By the end of August, Nepal’s Disaster Management Authority had confirmed 734 to 800 dead and roughly 2,500 to 3,000 missing, most of them believed buried under debris or swept downstream. Sixteen more died and over 500 were reported missing in Tibet’s Gyirong County on the Chinese side. Foreign ministries scrambled: India sent an 11-member tunnel rescue team, China sent its own, and even the White House offered help. Nepal’s foreign minister used the moment to call, publicly and pointedly, for a global crackdown on climate change.

That single line matters more than it might seem. A small, poor, landlocked country just lost close to a thousand citizens to a hazard it did not create and cannot mitigate alone. This is worth sitting with before moving to policy.

The science: this was not a monsoon flood

It is important to be precise about what this disaster was, because getting the mechanism wrong leads to the wrong prevention strategy. Nepal’s deadly floods of 2024 were driven by heavy monsoon rainfall hitting unplanned settlements on floodplains, a conventional hydrological disaster made worse by bad urban planning. The 2026 event was different in kind. It was very likely a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood, or GLOF, triggered by a sudden glacier collapse rather than by rainfall.

A GLOF happens when water trapped by a glacier or dammed behind a moraine of loose rock and ice, is released all at once, either because the dam fails, is overtopped, or because a rockfall or ice collapse displaces enough water to send it over the top. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, ICIMOD, has mapped more than 25,000 glacial lakes across the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, and classifies over 200 of them as genuinely dangerous because they sit above populated valleys and major roads. Nepal alone has recorded more than 90 GLOFs since the 1920s, five of them in the Everest region.

This is not a new or speculative field of science. The 1985 Dig Tsho GLOF in the Khumbu Himal destroyed a nearly finished hydropower project. The 1994 Lugge Tsho GLOF in Bhutan is a standard case study in glaciology journals. The Kedarnath disaster in Uttarakhand in 2013 and the South Lhonak GLOF in Sikkim in 2023, which wiped out the Teesta III dam, are both well documented in Indian government reports. Researchers publishing in the Journal of Glaciology this year project a threefold increase in GLOF risk across the Himalaya by the end of the century as warming accelerates glacier retreat. A separate study of a glacial lake in Ladakh found it expanded by 78.7 percent over 22 years while its feeding glacier shrank by 13.2 percent in the same period. These are measured numbers, not projections built on assumption.

None of this means every GLOF is individually predictable to the day. Glacier collapses involve structural failure in ice under stress, and pinpointing the exact moment is genuinely hard. But knowing that a valley sits below a swelling, unstable lake, and that the frequency of these events is rising as the region warms, is not hard at all. That is a mapping and monitoring problem, and it has a known fix.

Could this have been prevented?

Partially, yes, and that is the uncomfortable part. ICIMOD’s own strategic framework for GLOF risk reduction lists the standard toolkit: hazard mapping of dangerous lakes, early warning systems with sensors and sirens tied to real-time monitoring, engineered interventions like controlled drainage channels and reinforced spillways to lower lake volumes before they become catastrophic, revised building codes for settlements in the flood path, and community-level evacuation drills. None of this is exotic. Nepal itself pioneered some of this after the 1985 Dig Tsho disaster, and again after the 2021 Melamchi flood, which should have been the wake-up call that pushed systematic monitoring across every major river basin fed by Himalayan glaciers.

It clearly did not happen at the scale needed. The Langtang Lirung sector had no early warning infrastructure that gave downstream communities meaningful notice. Settlements continued to grow along the Trishuli corridor. The Gyirong Port complex, a major cross-border trade facility, sat directly in the flood’s path with no protective works. This is a governance failure layered on top of a geological one. Glacier collapse is a natural hazard. A trade complex and dozens of villages sitting unprotected in its direct path, decades after the danger were documented, is a policy choice.

The transboundary dimension makes this worse. The glacier that failed straddles territory close to the China-Nepal border, and the flood hit both countries within minutes of each other, yet there is no binding, functioning joint monitoring system between Nepal, China and India for glacial lakes that threaten all three. ICIMOD has spent years trying to build exactly this kind of regional cooperation platform. It has never received the funding, political priority or cross-border data sharing needed to become an actual early warning network rather than a research body. Geopolitics between India and China, and the general caution both countries exercise around sharing data near sensitive border regions, has made this harder than it should be. A hazard that does not recognize the Line of Actual Control is being managed by institutions that very much do.

Bashing the ‘climate change deniers’, with numbers

There is still a strain of commentary, some of it from otherwise serious people, that treats any single disaster as too small a data point to say anything about climate change and treats the broader warming trend itself as unsettled or exaggerated. The data does not support that comfort. Long-term temperature records show an accelerating warming trend from around 1980 onward, after decades of relative stability and even some cooling in the 1960s and 70s. Glacier retreat across the Hindu Kush Himalaya is not a model projection, it is measured on the ground and from satellites, year after year, lake by lake. The Ladakh case above is one of dozens of similar studies showing the same pattern: lakes expanding, glaciers shrinking, and outburst risk climbing in step.

Sea level projections for Mumbai, discussed below, are not activist talking points either. They come from oceanographic and remote sensing research published in peer reviewed journals, using multiple emissions scenarios, and they converge on the same broad conclusion regardless of which model is used. When the mechanism is this well established and the on-ground measurements match the models this closely, treating climate change as a matter of opinion is not skepticism, it is simply ignoring the instruments. The people who pay for that gap in understanding are rarely the ones making policy from air-conditioned rooms. They are Himalayan villagers, Sikkimese dam workers, and Mumbai slum residents.

Where the global accords fall short?

The Paris Agreement set emissions targets but has no binding mechanism to fund glacial monitoring in Nepal or drainage upgrades in Mumbai. The Loss and Damage Fund agreed at COP28 was meant to address exactly this kind of harm, disasters that poor, low-emitting countries suffer because of a crisis they did not cause, but it remains chronically underfunded relative to even conservative damage estimates, and disbursement has been slow and bureaucratic. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the main global agreement on early warning systems and hazard mapping, is voluntary and has no enforcement teeth. Countries sign it, cite it in reports, and then fail to fund the monitoring stations it recommends.

This is the pattern worth naming plainly. Global climate governance has become very good at producing frameworks, communiqués and pledges, and much less good at putting sensors on glacial lakes or fixing storm drains. Nepal’s foreign minister asking for a global climate crackdown after burying hundreds of citizens is not rhetoric, it is a fair description of a system that keeps promising and keeps under-delivering.

Lessons for India

India does not need to imagine this scenario; it has already lived a version of it. The 2023 South Lhonak GLOF in Sikkim, triggered by a similar lake failure, destroyed the Teesta III dam and killed dozens. The 2013 Kedarnath disaster in Uttarakhand, though driven more by extreme rainfall than a glacier collapse, exposed the same pattern of unregulated construction in a known hazard zone. Studies of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir show glacial lakes there are expanding just as fast as in Nepal. India has the scientific capacity, through IIT Bombay, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and the Geological Survey of India, to run a serious glacial lake monitoring programme across its own Himalayan states. What it needs is sustained funding and a willingness to restrict hydropower and tourism development in mapped hazard zones, even when that is politically unpopular with state governments chasing revenue.

Lessons for Bhutan

Bhutan is smaller and more exposed than either neighbour. Its 1994 Lugge Tsho GLOF is one of the most cited case studies in the field precisely because the country’s glacial lakes sit close to its main population centres. Bhutan has comparatively strong environmental governance by regional standards, but a small state with a small budget cannot build a full monitoring network alone. Its safest path is deeper integration into a genuinely functional regional platform, most plausibly through ICIMOD, rather than depending on ad hoc bilateral goodwill from Delhi or Beijing.

Lessons for Mumbai, a different hazard with the same failure

Mumbai will not suffer a glacial lake outburst. Its danger is the opposite end of the same warming system: rising seas rather than melting mountains. Projections published in Scientific Reports show Mumbai and Kolkata facing the highest coastal flood risk among major Indian cities under high emissions scenarios, with sea level rise estimates of 24 to 66 centimetres by 2100 and a real possibility that the Arabian Sea floods parts of the city at least once a year by 2050. The city is also sinking, at roughly 2 millimetres annually according to IIT Bombay studies, which compounds every centimetre of sea level rise. A Nature-published study found that around 8 percent of monsoon deaths in Mumbai are rainfall related, and 80 percent of those deaths occur among people living in slums, with children under five and women facing the highest risk. Recent satellite flood mapping shows Chembur West, Matunga and Ghatkopar as the worst-hit wards.

The mechanism is different from Nepal’s. The governance failure is nearly identical. Mumbai has kept building on reclaimed land, encroaching on mangroves and salt pans that would otherwise absorb storm surge, much as Nepal kept building in glacial flood paths. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, one of the richest civic bodies in Asia, still runs a drainage network that studies say is decades out of date, while structural flood measures like emergency food supplies get more attention than the harder, less visible fix of upgrading storm drains and protecting natural buffers. Strengthening that drainage network alone, according to the city’s own climate risk analysis, could cut flood losses by more than 70 percent. That number should embarrass every civic budget meeting where drainage upgrades get deferred for another year.

The actual lesson

Glacial collapse in Rasuwa and rising tides in Mahim are not separate stories. Both are downstream consequences of the same warming trend, both were foreseeable in general terms decades in advance, and both were left to unregulated development and underfunded monitoring because prevention is expensive now and disasters are expensive later, and politics almost always prefers later. Nepal, India, Bhutan and coastal Indian cities like Mumbai are bound by the same rivers, the same monsoon system and increasingly the same climate risk. Treating disaster preparedness as a national afterthought rather than a funded, regional, scientifically driven priority is the one choice that keeps repeating across every one of these disasters, and it is the one choice fully within the control of governments, unlike the glacier itself.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

Long or Short, get news the way you like. No ads. No redirections. Download Newspin and Stay Alert, The CSR Journal Mobile app, for fast, crisp, clean updates!

App Store –  https://apps.apple.com/in/app/newspin/id6746449540 

Google Play Store – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inventifweb.newspin&pcampaignid=web_share

The post Mumbai Is Nepal’s Future: Just With the Floods Coming From the Other Direction appeared first on The CSR Journal.

A Law Born of Outrage, Treated With Indifference

The POSH Act did not emerge from a policy seminar. It emerged from the brutalisation of Bhanwari Devi, a social worker in Rajasthan who was gang-raped in 1992 for trying to stop a child marriage, and from the Supreme Court’s 1997 Vishaka judgment that followed her case. The Court, in the absence of any statutory framework, was compelled to legislate through guidelines because the state itself had failed working women. Sixteen years later, those guidelines became law. Yet the underlying problem the law was built to solve, employer indifference to women’s safety, has not disappeared. It has simply changed its costume, from open denial to bureaucratic box-ticking.

Every organisation with ten or more employees is legally required to constitute an Internal Complaints Committee, adopt a written POSH policy, conduct annual training, and file an annual return with the District Officer by January 31. Non-compliance attracts a fine of up to fifty thousand rupees for a first offence, with repeat violations doubling the penalty and, in principle, risking cancellation of a business licence. On paper, this is a reasonably robust framework. In practice, consultants and compliance auditors who review Indian workplaces routinely report that a significant share of employers, particularly startups, MSMEs, and fast-growing firms, either never formed a committee or constituted one incorrectly.

Consider a case that recently surfaced from a mid-size Bengaluru IT firm. It had an Internal Complaints Committee, at least on paper. Its Presiding Officer had left the company eight months earlier and nobody bothered to reconstitute the committee. When a complaint finally arrived in January 2026, the entire inquiry collapsed on procedural grounds, and the employer received a show-cause notice from the District Officer. This is not a freak accident. It is what happens when a legal mandate is treated as HR paperwork rather than institutional infrastructure.

Even at the apex of Indian public life, the gaps are visible. In 2026, a public interest litigation sought to bring political parties, some of the most powerful workplaces in the country, under the POSH Act’s ambit, on the grounds that many parties have never constituted an Internal Complaints Committee at all. The petition argued that the exclusion of political parties leaves women in politics vulnerable and that inconsistent implementation of committees perpetuates a culture that fails to prioritise women’s safety. The Supreme Court declined to extend the Act to political parties, with the bench observing that treating party membership as employment could, in its words, become a tool for blackmail. Whatever one makes of that specific ruling, the fact that such a petition was necessary in 2026, thirteen years into the law’s life, tells its own story.

The Data Does Not Flatter India

India likes to describe itself as an emerging economic superpower, and by GDP trajectory that description is not wrong. But GDP growth and institutional maturity are not the same thing, and workplace safety compliance is one of the clearest places where the gap shows. Independent compliance reviews and government surveys have consistently found that a meaningful proportion of Indian employers, across sectors, either have no functioning Internal Complaints Committee or one that exists only in name, without proper composition, without the mandatory external member, without annual training, and without an annual return filed. Judicial observations across multiple cases have flagged the same three recurring failures: missing external members, lapsed committee terms that are never renewed, and a near-total absence of employee awareness because training, when it happens at all, is a single slide in an onboarding deck.

Compare this with peer developing economies. Kenya’s Employment Act and the work of its National Gender and Equality Commission require sexual harassment policies in workplaces above a certain size, with enforcement increasingly tied to labour inspections. Bangladesh’s High Court, drawing directly on India’s own Vishaka precedent, issued binding directives in 2009 mandating complaint committees in every workplace, and its garment sector, under sustained pressure from international buyers and the Accord on Fire and Building Safety framework, has developed harassment grievance mechanisms that are audited as part of export compliance. South Africa’s Employment Equity Act and its Code of Good Practice on the Handling of Sexual Harassment Cases are backed by the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, a specialised labour tribunal that gives complainants a genuine external escalation route, something India’s district-level Local Complaints Committees only weakly approximate, especially outside metropolitan areas.

At the global standard-setting level, the gap is starker still. The International Labour Organization’s Convention 190, adopted in 2019, is the first international treaty to recognise violence and harassment in the world of work as a human rights issue, covering not just employees but interns, job applicants, and even bystanders, and it explicitly calls for gender-responsive approaches that account for men and non-binary workers as well. India has not ratified Convention 190. The European Union’s framework under its 2006 Equal Treatment Directive requires member states to designate an independent body for the promotion of equal treatment, giving complainants access to a body outside their own employer’s control, something India’s law offers only partially and unevenly. The United States, through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and decades of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforcement, has developed a mature body of case law on hostile work environment liability that shapes corporate risk calculus in a way India’s comparatively young jurisprudence has not yet achieved. The point is not that these systems are perfect. It is that they treat enforcement as continuous, not episodic, and India’s own compliance ecosystem, twenty-six years after Vishaka, is still catching up to standards other developing nations reached faster.

Reading the Failure Through Social Theory

It is worth asking why a law with clear statutory teeth produces such patchy compliance, and social science offers more than one useful lens.

Robert Merton’s structural functionalism would frame the Internal Complaints Committee as a manifest institution meant to serve a latent organisational function, symbolic legitimacy, rather than its stated function, actual redress. Many employers do not resist the POSH Act because they reject its values. They comply just enough to signal legitimacy to regulators, clients, and investors, while quietly under-resourcing the mechanism itself. This is what sociologists call decoupling, the gap between formal structure and actual practice, and it explains precisely why so many committees exist on an organisation chart but collapse the moment a real complaint tests them.

Michel Foucault’s account of power as productive rather than purely repressive is equally instructive. Workplace hierarchies generate their own micro-disciplines of silence: a junior employee’s calculation of career risk, a manager’s informal authority to reassign or exclude, an HR department’s institutional loyalty to the employer rather than the complainant. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence captures the same dynamic from another angle: harassment and its concealment are often naturalised as “how this industry works,” internalised by victims and bystanders alike as an unfortunate but unchangeable feature of professional life, until the internalisation itself becomes part of the problem.

Finally, a rational choice and principal-agent lens explain employer behaviour rather than victim behaviour. When the expected cost of non-compliance, a modest fine, rarely enforced, is lower than the expected cost of a functioning grievance mechanism, reputational exposure, internal disruption, potential liability, some employers will rationally under-invest in compliance. This is not a claim about individual malice. It is a claim about incentive structures, and it is precisely why the fifty-thousand-rupee penalty under Section 26, unchanged since 2013 and trivial for any mid-size or large employer, functions less as a deterrent than as a rounding error.

Defending Women’s Rights, Without Apology

None of the above should be softened. Underreporting remains the dominant reality of workplace harassment in India. Surveys conducted by industry bodies and legal researchers over the past decade have repeatedly found that a majority of women who experience harassment at work do not file a formal complaint, citing fear of retaliation, career damage, social stigma, and, crucially, a well-founded belief that the committee meant to protect them either does not function or will not be taken seriously by management. This is not paranoia. It is a rational response to institutions that have, in case after case, proven themselves hollow. A committee without a properly reconstituted Presiding Officer, without an external member, without confidentiality protocols that are enforced, is not a safety net. It is theatre, and women who decline to test a stage set know exactly what they are doing.

Defending Men’s Rights, Without Contradiction

A serious argument for stronger POSH enforcement must also take seriously the anxieties raised, often dismissively, under the banner of men’s rights. The Supreme Court’s own observation that expanding certain frameworks could become a tool for blackmail is not an outlier concern. Natural justice, the presumption of innocence during inquiry, the right to a fair hearing, and protection against malicious complaints are not obstacles to women’s safety, they are preconditions for the law’s legitimacy. Section 14 of the Act already penalises complaints proven to be false or malicious, but many organisations apply this provision inconsistently or not at all, leaving accused employees in a limbo of suspended careers and social judgment even when an inquiry ultimately clears them. A credible POSH regime protects the genuinely aggrieved and shields the wrongly accused with equal seriousness. Treating these as competing rather than complementary goals is precisely the kind of false binary that weakens public trust in the entire framework, on both sides.

Why This Cannot Wait Any Longer?

India’s female labour force participation rate, despite recent modest gains, remains among the lowest of major economies, and workplace safety is not a peripheral factor in that statistic, it is a structural one. A country that wants to be taken seriously as a global manufacturing and services hub, that wants multinational clients to trust its outsourced back offices, that wants its own claims of demographic dividend to translate into actual productivity, cannot afford institutions that exist mainly on letterhead. Global capital increasingly prices in ESG and labour governance risk, and a workplace with a fictional grievance mechanism is a governance liability waiting to be discovered by an auditor, a journalist, or a court.

The choice in front of Indian employers, public and private, is not between compliance and non-compliance as competing costs. It is between building institutions that work and continuing to gamble on the assumption that nobody will ever test the committee that exists only in a PDF. That gamble has already failed enough times, in enough sectors, at enough scale, that it can no longer be called bad luck. It is a policy choice, and it is time India’s workplaces made a different one.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

Long or Short, get news the way you like. No ads. No redirections. Download Newspin and Stay Alert, The CSR Journal Mobile app, for fast, crisp, clean updates!

App Store –  https://apps.apple.com/in/app/newspin/id6746449540 

Google Play Store – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inventifweb.newspin&pcampaignid=web_share

The post Why India’s Workplaces Keep Failing the Women They Promised to Protect appeared first on The CSR Journal.

That number deserves to sit uncomfortably with anyone in power.

The NITI Aayog analysis, based on the 78th round of the National Sample Survey conducted in 2021, sorts of India’s youth and working-age population into 5 broad buckets: those still in school, those in higher education, those in formal or informal work, women managing unpaid domestic responsibilities, and the NEET (not in education, employment, or training) category. It is this last group, alongside a large share of women outside the workforce, that the report flags as most financially and structurally stranded.

The report does not stop at the headline figure. It notes that even among those who do make it through the education system, only about 8.25% of graduates end up working in jobs that match their qualifications. Read that again. Out of every 100 Indian graduates, fewer than 9 are doing work connected to what they studied. The rest are either underemployed, working in unrelated informal jobs, or unemployed altogether.

The report’s own diagnosis is telling. It says NEET youth are held back by a lack of income and by the sunk cost of the education they already have, meaning that many cannot afford to pay for additional skilling on top of existing financial pressure. Students from low-income households, it notes, often cannot layer paid training onto degree expenses they are already stretched to cover. So, they either grab the first stable paycheck available, however low it pays, or they fail to enter the workforce at all and drift into the NEET category.

This is not laziness. This is arithmetic. A young person with no savings, no family safety net, and a degree that taught them theory, but not employable skill has almost nowhere to go.

Whose Children Are These, Really?

It is worth asking, gently but firmly, who exactly makes up these 8.7 crore people. Independent academic research on India’s NEET population, including work published through the Institute for Human Development, has consistently found that young women, rural residents, and individuals from lower income and socially marginalised backgrounds are disproportionately represented in this group. This is not a coincidence. It is the predictable result of a system where quality schooling, private tuition, English fluency, internships, and professional networks are still, in practice, gated by privilege.

The children of the well-connected rarely become NEET statistics. They have access to coaching centres, family businesses to fall back on, and social capital that opens doors even when merit alone would not. The 8.7 crore are overwhelmingly the sons and daughters of farmers, daily wage workers, small shopkeepers, and first-generation learners who did everything they were told to do, stayed in school, tried to get a degree, and still found no door open on the other side.

When a nation’s ladder of opportunity only reaches the already privileged, the rest are not failing the system. The system is failing them.

The China Comparison Nobody Wants to Make?

China is not without its own labour market troubles. Its youth unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds, excluding students, has swung wildly in recent years, spiking past 21% in mid-2023 before easing to figures still hovering around 16 to 18% through 2025 and early 2026. That is a real problem, and Chinese policymakers have openly acknowledged it.

But there is a structural difference that changes everything.

• China built the manufacturing base, vocational training pipelines, and infrastructure first, and then let its population growth slow down almost by design. India inherited a much younger, much larger population and has not yet built an equivalent industrial and skilling base to absorb it.

• China’s youth unemployment is a cyclical, macroeconomic headache layered on top of decades of factory floors, apprenticeship systems, and an education pipeline tightly wired into manufacturing demand. India’s NEET crisis is structural. It is the result of a schooling system that was never redesigned for employability, a vocational training ecosystem introduced far too late, and an economy that has grown in value without growing proportionately in jobs.

Put simply, China has a population that mostly knows how to work but sometimes cannot find work. Large parts of India’s young population have neither been taught how to work in a modern economy, nor been given the work to try it on.

Population without productivity is not a demographic dividend. It is a demographic debt quietly accumulating interest.

Growth on Paper, Development in Question?

India has spent the last several years celebrating its position as the fastest growing major economy in the world. GDP charts look impressive. Stock markets have had good years. Unicorns get announced with regularity.

But GDP growth measures the size of the economic pie, not who gets a slice of it or whether the ovens that bake tomorrow’s pie are being built at all.

What good is being the largest or fastest growing economy on paper if 87 million of the very citizens meant to power that growth over the next two decades are sitting idle, untrained, and increasingly disillusioned?

Growth without development is a house with a beautiful facade and no foundation. NITI Aayog itself seems to sense this, calling for skilling to be introduced far earlier in a child’s education, starting employability and entrepreneurship modules from Class 6 and structured vocational pathways from Class 9, rather than treating skill training as an afterthought once formal education end.

That recommendation, however sound, arrives after roughly a decade in which skilling missions were announced with considerable fanfare and comparatively modest, uneven results on the ground. Since 2014-15, government figures cited in recent coverage put the number of individuals trained under national skilling programmes at around 7.67 crore. That is a meaningful number. But it is smaller than the current pool of NEET youth alone, without even accounting for the millions who will turn 15 in the years ahead. The pipeline of the problem is outrunning the pipeline of the solution.

A Warning Written in Plain Numbers

History offers little comfort to nations that ignore large, idle, aspirational young populations for too long. Frustration among educated but jobless youth has been a precursor to unrest in far smaller countries with far smaller populations than India’s.

When millions of young people finish their education, watch their peers struggle for years to find a livelihood, and see opportunity flowing predominantly to those already well positioned, patience erodes. Economic exclusion has a way of curdling into social and political tension, especially when it maps onto existing fault lines of caste, class, and geography that many of these NEET youth already carry.

India does not need panic. It needs urgency, and it needs honesty about where the gap lies. That means treating skilling not as a slogan but as core public infrastructure, on par with roads and electricity. It means fixing a school curriculum that still rewards rote memorisation over practical competence. It means ensuring that opportunity, internships, apprenticeships, credit for small enterprise, reaches the villages and small towns where most of these 8.7 crore live, rather than concentrating in a handful of metro clusters.

The NITI Aayog report is, in a sense, a gift. It has put a real, citable number on a problem that governance has too often preferred to discuss in vague, aspirational language. The question now is whether that number becomes the basis for a genuine course correction, or simply another data point quoted in speeches while the underlying reality stays the same. India has the population to become an economic superpower. Whether it becomes one or instead becomes a cautionary tale of growth without development, will be decided by what happens to these 8.7 crore young lives over the next few years, not by what the GDP chart says this quarter.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

Long or Short, get news the way you like. No ads. No redirections. Download Newspin and Stay Alert, The CSR Journal Mobile app, for fast, crisp, clean updates!

App Store –  https://apps.apple.com/in/app/newspin/id6746449540 

Google Play Store – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inventifweb.newspin&pcampaignid=web_share

The post The ‘Ticking Time Bomb’ Nobody in Parliament Wants to Mention appeared first on The CSR Journal.

An economy cannot formalise its ambitions while keeping most of its workers informal. That is not a slogan, it is basic economics.

The size of the problem, in numbers

Start with scale. Roughly 9 out of every 10 working Indians earn their living in some form of informal arrangement, without a written contract, without provident fund, without health insurance tied to the job, and often without a fixed employer at all.

The Periodic Labour Force Survey for 2025 puts the labour force participation rate at 59.3%, with regular salaried employment, the most “formal” category, rising only slowly from 22% to 24% of workers. That means even after years of a formalisation push, roughly 3 in 4 working Indians are still outside regular salaried work.

Narrow the lens to non-agricultural informal enterprises, the small shops, workshops, and street businesses tracked separately by government surveys, and the number is 1096 lakh workers, about 18.8% of total employment, running unincorporated businesses with fewer than 10 people and no social security cover. Add agriculture, casual daily wage labour, and unregistered home-based work, and the informal share of the total workforce climbs far higher, closer to the 90 percent figure that labour economists have used for two decades.

This is not a rounding error in the GDP calculation. It is the GDP calculation.

Why economics has a name for this: dualism, and its limits

Development economics has a classic model for what India is going through, the Lewis dual economy model, named after Nobel laureate Arthur Lewis. The idea is simple: a poor country has two sectors, a modern high-productivity sector and a traditional low-productivity sector, and growth happens as labour moves from the traditional sector to the modern one, raising average productivity along the way.

India’s problem is that this transition has stalled. Large enterprises, those employing more than 20 workers, account for only about 13.7% of the workforce, even after a recent uptick from 10.8% the year before. The traditional, informal sector has not been shrinking fast enough to fit the Lewis story. Instead, informality has become a permanent structural feature rather than a temporary waiting room before formal jobs arrive.

Economists studying informality broadly fall into three camps, and it is worth simplifying each one because policy depends on which story you believe.

The dualist view treats informal workers as excluded, people who would gladly take formal jobs if those jobs existed, but there simply are not enough of them.

The structuralist view, associated with economists in the Latin American tradition, argues that formal firms deliberately keep informal work alive because it is cheaper, subcontracting to unregistered units to avoid labour law costs, effectively using informality as a subsidy to formal capital.

The legalist view, most associated with the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, argues that informal workers are entrepreneurs trapped by bad regulation, people who would register and formalise readily if the paperwork, fees, and bureaucratic friction were not so punishing.

India’s reality contains all three: 1) A street vendor priced out of the formal retail lease market is dualist exclusion, 2) A garment unit outsourcing stitching to home-based women workers to dodge minimum wage and safety law is structuralist subcontracting, 3) A small trader who cannot navigate GST filing and licensing across three separate municipal departments is a legalist case waiting for de Soto’s solution: simplify the paperwork and formality follows.

Any serious plan to reach $5 trillion must work on all three fronts at once. You cannot fix informality with a single lever.

The politics of urban space

This is where economics runs into geography and politics. Urban space in Indian cities is never neutral. Every pavement, every market corner, every railway underpass is contested territory, and the contest has rules that are political long before they are economic.

The scholarship on the politics of urban space describes this well. Cities plan for a “formal” citizen who parks a car, shops in an enclosed mall, and pays fixed municipal taxes. The informal worker, the vendor, the rickshaw puller, the waste picker, is treated as a temporary irritant to be tolerated, taxed informally, or periodically removed, never as a permanent stakeholder in how the city is designed. Urban theorists have called this the difference between civil society, which has legal standing and formal claims on the state, and what has been termed political society, groups who survive the city through negotiation, patronage, and informal bargaining rather than legal right.

This matters economically because it determines who gets to invest in their own productivity. A vendor who does not know if she will be evicted next month has no reason to buy a cart with refrigeration, take a loan to expand stock, or build a customer base beyond daily survival. Insecure tenure over urban space is, in economic terms, a tax on long-term investment. It caps productivity growth for tens of millions of people before they even start.

The corruption nexus that keeps informality profitable for everyone except the worker

Informality persists not despite weak governance but because weak governance is profitable to a specific set of actors. Public choice theory, the branch of economics that studies how self-interested behaviour shapes political and bureaucratic decisions, explains this well. When a rule is unclear or unenforced, the people who control access to enforcement can extract rent from the gap.

In most Indian cities, a familiar nexus operates on the ground. The local municipal official who is supposed to allocate vending zones instead allows encroachment in exchange for a cut. The beat constable who could clear an illegal stall instead collects a weekly informal payment, commonly called ‘hafta’, in exchange for looking away. Local strongmen, sometimes tied to a political party’s local unit, control which vendor gets which spot on the pavement, effectively privatising public space and charging rent for access to it. And the elected local politician benefits twice over, first from a cut of the collection chain, and second from the vendor’s vote and gratitude come election time, since the politician is the one who can, selectively, protect a vendor from the very eviction drive the same system enables.

This is not a moral failing of individuals so much as an equilibrium. Each actor is responding rationally to the incentives in front of them. The vendor pays because the alternative, formal registration, is slower, costlier in bribes anyway, and offers no guarantee of security. The constable collects because his own pay and promotion structure gives him no reward for strict enforcement and real risk if he refuses informal income that peers are already collecting. The municipal officer benefits from discretion because discretion, not a fixed rule, is what generates a payment. Everyone in the chain has a reason to keep the system exactly as unclear as it is.

The economic cost of this nexus is enormous even though it never appears on a balance sheet. It taxes the poorest workers the most heavily, since a fixed daily bribe is a much larger share of a vendor’s income than of a shopkeeper. It blocks formalisation, since the whole extraction chain depends on workers staying outside the legal system. And it corrodes trust in the state, which is itself an economic input, because firms and workers who do not trust institutions invest less, save less formally, and route more of their activity through cash and informal channels that stay outside the tax net the $5 trillion target depends on.

Child labour, the sharpest edge of informality

Nowhere does the human cost of this system show up more starkly than in child labour. According to the 2011 Census, the most recent full count, 10.1 million children aged 5 to 14 in India were working as main or marginal workers, out of a total child population of 259.6 million in that age group. More recent survey-based estimates, using broader definitions that include hazardous household chores and long working hours, put the real figure considerably higher, with some researchers suggesting the true number could run into tens of millions once informal, unregistered, and home-based work is properly counted.

The pattern matters as much as the number. Children in informal work cluster overwhelmingly in agriculture, small workshops, domestic work, and street-level trade, precisely the sectors where regulatory oversight is weakest and enforcement is most easily bought off by the same corruption nexus described above. India’s own labour law adds a structural loophole here. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code only applies fully to establishments with ten or more employees, and since many India’s informal units are smaller than that, most child labour sits in a zone the law barely reaches even on paper.

Economically, child labour is not just a moral emergency, it is a long-run productivity trap. Human capital theory, the economic idea that education and skills are investments that raise future earnings, tells us plainly that a child pulled out of school today becomes a lower-productivity adult worker tomorrow. A country trying to reach $5 trillion by 2030 needs precisely the opposite, a generation with more years of schooling, not fewer.

Why has formalisation failed to keep pace?

India has not ignored this problem on paper. Schemes like PM SVANidhi have tried to extend small collateral-free loans to street vendors. GST simplification, the Udyam registration portal for small enterprises, and the four labour codes passed by Parliament were all designed, at least in intent, to lower the cost of becoming formal. Yet the informal share of employment has barely moved in real terms.

The reason is governance capacity, not policy design. India has one labour inspector for tens of thousands of establishments in many states, nowhere close to what would be needed to monitor, let alone enforce, minimum wage, safety, or child labour rules across the informal sector. Municipal bodies that are supposed to survey and license street vendors under the Street Vendors Act (2014), a law that explicitly recognises vending as a legitimate livelihood requiring town vending committees and identity cards, have in most cities never completed the vendor survey the law requires. Without the survey, there is no legal list of who is entitled to vend where, and without that list, the corruption nexus fills the vacuum the state left behind.

What needs to change?

Three shifts would matter more than any single scheme.

First, treat urban space allocation as an economic policy tool, not just a law-and-order issue. Cities that map vending zones, issue enforceable identity cards, and give vendors security of tenure directly raise those workers’ incentive to invest in their own productivity, exactly the kind of formal-sector convergence the Lewis model describes.

Second, break the discretion that fuels the corruption nexus. Public choice theory is clear that rent-seeking shrinks when rules are simple, transparent, and enforced by a system with independent oversight, not when enforcement is left to the same local actors who profit from the current mess. Digitised, publicly visible vending registers and rotating, audited enforcement teams would take away the discretion that ‘hafta’ collection depends on.

Third, fund labour and child protection enforcement at a scale that matches the size of the informal workforce, not the size of last year’s budget line. A $5 trillion economy can afford enough inspectors to make its own labour laws real rather than symbolic.

Last but not least,

GDP targets are, in the end, an accounting exercise, but growth is a human one. India’s informal workers are not a drag on the $5 trillion story, they are large parts of the story’s cast, cooking the food, building the homes, running the small trade, and in far too many cases, doing the work as children who should be in school.

An economy that keeps counting them as invisible in policy while depending on them completely in practice is not building toward $5 trillion. It is building a number on top of a foundation it refuses to look at directly.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

Long or Short, get news the way you like. No ads. No redirections. Download Newspin and Stay Alert, The CSR Journal Mobile app, for fast, crisp, clean updates!

App Store –  https://apps.apple.com/in/app/newspin/id6746449540 

Google Play Store – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inventifweb.newspin&pcampaignid=web_share

The post India Cannot Become a $5 Trillion Economy by Treating Informal Workers as Invisible appeared first on The CSR Journal.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) settled the argument this year, whether the country wanted to hear it or not. The ICMR-INDIAB survey, published in Nature Medicine and covering more than 18,000 adults across 30 states and union territories, found that 62% of the average Indian’s daily calories come from carbohydrates, one of the highest shares recorded anywhere in the world. Most of it arrives as white rice in the South, East and Northeast, and refined wheat flour in the North and Central belt. Meanwhile protein, the nutrient every fitness influencer screams about and almost nobody actually eats enough of, sits at just 12% of daily calories, against a recommended 15 per cent. Dairy contributes barely 2% of that protein. Animal protein contributes 1 per cent. The country that worships milk as sacred somehow cannot get enough of it into its own diet.

This is not a fringe finding buried in an obscure journal. It is a 15-year, government-funded study, and its authors were blunt about the consequence. Carbohydrate-heavy, protein-poor eating is linked to a 15 to 30% higher risk of type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, general obesity and abdominal obesity. And here is the part that should embarrass every fitness page selling millet miracles: switching from white rice to whole wheat or millet flour does not fix the problem. Milling raises the glycaemic index regardless of the grain. The issue was never rice versus wheat. It was quantity, and what quantity was never replaced with.

19 states and union territories are already exceeding the national safe limit for added sugar. This is not a country slipping quietly into a health crisis. It has already arrived, and it arrived with second helpings.

The Data Nobody Wants to Discuss at the Dinner Table

Numbers rarely lie, even when people insist they do. A separate ICMR-INDIAB analysis, published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, estimated that 101 million Indians were living with diabetes in 2021 and another 136 million with prediabetes, a category that functions less like a warning and more like a waiting room. The same body of research put hypertension at 315 million people and obesity at 254 million. High LDL cholesterol affected an estimated 185 million more. These are not small percentages rounded up for dramatic effect. They are the lived condition of a very large share of the country, most of whom will describe themselves, if asked, as basically fine.

Layer physical inactivity on top of diet and the picture stops being a health story and becomes a civilisational one. A Lancet Global Health study tracked insufficient physical activity in India rising from 22.3% of adults in the year 2000 to 49.4% in 2022, a near doubling in 2 decades. Women fare worse than men, with 57% classified as insufficiently active against 42% of men. If the trend holds, projections suggest roughly 60% of Indian adults could be physically unfit by 2030. India already ranks 2nd worst in the world for physical inactivity, behind only the wealthiest economies of the Asia-Pacific, which is a strange club for a country still calling itself ‘developing’.

The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s own Time Use Survey for 2024 is, if anything, more damning than any foreign journal. It found that only 14.8% of men and a mere 3.9% of women engage in daily sport or exercise. For every woman exercising in India, roughly 3.8 men do the same, a gap that says as much about domestic labour and gendered time poverty as it does about willpower. When it comes to actually playing a sport rather than a gentle walk, fewer than 1% of Indians reported doing so on the day surveyed, and 4 out of 5 of that tiny group were under 20. Adulthood, for most Indians, appears to be the point at which movement quietly stops.

The Real Minority Who Actually Show Up

Somewhere inside these grim averages exists a small, visible, and genuinely disciplined minority. India’s fitness market, by industry estimates, covers about 956 million adults in the working-age bracket, yet only around 138 million of them are physically active in any form, paid or unpaid, including walking, cycling, yoga or the gym. Of that already modest number, only 15% participate through paid channels such as gyms or studios. Paid gym membership penetration nationally stands at roughly 0.8% of the population, meaning fewer than 1 in a 100 Indians holds a gym membership of any kind.

Yoga remains the closest thing India has to a mass fitness movement, and even that is a minority pursuit relative to the population, not a national habit. It is telling that the fastest-growing segment of India’s fitness industry is the boutique category built around yoga, HIIT and pilates, projected to grow at nearly 19% a year through 2030, precisely because it currently serves such a small, urban, and disproportionately affluent sliver of the country. This is not a criticism of that minority. If anything, they are proof that the biology is not the barrier. Time, income, urban infrastructure and personal discipline are. The rest of the country is not incapable of the same outcomes. It has simply not been organised, incentivised, or governed towards them.

Where the Real Failure Sits

It would be dishonest, and frankly a little cheap, to place this entirely at the feet of individual Indians choosing rice over lentils. People are not stupid. They are responding, rationally, to a food and health environment that has been engineered by decades of policy indifference.

Consider the subsidy architecture.

India’s public distribution system has, for generations, subsidised rice and wheat at scale while leaving pulses, dairy and protein-dense foods largely to market price. The ICMR-INDIAB researchers themselves said as much, calling explicitly for food subsidy reform and stronger public health messaging to shift national eating patterns towards plant and dairy protein. When the state spends decades making carbohydrate the cheapest calorie in the country and protein the expensive one, it should not be shocking that carbohydrate wins the plate. That is not a failure of ‘collective willpower’. That is the predictable output of the incentive structure the state itself built.

Then there is the spending pattern on the other end of the crisis, once the damage is already done. India’s out-of-pocket health expenditure, the money citizens pay directly from their own pockets rather than through insurance or government cover, stood at around 47 to 50 % of total health spending as recently as the Economic Survey of 2023-24. That is a dramatic improvement from 64% a decade earlier, and credit is due for that movement, but it remains nowhere near the 35% benchmark the Survey itself recommended 3 years earlier.

Translated into ordinary terms, roughly half of what India spends on health is still money pulled straight from household savings, often after a diabetes or cardiac diagnosis rather than before one. A nation that will not fund preventive nutrition and movement infrastructure ends up funding hospital bills instead, at a much higher price, paid much later, usually by families least able to afford it.

This is where the political will genuinely deserves scrutiny, separate from personal choices at the dinner table. Front-of-pack warning labels for high sugar, salt and fat products have been debated and diluted for years without a binding national mandate. Junk food advertising aimed at children continues largely unregulated compared to comparable economies. School meal programmes, where a generation’s eating habits are formed, remain calorie-focused rather than nutrient-focused in most states. Physical education in schools is treated as a scheduling afterthought rather than a health intervention. None of this is a mystery to policymakers. It has simply never been urgent enough to survive budget season, because the costs of inaction land on families and hospitals years later, safely outside any single government’s electoral cycle.

Collective Consciousness, Not Collective Blame

There is a difference between calling out denial and mocking the people living inside it, and that difference matters here.

Millions of Indians are not choosing sedentary, carbohydrate-heavy lives out of laziness. They are choosing the cheapest available calories, the most accessible transport, the longest working hours, and the least amount of leisure time left over for a walk, let alone a gym. The 3.9 per cent daily exercise figure for women is not a character flaw. It is what happens when domestic labour, caregiving and paid work consume nearly every waking hour, and no employer, school, or civic body builds movement back into that schedule.

But denial is still denial, even when it is understandable. The defensiveness that meets any conversation about diet and inactivity in India, the instant pivot to genetics, to tradition, to “our grandparents ate rice and lived to 90,” ignores that the grandparents in question also walked for transport, farmed by hand, and ate a fraction of the sugar available today. Nostalgia is not a nutrition plan. And a ‘collective consciousness’ that treats a diabetes diagnosis as fate rather than a data point on a chart that ICMR has now published in exhaustive detail is a consciousness that has stopped asking questions it does not want answered.

The honest reading of all this data is uncomfortable in both directions.

Indians, on average, are eating in a way that is measurably driving disease at scale, and a large share of the population is either unaware of that fact or actively resistant to hearing it. At the same time, the state that should have made the healthier choice the cheaper, easier, and more socially normal one has, for decades, done close to the opposite, subsidising the wrong grain, regulating advertising too lightly, and funding treatment far more generously than it has ever funded prevention.

The fitness minority proves the exit exists. Roughly 138 million Indians already walk through it, on yoga mats, running tracks and gym floors, mostly self-funded and mostly self-motivated, with almost no meaningful structural push from the state to get there. The other billion are not being stubborn for its own sake. They are living inside a food system, a work culture and a health policy environment that has never made the healthier path the obvious one.

Fixing that is not a matter of shaming rice-eaters into salads. It is a matter of governance finally treating prevention with the seriousness it has, for decades, reserved only for treatment.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

Long or Short, get news the way you like. No ads. No redirections. Download Newspin and Stay Alert, The CSR Journal Mobile app, for fast, crisp, clean updates!

App Store –  https://apps.apple.com/in/app/newspin/id6746449540 

Google Play Store – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inventifweb.newspin&pcampaignid=web_share

The post Subsidised to Sickness: How Indian Food Policy Built a Health Crisis appeared first on The CSR Journal.

Ranchi is witnessing a dangerous collision between unemployment, examination distrust and politics. Thousands of young aspirants have marched towards the Jharkhand Assembly, demanding action over alleged irregularities in JPSC and JSSC recruitment examinations. Police used water cannons, tear gas and batons as the protest escalated on August 10. The agitation began on July 25 and has now become one of the most significant youth protests in the state in recent years but beneath the slogans, barricades and political accusations lies a question that deserves far more serious examination: Who exactly is driving this movement—and what does each stakeholder stand to gain from it? Because this is no longer merely a story about an examination, It is a battle over trust, jobs, political credibility and power.

For over a week, Jharkhand’s government job aspirants have continued their protest in Ranchi, braving heavy rain and demanding a CBI probe into alleged irregularities in JPSC and JSSC recruitment exams.

With arrests made, the JPSC Chairman resigning, and the Mains exam… pic.twitter.com/gMDGtiu7pO

— The CSR Journal (@thecsrjournal) August 5, 2026

First, let us not insult the students by calling their anger political

The easiest—and most dangerous—way to dismiss a student movement is to label it “politically sponsored.” That would be profoundly unfair. For thousands of young people in Jharkhand, government recruitment is not an abstract political issue. It is a question of survival. That anger is real. The current protesters are demanding cancellation of certain examinations, reforms in JPSC and JSSC and an independent investigation, including a CBI probe or an inquiry by retired High Court judges from outside the state.

So the first conclusion must be clear: There is a genuine student grievance here. Anyone who attempts to erase that fact by simply shouting “BJP-sponsored protest” or “political conspiracy” is avoiding the real issue. But then comes the uncomfortable question: Who is benefiting from the anger? This is where the story becomes politically explosive. Jharkhand is governed by the JMM-led alliance under Chief Minister Hemant Soren. The principal opposition force, the BJP, has seized upon the recruitment controversy and demanded accountability, a CBI investigation and even the Chief Minister’s resignation. BJP MPs have already protested in Parliament over the alleged JPSC paper leak.

On August 10, BJP Leader of Opposition Babulal Marandi and other BJP leaders were detained during protests linked to the recruitment controversy.  That tells us something important: The student movement may be genuine—but the political ecosystem surrounding it is unquestionably real. And that distinction matters. A protest can begin organically and still become politically useful. A student can protest because his career is being destroyed, while a political party sees an opportunity to weaken the government.Both things can be true simultaneously.

One of the most visible faces of the agitation is JLKM leader Devendra Nath Mahto. Mahto went on hunger strike and later joined the Assembly march after reportedly losing significant weight. His involvement has given the agitation a recognisable political face. That does not automatically make the student movement political. But it makes one thing unavoidable: The protest is no longer operating in a political vacuum. There are now political leaders, opposition parties and pressure groups attempting to associate themselves with the anger of the students.

Devendra Nath Mahto has launched an indefinite hunger strike over alleged JPSC-JSSC recruitment irregularities. He is demanding a CBI and ED probe, urging students to remain peaceful as the movement for fair and transparent recruitment grows.#Jharkhand #JPSC #StudentProtest… pic.twitter.com/Q4iAJc2pHw

— The CSR Journal (@thecsrjournal) August 5, 2026

 The BJP has its own political calculation. JLKM has its own political space to expand. The ruling JMM-Congress alliance has an obvious interest in containing the damage. And the students have their own very different objective: They want their examinations and careers protected. These interests overlap—but they are not identical.

The BJP’s calculation is obvious—but that does not make its questions illegitimate

The BJP has every political reason to attack the Hemant Soren government. Recruitment examinations are an extremely powerful political weapon because they connect directly with unemployment. If the opposition can successfully establish that the government has failed to protect recruitment examinations, it can convert a technical administrative controversy into a much larger political narrative: “The government has failed Jharkhand’s youth.” That is politically devastating.

But there is a trap here. If BJP leaders turn every student demand into an anti-Soren campaign, they risk destroying the credibility of the very movement they claim to support. The moment students become merely political ammunition, their cause becomes secondary. The question should not be: “Can this protest damage Hemant Soren?” The question should be: “Can this protest force an examination system that no government can manipulate?”

And the JMM-Congress response raises another uncomfortable question

The government says it has accepted approximately 98% of the protesters’ demands.The students strongly dispute that claim. According to reports, the protesters argue that only three of the 13 examinations they sought to have cancelled were actually scrapped.This is where communication has failed spectacularly. If the government says 98%, and students say “not even close,” then somebody needs to put the entire demand list on the table.

No political speeches, No slogans, No press conferences, No competing narratives, Just a document.

Demand number 1 — Government response.

Demand number 2 — Government response.

Demand number 3 — Government response.

And so on. Because when a government says 98% and protesters say the opposite, the public deserves to know who is telling the truth.

The biggest issue may not actually be the latest alleged leak

This is where the story becomes much deeper. Jharkhand’s recruitment system has been facing controversy for years. The Jharkhand High Court dealt with allegations surrounding the JSSC CGL examination and noted that the investigation had found evidence of candidates being allegedly extorted in the name of supplying question papers, but the investigation cited in the judgment did not find evidence of an organised leak of the original 150-question paper.

That is an extremely important fact because there is a massive difference between: “There was an organised paper leak.” and “Candidates were allegedly cheated or extorted by people falsely claiming to possess leaked papers.”The distinction matters legally. It also matters journalistically. And it matters politically. A protest should not be built upon an allegation being treated as a proven fact before an independent investigation establishes what actually happened. But equally, the absence of proof in one investigation should not be used to dismiss every concern about the recruitment system. The real crisis is bigger than one FIR. It is the collapse of confidence.

This is the real crime: destroying trust

Imagine preparing for an examination for two years. Then imagine hearing that someone may have obtained the paper beforehand. Even if the allegation ultimately proves false, what happens to your confidence? You begin asking:Was the examination fair? Was the centre secure? Was the agency competent? Were insiders involved? Was the result manipulated? Why was the examination cancelled? Why was it delayed? Why isn’t there an independent investigation?That is how institutional trust dies. And once trust dies, a government cannot repair it with a press release. It needs transparency, independent investigation and accountability.

But is political rivalry now turning this into a battlefield?

Very possibly—but that must be investigated, not assumed. There are clear signs of political appropriation. BJP leaders are openly demanding the Chief Minister’s resignation. JLKM’s Devendra Nath Mahto has become a prominent face of the agitation. Other political and pressure groups have also extended support. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke has publicly backed the students and described his organisation as a pressure group.That means the movement has developed multiple political stakeholders.

But here’s the crucial distinction: Political support does not automatically mean political conspiracy. A political party supporting a genuine public movement is normal democracy. The problem begins when politicians attempt to manufacture the grievance, control the protesters, dictate their demands or use students merely as weapons against their rivals.

So the correct question is not: “Is BJP behind the protest?” The more intelligent question is: “How much of the protest existed independently of political parties, and how much has subsequently been appropriated by them?” That is the question we as journalists should investigate.

Could this be an equal-score game between political parties?

Yes, that possibility deserves serious scrutiny. Indian politics has a familiar pattern. When Party A is in power, Party B attacks it over unemployment, recruitment scandals and examination failures. When Party B comes to power, Party A suddenly discovers the same issues.

The students remain the same, Their unemployment remains the same,  Their lost years remain the same, Only the political slogans change. That is why Jharkhand’s students should ask every political party a brutally simple question: “What did you do when you were in power?”

And then: “What exactly will you do if you come to power? Not promises, Not speeches, Not hashtags, A written recruitment reform plan with deadlines.

If the BJP is serious, let it publish its roadmap

If the BJP believes the JMM-led government has failed Jharkhand’s youth, it should go beyond demanding Hemant Soren’s resignation. Publish a blueprint. How will examinations be conducted? Who will conduct them? How will printing and transportation be secured? How will digital access be monitored? What punishment will paper-leak criminals face? How quickly will investigations be completed? What compensation will candidates receive when an examination is cancelled because of administrative failure? What will happen to officials responsible for negligence? And most importantly: Will the BJP guarantee a fixed annual recruitment calendar if it comes to power? That would turn political opposition into public accountability.

And the same test must be applied to JMM-Congress

The ruling alliance cannot hide behind the argument that “most demands have been accepted.” Young people do not need percentages. They need certainty. When will the examination happen? When will the investigation finish? Who will be held responsible? Which examinations will be cancelled? When will the new examinations be conducted? When will appointments be made?Give the students dates. Give them names. Give them procedures.Give them legally enforceable accountability.

The Assembly march is therefore bigger than a paper leak

What we are witnessing in Ranchi is not simply a fight between students and police. It is a fight between citizens and an increasingly distrusted recruitment system. It is also becoming a fight between the ruling alliance and the opposition for political ownership of youth anger. And somewhere between these two battles are thousands of young people who cannot afford to become anybody’s political weapon.

The government has a responsibility. The opposition has a responsibility. Political organisations have a responsibility. And the media has an even greater responsibility. Do not turn students into political props. Investigate the allegations. Investigate the investigation. Investigate the recruitment agencies. Investigate the political connections. Investigate the money trail, if any. Investigate the people accused of selling fake papers. Investigate whether genuine leaks occurred. Investigate whether rumours were deliberately manufactured. Investigate whether political actors are exploiting the movement. And investigate whether government institutions failed through corruption, negligence or incompetence.

The ultimate test: Follow the evidence, not the flag

There is a very simple way to determine whether this is a genuine youth movement or a political operation. Remove every political party from the equation. Remove BJP flags. Remove JMM flags.Remove Congress flags. Remove JLKM flags. Remove every political speech. Then ask the students five questions:

Do you want transparent examinations? Do you want an independent investigation? Do you want accountability? Do you want a fixed recruitment calendar? Do you want examinations conducted without political or bureaucratic interference? If the answer remains yes, then the movement has a legitimate democratic foundation. If political parties subsequently join it, that is politics.But the grievance remains real.

Jharkhand’s youth cannot be asked to choose between two political stories

One side says: “This is a BJP-sponsored conspiracy.” The other says: “This government has destroyed the future of Jharkhand’s youth.” Both slogans may serve political interests. Neither is enough. The truth must be established independently because the biggest victim is not BJP, It is not JMM, It is not Congress, It is not JLKM. It is the student who spent three years preparing for a government job and now doesn’t know whether the examination itself can be trusted. That student does not care who wins the next election. He wants to know whether his hard work will be worth anything.

The final question is therefore not “Who is behind the protest?”

The real question is: “Who will stand behind the students when the political cameras leave?”If there was a genuine paper leak, expose the network. If there was administrative negligence, punish those responsible.If there was a fake-leak racket, expose that. If political parties manufactured parts of the agitation, expose that too. And if the government is genuinely confident that the recruitment system is clean, then it should have nothing to fear from an independent investigation.

A transparent investigation does not weaken a government. It protects an honest government. Jharkhand’s youth deserve nothing less. Because a paper leak does not merely steal an examination. It steals time. It steals money. It steals opportunity. And worst of all— it steals a young person’s belief that merit still matters. That is why this protest must not be allowed to become merely another chapter in Jharkhand’s political score-settling. The students’ future is too valuable to become somebody else’s election strategy.

Investigate everything. Protect the students. Follow the evidence. And let neither the government nor the opposition escape accountability.

The post Jharkhand’s Paper Leak Protest: Students Fighting for Justice or Politicians Fighting for Power? appeared first on The CSR Journal.

Every semester I walk from my department to the library, and every semester the walk gets lonelier, not because the corridor has changed but because fewer people are making the same walk. Meanwhile the canteen, three buildings away, hums like a beehive. I do not blame my students for this. They are not lazy or shallow. They are simply living inside an architecture of attention that was built without their consent, by companies who profit from every second they do not spend reading.

But the numbers agree with what my eyes see. Indians now spend close to 2.5 hours a day on social media alone, according to industry estimates for 2025, with the youngest users, Gen Z, crossing three hours daily.

Add general screen time and the figure climbs past 6 hours a day for many young Indians. Compare this to the time an average Indian spends reading books for pleasure, which surveys consistently place at a fraction of that, often under 30 minutes a day, and mostly among an already shrinking population of committed readers. We have not lost the appetite for stories. We have simply handed that appetite to a machine that serves it back to us in fifteen-second increments, algorithmically tuned to keep us scrolling rather than thinking.

I see this most starkly on trains and buses. A decade ago, the daily commuter in Mumbai or Delhi would often carry a paperback, a newspaper, sometimes a worn copy of a novel borrowed from a colleague. Today the same commuter holds a phone at chest height, a reel autoplaying into the next reel, sound often turned up rather than down, so that an entire compartment becomes an unwilling audience to a stranger’s algorithm. Nobody asked for this noise. It simply became normal; the way pollution becomes normal to a city that has stopped noticing its own air.

The Numbers Behind the Feeling

India’s public library system, one of the largest in the world on paper, remains one of the most starved in practice. Research going back years and still cited today shows that India’s per capita government expenditure on public libraries works out to a matter of paise, not rupees, compared to the United States, where public libraries receive tens of dollars per person annually and serve well over 90% of the population.

India has an estimated 70,000 public libraries, yet a large share of them survive without adequate staff, without new acquisitions, without so much as reliable electricity, let alone digital catalogues. Central schemes exist to fund state libraries, but year after year, many states fail to even submit proposals to claim the money that is available to them. The result is a strange and quiet tragedy: a country that speaks constantly of its ancient intellectual traditions, of Nalanda and Takshashila, is simultaneously allowing its modern public reading infrastructure to wither from simple neglect.

Private lending libraries, which once filled the gap left by government indifference, particularly for the middle class in the 80s and 90s, have themselves been hollowed out by cheap smartphones and free content. The subscription library, once a fixture in almost every middle class neighbourhood in urban India, has become rare enough that when a new one opens, it is treated as a novelty rather than a return to normalcy.

Independent bookstores tell a similar story. Storied outlets have shut their doors or converted into stationery and lifestyle shops simply to survive rising rents and falling footfall. The overall Indian book market, measured in rupees, is not shrinking. It is in fact growing, driven largely by textbooks, exam preparation material, and online sales through platforms that deliver to your doorstep. But this is precisely the point I want to make as an academic rather than as a merchant. A market can grow in value while a culture shrinks in depth. Growth in exam guides is not growth in the habit of reading for its own sake. A student buying a coaching manual for an entrance exam is not the same as a citizen who reads a novel on a Sunday afternoon because it enlarges her understanding of another human life. We are buying more books than ever and reading less than ever, and these two facts are not contradictory. They describe two different economies, one of transaction and one of transformation, and only the first is thriving.

Why This Matters More, Not Less, in the Age of AI?

There is a temptation, especially among the young, to believe that reading is an old technology being replaced by a better one. I want to push back against this gently but firmly, because I think it misunderstands what reading actually does to a human mind.

A reel gives you information. A book gives you thought. These are not the same product wearing different packaging. When you read a book, particularly a long one, your brain is forced to hold an argument or a story in memory across hours or days, to connect a detail on page twelve with a revelation on page 200, to sit with discomfort and ambiguity rather than have it resolved for you in 15 seconds by an algorithm optimised for immediate gratification. This capacity, the ability to sustain attention on a single, demanding, uncertain thing, is precisely the capacity that artificial intelligence cannot replicate and precisely the capacity we are losing.

We are entering a decade where machines can summarise, translate, and even argue on our behalf. In such a world, the most valuable human skill will not be the ability to retrieve information, because a search engine or an AI model will always retrieve it faster than we can. The most valuable human skill will be the ability to think slowly, to doubt, to build an original argument out of scattered material, to notice when a machine’s answer is confident but wrong. This is exactly the muscle that deep reading builds and that reel culture atrophies.

A society that stops reading books in the age of AI is not choosing a modern path over an ancient one. It is quietly disarming itself at the precise moment it most needs its wits.

This is true everywhere, not only in India. Studies across the world, from the United States to parts of Europe, show falling attention spans and falling literary reading rates among the young even as overall screen time climbs. But the stakes are arguably higher here, in a country still building its institutions, still deciding what kind of public culture it wants, still home to the largest population of young people on earth. What that generation reads, or fails to read, will shape the next fifty years of Indian public life far more than any single policy document.

The Students’ Paradox

Let me be blunt, because 14 years of classroom experience has earned me the right to be. Some of the most confident young people I meet are MBA students chasing the highest paying job on campus, and some of the most intellectually hollow conversations I have ever had are with the very same students.

Ask an MBA aspirant about geopolitics and you often get a headline, not an understanding. Ask about basic economics beyond what a placement guide has fed them and the answers thin out quickly. Mention philosophy or the idea that ethics might actually matter in business decisions and you are met with a polite blankness, sometimes even mild irritation, as though the subject is a distraction from the real business of getting hired. Bring up something as old and human as spirituality, not religion, but the deeper question of meaning and purpose, and the room goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with respect and everything to do with unfamiliarity. These are not unintelligent young people. They are bright, hardworking, and desperately eager to succeed. What they are missing is not intellect. It is exposure, the kind that only sustained reading provides.

And here is the real irony, the one that should worry every business school in this country.

These same students, so eager for the corner office and the 6 figure package, often cannot communicate a simple idea clearly in a room. Give them a case study to present and watch the jargon multiply to hide the absence of a real argument underneath. Ask a follow up question and watch the confidence wobble, because what looked like knowledge was actually memorised vocabulary, borrowed frameworks repeated without being understood, phrases lifted from a slide rather than thought through by a mind.

This is what happens when a generation is trained to clear an exam rather than build a worldview, when the last serious book many of them read closely was assigned in school and never revisited by choice. Reading is not decoration for future managers and consultants. It is the raw material of judgment, of the ability to make an argument, defend it, and adjust it when someone pushes back. Without it, ambition simply has nothing to stand on.

The ChatGPT Shortcut

If reels stole our attention, generative AI is now quietly finishing the job by stealing our effort, and I say this as someone who uses these tools myself and sees real value in them when used with discipline.

What I increasingly see in my own classroom is a student who has not read the case study, has not opened the recommended article, has not sat with the discomfort of not knowing, but has instead pasted the question into a chatbot and submitted whatever came back, often word for word, sometimes with the AI’s own hedging language still intact. The assignment gets finished faster than ever. The student understands it less than ever. This is a new and dangerous kind of doubling. First reel culture eroded the willingness to sit with a long, difficult text. Now AI tools remove even the need to try, because the summary, the argument, even the counterargument arrives instantly, pre-digested, requiring nothing of the reader but a copy and paste.

The tragedy is that these tools could make a well-read student formidable, sharpening research that already has a foundation, testing arguments the student has already formed through independent reading. Instead, for a growing number of students, AI has become a replacement for the reading and thinking that should have come first, not an accelerant for it.

A model can summarise a hundred pages in a paragraph, but it cannot give a student the experience of struggling through those hundred pages, of getting confused, doubling back, and eventually understanding something on their own terms. That struggle is not an inefficiency to be optimised away. It is the entire point of an education.

A generation that outsources its thinking before it has learned how to think is not being augmented by artificial intelligence. It is being quietly hollowed out by it, one skipped case study at a time.

What Karl Marx Might Have Noticed

I want to make one more observation, and I make it carefully, because it is easy to sound preachy here.

There is something quietly ideological about the shift from library to canteen, from book to reel. A library, at its best, is a rare kind of space. It is one of the few public institutions where a person’s access to knowledge does not depend on how much money they have or which family they were born into. The book on the shelf costs the same attention from the richest student and the poorest one. It does not perform for you, it does not know your background, it does not sort you by caste, class, or clout the way so much of Indian institutional life still quietly does. In this sense, reading is one of the last genuinely democratic acts left to us, an equaliser hiding in plain sight on a dusty shelf.

The reel, by contrast, is not neutral. It is built by platforms whose business model depends on capturing and holding your attention for as long as possible, then selling that attention to advertisers. It thrives on spectacle rather than substance, on outrage rather than argument, on comparison rather than contemplation. It quietly sorts and stratifies its audience too, showing the well-off different content from the poor, the urban different content from the rural, each trapped in a feed engineered to keep them scrolling rather than thinking about why the world is organised the way it is. Where the library asks nothing of you but attention and rewards you with understanding, the platform asks for your attention and gives you back only more appetite for the platform. One builds a public. The other builds a market of isolated consumers who happen to be looking at their phones in the same room.

I do not say this to romanticise the past. Libraries in India have their own history of exclusion, and no institution is innocent. But there was, in the collective act of reading together, something that resembled solidarity. A shared canon, a shared reference point, a shared argument that could be had across class lines because everyone had at least encountered the same handful of books in school or college. The fragmentation of attention into millions of personalised feeds has fragmented that shared ground as well. We increasingly do not even disagree about the same things anymore, because we are not looking at the same things. This, too, is a kind of hierarchy, quieter than caste or class, but no less real: a hierarchy of who still has the discipline to read deeply in a world engineered to prevent exactly that.

What Is Actually Lost?

When focus goes, motivation tends to follow it. I have watched this happen in real time in my own classroom. Students who once could sit through a 180-minute lecture and take structured notes now visibly struggle to hold a single train of thought for more than a few minutes without reaching for a phone. This is not a moral failing on their part. It is what happens to any mind that has been trained, for years, on content engineered to reward the shortest possible attention span. You cannot spend six hours a day being fed fifteen-second bursts of stimulation and expect your brain to remain equally capable of sitting with a two-hundred-page argument. The muscle that reading builds, patience, delayed gratification, the tolerance for boredom that eventually gives way to insight, is being allowed to waste away.

And with it goes something larger than individual academic performance. A citizenry that reads widely and deeply is harder to manipulate, harder to distract, and more capable of holding power accountable, because it has practised the discipline of following a complicated argument to its end rather than accepting the first simple answer offered to it. A citizenry raised on reels is a citizenry optimised for consumption, not for judgment.

A Small, Stubborn Hope

I do not want to end on despair, because despair is itself a kind of surrender, and reading has never been a lost cause in India, only a neglected one. Independent bookstores in some cities report devoted, if smaller, communities of readers who return again and again. Regional language publishing remains genuinely vibrant, with a significant share of Indian trade books still sold outside English, carrying stories to audiences the metropolitan literary world often forgets exists. Reading clubs, however small, still meet in flats and offices across the country. My own students, the ones who do walk into the library, read with an intensity that reminds me why I chose this profession fourteen years ago.

What is needed now is not nostalgia but investment and intention. Real government spending on public libraries, not per capita paise but per capita rupees that mean something. School curricula that build reading stamina deliberately rather than assuming it will happen on its own. And a personal, almost private act of resistance from each of us: choosing, at least once a day, to open a book instead of a feed, to let an idea sit in the mind long enough to become our own, rather than letting 15 seconds of someone else’s spectacle pass through us and vanish.

The library will not save itself. But it is still there, half empty, patiently waiting, its silence not yet gone, only waiting to be filled again by the sound of a page turning.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

Long or Short, get news the way you like. No ads. No redirections. Download Newspin and Stay Alert, The CSR Journal Mobile app, for fast, crisp, clean updates!

App Store –  https://apps.apple.com/in/app/newspin/id6746449540 

Google Play Store – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inventifweb.newspin&pcampaignid=web_share

The post Why a Booming Book Market Does Not Mean India Reads More appeared first on The CSR Journal.

This is not an isolated story. It is the pattern of an entire decade.

Between 2019 and 2024, India lost 14,910 government schools to closure and merger, according to the Ministry of Education’s own reply to the Lok Sabha. Madhya Pradesh alone shut 6,972 schools. Odisha closed 4,589. Jammu and Kashmir, already a fragile region, lost 4,380 schools while nearly 13,000 teaching posts sat vacant. Children there now walk four to six kilometres daily just to sit in a classroom, a direct violation of the neighbourhood school principle written into the Right to Education Act itself.

Widen the lens further and the picture turns grimmer.

UDISE Plus data, the government’s own school census, shows that between 2017-18 and 2023-24, India lost 87,012 schools in total, of which 76,883 were government schools. In the most recent cycle alone, nearly 89,000 government schools shut down while roughly 42,944 new private schools opened their doors. Private school numbers rose from 3.31 lakh to 3.39 lakh in a single year. The 2024-25 UDISE data adds one more brutal detail. Government schools lost 5.9 lakh students in that year alone, while private unaided schools gained 5.8 lakh. The trade was almost one for one. A child who left a government classroom appeared, in the very same year, in a private one.

Who exactly is being pushed out deserves attention, because this is not a neutral demographic shift. Of the students who disappeared from government rolls that year, over 8 lakh belonged to Scheduled Castes, roughly 2 lakhs to Scheduled Tribes, and 3 lakhs to Other Backward Classes. These are the communities the Indian Constitution promised to lift through education. They are now the ones being quietly nudged out of the system that was built for them.

Why This Is Not an Accident?

To understand what is happening, it helps to borrow a simple idea from education theory, one that does not need a doctorate to grasp. Governments justify school closures using the language of rationalisation. Low enrollment, the argument goes, means resources are wasted keeping a half empty school running. Merge it with a bigger one nearby, save money, improve efficiency.

This sounds reasonable until you ask why enrollment fell in the first place. A government report submitted to the Lok Sabha itself lists the real reasons parents abandon government schools. Poor infrastructure, no functioning toilets, unsafe buildings. Severe teacher shortages, with over 9,500 schools in Uttar Pradesh alone running on a single teacher for thousands of students combined. Teachers pulled away from actual teaching to conduct census work, polio drives, and midday meal duties. No English medium instruction, despite rising parental demand.

In other words, the state starves a school of teachers, toilets, and basic upkeep for years, watches enrollment collapse as a predictable result, and then uses that same collapse as proof the school deserves to die. This is not efficiency. It is a manufactured justification, and once you see the pattern you cannot unsee it. Sociologists call this ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’: starve the institution, then point to its weakness as the reason to abandon it.

Follow the Money!

None of this happens without a budget decision behind it, and the budget tells its own story without needing much interpretation.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2014 election manifesto promised to raise total education spending to 6 percent of GDP, a figure first recommended by the Kothari Commission back in 1966. More than a decade later, that promise remains a jumla, an unfulfilled slogan. Economic Survey data shows combined central and state education spending fell from 3.1% of GDP in 2013-14, the final year of the previous government, to 2.7% by 2023-24. Central government spending alone tells an even starker story. It fell from 0.55% of GDP to around 0.37 to 0.4 percent, a decline that has continued almost without interruption for 15 years.

Look at it as a share of the total government budget, which is arguably the more honest measure, since it shows what a government actually chooses to prioritise when it decides how to spend its money.

Education’s share of total government expenditure fell from 4.14% in 2014-15 to about 2.5 percent by 2024-25. That is a 40% decline in political priority within a single decade. The Department of Higher Education’s share of the union budget fell from 2.52% in 2013-14 to 0.91% in 2024-25, more than halving in relative terms.

Nominal numbers look like growth on paper.

The education ministry’s allocation rose from roughly 85,010 crore rupees in 2018-19 to about 1.39 lakh crore in the 2026-27 budget. But nominal growth during a period of rising inflation and rising GDP is not the same as increased priority.

When you divide by total budget size or by GDP, the line points only one way, downward. India now spends less on education as a share of its economy than it did before this government took office, despite 11 consecutive budgets and a National Education Policy (NEP) that explicitly promises 6% of GDP on paper.

The Right That Was Never Really a Right

The Right to Education Act (RTE), passed in 2009, tried to build a bridge between the collapsing government system and the expanding private one. Section 12(1)(c) of the Act requires every private unaided school to reserve 25% of entry level seats for children from economically weaker and disadvantaged backgrounds, with the government reimbursing the school for the cost.

On paper this is a genuinely progressive idea. A poor child from a Dalit or tribal household should be able to sit in the same classroom as the son of a businessman, learn from the same teacher, and access the same social networks that private schooling in India quietly sells alongside its curriculum. In practice, the promise has collapsed almost everywhere it has been tested.

National fill rates for this 25% quota hover between 20 and 27 percent, according to a 2025 CAG report and independent research bodies. That means roughly three out of every four reserved seats sit empty every single year, not because eligible children do not exist, but because the application process is digital, complicated, and hostile to families without internet access or English literacy.

In Punjab, a state rule quietly required EWS families to first apply to a government school before they could even approach a private one under the quota, a bureaucratic trick that produced near zero admissions for over a decade before a court finally struck it down in 2025.

In January 2026, the Supreme Court itself admitted that without enforceable rules, the entire promise of Section 12(1)(c) and the constitutional guarantee under Article 21A risked becoming what the judges called a dead letter.

A single case captured the absurdity well. A father in Mumbai applied for his son’s admission in 2016. The school had vacant seats. He was rejected on a technicality about the online form. He fought the case for nearly a decade. By the time the Supreme Court finally ruled in his favour in early 2026, 648 seats at schools across that jurisdiction were still sitting vacant, waiting for children who could never navigate the system built to keep them out.

Two Nations, Two Classrooms?

Put these three threads together and a coherent picture forms.

Government schools, the institutions historically used by the poor, by Dalit and Adivasi families, by rural India, are being closed at scale under the banner of rationalisation. The public money that could fix their toilets, staff their classrooms, and keep them open is shrinking as a share of the national budget, promise after promise notwithstanding. And the legal mechanism designed to let poor children cross into the private system that is now absorbing them functions at barely a quarter of its intended capacity.

The result is not integration. It is quiet segregation dressed up in the neutral language of policy efficiency.

Elite and upper middle class children continue moving through a private school ecosystem that keeps expanding, supported indirectly by a state that starves its own public alternative. Poor children are pushed toward low-cost private schools that are barely better resourced than the government schools they replaced, or they simply drop out. The Scheduled Caste (SC) enrollment numbers from 2024-25 make clear which group is bearing the sharpest edge of that fall.

Education theorists have a name for what public schooling is meant to prevent, the reproduction of existing social hierarchy through the guise of merit. A functioning public school system is one of the few instruments a democracy has to interrupt that inheritance, to give a child born into poverty a fair shot regardless of caste or geography. When that system is allowed to shrink by 87,000 schools in 6 years, when its budget share falls by 40% in a decade, when its own legal safety valve admits three quarters of its seats every year to nobody, the interruption stops happening. The hierarchy simply continues, generation after generation, now with the state’s quiet cooperation rather than its resistance.

The child in that Madhya Pradesh village who stopped walking to school after a few weeks will likely never appear in any of these statistics again. She will not be counted as a dropout in most surveys, because surveys tend to lose track of children exactly like her.

That, more than any budget line or court order, is the real measure of what a decade of quiet withdrawal has cost the country?

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

Long or Short, get news the way you like. No ads. No redirections. Download Newspin and Stay Alert, The CSR Journal Mobile app, for fast, crisp, clean updates!

App Store –  https://apps.apple.com/in/app/newspin/id6746449540 

Google Play Store – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inventifweb.newspin&pcampaignid=web_share

The post India’s Two-Track Education System Is No Accident appeared first on The CSR Journal.

The answer, measured in gigawatts, kilometres of rail, tokamak seconds and rocket launches, is not close.

I am not writing this as an ideologue. I have spent years critiquing Indian governance failures in this same voice, and I will keep doing so. But intellectual honesty demands that when a neighbour executes at a scale nobody else in Asia can match, you say so plainly. China is not merely growing. It is compounding advantages in energy, infrastructure, space and defense in a way that is reshaping the balance of power on this continent, and the numbers make the case better than any slogan could.

On Energy

Start with the boring but decisive metric: power generation capacity.

By the end of 2025, China’s cumulative installed renewable energy capacity crossed 2,337 gigawatts, with renewables accounting for 82.7% of all newly installed power capacity that year. To put that in scale, China’s renewable additions alone made up more than 60% of the entire world’s new renewable capacity in 2025.

Solar tells the story most starkly.

China became the 1st nation on earth to cross 1,000 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, with total photovoltaic capacity reaching around 1,100 gigawatts by mid-2025. For context on how absurd that lead is, China installed 210 gigawatts of new solar capacity in just the first-half of 2025, more than the United States had accumulated in its entire history through the end of 2024.

In a single month, May 2025, China installed 198 gigawatts of solar and 46 gigawatts of wind, a volume roughly equal to the total power generation capacity of Turkey or India.

This is not a temporary sprint. National energy planners expect China to add roughly 300 more gigawatts of wind and solar capacity in 2026 alone, with a longer-term target of 3,600 gigawatts of combined wind and solar capacity by 2035. Combined wind and solar capacity has already surpassed thermal power capacity for the first time, reaching 1.84 billion kilowatts and accounting for 47.3% of the country’s total installed power capacity while contributing 22% of the nation’s total electricity output in 2025.

None of this happened by accident. It happened because Beijing treats the energy transition as an industrial and strategic project, not a moral posture. China now manufactures more than 80% of the world’s solar modules and over 70% of global EV batteries, which means every solar farm built anywhere on the planet, including in Europe and India, quietly strengthens Chinese industrial leverage.

The Artificial Sun

If solar and wind are the present, China is already building the future. In Hefei, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, nicknamed China’s “artificial sun,” sustained steady-state high-confinement plasma for 1,066 seconds, a new world record that shattered the previous mark of 403 seconds, itself also set by EAST in 2023. That is roughly 17 minutes of a reactor recreating conditions close to the sun’s core, held stable by superconducting magnets.

This is not showmanship. It feeds directly into the international fusion effort. China joined the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project as a founding member and is responsible for about 9% of ITER’s construction and operation, with the Institute of Plasma Physics as the lead Chinese agency. And the research keeps advancing.

Scientists at EAST have since reached what physicists call a long-theorized “density-free regime,” in which plasma remains stable even as density rises far beyond the traditional operating limits that used to end fusion experiments, a breakthrough that represents a step past a major fusion limit, advancing the world’s slow climb toward near-limitless clean energy.

Why does this matter geopolitically? Because energy independence has always been the quiet variable behind great power behaviour. A country that solves fusion, even decades from now, ends its dependence on imported hydrocarbons entirely. China is not waiting for someone else to solve that problem. It is trying to own the solution.

Infrastructure: Steel, Speed and State Capacity

If energy is the fuel, infrastructure is the nervous system, and here the comparison across Asia is almost unfair. China’s high-speed rail network had already crossed 50,000 kilometres in total operational length by late December 2025, more than the combined high-speed rail mileage of every other country on earth. For scale, Japan’s celebrated Shinkansen network runs around 3,081 kilometres and France’s TGV around 2,735 kilometres, meaning China has built roughly fifteen Japans worth of bullet-train track.

Speed is now the frontier. Japan, France and Germany’s fastest commercial trains cruise around 300 to 320 kilometres per hour. China’s new-generation CR450 has pushed operating speed to 400 kilometres per hour, a threshold no other country has matched commercially, and by February 2026 the train had completed nearly 300,000 of the 600,000 kilometres of operational testing required before mass commercial rollout, with entry into service expected by the end of 2026.

Compare this to the rest of the region.

India’s flagship Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train, built with Japanese assistance, covers roughly 508 kilometres and remains under construction years after China had already connected 97% of its cities with populations above 500,000 to the high-speed network. This is not a criticism of Indian engineers or planners, many of whom work under genuine fiscal and land-acquisition constraints that China’s political system simply does not face. But state capacity is state capacity, and the gap on the ground is not a matter of opinion.

Commercial Space: From Follower to Frontrunner

Space used to be a two-country conversation. It no longer is. China conducted 93 orbital launches in 2025, continuing a climb from 39 launches in 2020 to more than 60 in each of 2022, 2023 and 2024.

The Tiangong space station, China’s answer to decades of exclusion from the International Space Station, has been continuously crewed and is set to expand from 3 modules to 6 starting in 2027, and in May 2026 it hosted its first astronaut from Hong Kong, while China simultaneously trains astronauts from Macau and Pakistan for future missions, positioning Tiangong as the likely sole government-run space station once the ageing ISS retires.

The commercial layer underneath state programmes is what should really catch an economist’s eye. Chinese rocket-launch funding alone rose 46% to 8.6 billion yuan in 2025, and the commercial space sector has ballooned from a dozen companies in 2015 to more than 300 by 2022. Between 2015 and 2024, total investment in China’s commercial space sector reached approximately 11.4 billion US dollars, supported by a network of six simultaneously operating launch sites and even sea-based launch platforms.

To be fair to the neighbourhood, India is not standing still. New Delhi’s SpaDeX programme made it the 4th country in the world to successfully complete in-space docking in 2025, and India is planning its own Bharatiya Antariksha space station with a first module expected by 2028. That effort deserves respect. But respect for effort should not be confused with parity in scale, cadence or industrial depth, and right now China is launching in weeks what India launches in years.

Defense: Quiet Capability Over Loud Rhetoric

China folds military logic directly into its civilian space cadence, something few Asian nations can match. Analysts tracking China’s 2025 launch record noted the routine inclusion of classified Yaogan reconnaissance payloads alongside commercial and scientific missions, observing that China now treats defense-related access to space as a continuous operational need rather than an occasional programme, illustrating the dual-use nature of its orbital activity. Its reusable Shenlong spaceplane, tested repeatedly since 2020, is widely read as a direct answer to the American X-37B, with its most recent flights keeping the vehicle in orbit for roughly nine months at a stretch.

This is the part where geopolitical theory actually helps, if you strip out the jargon. Realist international relations thinking says simply: states build capability first, and intentions get inferred later by everyone else. China is not asking for permission to become the dominant infrastructure and technology power in Asia. It is building the roads, reactors, rail lines and rockets, and the region is adjusting its expectations accordingly. That is not propaganda. That is how power has always worked, from the Roman roads to the British railways to the American interstate system. The nation that builds the hardest infrastructure, fastest, tends to set the terms for everyone standing next to it.

What This Means for the Rest of Asia?

None of this is an argument for uncritical admiration. China’s political system carries real and well-documented costs, and I have never pretended otherwise in my other writing.

Coal still supplies a majority of Chinese electricity generation even as renewables race ahead, and plenty of that infrastructure spending comes wrapped in debt and opacity that democracies would struggle to replicate, and probably should not want to.

But if the question on the table is narrower and more honest, namely who is winning the infrastructure and energy race in Asia right now, the data does not leave much room for debate. A country that adds more solar capacity in a single month than most nations have built in their history, that runs bullet trains at speeds nobody else has commercialised, that sustains an artificial sun for seventeen minutes and keeps a permanently crewed space station in orbit, is not a rising power anymore. It has already arrived.

The rest of Asia, India very much included, would do well to study the blueprint even while resisting the parts of the model that come at the cost of liberty.

The Asian century needs infrastructure before it needs slogans. Right now, one country in this region is building both at a pace nobody else can match.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

Long or Short, get news the way you like. No ads. No redirections. Download Newspin and Stay Alert, The CSR Journal Mobile app, for fast, crisp, clean updates!

App Store –  https://apps.apple.com/in/app/newspin/id6746449540 

Google Play Store – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inventifweb.newspin&pcampaignid=web_share

The post China’s 17 Minutes That Could Change Global Energy Forever appeared first on The CSR Journal.

Every year, the story is the same. Families lose homes built through decades of hard work, Farmers lose crops that took months to cultivate, Children lose schools and books, Small shopkeepers lose the savings of an entire lifetime. Thousands of people are pushed into relief camps, where uncertainty replaces hope and survival becomes the only priority. The tragedy is not that floods occur, The tragedy is that India has accepted them as normal. That acceptance is unacceptable.

The Brahmaputra is one of the mightiest rivers on Earth. For centuries, it has sustained the people of Assam. It has nurtured civilisation, agriculture and trade. Yet the same river has become the source of annual devastation because nature has been allowed to collide with neglect, poor planning and administrative complacency.

There is a dangerous tendency to blame everything on heavy rainfall and climate change. Certainly, climate change has intensified the problem. Rainfall patterns have become increasingly erratic. Glaciers in the Himalayas are melting more rapidly. Extreme weather events have become more frequent and more severe. But climate change alone is not responsible for Assam’s suffering. The truth is far more uncomfortable.

The Brahmaputra carries one of the world’s heaviest sediment loads. As enormous quantities of silt accumulate in the riverbed every year, the river gradually loses its carrying capacity, causing water levels to rise more quickly. Massive deforestation in the hills of Assam and neighbouring states has further accelerated soil erosion. Forests that once absorbed rainwater and held the soil together are steadily disappearing, leaving vast amounts of loose sediment to be washed into the river.

Wetlands, which once acted as natural flood barriers, have been destroyed or encroached upon. Rivers and drainage channels have been narrowed. Urban expansion has often taken place without proper planning. Meanwhile, embankments that were originally intended to protect communities have, in many places, become symbols of failure. Some are old, poorly maintained and unable to withstand the immense force of the Brahmaputra. Others collapse repeatedly, leaving entire villages vulnerable. The geography of Assam itself presents another challenge. The state lies in a vast valley surrounded by mountains. During the monsoon season, water rushes down from the Himalayas and neighbouring regions with tremendous force before eventually flowing into the Brahmaputra.

The result is a perfect storm, A powerful river, Heavy rainfall, Rapid erosion, Destroyed wetlands, Unplanned development, Weak infrastructure, Administrative failures And millions of people paying the price. This is not merely an environmental problem. It is an economic problem, a humanitarian problem and, above all, a governance problem.

A country aspiring to become a global economic power cannot measure its progress only through expressways, airports, digital revolutions and soaring skyscrapers. Real progress is measured by the safety and dignity of ordinary citizens. The people of Assam do not need sympathy. They need solutions. Flood management cannot consist merely of rescue boats, temporary shelters and compensation packages announced after disaster strikes. Governments at every level must recognise that long-term planning is the only path forward.

The first priority must be scientific river management, including regular dredging wherever necessary and continuous monitoring of sediment accumulation. The second priority must be the restoration and protection of wetlands, which serve as nature’s own flood-control system. The third priority must be the strengthening of embankments and the construction of more resilient infrastructure designed specifically for flood-prone regions. The fourth priority must be large-scale afforestation programmes aimed at reducing erosion and stabilising the soil. The fifth priority must be the development of modern forecasting systems that can provide communities with timely warnings. Finally, there must be strict regulation of construction activities in vulnerable areas, along with a comprehensive and coordinated river basin management strategy involving every state connected to the Brahmaputra.

These measures demand political will, scientific expertise and sustained investment but they also demand something even more important. They demand that the nation stop treating Assam as a headline that appears every monsoon and disappears as soon as the rains subside.

The courage of the people of Assam has never been in question. Every year, they rebuild their homes, Every year, they plant their fields again, Every year, they return to schools, businesses and workplaces. Every year, they begin anew. Their resilience is extraordinary but resilience should never become an excuse for indifference.

A nation that learns to live with annual devastation is, in many ways, surrendering to failure. The people of Assam deserve far better than condolences, promises and temporary relief. They deserve the confidence of knowing that the next monsoon will not destroy everything they have struggled to build. The floodwaters will rise again. The only question is whether the country’s determination to solve this crisis will rise with them.

The post Assam Floods: When a National Tragedy Becomes an Annual Ritual appeared first on The CSR Journal.