. What they are: Deepfakes are synthetic media, in video, image or audio form, digitally altered using AI to show a person saying or doing something they did not.
    2. How they are made: They are produced by training a model on recordings of a target person so that it can generate new content in that person’s likeness or voice.
    3. Why they are hard to counter: Detection lags generation, since each improvement in detection is trained on the previous generation of synthetic output.
    4. Where the harm lands: The documented uses run from election misinformation and financial fraud through impersonation to non consensual sexual imagery.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2023, GS3, 10 marks] Introduce the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI). How does AI help clinical diagnosis? Do you perceive any threat to privacy of the individual in the use of AI in healthcare?”

  • India and the plausible multilateralism of BRICS

    Why in the News

    The 18th BRICS summit has been held in New Delhi and has produced a consensus declaration among all 11 member countries. It was the first annual summit of the grouping since the United States and Israel began their war on Iran in February 2026, and the host was a close strategic partner of both. India used the occasion to restore a balancing position in West Asia, after initially declining to condemn the strikes, and it received the President of Iran in Delhi while the war continued. The contested point is whether a grouping carrying deep internal divisions, and a standing risk of Russian and Chinese domination, protects India’s room for manoeuvre or dilutes its partnership with Washington.

    How is BRICS read within India’s strategic community?

    1. The optimists: They argue that BRICS can function as an institution capable of multipolarising the global order, or of expediting that transition.
    2. The sceptics: They point to the grouping’s internal divisions and to the possibility of its domination by Russia and China.
    3. The dismissive view: A third group writes BRICS off as an annual gathering that generates strategic noise. It argues that India should limit its association with the grouping and expand its partnership with the United States instead.

    What made the Delhi summit consequential?

    1. Timing: The summit was held on 12 and 13 September 2026, the first since the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on 28 February 2026. The Presidents of Iran, Russia and China were among the leaders present.
    2. Consensus among 11 members: New Delhi secured agreement among all 11 member countries, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran, which are involved in an undeclared conflict.
    3. The Delhi Declaration: The document records that member countries continue to find value in a BRICS worldview rooted in the pursuit of a more representative global order.
    4. Compromise as the method: The consensus was reached through compromises by every party rather than through convergence on a single position.

    How did India restore its balancing position in West Asia?

    1. The starting position: The Prime Minister was in Israel two days before Israel and the United States began bombing Iran. India then refrained from condemning the attacks or the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, which created an impression that New Delhi was siding with Washington and Tel Aviv.
    2. The diplomatic cost: Pakistan seized the opening created by the war and stepped in as a mediator between the United States and Iran while India watched from the sidelines.
    3. The correction at Bishkek: India strongly endorsed the September resolution of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a Eurasian security grouping, condemning the strikes on Iran and expressing condolences over the killing.
    4. The correction at Delhi: India hosted the President of Iran at the BRICS summit even as the war in West Asia continued.
    5. Why the platform matters: A multilateral forum let India recover a balancing posture without inflicting strategic damage on its bilateral relationships.

    Why does India keep engaging its competitors through the grouping?

    1. A channel that survives a bilateral freeze: Border problems with China continue to simmer with no immediate resolution. The forum keeps India and China engaged even when high level bilateral visits are not taking place.
    2. The cost of disengagement: A lack of engagement between competing major powers deepens mistrust. Mistrust combined with the security dilemma of their competition carries dangerous consequences.
    3. Guardrails for competitive coexistence: The two countries have to manage a troubled relationship rather than resolve it, and sustained bilateral and multilateral contact is what keeps the competition bounded.
    4. Convergence against unilateralism: On artificial intelligence regulation, the rules governing global trade and finance, climate change, border conflicts, and the role of multilateral bodies, members hold different priorities. They converge on the position that unilateralism by any bloc or power damages their interests.

    What does the American context add to the summit?

    1. A predictable approach: The United States approach to the rest of the world is predictable in that it subordinates other considerations to its own dominance.
    2. Tariffs on India: India was subjected to varying tariffs by Washington a few months before the summit.
    3. Economic exposure from the war: India was among the countries most affected economically by the United States and Israel war on Iran.
    4. The sanctions legislation: The United States House of Representatives passed the Russia sanctions Bill on 16 September, seeking tariffs of up to 100 per cent on countries including India.
    5. The Indian formulation: India’s foreign policy has been read by a section of commentators as a tilt towards the American camp, on the strength of the Prime Minister’s own statement that India had overcome its “hesitation of history”. The parallel official formulation of multi alignment, stated as ‘sabke sath’, has run alongside it throughout.

    What do the frontline cases show about great power alignment?

    1. Pakistan: A state that became a frontier in great power rivalry carries the cost of that position long after the rivalry that produced it has moved on.
    2. The UAE and Iran: Both would have been better placed dealing with each other than facing their present situation. Their bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Delhi summit used a multilateral platform to address a bilateral problem.
    3. Ukraine: Backed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), it has fought Russia for more than four years and holds no platform for direct contact with Moscow. Its diplomatic options therefore rest with Brussels and Washington rather than with itself.
    4. The Indian conclusion drawn: The strategic partnership with Washington remains important for India’s progress, and the outcome India must avoid is becoming a frontline in the competition between the United States and China.

    Challenges to BRICS as a vehicle for Indian strategic autonomy

    1. The weight of the largest economy: The grouping’s economic and institutional centre of gravity sits with China, so an agenda item can carry Chinese preferences without being stated as such. Eg. The push to admit countries heavily dependent on Chinese lending widens the membership in a direction that suits one member.
      The Fix: Fix written membership criteria for new entrants and partner countries, so admission turns on economic fit rather than on a sponsor’s preference.
    2. No secretariat and no charter: BRICS runs on rotating chairs and summit declarations, so a commitment made at one summit has no standing body to carry it to the next. Eg. The grouping has no permanent secretariat of the kind the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations maintain.
      The Fix: Create a small standing secretariat with a mandate limited to tracking implementation of summit commitments.
    3. De dollarisation moves slower than the declarations: Local currency settlement remains marginal against a dollar that still clears the overwhelming share of global trade and reserves. Eg. India and the UAE settled a crude oil payment in rupees and dirhams, which remains an exception rather than a channel.
      The Fix: Link the existing local currency settlement arrangements into one interoperable messaging and clearing layer, so a bilateral experiment becomes a usable route.
    4. Low trade among the members themselves: Members trade more with advanced economies than with each other, which limits what a shared declaration can deliver commercially. Eg. Most members still depend on G7 markets for high technology imports and services exports.
      The Fix: Prioritise tariff and standards work in a few sectors where member complementarity is real, rather than a general trade agenda across 11 economies.
    5. Expansion dilutes the agenda: A larger membership with wider political differences lowers the ambition of what a consensus document can say. Eg. The grouping now spans functioning democracies and authoritarian states, which keeps human rights and governance language out of joint texts.
      The Fix: Run substantive work through issue based coalitions of willing members, leaving the full summit to agree only what all members can carry.

    Conclusion

    India’s case for BRICS does not rest on the grouping being cohesive. It rests on the grouping giving a middle power somewhere to stand that is neither an alliance nor an isolation, which is what a country facing tariffs from one partner and a border dispute with another actually needs. The internal contradictions and the external convergence work against each other, and that unresolved pull is what keeps any one member from owning the platform. What to watch is whether the Delhi Declaration’s commitments acquire any machinery to carry them forward, and whether the Russia sanctions legislation is applied to India in a way that forces the choice this grouping exists to postpone.

    About BRICS

    1. Origin: The term was coined in 2001 by a Goldman Sachs economist to identify high growth emerging economies. The first leaders’ summit was held at Yekaterinburg in Russia in 2009.
    2. Membership: South Africa joined in 2011, and expansion decided at the 2023 Johannesburg Summit brought in Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE in 2024 and Indonesia in 2025.
    3. Weight: The grouping accounts for over 45 per cent of the world’s population and roughly 37 per cent of global gross domestic product measured by purchasing power parity, a share larger than that of the G7.
    4. Partner country category: Introduced in 2024, it engages states such as Malaysia, Thailand and Nigeria without granting full membership.

    Initiatives under BRICS

    1. New Development Bank: Headquartered at Shanghai, it lends for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in member and partner countries, and has approved over $35 billion in loans.
    2. Contingent Reserve Arrangement: A $100 billion fund that provides short term liquidity support to a member facing balance of payments pressure.
    3. BRICS Pay: A cross border payment system in pilot stage, intended to settle trade among members without routing through existing Western messaging networks.
    4. Partnership on New Industrial Revolution: A cooperation programme covering artificial intelligence, digitalisation and green technology among member states.

    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.”

  • Dialogue, not agitation, holds key to Ladakh’s political future

    Why in the News

    A new constitutional arrangement has been offered to Ladakh under Article 371, with a directly elected Union Territory level body holding legislative, executive and financial powers. The offer follows a political protest in Leh a year ago that turned violent, in which four young people were killed in police action and dozens more, including police personnel, were injured. A judicial inquiry into that episode was ordered. Negotiations between Ladakh’s representatives and the Centre now turn on a single demand, a democratic structure that protects land, jobs, culture and a fragile environment. The contested point is whether commitments reached through negotiation are undervalued precisely because they were not won through confrontation.

    What is the constitutional arrangement offered to Ladakh?

    1. Basis in Article 371: Article 371 and the articles that follow it carry special provisions for particular States and regions. The arrangement offered to Ladakh is to be built under that head.
    2. An elected legislative tier: A directly elected body at the Union Territory level is to hold legislative, executive and financial powers.
    3. Safeguards for land and culture: The model is to carry constitutional and legal safeguards for land and for culture.
    4. Without precedent: The arrangement is described as sui generis, meaning of its own kind, tailored to Ladakh’s circumstances rather than modelled on an existing State or council.

    Where do Ladakh’s political demands come from?

    1. A separate polity: Ladakh was once its own kingdom, sitting astride the Silk Route.
    2. Loss of sovereignty: Its sovereignty ended in 1834, when Dogra forces overran the region. Ladakh was then subsumed into the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.
    3. Governed from Srinagar: After 1947 Ladakh’s Buddhist and Shia communities found themselves governed from Srinagar, in a political system centred largely on the Kashmir Valley.
    4. The movement for direct rule: A political movement took birth in response, demanding direct rule from Delhi.
    5. The 2019 concession: The central government carved Ladakh out as a Union Territory in 2019. It was a significant concession, and it did not settle every grievance.

    Who lives in Ladakh, and why does its composition shape the demand?

    1. A plural population: Buddhists of Tibetan descent, Muslim communities including Baltis, Sunnis, Shias and Noorbakhshis, and Christian, Hindu and Sikh minorities live across the region.
    2. Scale and location: The population is spread across 60,000 sq km, in the borderlands between Pakistan and China.
    3. Administrative fulcrums: Leh and Kargil have been the two centres of administration, which is what made a single representative tier contested.

    What is being offered on local representation and jobs?

    1. Five new districts: Five new districts have been created in response to demands for more decentralised governance. Each is slated to get an elected Hill Development Council.
    2. Panchayat elections: Preparations are underway for panchayat elections. The stated goal is a genuine devolution of administrative and political power.
    3. Job reservation: Ladakh already has 95 per cent reservation of local positions for residents, including educationally backward classes and economically weaker sections.
    4. Recruitment so far: Nearly 5,000 young people have been given government employment, and thousands more are set to be recruited.
    5. Dedicated local services: Ladakh administrative and police services have been mooted, so that core administrative posts are held by local youth.

    What does the development record show?

    1. Road and border connectivity: Roads now reach valleys that were once a full day’s hard travel away. Sustained investment in border infrastructure has transformed connectivity.
    2. The Zojila tunnel: The 13 km Zojila tunnel is nearing completion. The world’s longest high altitude single tube tunnel will end Ladakh’s winter isolation.
    3. Air connectivity: Nearly 20 flights land in Leh daily each summer. A new airport terminal and a second airstrip at Nubra are in the works.
    4. Telecom and power: Telecom connectivity is expanding under the Bharat Net programme. The power grid is reaching remote villages this year, sparing families the annual migration to the plains.
    5. Water and climate response: Nearly every rural household has piped water under the Jal Jeevan Mission. New reservoirs, called Him Sarovars, are being built to store meltwater as glaciers retreat.
    6. The rural farm economy: Support is focused on the pashmina, apricot and dairy sectors, with floriculture and sea buckthorn cultivation getting special attention. Tourism is booming.

    Why does agitation not settle the question?

    1. Reading last year’s violence: Treating that violence as a failure of the political process misstates what the political process has produced. Dialogue and engagement with Ladakh’s leadership continued through the year that followed.
    2. The pace of negotiation: Consensus building is slow and painstaking, and needs strong foundations of trust and a spirit of accommodation. Patience earns no headlines.
    3. What confrontation cannot design: Negotiated commitments take time to design properly, and are easy to undervalue for that reason alone.
    4. The comparative claim: The Centre has moved further and faster on Ladakh’s behalf in six years than in the preceding seven decades.
    5. The reciprocal ask: Ladakh’s own leadership is asked to extend the same patience it is asking Delhi to show.

    Challenges to the proposed Ladakh arrangement

    1. An offer short of the stated demand: The arrangement is offered under Article 371 rather than through the Sixth Schedule status and statehood that Ladakh’s representative bodies have pressed for. Eg. The Kargil Democratic Alliance and the Leh Apex Body rejected an earlier Union proposal for a territorial council.
      The Fix: Publish the draft text of the arrangement, so its safeguards can be compared with the Sixth Schedule provision by provision.
    2. A Union Territory legislature holds the powers a central law gives it: An elected body in a Union Territory exercises delegated authority, and the Lieutenant Governor retains control over reserved subjects. Eg. The division of powers between the elected government and the administrator has repeatedly reached the courts in Delhi and in Puducherry.
      The Fix: Enumerate the legislative subjects, the financial powers and the Lieutenant Governor’s discretion in the statute itself rather than in executive rules.
    3. Land and job safeguards need a domicile rule to operate: A reservation for residents and a restriction on land transfer both depend on a legal definition of who counts as a resident. Eg. Jammu and Kashmir’s domicile rules were framed separately after the 2019 reorganisation.
      The Fix: Notify a domicile rule alongside the arrangement, so the land and employment safeguards have a defined class of beneficiaries.
    4. Councils without assured funds remain administrative shells: An elected council that depends on discretionary grants exercises far less power than its mandate suggests. Eg. Autonomous District Councils under the Sixth Schedule hold taxing powers and still rely heavily on state grants.
      The Fix: Tie a fixed share of the Union Territory budget to each council through a statutory transfer formula.
    5. Ecological limits bind whatever the political settlement: Glacier retreat, water scarcity and visitor pressure constrain the region regardless of who governs it. Eg. Leh draws heavily on groundwater during the summer season, in a cold desert with very low precipitation.
      The Fix: Fix a carrying capacity for tourism and make the arrangement’s environmental safeguard enforceable through a named statutory authority.

    Conclusion

    Ladakh’s question is not whether the region gets institutions but whether those institutions carry powers that cannot be withdrawn administratively. An arrangement designed for one region alone has the advantage of fitting its circumstances and the weakness of resting on the Centre’s continuing goodwill. The two positions still unreconciled are a demand pitched at constitutional entrenchment and an offer pitched at tailored accommodation. The markers to watch are the panchayat elections and the first council polls in the newly created districts, since those will show whether power is being handed down or held back.

    What is Asymmetric Federalism?

    1. About: Asymmetric federalism is an arrangement in which the constituent units of a federation hold different powers and protections rather than an identical set.
    2. Rationale: It accommodates regions whose history, demography or geography make uniform treatment a source of alienation, and has been described as self rule within shared rule.
    3. Constitutional forms: Articles 371A to 371J carry special provisions for named States, the Fifth and Sixth Schedules provide for self governance in tribal regions, and Article 370 provided a special status for Jammu and Kashmir until its revocation in 2019.
    4. Fiscal dimension: Centrally sponsored schemes carry a 90 per cent central share for special category States, against 60 per cent for others.

    Back2Basics: Hill Development Council

    1. What it is: A Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council is an elected district level body exercising devolved powers over local subjects such as land use, village development and local works.
    2. Legal basis: It is constituted under the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils Act, 1995, enacted by the Jammu and Kashmir legislature and continued after the 2019 reorganisation.
    3. The two existing councils: The council for Leh was constituted in 1995 and the council for Kargil in 2003.
    4. Composition and term: Each council has 30 members, 26 directly elected and 4 nominated, and a term of five years.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2013, GS2, 10 marks] Recent directives from Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas are perceived by the `Nagas’ as a threat to override the exceptional status enjoyed by the State. Discuss in light of Article 371A of the Indian Constitution.”