Credit : Open Letter

Well by Bihar, I meant the condition of the political dispensation.......Nothing Otherwise...

This video provides a critical investigation into the state of Madhya Pradesh (MP), arguing that the region is suffering from severe systemic governance failures despite over two decades of consistent BJP rule. The narrator posits that these issues are not isolated incidents but reflect a deeper erosion of accountability.

Core Governance Failures

Public Health & Safety: The video outlines a series of preventable tragedies, including deaths caused by contaminated water in Indore, the death of newborns due to rat bites in a government ICU, and casualties linked to adulterated cough syrup.

Administrative Arrogance: A recurring theme is the dismissive and often hostile response from government officials toward public grievances, which the narrator interprets as a symptom of a power structure that has lost its connection to the electorate.

Corruption & Scams: The video details widespread systemic corruption, from blatant demands for bribes to exam recruitment scandals like the Patwari exam scam and illegal sand mining operations.

Leadership & Financial Priorities

Land Acquisition Allegations: The narrator cites Indian Express investigations alleging that Chief Minister Mohan Yadav's family and associated real estate entities acquired 168 acres of land, with 111 acres located near government-announced development projects.

Financial Strain: The state is facing a growing debt crisis, with the total debt reaching ₹4,64,000 crore. Despite this, the narrator criticizes the administration for prioritizing expensive projects like grand statues and the acquisition of VVIP jets over urgent public needs.

Political Landscape

Cycle of Freebies: The video suggests that the state government relies heavily on populist schemes like the Ladli Behna Yojana to secure electoral victories, effectively using these to maintain power while avoiding substantive reform.

Weak Opposition & Media: The narrator concludes that the collapse of the opposition (Congress) and the failure of the media to ask rigorous, difficult questions have created an environment where systemic mismanagement goes unchecked.

Credit : Sarthak Goswami

This video provides a critical investigation into the state of food safety in India and the systemic failure of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI). Here is a summary of the key issues discussed:

1. The FSSAI Logo Fallacy

The FSSAI logo is often mistaken for a hallmark of purity or a safety guarantee. In reality, it is merely a registration number, serving more as a marketing tool than an assurance of food quality.

2. A 'Toothless' Regulatory System

Despite the FSS Act of 2006, the enforcement mechanism is largely ineffective. The video describes the authority as a "toothless tiger," noting that a vast majority of cases fail due to procedural errors or legal loopholes that allow companies to evade accountability.

3. Low Conviction Rates

Legal statistics are stark: in 2024-25, out of 170,000 samples analyzed, 34,000 failed, yet the conviction rate remained at a mere 3.7%. Large brands often exploit the right to re-test samples in referral laboratories, which frequently leads to the original findings being overturned.

4. Infrastructure and Staffing Shortages

The regulatory body suffers from a severe lack of resources. The video highlights that:

Thousands of Food Safety Officer (FSO) positions across the country are vacant.

Many state laboratories lack NABL accreditation, rendering their testing results inadmissible in court.

Samples often expire in laboratories before testing is even completed.

5. Double Standards

There is a notable discrepancy between the quality of products sold by the same corporations in India versus international markets, where standards are more rigorous. Furthermore, the video argues that safety limits for harmful substances, such as pesticide residues, are sometimes relaxed rather than tightened.

6. Silencing Whistleblowers

Rather than addressing the flaws exposed by journalists and social media creators, the FSSAI has reportedly responded with FIRs and defamation cases, creating a climate of fear for those attempting to highlight systemic issues.

Conclusion

The video concludes that the current system prioritizes corporate profit over public health, leaving the burden of food safety on the individual consumer rather than the state. It raises pressing questions about why accountability is so low and why safety standards for Indian citizens are significantly weaker than those enforced globally.

Credit : Sarthak Goswami

This documentary investigates how Byrnihat, located on the border of Assam and Meghalaya, became one of the most polluted cities in India despite being in a region known for its pristine nature. The report highlights the severe environmental and health impact of industrialization on the local population.

Key Findings and Data:

Extreme Pollution Levels: Byrnihat was recorded as the most polluted city in India in 2024, with an average PM2.5 level of 128, significantly exceeding the WHO recommended limit of 5.

Industrial Density: The area is home to approximately 80 highly polluting factories, including cement and alcohol manufacturing plants, which release toxic emissions into a bowl-shaped valley where the pollution gets trapped.

Health Impact: Official data indicates a sharp increase in respiratory issues, rising from 2,082 cases in 2022 to 3,681 in 2024, a 77% increase in just two years. Residents report high rates of cancer, asthma, and chronic skin diseases, which they attribute to the poor air and water quality.

Environmental Degradation: The documentary shows layers of black soot covering local vegetation. Despite the area being a matriarchal society with strong community ties, local families struggle with the consequences of this industrial development, which they claim has worsened significantly over the last three years.

Key Controversies:

Green Energy Irony: The factory featured in the investigation produces ethanol, the same fuel blended with petrol (up to 20%) and promoted as "green energy" by the government, creating a stark contrast between national goals and the lived reality of Byrnihat residents.

Regulatory Failure: While there have been sporadic inspections and fines, the report argues there is a lack of accountability and a long-term action plan, exacerbated by jurisdictional confusion between the Assam and Meghalaya state governments.

Edit : For the people who are putting the point that ethanol production dosen't cause significant pollution by examples of Brazil and other countries.....Let me Address that too

Ethanol itself isn't the variable. The difference is how it's produced and regulated.

Brazil's production is relatively cleaner because it uses sugarcane, which has an energy balance of about 8 to 9 units out for every 1 unit of input. The bagasse, the sugarcane waste, gets burned right there to power the distillery, so the factory is largely energy self-sufficient. No coal means no coal-related black smoke. Brazil also has decades of infrastructure, strict effluent treatment mandates, and distilleries are mostly located with enough land buffers away from dense residential zones to manage spent wash properly.

India's production is dirtier because molasses-based distilleries run their boilers on coal. That coal boiler is the source of black smoke, not the fermentation itself. The energy balance is far worse, roughly 1.5 to 2 units of output per fossil input, so you're burning a dirty fuel to make a "green" one. On top of that, there's a chronic spent wash disposal problem. Treatment technology exists but it's expensive, so many units dump partially treated or untreated effluent directly into rivers. The CPCB has known this for decades, distilleries are literally on its list of 17 most polluting industry categories, but enforcement is weak and fines are cheaper than compliance.

So the pollution isn't from ethanol itself. It's from the process fuel and waste management. Brazil burns sugarcane waste and enforces treatment standards. India burns coal and mostly looks the other way.

The question is : If they were not ready to make it entirly clean, why did they introduce and pitch it like that at the first place ?

Sunil Chhetri believes India’s failure to qualify for the FIFA World Cup is not due to a lack of talent but because the country lacks a strong sporting system. He said India is not yet a true sporting nation and many talented young players do not get the right opportunities, coaching, infrastructure, and support at an early age. Chhetri pointed out that successful football nations identify and nurture talent through structured development programs. According to him, improving the system is the key to India’s future success in football and other sports.

And yes, the elephant in the room,

Cricket captures approximately 85–90% of India's total sports sponsorship revenue and the lion's share of prime-time broadcasting slots. In contrast, football, hockey, and athletics collectively receive less than 10% of televised coverage outside major tournaments.

As millions of anxious medical aspirants prepare for the rescheduled NEET-UG examination tomorrow, a mounting human toll has cast a dark shadow over the country’s largest entrance test. At least 11 to 13 student suicides have been reported across India since the Centre cancelled the May 5 exam following a massive paper leak, with authorities scrambling to contain what activists are calling a "national tragedy of stress and despair."

At this point, it seems the system is out of fear of citizens.....They beleive they own the country and thus don't give a damn about the people.....

The Education Minister is a scum and I hope he pays the price for this indifferent behaviour.....

To everyone reading this, please post about it for this movement to not die......

The system exists to serve us.....not to serve themselves....

In 2024 alone, India recorded 23 lakh cybercrime complaints, a 42% rise over the previous year. Financial losses hit an estimated Rs 23,000 crore, a 200% jump from Rs 7,500 crore in 2023. The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre logged an average of 7,000 complaints every single day in the first four months of 2024. Digital arrest cases alone went from 40,000 in 2022 to 60,000 in 2023 to nearly 124,000 in 2024. By early 2025, Indians had lost 26 billion rupees just in digital arrests. And all of that is just what gets reported. Experts consistently estimate that real numbers are far higher, hidden by shame, ignorance of reporting mechanisms, or not knowing a crime occurred. This is not scattered fraud. This is an industry.

The Pre-Internet Foundation

India's scam economy did not start with smartphones. It rested on structural factors predating the internet.

• A large English-speaking population, a BPO sector that trained millions to talk to Western customers, extreme inequality pushing people to find income anywhere, and law enforcement never designed for cross-border economic crime.
• The early 2000s BPO boom created a workforce skilled at phone-based persuasion. When automation and offshoring shifts shrank legitimate call centre jobs, the same skills fed a criminal parallel economy.

The Jamtara Origin Story

Jamtara, a small Jharkhand district, became India's phishing capital after tech-savvy youth realized they could impersonate bank or telecom officials, create panic about account deactivation or SIM blocking, and extract OTPs, CVVs, and Aadhaar numbers to drain accounts instantly.

• Police teams from 12 states visited Jamtara about 23 times in two years, arresting 38 people. Over 80 cases were registered. By 2017 arrests crossed 100.
• One scammer, Pappu Mandal (22, a dropout), duped an MP of Rs 1.6 lakh posing as an RBI official. Another, Sitaram, jobless but with 15 SIM cards, owned Rs 12 lakh in cash, two houses, and a Scorpio SUV.
• The Netflix series Jamtara: Sabka Number Ayega made the district synonymous with online fraud in 2020. Scammers then dispersed the model across India like a franchise, using smaller groups and cloud servers to stay mobile.

The Geographic Spread

Jamtara is still active. Its operators now work leaner. Elsewhere, criminal ecosystems have matured.

Nuh / Mewat, Haryana

• In an educationally backward pocket, poverty and cheap smartphones drove cybercrime. Scammers rented fields with good internet to run phishing operations, exploiting proximity to UP and Rajasthan for quick escapes.
• On April 27, 2023, 102 police teams with over 5,000 personnel raided 14 villages, arrested 125 cybercriminals, and uncovered 28,000+ cases linked to Rs 100 crore in losses. Fake SIMs, Aadhaar cards, and fake job ads (Rs 30,000 for packing pencils) were standard.
• In July 2023, a mob attacked the Nuh cyber police station, specifically targeting evidence of cyber fraud. The Haryana government confirmed the attack was pre-planned to destroy records. That kind of attack only happens when the perpetrators trust the system's vulnerabilities.

Kolkata and Salt Lake, West Bengal

• YouTubers did what police wouldn't. In April 2022, Trilogy Media flew to Kolkata, hid boxes of cockroaches and mice inside call centres, hacked the CCTV feeds, and watched from a hotel as chaos erupted. They documented the interior of an active scam operation: employee numbers, methods, management.
• Mark Rober revealed the same centres were part of a 50,000-member pan-India WhatsApp group, raking in an estimated $65,000 a day, about $20 million annually. After his video, Kolkata Police raided one centre operating for a decade and arrested 15 senior officials. The world watched, briefly.
• In the first half of 2022, 15 call centres were raided and over 80 arrested, but most were repeat offenders who simply adapted: smaller groups, cloud storage, easy relocation.
• Jim Browning, the most technically skilled scambaiter, hacked a Kolkata call centre's CCTV, identified the ringleader, and handed evidence to the BBC and Delhi Police. The CEO, Amit Chauhan, got bail of Rs 50,000 (about USD 600) after three weeks. He then set up a new operation in the same building with the same partner while on bail. The case took 18 months to reach court; the prosecution failed to respond to a dismissal plea, and the entire case was thrown out. Chauhan's centre was making up to half a million dollars a month.
• That sequence, half a million dollars a month, Rs 50,000 bail, new scam while on bail, case dismissed because prosecutors didn't show, is the accountability gap in a single paragraph.

Ahmedabad and Gujarat

• Five major call centre conglomerates (HGlobal, Call Mantra, Worldwide Solution, Zoriion Communications, Sharma BPO) operated like a corporation, sharing scripts, victim lists, and payment processing. Job roles were formalized: Caller, Payment Processor, Data Broker, Hawaladar, Call Centre Operator.
• Using data bought from US marketing brokers, callers impersonated IRS and USCIS officials, threatening arrest or deportation. One 85-year-old in San Diego lost $12,300. A Hayward, California victim was coerced into buying 276 stored value cards and lost $136,000. Overall, 61 individuals and entities were charged; 20 arrested in the US, 32 and five call centres in India. Losses ran into hundreds of millions of dollars.
• The ringleader, Hitesh Madhubhai Patel ("Hitesh Hinglaj"), admitted that $25 to $65 million in losses was attributable to him. Co-defendants said he was the top boss. He was arrested in India in 2016, paid a bribe, and was released. He was eventually extradited from Singapore and prosecuted in Texas, not by India.

Other Hotspots

Gurugram (tech support and digital arrest scams from offices), Bharatpur and Deeg (sextortion and OTP fraud), Bhubaneswar (UK and Australian targets), Hyderabad and Bengaluru (VoIP operations), Mumbai (financial fraud).

The Scam Types

IRS and government impersonation. Callers pose as tax officials from the US, UK, Canada, or Australia, threaten arrest, and demand payment via gift cards or crypto. One centre ran scripts for six national tax authorities.

Tech support scams. Fake virus pop-ups lure victims to call "Microsoft" or "Amazon" technicians who gain remote access, steal banking data, or charge for worthless software. Microsoft and Amazon jointly targeted these Indian operations in October 2023.

OTP phishing (Jamtara style). Callers pose as bank or TRAI representatives, create panic about frozen accounts or KYC, extract OTPs and CVVs, and drain accounts via UPI instantly.

Digital arrest scam. Emerged around 2022 and exploded in 2024. Victims are told their Aadhaar was used for a SIM linked to money laundering. A fake police officer interrogates them on Skype, provides forged court documents, and keeps them under continuous video surveillance, sometimes for days. A Gujarat doctor was coerced into transferring Rs 19 crore over three months. Scammers use deepfake videos, fake uniforms, and official-looking backdrops. The scam exploits deep-rooted deference to authority and fear of institutional consequences. Victims include academics, bankers, retired bureaucrats, and a former senior police officer. An elderly Karnataka couple died by suicide after losing Rs 50 lakh. A retired Punjab IGP shot himself after losing over Rs 8 crore.

Pig butchering. Scammers build fake romantic or social relationships over weeks or months, introduce fraudulent investment platforms showing fake profits, then disappear with the victim's life savings. Global theft from pig butchering (2020 to 2024) exceeded $75 million. Indian operators used fabricated BlackRock partnership articles to add legitimacy.

Sextortion. Scammers record video calls of victims in compromising positions and threaten to share the footage with family and contacts unless paid repeatedly. Suicides are documented.

Task-based and marketplace frauds. Telegram scams offer easy tasks with small payments to build trust before demanding larger "investments." OLX and Quikr fraud involves fake sellers collecting advance payments or fake buyers using forged payment screenshots.

The Money Flow

By the time anyone investigates, money has moved through too many layers.

• Mule accounts. Funds are immediately split across multiple accounts opened with fake Aadhaar cards. Low-level operators get a 5 to 50 percent commission.
• Hawala. Trust-based underground networks move money internationally without wire transfers or records. A hawaladar in India takes cash, a counterpart abroad delivers the equivalent, and debts settle through reverse transactions.
• Cryptocurrency. Larger sums convert to USDT on the TRON blockchain, moving globally in seconds.
• US runners. For IRS scams, local runners liquidate payments via reloadable cards or wire transfers. The whole chain is compartmentalized: caller doesn't know hawaladar, mule holder doesn't know the call centre.

The Southeast Asia Connection

Nearly 46% of cyber frauds reported in India in early 2024 originated from Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. Chinese syndicates built industrial-scale scam compounds in lawless special economic zones, trafficking workers, including Indians, to run operations in Hindi and English. Some Indians went voluntarily, lured by fake jobs; others were held captive. The MEA has repatriated over 280 Indians from these compounds. The scam industry is now also a human trafficking industry.

The YouTubers Who Did What Police Wouldn't

Jim Browning handed evidence to the BBC and Delhi Police, only to see the mastermind get Rs 50,000 bail, reopen shop, and walk free because prosecutors didn't show. Trilogy Media flew to Kolkata, planted vermin, and exposed decade-old operations that police had ignored. Mark Rober's video led to 15 arrests, but the centres soon reopened. Kitboga wastes scammers' time and educates millions. Pattern: exposure, headline arrests, release on trivial bail, cases collapse, operations resume.

Why Nothing Happens

• Jurisdictional chaos. Victim in Kerala, call centre in Bengal, mule accounts in Rajasthan, hawaladar in Gujarat, crypto wallet in Myanmar, state police can't chase cross-border networks, and coordination is weak.
• Prosecution failure. The Amit Chauhan case (half a million dollars a month, same building, case dismissed) is emblematic.
• Documented corruption. Hitesh Patel paid a bribe after 2016 arrest and was released. Multiple scam bosses have allegedly bribed their way out. The Nuh police station attack targeted evidence.
• Minimal deterrence. Bail of Rs 50,000 for someone making Rs 4 crore a month is a business cost. The IT Act treats these as minor offences.
• Foreign victims, zero political push. An 85-year-old in San Diego has no Indian voter constituency.
• Economic dependency. In Jamtara and Nuh, scam money is the primary economy. "Now I earn Rs 40,000 to Rs 60,000 a month," said one scammer. "More than my father ever made." Politicians are unwilling to shut it down.
• Technical asymmetry. Spoofed numbers, multi-country VoIP routing, cloud servers, police cyber cells are always behind.

What the Government Claims It Is Doing

The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre runs a Cyber Fraud Mitigation Centre with telecom, banking, and fintech reps. The 2021 Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting System says it saved Rs 3,431 crore across 9.94 lakh complaints. National forensics labs, training for 98,000+ officers, PM's Mann Ki Baat warnings, a Supreme Court-directed CBI probe, and 6 lakh blocked numbers and 3.25 lakh frozen accounts. Yet losses jumped 200% in 2024.

The Data Problem

Every scam starts with personal data. In 2023, a hacker sold ICMR data on 815 million Indians: Aadhaar, passport, phone numbers, addresses. Digital arrest scams surged the next year. US National Public Data was breached in April 2024, exposing billions of records globally. Legitimate data brokers also sell profiles scraped from social media, e-commerce, and loyalty programmes. When a caller already knows your bank and employer, the con is far more convincing.

Things That Don't Look Straight

The ICMR breach: 815 million records, no accountability, data still for sale, the obvious link to digital arrest spikes never formally investigated. Telecom distributors supply fake SIMs that are the lifeblood of fraud, yet none face serious prosecution. Kolkata call centres ran openly for a decade with 50,000-member WhatsApp groups until YouTubers exposed them. The US prosecuted Hitesh Patel after India arrested and released him on a bribe.

Concluding, India hosts the world's largest scam industry by geographic concentration. It targets anyone with a phone and bank account, generates billions annually, and leaves behind suicides, ruined retirees, and trafficked citizens. The infrastructure enabling it, fake SIMs, mule accounts, data brokers, hawala, involves the formal economy at every step. This is not hidden. It's in corporate parks, WhatsApp groups, and villages where the scammer's new SUV is unmissable.

The accountability gap isn't mainly technical. It's political and cultural. Bail is a business expense, prosecution is a gamble, corruption is documented but unpunished. What looks like a million individual frauds is a single structural failure refracted through a million lives. Until running a scam operation in India reliably leads to prison, asset seizure, and prosecutorial follow-through, the math will keep favouring the scammer. Right now, it does.

This isn't a random collection of diplomatic incidents. It's a pattern with a consistent logic, and it deserves an honest look, which means laying out both the prosecution's case and the defence, because neither side gives you the full picture on its own.

The US pressure campaign: Russia dimension

The Russian oil saga: You asked us to buy it, now you're punishing us for it

This is probably the most embarrassing double-bind India has been caught in, and Jaishankar frankly admitted it in public. Back in 2022, the US practically asked India to buy Russian oil to keep the global market stable. India did exactly that. What followed was a clean lesson in how recommendations from the world's dominant economy actually play out.

Before the Ukraine conflict, Russian oil made up just about 2.5% of India's total imports. Once Western sanctions hit, Moscow started offering heavy discounts, saving Indian refiners roughly $12.2 per barrel. Naturally, imports from Russia shot up to 21.6% in FY 2022-2023, and hit 35.9% in FY 2023-2024. But then, the goalposts moved:

• In August 2025, Trump signed an Executive Order hitting India with secondary tariffs, bumping the total tariff rate to 50%, explicitly targeting New Delhi's Russian crude purchases.
• In Parliament, Congress leader Randeep Surjewala questioned why India suddenly needed Washington's green light to protect its own energy interests. Udit Raj was even more direct, arguing that Trump hadn't given a suggestion, but an order, essentially setting himself up as India's fate-maker.
• By March 2026, the US Treasury announced a 30-day waiver allowing Indian refiners to clear Russian crude already loaded onto ships. It was framed entirely as a privilege granted by Washington.

Think about the timeline: India went from buying oil on Washington's advice, to getting penalized for it, to needing explicit American permission just to keep going. All in less than four years.

CAATSA and the S-400 question

When India went ahead with buying the S-400 missile system from Russia, it was staring down the barrel of CAATSA sanctions. Washington pushed hard to sell its own Patriot and THAAD alternatives, using interoperability concerns as leverage. India didn't back down, but the mechanics of the process itself felt like a quiet hit to sovereignty:

• India basically had to lobby a foreign government for a waiver just to buy weapons for its own national defence from a partner of its own choosing.
• Even India's own Defence Ministry felt the need to use the phrase sovereign decision in Parliament. But here's the thing: you don't usually have to loudly declare a decision is sovereign unless someone is actively making you justify it.
• The US never actually triggered the sanctions, but the lingering threat worked perfectly as soft coercion. India managed to bypass it by making itself too geopolitically important to punish, not because Washington suddenly respected the underlying principle.

The US pressure campaign: Iran dimension

The 2019 Iranian oil cutoff

When Trump yanked back the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions in 2019, India, one of Iran's largest oil buyers, was forced to dry up its purchases. Washington gave a temporary waiver, but India ultimately fell in line, cutting Iranian imports down to absolute zero. A massive, direct economic interest was sacrificed simply to keep from antagonizing the US.

Chabahar Port: A strategic investment abandoned under US pressure

This one is a lot harder to defend. Chabahar was supposed to be India's geopolitical masterstroke, a strategic sea route into Afghanistan and Central Asia that completely bypassed Pakistan. India had sunk roughly $120 million into it and had managed to hold onto sanctions exemptions since 2018.

Then in 2025, Washington announced it was pulling the plug on the Chabahar waiver, effective September 29. What happened next speaks volumes:

• Instead of pushing back, India rushed to transfer its entire remaining $120 million financial commitment to Iran right before the deadline, wrapping up its liabilities and effectively walking away from its position.
• To external observers, it looked like a panicked exit before the door slammed shut.
• Continuing to invest meant exposing major Indian companies to heavy US sanctions, which would have killed India's broader ambitions of becoming a global player in port management.

A decade-long, $120 million strategic gateway to Central Asia was quietly dropped because an American president decided to turn up the heat. The long-term geopolitical loss here is massive.

Operation Sindoor and the ceasefire narrative

Trump didn't mince words when he declared that after a long night of talks mediated by the United States, he was pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a full and immediate ceasefire.

New Delhi rejected this narrative immediately and furiously:

• Modi laid it out directly to Trump in a 35-minute phone call, making it clear that India has never accepted third-party mediation and never will. He emphasized that no trade deals were linked to the truce, and that halting hostilities was handled directly between New Delhi and Islamabad via military channels after Pakistan requested it.
• But the damage was done. The initial announcement didn't come from the Indian PMO; it came straight from the White House. No amount of damage control could completely erase that first impression.
• On the domestic front, Surjewala went a step further, openly questioning why India halted military operations right when the armed forces clearly had the upper hand, directly tying the sudden stop to US interference.

Whether Trump was just exaggerating or not, his claim of mediation completely messed with India's carefully built narrative of strategic autonomy, creating a public relations headache New Delhi didn't see coming and couldn't fully control.

China's territorial pressure campaign

Galwan: Blood paid, ground conceded

The 2020 Galwan clash cost the lives of 20 Indian soldiers. The mutual disengagement that followed ended up with Indian troops pulling back 1.8 kilometres from Patrol Point 14, moving out of territory they had actively controlled for generations:

• China's Foreign Ministry turned around and claimed sovereignty over the entire Galwan Valley, basically telling New Delhi that if they wanted to avoid more bloodshed, India needed to rein in its troops.
• The reality of the buffer zones created by these disengagement agreements meant that India had to step back from areas it used to patrol regularly.
• It certainly didn't help that the government kept a tight lid on information, leaving the public largely in the dark about exactly where the PLA had moved in and what ground was lost.

Arunachal Pradesh: Cartographic aggression

Beijing has been running a slow-burn, systematic campaign to chip away at India's administrative grip on Arunachal Pradesh by renaming places on maps:

• They renamed 6 places in 2017, 15 in 2021, 11 in 2023, and a staggering 30 places in March 2024.
• This is a textbook execution of China's Three Warfares strategy, blending psychological, legal, and media warfare to gradually shift international perceptions.
• What's wild is that the sixth list of renamings dropped right after a high-profile diplomatic meeting between Modi and Xi in October 2024. India issues its usual formal protests, China dismisses them as routine, and the world moves on. But on paper, the new maps stick.

Aksai Chin

We are talking about 38,000 square kilometres of territory claimed by India that has been under solid Chinese control since 1962. There's been no real pushback, no negotiated return, just raw facts on the ground that New Delhi has been forced to accept as the actual Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Doklam: Coercion by proxy

The 2017 Doklam standoff showed just how clever Beijing's pressure tactics can be. They didn't cross into Indian territory directly. Instead, they started building a strategic military road inside disputed Bhutanese territory, knowing full well that India would be forced to step in to protect its highly vulnerable Siliguri Corridor, the Chicken's Neck:

• They basically forced India to fight a diplomatic and military battle on someone else's soil, or risk letting China secure a permanent chokehold over the link to the Northeast.
• India did manage to get a withdrawal after a tense 73-day standoff, and the road building stopped. But since then, the permanent Chinese military footprint in the wider Doklam area has quietly skyrocketed.

US trade coercion: The economic sovereignty front

GSP removal and the Harley-Davidson shakedown

Up until June 2019, India was the single biggest beneficiary of the US Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), which kept nearly 2,000 Indian products duty-free. Trump abruptly cut India from the program, and the trigger was incredibly petty: India refused to give Harley-Davidson bikes and American medical devices unrestricted access to its domestic market. A domestic political talking point for Trump was weaponized into a blunt bilateral weapon.

India's pushback was surprisingly weak. Officials initially threatened retaliatory tariffs on over 20 American goods, but then quietly let the matter drop. The government put out a mild statement calling it unfortunate and promised to keep building ties. The GSP was gone, and New Delhi's response looked a lot like diplomatic meekness wrapped up as maturity.

WTO disputes and the 2023 tariff surrender

In June 2023, India agreed to shut down six active WTO disputes and completely scrap its retaliatory tariffs on a range of US goods, including chickpeas, lentils, almonds, walnuts, and apples. Remember, these tariffs were India's legal, legitimate countermeasure against US duties on Indian steel and aluminium:

• India completely dropped its defensive tariffs.
• The US kept its steel tariffs perfectly intact.
• In any basic power equation, that's not a compromise, that's a straight-up concession.

The 2026 interim trade framework: Squeezing the farmers

Just days after Trump publicly tied tariff cuts on Indian goods to India walking away from Russian oil, New Delhi agreed to slash import duties on luxury American cars from 110% down to 30%, and completely wiped out tariffs on Harley-Davidsons:

• Indian farm unions are already raising red flags, warning that cutting these tariffs on US agricultural imports is going to heavily undercut local farmers.
• For a developing economy where a huge chunk of the population relies on agriculture, opening up sensitive sectors isn't just a business deal. It's a massive social risk.
• True sovereignty doesn't just erode through formal treaties; it can happen slowly through shifting price signals that ruin local livelihoods.

Technology and structural sovereignty

Huawei and the 5G ban

For a year and a half, Washington went on a global campaign pressuring allies to block Huawei from their 5G rollouts. India eventually followed suit, quietly freezing out both Huawei and ZTE. The official talking point was that this was purely based on India's independent security assessment:

• It's interesting timing, though. The decision dropped exactly when Mike Pompeo was bragging that the international tide was turning against Huawei, and right after the Galwan clash gave New Delhi the perfect domestic political cover to frame the ban around China rather than US pressure.
• Whether you believe India's independent assessment just magically aligned with 18 months of intense US lobbying, or see it as compliance dressed up as conviction, is a matter of perspective.

H-1B visa weaponisation

The constant threat of tightening H-1B visa rules is essentially Washington holding a financial gun to India's most profitable export sector:

• If US tech immigration laws tighten up, Indian IT giants face immediate, massive cost increases running into billions of dollars.
• India's massive $250 billion IT services sector is structurally dependent on this single US visa pipeline.
• When 75% of your tech sector's access to its biggest market depends entirely on domestic policy decisions made inside Washington, that's a dangerous systemic vulnerability that should have been diversified decades ago.

The dollar-SWIFT structural trap

This is the big one, the overarching issue that makes all the other leverage points work.

• When the West froze $300 billion of Russia's central bank reserves in 2022, it sent a massive shockwave through the Global South. It made every developing nation realize that their own hard-earned sovereign reserves could be frozen overnight if they cross US foreign policy.
• India's economy is incredibly dollarized, especially when it comes to trade invoicing, making it incredibly hard to break away from the system.
• Almost every single sanction threat against India works because our banks, our energy imports, and our global trade rely heavily on financial infrastructure that Washington owns and operates. The threat of secondary sanctions, getting completely cut off from the dollar clearing system, is the ultimate lever. Every other piece of pressure in this text gets its power from this one core vulnerability.

Now it would'nt be fair to not listen the other side so....

Sovereignty was never an all-or-nothing thing

The whole idea that India's sovereignty is being uniquely violated deserves a reality check. Absolute Westphalian sovereignty doesn't actually exist for any country that wants to be part of the global economy:

• Germany couldn't just buy Russian oil without massive blowback either. Japan doesn't have total freedom over its military posture. South Korea literally hosts thousands of US troops under terms it didn't write.
• This isn't a failure of sovereignty. These are just the entry costs of the post-WWII international order, an order that India chose to join and from which it has benefited immensely.
• Real statecraft is about constantly adjusting your behavior based on shifting global power balances. It's practical calibration, not subjugation.

The reality of the trade-off

When you look at the math, the argument for playing ball with the US is incredibly strong. Look at what the American relationship actually delivers:

• It's the primary engine for India's $250 billion IT sector.
• It keeps the vital H-1B pipeline open for Indian talent.
• It brings in critical defence tech transfers, like the GE F-414 engines needed for the TEJAS Mk2 fighter jets.
• It gives India major strategic cover against China through the Quad, without forcing New Delhi into a rigid, formal military alliance.
• It brought about the 2008 Civil Nuclear Deal, which was arguably the single biggest boost to India's strategic standing since the Cold War.

Those Russian oil discounts saved Indian refiners roughly $12 a barrel. Meanwhile, the US economic and strategic relationship is worth hundreds of billions every single year. A government that risks a massive, multi-billion-dollar relationship just to save a few bucks on a barrel of oil isn't protecting its sovereignty, it's committing strategic malpractice.

India has handled the pressure better than most

Compared to almost any other middle power, India has held its ground remarkably well under US pressure:

• Look at Turkey: they bought the exact same S-400 system from Russia, got hit with formal US sanctions under CAATSA, and got kicked straight out of the F-35 fighter jet program. India bought the S-400 and got a pass. That's not giving in; that's incredibly smart diplomacy.
• India has steadfastly refused to sign any formal military alliance with Washington, refused to vote against Russia at the UN, refused to take an official stance on Taiwan, and managed to keep its footprint in BRICS while simultaneously deepening ties with the Quad. And Modi openly pushed back on Trump's claims regarding the Pakistan ceasefire.

What looks like giving in from one angle looks a lot like masterclass fence-sitting from another.

The Iran and Chabahar exits aren't total disasters

Let's be realistic about Iran: under heavy global sanctions, it has always been an incredibly unreliable partner for infrastructure projects:

• Chabahar's actual trade volume was consistently low. The connecting roads and rail lines up into Afghanistan were lagging, and then Afghanistan completely collapsed under the Taliban anyway.
• Walking away from that $120 million investment might just be a case of cutting losses on a sunk cost. The returns on Chabahar were always up in the air, and US pressure gave India a convenient, face-saving excuse to exit a stalled project.
• Plus, India quickly replaced that lost Iranian oil with heavily discounted Russian crude anyway, which actually served its immediate economic goals much better.

On China: Playing a weak hand defensively

The claim that India is letting China walk all over its borders has some weight, but the reality is about hard capabilities, not a lack of will:

• New Delhi hasn't voluntarily handed anything over to Beijing. Any ground lost was forced by a much larger military machine or the immediate threat of escalating conflict.
• The disengagement at Galwan required Indian troops to step back because they were facing a massive PLA buildup that had suddenly moved 5,000 troops to the front line. India pulled back because the alternative was triggering a full-scale mountain war it wasn't fully prepared to win at that specific place and time.
• A nation's sovereignty isn't destroyed just because a stronger neighbor makes aggressive, loud claims. It's destroyed if those claims are successfully turned into permanent occupation of administered territory, and that has not happened in Arunachal Pradesh.

The Operation Sindoor story is overblown

Trump claiming he single-handedly brokered a ceasefire is just typical Trump rhetoric. He's claimed credit for stopping the war in Ukraine the exact same way:

• Modi openly and publicly set the record straight right after the claim was made.
• There is zero actual evidence behind the scenes showing that India stopped its military operations just because Washington called.
• The opposition weaponizing Trump's tweets to paint the government as weak is just standard, everyday domestic politics.

Strategic autonomy is a legit strategy, not a buzzword

India is literally the only major country on the planet that sits simultaneously in the Quad, BRICS, the SCO, the G20, and the Non-Aligned Movement. No other nation handles that kind of tightrope walk. The concessions India makes here and there on oil, trade, or diplomatic statements are just the inevitable transaction costs of keeping a foot in every single camp. If you want a seat at every table, you have to pay the occasional entry fee.

Where the defense runs into a wall

To be completely fair, there are points where the government's justification wears incredibly thin:

• The Chabahar exit is genuinely tough to defend. No matter how you spin it, India spent over a decade building a vital strategic corridor, only to drop a $120 million investment and a fresh 10-year operating contract just because a foreign administration changed its policy overnight. That is a concrete, painful concession of a core national interest.
• The Russian oil situation is a textbook trap that Washington manufactured. Even Jaishankar had to call it out publicly. Asking a partner country to buy oil to keep global prices down, and then turning around and punishing them for doing exactly that, is pure financial coercion, plain and simple.
• The tech sector's extreme vulnerability to H-1B visa changes is a massive structural flaw that has been left completely unaddressed. Having 75% of your crown-jewel industry's access to its primary market depend on the whims of politicians in Washington is a dangerous dependency that should have been solved years ago.
• On China, dismissing the systematic renaming of places in Arunachal Pradesh as harmless cartographic nonsense might be a massive mistake, given that Beijing did the exact same thing with Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea before they completely consolidated control. A repetitive cycle of issuing strongly worded diplomatic protests and moving on feels dangerously passive given China's long-term track record.

Also In recent the politicians at helm, have been restraining to act against US for the killings of seafarers...

Indians lack discipline, respect for public spaces, and basic consideration for others. It shows up everywhere, from op-eds and viral social media threads to everyday dinner-table conversations. But in many cases, this diagnosis gets the problem backwards. What is often described as a failure of civic sense is, in reality, a failure of systems, institutions, and infrastructure. We see the behaviour and assume a moral flaw. We rarely stop to examine the conditions producing it. When you zoom out, the picture begins to look very different.

1. The Train Problem: Exam Aspirants and the Ticketless Masses

Today, June 14, 2026, chaotic scenes unfolded at Patna Junction as thousands of candidates appearing for the Bihar Police Prohibition Department exam struggled to board severely overcrowded trains. Many missed their exams entirely. One student, Ravi Kumar, summed up the situation in a single sentence: "There are 14 lakh students and only two trains from Patliputra. How many can travel? I missed my first-shift exam."

This is not some extraordinary one-off incident. It is a recurring structural crisis that returns every exam season because the underlying problems never get fixed.

• Exam centre allocation is broken. JEE Main 2023 students who selected Ballia, Mau, and Varanasi as their preferred centres found themselves assigned to Dehradun, in another state, just days before the exam. AIIMS INI CET 2026 candidates were allotted centres 500-600 kilometres from home, with some calling the process unfair after paying Rs 4,000 in fees only to be forced into expensive long-distance travel.
• Railway supply is structurally inadequate. Indian Railways carries more than 22 million passengers every day, yet coaches on many routes routinely operate at several times their intended capacity. As one journalist remarked, securing a confirmed Tatkal ticket on a busy route can feel harder than clearing UPSC.
• Ticketless travel is not always a matter of choice. When a waitlisted ticket fails to confirm, it is automatically cancelled, effectively leaving a passenger ticketless while they are already at the station. Bihar has India's highest poverty rate at 51.91%, while Uttar Pradesh stands at 37.79%. These are also the states producing some of the largest pools of government-job aspirants and the highest concentrations of ticketless travel.

The person boarding a train without a confirmed ticket is not necessarily displaying a lack of civic values. They are often making a straightforward calculation: pay a Rs 1,000 fine if caught, or miss a government job examination that may represent their family's best chance of economic mobility. What looks like civic failure is often poverty, exam mismanagement, and inadequate railway capacity compressed into a single photograph.

2. Open Defecation: The Toilet That Wasn't There

When Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was launched in 2014, roughly 400 million Indians practiced open defecation. Millions of toilets were subsequently built, and by 2019 around 600 million people had gained access to sanitation facilities. Yet a 2022 WHO and UNICEF report found that 17% of rural Indians still practiced open defecation.

At first glance, this appears to be a civic problem. A closer look tells a more complicated story.

• Only about 30% of villages have toilets connected to functional sewage treatment systems. Many pit latrines require manual emptying every few years because no proper sewage infrastructure exists.
• A Rice University survey found that many households avoid pit toilets due to the stigma attached to cleaning them and their association with manual scavenging and caste.
• Research by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso found that Hindus are significantly less likely to use toilets than Muslims across income levels, suggesting that caste attitudes, not simply poverty, play a major role.

The government builds a toilet. The toilet eventually needs emptying. The work of emptying it remains tied to a deeply stigmatized occupation that society officially condemns but often continues to practice informally. Families refuse to engage with the system and continue defecating in the open. The behaviour is labelled a lack of civic sense, while the role of caste, absent sewage infrastructure, and weak enforcement of constitutional protections receives far less attention. In cities such as Bhopal and Patna, more than 60% of public toilets for women are reportedly non-functional. Women are left with limited options and then judged for the choices available to them.

3. Littering: No Dustbins, No Civic Sense

India generates approximately 43 million tonnes of municipal solid waste every year. Around 31 million tonnes ends up dumped in landfills, while only 11.9 million tonnes is formally treated. A 2023 survey covering 700 villages found that only 36% had public dustbins, nearly two-thirds of rural families regularly burned plastic waste, and fewer than 30% had access to regular waste collection vehicles.

In Bengaluru, authorities removed public dustbins from many streets in an effort to encourage household waste segregation. The policy often backfired. Many residents working irregular schedules found it difficult to coordinate with limited garbage collection timings. One editorial noted that it is unreasonable for municipal authorities to place the entire burden on citizens while failing to provide even basic waste-disposal infrastructure.

The broken window theory is frequently used to explain why people litter in already dirty spaces. But the theory cuts both ways. The first signal of neglect is often not the litter itself. It is the absence of a dustbin.

4. Jaywalking and Traffic Violations: You Can't Walk on What Doesn't Exist

A 2024 report found that more than 60% of roads in Pune, Delhi, and Hyderabad lacked footpaths. Among the footpaths that did exist, only 26% met the standards laid down by the Indian Road Congress. Many were damaged, blocked by parked vehicles, or occupied for other uses.

Even traffic officials acknowledge the problem. A Cyberabad DCP Traffic officer stated bluntly: when we have not created any footpath for pedestrians, how can we book cases against them?

People cross roads where they can because overpasses and underpasses are often inaccessible, physically demanding, or poorly located. Bus stops are frequently positioned far from designated crossings, forcing pedestrians to navigate open traffic. The consequences are severe. Pedestrian deaths increased from 29,124 in 2021 to 32,825 in 2022, a rise of 12.7%. In Ahmedabad, pedestrians accounted for 44% of road fatalities in 2023.

These individuals are not simply ignoring traffic rules. Many are trying to move through an environment that was never designed around their needs.

5. Honking: Road Rage That Is Actually a System Deficiency

Responsibility for controlling noise pollution and honking is divided among pollution boards, municipalities, and police departments. The result is fragmented enforcement and limited accountability. Symbolic anti-honking campaigns rarely address the underlying reasons drivers honk so frequently. One Mumbai traffic official admitted that honking enforcement ranks relatively low among policing priorities.

The deeper issue is not simply aggression. It is road design. Drivers use horns as navigation tools because they cannot see around blind corners, because traffic consists of a chaotic mix of vehicles and pedestrians moving at different speeds, and because lane discipline becomes difficult where lane rules are inconsistently enforced. The culture of constant honking is real, but it often emerges from structural disorder rather than causing it.

6. Footpath Encroachment by Hawkers: Livelihood Dressed Up as Civic Failure

Mumbai is home to roughly 250,000 street vendors. Kolkata has around 200,000. Authorities frequently classify street vending as illegal even though it provides livelihoods for some of the most economically vulnerable groups in society.

Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to practice a trade or profession. That protection extends to hawkers, yet street vending remained trapped in legal uncertainty for decades. The Street Vendors Act of 2014 was meant to resolve the issue, but implementation has been patchy. Designated vending zones remain limited. Regularisation remains incomplete. Rehabilitation efforts often fall short.

In Kolkata, hundreds of thousands of hawkers support not only themselves but also millions of consumers who depend on affordable goods and services. Removing them is not merely the demolition of stalls. It affects local markets and household purchasing power. The blocked footpath is a civic problem. But its root cause is often the absence of viable economic alternatives.

7. Public Hospital Overcrowding: The Floor Is Not Indignity, It's Capacity Arithmetic

Public hospitals in major cities frequently treat patients on the floor. A senior doctor at KEM Hospital in Mumbai explained the situation simply: "We only have 1,350 beds and get 1,700 patients. We cannot refuse admission."

India has approximately 1.3 hospital beds per 1,000 people, far below the WHO recommendation of three. During peak illness seasons, hospitals routinely operate beyond capacity. The sight of patients lying on floors is often portrayed as evidence of disorder. In reality, it is frequently the result of decades of underinvestment colliding with overwhelming demand.

The 2024 Jhansi NICU fire, which killed 18 newborns, occurred in a ward housing 55 infants despite being designed for only 18 beds. That is not a failure of civic behaviour. It is a capacity crisis.

8. The Water Crisis and the Violence of Queuing

When water does not reliably reach homes, people adapt. Women in lower-income neighbourhoods often spend hours waiting in lines, negotiating with tanker operators, storing water, and rationing it carefully. That lost time comes at the expense of education, paid work, and rest.

India's water crisis is not simply about scarcity. It is also about poor governance, pollution, leakage, mispricing, and distribution failures. When fights break out at a public tap, the common explanation is that people lack patience or civic sense. But if the tap runs for only a few hours a day, tanker schedules are unreliable, and private water costs several times more, the situation looks very different.

What appears to be aggression is often scarcity expressed through human behaviour.

The Psychology Underneath All of It

Economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir argue that scarcity consumes mental bandwidth. When people are preoccupied with urgent concerns such as money, transport, water, food, or deadlines, their capacity for planning, patience, and self-control is reduced.

As Mullainathan put it: "If I made you poor tomorrow, you'd probably start behaving in many of the same ways we associate with poor people."

This perspective helps explain queue-jumping, pushing, and ticketless travel not as moral defects but as predictable responses to scarcity. The person cutting a line at a ration shop may not be acting out of selfishness. They may simply fear that supplies will run out before their turn arrives.

The civic sense lecture targets the symptom. The system producing scarcity often escapes scrutiny.

■The Indore Counterproof

Perhaps the strongest challenge to the claim that Indians inherently lack civic sense is the example of Indore, repeatedly ranked as India's cleanest city.

Indore's success did not begin with motivational campaigns about cleanliness. It began with functioning systems. Door-to-door waste collection. A working segregation framework. Waste-processing infrastructure. Consistent administrative effort. Garbage collection became reliable enough that residents could actually participate in it.

Indore is not cleaner because its residents are somehow genetically or morally superior. It is cleaner because the municipal system works. When institutions function, citizen behaviour tends to follow. Kigali in Rwanda is often cited for similar reasons. Community responsibility matters, but it becomes meaningful only when supported by institutions that make responsible behaviour possible.

◇The Diagnostic Frame That Changes Everything

The question that India's civic sense debate rarely asks is deceptively simple: what minimum level of infrastructure should exist before we hold citizens fully responsible for their behaviour?

A footpath should exist before we blame someone for walking on the road.

A dustbin should exist before we blame someone for littering.

A train should have adequate capacity before we blame someone for boarding without a ticket.

A toilet should be functional before we blame someone for defecating outside.

A hospital should have enough beds before we blame patients for lying on the floor.

A government should provide legal and regulated vending spaces before blaming hawkers for occupying footpaths.

India's civic sense problem is real. But it is often downstream rather than upstream. Beneath many of these behaviours lie decades of infrastructure gaps, institutional failures, sanitation barriers shaped by caste, examination systems sending students hundreds of kilometres from home, overcrowded rail networks, and municipal policies that remove facilities without creating workable alternatives.

What appears to be millions of individual moral failures may, in many cases, be a single structural failure reflected across millions of individual lives.

Between 1977 and 2017, 2,130 bridges collapsed in India. The CAG estimates that up to 40% of infrastructure budgets are lost to corruption. Put those two facts side by side and you almost have the entire story. India doesn't really have an infrastructure problem. It has a governance problem that keeps showing up through infrastructure.

The same patterns repeat themselves across states, political parties, and decades. The same collapses. The same inquiries. The same compensation announcements. The same reports that disappear from public memory. And every time it happens, everyone behaves as though it came out of nowhere. Here's how the system actually works.

Before the first brick is laid, the dominant procurement system is L1, where the contract goes to the lowest bidder. In theory, this protects taxpayers. In practice:

• Firms deliberately underbid to secure contracts, then recover their losses through collusion with supervising engineers who approve inflated claims, extra items, and ghost works that were never actually executed. These are often called suicide bids. Nobody plans to build at the quoted price. That was never the objective.
• At the state level, a fixed commission often moves up the political chain for every tender. The contractor pays politicians, pays engineers, pays inspectors to look the other way, and then builds whatever can be built with the money that's left. The public ends up getting a bridge constructed for a fraction of the amount that was sanctioned.
• 65% of India's sand demand comes from government infrastructure projects. Yet no department has been able to produce bills proving that legal sourcing requirements were actually followed. Illegal sand syndicates operate across Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, backed by politicians, contractors, and enforcement officials who share the profits. The corruption in the supply chain is quite literally built into the foundation.
• The CAG has found projects awarded without any DPR, on falsified documents, or on the basis of faulty DPRs. When there is no proper DPR, there is nothing meaningful to audit against. Costs can balloon, work can be shown as completed when it wasn't, and proving the deviation becomes nearly impossible.

From 2019 to 2024, 42 bridges collapsed across India. Bihar leads the list. But even that number doesn't tell the full story because in Bihar, bridges don't just collapse once.

The Agwani-Sultanganj bridge over the Ganges. Rs 1,700 crore. Contracted to SPS Construction. Foundation stone laid in 2014. Supposed to be completed by 2020. It has now collapsed three times. In 2022. In 2023. In 2024. Not three different bridges. The same bridge.

• An expert report after the 2023 collapse found design flaws, substandard materials, and inadequate seismic and hydraulic testing. The conclusion was blunt: "Repairing this mess would be throwing good money after bad."
• The engineer who approved payments to SPS despite an existing ban on the company was suspended.
• Bihar's Deputy Chief Minister alleged that the project file went missing for days.
• A banned company continued receiving money. An expert panel said the bridge should be scrapped. Bihar rebuilt it. It collapsed again.

June and July 2024 saw Bihar record its 13th bridge collapse in just three weeks. One bridge in Araria collapsed before it had even been opened, while the approach roads were still under construction. The government suspended 15 engineers. Which is both an accountability measure and, in its own way, an admission. Fifteen people do not independently decide to build fifteen defective bridges. They're all operating inside the same system.

October 30, 2022. The Morbi suspension bridge collapses during Diwali crowds. 135 people die. The bridge had reopened just four days earlier after renovation.

• The company responsible was Oreva Group. Its main business was making clocks and e-bikes. It had no prior experience in bridge management.
• It received a 15-year contract despite the absence of a transparent tendering process, meaningful supervision, or a fitness certificate before reopening.
• Around 400 to 500 people were on the bridge when it collapsed. The stated limit was 20 to 25 people per batch.
• The SIT found corrosion in nearly half the cable wires, old suspenders welded onto new ones, and heavier flooring installed without replacing the rusted main cable.

Oreva's managing director was arrested. The municipal officials who awarded the contract without a tender, without supervision, and without ensuring the bridge was safe to reopen did not face equivalent consequences. That gap between who gets punished and who doesn't is one of the most consistent features of these cases.

July 9, 2025. The Gambhira-Mujpur bridge in Vadodara collapses during peak traffic. Twenty-two people are killed. The bridge was built in 1985. Repaired in 2023. Certified as trafficable. A replacement had already been approved in November 2024. Residents had reportedly been warning authorities about its condition for years. A retired engineer who certified the bridge in both 2023 and 2024 later came under scrutiny. The ACB began investigating whether he had left the country after the collapse.

A bridge was inspected, certified safe, repaired, certified safe again, and then it killed 22 people. The inspector may have fled. Somehow, this is where the story keeps ending.

Bharatmala, the flagship national highway programme, was sanctioned to build 34,800 km of highways. The CAG audit tabled in Parliament in August 2023 found:

• Costs had risen from the approved Rs 13.98 crore per km to Rs 23.89 crore per km.
• Less than 39% of the approved length had been completed by March 2023 despite spending significantly more money.
• The Dwarka Expressway alone went from Rs 528.8 crore to Rs 7,287.2 crore. A 1,278% increase. It was approved without any DPR.
• Bidders were selected using falsified documents. More than Rs 3,598 crore was diverted from ring-fenced escrow accounts that were specifically designed to prevent such diversions.

The Union Minister described the CAG findings as a gross misrepresentation of facts. A familiar response.

The 14-km Rampath in Ayodhya, inaugurated ahead of the Ram Mandir consecration in January 2024, developed large potholes and waterlogged stretches after the first rains. Six officers were suspended. A road built for one of the most politically significant events in independent India's history could not survive a single monsoon.

June 28, 2024, 5 AM. The forecourt canopy of Terminal 1 at Delhi Airport collapsed during monsoon rain. It killed a taxi driver named Ramesh Kumar, who was working an overnight shift. Terminal 1 had been renovated and inaugurated by the Prime Minister in March 2024. Four months separated inauguration from collapse. During the same week, the roof of Jabalpur's newly inaugurated airport collapsed, and a water tank in Mathura burst and killed two people.

June 2, 2023. The Coromandel Express, the Yesvantpur-Howrah Superfast Express, and a goods train collide near Bahanaga Bazar in Odisha. 296 people die. More than 1,200 are injured. It becomes India's worst rail disaster in two decades.

• The immediate cause was faulty signalling connections that sent the Coromandel Express into a loop line at full speed.
• In December 2022, just months before the crash, the CAG had reported that almost 70% of railway accidents between 2017-18 and 2020-21 were linked to maintenance failures and derailments. Mandatory inspections had been skipped in more than half the required cases.
• More than 300,000 posts remained vacant across Indian Railways. Funding for track renewal had been cut by 14% in the 2022 budget.
• At the same time, the government was announcing Vande Bharat trains and high-speed corridors. New trains. Old, undermaintained tracks. A workforce stretched to its limits.

Whether anyone in the Railway Board read the CAG report and acted on it before 296 people died has never been satisfactorily answered.

The Smart Cities Mission was launched in 2015. One hundred cities. Rs 1.64 lakh crore. It promised completion by 2023, was extended to 2025, and then quietly faded away.

• As of April 2025, 518 projects worth Rs 13,142 crore were still unfinished despite a government press release in July 2024 claiming everything would be completed by March 31, 2025.
• In Chhattisgarh, 84% of the Nava Raipur Smart City work was awarded to a single contractor. Another 128 projects failed to meet basic smart-city standards.
• In Srinagar, the CFO and Executive Engineer of Srinagar Smart City Limited were arrested for possessing assets disproportionate to their income, including multiple properties and benami assets, despite Rs 466 crore already being spent on projects, many of which lacked environmental clearances.
• As of December 2023, 47% of projects in the 20 lowest-ranked cities were still stuck at the work-order stage. Paperwork existed. Construction did not.

The post-collapse ritual follows a script, and everyone already knows their role.

• A minister visits the site. Ex-gratia compensation is announced, usually Rs 2 to 4 lakh per death. Grief is displayed before the cameras.
• Junior engineers are suspended. Lower-level contractors are arrested.
• A committee is formed. The opposition blames the government. The government blames someone else. Plenty of noise is generated. Accountability is not.
• The report is submitted. It disappears into a drawer. Engineers are eventually reinstated. Contractors return through subsidiaries. The next contract goes to the next lowest bidder.

The Agwani-Sultanganj bridge collapsed in 2022, was rebuilt, collapsed again in 2023, was rebuilt again, and collapsed yet again in 2024. Because nothing fundamental changed. Not the L1 system. Not the commission structure. Not contractor blacklisting. Not supervision. The cycle doesn't break because the bridge gets repaired, but the system never does.

Since 2006, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative has documented 99 RTI activists killed and 180 physically assaulted. These were ordinary people asking for project files, payment records, contractor details, and inspection reports.

• In Bihar, activists were killed after exposing irregularities in road construction and housing schemes.
• In Gujarat, Nanjibhai Sondharva was beaten to death after filing RTIs on financial irregularities in development projects.
• In Maharashtra, Satish Shetty was murdered after exposing land scams near Pune.
• The first widely recognised case was Satyendra Dubey in 2003, an engineer murdered after raising concerns about corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral road project.

The Whistle Blowers Protection Act was passed in 2014 to protect exactly these people. It still has not been fully operationalised. A law meant to protect those exposing corruption has itself never been properly implemented.

Why does none of this change?

• Infrastructure contracts are one of the primary ways political funding flows through the system at the state level. The commission system isn't an accidental side effect. In many cases, it is the point.
• A public works engineer who flags quality issues risks transfers, stalled promotions, and sometimes outright threats. One bureaucrat who exposed Rs 400 crore worth of illegal sand mining was transferred eleven times in eleven years. The rational career choice becomes compliance, not accountability.
• The CAG can audit but cannot enforce. Courts can issue directions, but implementation still depends on the same machinery that produced the problem.
• Infrastructure is largely a state subject. The Centre blames the state. The state blames the contractor. The contractor blames the engineer. The engineer has already been suspended and later reinstated.
• The media cycle usually moves on within a few days.

Between 2018 and 2022, more than 8,500 people were killed by collapsing public infrastructure. Ninety-nine citizens were killed simply for asking questions about it. A highway programme spent roughly 40% above approved costs while completing less than 39% of its target. A bridge collapsed three times in three years while the contractor continued operating. A newly renovated airport terminal came down just four months after the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The story of Indian infrastructure corruption is ultimately a story about the gap between what the state announces and what it actually delivers, and about who profits from that gap. The gap is enormous. And the people benefiting from it are remarkably well organised.

Sources :

Bridge Collapses — Bihar

• https://earthjournalism.net/stories/inside-the-repeated-collapse-of-a-bihar-bridge-and-its-ecological-impact
• https://www.groundreport.in/groundreport/inside-repeated-collapse-of-a-bihar-bridge-and-its-ecological-impact/
• https://www.outlookindia.com/national/explained-shoddy-construction-missed-deadlines-and-a-cover-up-how-the-4-lane-bihar-bridge-collapsed-news-292918
• https://latest.sundayguardianlive.com/news/bridge-collapse-in-bihar-exposes-commission-system
• https://www.deccanherald.com/india/bihar/another-bridge-collapses-in-bihar-13th-such-mishap-in-3-weeks-3099939

Morbi Bridge Collapse

• https://polstrat.medium.com/morbi-mishap-rethink-public-infrastructure-management-urgently-39571d3065e8
• https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/morbi-bridge-collapse-clock-making-firm-with-no-prior-experience-was-awarded-contract-for-maintenance
• https://www.pressreader.com/india/hindustan-times-gurugram/20221118/282106345633268
• https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/2/20/broken-wires-faulty-renovation-caused-india-bridge-mishap-probe

Gambhira Bridge Collapse, Gujarat 2025

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambhira_Bridge_collapse
• https://english.gujaratsamachar.com/news/gujarat/corruption-substandard-construction-to-blame-for-gambhira-bridge-collapse-that-killed-15-in-gujarat
• https://english.gujaratsamachar.com/news/gujarat/acb-to-probe-gambhira-bridge-collapse-sit-formed-to-investigate-misuse-of-power-funds
• https://deshgujarat.com/2025/08/13/acb-gujarat-summons-retd-rb-engineer-others-in-gambhira-bridge-collapse-case/
• https://www.thecivilengineer.org/news/structural-deterioration-leads-to-fatal-bridge-failure-of-gambhira-bridge

Delhi Airport T1 Collapse

• https://www.outlookindia.com/national/delhi-airport-roof-collapse-indira-gandhi-international-airport-igi-aviation-minister-ram-mohan-naidu-kinjarapu-dgca
• https://www.cbsnews.com/news/delhi-airport-roof-collapse-india-severe-weather-death
• https://www.deccanherald.com/india/delhi-rains-roof-collapse-at-t-1-leaves-1-dead-five-injured-3084485

Bharatmala / Highway Corruption (CAG Reports)

• https://theprint.in/india/modi-govts-corruption-in-infra-projects-taking-nation-on-highway-to-hell-says-congress/1714486/
• https://www.business-standard.com/politics/corruption-in-infra-projects-taking-nation-on-highway-to-hell-cong-123081400732_1.html
• https://thefederal.com/category/news/roads-bridges-new-infra-poor-quality-l1-reform-229775
• https://tehelka.com/cag-report-flagship-schemes-red-flagged/

Odisha Train Crash (Balasore 2023)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Odisha_train_collision
• https://thefederal.com/news/odisha-train-tragedy-cag-report-flagged-concerns-on-rail-safety
• https://therealnews.com/indian-railways-train-crash-balasore
• https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1797137/deadly-india-rail-crash-caused-by-faulty-signal-connections-made-during-repair

Smart Cities Mission

• https://theprobe.in/governance/scm-mess-smart-cities-mission-trips-on-graft-delays-false-promises-8989678
• https://thefederal.com/category/analysis/smart-cities-vision-derailed-by-poor-execution-shifting-priorities-138369
• https://www.etvbharat.com/en/state/huge-losses-corruption-in-chhattisgarh-psus-and-smart-city-mission-cag-report-enn25121801811

Sand Mafia

• https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Sand-Mining-in-India-Report-17Jul1045-Web.pdf
• https://bpr.studentorg.berkeley.edu/2019/04/30/murder-and-famine-sands-story-in-21st-century-india/
• https://grokipedia.com/page/Political-criminal_nexus_in_India

Ayodhya Roads

• https://clarionindia.net/first-rains-reveal-crumbling-ayodhya-infrastructure-six-officers-suspended/
• https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/2/1/indias-ayodhya-wakes-up-to-harsh-realities-after-modis-ram-temple-event

RTI Activists Killed

• https://www.moneylife.in/article/in-bihar-too-20-rti-activists-killed-for-exposing-corruption-but-hardly-any-conviction-families-continue-to-suffer/67743.html
• https://m.thewire.in/article/rights/despite-20-rti-activists-killed-in-bihar-no-expedited-probes-rights-groups-point-to-disturbing-trend
• https://hrdmemorial.org/india-government-contractors-lobbies-and-politicians-responsible-for-most-rti-related-killings-in-india-82-activists-killed-for-asking-questions-under-the-right-to-information-act/
• https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/statement-report/targeted-attacks-against-right-information-activists
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_RTI_activists_in_India

General / Overarching Infrastructure Failures

• https://reflections.live/articles/5446/infrastructure-failures-in-india-the-cost-of-poor-governance-and-systemic-corruption-muhammed-shibili-tp-17220-lzzsrh0t.html
• https://zeenews.india.com/india/how-corruption-poor-infrastructure-are-costing-quality-life-to-indians-dna-decodes-2929475.html
• https://jk-singh.com/2025/08/30/indias-infrastructure-through-a-global-lens-a-monument-of-corruption/

*the opinions here are mine and I am very open to listen and correct, just be dignified and keep the comments critical..

There's Pranit More's role as a comedian and content creator. There's Himanshu Jangra's remarks about spending ₹370 on biryani and expecting intimacy in return. And then there's Sejal Pawar's cadaver joke.

The part that interests me most isn't what was said on stage. Comedy clubs are full of people saying stupid, offensive, embarrassing things. The real story begins afterwards. Himanshu made the remark during a live crowd-work interaction. But the fact is he actually fueled the conversation.Moreover, Pranit More later went home, reviewed the footage, edited it, added subtitles, packaged it for maximum engagement, and uploaded it. That wasn't a spontaneous moment. It was a deliberate editorial decision. He looked at a clip where a man implied that buying dinner created a sexual expectation and concluded that it was content worth distributing to hundreds of thousands of people. The backlash exists largely because of that choice, not because of what happened in the room itself.

Some argue that comedians upload crowd-work clips all the time and cannot be expected to morally endorse everything audience members say. That's true up to a point. But editing and publishing content isn't passive documentation. Once you choose to amplify something, you're making a judgment that it deserves a larger audience. That's why the upload matters more than the original exchange. The criticism isn't that he failed to stop Himanshu. The criticism is that he chose to broadcast the moment afterwards.

Himanshu's situation is more complicated than many people admit. He said something publicly, on camera, at a ticketed event. His employer then made an independent decision about whether they wanted to be associated with those remarks. That's not the same thing as a random mob forcing a termination. Employers routinely evaluate reputational risk. At the same time, watching someone lose their livelihood over a thirty-second interaction at a comedy show understandably makes people uncomfortable.

Some people argue that consequences are consequences and that's the end of the discussion. I don't think it's that simple. A society should be capable of acknowledging harmful behaviour while also asking whether the response is proportionate. Otherwise every conversation becomes a binary choice between total forgiveness and maximum punishment. Real life is usually messier than that.

The Sejal Pawar controversy is where proportionality becomes most important. Sejal, a final-year MBBS student, made a crude joke about a cadaver during crowd work. The clip went viral, medical organisations criticised her comments, and she apologised. The key distinction is that her joke, however distasteful, is fundamentally different from Himanshu's remark. Himanshu expressed a worldview that suggested spending money on a woman creates entitlement to intimacy. Sejal made an immature joke about a cadaver. Both can be criticised. They are not equivalent forms of harm.

Some also feel like Himanshu's doesn't emerge in a vacuum. Maybe his friends laughed at similar comments for years. Maybe nobody challenged those attitudes. Maybe the environment rewarded them. That's probably true. But explanation and excuse are different things. An environment can explain why someone developed certain views. It doesn't erase responsibility for expressing them. Peer approval influences choices. It doesn't remove the ability to choose differently.

Where I think social media consistently fails is in defining an endpoint. Accountability should ideally have a purpose: identify a problem, explain why it's harmful, and create pressure for change. Once the goal becomes permanent humiliation, the process stops being corrective and starts becoming punitive. The easiest test is asking whether the criticism is still teaching anyone something. If it's no longer informing, correcting, or preventing harm, it's probably just punishment wearing the language of accountability.

That's why calling Pranit More out for uploading the clip makes sense. Criticising Himanshu's comments makes sense. Medical bodies criticising Sejal's remarks makes sense. Calling Pranit a rapist without evidence does not. Doxxing people does not. Harassing family members does not. Chasing someone indefinitely after they've disappeared from the platform does not. At some point criticism stops serving a public purpose and becomes entertainment.

There's also a practical reality that the internet rarely rewards nuance. Outrage is easier to spread than proportionality. Once a name enters the algorithmic grinder, every new piece of information gets processed at the highest possible emotional setting. A bad joke, a bad opinion, a bad editorial decision, and an actual crime all begin receiving similar treatment because outrage operates on momentum rather than careful distinctions.

My overall view is fairly simple. Pranit More deserved criticism because the upload was a deliberate choice and patterns matter. Himanshu faced a consequence that was harsh but not entirely unforeseeable. Sejal appears to be receiving a level of backlash that maybe exceeds the actual nature of what she did. And the broader internet response demonstrates, once again, that social media is extremely good at generating attention and extremely bad at calibrating punishment.

The biggest lesson here isn't about comedy, influencers, or even these specific individuals. It's that once outrage becomes the main currency of a conversation, proportionality is usually the first casualty. What begins as accountability can very quickly turn into momentum. And momentum has no brakes.

Remember this mate, I am sure you have seen those low effort memes......An influencer called Parley recorded mate without his consent, posted it online.......and we as society showed the place of humanity in our scale of action....Mate is really intelligent and thoughtful but was mocked for something that we cannot accept despite the fact that it is not a choice.....We need to actually question ourselves whether we are actually progressing or regressing.....Coz no one here seems to bother about someone's dignity and just think for once that the person also has some emotions......they too deserve the same respect and dignity as anyone else......

*Please Keep the Comments Critical......rather than writing random stuff like: every third post about blah blah.....

*(this post is just created seeing the interest)

Sources :

1. Supreme Court Observer — Umar Khalid Bail Application Tracker https://www.scobserver.in/journal/umar-khalid-bail-application-tracker/

2. Supreme Court Observer — Why Was Umar Khalid Denied Bail Under UAPA https://www.scobserver.in/journal/sco-daily-why-was-umar-khalid-denied-bail-under-uapa/

3. Supreme Court Observer — Constitutional Abdication, Not Judicial Restraint https://www.scobserver.in/journal/umar-khalid-bail-case-constitutional-abdication-not-judicial-restraint/

4. Supreme Court Observer — SC Seeks Reference to Larger Bench to Resolve UAPA Bail Divergence https://www.scobserver.in/journal/sc-seeks-reference-to-a-larger-bench-to-resolve-uapa-bail-divergence/

5. Supreme Court Observer — SC Reserves Judgment on Khalid Bail https://www.scobserver.in/journal/umar-khalids-bail-application-supreme-court-reserves-judgement/

6. Supreme Court Observer — Charge Sheet Wrongly Paints Umar Khalid as Terrorist https://www.scobserver.in/journal/charge-sheet-wrongly-paints-umar-khalid-as-a-terrorist-says-counsel-at-delhi-hc/

7. LawChakra — Delhi Riots Chargesheet, Umar Khalid Arguments in Sessions Court https://lawchakra.in/other-courts/delhi-riots-chargesheet-umar-khalid/

8. LiveLaw — NEET UG Cancellation, Revisiting SC Advice to NTA After 2024 Paper Leak https://www.livelaw.in/amp/top-stories/neet-ug-cancellation-revisiting-supreme-courts-advice-to-nta-after-2024-paper-leak-534717

9. Tribune India — Ex-JNU Student Umar Khalid Arrested in Connection with Riots Case https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/ex-jnu-student-leader-umar-khalid-arrested-in-connection-with-northeast-delhi-riots-141084

10. Tribune India — Court Denies Bail to Umar Khalid for 2020 Delhi Riots https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/court-denies-bail-to-former-jnu-student-umar-khalid-for-2020-delhi-riots-380333

11. Tribune India — 2020 Riots: Being on WhatsApp Groups Doesn't Indicate Criminality https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/2020-delhi-riots-being-on-whatsapp-groups-doesnt-indicate-criminality-says-khalids-counsel

12. Tribune India — AAP Govt Gives Nod to Prosecute Umar Khalid Under UAPA https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/delhi-riots-consipracy-case-aap-govt-gives-nod-to-prosecute-umar-khalid-under-uapa-166941

13. Deccan Herald — Delhi Police Arrest Umar Khalid in Connection with Riots Case https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india/delhi-police-arrest-umar-khalid-in-connection-with-riots-case-887135.html

14. Deccan Herald — 2020 Riots: Being Part of WhatsApp Groups Doesn't Show Criminality https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india/delhi/2020-riots-being-part-of-whatsapp-groups-doesnt-show-criminality-umar-khalid-to-delhi-high-court-3414478.html

15. Deccan Herald — Chronology of Events in Delhi Riots Case Involving Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam https://www.deccanherald.com/india/chronology-of-events-in-delhi-riots-case-involving-umar-khalid-sharjeel-imam-3851856

16. Deccan Herald — Umar Khalid, Saifi Discharged in 2020 Northeast Delhi Riots Case https://www.deccanherald.com/india/2020-delhi-riots-umar-khalid-saifi-discharged

17. Deccan Herald — Umar and Sharjeel Used Social Media for Indoctrination for Chakka Jaam https://www.deccanherald.com/india/delhi-riots-umar-khalid-sharjeel-imam-used-social-media-for-indoctrination-of-youths-for-chakka-jaam-891427.html

18. Scroll.in — Umar Khalid Arrested Under UAPA, Sent to 10-Day Police Custody https://scroll.in/latest/973010/delhi-violence-former-jnu-student-umar-khalid-arrested-under-uapa

19. Scroll.in — Umar Khalid Not My Guru, No Connection With Him https://scroll.in/latest/1089872/umar-khalid-not-my-guru-no-connection-with-him-sharjeel-imam-tells-court-in-riots-conspiracy-case

20. Al Jazeera — Delhi Riots Case: Why Won't India Release Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/5/delhi-riots-case-why-wont-india-release-umar-khalid-and-sharjeel-imam

21. Al Jazeera — India Ex-Student Leader Arrested for Alleged Role in Delhi Riots https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/9/14/india-ex-student-leader-arrested-for-alleged-role-in-delhi-riots

22. Deccan Herald — JNU Student Activist Umar Attacked Near Parliament https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/archives/jnu-student-activist-umar-attacked-near-parliament-687301.html

23. Deccan Herald — Khalid Shares Pic of Suspect https://www.deccanherald.com/india/khalid-shares-pic-suspect-687840.html

24. Deccan Herald — Special Cell Takes Over Umar Khalid Attack Investigation https://www.deccanherald.com/india/spl-cell-takes-over-umar-687600.html

25. Hindustan Times — Attack on Umar Khalid: Two Haryana Men Held https://www.pressreader.com/india/hindustan-times-chandigarh/20180821/281775630008452

26. DNA India — Chargesheet Filed in IB Officer Ankit Sharma Murder Case https://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-delhi-riots-chargesheet-filed-in-ib-officer-ankit-sharma-murder-case-suspended-aap-councillor-tahir-hussain-named-2826768

27. The Quint — Inside Delhi Police Charge Sheet on Ankit Sharma Case https://www.thequint.com/news/india/ankit-sharma-ib-officer-delhi-police-charge-sheet-ne-delhi-riots

28. Tribune India — Deep Rooted Conspiracy Behind Killing of IB Officer https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/deep-rooted-conspiracy-behind-killing-of-ib-officer-during-delhi-riots-police-tells-court-93963

29. Deccan Herald — Deep Rooted Conspiracy Behind Killing of IB Officer https://www.deccanherald.com/india/deep-rooted-conspiracy-behind-killing-of-ib-officer-during-delhi-riots-police-tells-court-845385.html

30. India.com — Tahir Hussain Confesses His Role in Northeast Delhi Riots https://www.india.com/news/india/tahir-hussain-confesses-his-role-in-northeast-delhi-riots-say-police-4100829/

31. Deccan Herald — Tahir Hussain Gave Money for Purchasing Ammunition https://www.deccanherald.com/india/delhi-riots-tahir-hussain-gave-money-for-purchasing-ammunition-for-big-riot-police-tells-court-847313.html

32. Deccan Herald — Tahir Hussain Admits His Role in Delhi Violence https://www.deccanherald.com/india/tahir-hussain-admits-his-role-in-delhi-violence-report-868974.html

33. Swarajya — Every House Became a Fortress https://swarajyamag.com/politics/every-house-became-a-fortress-a-survivors-account-of-tahir-hussains-delhi-riots

34. Deccan Herald — Delhi High Court Grants Bail to Tahir Hussain in 5 Cases https://www.deccanherald.com/india/2020-delhi-riots-delhi-high-court-grants-bail-to-former-aap-councillor-tahir-hussain-in-5-cases-1236195.html

35. Hindustan Times — AAP Leader Tahir Hussain Booked for Murder https://www.pressreader.com/india/hindustan-times-jalandhar/20200228/281891595312510

36. Hindustan Times — Tahir Hussain Held for IB Officer's Murder https://www.pressreader.com/india/hindustan-times-st-jaipur/20200317/281689731885444

37. Tribune India — Sharjeel Imam Seeks Bail in Sedition Case https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/sharjeel-imam-seeks-bail-in-sedition-case-denies-encouraging-violence-during-anti-caa-protests-283638

38. Tribune India — Sharjeel Imam Denies Links With Co-Conspirators https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/delhi-riots-sharjeel-imam-denies-links-with-co-conspirators

39. Tribune India — Cops Raid Sharjeel Imam's Bihar Home https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/cops-raid-sharjeel-imams-bihar-home-32072

40. Tribune India — Delhi Police Arrests Sharjeel Imam from Jehanabad https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi-police-arrests-sharjeel-imam-from-jehanabad-32490

41. Scroll.in — Activist Charged With Sedition Says He Called for Peaceful Road Blockades https://scroll.in/latest/951159/citizenship-act-activist-charged-with-sedition-says-he-called-for-peaceful-road-blockades

42. Deccan Herald — No Call for Violence, No Connection With Co-Conspirators https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india/delhi/2020-delhi-riots-no-call-for-violence-no-connection-with-co-conspirators-sharjeel-imam-tells-hc-3315247.html

43. India Legal Live — No Guru, No Plot https://indialegallive.com/constitutional-law-news/courts-news/no-guru-no-plot-sharjeel-imam-denies-any-coordinated-role-with-umar-khalid-in-caa-protest-case/

44. BOOM Live — Sharjeel Imam's AMU Speech Sparks Row https://www.boomlive.in/politics/sharjeel-imams-amu-speech-sparks-row-assam-police-slaps-sedition-6662

45. Raiot.in — Full Transcript and Translation of AMU Speech https://raiot.in/what-was-sharjeel-imam-saying-at-amu-transcript-translation/

46. Hindustan Times — Sharjeel Tried to Create Anarchy https://www.pressreader.com/india/hindustan-times-st-noida/20210902/281775632261350

47. Deccan Herald — AMU Speech Neither Called for Arms Nor Incited Violence https://www.deccanherald.com/national/sharjeel-imams-amu-speech-neither-gave-call-for-anyone-to-bear-arms-nor-incited-violence-allahabad-hc-1056006.html

48. Article 14 — Field Notes: He Does Not Have FOMO https://article14.substack.com/p/field-notes-he-does-not-have-fomo

49. Wikipedia — Umar Khalid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Khalid

50. Grokipedia — Umar Khalid https://grokipedia.com/page/Umar_Khalid

51. The Polis Project — Profile of Umar Khalid https://thepolisproject.com/read/is-it-my-fault-that-i-say-india-is-mine-as-much-as-it-is-yours-a-profile-of-umar-khalid/

52. The News Minute — How Jail Has Changed Umar Khalid https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/from-restless-student-activism-to-calm-awareness-how-jail-has-changed-umar-khalid

53. The Federal — Umar Khalid Has Transformed in Prison https://thefederal.com/news/umar-khalid-has-transformed-as-an-activist-in-the-prison-says-his-father-dr-ilyas

54. The Hindu — Umar Khalid: Activist Behind Bars https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/umar-khalid-activist-behind-bars/article70020563.ece

55. Muslim Mirror — Umar Khalid, Scholar and Activist, 1500+ Days in Jail https://muslimmirror.com/muslim-political-prisoners-series-2-umar-khalid-scholar-activist-1500-days-in-jail/

56. BOOM Live — Did Umar Khalid Raise "Hinduon se Azaadi" Slogan https://www.boomlive.in/fake-news/did-umar-khalid-raise-hinduon-se-azadi-slogan-at-mumbai-protest-6484

57. The Quint — Umar Khalid Did Not Chant "Hinduon se Azadi" https://www.thequint.com/news/webqoof/jnu-umar-khalid-chanted-hinduon-se-azadi-bjp-makes-false-claim-fact-check

58. Alt News — No, Umar Khalid Did Not Raise "Hinduo Se Azadi" https://altnews.in/no-umar-khalid-did-not-raise-hinduo-se-azadi-slogan-at-gateway-of-india-mumbai/

59. Gulf News — Doctored Videos Controversy https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/doctored-videos-controversy-delhi-police-file-status-report-1.1861266

60. Deccan Herald — JNU Row: New Video Showing Outsiders Surfaces https://www.deccanherald.com/india/jnu-row-new-video-showing-outsiders-surfaces-511404.html

61. Deccan Herald — Anti-National Pamphlet Seized https://www.deccanherald.com/india/jnu-row-anti-national-pamphlet-seized-511118.html

62. Scribd — Umar Khalid Full Amravati Speech https://www.scribd.com/document/451536988/Umar-Khalid-Full-Speech

63. Maktoob Media — Beyond the Fate of Afzal Guru https://maktoobmedia.com/2020/02/09/beyond-the-fate-of-mohammed-afzal-13-unanswered-questions-regarding-2001-parliament-attack/

64. The Caravan — Revisiting the Hanging of Afzal Guru https://caravanmagazine.in/crime/revisiting-the-hanging-of-afzal-guru

65. Legal Service India — Constitutional Flaws in Afzal Guru's Execution https://www.legalserviceindia.com/legal/article-21215-constitutional-flaws-in-afzal-guru-s-execution-uncovering-legal-loopholes.html

66. Tribune India — Centre Rules Out Handing Over Afzal's Remains https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/j-k/centre-rules-out-handing-over-afzal-s-remains-to-family-49340

67. Wikipedia — Burhan Wani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burhan_Wani

68. Wikipedia — 2016–2017 Kashmir Unrest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%932017_Kashmir_unrest

69. Outlook India — How Burhan Wani Changed Kashmir Militancy https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/how-burhan-wani-changed-the-definition-of-militancy-in-kashmir/313209

70. The Diplomat — Burhan Wani's Killing Brings Kashmir to a Crossroads https://thediplomat.com/2016/07/burhan-wanis-killing-brings-kashmir-to-a-crossroads/

71. BBC — Kashmir Protests Over Burhan Wani Leave 36 Dead https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-36781367

72. Fox News (AP) — In Death, a Kashmir Rebel Becomes What India Has Long Feared https://www.foxnews.com/world/in-death-a-kashmir-rebel-becomes-what-india-has-long-feared.amp

73. Human Rights Watch — "Shoot the Traitors" https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/04/10/shoot-traitors/discrimination-against-muslims-under-indias-new-citizenship-policy

74. Amnesty International — CAA Is a Blow to Indian Constitutional Values https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/03/india-citizenship-amendment-act-is-a-blow-to-indian-constitutional-values-and-international-standards/

75. Al Jazeera — Why Is India's Citizenship Amendment Act So Controversial https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/12/why-is-indias-citizenship-amendment-act-so-controversial

76. The Intercept — How India's Citizenship Law and NRC Could Target Muslims https://theintercept.com/2020/01/30/india-citizenship-act-caa-nrc-assam/

77. Migration Policy Institute — India's Controversial Citizenship Amendment Act https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/india-controversial-citizenship-amendment-act-register-citizens

78. Scroll.in — Pune Complaint Against Jignesh Mevani and Umar Khalid https://scroll.in/latest/863606/pune-complaint-against-jignesh-mevani-umar-khalid-for-their-alleged-provocative-speeches

79. Tehelka — FIR Against Jignesh Mevani and Umar Khalid https://tehelka.com/bhima-koregaon-violence-fir-against-jignesh-mevani-umar-khalid/

80. Tribune India — Police Brief Maharashtra Govt About Probe in Koregaon Bhima Case https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/police-brief-maharashtra-govt-about-probe-in-koregaon-bhima-case-30473

81. Wikipedia — 2020 Delhi Riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Delhi_riots

82. Hindustan Times — Tahir Hussain Booked for Murder of IB Staffer https://www.pressreader.com/india/hindustan-times-jalandhar/20200228/281891595312510

83. Deccan Herald — Father-Son Duo Accused in Delhi Riots Case Sent to Custody https://www.deccanherald.com/india/father-son-duo-accused-in-delhi-riots-case-sent-to-judicial-police-custodies-811860.html

84. Deccan Herald — Sharjeel Imam Denies Links With Co-Conspirators https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india/delhi/2020-delhi-riots-no-call-for-violence-no-connection-with-co-conspirators-sharjeel-imam-tells-hc-3315247.html

85. OpIndia — Umar Khalid Bail Plea and Father Background https://www.opindia.com/2024/04/umar-khalid-bail-plea-defence-refrains-from-mentioning-details-of-khalid-father-syed-qasim-rasool-ilyas/

86. OpIndia — Qasim Rasool Ilyas Under Intelligence Watch https://www.opindia.com/2022/05/aimplb-syed-qasim-rasool-ilyas-father-of-umar-khalid-under-intelligence-scanner/

87. Deccan Chronicle — NEET UG 2024 Crisis https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/neet-ug-2024-crisis-a-look-back-at-the-paper-leak-scandal-and-the-nta-grace-marks-dispute-1956292

88. LiveLaw — Revisiting Supreme Court's Advice to NTA After Paper Leak https://www.livelaw.in/amp/top-stories/neet-ug-cancellation-revisiting-supreme-courts-advice-to-nta-after-2024-paper-leak-534717

October 2, 2019. Modi presses a ceremonial button at Sabarmati Riverfront. A map of India lights up behind him. Rural India is declared Open Defecation Free. Balloons, speeches, the whole thing.

The government's own NSO survey, conducted between July and December 2018, had already found that only 71.3% of rural households had toilet access. The report was released weeks after the ceremony. The declaration went ahead anyway.

That's where this story starts. It gets significantly worse from there.

The scheme's basic mechanics were straightforward. Households received a ₹12,000 incentive to build a toilet, triggered by uploading a geotagged photograph to a government app. The app could confirm that someone was standing near a toilet. It could not confirm whether the toilet was new, functional, or even belonged to the claimed beneficiary.

That made the system remarkably easy to manipulate. One toilet photographed from twelve angles could become twelve entries and twelve payments. The same photograph uploaded under multiple beneficiary IDs could generate multiple payouts. A toilet in one village could be submitted for a neighbouring village if the GPS coordinates were close enough.

In Madhya Pradesh alone, investigators found 4.5 lakh toilets worth ₹540 crore that existed only in government records. In Jammu and Kashmir, an NGO received over ₹38 lakh for 218 toilets and nine storage pits, yet investigators found that not a single structure had been built. Municipal engineers had approved completion reports anyway.

The problems extended far beyond isolated fraud. In Bengaluru, the Enforcement Directorate investigated the alleged diversion of ₹92 crore of Swachh Bharat funds to unrelated projects such as roads and drains. In Kaithal, Haryana, officials and contractors allegedly siphoned off the entire ₹15.82 crore sanitation allocation meant for 151 villages. Investigators later uncovered commissions of 35-40% on sanitation fund releases, with thirteen people eventually arrested.

Even where toilets physically existed, many were unusable. Journalists visiting tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh found structures without gates, septic pits, or water connections. Some were being used as storage rooms or animal shelters. Men continued going to fields before sunrise carrying plastic bottles. Women still waited until after dark and travelled in groups. On paper these villages were success stories. On the ground, daily life looked much the same.

The annual Swachh Sarvekshan rankings faced their own credibility crisis. In 2024, two Quality Council of India officials were arrested for allegedly demanding a ₹1.80 lakh bribe to manipulate Phagwara's cleanliness rankings. According to investigators, the officials claimed part of the money would go to their superiors. Municipal officials recorded the interaction and reported it. If rankings can be bought, confidence in the entire exercise becomes difficult to sustain.

The certification process itself had a flaw large enough to shape everything that followed. To be declared ODF, a district simply uploaded a certificate signed by the District Collector. It was largely self-reported.

When the CAG audited Gujarat, which had declared itself fully ODF a year ahead of the national target, it found that 29% of households in its sample still had no toilet. In one block of Valsad district, only 223 of 17,646 targeted toilets had actually been built.

Researchers from Praxis, the Institute of Development Studies, and WaterAid spent time living in eight villages that had already been certified ODF across Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Only one village was genuinely ODF. One was close. The remaining six still showed varying levels of open defecation. One village in Rajasthan had toilet coverage of just 16%, yet it carried an official ODF certificate.

There was also a less visible problem buried in the programme's design. All targets were based on a 2012 household survey derived from the 2011 Census. Any family formed after 2012 simply did not exist within the programme's baseline.

In a country adding roughly 1.4 crore people every year, that meant millions of households were effectively invisible. Their missing toilets could not count as a shortfall because, administratively, they were never counted in the first place.

Barmer district in Rajasthan illustrates this perfectly. It was declared ODF even though a contemporary survey found 43,054 families without toilets. Officials defended the declaration by pointing out that those families were not part of the original baseline. Technically, they were correct. The target had been achieved because the target stopped counting new households years earlier.

Then came NFHS-5.

Conducted between 2019 and 2021, it found that roughly 30% of households nationwide still lacked toilets. Bihar, despite its ODF declaration, had around 40% of households without toilet access. Jharkhand and Odisha also showed large gaps.

The distance between the government's dashboard claiming universal coverage and NFHS findings showing millions still without toilets was not a minor statistical disagreement. It represented a discrepancy involving tens of millions of people.

The government's response focused less on investigating the gap and more on the institutions measuring it.

On July 28, 2023, K.S. James, Director of the International Institute for Population Sciences, received a suspension order. Officially, the issue involved recruitment irregularities. Multiple reports, however, linked the controversy to disagreements over NFHS-6 findings relating to anaemia, sanitation, and the Ujjwala scheme. James eventually resigned.

The signal sent to India's statistical community was difficult to ignore.

When NFHS-6 fact sheets were released, several indicators present in NFHS-5 were missing. Sanitation. Cooking fuel. Anaemia estimates. Infant mortality. Child mortality. Sex ratio at birth. Family planning quality indicators.

The official explanation was that some of these indicators were already being tracked through other government platforms, making duplication unnecessary. Critics argued that this effectively removed independent verification and replaced it with self-reporting.

Around the same period, a 14-member committee responsible for coordinating major national surveys was dissolved without a public replacement.

The broader statistical backdrop only deepened concerns.

India had conducted a census every ten years since 1881. Through colonial rule, World Wars, Partition, famines, and epidemics. The 2021 Census became the first major break in that uninterrupted tradition.

COVID-19 was the official reason. Yet China, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, and many other countries completed censuses during or shortly after the pandemic. Meanwhile, India's census kept getting postponed.

During those years, state elections happened. National elections happened. Massive religious gatherings happened. The census alone remained delayed.

A timely census would have provided independent household-level verification of toilet ownership, LPG usage, drinking water access, and other flagship welfare claims. It also would have provided critical demographic data for evaluating issues ranging from welfare coverage to pandemic mortality estimates.

This pattern extended beyond sanitation.

The 2017-18 NSS employment survey showing a 45-year high in unemployment was delayed until after the 2019 elections and later discarded. The 2018 consumption survey showing a decline in rural spending was suppressed over data-quality concerns. By late 2024, numerous official datasets remained delayed, while several ministries had not released annual reports for years.

Then came Census 2027.

After a sixteen-year gap, the exercise finally began on April 1, 2026. It was supposed to provide the most comprehensive household-level snapshot of India in more than a decade.

On June 5, 2026, The Hindu published accounts from census enumerators working in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

One enumerator from Rajasthan described being instructed to change entries showing tin-roof houses to concrete-roof houses. The same enumerator said households practising open defecation could be marked as having toilet access if a neighbour's toilet, a relative's toilet, or even a public facility was available nearby.

An enumerator from Uttar Pradesh described being told not to select options that might portray the government negatively.

These were not anonymous social media posts. They were accounts from serving government employees involved in census operations.

According to the reporting, the Rajasthan case was linked to a written communication from census authorities. The indicators reportedly receiving special attention mapped closely onto three flagship welfare schemes: sanitation under Swachh Bharat Mission, cooking fuel under Ujjwala Yojana, and drinking water under Jal Jeevan Mission.

The Census was expected to independently evaluate those programmes. Critics argued that such instructions risked making the data conform to official claims instead.

To be fair, Swachh Bharat Mission did achieve substantial progress. Toilet access increased dramatically compared to 2014 levels. Millions of women gained safer sanitation facilities. Some delay to the census during the pandemic was understandable. Large infrastructure programmes everywhere experience leakage, inefficiency, and corruption.

The argument is not that nothing improved.

The argument is that the mechanisms capable of measuring the remaining gap were progressively weakened.

A disputed survey appears. Questions arise about the survey. Indicators disappear. Oversight bodies vanish. The census is delayed. Then field workers report pressure to alter classifications.

Taken individually, each event can be explained. Taken together, they form a pattern many critics find difficult to dismiss.

The most recent independent estimate, based on a peer-reviewed study using the government's own HCES 2022-23 data covering more than 261,000 households, estimated that around 162 million Indians still lacked toilets. More than the population of Russia.

The official dashboard continued to show universal ODF achievement.

Both numbers cannot simultaneously describe reality.

One week before the October 2019 ODF declaration, two Dalit children aged ten and twelve were murdered in Shivpuri, Madhya Pradesh, after being accused of defecating in the open in a village already certified as ODF.

That incident captured the contradiction at the centre of the story.

The village had achieved cleanliness on paper. The reality on the ground was more complicated.

In the end, this is not really a story about toilets.

It is a story about what happens when the gap between a government's claims and measurable reality becomes too large. At some point, either reality must change, or the measurement systems must.

The central allegation running through a decade of disputes is that, too often, the second option became easier than the first.

For very detailed analysis with all details refer : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LHF1oAGAdvbnWCgOgoyLlxuwIYHY6nsa/view?usp=drivesdk (HTML FILE)

OR

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oYiPMN3cMP2Lqson1viZPP0wSj5IXcRV/view?usp=drivesdk (PDF FILE)

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2. The Wire — Census Enumerators Told to Ensure Data They Collect Tallies with 'Government Data' https://thewire.in/government/census-enumerators-told-to-collect-data-tallying-with-govt

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16. ThePrint — Decade without data — Why India is delaying Census when US, UK, China went ahead during Covid https://theprint.in/opinion/decade-without-data-why-india-is-delaying-census-when-us-uk-china-went-ahead-during-covid/954383/

17. Al Jazeera — History's biggest census: Why India's new population count is controversial https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/1/historys-biggest-census-why-indias-new-population-count-is-controversial

18. The Squirrels — The 15-Year Data Vacuum: India's Census 2027 Reality Check https://thesquirrels.in/governance/india-census-2027-data-vacuum-welfare-cost-11439232

19. ORF Online — ODF Status: Claims vs. Reality of the Swachh Bharat Mission https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/odf-status-claims-vs-reality-swachh-bharat-mission

20. Down To Earth — Is India really open-defecation-free? Here's what numbers say https://www.downtoearth.org.in/rural-water-and-sanitation/is-india-really-open-defecation-free-here-s-what-numbers-say-77918

21. IndiaSpend — 2.5 Years On, Swachh Bharat Mission's Claims Remain Unverified https://www.indiaspend.com/2-5-years-on-swachh-bharat-missions-claims-remain-unverified-93558

22. The Wire — A Failed Attempt to Create an Equally Sanitary India https://m.thewire.in/article/politics/a-failed-attempt-to-create-an-equally-sanitary-india

23. The Wire — Claiming That Rural India is 'Open Defecation Free' Is Blatant Exaggeration https://science.thewire.in/health/the-claim-that-india-is-odf-is-blatant-exaggeration/

24. National Herald — Water scarcity and corruption ruptures Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin in Madhya Pradesh https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/national/water-scarcity-and-corruption-ruptures-swachh-bharat-mission-gramin-in-poll-bound-madhya-pradesh

25. The Probe — Swachh Bharat Abhiyan mission needs a complete overhaul. Here's why https://theprobe.in/columns/swachh-bharat-abhiyan-mission-needs-a-complete-overhaul-heres-why/

26. Deccan Herald — ED probes BBMP for misusing Rs 92 crore of Swachh Bharat funds https://www.deccanherald.com/india/karnataka/bengaluru/ed-probes-bbmp-for-misusing-rs-92-crore-of-swachh-bharat-funds-1068395.html

27. Deccan Herald — JK ACB arrests NGO director for embezzling funds under Swachh Bharat Abhiyan https://www.deccanherald.com/india/jk-acb-arrests-ngo-director-for-embezzling-funds-under-swachh-bharat-abhiyan-905836.html

28. The Tribune — Swachh Sarvekshan survey bribery scandal exposed, 2 officials arrested https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/jalandhar/swachh-sarvekshan-survey-bribery-scandal-exposed-2-officials-arrested/

29. The Tribune — 7 held for siphoning off sanitation funds for 151 villages https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/haryana/7-held-for-siphoning-off-sanitation-funds-for-151-villages-625800

30. The Tribune — 2 junior engineers held for embezzling Zila Parishad funds https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/haryana/2-junior-engineers-held-for-embezzling-zila-parishad-funds

31. FactChecker.in — PM Modi Claims India Open Defecation Free, All Villages Electrified, But Data Show Otherwise https://www.factchecker.in/fact-check/pm-modi-claims-india-open-defecation-free-all-villages-electrified-but-data-show-otherwise-824267

32. Data For India — Access to toilets in India https://www.dataforindia.com/access-to-toilets-in-india/

33. The Wire — NFHS-5 Data Can Help India Become a Truly Open Defecation Free Country https://m.thewire.in/article/government/nfhs-5-sanitation-open-defecation

34. Journal of Global Health — Prevalence of zero-sanitation in India: Patterns of change across states and UTs, 1993–2021 https://jogh.org/2023/jogh-13-04082

35. PMC — Prevalence of zero-sanitation in India: Patterns of change across states and UTs, 1993–2021 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10373110/

36. Frontiers in Environmental Science — Effectiveness of the Swachh Bharat Mission and barriers to ending open defecation in India: a systematic review https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-science/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2023.1141825

37. BMJ Global Health — Evaluating the declarations of open defecation free status under the Swachh Bharat Mission https://doaj.org/article/0246b2278fcc47d29fb2cd140df1112c

38. East Asia Forum — Solving India's sanitation scourge https://eastasiaforum.org/2022/07/02/solving-indias-sanitation-scourge/

39. The News Minute — Swachh Bharat: Caste minorities in ODF declared villages still have no toilets https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/swachh-bharat-caste-minorities-odf-declared-villages-still-have-no-toilets-110105

40. The New Republic — India's Futile War on Open Defecation https://newrepublic.com/article/153549/indias-futile-war-open-defecation

41. PLOS One — Addressing information and credit barriers to making India ODF https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0318198

42. BBC — India's toilets: Report questions claims that rural areas are free from open defecation https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46400678

43. BBC — Census in India: Baffling lack of data is hurting Indians https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-64282374

44. Deccan Herald — Goa govt lying about ODF data: Digambar Kamat https://www.deccanherald.com/national/goa-govt-lying-about-odf-data-digambar-kamat-758503.html

45. Deccan Herald — Other G20 members could conduct census but Modi govt couldn't: Congress https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india/other-g20-members-could-conduct-census-but-modi-govt-couldnt-cong-2678090

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48. Dhyeya IAS — India's Upcoming Census 2026-27: Why It Matters More Than Ever https://www.dhyeyaias.com/current-affairs/daily-current-affairs/india-census-2026-27-importance-demographic-policy

49. Vishnu IAS — Digital Census in India 2027: Opportunities, Challenges and Concerns Over Data Reliability https://vishnuias.com/digital-census-india-2027-data-reliability-challenges/

50. China Daily — India's census delay hinders policymaking https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202302/18/WS63f03bdaa31057c47ebaf837.html

51. New Security Beat — Swachh Bharat Mission: Intended and Unintended Consequences https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2024/12/swachh-bharat-mission-intended-and-unintended-consequences/

52. Deccan Herald — Total hera-pheri in total sanitation https://www.deccanherald.com/india/total-hera-pheri-total-sanitation-2353948

53. Press Information Bureau — Over 11 crore Toilets built: Govt response to Lok Sabha https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1907510&reg=3&lang=2

54. CPI-ML — Caste Is The Dirty Secret Behind Open Defecation https://cpiml.org/first-page-category/commentary-first-page-category/caste-is-the-dirty-secret-behind-open-defecation/

55. Aashah — Re-check ordered over Census data 'discrepancies' https://www.aashah.com/re-check-ordered-over-census-data-discrepancies/

Across India's political spectrum, one pattern appears again and again: when political families have the means, many choose foreign universities for their children. This isn't unique to the BJP, Congress, SP, TDP, BRS, or any one party. It's a cross-party phenomenon.

Among BJP and NDA leaders, Jagdeep Dhankhar's daughter studied at Wharton and attended multiple institutions abroad. Nirmala Sitharaman's daughter pursued journalism at Northwestern. S. Jaishankar's son studied at Macalester and Georgetown before building a career in the US policy world. Piyush Goyal's son and daughter attended Harvard. Dharmendra Pradhan's daughter studied at Tufts. Rajnath Singh's son earned an MBA from Leeds. Shivraj Singh Chouhan's son studied law at UPenn, while his daughter-in-law studied at Oxford.

The list continues. Smriti Irani's stepdaughter earned an LLM from Georgetown. Mahaaryaman Scindia graduated from Yale. Hardeep Singh Puri's daughter studied at Warwick and UCL. Gajendra Singh Shekhawat's daughter attended Oxford. JP Nadda's son studied law in London. Vasundhara Raje's son studied in the US and Switzerland. Ravi Shankar Prasad's son attended Cornell. Prakash Javadekar's daughter completed a PhD at Boston University. Members of the Scindia family have also studied at NYU.

Outside the BJP, the pattern barely changes. Rahul Gandhi studied at Rollins College and Cambridge. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's daughter Amrit Singh studied at Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge before becoming a Stanford law professor.

In the Samajwadi Party, Akhilesh Yadav studied environmental engineering at the University of Sydney, while Prateek Yadav and Tej Pratap Yadav both earned MBAs from Leeds University.

In Telangana, K. T. Rama Rao completed an MBA in New York and worked in the US before entering politics. In Andhra Pradesh, Nara Lokesh studied at Carnegie Mellon and later earned an MBA from Stanford before joining public life.

In Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah enrolled at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland before leaving to enter politics. Going further back, foreign education was also common in the Nehru-Gandhi family, with Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi all spending part of their education abroad.

The universities that repeatedly appear are some of the world's most prestigious: Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Georgetown, Cornell, Northwestern, UPenn, Tufts, NYU, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, Warwick, Leeds, UCL and the University of London.

The most interesting takeaway is that this is not really a party story. It is an elite Indian political-family story. Across ideologies and generations, political leaders have overwhelmingly chosen global universities when the opportunity existed.

At the same time, many of these foreign-educated heirs returned to India and entered politics, business, public policy or government. Nara Lokesh, K. T. Rama Rao, Ram Mohan Naidu and others are examples. Foreign education and participation in Indian public life often go hand in hand rather than existing in opposition.

Viewed as a whole, the record shows that India's political class, regardless of party affiliation, has consistently seen elite foreign universities as valuable investments in education, networks and future opportunities.

Also couldn't find anything in relevance with AAP.......An exception