India needs economic muscle, military depth, principled consistency and real coalitions to turn autonomy from slogan into strategy.

1. The summit season that stripped the mask

When a country tells Russia to end its war in public, signs a declaration condemning attacks on Iran a few days later, hosts Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in New Delhi, and still hopes Washington will treat it as a trusted partner, the word for that is not genius. The word is exposure.

The SCO summit in Bishkek (31 August to 1 September 2026) and the BRICS summit in New Delhi (12 and 13 September 2026) was meant to showcase India as the indispensable swing state. The Eurasian affairs commentator Muqtedar Khan reads them differently: as evidence that New Delhi’s balancing act is eroding Russia’s trust while buying little durable trust elsewhere. India endorsed a Bishkek Declaration that condemned the attacks on Iran as violations of international law and mourned the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes on 28 February 2026. It did so without naming Washington or Tel Aviv, a phrasing everyone understood, and nobody had to own. Days earlier, Prime Minister Modi had publicly urged Mr. Putin to end the war in Ukraine. Then, at the BRICS summit, the New Delhi Declaration reportedly dropped any reference to the Ukraine war, bending to Russian preferences, even as it avoided naming the US and Israel on Iran.

Mr. Modi told Mr. Putin at Samarkand in 2022 that “this was not an era of war”, a line Delhi then repeated in Western capitals to excuse its discounted Russian oil. Yet the same language has not been aimed at Mr. Netanyahu over Gaza or Mr. Trump over Iran. Moscow can read that as principle. It is more likely to read it as performance, designed to reassure the West at Russia’s expense. New Delhi wants to back Israel while condemning attacks on Iran, buy Russian oil while moving closer to the West on Ukraine, and remain central to BRICS while telling Washington it is no anti-American bloc.

That is not a doctrine. It is a juggling act performed over a widening gap between ambition and capability. And a juggler who drops one ball can recover. A state that drops its credibility cannot.

This article argues 3 things:

First, India’s multialignment has become a slogan that hides the absence of strategy.

Second, the record since 2014, sharpened after 2019 and after 2024, shows a pattern of tactical cleverness and strategic loss.

Third, India can still fix this, but only by building the power and the principles that make autonomy real.

2. Theory without jargon: what is India doing?

Strip away the diplomatic vocabulary and international relations theory offers a few simple lenses.

Realism (Waltz, Mearsheimer). States survive by power. Kenneth Waltz said states balance, internally by growing their own strength and externally by joining coalitions. John Mearsheimer added that great powers fear one another and cannot trust promises. The realist test of India’s policy is brutal and simple: is India stronger relative to its main threat today than it was in 2014? China’s economy is roughly four to five times larger than India’s (about 19 trillion dollars against about 4 trillion). China’s declared defence budget in 2025 was around 245 billion dollars, against India’s roughly 78 billion. That gap has widened, not closed.

Balance of threat (Stephen Walt). States do not balance against power alone, they balance against threat: proximity, offensive capability and aggressive intent. China sits on India’s border, holds Indian territory in Ladakh, backs Pakistan with weapons and diplomacy, and dominates Indian supply chains. By Walt’s logic India should be aligning firmly against that threat. Instead, it hedges between the threat’s partners.

Underbalancing (Randall Schweller). Some states fail to balance despite obvious threats, because elites are divided, fear domestic costs or prefer comfort over preparation. This is the sharpest diagnosis of India. The threat is visible. The response is rhetoric, summits and slogans, not sustained investment.

Hedging and strategic autonomy. Hedging means keeping options open with several powers. It works when a state has enough strength to make each patron fear its defection. Without that strength, hedging becomes dependence on everyone and leverage over no one.

Non-alignment, the original. Nehru’s non-alignment (1950s) worked in a bipolar world where both blocs competed for Third World favour, and even then, it failed in 1962, when India faced China alone. Multialignment is non-alignment’s grandchild, but without a bipolar bidding war to exploit.

Kautilya’s mandala. India’s own tradition says your neighbour is a natural enemy and your neighbour’s neighbour a natural friend. The practical meaning: build partnerships around the pressure points of the main rival. India has done this only timidly, with Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, while sentimentally chasing a seat beside Beijing.

Weaponised interdependence (Farrell and Newman). Trade and technology networks become tools of coercion. China controls these chokepoints for India. When Beijing restricted rare earth magnet exports in 2025, Indian automakers felt it within weeks.

Constructivism. States act on identity as much as interest. India’s identity as a leader of the Global South, a civilisation state and a democracy is repeatedly asserted. The test is whether actions match the identity. When they do not, credibility collapses.

Put simply: realism asks whether India is strong, balance of threat asks whether it has picked the right side of the real danger, underbalancing asks why it has not acted, and constructivism asks whether anyone believes what it says. On all four counts, the report card is poor.

3. After 2014: the era of personal diplomacy

The Modi government began with theatre and promise. The 2014 swearing-in invited every SAARC leader. “Neighbourhood First” and “Act East” were announced. Mr. Xi was welcomed on a swing in Ahmedabad in September 2014. During that same visit, Chinese troops were camped in Chumar in Ladakh. The lesson should have been immediate: warmth without leverage buys nothing.

What followed was a pattern.

Neighbourhood. The 2015 blockade of Nepal, widely seen there as an Indian squeeze, pushed Kathmandu toward Beijing and produced a transit agreement with China within a year. The Maldives swung into the Chinese orbit and later elected an India Out campaigner. Sri Lanka handed the Hambantota port to China on a 99-year lease in 2017. Each of these was a failure of patient, respectful, resourced engagement.

China. Wuhan (2018) and Mamallapuram (2019) were sold as personal breakthroughs. But the Doklam standoff of 73 days in 2017 had already shown that the Chinese military was pushing on the ground. India treated summitry as substance. Beijing treated it as cover.

Pakistan. The Lahore stopover of December 2015 was followed within days by the Pathankot attack. Uri (2016) produced surgical strikes and loud claims of a new normal. The new normal did not prevent Pulwama.

Economy. Make in India (2014) promised manufacturing at 25 percent of GDP by 2022. It has hovered around 15 percent. A foreign policy cannot outrun a weak industrial base. Meanwhile the trade deficit with China ballooned, from roughly 48 billion dollars in 2014 to nearly 100 billion by 2025.

Iran. In 2019, India stopped importing Iranian oil under American sanctions pressure, sacrificing a long-standing relationship and slowing Chabahar. What did India receive in return? A reputation as a state that complies when pressured.

The verdict on this era: spectacular optics, thin strategic return. India accumulated photographs, not leverage.

4. After 2019: confidence turns into overreach

2019 is the pivot. A second mandate, Balakot after Pulwama (40 CRPF personnel killed), the abrogation of Article 370 and the Citizenship Amendment Act reshaped India’s image abroad. Domestic politics now entered foreign policy at full volume.

The costs came quickly. Article 370 and the Kashmir lockdown brought criticism from Western legislatures and media and gave Pakistan and Turkey a platform. The CAA and the surrounding protests strained ties with Bangladesh and put India’s liberal-democratic claim under review. India’s own identity as a democratic leader, the foundation of its soft power, began to look selective.

Howdy Modi (September 2019) and Namaste Trump (February 2020) crossed a line that diplomats avoid: openly aligning with a foreign politician’s electoral fortunes. When American power changed hands in 2021, India had to rebuild trust with the Biden administration.

Galwan (15 June 2020) was the great strategic shock. Twenty Indian soldiers died. Chinese forces occupied pockets in Depsang, Demchok and Pangong, and buffer zones later restricted Indian patrolling rights. India banned 59 Chinese apps, a symbolic act, yet imports from China rose to record levels in the following years. India had walked out of RCEP in 2019 but had no alternative trade architecture ready. The posture was assertive in language, passive in effect.

Ukraine (2022). India abstained on UN votes condemning the invasion more than a dozen times, and Russia’s share of Indian crude imports leapt from about 2 percent before the war to well over a third. The discounts were real and helped inflation. But the political cost was also real: India was now financing, through the market, a war it said it opposed, while its own foreign minister told Europeans they were part of the problem. The Samarkand line of 2022 tried to square this circle. It satisfied no one.

Canada and the US (2023). Allegations about the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada and a foiled plot against Gurpatwant Pannun in the United States reinforced a perception of a state that pursues overseas dissidents. Whatever the truth, India’s reaction (anger, denial, visa freezes) damaged trust with two Quad-adjacent partners.

Gaza (2023). After abstaining on the first UN General Assembly ceasefire resolution in October 2023, India shifted to support later ones. It declared solidarity with Israel after 7 October, then drifted toward calls for a two-state solution. Position followed pressure, not principle.

Across this period, the central failure was this: India confused hedging with strategy. It leaned on China’s border patience, Russia’s oil, America’s technology and the Gulf’s remittances (about 40 percent of India’s 125 billion dollars in annual remittances) all at once, without the capacity to withstand any one of them turning hostile.

5. After 2024: the year the hedge broke

The 2024 election returned Mr. Modi to office with 240 seats for the BJP, a coalition government and a diminished mandate. Foreign policy took on a more reactive tone, and events overran it.

Moscow and Kyiv (2024). Mr. Modi embraced Mr. Putin in Moscow in July 2024, on a day Russian missiles struck a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Weeks later he visited Kyiv. Photographs substituted for a policy. Neither capital felt it had India’s genuine alignment.

Bangladesh (August 2024). Sheikh Hasina fled after a mass uprising. India had invested in one leader and one party for fifteen years and was left with a hostile successor government. A 4,096 km border and a Chinese opening later, India had no plan B. Nepal and Sri Lanka saw further turbulence in the following year. The neighbourhood is now more contested than at any time since 1971.

The LAC deal (October 2024). A patrolling agreement before the Kazan BRICS meeting was presented as progress. But the status quo ante of April 2020 was not fully restored, and the 50,000 to 60,000 troops each side holds in Ladakh remain deployed. The two sides have returned to talks, not to trust.

Trump 2.0 (2025). Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on India that reached 50 percent by August 2025, a 25 percent reciprocal tariff plus 25 percent as a penalty over Russian oil. He added a 100,000-dollar fee on H-1B visas, targeting a workforce that is largely Indian. Indians were deported in shackles in February 2025 and Delhi barely protested. Mr. Trump then claimed, repeatedly, that he personally brokered the India-Pakistan ceasefire after Operation Sindoor, and hosted Pakistan’s army chief for lunch. India’s denials did little. A Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan followed in September 2025.

Operation Sindoor (May 2025). After the Pahalgam massacre (22 April 2025, 26 civilians killed), India struck Pakistan with force. Militarily it showed resolve. Diplomatically it showed isolation. Few countries condemned Pakistan by name, and China’s support to Pakistan in intelligence and equipment became visible. India has faced a growing sense of diplomatic marginalisation since, while Pakistan has gained new prominence, including Washington’s choice of Islamabad as a mediator with Iran.

SCO Tianjin and BRICS Delhi (2025 and 2026). Mr. Modi travelled to China for the first time in seven years and stood beside Xi and Putin, a signal to Washington. The hedge was now openly directional, and then the Bishkek and Delhi summits in 2026 demonstrated its limits. India won a consensus declaration in Delhi, which is real diplomatic craft, bridging the Iran and UAE positions. But a consensus text that avoids Ukraine, avoids naming the aggressor in the Gulf and offends nobody is the diplomacy of absence.

The pattern since 2024 is clear. India has been hit by the US, shut out of regional diplomacy, matched by China and outmanoeuvred by Pakistan, while telling itself that all of this proves its autonomy.

6. Why India lacks spine: the real causes

Call it spine, call it strategic nerve. The causes are structural, not personal.

1. A weak material base. India’s manufacturing share is stagnant, its R&D spending is about 0.65 percent of GDP (China spends about 2.4 percent), and about 70 percent of its pharmaceutical ingredients and most solar and electronics components come from China. A state that cannot make its own inputs cannot say no to the supplier.

2. Underinvestment in defence. India spends under 2% of GDP on defence, and a large share goes to pensions and salaries. It remained the world’s largest arms importer in the 2019 to 2023 SIPRI period, with about 9.8% of global arms imports. Russia’s share of Indian arms imports has fallen from 76 percent (2009 to 2013) to 36 percent, but the replacement has been imports from France, Israel and the US, not indigenous capacity. Dependence has changed addresses, not disappeared.

3. Personalised, centralised decision making. Foreign policy is run through a few offices, with an emphasis on leader-level optics. The foreign service has thinned: India’s diplomatic corps of about 900 officers is smaller than Singapore’s per capita and a fraction of the US, China or even Brazil’s. Strategy needs institutions, not just charisma.

4. Domestic politics exported. Majoritarian politics at home reduces India’s moral authority abroad and gives rivals openings in Muslim-majority states and Western parliaments. A foreign policy cannot claim to defend a rules-based order while ignoring one’s own commitments.

5. Fear of commitment. Doctrines of strategic autonomy are comfortable because they never require paying a price. But a state that avoids every entanglement also avoids every guarantee. When Galwan happened, no ally came. That is the price of having none.

6. How India should develop her foreign policy, in five parts:

First, build power before posture (internal balancing). Raise defence spending toward 2.5 to 3 percent of GDP over the next decade, with a funded plan for theatre commands, submarines, air defence, long-range fires and drones. Make capital expenditure, not pensions, the growth line. Lift R&D toward 1.5% of GDP, using Israel, South Korea and Taiwan as models. Treat semiconductors, rare earths, pharma ingredients and batteries as national security sectors, with time-bound targets: reduce dependence on any single country below 40 percent by 2032. Pursue manufacturing at 25 percent of GDP, not as a slogan, but as the measure of seriousness.

Second, treat China as the central problem, not one of several. Realism demands it. India should stop splitting the difference between confrontation and summitry. It should keep talking but align deliberately: deepen the Quad’s maritime and technology agenda, build the Indo-Pacific arc with Japan, Australia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia, and deliver more than BrahMos missiles and communiqués. It should also be ready to restrict Chinese investment in strategic sectors, rather than letting trade deficits widen to 100 billion dollars a year.

Third, adopt principle as policy. If a war of aggression is wrong in Ukraine, it is wrong in Gaza and Iran. If sovereignty matters in Kashmir, it matters in Tibet and Taiwan’s waters. India should choose a standard, state it plainly, and apply it to friends and foes. Consistency is the cheapest form of credibility. A state whose voting record can be predicted by who is pressuring it will never be a leader of the Global South.

Fourth, repair the neighbourhood with money, patience and humility. The Neighbourhood First budget should be multiplied. India should offer faster credit lines, electricity and rail connectivity, visa openness and trade access, and refrain from backing a single leader or party. Every neighbour that leans to Beijing is a failure of Delhi’s offer, not of Beijing’s cleverness.

Fifth, build real coalitions, not just forums. BRICS and the SCO are useful tables but poor alliances: Russia is dependent on China, Iran and the UAE are at odds, and China shapes the rules. India should invest in minilateral groups that carry real obligations: supply chain pacts, joint production of defence systems, intelligence sharing and a standing crisis mechanism with democracies and middle powers. Diversify energy (nuclear, renewables, Gulf, US, African supply) so that no single supplier, whether Russia or anyone else, dictates India’s diplomacy.

In addition, India should professionalise its foreign service. Triple the size of the Indian Foreign Service over a decade, create a National Security Council with real analytical depth and open the policy process to scholars, diplomats and business leaders. Great-power strategy is a team sport.

8. The strongest case for the defence

An honest critique must face the best counterarguments. Defenders of India’s approach argue that multialignment is the only sane choice for a poor, populous, nuclear-armed country with hostile neighbours. They point out that discounted Russian oil saved India several billion dollars and helped contain inflation, that India’s BRICS chairmanship produced a consensus text between Iran and the UAE, and that no major power gave India a better offer for exclusive alignment. They cite Mearsheimer’s own logic: great powers rarely offer guarantees that survive their own interests, and small commitments become big liabilities. They note that Kautilya himself favoured flexible alliances, and that India’s choices are made under real constraints of capacity and time, which is why gradualism is rational.

Those points have weight. But they prove too little. Discounts are tactical wins inside a strategic loss. A consensus text is a procedural achievement, not a power gain. And flexibility is a virtue only when a state has something to be flexible with. The question is not whether India should keep options (it should) but whether it has built the strength that makes those options worth having. On the evidence of Galwan, Dhaka, Washington’s tariffs and Bishkek, not yet.

9. Conclusion: autonomy is earned

Strategic autonomy is not a policy choice. It is a possession, like a balance sheet. A state earns it through a larger economy, a stronger military, reliable institutions and a record of principled consistency. India has the ingredients: 1.4 billion people, a young workforce, a 4 trillion-dollar economy, a globally respected diaspora and a unique civilisational voice. What it lacks is the discipline to turn them into power.

Since 2014 the style has been grand, the substance patchy. Since 2019 the costs have mounted at the border and in the neighbourhood. Since 2024 the hedge has been exposed in public, in Moscow, Washington, Beijing, Islamabad and Dhaka at once. Even Russia, India’s oldest partner, can see that its Delhi friend is playing to several audiences at once. That is not leadership of the Global South. It is a nation talking itself out of consequence.

India does not need to abandon multialignment. It needs to stop confusing it with a strategy. Build first, balance second, speak with one voice, and the world will treat India as what it aspires to be: a pole, not a pivot.

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.

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The post Why India’s Multialignment Needs a Spine appeared first on The CSR Journal.

I expect the phrase “spirit of Mumbai” is already being drafted somewhere. I am tired of it. A city that walks along live tracks because nobody will say when the next train is coming does not have a spirit problem. It has a governance problem. This article is a “charge sheet” against the BMC, the Maharashtra government and the Union government, against every party that has held power in any of them, and against a comfortable class that has turned public suffering into a personality trait.

Money is not the excuse

Mumbai is not poor. The BMC tabled a budget of ₹80,952 crore for 2026-27, the highest in its history, and it keeps its status as the country’s richest civic body. In 2021-22 the figure was ₹35,962 crore, so it has more than doubled in five years. On the 2021 population estimate of about 1.29 crore, I calculate roughly ₹62,000 per resident, per year. That is a priorities problem, not a resource problem.

Data released just before the budget showed over half of the 2025-26 allocations unutilised, with the year nearly over, while the corporation plans to draw ₹36,623 crore from its fixed deposits for infrastructure. Roads are the biggest single capital expense. ₹13,990 crore goes to the Coastal Road and Goregaon-Mulund Link, ₹9,650 crore to bridges, and the bus system, BEST, gets a ₹1,000 crore grant. Meanwhile two-wheelers and cars make up nearly 88 percent of the city’s 50 lakh plus vehicles, and buses are under one percent. A budget tilted toward flyovers tells me whose commute the planners imagine. It is not the commute of the millions who cannot afford a car.

A colonial statute running a 2026 megacity

Nobody answers for Monday, and the law explains why. The Imperial Legislative Council passed the Bombay Municipal Corporation Act in 1888. Bombay then had fewer than a million people, and the horse-drawn tram was the height of urban mobility. Mumbai now has more than twelve times as many. We run a 21st century megacity on a framework drafted for a colonial port.

Executive power sits with an IAS Commissioner appointed by the Maharashtra government under Section 54. The elected mayor, by contrast, is a titular head whose main function is to preside over meetings. The mayor is indirectly elected and cannot write the Commissioner’s confidential report, a power only Kerala grants. The term is 2.5 years, barely enough to find the files. Follow the loop: the voter elects a councillor, the councillor picks a mayor, the mayor has no power over the person who runs the city, and that person answers to the state, not the voter. When a drain fails, the elected cannot act and the appointed cannot be voted out. Then came the first civic election in nearly nine years, and the city had barely changed in the meantime, which tells you how decorative the elected layer had become.

Reform has been tried and dropped. A Mayor-in-Council system was introduced in April 1998 and done away with in 1999. Experts keep asking for the obvious: a five-year term, executive authority over the Commissioner and direct election of the mayor. The state does amend the Act, through ordinances in 2010, 2011 and 2017, and bills in 2015 and 2026. I notice what gets tweaked: who becomes mayor and who loses the post. I see no one amending who answers for the city.

Add the fragmentation 1888 never imagined. The Act covers roads and drains. It does not cover the railway that failed on Monday, which belongs to the Union, or the metro and the MMRDA, which belong to the state. A commuter standing on a track near Nahur cannot name the authority responsible, and I suspect the authorities cannot either.

Voters know this. Turnout in January was 52.94%, so nearly half the electorate stayed home. The Shiv Sena (UBT) ruled the civic body for 25 years, and a BJP-led alliance now holds 118 of 227 seats. The name on the hoarding changes, and the trains still run late. The failure belongs to Congress-NCP state governments, the Sena-run BMC and the BJP at the state and the Centre alike.

The suffering that was priced in

According to the Government Railway Police, 29,970 people died and 30,214 were injured on the suburban network over 11 years. By my arithmetic that is about 2,700 deaths a year, 7 or 8 every day, and 8,416 of the dead remain unidentified. On 9 June 2025, 5 people died after falling from overcrowded trains near Mumbra, and only afterwards did the Railway Board announce automatic door closers for new rakes and retrofits for existing ones. Parties traded blame: the Mumbai Congress president demanded the railway minister resign. The Bombay High Court called the way Mumbaikars travel a matter of shame. The remedy was known, cheap against the budgets above, and came after the bodies. Monday is the same story with a different fault.

A city with no slack

Fragility is what you get when a system runs at full capacity every day with nothing in reserve. One fire in a signal room and millions stall.

Buses and metro. The BEST fleet fell from 4,657 buses in 2012 to 3,052 in 2023, while central benchmarks say Mumbai needs roughly 10,000. The rest of the metropolitan region overtook Greater Mumbai’s population in 2021, while the four big bus fleets shrank from 4,789 in 2016 to 3,911 in 2023. A plan for a 146 km metro by 2021 saw its first line open only in 2014, and the network sits near the 100 km mark today, against Shanghai’s 803 km.

Floods. On 26 May 2025 Mumbai had its wettest May day in over a century. Metro Line 3 services to Worli were suspended when an underground station was inundated, a station inaugurated two weeks earlier. The Commissioner admitted that only 55 percent of Mithi desilting was complete, while a BJP leader claimed about ₹1 lakh crore had been spent on flood management over 20 years and pointed to a police probe into an alleged ₹65 crore Mithi desilting scam. Both can be true at once: enormous spending, and a drain that fails. That is the signature of weak accountability. The 2026-27 climate budget has ₹20,730 crore in capital expenditure and ₹4,632 crore in revenue expenditure. I will judge it by the next monsoon.

Open space and air. Development Plan 2034 records 1.28 square metres of open space per person against an international standard of 11, and only 31% of the 1991 plan’s open-space provisions were implemented. In December 2025 the Bombay High Court condemned the BMC and the Pollution Control Board for inaction on air quality, and in January the BMC admitted 662 of 1,954 construction sites lacked mandated monitors. To be fair, the BMC now says 3,166 sites have installed monitors and 2026 has seen 231 good or satisfactory days so far, up from 218 in 2025. That is progress, after a court had to shout.

We know where such fragility ends: the 2017 Elphinstone footbridge stampede killed 23, and the 2024 Ghatkopar hoarding collapse killed 17.

What the developing world did, while we celebrated?

I will not compare Mumbai to London, Tokyo or Singapore. Compare us with cities that started poorer or comparable. Bogotá opened TransMilenio in 2000 and it now delivers about 2.3 million daily trips over 113 km. The old busway on its main avenue had 64 fatalities in 1998; the new BRT had 8 in 2001. The gain was institutional: a single city agency running the system and a restructuring of the fragmented bus market. Honest comparison requires me to add that Bogotá has security problems and overcrowding.

But look at the ambition and the speed. Mexico City’s Metrobús opened in 2005 and covers 105 km. Medellín links hillside neighbourhoods to its metro by cable car at about US$19 million per kilometre, and Guayaquil built a 4.1 km line in 24 months. São Paulo has fares integrated with its metro. Shanghai runs 803 kilometres carrying 2.83 billion trips a year.

The common thread is not wealth. Someone owned the problem, one authority held the mandate, timelines were public, and failure had a name attached. Mumbai has the money. It lacks the ownership.

Fourth in GDP, 144th in income

We were told, with great fanfare, that India overtook Japan. The IMF’s April 2025 projection put India at $4.187 trillion against Japan’s $4.186 trillion, a margin you could lose in a rounding error, or in a single Central Line delay. The claim was contested: India’s government projected just over $4 trillion for the year to March 2026, while official Japanese data showed about $4.4 trillion for calendar 2025. We celebrated a forecast, disputed, decided by a fraction of a percent.

Now the part the celebrations skip. World Bank data put India’s GDP per capita at $2,694 in 2024, against $32,487 for Japan, and India ranked 144th of 196 countries in nominal per capita income. A big pie…sliced very thin.

Offer the average Mumbaikar a swap, a Japanese passport for our GDP ranking, and watch the queue form before the sentence ends. I say this out of arithmetic, not disloyalty. In 2017 a Japanese rail operator apologised publicly because its train left 20 seconds early. Here the train leaves when nobody knows, and passengers wait inside it or walk beside it until it moves. I accept that no democracy becomes Tokyo in a year. Nobody is asking for Tokyo. We are asking for a signal room that does not stop a city. A trillion dollars of national output does not travel from Mulund to Thane. A commuter does, on foot, along a track.

Where “the spirit of Mumbai” came from, and why I refuse it

The phrase hardened around three moments: the floods of 26 July 2005, the train bombings of 11 July 2006 and the attacks of 26 November 2008. In those moments it was earned. Strangers opened doors and walked home together, and I will not sneer at that. But the phrase was then recycled for everything: a pothole, a cancelled train, a flooded underpass. Disasters caused by terror and monsoon were joined by failures caused by procurement, permissions and neglect, and the blurring suits those who administer.

Who says it loudest? Not the man on the footboard. It is the editor, the chairman, the celebrity wading through ankle-deep water for a photograph, the politician who needs a gentle word for a catastrophe. These are people who built private exits from public failure: the car and driver, the tower with its own water tank, the private hospital. Their bargain with this city has long been to leave public systems and then praise those who cannot. Praise is cheap, and it carries a message: do not complain, you are brave.

Resilience is a trait of individuals. Safety is the duty of the state. When I celebrate the first, I excuse the second, and a government that learns endurance earns applause has no reason to build anything. Mumbaikars should question the phrase for three reasons. We pay for the state: property tax is budgeted at ₹7,000 crore for 2026-27, and we are entitled to what it buys. The people paying the highest price are not the ones writing op-eds, so someone must speak for them. And a tolerated failure does not stay static. It grows. Monday is the proof.

Accountability, not identity

Every election season offers the same menu: Marathi against non-Marathi, one community against another, locals against outsiders. One analysis of the 2026 result described a persisting split between development and identity politics. That split is the problem.

A body falling from a footboard at Mumbra has no mother tongue and no religion. A flooded drain does not check your surname. A child breathing construction dust in Worli is not a vote bank. When we argue over who belongs, we do not ask who failed to desilt the Mithi, who left 662 sites without monitors, or who underspent the capital budget. Identity politics is where governance goes to hide.

So, I would ask every candidate and every party, in every language this city speaks:

1. Publish ward-level, quarterly data on capital spending against allocation.

2. Amend the 1888 Act: a five-year mayoral term, executive authority over the Commissioner and direct election of the mayor.

3. Create a single metropolitan transport authority, with dated commitments on track fencing, platform safety and automatic doors.

4. Commission an independent audit of drain desilting before the next monsoon and publish it.

5. Tie the bus fleet to the 10,000 benchmark and fund BEST as the essential service it is.

6. Deliver the open-space reservations already in the Development Plan, and hold civic elections on time.

I am not asking Mumbaikars to stop loving this city. I am asking them to stop letting that love be used against them. The next time a politician, columnist or chairman praises your spirit after a disaster, ask the question the praise is designed to prevent: who was supposed to stop this, and what will happen to them? A city that deserves its spirit will demand its safety too.

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.

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Twelve years ago, it employed 40 skilled and semi-skilled workers. Today it runs with twenty-two. The proprietor is not a data point; he is the modal case. Cash vanished after demonetisation. GST compliance consumed an entire clerk’s week every month. Inspectors arrived with the regularity of monsoon and the expectations of a feudal court.

Last year a tender was lost…not on price, not on quality, not on delivery schedules…but on proximity to power. The critical precision-machined component in his highest-volume product now arrives in containers from Guangdong. He has become a final assembler of Chinese intermediate goods, paying Indian wages and Indian compliance costs while capturing only the residual margin.

Walk any industrial estate from Chakan to Hosur, from Faridabad to Coimbatore, and the same silhouette appears. This is not anecdotal colour. It is the micro-foundation of India’s manufacturing stagnation.

Markets have already rendered their verdict.

On 8 October 2026, the Nifty closed at 22,231—its lowest level since April 2025 and more than 10% below the August peak. Inclusive of dividends, the index was down approximately 16.7% for the calendar year by early October. A partial recovery to 22,889 by 19 October changed little. Analysts now prescribe tax cuts as the remedy. A 10% technical bounce is possible. A bounce is not a recovery. Investors are not merely short of liquidity or animal spirits; they are reading the consolidated balance sheet of the Indian economy and finding structural weakness precisely where competitive capacity must reside.

The Arithmetic of Underperformance

India’s share of global manufacturing value added rose from roughly 1.5% in 1995 to 3.2% in 2023. China’s share moved from about 5% to nearly 32% over the same period. Manufacturing has remained locked between 16 and 18% of Indian GDP for two decades.

The “Make in India” programme, launched in 2014 with an explicit target of 25 percent, has not altered the trend line. India and China possess comparable populations; India accounts for approximately 2% of global goods exports while China accounts for 15 percent.

The official rejoinder is familiar. The Chief Economic Adviser notes that India’s global manufacturing share edged up from 2.4% in 2014 to 3% by 2025 and that manufacturing output expanded 73 percent against China’s 51 percent. The arithmetic is correct and almost entirely irrelevant.

Growing faster from a base one-tenth the size of the comparator does not close the absolute gap; it merely slows the rate at which the gap widens. Twelve years after the slogan was coined, India remains a statistical rounding error in the global production network.

Why a Weaker Currency Cannot Substitute for Capability?

A depreciating rupee is routinely offered as the automatic stabiliser. It is not. In the first nine months of 2026, imports from China rose 23.3% to $125 billion; the bilateral trade deficit crossed $105 billion. In multiple critical sectors more than 80% of key intermediate components continue to originate in China.

Currency depreciation can alter relative prices at the border. It cannot create the machine tools, the process engineers, the metallurgical know-how, or the dense supplier ecosystems that determine whether a component is manufactured domestically at competitive cost and quality.

Lower the exchange rate to ₹100 or ₹200 per dollar and the Pune manufacturer will still import the Chinese part. The decision is not ideological; it is technological and organisational. A currency adjustment cannot invent a missing production function.

Vietnam supplies the contrasting case. With roughly 100 million people—less than one-tenth of India’s population—Vietnam’s goods exports reached approximately $475 billion in 2025. It runs a surplus with India, exporting $10.3 billion while importing only $6.1 billion. The composition is revealing smartphones, semiconductors, machinery—precisely the high-value, high-complexity segments that India continues to import.

Vietnam achieved this by inserting itself into global value chains that enforce ruthless standards on cost, quality, and delivery. India’s manufacturing share of GDP stood below 15% in 2024, well beneath the levels recorded by South Korea, Taiwan, and China during their respective high-growth decades. Those economies did not industrialise on rhetoric. They industrialised on factory floors, cumulative engineering competence, and firms forced to survive open competition.

The Incentive Architecture of Stagnation

The deeper pathology is institutional. When procurement and licensing decisions systematically favour the connected over the competent, the rational firm stops investing in technology and process improvement.

Why purchase a five-axis machining centre if the tender is awarded since political access?

Capital deepening slows. Total factor productivity stagnates. Unit labour costs remain elevated relative to East Asian competitors even when absolute wages are lower. Small and medium enterprises shrink; a handful of large, politically adept conglomerates expand. Not every large Indian firm is a product of favouritism—many operate at genuine global standards—but a system in which outsiders cannot distinguish the two has already destroyed the informational value of market signals.

This is the classic lemons problem applied to industrial policy. When buyers cannot reliably separate high-quality from low-quality suppliers because non-market criteria dominate, the market for quality itself collapses. The honest manufacturer internalises the lesson: better machines do not win orders.

The result is a low-level equilibrium of mediocre quality, high compliance costs, and chronic dependence on imported intermediates.

The Political Economy of Distraction

Voters are entitled to anger. Real wages for large segments of the workforce have been stagnant. Formal job creation remains inadequate relative to the demographic surge. Relative prices of essentials continue to rise. That anger, however, is routinely redirected toward symbolic contests—mosques, menus, nomenclature—that generate heat without generating output. The Muslim shopkeeper and the Hindu machine operator lose the identical livelihood when the factory sheds workers. Identity politics is a free good for politicians; industrial capability is not.

The only question that matters are technical and temporal: what tangible production capacity has been created in the last 12 years that will still be generating employment and export earnings twelve years from now?

Governments that are never compelled to answer this question will continue supplying the cheaper narrative—the one that requires no capital expenditure, no skill formation, and no exposure to competitive pressure.

Tax cuts and further currency depreciation can buy time. They cannot purchase missing technological capability, missing supplier density, or missing competitive discipline.

Without those foundations, India will remain a competitive exporter of incense sticks, toys, and low-value textiles—where it already holds a respectable 4.1% of global trade—while the high-value nodes of the global production network continue to locate elsewhere.

The Pune manufacturer already knows this. The markets are beginning to price it.

The only open question is whether the political system will confront the arithmetic before the gap becomes irreversible.

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.

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I was not asking my students to accept it as economic gospel. I wanted them to challenge it. 22 MBA students could disagree in a class of 108, bring arguments from political philosophy, discuss the social contract, and examine why citizens pay taxes. The slogan was a starting point for a conversation, not the conclusion.

Today, after 14 years in education, I wonder whether I would paint that wall again.

The sentence has not become less debatable. What has changed is the possibility that someone might photograph it, remove it from its academic context, circulate it online and interpret it as evidence of something else.

This is the quiet transformation taking place across educational institutions and corporate workplaces. The most consequential restriction on free expression may not always be a formal prohibition. Sometimes, it is the moment a teacher deletes a post, a student abandons a question, or an employee decides that a perfectly legitimate opinion is not worth the professional risk.

The person learns to censor themselves before anyone else must.

In 2019, I taught international trade to a student named Ritu. We discussed tariffs, supply chains, trade wars and the distribution of economic costs. Inevitably, our conversations moved beyond textbooks. International trade raises questions about power, labour, inequality, national interest and who gets to make decisions that affect everyone else.

Ritu began engaging with these questions more deeply. Our classroom discussions became an opportunity to examine politics, rather than treating it as a subject that belonged exclusively to politicians.

Today, she participates in feminist solidarity walks across Mumbai and Thane.

Recently, she publicly expressed gratitude for having encountered a teacher who spoke openly about politics and issues that mattered. Her message stayed with me because it captured something that university brochures rarely measure: the moment a student discovers that questioning the world is not an academic inconvenience but a civic responsibility.

I do not claim credit for the person Ritu has become. Her choices are her own. But I recognise the importance of a classroom where questions are welcomed rather than discouraged.

When a student moves from discussing inequality in a lecture to demanding dignity in public spaces, education has travelled beyond the examination hall.

That is precisely why the shrinking of educational freedom matters. It threatens not merely the teacher’s ability to speak, but the student’s opportunity to learn how to think independently.

What the international rankings tell us?

The concern is not confined to individual experiences. Several international assessments have documented difficulties in India’s broader environment for free expression and academic freedom.

According to Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index, India ranks 157th out of 180 countries, down from 151st in 2025. The organisation points to concerns involving journalist safety, media ownership concentration, political pressure and the legal environment.

These ranking measures press freedom, not the freedom of every teacher or corporate employee. It should not be misrepresented as a direct measure of classroom censorship. Nevertheless, the conditions surrounding journalism matter because they influence how freely citizens can access information, scrutinise authority and debate public policy.

The academic environment presents another warning. Scholars at Risk’s Free to Think 2025 report cites the Academic Freedom Index’s assessment of India in 2024 as “completely restricted,” with a score of 0.16. The report also documents concerns involving university autonomy, faculty employment and restrictions on student expression.

These are assessments produced by independent research organisations, using their own methodologies. They are not judicial findings about every Indian institution, and the rankings should be read in that context. But they raise an important question: what happens when a country aspiring to become a global knowledge economy struggles to protect the freedom to question?

India wants innovation, entrepreneurship, world-class universities and globally competitive talent. Yet innovation requires people who can challenge established assumptions without automatically fearing professional consequences.

A country cannot sustainably cultivate independent thinking while treating disagreement as a potential disciplinary problem.

The surveillance that does not need to announce itself

The modern workplace has made this dilemma more complicated.

A teacher once expressed an opinion primarily through a classroom discussion, an article or a public meeting. Today, that teacher may also have a professional profile, a public social media account, years of digital posts and opinions that can be detached from their original context.

The same is true of corporate employees.

An argument about public policy, a post supporting a protest, a comment on discrimination or criticism of an institutional decision can travel far beyond its intended audience. Screenshots preserve opinions after the original conversation has ended. Algorithms amplify controversy. A post intended for a limited audience can become a reputational issue overnight.

There is a legitimate place for institutional rules. Teachers should not harass students, disclose confidential information or abuse their authority. Employees should not leak customer data, expose trade secrets or engage in workplace discrimination. Organisations have a responsibility to protect people and information.

The problem begins when those legitimate responsibilities expand into a general expectation of political conformity.

In India, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 recognises certain employment-related purposes as a category of legitimate use under Section 7(i). However, this should not be interpreted as unrestricted permission to monitor every aspect of an employee’s life. The law, its applicable provisions and rules, the nature of the data collected, and other relevant legal protections all matter. A useful legal discussion is available from ‘Chambers and Partners on workplace monitoring in India’. The practical concern is broader than whether monitoring is technically or legally possible.

It is whether people understand what is being monitored, why it is being monitored, who can access the information and how it might affect their careers.

A teacher does not need to receive a formal warning to become cautious. An employee does not need to be dismissed to understand that a colleague’s public criticism has attracted unwelcome attention. The possibility of being watched can itself alter behaviour.

That is the more subtle danger. Surveillance becomes effective not merely when information is collected, but when people begin adjusting their conduct because they cannot predict how that information might be used.

Orwell’s warning, Foucault’s panopticon

George Orwell imagined a society in which power extended beyond controlling behaviour to shaping what people felt safe enough to think and express. The disturbing part of that vision was not simply the existence of surveillance. It was the normalisation of surveillance.

Michel Foucault offered a related explanation in Discipline and Punish. Drawing on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, he examined how the possibility of observation can make individuals regulate themselves. A person need not know whether they are being watched at every moment. Uncertainty can be enough to encourage compliance.

Apply this to a university.

A professor considering a lecture on caste discrimination, electoral politics, religious nationalism or labour rights may begin anticipating the reaction of administrators, parents, students and social media users. Instead of asking whether the discussion is academically sound, the professor starts asking whether it is professionally safe.

The same calculation occurs in an office. An employee who wants to question a company’s environmental claims or discuss a public policy may decide that silence is the safer career choice. No explicit instruction to remain silent is necessary.

Psychologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s “spiral of silence” helps explain how this process spreads. People who believe their opinions are unpopular or socially risky may withhold them. Their silence then makes the dominant opinion appear even more widespread, encouraging others to remain quiet. The result is a misleading appearance of consensus.

A department may appear politically unanimous when its members are simply unwilling to disagree publicly. A corporate team may seem comfortable with a decision because nobody wants to be the first person to question it.

Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments also demonstrated how social pressure can influence individuals’ public judgements. In his classic experiments, many participants conformed to an incorrect majority answer at least once. The lesson is not that every individual inevitably submits to authority. It is that social settings can make disagreement psychologically costly, even when the facts appear clear.

These theories help explain why restrictions on expression are so difficult to measure. A disciplinary notice can be counted. A question never asked cannot.

When teachers themselves become the lesson?

Recent cases show how social media expression can become an employment issue for educators.

In October 2025, a circular issued by the chief education officer in Baramulla warned government school staff against social media posts concerning policy matters and referred to possible employment consequences. The Jammu and Kashmir administration subsequently ordered an inquiry and removed the officer from those responsibilities, according to The Indian Express.

The episode illustrates an important distinction: institutional restrictions can be challenged, and administrative action does not automatically establish that a policy was lawful or appropriate.

Yet the episode also raises a question that extends beyond one officer or one circular. What happens when educators begin to believe that commenting on public policy could jeopardise their employment?

A teacher’s public expression should not be immune from accountability. Professional misconduct, threats, harassment and breaches of confidentiality deserve appropriate scrutiny. But lawful criticism of government policy is not automatically professional misconduct merely because it is uncomfortable for an authority. The distinction is fundamental to constitutional democracy.

Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution guarantees citizens the right to freedom of speech and expression, subject to the reasonable restrictions permitted under Article 19(2). The scope of these protections and their application to employment relationships can involve complex legal questions.

The principle, however, remains clear: a democratic society must distinguish between legitimate restrictions on harmful conduct and attempts to suppress lawful disagreement.

If teachers are expected to explain democracy but discouraged from discussing its controversies, the contradiction becomes part of the curriculum. Students learn from the teacher’s words. They also learn from the subjects the teacher avoids.

When the streets become classrooms

India’s recent protests provide a live illustration of why the freedom to question matters.

In October 2026, student groups and other protesters gathered in Delhi over allegations concerning electoral-roll revisions and demands for the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner. Police detained demonstrators on multiple occasions. Human Rights Watch, in its 13 October 2026 statement, raised concerns about the treatment and detention of protesters.

The authorities and protesters may offer different accounts of individual incidents, and allegations should be evaluated on the available evidence. Public order is a legitimate concern. But peaceful political expression and violence are not interchangeable categories. The question is whether the response to dissent is proportionate, lawful and consistent with constitutional protections.

A similar tension appears in women’s movements for safer public spaces.

On 4 October 2026, The Times of India reported that women gathered at locations across Mumbai for solidarity walks organised by the “Why Loiter” collective. Participants called for women’s right to occupy public spaces and challenged the restrictions that fear and sexual violence impose on their everyday lives. The report also described a solidarity walk in Thane.

These women were not asking for permission to have opinions. They were asserting their right to participate in public life. Their placards, conversations and collective presence make a political argument: safety cannot mean permanently restricting the movement of those at risk. It must also mean addressing the conditions that make public spaces unsafe.

This is where Ritu’s story returns to the centre of mine. A student who once discussed international trade in a classroom now participates in feminist walks, expressing concerns about dignity, equality and public space. The connection between these experiences is not that a teacher produces a particular political viewpoint. It is that education can give people the confidence to examine social problems and participate in public debate.

The street is not the enemy of education. Sometimes, it is where education becomes visible.

My own experience: the cost of speaking

Over 14 years of teaching, I have repeatedly used provocative questions, public commentary and unconventional teaching methods to encourage debate.

The phrase “Taxation is theft” was one example. Its purpose was to force students to consider competing arguments about taxation, liberty, public goods and the social contract. It was not an instruction to evade taxes or an endorsement of any single ideology.

In January 2022, I also became involved in bringing a hateful Clubhouse conversation to the attention of the authorities. 4 young men were arrested in connection with the case. An arrest is not a conviction, and the legal responsibility of each person must be determined through due process. It’s all on the internet, via google search.

I mention this experience because it taught me something about the responsibilities attached to public expression. Digital platforms can facilitate abuse and hateful speech, and reporting potentially unlawful conduct can be necessary. At the same time, digital evidence and public outrage must not become substitutes for fair investigation or legal standards.

There is a difference between challenging prejudice and demanding that everyone agree with us. There is also a difference between reporting harmful conduct and suppressing a legitimate political opinion.

A democratic culture must preserve both distinctions. The difficult part is that the same digital environment in which genuine wrongdoing can be documented also allows an academic argument to be stripped of context. A lecture slide, a photograph of graffiti or a sentence from an article can circulate without the discussion that originally gave it meaning.

The teacher becomes more than a teacher. He becomes a searchable public profile, a collection of archived opinions and a potential subject of scrutiny. I increasingly find myself asking not only whether a statement is intellectually defensible, but how it might be interpreted outside the classroom. That is an uncomfortable change after fourteen years in education.

Why should the silence worry businesses too?

This is not only a problem for universities or governments. Corporate India has something substantial to lose when employees become afraid to speak.

Research on organisational behaviour has long examined “psychological safety”, a concept associated with Harvard Business School scholar Amy Edmondson. It refers to a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, including asking questions, admitting mistakes and raising concerns.

Psychological safety does not mean the absence of accountability. It means that people can raise difficult issues without automatically fearing humiliation or retaliation.

A workplace that discourages dissent may look orderly while allowing serious problems to remain hidden. Employees may withhold warnings about unsafe practices, questionable decisions or unrealistic targets. Junior workers may stop asking questions precisely when they need guidance most. The consequences can be financial as well as ethical.

In education, the losses are equally serious. A student who never encounters disagreement may mistake confidence for evidence and conformity for understanding. A teacher who avoids difficult questions cannot adequately prepare students for a world shaped by political conflict, technological disruption and social inequality.

An institution that produces obedient workers may achieve short-term predictability. But an economy seeking innovation needs people willing to question assumptions, identify mistakes and propose alternatives.

Independent thought is not a threat to institutional excellence. It is one of its essential conditions.

None of this requires the assumption that every institution is deliberately suppressing speech or that every act of monitoring is illegitimate. The solutions are practical.

Universities should establish transparent academic-freedom policies and protect good-faith debate, including disagreement with public authorities. Corporate employers should distinguish legitimate confidentiality and conduct requirements from restrictions on lawful personal expression. Monitoring should have clearly stated purposes, proportionate methods, appropriate safeguards and meaningful accountability.

When disciplinary action follows public expression, institutions should provide reasons, follow fair procedures and allow independent review. Teachers and employees, in turn, must remain responsible for the accuracy of their claims and the consequences of their conduct.

Free speech is not a licence to harass, defame or spread falsehoods. Equally, professional responsibility should not become a convenient argument for demanding silence. And universities must remember that political neutrality does not mean avoiding politics altogether. It means making space for evidence, competing interpretations and rigorous disagreement without imposing a prescribed conclusion.

The wall is still there?

I keep returning to that classroom wall and the sentence painted on it.

The slogan was deliberately provocative. Its educational value came from the fact that students could challenge it, defend it or reject it. The classroom was not valuable because everyone agreed. It was valuable because disagreement was possible.

Ritu’s journey reminds me that the consequences of such conversations can extend far beyond a semester or an examination. Students carry questions into workplaces, communities and streets. They develop their own positions, often different from those of their teachers.

That is how it should be? The real danger is not that young people will disagree with their teachers, employers or governments. The danger is that they will learn to avoid disagreement altogether.

A society does not become intellectually free merely because its citizens can technically publish a post or attend a lecture. Freedom also requires the confidence that a lawful opinion will not automatically destroy a career, close an academic opportunity or invite disproportionate punishment. After fourteen years in teaching, I remain convinced that education must do more than prepare people for employment. It must prepare them to question power, examine evidence, recognise injustice and disagree without fear.

A campus without meaningful debate risks becoming a training centre for compliance. An office without psychological safety risks becoming a place where mistakes remain unchallenged. A democracy without room for dissent risks confusing public silence with public consent.

The future of free expression will not be decided only by constitutional provisions, court judgments or international rankings. It will also be decided in the small moments that rarely make the news: when a teacher chooses a difficult topic, when a student raises an uncomfortable question, when an employee challenges a decision and when a woman insists on occupying a public street. The test is whether these people can speak without first calculating the price of being heard.

I hope the next teacher who writes a provocative sentence on a classroom wall will be able to spend the following week debating its meaning with students, rather than worrying about who might photograph it. Because education is not a factory floor. And a campus that teaches people only when to remain silent cannot claim to have fully taught them “democracy”.

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.

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On the road, they found the bones of a dead lion scattered in the forest. The first scholar said, “I can join the bones.” He did. The second said, “I can give it skin, flesh and blood.” He did. The third said, “I can breathe life into it.” The fourth friend raised his hand and pleaded, “Stop. This is a lion. If you wake it, it will eat us.”

The three scholars laughed. “You are uneducated,” they said. “Watch the power of our knowledge.” The fourth friend sighed, climbed a tall tree, and waited. The third scholar completed his mantra. The lion opened its eyes, stood up, and killed all three of its creators.

I have told this story in classrooms from the metros to the small towns of India for 14 years. Every year, the room goes quiet at the same moment. Because every student suddenly realises that the three scholars are not characters from an old book. They are the products of our modern degree factories. They are technically perfect, commercially confident, and dangerously unwise.

What fourteen years of teaching has shown me

I will not name the institutions where I have taught, trained, examined, mentored or evaluated. They are scattered across this country: big city campuses with glass atriums, tier-two town colleges with leaking ceilings, glossy private universities with international tie-ups, and humble programmes run in rented floors above shops. The institutions differ in fees, faculty and furniture. But the pattern I have seen repeats with painful consistency.

A student walks into a postgraduate management class. She can build a pivot table in ninety seconds. She can recite the 4Ps, the five forces and the seven Ss. She cannot explain why a border dispute thousands of kilometres away changes the price of the fertiliser her family buys. She cannot write three coherent paragraphs without help from a tool. When I ask her what she thinks about a difficult policy question, she asks me what the “right answer” is for the exam.

A young engineer in an M.Tech class can tune a model but cannot tell me who might be harmed by it. A data science student can clean a dataset but has never asked who decided what was collected and who was left out. An HR specialisation student can list motivation theories but has never read a novel that shows what a human being at work feels. A marketing student can run a campaign but cannot distinguish persuasion from manipulation, because nobody ever taught her ethics, history or psychology as living subjects.

These are not stupid young people. I want to be very clear about that. They are hardworking, anxious and often the first graduates in their families. But we have trained them to become narrow. When I say people are becoming dumber, I do not mean they have lost intelligence. I mean they are losing the breadth of mind, the habit of questioning and the capacity to connect ideas. That is cognition, and it is being starved.

The employability gap is not a rumour

The India Skills Report, published annually by an employability assessment firm along with industry partners, has hovered around the 50 to 55% range for the employability of Indian graduates in recent editions. The 2025 edition put the figure at roughly 55 percent. Read that again. Nearly half of those who finish our degrees are considered not ready for a job.

An older but widely discussed national employability study by a talent assessment company found that around 80% of Indian engineers were not employable for software roles, and that only a tiny fraction possessed skills in emerging areas like AI and machine learning. The exact figure can be debated. The direction cannot.

The India Employment Report 2024, prepared by the International Labour Organization and the Institute for Human Development, delivered a harder blow. Youth made up about 83% of India’s unemployed. The share of educated youth among the unemployed rose from about 35% in 2000 to nearly 66% in 2022. In plain words, a degree no longer protects a young Indian from joblessness. It has become the common qualification of the jobless.

Now place this beside the demand side. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect roughly 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. The top core skill employers want is analytical thinking, which about seven in ten companies rated as essential. Right behind it come resilience, flexibility, agility, leadership and social influence, creativity, and curiosity with lifelong learning. Look at that list carefully. Not a single item is a software package. These are habits of mind. They are exactly what history, philosophy, literature, sociology, political science, psychology and economics are designed to build, slowly, through reading, argument and writing.

So, the connection is simple. The market is asking for minds. We are supplying tools. And then we blame the students, the employers and each other when the two do not match.

The “cognition problem” in the age of AI

There is a deeper alarm that few admissions brochures will mention.

When I began teaching, the fear was that machines would do routine work. Today machines also write, summarise, design, code and analyse. A student who has been trained only to execute a defined technical task is training for exactly the work that software now does faster and cheaper. The more narrowly you are trained, the more easily you are replaced.

What cannot be easily automated? Judgment under ambiguity. Moral reasoning. Understanding of culture, language and context. The ability to ask the right question when the data is incomplete. The ability to persuade a sceptical room. The capacity to see how a policy in one ministry shakes a market in another. These are not “soft skills,” as the corporate world condescendingly calls them. They are the hardest skills of all, and they grow only through sustained engagement with the humanities.

There is also early scientific evidence that we should not ignore. In 2025, researchers at the MIT Media Lab released a preliminary study, with a small group of about 50 participants, in which people writing essays with the help of a large language model showed weaker brain connectivity and poorer recall of their own work than those who wrote unaided. It is early research, not yet a final verdict, and I would not build a doctrine on it. But it matches what I see in my classrooms. When a student outsources thinking before she has learned to think, the muscle never forms.

Long before AI, researchers in Norway analysing military conscript data found that the long rise in average IQ scores, the famous Flynn effect, had begun to reverse for cohorts born after the mid-1970s, with evidence pointing to environmental causes rather than genetics. Nobody can claim a simple link to any one factor. But it tells us that human cognition is not guaranteed to rise on its own. It depends on how we educate, read, converse and struggle with ideas. A society that stops exercising its mind should not be surprised when the mind weakens.

Now imagine this happening in a country of 1.4 billion people, where the Annual Survey of Higher Education counted a gross enrolment ratio of about 28% and over 4,00,00,000 students in higher education. If a large share of those minds is trained narrowly and then handed an AI that finishes their sentences, we are not building a demographic dividend. We are building a demographic dependency.

The curse of the specialisation scramble

Walk through any admission season and you will hear the same chant. Marketing, finance, analytics, business management, robotics, data science, HR. Parents say it with the confidence of people reciting a family prayer. Coaching centres sell it. Colleges print it on hoardings with photographs of smiling students holding offer letters.

Nobody is saying these fields are worthless. They are essential. My objection is to the way they are taught in isolation, as if a marketer does not need to understand anthropology, as if a finance professional does not need history, as if a robotics engineer does not need philosophy, as if an HR manager does not need literature and psychology.

Consider the evidence from our own recent past. Financial crises have repeatedly been preceded by brilliant quantitative models operated by people who had never studied how panics, greed and institutions behave across centuries. Social media algorithms optimised for engagement, built by superb engineers, have also deepened polarisation and anxiety, partly because their builders were never trained to ask what a society needs. Businesses launch products that fail because they misread the culture they sell into. Entire teams burn out because managers learned motivation as a framework and not as a human reality.

The blind men and the elephant are another story we all grew up with. One touches the trunk and says it is a snake. One touches the leg and says it is a pillar. One touches the ear and says it is a fan. Each is correct about his own part and wrong about the animal. A specialist trained without a liberal education is exactly such a man. He is confident, detailed and wrong about the whole.

When education became a product

I must now say something uncomfortable, and I say it as an insider who has seen this up close in many kinds of institutions.

Much of the damage comes from the unchecked commercialisation of education. When a degree is treated as a product and a student as a customer, the institution begins to think like a retailer. Programmes are launched where the demand is loud, not where the need is deep. Fashionable specialisations are added because they fill seats. Humanities departments are shrunk, merged or quietly shut because they do not produce visible placement numbers in the first week. Faculty members are hired on thin contracts, burdened with massive teaching loads and little time for research or mentoring. Libraries become decorative. Admission targets overrule academic standards.

Governance has not kept pace. Regulators are stretched, accreditation is often a paperwork exercise, and disclosures about placements, salaries and faculty quality are frequently inflated or vague. A shiny brochure can claim “100% placement” without anyone defining what counts as a placement, at what salary, in what role, and how many months it lasted. Students and parents, who have often taken loans or sold land and gold to pay fees, cannot verify what they are told.

The National Education Policy 2020 deserves credit for pushing in the right direction. It speaks of multidisciplinary education, flexible choices, a four-year undergraduate structure with liberal arts foundations, and a target of 50 percent gross enrolment by 2035. But a policy is a promise, not a practice. On the ground, I have seen “multidisciplinary” reduced to a single elective squeezed into a crowded timetable, taught by whoever was available, assessed by multiple choice questions. The label changes. The learning does not.

Without strong, transparent, independent checks on quality, pricing, claims and academic freedom, the market will always reward the cheapest way to produce a certificate. And the cheapest way to produce a certificate is to teach narrowly, test narrowly and avoid anything that makes students ask difficult questions.

The great LinkedIn misconception

Now to a myth I meet every week, usually in a confident LinkedIn post. It goes like this: liberal arts only teach students to protest, to criticise, to romanticise poverty and to hate business. A professional who has never opened a book on political theory or sociology explains with certainty that humanities graduates are “unemployable activists.”

Let me answer this plainly, as someone who has spent a career both in the classroom and in public life.

Liberal arts do not teach protest. It teaches inquiry. A history student learns to weigh evidence from conflicting sources. A philosophy student learns to build and break an argument. A literature student learns to read between lines and to understand how people feel when they cannot say it. A political science student learns how institutions, interests and incentives shape outcomes. An economics student learns why markets work and sometimes fail. A sociology student learns why the same policy lands differently in a Chennai fishing village and a Delhi apartment complex. A psychology student learns why people behave irrationally with money, with power and with each other.

Is a questioning mind uncomfortable to those who prefer obedience? Yes. But the same questioning mind is what a company needs when a strategy is heading for a cliff. The best chief executives, regulators, diplomats, founders and editors I know did not become great by memorising frameworks. They became great because they could see systems, read people, weigh trade-offs and communicate clearly. Many of them studied the humanities.

And let us be honest about protest itself. Peaceful dissent is not a defect. It is a pillar of a democracy and a feature of our own freedom struggle. Gandhi was a lawyer who read widely, wrote constantly and reshaped how an empire could be challenged. Ambedkar, an economist, jurist and scholar, gave us a constitution because he had mastered law, economics, history and sociology together. These were not narrow technicians. They were integrated minds. If we mock liberal education, we mock the very roots of the republic that allows us to post our opinions on LinkedIn.

What we must do, urgently

I do not want to end with despair, because an educator who gives up has no business in a classroom. So here is what I believe must happen.

First, every professional programme, whether MBA, M.Tech, MMS, law, design or medicine, must carry a serious liberal arts core. Not one token elective. A real sequence in history, philosophy, ethics, economics, literature, sociology, political science and writing, taught by committed faculty and assessed through essays, debates and reading, not recall.

Second, we must treat reading and writing as non-negotiable. A graduate who cannot write a clear page of argument will not survive in a world where machines can generate fluent nonsense. Our task is to build people who can tell sense from nonsense.

Third, regulators must demand honest disclosure. Placement data, salary figures, faculty qualifications, student-faculty ratios and the content of curricula should be independently audited and made public in a standard format. Parents deserve the same protection in education that they get when buying a house or a medicine.

Fourth, institutions must be rewarded for learning outcomes, not for admission volume. Public funding, accreditation and recognition should favour those that protect academic freedom, invest in faculty and show real evidence of intellectual growth.

Fifth, employers must stop writing narrow job descriptions and then complaining about narrow graduates. Hire for curiosity, writing, judgment and learning ability. Train the tools later. Tools change every eighteen months. Minds last forty years.

Sixth, students and parents must ask a different question during admissions. Do not only ask, “What is the average package?” Ask, “What will my child be able to think, write, question and understand at the end of this programme that a machine cannot do for her?”

The tree and the lion

Let me return to the Panchatantra.

The fourth friend did not save himself by being ignorant. He saved himself by being wise enough to ask a question the three scholars never thought to ask: should we do this? That is the question of the humanities. It is the question that comes before capability and after it. It is the question that every engineer, manager, marketer, analyst and policymaker must learn to ask.

We are now building lions faster than any civilisation in history. Algorithms that shape what a billion people see, models that decide who gets a loan, robots that replace hands, platforms that rewrite attention. If the people building them have only learned how, and never why, we will repeat the fate of the three scholars at national scale.

India has always known better. Takshashila and Nalanda did not teach a single craft in a single silo. They taught logic, grammar, medicine, astronomy, ethics and debate side by side, because the ancients understood that a mind is not a machine with separate compartments. Somewhere between the colonial clerk factory and the modern placement mill, we forgot this.

The time to remember is now, before the lion fully wakes. Our children do not need to choose between employability and wisdom. They need both, together, in the same classroom, taught by teachers who are free to teach and regulated by systems that value truth over marketing. Fourteen years of watching bright young faces go dull under the weight of narrow syllabi has convinced me of one thing. A nation that stops teaching its young to think broadly will soon find that it has forgotten how to think at all.

Let us give our children the roots of the tree, not only the fruit. And let us pray, and work, so that the next time a lion rises, someone in the room has the wisdom to say: wait.

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.

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You might think that was a one-off? It wasn’t. In 2018 the telecom wing of the UP Police put out 62 messenger posts. Over 93,000 people applied. Of those, 3,740 held PhDs. Again, the job required only Class 5 and a self-declaration that you could ride a bicycle. Read that slowly: nearly 4,000 PhDs competed for 62 bicycle-riding jobs.

Let’s call one of them Suresh. He’s a composite, but you’ve met him. He spent 5 years on a thesis. Changed topics twice because his guide kept changing his mind. Paid a “consultant” to fix the methodology chapter. Published in a journal that accepted the paper in 4 days and sent the invoice on the fifth. Framed the degree, hung it on the wall, and then discovered the market couldn’t care less about the frame.

Suresh isn’t an accident. He’s the product. We’ve built a system that celebrates admission and ignores what happens after, then acts shocked when the outcome shows up on a peon recruitment form.

The Gross Joke Called GER

Every few years the Ministry of Education releases a number, and everyone claps. The Gross Enrolment Ratio. India’s GER climbed to 30.0 in 2023-24, up from 29.5 the year before and 23.7 in 2014-15. Banners go up. Speeches are written.

Look carefully at the word “Gross.” It’s the most honest word in the entire policy. It counts heads. It does not count learning, skills, jobs, or mental health. A student who enrols, never attends, and writes the exam through a coaching centre is counted the same as one who actually masters the subject.

The target is 50% by 2035. From the current base that means roughly three crore more enrolments. So, the plan is to add 30 million more seats while we still can’t employ the people already sitting in the existing ones. It’s like opening more restaurants in a city where no one can afford to eat.

And right at the top of this pyramid sits the PhD, the most expensive and most abused enrolment of all.

The PhD Factory With No Quality Control

Here’s the number that should stop every policymaker cold. PhD enrolment jumped from 1.17 lakh in 2014-15 to 3.43 lakh in 2023-24, an increase of about 193%, the sharpest rise at any level. The AISHE report puts the latest figure at 3,43,559. In a single year the system added more than a lakh doctoral student (from 2.33 lakh to 3.44 lakh). The survey itself offers no explanation for that sudden leap.

Now the other side. PhD out-turn is only 0.3% of the total 1.10 crore out-turn, which works out to roughly 33,000 PhDs awarded in 2023-24. That’s an estimate based on the published share, but it’s the best public number we have.

Notice what’s missing. The government can tell you how many people enter a PhD programme. It can roughly estimate how many leave with the degree. What it cannot (or will not) tell you is what happens to those people afterwards: where they work, what they earn, whether they do any research at all. Nobody tracks it, because the answer would embarrass almost everyone involved.

We measure the intake of the factory and never inspect the product.

The Job Market Laughs Back

Central universities have 18,951 sanctioned teaching posts. As of July 2025, 4,889 of them were vacant. That’s the entire central university system — the most sought-after academic employer in the country. Against 3.44 lakh PhD students, that works out to roughly 18 doctoral students for every single sanctioned central university teaching post. One year’s output of about 33,000 PhDs is nearly seven times the total number of vacancies.

And yet posts remain vacant while PhDs remain jobless. How? Because the system cannot match supply with demand, and often simply refuses to. In one parliamentary reply, 549 reserved teaching posts stayed empty for five years because universities declared that “no suitable candidate” had been found. Lakhs of doctors on one side, empty chairs on the other, and a committee in the middle saying nobody is good enough. If that doesn’t tell you something about the quality of the degree being produced, nothing will.

Outside government the picture is no better. Private colleges hire the “Dr.” title as a branding asset and pay as if they’re doing you a favour. Guest lecturers are paid by the hour, with no research time, no security, and no future. Industry looks at a typical Indian PhD and sees someone trained to write two hundred pages that nobody will ever read — not a skill any company is willing to pay for. India spends well under 1 percent of GDP on R&D. China spends more than 2.4 percent. Without a real research economy, a PhD is a ticket to a train that isn’t running.

What Serious Systems Actually Look Like?

In the US, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands, a doctoral candidate is treated as a junior researcher. Most are funded through stipends, assistantships or actual employment contracts. Theses go through external examiners. Supervisors have strict limits on how many students they can take. The timeline is fixed and the money runs out when the time does. Admission is selective precisely because the university is paying.

Now China — the comparison we prefer to avoid. China is no utopia, but it is a serious player. The US and China together host about a quarter of the world’s doctoral candidates and more than a quarter of its graduates. Projections suggested that by 2025 Chinese universities would produce over 77,000 STEM PhDs a year against roughly 40,000 in the United States. Around 45% of China’s PhDs come from its 42 most elite institutions; only about 20% come from weaker local or private universities. They concentrate doctoral training where the research capacity exists. Even they worry about oversupply.

India, meanwhile, hands out PhD admissions like loyalty points. A college with two shelves of books and a part-time librarian can declare itself a “research centre.” The country that does not fund research at any serious scale expands doctoral enrolment at scale. That is not a strategy. That is a clerical habit.

Guides, Gurus and Free Labour

Every PhD in India has a guide, and that relationship decides almost everything. When it works, it can be excellent. When it fails, it is feudal.

The exploited scholar is a familiar figure. He writes the guide’s papers and gets second authorship if he’s lucky. He drafts the guide’s project proposals. He grades scripts, runs departmental events, collects forms, and sometimes collects the guide’s relatives from the railway station. His own thesis waits until the guide has time, which is never. If he complains, the guide controls his progress reports, his viva date, and his recommendation letter. There is no real ombudsman and no external appeal.

Honest guides are trapped too. They are handed scholar quotas, institutional targets, and students who cannot write a coherent paragraph without help. A guide who insists on quality is asked why the scholar is “delayed.” A guide who clears everyone is called efficient.

So, the power sits almost entirely with one person, and the scholar has almost no leverage. In any serious system, supervision involves a committee, external review, and written accountability. In ours, it often involves a phone call and a favour.

Pressure Cooker, Zero Accountability, and the AI Shortcut

Regulators set maximum tenures. Institutions advertise the number of PhDs awarded because rankings reward that count. Completion becomes the key performance indicator. Quality is not even a column in the spreadsheet.

The scholar is under pressure to finish. The guide is under pressure to deliver a finisher. The institution is under pressure to report the number. Everyone is incentivised to push the file through. Nobody is incentivised to stop and ask whether the work is any good. When a thesis is rejected, it becomes a scandal. When a poor thesis is accepted it becomes a statistic.

Then came AI — the most convenient accomplice in history. A scholar can now generate a literature review in ten minutes, complete with references (some of which do not exist). Entire chapters appear in smooth, correct-sounding prose. The plagiarism checker reports low similarity because the text is technically original. The overworked guide skims it with the help of another AI tool. A machine writes, a machine checks, a machine summarises, and a human collects the degree.

I’m not against AI in research. Used properly it can accelerate real work enormously. But in a system with almost no accountability, AI doesn’t raise the floor. It removes it. The viva, which is supposed to test whether the scholar understands the work, has in too many places become a polite formality where nobody asks how a regression was run, because nobody wants to discover that it wasn’t.

When a degree can be purchased, fabricated, or machine-written, employers notice. They are not stupid. They simply stop trusting the letters “Dr.”

What a Serious Country Would Do?

If India wanted a research economy rather than a PhD economy, it would do a few obvious things.

It would stop admitting students it cannot fund. A doctorate should be a funded position, not a self-financed hobby. It would restrict doctoral programmes to institutions that already have real research capacity, instead of spreading the label across every campus with a signboard.

It would require external examination of every thesis and put every thesis, with its data, into an open national repository. Sunlight is cheaper than any plagiarism software. It would cap the number of scholars per guide and give every scholar a genuine grievance route outside their own department. It would stop treating a fee-charging journal as a publication and start auditing outlets honestly.

It would track PhD outcomes nationally — employment, salary, research output, time to placement — and publish those numbers so a student could choose a programme the way a customer chooses a product. And it would link doctoral training more tightly to industry and public research labs, so a PhD becomes a professional pathway rather than an exit ramp from unemployment.

Above all, it would change what it celebrates. Stop applauding the GER and start asking what the G stands for, and what comes after the E.

Back to Suresh

Suresh did not get the peon job. There were 3,739 other doctors in the queue. He is now a guest lecturer at two colleges, paid by the hour, teaching a syllabus he did not write, in a department that will never give him a permanent post. His WhatsApp status still says “Dr. Suresh, Ph.D.” His bank balance says otherwise.

The country has given him a title and kept the opportunity. It has called that progress, put the number in a press release, and moved on to the next target. This is what happens when a nation mistakes enrolment for education, a degree for competence, and a headcount for a future.

Three lakh doctoral students are waiting for someone to ask the only question that matters.

Not “how many?”

But “for what?”

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.

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The post India Prints PhDs Faster Than It Prints Jobs appeared first on The CSR Journal.

This year I want to break the pattern. I was recently invited on a podcast to talk about the economics of mental health, and the conversation changed how I frame the subject. For years I wrote about mental health as a cultural and moral failure. The podcast forced me to count it as an economic failure too, and the numbers are brutal.

You can hear the full conversation through the Spotify link here:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5SKomXkCIRNcZxLDVQy17k?si=dSmINov4T3-BiFuKnn1KZA

We usually ask how much it costs to treat a mental health condition. That is the wrong question. The right question is what it costs when we do not treat it.

The National Mental Health Survey says nearly 150 million Indians need care, yet fewer than 30 million seek it. The other 120 million do not vanish. They reappear as lost workdays, weak performance, relatives who quit jobs to become caregivers, and, in the worst cases, funerals. India records over 170,000 suicides every year. That is 1 person every 3 minutes.

Now look at what we spend.

Public health spending hovers around 1 to 2% of GDP, and less than 1% of the health budget goes to mental health. India has roughly 9,000 psychiatrists and needs about 30,000 more. The Indian Journal of Psychiatry estimates it would take 42 years to close the gap for psychiatrists and 76 years for clinical psychologists and psychiatric social workers. That is not a plan. That is a delay with a government logo on it.

Treatment is cheap compared to the damage. A WHO-backed study found that every dollar invested in treating depression and anxiety returns about four dollars in better health and productivity. Harvard and the World Economic Forum estimated that India could lose about USD 1.03 trillion between 2012 and 2030 because of mental disorders. We are not saving money by neglecting this. We are paying a far higher price, just not on a hospital bill.

The Employee Who Is Present and Absent

Absence is visible. Presenteeism is not. The person sits at the desk, but the mind is somewhere else.

A 2023 ASSOCHAM study found that 89% of Indian employees suffer from work-related stress, yet only 27% feel comfortable telling their supervisor. So, most people stay quiet and keep showing up. Quiet does not mean fine. It means slower decisions, more errors, less creativity and less risk taking. The anxious employee stops volunteering for the stretch project. The burnt-out employee stops asking for the promotion. A career stalls and nobody records why.

For the individual, this is a ceiling on potential. A talented person works below capacity for years and is then told she lacks ambition. For the economy, it is a hidden tax. Deloitte estimated in 2022 that poor mental health costs Indian employers about USD 14 billion a year, and global employer studies keep finding that presenteeism costs more than absence, because the loss is spread across every task done at half strength.

12 Hours Is Not Productivity. It Is Theft From Tomorrow

Take the Big 4 as the extreme case. Audit staff have been reported working 12 to 16 hour days, and surveys show over 70% say the pressure is damaging their mental health. Does a longer day mean more output? No.

Economist John Pencavel studied this and found that output rises with hours only up to about 49 hours a week. After that, output per hour falls sharply. Someone working 70 hours produces almost nothing more than someone working 55. The extra hours are wasted, and the worker pays for them with health.

The health cost is documented. The WHO and the ILO found that working 55 hours or more a week raises the risk of stroke by 35% and the risk of dying from heart disease by 17%, compared with a 35 to 40 hour week. They linked 745,000 deaths in 2016 to long working hours.

The firm pays too, through attrition, errors and weaker audits. Replacing a single manager costs roughly 12 to 15 lakh rupees. And audit quality is a public good: a tired auditor is more likely to miss a red flag, and then investors, banks and taxpayers settle the bill. In July 2024, a 26-year-old EY employee in Pune died, and her mother wrote publicly that overwork played a part. That case forced India to look at what these hours really cost.

It is not only a Big 4 problem. In Indian startups and corporates, 70 to 80 hour weeks are celebrated, and prominent business leaders have argued for 70-hour and even 90-hour weeks. The evidence says they are wrong. Long hours borrow from tomorrow, and fatigue always collects the debt.

Hustle Culture Converts the People Who Resist It

Hustle culture turned exhaustion into a badge of honour. The person who keeps a boundary is labelled “not committed” or “lacking passion.” Busy has become a personality, and rest has become a weakness.

It also changed how we talk about mental health. Hustle culture says stress is your personal problem: meditate more, wake up earlier, build resilience. It moves the blame from the system to the individual. A company can run a wellness webinar on Friday and send a 10 pm email on Saturday. Women carry a triple burden of work, home and social expectation, and a 2022 survey found that 76% of working women in India report anxiety from balancing work and family.

The young are not choosing this freely. Gen Z employees, facing a tough job market and heavy debt, show 23% higher tolerance for toxic behaviour than millennials at the same career stage. When you carry 15 lakh rupees in education debt and 200 candidates are chasing one job, you smile through abuse. That is not a mindset. That is economic pressure.

Then the cycle feeds itself. A five-year study of 1,000 Indian professionals found that in year one, 89% said toxic managers should be fired. By year five, 34% had become toxic managers themselves. Hustle culture does not merely survive resistance. It recruits the resisters.

Why 92 Percent of Toxic Managers Keep Their Jobs?

According to the figures I used on the podcast, 67% of Indian employees have worked under a toxic manager, and only 8% of such managers are ever fired. Managers with the highest employee complaint ratios had a 43% higher chance of promotion. In the same research, 78% of surveyed C-suite executives admit they know toxic managers exist in their organisations, and 92% believe removing all of them would hurt short-term profit.

Read that again. Reported research suggests toxic managers can save a company about 45 lakh rupees a year and deliver 23% higher short-term productivity. The benefit lands in the quarterly result. The cost lands on the employee, and on the health insurance claim two years later. When the boss is part of the problem, showing up sick becomes a survival strategy. The problem is not only overwork. It is the toxic combination of unrealistic targets, job insecurity and a cultural acceptance of workplace abuse.

The Poverty Trap Inside the Mind

If financial stress worsens mental health, and poor mental health makes it harder to earn and manage money, we are not looking at two problems. We are looking at one trap.

A major review in Science in 2020 found that the link runs both ways: poverty raises the risk of mental illness, and mental illness pushes people deeper into poverty. Picture a father who loses income. Stress builds. He sleeps badly, decides poorly, misses work. Income falls further. The family borrows, and debt adds stress. Now he needs care, but a private therapy session in a metro can cost 1,500 rupees or more. With per capita income around 2 lakh rupees a year, weekly sessions would eat nearly 40 percent of a person’s annual income. That is an illustration, but it explains why care stays out of reach. By my estimate, not more than 10 percent of Indians can afford mental health assistance.

Stress also changes the arithmetic of decisions. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir showed that scarcity taxes the mind. In a study of sugarcane farmers in Tamil Nadu, the same farmers scored far lower on thinking tests before harvest, when money was tight, than after it. The gap resembled losing about 13 IQ points. Same person, same brain, different financial stress.

So, households respond in opposite directions. Some hoard cash and gold out of fear and refuse to invest. Others spend impulsively and stop opening bills. Both are rational reactions to an irrational amount of pressure. Borrowing is where the damage peaks: a stressed household takes the fastest loan, not the cheapest, and in India that often means a moneylender. With close to 40% of health spending paid out of pocket, one mental health episode can push a family straight into debt.

The state is supposed to break this cycle. Section 18 of the Mental Healthcare Act 2017 gives every person the right to mental health care from government-run or funded services and says the government must reimburse treatment costs if it fails to provide it. The Act also says insurers must cover mental illness on the same terms as physical illness. Yet on 16 May 2020, the Supreme Court had to issue a notice to the insurance regulator IRDAI because insurers were still refusing cover. We have a law that promises care, a market that declines to provide it, and a public system with too few professionals. The family is left alone with the cycle. That is a policy failure, not a personal one.

Two Families, Same Salary, Different Lives

Take two Mumbai families, both earning 8 lakh rupees a year. In the first, someone can talk about stress, and a relative with depression is treated early. In the second, the same illness is hidden behind shame. The family says “pagal hai kya” or “sab dimag mein hai,” and money goes to rituals and spiritual healers first. In one documented case, a family spent two years on religious remedies for a son with schizophrenia before accepting medical treatment, and by then his condition had badly deteriorated.

Compare the outcomes.

The first family keeps its earner working, its savings intact and its children stable.

The second loses workdays, takes on debt, and has a caregiver who cannot work.

The illness may even shadow marriage prospects and social standing.

The joint family once acted as an emotional buffer, but urbanisation and migration have weakened it, so many households now face illness alone.

This is why income is a weak measure of welfare. Amartya Sen made the point with his capability approach: what matters is what people can do and be. Mental health is one of the biggest drivers of that ability, and stigma, family structure and access to care spread it unevenly. Religion deserves a hard work here. Faith can comfort, but when someone with severe depression is told to “just have faith,” comfort becomes a delay. Religious and community leaders need training on when prayer must be paired with medicine.

When the Person Is the Firm?

My own research lives in informal markets, so the podcast question I enjoyed most was about entrepreneurs. Nearly 90% of India’s workers are in the informal economy. There is no HR department, no sick leave, no insurance and no manager to cover for you. If a street vendor, small trader or gig worker has a bad week mentally, the shop shuts, the delivery does not happen, and income stops that day.

That makes mental health a direct business risk. Stress narrows decisions. A stressed entrepreneur avoids risk, skips investing in stock or equipment, and takes short-term credit at a high rate because it is fast and needs no paperwork. Household and business finances are mixed, so a family crisis becomes a business crisis, and the reverse. Delivery workers, cab drivers and freelancers face income uncertainty, no benefits and social stigma, and their distress stay invisible to policymakers.

But informal markets also teach something formal workplaces forgot. Traders rely on peer networks, rotating savings groups and informal credit from people who know their family. Someone covers your stall for an afternoon. That is insurance built from trust. Formal employers can borrow three lessons: flexibility, community and trust. Offer results-based schedules without treating them as a favour. Build peer support circles and emergency salary advances so one bad month does not become a debt trap. Let teams cover each other without fear. One warning, though: do not romanticise the informal sector. It has almost no safety net. The goal is to combine its flexibility with the protection only formal systems can give.

The Invisible Ledger

Why do we underestimate all this?

Because GDP counts what is produced, not what is lost. It counts a hospital bill as growth, and it does not count the person who worked at half strength for ten years. It ignores presenteeism, the unpaid care work done mostly by women, informal workers who never appear in company data, and the lifetime earnings lost to suicide.

Consider the scale.

The OECD estimates that mental ill health could reduce GDP by 1.7% annually in OECD countries. As a benchmark for India, whose GDP is around USD 4 trillion, even 1.7% is about USD 68 billion a year, more than 5 lakh crore rupees, every year and compounding. It would hit growth, shrink labour supply, raise healthcare spending and weaken government finances at once, because fewer people pay tax while more need support. A country that wants to be developed by 2047 cannot run its workforce at partial capacity.

What gets measured gets managed. So, measure it. Add mental health indicators to corporate reporting such as BRSR, track attrition and complaints by manager, and include mental health in national statistics. Until then, we will keep calling a slow budget crisis a private problem.

The Dividend That Could Become a Liability

India’s median age is around 28, and the window of a large working-age share is expected to stay open only until the early 2040s. A young workforce is an advantage only if it is healthy. The WHO estimates that 56 million Indians live with depression and 38 million with anxiety disorders. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded over 13,000 student suicides in 2022.

At the current pace, closing the gap in professionals will take 42 to 76 years. A 25-year-old today will be retired by then. The dividend will be over before the doctors arrive. Early burnout means shorter careers, lower incomes, lower savings and, eventually, an older India that is poorer and sicker. The best talent will also leave for countries and employers that treat them better.

Instagram Is Not Your Psychiatrist

Into this vacuum of care has marched a new profession: the influencer therapist. In my Medium essay on this, I opened with a 19-year-old in Mumbai at 2 a.m. who watches a 47-second reel about “high-functioning depression,” ticks off every “symptom,” and goes to bed convinced she has a clinical disorder. The qualification of the person who diagnosed her was 1.4 million followers.

This is not a hypothetical. A licensed clinical psychologist needs six to eight years of education and supervised practice. An influencer needs a phone and Wi-Fi. A 2023 study in JAMA Network Open found that more than half of the 100 most popular TikTok ADHD videos contained inaccurate or misleading information. Then comes the more dangerous genre: the anti-medication narrative, “I healed myself naturally, you don’t need pills,” which can push someone with severe illness to stop treatment without supervision. That is a medical emergency dressed in motivational aesthetics.

India is especially exposed. The WHO estimates a treatment gap of over 80 percent for common mental disorders, and a wave of Hindi and regional-language creators has rushed in, offering astrology-based emotional advice, morning routines that supposedly cure depression, and breathwork as a substitute for psychiatry. I am not against lay conversation. Peer support and shared experience have helped millions feel less alone. The problem is not the conversation. The problem is the costume. “This is what it felt like for me” is honesty. “Here is what is wrong with you” is the practice of a clinical profession.

Fix the Environment, Not the Flower

There is a quieter lesson underneath all of this, and I learned it the hard way. A Mumbai counsellor once told me, “When you give space to the saplings, they grow. When you regulate them more frequently, they will never become a tree.” We are inured to fixing the person, not the environment. The speaker Alexander Den Heijer put it well: when a flower does not bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.

That is why a resilience workshop cannot cure a toxic office. It is also why India’s families, workplaces and religious spaces matter more than any app. Your environment, your colleagues, your feed and your habits shape your mind more than you realise. Walking out of an environment that keeps you stagnant is not selfishness. Sometimes it is treatment.

The same logic applies to helpers. For years I suffered from what psychologists call a savior complex, trying to rescue every struggling student and colleague. A Japanese monk in Worli, Bhikku Morita, told me, “Kindness without boundaries becomes a burden.” He was right. Listen without absorbing. Encourage professional help. Set time limits. Protect your own peace. You cannot heal everyone, and the system should not rely on exhausted volunteers to do its job.

What India Must Do Before the Next 10 October

I will start with policymakers, because employers will not move alone.

First, fund it. Mental health should be a non-negotiable line in the budget, with clear targets and public reporting. Less than 1% of the health budget is not serious.

Second, enforce the law we already have. Section 18 gives a right to care, and insurers must offer parity cover.

Third, build people. We cannot wait 42 to 76 years for specialists. Train community health workers and lay counsellors for basic care, expand tele-services such as Tele-MANAS, teach mental health in schools from primary level, and push the media to report responsibly.

For employers, my advice is direct. Cap working hours and mean it. Offer real mental health leave without penalty. Cover outpatient therapy in health insurance, not just hospitalisation. And fix the managers: put people management into promotion and bonus criteria, provide safe anonymous reporting, and attach real consequences. If a manager hits targets by breaking teams, that should count against them.

For platforms and influencers, the ask is not silence. It is honesty. Disclose your qualifications. Stop selling diagnoses. Advertisers should refuse to sponsor unqualified mental health advice.

And for the rest of us, the ask is smaller and harder: have the uncomfortable conversation at home. Drop the “pagal hai kya.” Ask the quiet colleague how they are and wait for the real answer.

The Question That Remains?

Mental health is not a cost. It is an investment we refuse to make while paying for the refusal in lost workdays, ruined households, stalled careers and lives.

The question is not whether India can afford to address this. It is whether India can afford not to.

If you are struggling, please speak to a licensed professional or a trusted person.

If this article stirred something, listen to the full podcast conversation here:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5SKomXkCIRNcZxLDVQy17k?si=dSmINov4T3-BiFuKnn1KZA

“Thank you very much!”

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!

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The post India Needs 76 Years to Train Enough Therapists. Your Dividend Expires in 15 appeared first on The CSR Journal.

India is living through such a season. It arrives in the polite language of administration: forms, enumeration, verification, cleaning. Nobody announces the end of anything. A Booth Level Officer knocks on a door, a form is handed over, and a household discovers that its place in the republic now depends on a document it may not have.

This essay does not accuse any individual or institution of bad faith. It asks something older and simpler: what happens to a republic when the state, rather than the citizen, decides the terms of membership, and when the bodies meant to guard that membership choose to speak softly?

What the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is?

The Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, is a house-to-house re-verification of electoral rolls run by the Election Commission of India under Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950. It is not new in name. Intensive revisions were carried out in earlier decades, and the reference rolls for the current exercise in many states date to 2002 to 2004. What is new is scale, speed and method.

Bihar went first in 2025. Its rolls stood at about 7.89 crore electors when the exercise began in June 2025. The draft published on 1 August 2025 listed 7.24 crore, meaning roughly 65 lakh names had been left out. The Election Commission’s own breakdown attributed about 22.34 lakh to death, 36.28 lakh to permanent shifting or absence, and 7.01 lakh to duplicate enrolment. After claims and objections, the final roll of 30 September 2025 stood at 7.42 crore, a net fall of nearly 47 lakhs, or about 5.95%, after 21.53 lakh additions and 3.66 lakh further deletions.

Phase II began in late 2025 across nine states and three Union Territories, covering 321 districts and 1,843 Assembly constituencies. Reported outcomes were larger still. West Bengal’s rolls moved from about 7.69 crore to 6.86 crore, a net reduction of roughly 84 lakhs. Uttar Pradesh reportedly saw around 2.04 crore names removed between October 2025 and April 2026.

Phase III, running from July to December 2026, spans 16 states and 3 Union Territories. The qualifying date is now 1 October 2026. In Maharashtra, home to this writer, claims and objections close on 12 October and the final roll is due on 16 November. Delhi’s final publication is slated for 4 December. Some commentators now speak of cumulative deletions across phases in the range of 13 to 14 crore entries. I treat that figure with caution because it is a critique’s estimate, not an official tally, but even a fraction of it should concentrate the national mind.

On 27 May 2026, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the SIR, holding that it falls within the Commission’s statutory mandate and advances the constitutional goal of free and fair elections. The Court also clarified something important: removal from the roll-on citizenship grounds is not a declaration that a person is a non-citizen. It means only that the Commission was “unable to be satisfied” for electoral purposes. That distinction matters, and I return to it below.

The quiet inversion of the burden

For 75 years the working assumption of Indian electoral administration was inclusion. An adult who showed up was presumed to belong, and the state bore the burden of showing otherwise. The SIR, in the view of its critics, has softened that presumption. Analysts have described it as a hybrid of intensive and summary revision that, unlike past practice, requires documentary proof at the enumeration stage itself.

Consider who carries that burden. The agricultural labourer who migrates to Surat or Mumbai for eight months a year. The woman who married across districts and whose maiden-home records sit with parents who may no longer be alive. The elderly voter whose name was spelt three different ways by three different clerks across three decades. The urban poor whose addresses are rented, informal and frequently changed. These are people whose lives generate little paper, not people who have done anything wrong. A system that asks for paper will find them wanting, and a system that treats wanting paper as wanting eligibility will remove them.

The Bihar numbers carry a pointed detail. Election Commission data shows 7.72 crore electors in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and 7.89 crore after the January 2025 summary revision, a jump of about 17 lakhs in months. Critics such as the political scientist Yogendra Yadav argued before the Court that Bihar’s elector-to-population ratio fell from about 97% to 88% after the exercise, a nine-point drop. Civil liberties groups like the PUCL have argued that the shrinkage fell disproportionately on women, minorities, migrants and the poor. The Commission disputes the framing and says it is cleaning the rolls, not shrinking the electorate. Both claims can be examined, which is exactly why the underlying data should be fully open to independent audit.

Here is the hard question for any citizen who values the franchise. Even if most deletions are legitimate, such as the dead, the departed and the duplicated, what is the acceptable error rate for a right that is the precondition of all other rights? A 1% error on a roll of ninety-nine crore is nearly a million people. Journalists and field investigators have reported living citizens recorded as dead or shifted without notice. A democracy cannot treat such cases as rounding errors. Each is a person who loses the ability to hold power to account.

The rise of electoral surveillance

The deeper shift is not only about deletion. It is about what the state now knows, and can know, about the voter.

The modern electoral roll is no longer a printed booklet in a panchayat office. It is a database. It is linked to Booth Level Officers who photograph, geotag and upload. It is increasingly cross matched with other administrative records and processed through centralized software. Reporting on the SIR has flagged exactly this: automated systems that classify a voter as “shifted” or “dead,” with local Electoral Registration Officers lacking effective means to reverse a flag they believe is wrong.

Surveillance in a democracy rarely looks like surveillance. It looks like convenience. A name is matched, a family tree is reconstructed, a “logical discrepancy” is generated by an algorithm that has never met the person it questions, and a notice is issued. In several states, citizens have been summoned to hearings to prove lineage to a roll compiled twenty years earlier. Whatever one thinks of the intent, the experience is of a state that now interrogates the voter before the voter can interrogate the state.

There is a structural asymmetry in this. The voter’s data flows upward, to databases the voter cannot inspect. The state’s reasoning flows downward; in the form of orders the voter cannot easily challenge. The Supreme Court has rightly pushed the Commission to publish the lists of deleted names with reasons, and the Commission complied in Bihar. But disclosure after the fact, on a website, in a country where tens of crores have patchy internet access and limited literacy in the language of the notice, is transparency in form more than in function.

Surveillance also has a chilling effect that numbers cannot capture. When a family learns that its status can be reopened by a clerk, a form or a software flag, it learns to be careful. It learns not to complain, not to join the protest, not to be noticed. The most effective systems of control are the ones that teach citizens to police themselves.

The astute silence of institutions

What strikes the careful observer most is not any single decision but the choreography of quiet around it.

Parliament, the supposed forum of the people, has seen the matter reduced to walkouts and sloganeering rather than sustained legislative scrutiny. The courts, which in India have historically been the final shelter of the vulnerable, upheld the exercise after nearly a year of hearings, while also insisting on safeguards that critics say were then thinly enforced. The national media, with honourable exceptions, has treated mass deletion as a routine administrative story, a table of numbers on page eleven. Many professional bodies, universities and public institutions that once spoke on matters of civic principle have found reasons to say little.

Silence in institutions is rarely cowardice in the crude sense. It is more often prudence: a calculation about funding, appointments, inspections, careers. Each office reasons that it alone cannot change the outcome and that speaking costs more than staying quiet. Multiplied across a thousand offices, this reasoning produces an astonishing result: a profound change in the republic’s membership, with almost no institution willing to call it profound.

I call this silence astute because it is not stupid. It is the rational response of institutions that have learned where the limits are. And that is precisely the danger. A system where every guardian is individually careful is a system with no guardians.

What the last century teaches?

I will not claim that India resembles any particular regime of the twentieth century. Such claims are lazy and, usually, wrong. Historical comparison is useful only when it studies mechanisms, not labels. So, consider the mechanisms.

The regimes of the 1920s and 1930s that destroyed their own republics did not begin by abolishing elections. Many kept them. Several kept parliaments, courts and newspapers for years. What they changed first was the definition of who counted. Citizenship was reclassified by statute and decree, and the registers of the state became the instruments of that reclassification.

In Germany, the legal architecture of exclusion was built through registration, certification and documentary proof of descent, and the decisive step was not violence but paperwork. A person was a citizen if the state’s papers said so, and a non-person if they did not. In Italy, the consolidation of one-party rule ran through the law, through decrees that were technically valid, and through officials who said they were merely applying the rules. In Spain and elsewhere, the vocabulary of order, purification and national renewal gave administrative cleansing a moral gloss.

Three patterns recur in the scholarship on democratic collapse.

First, exclusion is administrative before it is political: lists, forms, certificates.

Second, the language is hygienic, speaking of cleaning, purifying, correcting, rooting out.

Third, the old institutions are not abolished but hollowed, left standing as facades while their independence drains away through caution and compliance.

None of this proves anything about the present. It does supply a set of questions. When a state asks its people to prove their belonging, who gets to define the proof? When the language of purification enters public administration, who is being purified? When courts, commissions and legislatures all agree to do their duty narrowly, who is doing it broadly? Political scientists have a phrase for the end state of this process: competitive authoritarianism, where elections occur, opposition exists, and the field is quietly tilted so that the outcome is never really in doubt. Indian and international democracy indices have already shown concern about India’s trajectory. The SIR becomes a test case for whether that concern is justified.

Democracies rarely get a clean warning. What they get is a series of measures each of which has a plausible defence. The register is only a register. The notice is only a notice. The deletion is only a deletion. History’s lesson is that the sum can differ from the parts.

Democracy as a ritual, and the loss of its substance

India votes more passionately than almost any country on earth. Turnout in recent general elections has exceeded 65 percent, and the sheer logistics of the exercise are a marvel. This is the democracy of the ritual: the queue, the ink on the finger, the results night.

But a democracy has a second life, the democracy of substance, which consists of the conditions that make the ritual meaningful. An accurate and inclusive roll. An election authority that is, and is seen to be, neutral. Courts willing to restrain the executive. A press willing to ask. A civil society free to organize. An electorate that does not fear that dissent will be punished with administrative inconvenience.

When the ritual is intact and the substance thins, citizens sense it before they can articulate it. They feel that something is being managed rather than decided. The vote still counts, but the question of whose vote counts is no longer settled by the citizen. It is settled upstream, by a process in which the citizen is the object and not the author.

This is what I mean by the failure of democratic imagination. Not that democracy has fallen, but that it is being quietly redefined: from a system in which the people choose the state to one in which the state certifies the people. The first is a republic. The second, whatever it calls itself, is something else.

Refusing the logic of statism

The deepest assumption behind exercises like the SIR is a statist one: that the state is the natural owner of the register of belonging, that the individual’s standing is a privilege issued by officials, and that more verification equals more legitimacy. It is worth challenging this assumption directly and calmly.

A constitution does not create a citizen. It recognizes one. The Indian Constitution begins with “We, the people,” not “We, the registered.” The franchise in a republic is not a licence granted after inspection. It is a right held by the person, which the state must protect and may restrict only on narrow, clear and challengeable grounds. When the default flips, and the citizen must continually re-earn recognition, the relationship between person and state has been inverted.

There are practical alternatives that serve the stated goal of clean rolls without the costs of mass re-enumeration. Rolls can be kept accurate through continuous, citizen-initiated updating with strong default protection for the person already enrolled. Deletions can require individual notice, a real hearing and an accessible appeal before removal, not after. Automated flags can be treated as leads for human review, never as verdicts. Independent statistical audits by academic bodies can examine deletion patterns by region, gender, religion and class, with results made public. Migrants can be allowed to carry their enrolment to their place of work without losing their home registration. Data collected for electoral purposes can be ring-fenced from every other use of state power, with legal penalties for misuse.

None of these ideas is radical. Each places the burden on the state, which commands the resources, rather than on the individual, who commands little. Each treats accuracy and inclusion as partners, not rivals.

Citizens also have tools that need no one’s permission. Check your own name, your family’s names and your neighbours’ names against the draft rolls, and file claims and objections within the window, which in Maharashtra closes on 12 October. Help the elderly and the less lettered with forms. Document discrepancies and share them with reporters, researchers and elected representatives. Keep asking for the data. The republic is protected less by grand declarations than by ordinary people refusing to let a form go unexamined.

The other side, fairly stated

In fairness to those who hold the opposite view, here is the case they make. The Election Commission maintains that decades of migration, death and duplication left the rolls inflated and unreliable, and that no ineligible person on the roll is as great a threat to fair elections as an eligible person left off. It points to the Bihar figures on the dead, the permanently shifted and the doubly enrolled, to the claims and objections windows, and to the participation of party-appointed Booth Level Agents at every stage.

The Supreme Court, in May 2026, found the exercise lawful and tied to the constitutional aim of free and fair elections, and clarified that deletion is not a finding of non-citizenship. Defenders argue that a clean roll is the foundation of a credible election, that other democracies verify identity more strictly than India does, and that the scale of the numbers reflects the scale of past neglect, not a political design. Readers should weigh these arguments alongside the criticisms above, and the final rolls and independent audits will be the best evidence for either side.

Last but not least,

A republic is not tested by how it treats the powerful, who can always speak for themselves. It is tested by what happens to the person with the least paper, the least voice and the least time. If that person can be quietly removed from the rolls, and the removal is explained as routine, then the republic has already moved some distance from its founding promise.

The task now is not outrage. It is attention. Count the names. Read the notices. Ask for the audits. Insist that every institution, from the Commission to the courts to the press, say plainly what it sees.

Democracy survives on citizens who refuse to find the unusual normal. And it is preserved, finally, not by the state that certifies us, but by the people who remember that the state exists because we do.

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.

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The post Respected Gyanesh Kumar, it is ‘We the People’, Not ‘We the Registered’ appeared first on The CSR Journal.

Fought in two main phases from 1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860, the wars arose from deep economic imbalances, the explosive growth of the illegal opium trade, and fundamental clashes over sovereignty and diplomacy. China suffered decisive military defeats and was forced into a series of unequal treaties that opened its ports, ceded territory, and granted extraterritorial rights to foreigners. The conflicts marked the beginning of what Chinese historians later termed the Century of Humiliation and accelerated the decline of the Qing dynasty.

The Economic Roots of Conflict

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Britain faced a persistent trade deficit with China. British consumers demanded large quantities of Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain. China, however, showed little interest in British manufactured goods. The Chinese authorities insisted on payment in silver, which steadily drained British reserves. To reverse this imbalance, British merchants and the East India Company turned to opium cultivated in India.

Opium grown in Bengal and the Malwa region was shipped to China, where demand for the drug as both medicine and recreational substance had long existed. Although Chinese emperors had banned the sale and smoking of opium as early as 1729, enforcement remained weak. Corrupt officials and local smugglers allowed the trade to flourish. From the 1820s onward the volume of imports rose dramatically. By the late 1830s tens of thousands of chests arrived each year. British traders sold the opium for silver, which they then used to purchase Chinese tea and other goods for export to Europe. This triangular system of Indian opium, Chinese silver, and British tea solved Britain’s trade problem while creating severe problems inside China.

Widespread addiction spread across Chinese society. Social productivity declined, families were ruined, and the outflow of silver disrupted the domestic monetary system. Taxes assessed in silver became harder for peasants to pay as the metal grew scarce and more expensive. The resulting economic pressure, combined with official corruption linked to the trade, alarmed the Qing court. In the eyes of Chinese officials, the opium trade threatened both public health and the moral foundations of the empire.

Britain, by contrast, viewed the trade as a legitimate commercial activity essential to its imperial economy. British merchants resented the restrictions of the Canton System, which confined all foreign trade to the single port of Guangzhou and treated Westerners as subordinate outsiders rather than equal trading partners. Earlier British diplomatic missions, including the Macartney Embassy of 1792 to 1793, had failed to secure freer access or diplomatic equality. Tensions therefore mounted on both sides.

The First Opium War

In 1839 the Daoguang Emperor appointed Lin Zexu as Imperial Commissioner with orders to suppress the opium trade. Lin arrived in Guangzhou and acted with determination. He forced foreign merchants to surrender more than twenty thousand chests of opium, amounting to roughly fourteen hundred tons. The confiscated drug was destroyed under his supervision. British merchants regarded the seizure as an unlawful confiscation of private property. The British government, already eager to expand commercial and diplomatic influence in China, decided to respond with force.

A British naval expedition arrived in 1840. Armed with superior steam powered ships, modern artillery, and better organization, British forces quickly demonstrated their military advantage. Chinese junks and coastal fortifications proved no match. British ships broke Chinese blockades, captured key positions along the coast, and advanced up the Yangtze River. After a series of defeats the Qing government agreed to negotiate.

The Treaty of Nanjing, signed on 29 August 1842, ended the First Opium War. China was required to pay a large indemnity that included compensation for the destroyed opium. Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain. Five treaty ports, including Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai, were opened to foreign trade and residence. Tariffs were fixed at low rates, and British subjects were granted extraterritoriality, meaning they would be tried under British rather than Chinese law. The restrictive Canton System effectively collapsed. Although the treaty did not explicitly legalize opium, it ended Chinese efforts to suppress the trade and established a pattern of unequal treaties that would define China’s relations with foreign powers for decades.

The Second Opium War

Peace proved temporary. Britain and other Western powers sought still greater commercial privileges, the right to station diplomats in Beijing, and the formal legalization of the opium trade. Chinese authorities resisted further concessions and continued to restrict foreign access to the city of Guangzhou. In October 1856 Chinese officials boarded the Arrow, a Chinese owned vessel registered in Hong Kong and flying the British flag. They arrested several Chinese crew members on charges of piracy and smuggling. Britain treated the incident as an affront to its flag and an opportunity to force further negotiations.

France joined Britain, motivated in part by the murder of a French missionary. Allied forces captured Guangzhou, advanced northward, and seized the Dagu forts near Tianjin. In 1858 the Treaties of Tianjin were signed, granting foreign envoys the right to reside in Beijing, opening additional ports, allowing foreigners to travel in the interior, and permitting Christian missionaries greater freedom of movement. When the Qing court delayed ratification, hostilities resumed. In 1860 British and French troops entered Beijing and burned the Old Summer Palace. The Convention of Beijing confirmed the earlier treaties, legalized the opium trade, ceded the southern portion of the Kowloon Peninsula to Britain, and imposed further indemnities.

Consequences for China and the World

The Opium Wars transformed China’s relationship with the outside world. The unequal treaties stripped the Qing government of key aspects of sovereignty. Foreigners enjoyed extraterritorial rights, controlled tariff policy in practice, and established permanent footholds in treaty ports that became centers of Western commerce and influence. Opium imports increased sharply after legalization, deepening social problems. The wars exposed the military and technological weakness of the Qing state at a time when internal rebellions, most notably the Taiping Rebellion, further drained imperial resources.

In Chinese historical memory the conflicts inaugurated the Century of Humiliation, a period of foreign encroachment that lasted until the mid-twentieth century. The loss of territory, the imposition of indemnities, and the visible superiority of Western arms undermined the prestige of the dynasty and contributed to its eventual collapse in 1911 and 1912. At the same time the opening of China accelerated the flow of Western ideas, technology, and capital, setting the stage for later reform movements and revolutionary change.

For Britain the wars secured valuable commercial advantages and a strategic foothold in East Asia. Hong Kong became a major imperial outpost. The legalization of opium and the expansion of treaty ports strengthened the economic links between India, China, and Britain that had underpinned the original trade system.

The Role of Indian Merchants from Diverse Communities

While the Opium Wars are usually framed as a conflict between Britain and China, merchants from various Indian communities played a central role in the trade that precipitated the crisis. Operating within the structures of British colonial rule, these groups handled financing, procurement, inland transport, shipping, and consignment of opium, particularly the Malwa variety produced in central India. Their participation cut across religious and regional lines and helped generate significant capital that later supported urban growth and industry in western India.

Parsis, who follow the Zoroastrian faith, were among the most prominent ship owners and consignment merchants. Families such as the Jejeebhoys, Wadias, Camas, Banajis, and Readymoneys owned vessels, established agencies in Canton, and partnered with British firms. Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy rose from modest beginnings to become one of the largest suppliers of opium to Jardine Matheson. He later received a knighthood and baronetcy and directed much of his wealth toward philanthropy in Bombay.

Gujarati Jains and Banias formed another important group. They specialized in financing cultivators in Malwa, acting as agents, and linking inland production to coastal exporters. Motichund Amichund, a Jain merchant, was a key partner in Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy’s firm and maintained strong connections with opium producers in central India.

Marwari merchants, who were predominantly Hindu and originally from Rajasthan, dominated much of the inland financing and speculative side of the trade. Known as sahukars or sowcars, they advanced credit to poppy growers, controlled local money markets, purchased raw opium, and later engaged in futures speculation in Bombay and Calcutta. Their networks proved essential to the scale of Malwa production.

Konkani Muslims contributed shipping expertise and capital. Mahomed Ali Rogay, a Konkani Muslim ship owner, was another partner in Jejeebhoy’s firm and helped manage maritime operations.

Goan Catholics and Indo Portuguese merchants were early pioneers of the Malwa export trade, especially through Portuguese controlled ports such as Daman. Rogério de Faria stood out as one of the leading figures in this group during the early nineteenth century, using his connections with Portuguese authorities to facilitate shipments.

Baghdadi Jews who had settled in Bombay, most notably the Sassoon family under David Sassoon, became major exporters after the First Opium War. They built substantial trading houses and competed effectively in the China market.

Other participants included Bohra, Khoja, Memon, and Ismaili Muslim traders from Gujarat, as well as some Sindhi and Shikarpuri merchants. In eastern India a few Bengali entrepreneurs, such as Dwarkanath Tagore, invested in the Company controlled Bengal opium trade.

These communities often collaborated across religious lines. Jejeebhoy’s firm itself brought together a Parsi, a Jain, a Konkani Muslim, and later a Goan Catholic partner. Profits from the trade enriched many of these groups and financed later investments in textiles, banking, insurance, and public institutions in Bombay. Their involvement illustrates how Indian capital and commercial networks formed an integral part of the larger colonial trading system that linked Indian production to Chinese markets.

Legacy and Reflection

The Opium Wars continue to shape historical understanding of imperialism, trade, and national sovereignty. For China they represent a foundational trauma that informs modern attitudes toward foreign interference and national rejuvenation. For Britain they form a less celebrated episode in the history of empire, one in which commercial interests and military power combined to force open a reluctant market.

The participation of diverse Indian merchant communities adds important complexity to the narrative, showing how colonial subjects from multiple religious and regional backgrounds both enabled and benefited from imperial expansion.

The conflicts demonstrated the transformative power of industrial military technology and the vulnerability of traditional agrarian empires to determined commercial aggression. They also revealed the human cost of a trade that enriched distant merchants and governments while devastating communities through addiction and social disruption.

More than a century and a half later the Opium Wars remain a powerful reminder of how economic ambition, technological disparity, and cultural misunderstanding can combine to alter the course of nations.

The story of the wars is therefore not only about battles and treaties. It is about the interconnected economies of India, China, and Britain, the rise of varied commercial communities across religious lines, and the long shadow cast by decisions made in the pursuit of profit and power.

Understanding these events in their full complexity offers insight into the origins of the modern world order and the enduring questions of sovereignty, trade, and moral responsibility that continue to resonate today.

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!

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

The post Why China Still Remembers the Opium Wars as National Trauma appeared first on The CSR Journal.

Then the next case arrives.

This pattern is the real story. India does not lack outrage or legislation. What it lacks is a change in the everyday beliefs that make sexual violence easy to commit, easy to excuse and hard to punish.

What the numbers say, and what they hide?

The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) is the government’s own record keeper. Its latest full report covers 2023. It shows about 29,670 registered rape cases that year. That works out to a rape rate of 4.4 per lakh population.

Here I need to be honest with you. For adult women, the registered figure has stayed roughly in the range of 30,000 a year for several years. It is not exploding. Anyone who says otherwise is not reading the data carefully, and the argument in this article does not need exaggeration.

The trend is different for children. Crimes against children rose from 1,49,404 in 2021 to 1,62,449 in 2022 and then to 1,77,335 in 2023, a 9.2% jump in the last year. Sexual offences against children numbered 70,053 in 2023, which is about 192 every day. Overall crimes against children have grown nearly tenfold since 2005, when 18,700 cases were recorded.

Look closer at the child cases. There were 40,434 cases of penetrative sexual assault on children in 2023. In 39,076 of them, the offender was someone the child knew, and in 3,224 cases the offender was a family member. The same report links 89 child murders to rape or sexual offences law.

This tells us that the “stranger in a dark alley” is largely a myth. The danger sits in homes, neighbourhoods, schools and relatives’ houses. And that is exactly where our culture teaches children and families to stay quiet.

Are cases rising, or is reporting rising?

Both may be true. Some of the rise in child cases reflects a stronger law (the POCSO Act of 2012) and more willingness to file complaints. Researchers who study these numbers say a higher count does not automatically mean a more hostile society. But consider the other side. If about 30,000 rapes reach a police officer register in a country of over 140 crore people, the real number is almost certainly far larger. Survey data on women who report experiencing sexual violence points to millions of women, not thousands. The gap between what happens and what is recorded is the silence that rape culture builds.

The justice numbers

Registering a case is only the first step. In 2023, about 2.03 lakh rape cases were pending trial in courts, and convictions came in only 4,464 of them, a conviction rate of 22.7 percent. In plain terms, roughly three out of four completed trials end without a conviction. For child sexual offences, over 5.9 lakh trials were pending.

Why does this happen? Police officers in Karnataka told journalists that many parents settle matters out of court because the case involves a child and they do not want to drag it on. The same report notes that the law requires POCSO trials to finish within a year, but this is hardly followed.

Read that again. Families settle with the accused because the system is slow, the shame is heavy and the child pays the price for a public trial. The offender, meanwhile, learns that the risk is low.

Who gets blamed: the woman’s clothes, or the woman’s clock?

Now turn to what happens after a woman is attacked. The first questions asked are rarely about the attacker. What was she wearing? Why was she out at that hour? Who was she with? Why did she not scream?

Every one of these questions quietly moves the responsibility from the person who committed the crime to the person who survived it.

Consider what the evidence says. Rape happens to toddlers in frocks, to women in sarees and salwar suits, to girls in school uniforms, to women in burqas, and to women in their own bedrooms. If clothing caused rape, these cases would not exist. The child cases above are the strongest answer to the dress argument. An eight-month-old baby does not “provoke” anyone.

Timing follows the same logic. We tell women to be home before dark, as if the home were safe. But the data shows the offender is known to the victim in the great majority of cases. The curfew does not protect women from the person most likely to harm them. It only shrinks women’s lives.

This is what I mean by gaslighting. A woman is told that her freedom is the problem. She is made to doubt her own judgment, to feel that if she had dressed differently or returned earlier, it would not have happened. She then carries guilt for a crime committed against her. Some families internalise this so deeply that they stop the girl’s education, marry her early or keep her inside.

Public figures have said these things aloud. In a well-known 2015 documentary on the Delhi case, the defence lawyers spoke openly about women being like flowers to be protected or objects to be kept safe. That is not fringe thinking. It is the same idea, said without embarrassment.

Nobody tells the boys, but why?

Now look at the other side of the picture. Where is the message aimed at men?

Most Indian boys grow up hearing a long list of things girls must do. Sit properly, cover up, speak softly, return early, tolerate. What they rarely hear is a plain sentence: you must never touch another person without their clear agreement, and “no” means stop.

Instead, many boys learn the opposite from the world around them. Films present stalking as romance, where a woman’s refusal is only the first step in a chase. Eve teasing is laughed off as “boys will be boys”. A boy who harasses is seen as naughty. A girl who complains is seen as trouble. Sex is not discussed at home or at school, so young people learn about it from pornography and from friends who know no more than they do.

The result is a generation of boys who have been trained to see women as prizes to be won or property to be guarded, and never as equals whose “no” carries weight. A society cannot ask women to change their behaviour and then act surprised when the behaviour of men stays the same.

The fix is not complicated to describe. Teach boys, at home and in schools, that consent is a basic rule of human behaviour. Teach them that a man who respects a woman’s boundaries loses nothing. And have fathers, uncles, teachers and sports coaches say it out loud. Boys copy what adults do far more than what adults say.

Tradition, privacy and consent

This is the deepest layer, and the one people are most reluctant to discuss.

In many Indian families, the individual barely exists as a separate person. A child’s body, choices, marriage and career belong to the family. A daughter’s virginity is called the family’s “izzat”, its honour. A wife’s body is expected to be available to her husband. A young person who asks for privacy is often treated as hiding something. A closed door invites suspicion.

When privacy is not respected, consent has no room to grow. If a child learns that no one asks before touching her, hugging her, deciding her future and choosing her spouse, she does not learn that her body is hers. And a boy raised the same way does not learn to ask.

This shows up in several places:

• Children. Many families teach children to obey any elder without question. An uncle or tutor who abuses a child can rely on that obedience and on the family’s fear of shame.

• Marriage. Indian law still carries an exception saying that sex by a husband with a wife above the age of 18 is not rape. The same idea moved from the old Penal Code into the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita of 2023. Marriage, in law and in tradition, is treated as permanent consent.

• Honour. A rape victim is often said to have “lost her honour”, as though she did something wrong. The idea that shame belongs to the victim and not to the attacker pushes families toward silence, compromise and even marriage of the survivor to the accused.

This is not an argument against Indian “culture”. India has also given the world traditions of respect for women, strong female figures and reform movements led by both women and men. The point is narrower. Certain inherited habits, especially the ideas that family honour lives in women’s bodies and that individual privacy is selfish, make it very hard for a victim to speak and for a society to listen.

The legal view

Indian law has moved a long way, and it deserves credit for that. After the 2012 Delhi case, the Justice Verma Committee reviewed the law, and Parliament passed the 2013 amendments. Stalking, voyeurism and acid attacks became clear offences. The definition of rape widened. The law now says consent must be a clear and voluntary agreement. The POCSO Act of 2012 created a special child protection law with child friendly procedures. In 2017 the Supreme Court recognised privacy as a fundamental right, and in 2018 it struck down the criminalisation of adultery and of consensual adult same sex relations, moves that treated adults as owners of their own choices.

Yet the law in the books and the law in the street are different things.

• Delays. As shown above, lakhs of cases are pending, and the one-year limit for POCSO trials is often ignored.

• Police behaviour. Women still report being turned away, told to “compromise”, or questioned about their character. Many stations lack women officers.

• Invasive practices. The Supreme Court banned the so called two finger test years ago because it is degrading and unscientific. Reports of its use still surface.

• Marital rape. As noted, the law still shields husbands, and the matter remains unresolved in the courts.

• Uneven justice. The Bilkis Bano case showed how fragile accountability can be. Convicts in a gang rape and mass murder case were released early in 2022 and welcomed with garlands in some quarters, and the Supreme Court later cancelled the release in 2024.

A stricter law does not help if the court is slow and the police officer is unsympathetic. Harsher punishment, including the death penalty for child rape introduced in 2018, has not reduced the cases. Research in many countries suggests that the certainty of getting caught deters crime far more than the severity of the sentence. Right now, with a conviction rate of 22.7 percent, an offender’s chance of being caught and convicted is low.

The psychological view

Why do so many people, including well educated ones, blame the victim? Psychologists offer some simple explanations.

The “just world” belief. Most of us want to believe that bad things happen to people who did something wrong, because it makes the world feel safe. If a woman was raped, we look for what she did wrong, because otherwise we would have to accept that it could happen to anyone, including us or our daughters. Blaming her is a way of calming our own fear.

Power, not desire. Researchers who study offenders repeatedly find that sexual violence is mostly about control and entitlement, not uncontrollable lust. A man who believes he is owed access to a woman’s body, and who sees her refusal as an insult, is more likely to force himself on her. That is why child rape and the rape of elderly women happen. Desire does not explain them. Power does.

Learning by watching. Children absorb behaviour from what they see. A boy who watches his father shout at his mother, or his friends mock a girl on the street, learns that this is normal male behaviour. A girl who watches her mother silently accept everything learns to expect the same.

The bystander effect. In a crowd, each person waits for someone else to step in. Many harassment incidents on buses and streets happen with plenty of onlookers. Silence protects the offender.

Trauma and silence. Survivors, especially children, often blame themselves. When the adults around them also blame or hush them, the harm multiplies. Many carry it for decades without telling anyone.

The sociological view

Sociologists look at how society is arranged. Three ideas are useful, and none needs a textbook.

Patriarchy. This just means a system where men hold most of the power and decisions, at home, at work and in public life. When power is unequal, it is easy for the stronger side to dismiss the weaker side’s complaint. Women’s lower share of property, jobs and public positions makes them more dependent on family approval, and so more likely to stay quiet.

Norms and enforcement. Every society has unwritten rules about what is acceptable. In India, these rules have long been policed against women (do not stay out late, do not argue) rather than against men (do not harass, do not force). The society enforces obedience by shaming girls and lets men off with a shrug.

Caste and class. Sexual violence in India is tangled with caste. Dalit and Adivasi women face a much higher risk and have a much harder time getting justice, because the accused is often more powerful locally. The police, the village and sometimes the courts lean toward the powerful. A woman who is poor, from a marginalised caste and living far from a city has the least protection.

Add rapid change to this mix. More women now study, work and travel alone than ever before. That is progress. But it collides with old expectations, and some men respond to women’s growing independence with resentment. The reaction to women’s freedom, dressed up as concern for “safety” or “culture”, is one of the strongest forces holding rape culture in place.

So why will it be so hard to undo?

Because the problem is not a shortage of laws. It is a chain of habits, each of which protects the next.

Families teach silence. Silence lowers reporting. Low reporting hides the true scale. Slow courts and weak conviction rates tell offenders they will likely get away with it. Victim blaming tells women that speaking up costs more than staying quiet. And the absence of any lessons on consent means a fresh group of boys arrives every year with the same beliefs their fathers had.

Each link relies on the others. Pull one, and the rest hold it in place. That is why a single new law or a single fast track court, however welcome, does not break the cycle. It is also why candlelight marches feel powerful for a week and change nothing for a decade.

Being honest about this is not the same as giving up. Societies do change, but usually slowly and on several fronts at once. What would it take?

1. Teach consent early. Age-appropriate lessons in schools, starting in primary classes, on body safety, privacy and respect. The reported cases of child abuse make this the most urgent step.

2. Speak to boys directly. Campaigns, teachers, sports clubs and parents must address men and boys as the people responsible for stopping sexual violence, not just as protectors of “their” women.

3. Fix the courts and police. Meet the one-year limit for child cases, add women officers, train police to record complaints without judgment, and publish the pending numbers every year.

4. Recognise marital rape. Remove the exception in the law so that consent means the same thing inside and outside marriage.

5. Protect victims from the family’s pressure. Support survivors with counselling, legal aid and safe shelter so that families are not forced to choose between justice and survival.

6. Stop blaming the victim, in public and at home. Media, politicians, religious leaders and neighbours all shape the tone. When a public figure mentions a woman’s clothes in a rape case, that person deserves criticism.

Last but not least

India can undo rape culture, but not soon and not through outrage alone. The figures are clear enough. About 30,000 rapes a year reach the police, which is only a fraction of what happens. More than 1.77 lakh crimes against children are recorded, with sexual offences among the largest groups, and the offender is almost always someone the child knows. Roughly three in four rape trials that end do so without a conviction.

Behind those numbers is a society that still asks a woman what she wore before it asks a man why he did it, and that still teaches girls to hide and boys to take. Until families change what they teach their sons, until schools talk openly about consent, and until courts deliver justice in months and not decades, each new case will feel like the first, and the country will keep lighting candles for the same reasons.

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.

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