Some Immediate Steps That Can Help Rebuild Public Trust

We do not claim that these are the only or the best solutions. The Government may have far better ideas and more effective mechanisms to strengthen India’s education system. Our intention is simply to encourage constructive dialogue. The suggestions below are possible options that could be considered to restore public confidence, improve transparency, and reinforce the integrity of India’s examination system.

1. Create a National Education Crisis Dialogue Committee

Within 48 hours, establish an official committee including student representatives, education experts, retired judges, parents and government officials. Every meeting should be publicly documented.

2. Release a Time-Bound Reform Roadmap

Announce measurable deadlines for examination security, technology upgrades, anti-paper leak mechanisms, and accountability measures. Every milestone should be available for public scrutiny.

3. Independent Investigation

Any allegations of paper leaks or examination malpractice should be investigated independently, with findings released transparently. Accountability should extend to every level where negligence or wrongdoing is established.

4. Student Mental Health Mission

Thousands of students experience enormous psychological pressure during competitive examinations. A nationwide counselling and crisis-support programme should accompany educational reforms.

5. National Education Accountability Law

Introduce stronger legal provisions with swift investigation and prosecution for organised examination fraud, while protecting honest students from prolonged uncertainty.

This Is Bigger Than Politics

This should never become a battle between the government and students. It should become a partnership to rebuild trust. Today’s students are tomorrow’s doctors, engineers, scientists, civil servants, entrepreneurs and soldiers. If they begin believing that the system is deaf to their concerns, the damage will last for generations.

Our Appeal

At The CSR Journal, we appeal to the Government of India, all political parties, educational institutions and protest organisers:

Lower the volume.

Raise the dialogue.

Do not allow this issue to become another political spectacle.

The youth gathered at Jantar Mantar are not India’s enemies. They are part of India’s future. Their concerns deserve to be heard with seriousness, just as protests must remain peaceful and within the framework of law. History remembers governments that solved crises—not governments that simply survived them. The real victory today will not belong to any political party. It will belong to every Indian student who walks into an examination hall believing that honesty, hard work and merit still matter.

The post CJP Protest: The Government Must Shift From Control to Communication appeared first on The CSR Journal.

I write this as someone who has spent 14 years inside the system, as a teacher, a doctoral guide, and an editorial board member who reviews research from across the country. What I see is not a system short of talent. India has no shortage of bright young PhDs desperate to teach. What it lacks is the political will to hire them, pay them fairly, and let them work without fear.

The Numbers Nobody Wants to Talk About

In December 2025, the Ministry of Education told the Rajya Sabha that 25.44% of sanctioned teaching posts in India’s 56 central universities remain vacant. That is roughly 1 in 4 chairs sitting empty in institutions the central government itself funds and administers. The ministry also admitted that only 3,898 women hold faculty positions across all central universities as of November 2025, less than 30% of the total teaching strength, a figure that should embarrass a country that speaks so often of women’s empowerment.

This is not new. In December 2022, Parliament was told that 32.6% of teaching posts in central universities were vacant, along with 38.3% in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and 31% in the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM).

Delhi University alone reported over 900 vacant posts, the highest of any central university. A parliamentary standing committee found that across IITs, NITs, IIMs, IISERs and central universities combined, more than 34,000 posts, teaching and non-teaching, were lying vacant as of early 2023.

Four years, several parliamentary questions, and multiple special recruitment drives later, the vacancy rate has come down only marginally, from roughly 33 percent to about 25 percent. At this pace, closing the gap fully would take another decade, by which time a fresh wave of retirements would open up just as many new vacancies. The problem is not being solved. It is being managed cosmetically.

Reserved category posts tell an even starker story. In 2021, the ministry admitted that 47.57% of posts reserved for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes lay vacant nationally. Two years later, nearly 3,874 reserved posts were still vacant, with several universities citing the excuse that “none were found suitable” over five years, a claim that deserves far more scrutiny than it usually receives, since it effectively locks out entire categories of aspiring scholars from public employment.

A Pay Commission That Refuses to Arrive

Ask any university teacher in India what frustrates them most, and pay parity will come up quickly. Here lies a quiet but serious injustice. University and college teachers in India are not covered by the regular Central Pay Commission cycle that revises salaries for other government employees. Their pay is instead decided separately through UGC Pay Review Committees, and this process has repeatedly fallen years behind schedule.

The 7th UGC Pay Revision Committee report, meant to update teacher salaries in line with the 7th Central Pay Commission, has faced long delays in even being made public, prompting the All India Federation of University and College Teachers Organisations to threaten nationwide agitation.

Meanwhile, the 8th Central Pay Commission, approved by the Union Cabinet in November 2025, is expected to revise pay for central government staff from January 2026, but reports suggest final implementation and payouts for teachers may not materialise before mid to late 2027. Teachers, in other words, are told to wait for a revision of a revision, while their counterparts in other government departments move ahead on schedule.

This is not a trivial delay. Salary stagnation, combined with rising cost of living in cities where most universities are located, pushes talented young academics away from teaching altogether, into corporate research roles, foreign universities, or simply out of the profession. A country cannot expect world class teaching from a workforce whose pay negotiations move slower than its bureaucracy.

The Rise of the Disposable Teacher

If permanent vacancies are one half of the crisis, the explosion of ad hoc and contractual teaching is the other, arguably more damaging half.

Delhi University is the clearest case study. In 2022, the Ministry of Education confirmed that over 4,300 ad hoc teachers were employed across DU colleges, some working for well over a decade without ever being made permanent. In July 2025, the Delhi High Court criticised the university for consciously relying on ad hoc appointments instead of permanent hiring, ordering regularisation for two long serving teachers who had waited since 2017. As recently as May 2026, teachers were still protesting outside DU colleges, demanding regularisation and accusing the administration of ignoring court directions.

These teachers work on contracts as short as four months. They are not entitled to increments, promotions, medical benefits, study leave or academic leave. Their appointments can be terminated with a single day’s notice. Until 2022, they were not even guaranteed maternity leave, forcing many women to return to work days after childbirth to avoid losing their jobs. Teachers’ associations describe repeated cycles of what they call “mass scale displacement,” where ad hoc staff are removed and rehired to avoid triggering seniority or regularisation claims.

This is not employment. It is a hire and fire arrangement dressed up in academic robes. A teacher who does not know if she will have a job next semester cannot invest emotionally or intellectually in her students, her research, or her institution. She is, quite reasonably, focused on survival. This precarity has become the default entry point into Indian academia for an entire generation of young PhDs, and it is corroding the profession from within.

The Silent Mental Health Toll

We rarely discuss the psychological cost of all this, yet it is significant and measurable.

Indian research on the subject, going back to studies by Reddy and Poornima, has long noted that job insecurity among contract teachers sharply worsens anxiety and reduces job satisfaction compared to their permanent peers. A study by Shukla and Trivedi found that more than a quarter of Indian teachers reported severe burnout tied to a persistent sense of personal failure, regardless of effort. More recently, an IIT Guwahati study found that workplace culture within institutions plays a decisive role in shaping teachers’ overall wellbeing, pointing to poor administrative support and toxic hierarchies as major stress multipliers, not just workload alone.

Globally, the picture rhymes uncomfortably with what we see in India. Surveys of university faculty abroad find that roughly half report rising stress levels, with a third actively considering leaving the profession, and instructors report workload as the single largest driver of exhaustion, sleep loss and declining mental health. If this is true in wealthier systems with better pay and job security, one can only imagine the compounded strain on an Indian academic juggling underpayment, contractual insecurity, and an ever expanding list of non-teaching duties.

Because that list truly is endless. Beyond classroom teaching, faculty in India are routinely expected to handle admissions counselling, examination duties, accreditation paperwork for NAAC and NBA, research supervision, committee work, social media promotion for their department, and increasingly, data entry for government portals and rankings frameworks. Somewhere in this pile, actual scholarship is expected to happen too, usually late at night or on weekends.

Research Quality Suffers, and the World Notices

This brings us to a painful irony. India has dramatically expanded its higher education footprint over the past decade, yet its research quality has not kept pace, and the world’s ranking agencies keep reminding us of it.

The good news first. In the QS World University Rankings 2026, India put up its best ever performance, with 54 institutions ranked, a fivefold increase since 2015, and 12 IITs on the list. IIT Delhi, the country’s top performer, rose to rank 123 globally. Eight Indian institutions now feature among the world’s top 100 for Citations per Faculty, with an average score higher than Germany, the United Kingdom or the United States on that specific metric.

Now the sobering part. Despite this genuine progress, not a single Indian university features in the QS global top 100. Only six make it into the top 250. India remains the 4th most represented country in the rankings, yet its best institution sits well outside the elite bracket that includes Oxford, MIT, Tsinghua and the National University of Singapore. A country of over one billion people, producing millions of graduates each year, cannot place a single university among the world’s hundred best. That is worth sitting with.

The reason is not a lack of intelligence or ambition among Indian scholars. It is structural. When a quarter of teaching posts are vacant, when career progression for the rest is bottled up in contractual limbo, and when workload leaves little room for sustained research, deep original scholarship becomes a luxury rather than the norm. Faculty publish under pressure to meet promotion quotas, often producing volume rather than depth, in journals that exist mainly to satisfy that quota rather than to advance knowledge.

Nations Without Goddess Saraswati Still Get It Right

Here is a thought that deserves honest reflection, even if it is uncomfortable. India is a country that venerates Goddess Saraswati, the deity of knowledge and learning, in classrooms, on Vasant Panchami, in the small photo frame tucked into a teacher’s staff room. Yet countries with no such tradition, no cultural reverence for a goddess of wisdom, routinely produce better functioning, better resourced, and more respected academic systems.

Finland pays its teachers well, requires a rigorous master’s degree for entry, and grants them enormous professional autonomy, resulting in one of the most consistently admired school systems in the world.

Singapore, a nation smaller than many Indian districts, has built the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University into fixtures of the global top 20, through sustained, predictable, decades long investment in faculty pay, research infrastructure and merit based hiring free of political interference.

Germany funds public universities generously, keeps tuition largely free, and offers academic staff clear, secure career tracks. None of these nations worship a goddess of learning. All of them treat the profession of teaching, in practice, as sacred.

This is the uncomfortable truth Indian policymakers must confront. Reverence in ritual means little if it is not matched by reverence in resource allocation, in pay scales, in the dignity of a stable job. A garland offered once a year to a photograph is not a substitute for a functioning pay commission or a permanent contract.

The Mushrooming of Private Universities

While public institutions struggle with vacancies, India’s private higher education sector has exploded at a startling pace. According to UGC and AISHE data, the number of private universities in the country rose from just 87 in 2010-11 to around 510 today, a growth of nearly 480% in 15 years. Private universities now account for close to 47% of India’s total university count. States like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan have seen the sharpest surges, often after passing enabling legislation with minimal regulatory scrutiny attached.

To be clear, private capital in education is not inherently a problem, and several private institutions have genuinely raised standards. The concern is what many of these institutions optimise for. Too many are built around glossy admission brochures, aggressive marketing, aggregator tie ups, and rankings gamesmanship, rather than around learning outcomes, industry-aligned skill building, or genuine ‘job readiness’ for graduates.

Curricula in many such institutions remain outdated, faculty are hired even more casually than in the public sector, often on renewable annual contracts with performance clauses tied to student satisfaction scores rather than teaching quality, and research investment is minimal because the business model depends on tuition volume, not knowledge output.

The overall AISHE 2023-24 report shows India now has 1,278 universities and 46,468 colleges nationally, with the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) rising to 30% from 23.7% a decade earlier. On paper, access has expanded impressively. But access without quality is a hollow achievement. A degree that does not translate into employable skills, critical thinking or research capacity is a piece of paper, not an education.

Who Benefits, and Why the Crisis Is Ignored

This is the question that governance conveniently avoids. If vacancies are well documented, if pay delays are on record, if contractualisation is visible in court judgments and parliamentary answers, why does meaningful reform not happen?

Part of the answer lies in incentives. Vacant permanent posts save the exchequer significant recurring expenditure. A contractual or guest faculty member costs a fraction of a regularised professor’s salary, pension liability and long term benefits. From a narrow fiscal lens, unfilled posts and adhocism are not a failure, they are a saving, and that saving is precisely why successive governments have been in no great hurry to close the gap, despite repeated committee recommendations and court strictures.

Private universities benefit too, in a different way. A public system stretched thin, with overcrowded classrooms, delayed recruitment and demoralised permanent faculty, pushes aspirational and paying families toward private alternatives, regardless of whether those alternatives genuinely deliver better learning outcomes. The perception of dysfunction in public higher education becomes, in effect, free advertising for private capital.

Political patronage plays its part as well. Faculty recruitment, especially at senior levels in public universities, remains vulnerable to ideological and factional considerations, slowing down selection committees and giving convenient cover for prolonged vacancies. Guest and ad hoc appointments, meanwhile, are easier to control, easier to discipline into silence, and far less likely to unionise effectively or challenge institutional decisions, since livelihoods hang on renewal.

None of this is a conspiracy in the dramatic sense. It is simply a set of quiet, rational incentives operating without sufficient public scrutiny or electoral consequence. Education rarely decides elections in India the way roads, subsidies or law and order do, and that absence of electoral pressure is precisely why the crisis has been allowed to drift for so long.

What Needs to Change?

The fixes are not mysterious. They require political courage more than new ideas.

First, vacancy filling must move from special drives announced under public pressure to a permanent, time bound, rule based recruitment calendar with real penalties for institutional delay.

Second, the UGC Pay Review process needs to be brought into lockstep with the Central Pay Commission cycle, not treated as an afterthought.

Third, a hard cap on ad hoc and contractual teaching duration, with automatic conversion to permanent status after a defined period, would end the endless cycle of insecurity that current rules quietly permit.

Fourth, mental health support, workload audits, and genuine institutional accountability for toxic administrative cultures must become standard practice, not a topic for occasional seminars.

Finally, private university regulation must shift its gaze from infrastructure and paperwork compliance toward learning outcomes, faculty welfare and research output, with real teeth to penalise institutions that treat education purely as a revenue model.

India has the talent, the youth, and the ambition to build a genuinely world class higher education system. What it currently lacks is the seriousness to match its rhetoric with resource allocation, and the honesty to admit that empty faculty chairs are not a minor inconvenience. They are a quiet, ongoing act of national self-sabotage, and every year we delay fixing it, we hand away one more chance to build the knowledge economy we keep claiming to want.

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 Best Minds Are Fleeing the Teaching Profession appeared first on The CSR Journal.

79 years later, that idea is cracking in the 2 places Islamabad talks about the least in polite company: Balochistan and Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, including Gilgit Baltistan. Both regions are done pretending the federation works for them. The signal is no longer subtle. It is bodies, blockades and burnt patience.

This is not a call for war cries or map fantasies. It is a plain reading of numbers, patterns and incentives.

And the conclusion is simple.

A vacuum is opening on India’s western border: If New Delhi does not fill it with quiet, sustained statecraft, Beijing or Tehran will fill it instead, on terms far less comfortable for India.

Balochistan: A Province Treated Like a Colony

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province by land, about 44% of the country’s territory, and its smallest by population share. It sits on gas, copper, gold and a coastline that opens straight onto the Arabian Sea and the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. It should be Pakistan’s richest region. Instead it is its poorest, and the reason is not an accident of geology. It is policy.

Look at the resource math first.

The Reko Diq copper gold deposit in Chagai district is one of the largest undeveloped mineral finds on earth. Pakistan and Balochistan’s provincial government together hold a 50% stake, with Barrick Gold holding the other half, and the project has drawn 3.5 billion dollars in international financing from the Asian Development Bank, the US Export-Import Bank and other lenders in late 2025.

Officials project the mine will generate something in the range of 75 billion dollars over roughly 35 years, with between 7,500 and 13,500 jobs at full production. That sounds generous until you remember whose land this is and who has historically been shut out of its returns. A 1993 deal handed 75% of Reko Diq’s shares to an Australian company, sparking outrage in a province where most people live below the poverty line, and the fight over who profits from Baloch soil has run for 3 decades since.

Then there is the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Nationally, CPEC has pulled in 25.9 billion dollars in investment and created more than 261,000 jobs since it began, with the wider corridor valued at roughly 60 billion dollars. Gwadar port, sitting inside Balochistan, is the crown jewel of this plan, marketed as the future gateway between China and the Gulf. But energy projects make up 60% of announced CPEC funding within Balochistan itself, largely built to enable mining and extraction rather than to develop the province’s own economy. The people living on top of this wealth still face some of the worst human development indicators in South Asia. Roads exist to move ore and gas out, not to connect Baloch towns to hospitals or universities.

This is the oldest colonial trick in the book, dressed up as a national development project. Extract the resource, ship the profit to the capital and to a foreign patron, and leave the local population with dust, checkpoints and a military garrison.

Now look at what the Pakistani state does to anyone who objects.

The numbers on enforced disappearances in Balochistan are not whispered activist rumors anymore. They are monthly, documented, and rising.

Paank, the human rights wing of the Baloch National Movement, recorded 1,355 enforced disappearances in 2025 and 225 extrajudicial killings, with the pattern continuing into 2026 at 82 disappearances in January and 109 in February. A separate monitor put the February 2026 figure even higher, at 234 enforced disappearances including a woman and 9 teenagers, alongside 87 killings that month, with students the single largest group of victims and the Frontier Corps identified as the main perpetrator.

March brought 65 more disappearances and 50 killings, again concentrated among students, with 14 of the dead having previously been reported missing before being found killed in custody.

April added 124 further disappearances, including 8 women and 5 teenagers, and 53 killings, with the Frontier Corps again named as the primary force behind the abductions.

Read that pattern again. Students. Teenagers. Women. Health workers. People picked up from hostels, buses and their own homes, some released after weeks of torture, many never seen again, others returned only as bodies. In just two weeks in January 2026, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee documented 18 people forcibly disappeared in raids across Kech and Gwadar districts alone. This is not counter-insurgency. This is collective punishment of an entire ethnic population for the actions of an armed few.

And the armed few are not going away. In one of the bloodiest stretches on record, Baloch guerrillas, mainly the Baloch Liberation Army, killed at least 42 Pakistani security personnel in 4 days starting July 5, 2026, prompting a major new army operation that claimed 102 Baloch fighters killed in response.

On January 31, 2026, the BLA carried out coordinated attacks across more than a dozen cities in Balochistan simultaneously, including the provincial capital Quetta itself. This is not a fringe insurgency hiding in the hills anymore. It is a movement with the reach to strike the seat of provincial government on a single day, in multiple cities at once.

A Pakistani army spokesman was once asked directly about the missing. His answer, on record, was that the state does not “wish that anyone should be missing”. That is the entire official position, offered with a straight face while the bodies keep turning up in ditches.

Gilgit Baltistan and PoK: Taxation Without Representation, Wrapped in Silence

If Balochistan burns, Gilgit Baltistan (GB) simmers, and it has been simmering since December 2023 in one of the longest sustained protest movements in the region’s history.

The trigger was wheat. The Gilgit Baltistan government raised the subsidized wheat price from Rs20 per kilogram to Rs36, after it had already climbed from Rs12 to Rs20 earlier in 2023. In a region with almost no agricultural land, wedged into some of the most mountainous terrain on the planet, wheat subsidy is not a policy footnote. It is survival. GB is rugged and mountainous, contains little farmable land, and depends on the federal government for basic necessities like food.

What started as a bread and butter protest widened fast into something bigger? The Awami Action Committee, an alliance of political, religious and social groups, published a 15-point charter of demands that went well beyond wheat, calling for suspension of the 2022 Finance Act, revocation of new taxes, and restoration of local land ownership rights taken from residents. Load shedding, illegal land occupation and resource exploitation were named as major, long standing sources of anger alongside the wheat issue. The protests became the largest and longest in the region’s history, drawing participants from every district, chanting that autonomy is their right.

Sit with that demand list for a second. Tax without representation. Land without title. Food without subsidy. Power without supply. This is a textbook description of a colony, not a constituent unit of a federation. And Islamabad’s own response confirms it. Government negotiators reportedly tried to fracture the protest movement along sectarian lines by inserting religious political leadership into it, the same divide and rule tactic the Pakistani establishment has run in Balochistan for decades. When people organize around bread, the state’s answer is to organize them around sect instead.

The protest movement has not stopped. It flared again in 2024 over further wheat flour subsidy cuts, and it has since spread its demands into Azad Kashmir on the other side of the same disputed territory, where price protests over flour and rice followed the same trajectory. Two regions, one federal government, one recurring grievance: extraction from the center, almost nothing coming back.

The Establishment’s Real Product Is Not Islam, It Is Control

Pakistan’s founding myth was that a shared faith could substitute for shared governance. Seventy-nine years of evidence say otherwise, and the country’s own establishment knows it better than anyone. That is exactly why it keeps reaching for religion as a management tool rather than treating it as a genuine national compact.

Every time Balochistan or Gilgit Baltistan pushes back on economic exploitation, the response from Islamabad and Rawalpindi is the same playbook. Frame the dissent as a security threat, not a governance failure. Bring in religious clergy to compete with secular or ethnic nationalist leadership for the same street. Pass the problem to the army, whose budget and institutional weight only grow with every internal crisis, because a country perpetually at war with parts of itself always needs a bigger military. This is not faith guiding politics. This is politics wearing faith as a uniform, because a uniform is easier to justify than an argument.

The result is a state where the military establishment answers to no real civilian check, where blasphemy accusations can be weaponized against political rivals and minorities alike, and where an entire province’s population can be forcibly disappeared by the thousand while the loudest domestic voices calling for accountability get branded as agents of India or the West. That is not a religious state. That is a security state that has found religion to be the cheapest available adhesive for public loyalty, and cheap adhesive does not hold when the load gets heavy.

Why This Vacuum Will Not Stay Empty

Pakistan’s internal fractures are not happening in isolation. Two outside powers already have deep, structural interest in what happens next in Balochistan specifically.

China’s stake is direct and enormous. Gwadar and the CPEC corridor sit inside the province Beijing needs pacified to protect its Belt and Road investment and its access route around the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint. Gwadar sits roughly 400 kilometers from the Strait of Hormuz, which is precisely why Beijing has poured money and, increasingly, its own security personnel into the province. A Chinese footprint that started as ports and railways is steadily becoming a security presence, and a security presence in a restive province tends to become a permanent one.

Iran’s interest is quieter but just as real. Its own Sistan and Baluchistan province, directly across the border, shares ethnicity, language and a parallel history of Baloch grievance against a distant capital. Tehran has every incentive to shape outcomes on the Pakistani side of that border rather than let instability spill uncontrolled into its own restive province, and it has the religious and ethnic channels to do so without ever needing to send in a division of troops.

Neither Beijing nor Tehran is doing this out of sentiment. Both are doing it because vacuums get filled by whoever shows up with resources and patience. Right now, that is not India.

What India Should Actually Do, Without the Theatrics

This is the part that gets lost in television debates and dramatic hashtag campaigns. Leveraging this moment does not mean flags, slogans or promises of liberation delivered from a studio. It means quiet, sustained, unglamorous statecraft, the kind that takes years and gets almost no primetime coverage.

First, information and documentation. India should be the most reliable, most cited source of verified data on enforced disappearances and rights violations in Balochistan and PoK, feeding international human rights bodies, the United Nations, and global media with material that is accurate and defensible, not exaggerated. Credibility compounds. Propaganda does not.

Second, diaspora and exile engagement, done through institutions rather than through visible state theater. Baloch and Gilgit Baltistan activists living abroad need platforms, protection and a hearing, but this works best through universities, think tanks, and civil society channels rather than official government photo ops that let Islamabad dismiss every grievance as an Indian plot.

Third, economic and development diplomacy aimed at the region’s actual population, not just its rulers. Scholarships, trade access study, healthcare partnerships and cultural exchange programs built for Baloch and Gilgit Baltistan communities create long-term goodwill that no press release can manufacture overnight.

Fourth, patient multilateral pressure. India has diplomatic capital in Gulf states, in Washington, and in European capitals. Consistently and calmly raising documented human rights data in these forums, without theatrics, builds an international paper trail that outlasts any single news cycle.

Fifth, and most important, strategic restraint on rhetoric. Every time an Indian politician gives a fiery speech promising to “liberate” Balochistan, it hands Rawalpindi exactly the propaganda it wants: proof that Baloch grievances are an Indian conspiracy rather than a homegrown demand for dignity. The most effective thing India can do is stay credible, stay factual, and let Pakistan’s own documented record do the talking. Baloch and Gilgit Baltistan activists have said this themselves, more than once: they want solidarity and honest documentation, not a foreign flag draped over their movement.

The Honest Counterpoint

None of this is simple, and anyone pretending it is deserving skepticism. Pakistan’s establishment still frames Balochistan and Gilgit Baltistan as core sovereignty and security issues, not governance failures, and that framing has real support inside Pakistan itself, not just among the generals. Any visible Indian involvement risks the opposite of what it intends. It can rally Pakistani nationalism around the flag, hand the army a justification for even harsher crackdowns, and make ordinary Baloch and Gilgit Baltistan civilians the ones who pay the price for India’s optics.

China’s economic weight in the region is also not going anywhere soon regardless of what India does, given the scale of capital already committed. And there is a legitimate question of double standards that critics will rightly raise, since India’s own record on internal dissent and minority rights is not spotless either. A serious approach has to hold both truths at once: Pakistan’s record in these regions is documented and damning, and India’s response has to be built on patience and credibility rather than satisfaction at a rival’s discomfort.

Pakistan spent 7 decades trying to paper over ethnic and economic fault lines with a religious nationalism it never actually delivered good governance to match. The bill for that shortcut has come due in Balochistan and in Gilgit Baltistan at the same time, and the numbers, the disappearances, the resource math, the protest charters, tell a consistent story that no ministry statement can spin away.

A vacuum is opening on India’s western flank. China is already inside it. Iran is watching it.

The only question left is whether India treats this as a serious, patient, long-horizon strategic opportunity, or whether it lets the moment pass while the debate stays confined to studio lights and hashtags. History rarely waits twice.

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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In early 2026, after 2 rounds of upward revision, it climbed back to somewhere between 75th and 78th, depending on which quarterly update you read. Indian passport holders can now travel visa free, or with visa on arrival, to 55 or 56 countries. Singapore’s passport, ranked first, offers its citizens access to 192 or more destinations. Japan and South Korea are close behind.

The recent uptick is worth noting honestly, since good data journalism does not cherry pick only the bad news. But an uptick of a few places after two decades of overall decline is not a recovery. It is a correction inside a longer story of stagnation.

The real question an Indian citizen should ask is simple: Why does a passport from the world’s fifth largest economy, a nuclear power, a country that sends astronauts to space and runs one of the largest software export industries on earth, still sit below Rwanda, Namibia, and several small Pacific island nations on a list of travel freedom?

The answer is not one single villain.

It is a mix of diplomacy, economics, and something less discussed in polite policy circles: the daily conduct of Indian citizens themselves once they land in another country.

This piece tries to look at both honestly, without shouting and without excusing anyone, including ourselves.

How the Index Actually Works

The Henley Passport Index is built on reciprocity data supplied by the International Air Transport Association. It counts, for each passport, how many of 227 destinations a holder can enter without a visa arranged in advance. This includes visa free entry, visa on arrival, and electronic travel authorisation.

The important word here is reciprocity. No country grants visa free access out of goodwill alone. It grants it because it expects the same treatment for its own citizens, and because it trusts that visitors from that country will follow the rules, leave when their visa expires, and not become a burden on its immigration and law enforcement systems. A passport ranking, in other words, is a trust score. It measures how much the rest of the world is willing to take your word for it that you will behave.

This is why India’s low ranking cannot be blamed only on foreign ministries or old colonial hierarchies, tempting as that explanation is. Trust has to be earned continuously, and it can be eroded by things a government cannot fully control.

Well,

There are real structural reasons why India’s passport underperforms relative to its economic size.

First, visa policy is negotiated bilaterally and regionally, and it moves slowly. Countries that liberalised early, such as the Schengen bloc among themselves, built decades of institutional trust through free movement treaties. India has no equivalent regional club. Its neighbourhood, from Pakistan to Myanmar to Afghanistan, is one of the least visa friendly regions in the world, and that regional reputation spills over.

Second, per capita income still matters more to visa officers than aggregate GDP. India’s GDP is large because its population is large. Its per capita income remains modest by global standards. Visa officers in wealthier countries use income, employment history, and property ownership as informal predictors of whether a traveller will overstay. A large population with a wide income spread means a higher statistical chance, in the eyes of foreign immigration departments, that some travellers will look for informal work or simply not go home.

Third, and this is measurable, overstay rates matter enormously. The United States Department of Homeland Security publishes an annual overstay report. India has consistently featured among the countries with a meaningfully high number of overstays in absolute terms, even though the percentage rate is not the worst in the world. Absolute numbers matter to policy makers because they translate into enforcement cost. When lakhs of visa holders are involved, even a small percentage overstaying becomes a real administrative headache for the host country, and that headache gets remembered the next time a visa waiver negotiation comes up.

Fourth, India’s outbound tourist numbers have grown extremely fast, crossing 27 million in 2024 alone, and are expected to keep rising. Rapid growth without matching improvement in traveller conduct or documentation systems puts pressure on host countries to tighten rather than loosen entry rules. A country granting visa free access is making a bet on future behaviour based on past behaviour. When the numbers of travellers rise faster than the trust built with each one, the bet gets harder to make.

None of this means India’s diplomats are not working. Reciprocal arrangements have expanded with several African, Pacific, and Caribbean nations, and this is exactly why the index recovered to the mid-seventies in 2026 after touching 85.

But look closely at which countries actually grant India visa free access. It is overwhelmingly small economies in Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania. It is not Europe, not North America, not most of wealthy East Asia. That pattern tells its own story about where global trust in Indian travel conduct currently sits.

The Part We Do Not Like to Discuss

Governments negotiate visa policy, but individual travellers write the reputation that governments then have to negotiate with. And on this front, the last two years have not been kind to India’s image.

Consider the episode in May 2026 when a group of Indian tourists performed garba, complete with a portable speaker, in a circle right next to a parked aircraft on the tarmac of a Vietnamese airport. A tarmac is not a public square. It is an active operational zone with fuel trucks, ground equipment, and safety protocols that exist because aircraft fuel and moving vehicles are genuinely dangerous. The same group reportedly repeated similar performances at a train street and a theme park during the same trip. Some commentators called it cultural pride. Fair enough, culture deserves celebration. But celebrating culture in a hazardous restricted zone, ignoring the safety staff standing right there, is not pride. It is a failure of basic situational awareness, dressed up as pride so that criticism can be waved away as prejudice.

This was not an isolated case. A similar video from the top of the Burj Khalifa showed a matching-outfit group dancing to loud film music on a public viewing deck shared by tourists of every nationality, prompting even sympathetic Indian commentators online to ask whether the same behaviour would be acceptable at the Taj Mahal or India Gate.

In Bali, visitors were filmed climbing on statues at temple sites considered sacred by local Hindus, purely for a better camera angle, an act that led local authorities to consider restricting group entries from certain Indian travel agencies. In a separate incident at a Bali resort, hotel staff reportedly recovered towels, a hair dryer, cutlery, and a bathrobe from the luggage of departing Indian guests.

On a Singapore Airlines flight in 2026, a dispute over cabin baggage space between Indian passengers went viral and nearly delayed departure, feeding yet another round of stereotyping in international comment sections.

Then there is the pattern that Indian women travellers, and foreign women visiting India, have both separately complained about for years: men who ask for photographs and then linger, film without consent, or make remarks that cross clearly from admiration into harassment. Reports from Goa describe local police having to act against domestic tourists harassing foreign visitors, women in particular, for photographs. This is not a new problem invented by social media outrage. It has simply become harder to hide now that everyone carries a camera.

None of this justifies blanket stereotyping of over a billion people based on a handful of viral clips, and honest commentary should say so clearly. Most Indian travellers abroad are polite, curious, and behave exactly as any responsible visitor should.

But the uncomfortable truth is that a small percentage of loud, careless, or entitled behaviour, once filmed and shared, does more damage to national reputation in a week than a decade of quiet diplomatic effort can repair. Visa officers and airline staff do not read academic papers on statistical outliers. They watch the same viral clips as everyone else, and they remember.

Two Questions Worth Sitting With

• Why do we, as Indian travellers, so often treat a foreign public space, whether a tarmac, a heritage site, or a hotel room, as an extension of a private family function, entitled to music, dancing, and souvenirs on our own terms?

• And why do some of us confuse being watched with being disrespected, when a request for a photograph or a raised phone camera is met with either aggressive harassment of the woman being photographed, or outrage when the same men are called out for it?

These are not rhetorical questions meant to shame anyone reading this. They are genuine questions worth discussing at the level of schools, families, and travel companies before the next big group tour departs.

What Would Actually Move the Needle

Fixing the passport ranking properly requires work on both sides of the reciprocity equation. On the government side, that means faster negotiation of long-term visa waiver agreements with major economies, stronger consular data sharing to prove overstay rates are under control, and continued outreach with the growing economies of Africa and Southeast Asia that have already shown willingness to reciprocate.

On the citizen side, it means something much simpler and much harder: basic civic sense. Read the safety signage. Respect restricted zones. Ask before you photograph anyone. Leave the hotel room the way you found it. Save the garba for a wedding hall, not an airport tarmac.

A country’s passport strength is, in the end, a report card on how much the world currently trusts its citizens to behave. Indians have every reason to feel pride in where the country stands today.

But pride and self-awareness are not opposites.

A nation that wants a stronger passport should want stronger conduct from its people first, because no ministry of external affairs can out-negotiate a bad viral video.

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 Wants Singapore’s Passport Rank With Vietnam Tarmac Behaviour appeared first on The CSR Journal.

The story goes like this: we are the fastest growing large economy in the world, our stock market is the envy of emerging markets, and every young Indian with a smartphone and a demat account is now a shareholder in the nation’s growth.

It is a good story. It is also, on the evidence, only half true.

The other half is a quieter one, told in tax notifications, SEBI data releases, and rupee depreciation charts, and it says something less flattering. It says that the Indian state has spent the last decade squeezing the ordinary investor and trader from every direction, taxing the entry, taxing the exit, taxing the currency in which the whole game is played, and then sending its ministers and cheerleaders to Television studios or YouTube videos or LinkedIn to explain why this is all for our own good.

I want to walk through the numbers, because numbers do not care about narratives.

The tax that taxes the tax

Start with the Securities Transaction Tax, or STT. It was brought in back in 2004 by then finance minister P. Chidambaram, sold as a simple, low-friction way to catch capital gains at source. For years it stayed modest.

Then came Budget 2024, and the government raised STT on futures from 0.0125% to 0.02% of turnover, and on options from 0.0625% to 0.1% of premium, effective October 2024. That is not a small tweak.

On options alone, the tax nearly doubled. And it did not stop there. Budget 2026 raised it again, to 0.05% on futures and 0.15% on options, effective April 2026, a further hike of 150% on futures and 50% on options within about 18 months of the last one.

STT is charged regardless of whether you make money or lose it. It is not a profit tax. It is an entry fee on participation itself, deducted whether your trade wins or dies. And since Budget 2023 quietly removed the ability of speculative traders to claim STT as a deductible business expense, even the professional trader who declares trading as business income cannot offset this cost the way a normal business would offset any other expense. You are taxed on the attempt, not the outcome.

Then,

Long Term Capital Gains tax on listed equity, once a politically sacred zero in India for years, was reintroduced in 2018 at 10%, then hiked in Budget 2024 to 12.5%, with the exemption threshold barely nudged from one lakh to 1.25 lakh rupees, a threshold that has not kept pace with either market growth or inflation.

Short Term Capital Gains went from 15% to 20% in the same budget. And crucially, all these concessional rates apply only if STT was paid on the transaction. So the investor is taxed at the gate through STT, and then taxed again at the door through LTCG or STCG, and the government has structured the two taxes so that one is now the precondition for the other.

Compare this to the older folk tale that Indian equity investing is somehow undertaxed. It simply is not true anymore. Between STT, capital gains tax, stamp duty, GST on brokerage, and now higher F&O transaction costs, an active Indian trader today pays more layers of tax on a single roundtrip trade than most people realize, and none of these layers care whether the trade made a rupee of profit.

What the numbers on losses actually say?

The government’s own regulator has given us the receipts. SEBI’s July 2025 study titled “Comparative Study of Growth in Equity Derivatives Segment vis-à-vis Cash Market After Recent Measures” found that individual traders lost a net 1,05,603 crore rupees in the futures and options segment in FY 2024-25, up 41 percent from 74,812 crores the year before.

91% percent of individual traders in equity derivatives ended the year in the red. The average loss per trader was about 1.1 lakh rupees, itself up 27% year on year. An earlier SEBI study covering FY22 to FY24 had already found 93% of individual traders losing money, with aggregate losses of over 1.8 lakh crore rupees across three years, and separately calculated that retail traders spent about 50,000 crore rupees over that period purely on transaction costs, brokerage, and fees, money lost regardless of whether the underlying trade won or lost.

Here is where the government’s own logic turns against it. If 9 out of 10 retail traders are losing money on derivatives, and the government’s stated reason for repeatedly hiking STT is to curb this exact behaviour, then the honest thing to say is that the tax hikes are not primarily revenue measures, they are behavioural weapons aimed at retail participation itself. That may or may not be sound regulatory policy. But it is a very different thing from the story sold on budget day, where a rising STT is framed as a modest, technical, revenue-neutral adjustment.

When the finance minister stood up in Parliament in July 2024 to announce the F&O STT hike, and again in the 9^th budget to raise it further, the framing was procedural, “I propose to raise the STT.” What was not said with equal clarity is that this is a tool being used to price ordinary Indians out of a market that Indians are simultaneously being urged, in every advertisement and every talk show, to enter.

You cannot run a national campaign to get more citizens into equity markets while your finance ministry raises the cost of every single trade those citizens make, and call both of these things coherent policy in the same breath. One of them is theatre.

Even an investor who avoids derivatives entirely, buys blue chip stocks, and holds for the long term, faces a tax that never appears on any tax form: the rupee itself. The rupee has depreciated from about 3.3 to the dollar at independence to over 90 to the dollar by late 2025, a slide that has averaged something like 4 to 4.5% a year over the long run. In just the 10 years to March 2025, the rupee fell roughly 38% against the dollar, from about 62.8 to 87.

In 2025 alone, it slid further, breaching 90 and touching an all-time low near 91 in December, a fall of around 5% for the year even as the Nominal Effective Exchange Rate against a wider basket of 40 currencies fell about 8% and the inflation adjusted Real Effective Exchange Rate fell nearly 10 percent.

What this means in plain terms is that an Indian investor’s rupee returns are already discounted before they even look at a stock chart. A portfolio that grows 12% in rupee terms in a year when the rupee falls 5% against the dollar has, in real global purchasing power terms, grown closer to 6 or 7 percent. This is not a conspiracy, currencies of developing economies often depreciate relative to reserve currencies, but it is a cost that is rarely mentioned honestly in the same breath as market returns, because it complicates the growth story.

Where the foreign money actually went

If Indian markets were truly the best growth opportunity going, foreign capital would say so with its feet. Instead, 2025 became officially the worst year on record for foreign portfolio flows into Indian equities, with net outflows of about 1.58 to 1.6 lakh crore rupees, roughly 18 billion dollars, surpassing the previous record outflow of 1.21 lakh crore in 2022.

Foreign ownership of NSE-listed companies fell to 16.9 percent, its lowest level in over fifteen years, and foreign ownership within the Nifty 50 itself slipped to a thirteen-year low of about 24.1 percent. Between September 2024 and November 2025, foreign portfolio investors pulled out nearly 28 billion dollars from Indian equities, according to HSBC research, making India the second largest underweight position among global emerging market portfolios. By some counts, cumulative FII selling since December 2024 reached roughly 49 billion dollars.

Where did that money go instead? South Korea’s Kospi returned close to 70 to 76% in 2025, its best year since 1999, driven by semiconductors and AI infrastructure demand. Brazil’s Bovespa rose close to 39 percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose about 20 percent. India’s Nifty 50, by contrast, delivered around 10 to 10.5% for the year, and by mid-2025 was underperforming the Hang Seng by roughly twelve percentage points and the Kospi by over twenty.

One brokerage house, Ambit Capital, described India’s one-year underperformance against emerging market peers as close to the worst in two decades, with earnings per share revisions in dollar terms among the worst of any major emerging market. This is not a market being starved of global capital by bad luck. Capital goes where returns and policy predictability are highest, and in 2025 that was mostly not India.

Only domestic mutual funds, propped up by relentless SIP inflows from ordinary households, kept the market from a much sharper fall, with domestic institutional ownership of Indian equities climbing to a record high even as foreign investors quietly walked out the back door. In effect, retail India’s own savings discipline is subsidising the exit of the very foreign capital the government spent a decade courting.

The theatre of good news

Every time the market wobbles, a familiar chorus appears in the newspapers and on business television. Officials describe corrections as healthy. Commentators aligned with the establishment describe every dip as a buying opportunity and every crackdown as investor protection, never as a tax grab. Newspaper front pages carry breathless stories about record IPO subscriptions and unicorn valuations on the very weeks that SEBI’s own data shows nine out of ten retail derivative traders losing money. This is not unique to India, financial media everywhere has a weakness for optimism, since optimism sells advertising and pessimism does not.

But in India this cheerleading has a particular political flavour. It is not merely bullish, it is patriotic, framed as an act of loyalty to the nation to believe the market will always go up and that any tax hike, however punishing, is simply the mature price of nation building. Genuine scepticism, the kind that simply asks to see the loss data before celebrating the growth data, gets treated less as analysis and more as disloyalty.

The honest description of what is happening is less flattering than the theatre suggests. A government raises transaction taxes twice in eighteen months, its own regulator’s data shows the overwhelming majority of active retail participants losing money, foreign investors are leaving at a record pace, and the rupee is quietly eroding whatever gains remain, and yet the dominant public conversation stays fixed on record indices and IPO oversubscription numbers, as if scale of participation were the same thing as return on participation. Numbers of demat accounts opened are not evidence of wealth created. They are evidence of participation, and participation, as SEBI’s own data proves, has been increasingly a losing proposition for the individual on the other side of the trade.

What India could actually learn

Look elsewhere and the contrast is instructive. Vietnam taxes listed share sales at a flat 0.1% of the transaction value, a single simple charge, and has spent years reforming settlement and foreign access rules rather than repeatedly hiking transaction costs, work that earned it an upgrade to FTSE Russell’s emerging market status in 2025, a signal that tends to draw fresh foreign capital rather than repel it.

Indonesia applies a comparable flat 0.1% withholding on listed share proceeds. Singapore and Malaysia levy no capital gains tax on securities at all, relying instead on modest stamp duties. Thailand exempts individual residents from tax on gains from shares listed on its own exchange entirely.

None of these markets are free of speculation or retail losses, and none of them are utopias, but their tax architecture treats the ordinary saver’s entry into equities as something to be simplified and encouraged, not something to be taxed twice over and then hiked again whenever the exchequer needs a headline number.

The lesson is not that India should abandon capital gains tax or investor protection regulation. SEBI’s caution about retail losses in options is grounded in real, well-documented harm, and that part of the regulatory response deserves credit rather than ridicule.

The lesson is that a government cannot on one hand build a national identity around stock market participation as evidence of a rising middle class, and on the other hand treat every rupee that enters that market as a target for repeated, compounding taxation, while pretending in public commentary that this is all simply prudent stewardship.

Simpler, flatter, more stable tax regimes elsewhere have not stopped those markets from protecting their retail investors. They have simply stopped pretending that taxation and investor protection are the same policy instrument.

Well,

None of this means the Indian growth story is fake.

The economy is genuinely growing, corporate earnings genuinely exist, and millions of new investors have genuinely entered formal markets for the first time.

But a story can be real and still be told dishonestly. The dishonesty here is specific: treating tax hikes as investor protection, treating capital flight as a temporary sentiment problem rather than a verdict on policy and currency stability, and treating loud optimism on television as a substitute for reading what SEBI itself has published.

The numbers, when you actually sit with them, tell a story of a state extracting more from its investors at almost every turn, a currency quietly eroding whatever nominal gains remain, and a foreign investor base voting with its capital while officials insist all is well. An investor does not need cheerleaders. An investor needs an honest tax regime and a stable currency. India has, for the moment, chosen theatre instead.

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 Who Really Profits When Indian Traders and Investors Lose ₹1 Lakh Crore appeared first on The CSR Journal.

The Great Guessing Competition

The latest round of speculation over a possible Modi cabinet reshuffle has produced a flood of headlines and social media posts:

• “Big Cabinet Reshuffle Likely Before the Monsoon Session.”

• “Cabinet Expansion Delayed?”

• “Who May Enter, Who Could Exit?”

• “Amit Shah Set for a Bigger Role?”

• “New Faces from Bihar?”

• “Major Changes Coming Soon.”

Many of these stories openly acknowledge that they are based on “sources,” “buzz,” “expectations,” or “likely scenarios.” Yet the headlines are often written with a certainty that the underlying reporting simply does not support. Different outlets have projected different timelines, different ministers, and different political calculations—often contradicting one another. Social media has amplified the cycle even further. Posts confidently announce that the reshuffle is happening “this week,” then “next week,” then “after Parliament,” then “later in the year”—all with equal confidence and little accountability when the prediction changes.

The reality is that only a very small circle around Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to know the final decision on a cabinet reshuffle. Everything else is speculation. Political discussions, internal assessments and consultations may indeed take place. But until an official announcement is made, nobody outside that small decision-making circle can honestly claim to know the complete picture. Yet the competition for clicks, TRPs, YouTube views and social media engagement often rewards certainty over honesty. Why say “we don’t know” when “BIG BREAKING” attracts millions of views?

There is nothing wrong with analysing political possibilities, there is nothing wrong with discussing electoral arithmetic or governance challenges, there is nothing wrong with explaining why certain ministries may need attention but presenting speculation as near certainty crosses a line. When news becomes a guessing contest, the public loses.People begin confusing rumours with facts. Markets react, political workers become anxious, government employees start believing unverified claims. Most importantly, public trust in journalism erodes a little more each day.

Today’s digital economy rewards attention. The algorithm does not ask whether a headline was accurate. It only measures whether people clicked. In that race, sensational predictions become profitable even when they prove wrong. If ten different predictions are published and only one eventually comes true, the successful prediction is promoted endlessly while the nine incorrect ones quietly vanish. This creates the illusion of extraordinary accuracy when, in reality, it may simply be a numbers game.

If journalism’s purpose is to inform citizens, should it flood the public with contradictory claims that nobody can independently verify? Should every political whisper become a breaking-news alert? Should viewership become more important than credibility? Every incorrect “exclusive” may earn temporary clicks but it also weakens the long-term trust that journalism depends upon. Credibility is built slowly and lost quickly.

Political reporting is one of journalism’s most important responsibilities. That  responsibility demands restraint. If something is confirmed, report it. If something is under discussion, say it is under discussion. If something is only speculation, clearly label it as speculation. And if nobody truly knows, the most honest headline may simply be: “We’ll know when the official announcement comes.” In an era overflowing with information, accuracy is more valuable than speed. The public deserves facts—not an endless parade of predictions designed to maximise clicks. When journalism becomes a guessing game, everyone loses except the algorithm.

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Offences under the ‘Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act’, the law we call ‘POCSO’, now account for more than a third of all crimes against children in the country. This is not a fringe problem. This is a national emergency hiding in plain sight, and I am done pretending otherwise.

I teach geopolitics and international business to MBA students. I am not a criminologist or a child rights lawyer. But I read data for a living, and I have spent enough years dissecting Indian institutions to know when a system is failing by design rather than by accident. The POCSO numbers are not just tragic. They are a diagnostic. They tell us exactly where our courts, our schools, our homes, and our digital habits have collapsed. This article is my attempt to read that diagnostic honestly, without the euphemisms we usually wrap around this subject.

The Rise Is Real, But Read It Correctly

Before I go further, I want to make one thing clear, because ‘lazy’ commentary on this subject usually gets it wrong in one of two directions. Either people panic and declare Indian society uniquely depraved, or they dismiss the numbers as media exaggeration. Both readings are wrong.

The honest reading is this: Registered POCSO cases have risen sharply, but a rising number of registered cases is not the same as a rising number of actual incidents. It can also mean, and substantially does mean, that more survivors and families are choosing to report rather than stay silent. NCRB data shows POCSO registrations increased more than 30% between 2016 and 2020, and the number of children sexually abused as recorded in official data rose 65% between 2017 and 2021, climbing from 32,608 cases to 53,874. That is a brutal number. But brutal numbers going up because people are finally speaking is a different story from abuse itself multiplying unchecked.

For decades, child sexual abuse in India lived inside a wall of silence. A 2018 study by the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation found that only 7% of victims or their families ever approached the police. Shame, stigma, fear of the family’s reputation, and plain disbelief kept the other 93% quiet. So when I see case registrations climbing year after year, my first instinct is not despair. It is cautious relief. A society that used to bury this issue is now, however slowly, dragging it into the open. More FIRs are not automatically bad news. Silence was always the worse outcome, because silence protected the offender, not the child.

That said, I am not going to let this framing become an excuse. Even after accounting for improved reporting, the absolute scale is staggering. Delhi alone recorded a crime rate of 138.3 cases per 100,000 children in 2024. Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh post the highest raw numbers. Bihar has seen a sixfold increase over the decade, the steepest rise of any state, followed by Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, and Odisha, each tripling. Reporting alone cannot explain increases of that magnitude. Something in the underlying conditions is also getting worse, and I will spend the rest of this piece arguing about what that something is.

A Justice System That Punishes Patience Out of Children

If there is one institutional failure I want to bash without qualification, it is the Indian judiciary’s handling of POCSO cases. We passed this law in 2012 specifically because ordinary criminal trials were too slow for child victims. We built ‘Fast Track Special Courts’ in 2019, promising 1,023 of them, including 389 exclusive POCSO courts, precisely to solve the delay problem. 13 years after the law and half a decade after the fast track scheme, the delay problem is worse than when we started.

Look at the pendency numbers. By the end of 2020, POCSO case pendency in courts had crossed 94 percent. Rape cases under ordinary criminal law showed almost the same figure, 94.4 percent. A parliamentary response in March 2022 revealed over 2.26 lakh POCSO cases pending in designated POCSO courts as of January that year.

By 2024, the picture across all crimes against children had not improved. Of 707,523 cases under trial nationally that year, 644,887, or 91 percent, remained pending at year’s end. Cases pending before courts have nearly tripled in a decade, from 165,853 in 2015 to 644,887 in 2024. IndiaSpend’s analysis of nearly 400,000 POCSO cases across 28 states found the average case takes 510 days to be disposed. That is a year and a half of a child returning to court, reliving trauma, facing the accused in hearings, before a verdict even arrives.

I want to be blunt about what this pendency actually does. It is not a neutral administrative delay. It is a second injury. A child who survives abuse is then asked to survive the legal system, and the legal system takes longer than her own recovery. Families give up. Witnesses turn hostile after years of pressure and fatigue. Memories fade under cross examination conducted half a decade after the incident. The conviction rate under POCSO stood at 37.9% in 2020, only slightly ahead of the 39.3 percent conviction rate for rape cases against women generally. A conviction rate below 40 percent, sitting on top of a pendency rate above 90 percent, is not a justice system. It is a queue that occasionally produces justice as a side effect.

Why is disposal so slow when the police machinery is not actually the bottleneck. Chargesheeting rates are high. In 2024, police filed chargesheets in 95% of POCSO cases, a rate that has held steady between 93-95% since 2017. The bottleneck sits squarely in the courts. Judicial vacancies in fast track courts remain unfilled. Many so called special courts lack child friendly infrastructure such as video recording facilities, separate waiting areas, or in camera testimony rooms that spare a child from facing the accused directly.

Judges assigned to these courts frequently have no specialised training in handling child witnesses, a gap the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation flagged repeatedly in its reports. As of May 2021, only 640 of the promised 1,023 fast track courts had become functional, and only 338 of the promised 389 exclusive POCSO courts existed. We built half a solution and called it a scheme.

The Poor Accused Move Fast, the Powerful Accused Do Not

Here is the part of this story that makes me genuinely angry, and I say this as someone who otherwise defends due process without apology. The same slow judicial machine that takes 510 days on average to dispose a case does not apply that delay evenly. If the accused is poor, unconnected, and unable to afford competent legal counsel, the machinery of the state can move with surprising speed. Overworked legal aid lawyers, minimal cross examination, no resources for a defence investigation, and a presumption of guilt in the public eye all combine to produce quick convictions or quick, coerced plea arrangements. Poor defendants in India routinely spend years in undertrial detention even before their case reaches a verdict, because they cannot afford bail, and once the trial starts it often proceeds without the kind of procedural friction that money can buy.

Contrast that with cases involving the economically or politically powerful. Bail becomes easier to obtain. Adjournments multiply. Star witnesses turn hostile after being approached, whether through pressure or inducement. Cross examinations stretch for years. Appeals climb through multiple tiers of the court system, each one adding months. High profile POCSO cases involving religious figures, politically connected individuals, or the wealthy have historically taken far longer to conclude, and several have ended in acquittal or in convictions that were later diluted on appeal. I am not naming specific ongoing matters here because sub judice cases deserve caution, but anyone who has followed Indian criminal trials over the last decade knows this pattern by heart. Justice delayed for the poor looks like an undertrial languishing in jail. Justice delayed for the powerful looks like an accused living freely on bail while the case quietly loses momentum.

This is the uncomfortable truth about our POCSO system. It does not simply fail child victims uniformly. It fails them differently depending on who sits in the accused’s chair. A system that claims to protect the most vulnerable citizens in the country, its children, cannot simultaneously operate two different clocks depending on the wealth of the accused. That is not a justice system. That is a caste system wearing judicial robes.

This Is Not Just About Lust. It Is a Mindset Problem

Most public commentary on child sexual abuse treats it purely as an expression of uncontrolled sexual urge. I think that framing is incomplete and, frankly, lets society off the hook too easily. Lust does not explain why an overwhelming share of offenders’ target children they already know, children who trust them, children who are structurally powerless to resist or report. What explains that pattern is entitlement. It is a mindset that treats a child’s body as available, that treats a child’s silence as consent, and that treats a child’s inability to fully understand or articulate violation as an opportunity rather than a moral red line.

This entitlement mindset is cultivated, not innate. It grows in households and communities where hierarchy trumps consent as an organising principle, where elders are never questioned, where a closed door in a family home is treated as sacred regardless of what happens behind it, and where the idea that a child has bodily autonomy independent of adult authority barely exists as a concept. Until we treat this as a cultural and psychological problem, not merely a criminal impulse problem, we will keep building courts and fast track schemes that address the crime after it happens instead of the conditions that produce it.

We Are Not Teaching Children How to Say No

Most Indian households still raise children to be deferential to all adults by default. Touch a relative’s feet. Do not question an elder. Do not embarrass the family by making a scene. These are values taught with good intentions, respect for age and hierarchy, but they come at a brutal cost. A child conditioned from birth never to say no to an adult, never to question an elder’s behaviour, and never to make a scene in front of family, is a child who has been pre trained to comply with an abuser rather than resist one.

Consent as a concept, the idea that a child’s body belongs to the child and that “no” is a complete sentence regardless of who is asking, is almost entirely absent from Indian home education. We teach children to share, to respect elders, to not talk back. We rarely teach them that they are allowed to refuse physical affection from anyone, including family, if it makes them uncomfortable. Parents who force children to hug or kiss relatives at gatherings, dismissing the child’s visible discomfort as shyness, are unintentionally teaching the exact opposite lesson an abuser depends on: that discomfort should be overridden for the sake of social harmony. This has to change at the level of the dinner table, not just the classroom.

Schools Failed First, Then Some of Them Learned

Schools were supposed to be the second line of defence after the home, and for a long time they were not even that. The POCSO Rules of 2020 finally mandated that central and state governments prepare age appropriate educational material on personal safety for children, to be disseminated through schools, panchayats, community centres, and even digital spaces. That mandate came eight years after the original Act, which tells you how long institutional child safety education was treated as optional.

The VIBGYOR Group of Schools case from 2014 remains one of the starkest illustrations of what happens when a school treats child safety as a brand risk rather than a duty of care. A six year old student at VIBGYOR High School in Marathahalli, Bengaluru, was allegedly raped by 2 staff members. The case triggered protests across Bengaluru and the country, the group’s chairman was arrested on charges of suppressing information, and two staff members were eventually chargesheeted. What made the case so damaging was not just the abuse itself but the perception that the institution’s first instinct was to protect its reputation rather than the child. That instinct, unfortunately, is not unique to one school group. It is a structural incentive across private education in India, where enrolment numbers and brand image often outweigh child protection protocols in the actual priorities of school management.

To their credit, VIBGYOR and many other institutions did eventually respond by introducing structured good touch, bad touch sessions and personal safety modules for young students, a step several Indian schools now treat as standard practice rather than optional add on.

A 2024 field report from personal safety educators working with adolescents in Pune found that even after a case as high profile as the Badlapur child sexual abuse case had dominated headlines, half the children in a session on personal safety had never previously attended a school session on the subject. Among those who had, understanding was shallow. Some children equated bad touch purely with physical pain rather than violation of boundaries, missing the point entirely.

Good touch, bad touch as currently taught in most Indian schools is often a single assembly session delivered once, without follow up, without integration into an ongoing curriculum, and without training teachers to handle disclosures if a child actually comes forward afterward. Comprehensive sexuality education curricula, of the kind now being piloted by groups such as Prayas in Maharashtra through programs like SAHAJ, treat personal safety as one module within a broader, age appropriate, repeated curriculum covering consent, healthy relationships, and self-worth. That is the direction schools need to move in nationally, not a single poster on a noticeboard once a year. CBSE has begun including some of this content, but the rigor and consistency across schools remains wildly uneven, and teacher training on how to actually deliver these sensitive sessions remains the single biggest gap.

Most Offenders Are Not Strangers

If there is one fact that should reshape how Indian parents think about child safety, it is this. The stranger danger narrative, the idea that abuse comes from an unknown man lurking outside school gates, is largely a myth. NCRB age profile data on child rape victims shows that a significant share of cases involve victims aged 12 to 18, and case pattern data collected by child rights organisations consistently shows that the overwhelming majority of offenders are known to the child. Relatives, parents, step parents, neighbours, tutors, family friends, and people who hold positions of trust within a household or a school are disproportionately represented among accused persons in POCSO cases.

This single fact should end the fantasy that child safety is achieved by monitoring strangers and unfamiliar spaces. It should redirect our attention to the people who have unsupervised, repeated, trusted access to a child, which is precisely the access that a known relative or neighbour has by default. Parents who obsess over stranger danger while remaining blind to patterns of behaviour from a trusted uncle, a family friend, or a domestic staff member are protecting their children from the wrong threat entirely. The uncomfortable implication is that Indian families need to be willing to question people within their own social circle, something the culture of hierarchy and unquestioning respect for elders, which I addressed earlier, makes extremely difficult to do.

Social Media and Easy Access to Pornography Are Rewiring Expectations

I do not think it is possible to have an honest conversation about the rise in child sexual abuse without talking about smartphones. India has some of the cheapest mobile data in the world, and children now get unsupervised access to devices at younger ages than any previous generation. Two consequences follow from this, and both matter here.

First, unrestricted access to pornography, including violent and non-consensual content, has become nearly universal among adolescents with a smartphone and an internet connection, often without any parental awareness. Repeated exposure to content that normalises coercion, power imbalance, and non-consent as titillating rather than criminal shapes sexual expectations at a formative age, for both potential victims and potential offenders. When a teenager’s primary source of sexual information is unmoderated internet content rather than any structured education from home or school, distorted norms fill the vacuum by default.

Second, social media has become a direct vector for grooming and exploitation. Predators use messaging platforms and social apps to build trust with children over time, often posing as peers or presenting fabricated identities, before escalating toward abuse either online or in person. Law enforcement agencies and child protection groups have flagged a rise in cases where the first point of contact between an offender and a victim was a social media platform, not a physical space at all. I will not go into the specific mechanics’ predators use, because describing them serves no protective purpose and only risks handing a playbook to the wrong reader. What parents and schools need to understand is simpler: the assumption that a child is safe once physically at home, phone in hand, is dangerously outdated.

What Actually Needs to Change

I will not end this piece with a vague call for awareness, because vague calls for awareness have achieved close to nothing in thirteen years of POCSO. Here is what the data actually points toward.

Court capacity has to match caseload growth in real numbers, not in press releases about schemes. Every promised fast track court needs to actually be functional, staffed with judges trained specifically in child testimony, and equipped with the infrastructure the law already mandates, in camera testimony, video recording, child friendly waiting spaces. A scheme that is 60 percent implemented eight years after launch is not a scheme. It is a failure with a good name.

Bail and trial procedures need genuine parity regardless of the accused’s wealth or connections. If undertrial poor defendants can be tried and convicted within a reasonable timeframe, there is no legitimate reason wealthy or influential defendants require years of adjournments to reach the same procedural point. Any visible disparity in trial speed correlated with the accused’s resources should itself be treated as a red flag warranting judicial oversight.

Consent education has to start at home, before school, and it has to override the reflexive cultural instinct to prioritise adult comfort over a child’s discomfort. Parents forcing physical affection onto reluctant children at family gatherings need to stop doing that, immediately, as a first and free intervention available to every household regardless of income.

Schools need mandatory, recurring, professionally designed personal safety curricula, not single assemblies, delivered by trained staff capable of handling disclosures appropriately when they occur. The VIBGYOR case should be remembered not as an isolated scandal but as the moment Indian schools were forced to confront how unprepared they were, and every school that has not yet built a comparable, ongoing program is repeating that same unpreparedness today.

Parents need to redirect vigilance away from strangers and toward the people who actually have close, trusted, repeated access to their children. That is uncomfortable. It requires questioning relatives, neighbours, and family friends, exactly the people culture tells us never to question. Do it anyway.

Finally, digital literacy for both children and parents needs to catch up with the reality of how much unsupervised time children now spend online, and how directly that exposure connects to both distorted sexual norms and active predatory contact.

Nevertheless

I started this piece with a number, 512 crimes against children every day. I want to end with a reframe of that number rather than a repetition of it. Every one of those 512 daily cases represents either a family that finally found the courage to report, breaking a silence that protected abusers for generations, or an abuse that has not yet been reported at all. Neither possibility is comfortable. But only one of them is something we can actually influence starting today, in our own homes, our own schools, and our own expectations of the justice system.

I would rather live in a India that reports too much and prosecutes too slowly than one that stayed silent and called it peace. But I refuse to accept slow prosecution as the ceiling of our ambition. We built a law in 2012. Thirteen years later, it is time we built a system that actually lives up to it.

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 Railway Recruitment Board had advertised 35,281 posts under its Non-Technical Popular Categories drive. According to Ashwini Deshpande, professor of economics at Ashoka University, 1.25 crore young Indians applied for those vacancies. That works out to 354 applicants for every single job. Most of these were not high-skill positions. Many were for goods guards and traffic assistants, jobs that pay between 19,000 and 35,000 rupees a month. A twelve-year-old boy in Bihar today grows up hearing that this is what a good future looks like: a permanent seat in a queue that is 354 people deep.

I want to start with that story because I think we, as a country, keep having the wrong conversation. We debate GDP growth rates, we debate which state has the best “ease of doing business” ranking, we debate whether the stock market reflects the real economy. What we do not debate enough, at least not with the seriousness it deserves, is this: what happens to a young nation when it cannot create enough dignified work for its young people.

I do not think this is a technical economic question anymore. I think it is a question about the kind of India we are going to live in 10 years from now, and whether that India stays whole.

The numbers are not a mystery.

India’s overall unemployment rate has been drifting upward through 2026. According to India Macro Indicators, the rate rose to 5.1% in March 2026, up from 4.9% in February, after touching a low of 4.8% in December 2025. That headline number understates the real story.

Youth unemployment in the 15 to 29 age bracket rose to 15.2% in March 2026, up from 13.8% as recently as April 2025. Within that group, female youth unemployment stood near 17.7% against 14.3% for young men.

Manufacturing growth, measured by the PMI gauge, slowed to a 45-month low around the same period, and urban employers who had driven the 2023 to 2024 recovery moved into what analysts described as a wait and watch mode.

Look at the state level picture and it gets sharper. Kerala, a state with strong education outcomes, recorded youth unemployment of nearly 30% in the 15 to 29 bracket, with female youth unemployment above 47 percent. Lakshadweep reported youth unemployment above 36 percent, with female joblessness near 80 percent.

Among degree holders specifically, unemployment reached almost 40 percent for women in Jammu and Kashmir and 32 percent in Rajasthan, according to analysis of Periodic Labour Force Survey data published through 360info. These are not people without qualifications. These are graduates.

Now add the employability problem on top of the unemployment problem, because they compound each other. The Mercer Mettl India Graduate Skill Index 2025, based on assessment of over a million students across 2,700 campuses, found that overall graduate employability had fallen to 42.6 percent. That means well over half of India’s graduating class is, by industry assessment, not ready for the jobs that do exist.

Even the more optimistic India Skills Report, prepared by the Confederation of Indian Industry with Wheebox and AICTE, which put projected employability at around 55% for 2025, showed women’s employability actually declining, from 50.9 percent to 47.5 percent, even as men’s ticked upward.

So here is the honest picture. We are producing more graduates than ever, we are not making most of them industry ready, and the formal jobs we do create attract applicant pools three hundred times larger than the vacancies on offer.

I ask you plainly: what did we expect young India to do with that arithmetic?

I am not going to claim, and no honest analyst should claim, that unemployment is the single or direct cause of any specific riot or communal clash in India. That would be a lazy argument and it would insult the complexity of what actually happens on the ground, where local politics, historical grievance, propaganda and opportunism all play their part.

But I will make a narrower and, I think, defensible claim.

A young man with a job, a routine, a wage and a stake in tomorrow is a harder person to mobilise into a mob than a young man with none of those things. Idle time, wounded pride and a search for identity and purpose are the raw material that identity politics runs on, whether that politics wears a religious colour, a caste colour or a regional colour. When the legitimate channel for ambition, the channel of study hard, get a degree, get a government job, is clogged for lakhs of people at a time, some of that frustrated energy does not simply evaporate. It looks for other outlets. Sometimes those outlets are railway platforms. Sometimes they are darker.

Bihar, the state at the centre of the 2022 RRB protests, is instructive here for a second reason. Political parties across the spectrum, from the RJD to the Congress to the CPI, put out a joint statement at the time arguing that Bihar has among the highest concentrations of young people in the country alongside among the highest unemployment, and that students were being repeatedly promised jobs and then baton charged when they demanded them.

Whatever one’s politics, that combination, a young population and a starved job market, is a standing fire risk. It does not need a match every day. It only needs one, occasionally, and there is never a shortage of people willing to strike it.

I raise this not to be alarmist for its own sake but because I think we owe our students, the MBA candidates I teach included, an honest conversation about where a jobless growth trajectory actually leads. GDP headlines do not employ people. Jobs employ people. And when jobs are scarce, identity becomes the next best currency of belonging and status that a young person can access for free.

We built a consumption engine, not a production engine, and now the engine is coughing.

For much of the last 3 decades, Indian macroeconomic policy has leaned heavily on a Keynesian, demand-side playbook, post-1991. Boost consumption, expand welfare transfers, run fiscal stimulus during slowdowns, rely on the government as the employer and spender of last resort. There is a place for counter-cyclical spending, I am not arguing against it in a genuine downturn. But as a permanent operating philosophy for a country of 1.4 billion people with a median age around 28, demand-side management alone cannot create the tens of millions of jobs we need every single year just to keep pace with new entrants to the workforce.

Consumption without production is borrowed prosperity. It shows up in the GDP print, it shows up in retail sales data, but it does not show up as a factory floor, a supply chain, an export order book or a payroll. India’s Labour Force Participation Rate itself tells the story of an economy where too many working age people are not even in the race, not employed and not actively seeking work, because they see no point. The rate fell to 55.4 percent in March 2026 from 55.9 percent in February, according to India Macro Indicators, with rural participation declining the fastest.

When people stop looking for work altogether, unemployment numbers can even appear to improve on paper while the underlying rot deepens. That is the statistical trick of a demand-managed economy running out of runway.

I want to be direct with my fellow economists and policy commentators. We cannot keep prescribing more transfer payments, more subsidised consumption, more government scheme announcements as the answer to a jobs crisis that is fundamentally about production capacity, regulatory friction and the cost of starting and running a business in this country. That is treating the symptom with the very medicine that helped cause the disease.

Allow Entrepreneurship to breathe, to create jobs

India’s startup ecosystem, wherever it has had room to operate, has scaled at a pace almost nobody predicted a decade ago. In 2014, India had roughly 350 recognised startups. By June 2026, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade had recognised over 2.40 lakh startups, making India the world’s third largest startup ecosystem. These recognised startups alone had created more than 23.36 lakh direct jobs as of March 2026, a 36 percent jump in one year.

55,000 new startups received DPIIT recognition in FY 2025-26, the highest single year addition since the programme began. Nearly half of all recognised startups have at least one-woman director or partner. And this is only the formally recognised layer. Industry data from Tracxn puts the broader Indian startup universe above 687,000 ventures, with over 34,000 of them funded, collectively raising close to 620 billion dollars.

This did not happen because the state planned it from a five-year plan document. It happened because, in specific pockets, digital public infrastructure like UPI, the relaxation of certain compliance burdens under Startup India, and access to early risk capital through vehicles like the Fund of Funds for Startups gave Indian entrepreneurs enough room to build. UPI itself now processes the majority of India’s digital payments and roughly half of all real time digital transactions globally. That is what happens when the state gets out of the way of a genuinely useful private innovation and lets it scale on its own logic.

Contrast that with the RRB story. One is a picture of hundreds of thousands of jobs created by entrepreneurs building things people want to buy. The other is a picture of a fixed, tiny number of government jobs being fought over by a crore aspirants, decided by exam committees, and eventually torched in frustration. Which of these two models do we actually think can absorb India’s youth bulge. I do not think the answer is close.

Gurcharan Das, who ran Procter & Gamble in India before turning to writing, put this best in his book “India Grows at Night.” His argument, distilled, is that India’s prosperity has largely happened despite the state, not because of it, and that the country has a long history of a weak, license-bound state smothering the same private enterprise it should be enabling. In an essay reflecting on the pre-1991 years, Das has written about turning from a young socialist believer in Nehru’s mixed economy into someone disillusioned by what that mixed economy actually became in practice, which he and others of his generation sardonically nicknamed the license raj. He has described watching the state act as, in his words, at best a protector of private freedoms and at worst an active destroyer of them.

Sauvik Chakraverti, one of India’s most uncompromising libertarian voices and a regular commentator on economic freedom, spent much of his writing life arguing that a state without sound money and without restraint on its own reach is, to borrow the line he liked to invoke from St Augustine, little more than an organised band of robbers dressed up in the language of welfare. His central complaint against Indian economic policy was that we had replaced genuine free enterprise with what he called funny money welfarism, propped up by central bank interventions and Keynesian demand management that create the illusion of growth while eroding the value of a rupee earned honestly through production.

This intellectual lineage goes back further than either of them. C. Rajagopalachari, one of the tallest freedom movement leaders and independent India’s first Indian Governor General, broke away from the Congress in 1957 precisely because he saw the socialist direction of Nehruvian planning as a threat to individual enterprise. He founded the Swatantra Party on the explicit position that social justice is better achieved by fostering individual initiative than by state ownership and government control, and that the party existed to protect the individual citizen against, in the founding document’s own words, the increasing trespasses of the state.

I find it remarkable that 70 years later, we are still relearning this lesson through Railway Recruitment Board riots. The state, no matter how well intentioned, cannot out-hire the private economy. It should not try. Its job is to build the rule of law, protect contracts and property, get out of the way of the entrepreneur trying to open a shop, hire a worker, import a machine or export a product, and then let millions of individual decisions do what no five-year plan ever could.

What a genuine supply-side turn would actually require

I am not calling for anarchy or for the state to disappear. Gurcharan Das himself, to his credit, argues for a strong liberal state, one capable of enforcing contracts quickly, running courts efficiently and being accountable, rather than a weak, absent one. A supply side agenda for India needs a state that does a few things extremely well rather than a state that tries to do everything and does most of it badly.

First, land and labour markets that let a manufacturer actually scale a factory without years of litigation and multiple licensing regimes across state and central authorities.

Second, credit access for small and first generation entrepreneurs that does not require the kind of collateral only the already wealthy possess.

Third, an education and vocational system tied to actual industry certification rather than degree inflation, since a 42.6% employability rate among graduates tells us our colleges are producing certificates, not capability.

Fourth, a tax and compliance architecture for small business that does not punish a shopkeeper or a small manufacturer with the same reporting burden designed for a listed conglomerate.

And fifth, and I say this as someone who has spent years around policy circles, a basic shift in status. We celebrate the person who cracks a government exam far more than we celebrate the person who builds a business that employs twenty people.

Until that cultural hierarchy flips, our best young minds will keep queuing for 35,000 railway jobs instead of building the next hundred companies that could employ ten times as many people, sustainably, at a fraction of the fiscal cost to the exchequer.

A question I would like every reader to sit with

If you are a parent of a 22-year-old today, ask yourself honestly which future you would rather bet on for your child: a seat in a government exam queue three hundred times deeper than the number of seats available, or a small business loan and the freedom to build something of their own. I suspect most of us, if we are honest, already know the answer. The tragedy is that our policy architecture has not caught up with what we already know in our own homes.

India does not need another stimulus cheque. It needs a licence raj exorcism, sector by sector, state by state, until the barriers to starting and scaling a business fall as fast as our population of aspiring entrepreneurs is rising.

The alternative, and I say this with real concern rather than rhetorical flourish, is a country where millions of capable, frustrated young people keep discovering that the fastest way to feel powerful is not a payslip but a mob, and not always one organised around economics.

We have already seen the trains burn once. I would like us to notice that warning before we see something we cannot put out.

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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Across the world, countless real-life tragedies have shown how uncontrolled emotions, mental instability, obsession, jealousy, rage, and emotional breakdowns can destroy lives within moments. These incidents are painful reminders that society is facing a serious emotional crisis. To mention a few :

These are not just crimes anymore. This is a terrifying emotional collapse of society. We are living in an age where patience is disappearing, emotional control is weakening, and mental peace has become a luxury. People today are becoming extremely hyper, impulsive, and low tempered. Small disagreements are turning into deadly confrontations. A simple “no,” a misunderstanding, a breakup, or a heated argument becomes enough to trigger violence.

What is even more disturbing is the age group involved in many such incidents — young people. The very generation that was supposed to build a brighter future is slowly getting trapped in emotional instability, aggression, loneliness, obsession, and uncontrolled anger. Technology has connected the world, but emotionally, people are becoming more isolated than ever before.

Relationships today are often built on possession instead of understanding. Many people confuse control with love, obsession with care, and dominance with strength. The inability to accept rejection, failure, disagreement, or emotional pain is pushing individuals toward horrifying actions. Mental health issues are silently growing everywhere. Stress, Depression, Anxiety, Emotional insecurity, Trauma, Social pressure, Constant comparison on social media, Fear of abandonment, Anger issues, Lack of communication. Yet most people continue to ignore mental health as if it does not matter.

We teach children mathematics, science, and technology, but who is teaching them emotional balance? Who is teaching them how to handle heartbreak, rejection, anger, disappointment, or failure without destroying themselves or others? Parents are busy. Schools are focused on marks. Society is obsessed with money and success. Social media rewards aggression, drama, and instant reactions. As a result, emotional maturity is disappearing. This is the most dangerous part. A generation without emotional control becomes a generation capable of violence.

If we continue on this path, where is our future headed? What kind of society are we creating where relationships are filled with fear instead of trust? Where love stories are ending in murders? Where young minds are unable to tolerate emotional pain for even a moment? The future cannot survive on intelligence alone. A society survives on compassion, patience, empathy, and humanity. And today, those values are weakening rapidly. But there is still hope — if we act now.

We must begin by normalizing conversations around mental health. Seeking help from counselors, therapists, or psychologists should never be seen as weakness. Emotional healing is just as important as physical health. Families must create environments where children can openly express emotions without fear or judgment. Schools and colleges must introduce emotional education — teaching students how to manage anger, communicate respectfully, deal with rejection, and control impulses. Social media platforms and entertainment industries must stop glorifying toxic aggression and revenge as signs of strength.

Most importantly, every individual must learn one powerful truth: No emotion is permanent, No anger is worth a life, No relationship problem is bigger than humanity itself. Walking away from an argument is strength, Controlling anger is strength, Seeking help is strength, Choosing peace over violence is strength. We cannot bring back the lives already lost but we can still save the lives that are standing dangerously close to emotional destruction.

The need of the hour is not just stricter laws. The need of the hour is emotional awakening because if our youth continues to grow with uncontrolled anger, emotional instability, and absence of empathy, then the biggest tragedy will not just be individual murders — the biggest tragedy will be the slow death of humanity itself.

The post Modern Love, Deadly Rage: Where Is This Generation Headed? appeared first on The CSR Journal.

India worships Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, with genuine devotion every Vasant Panchami, garlanding her idol, placing books at her feet, asking children to touch pens to her image before exams. It is a beautiful tradition.

But somewhere between the ritual and the reality, the system meant to honour her has become a machine optimised for everything except learning. It is time to walk through that machine, stage by stage, and ask the uncomfortable questions out loud.

Where is the competence?

Start with the most basic fact: India now has more colleges and universities than at any point in its history, over 1,100 universities and roughly 45,000 colleges by the latest All India Survey on Higher Education counts.

On paper this looks like a civilisational achievement, a young nation building capacity at scale. In practice, capacity has outrun competence.

A new report on India’s Graduate Skill Index 2025 by Mercer-Mettl found that only 42.6% of Indian graduates are employable, a decline from 44.3% in 2023.

Even the more optimistic India Skills Report, produced with industry bodies, projects employability hovering only around 55% in 2025, which still means nearly half the graduating workforce is not job-ready.

Graduates from Tier-I institutions reach 48.4% employability, Tier-II institutions 46.1%, and Tier-III institutions only 43.4%, while in fields like sales, marketing, HR and business development employability has actually fallen to 43.5% from 48.3% in 2023.

The Chief Economic Advisor’s own assessment, cited in the same body of research, suggests that barely half of those who pass out of Indian institutions are in a position to secure a job. More colleges did not mean more capability. It meant more degrees chasing fewer real skills, and a generation discovering, often too late, that a transcript is not a passport to employment.

Move beyond brochures!

This brings us to stage two of the same story: the brochure versus the placement cell. Walk into almost any private engineering or management college during admission season and you will be shown glossy photographs of corporate logos, testimonials from a handful of toppers who landed offers from recognisable firms, and statistics that, on closer inspection, rarely specify what percentage of the batch they actually represent. The brochure speaks in absolutes.

The placement office, when pressed, speaks in qualifiers. This is not a new complaint, but the scale has grown with the number of institutions.

A Periodic Labour Force Survey found that only 21% of youth aged 15 to 29 have ever undergone any vocational or technical training, and a mere 4.4% have received formal vocational training.

Institutions are not lying outright when they print a 90% placement figure somewhere in fine print. They are simply choosing which 90% to advertise, and which larger denominator to leave out.

The admission brochure has become a marketing document first and an educational disclosure a distant second, and parents who do not have the time or training to read between the lines pay the price in fees first and in their children’s careers later.

While colleges chase admissions through brochures, faculty inside those same institutions are caught in a different, equally distorting race: the scramble for Scopus-indexed papers and patents. Academic promotion in India today runs substantially on the Academic Performance Indicator system, which rewards publication count, and the predictable result has been a flood of low-value, sometimes outright fraudulent research.

Rat race for the professors

A study by researchers including Bhushan Patwardhan at Savitribai Phule Pune University examined 1,009 journals from the university-recommended category of the UGC-approved list and found that only 112 passed a rigorous quality protocol, suggesting that over 88% of the non-indexed journals on that list could be of low quality.

Separately, a 2017 study by the Institute for Democracy and Economic Analysis found that 10% or more of academic papers from India and Nigeria listed in Scopus between 2013 and 2015 were published in predatory journals, and a 2015 study in BMC Medicine found that more than a quarter of the world’s predatory publishers were based in India.

The authors of the Pune study were blunt about the cause: the primary driver is the emphasis placed on the sheer number of research publications for faculty appointments, combined with a mandatory requirement that doctoral scholars publish at least two papers before submitting their thesis. Patents follow a similar logic, filed in volume to satisfy institutional rankings and accreditation scorecards rather than because they represent genuine, commercially viable innovation. The metric became the mission, and the mission of actual knowledge creation quietly stepped aside.

Faced with this cascading set of problems, more colleges without skilled graduates, brochures hiding weak placements, faculty gaming citation counts, one might expect the Ministry of Education to step in with clarity and urgency. Instead, the institutional response has often been a kind of astute silence, an unwillingness to name the scale of the crisis even as data piles up from its own affiliated bodies, from CII, from Wheebox, from the very surveys it commissions.

Policy announcements arrive with the language of transformation, National Education Policy 2020 chief among them, but the gap between policy ambition and ground-level enforcement remains wide and largely unaddressed in public discourse. Silence at the top has a way of cascading downward.

That cascade reaches its most absurd form in the regulators and accreditors meant to be the system’s gatekeepers.

In 2018, the University Grants Commission introduced the UGC-CARE list specifically to identify legitimate journals and discourage predatory publishing, but in October 2024 the commission scrapped this list altogether, arguing it had over-centralised decisions and neglected regional language journals, and instead asked institutions to design their own mechanisms to assess journal quality.

Critics have pointed out that this move opens further pathways for predatory journals to flourish and increases the risk of sub-standard academics entering faculty positions through politically motivated appointments. This is regulation by retreat, a Kafkaesque shuffle in which the very body created to police quality dismantles its own checklist and hands the responsibility back to the institutions that were gaming the checklist in the first place.

Accreditation processes like NAAC have faced their own credibility questions over the years, with grading scandals and inconsistent benchmarks that accreditors themselves have had to publicly defend. When the referee keeps changing the rules mid-match and occasionally leaves the field, the players naturally start writing their own scorecards.

Post-colonial hangover?

Into this vacuum has arrived a new player with its own complicated promise: the foreign university. Since November 2023, India has opened a formal legal pathway for international institutions to set up independent campuses, and the rush has been real. As of early 2026 roughly 18 to 19 foreign universities have received formal approval from the UGC or the International Financial Services Centres Authority, with Deakin University, the University of Wollongong, and the University of Southampton already operational, enrolling fewer than 250 students between them in their first year combined.

The pitch sounds attractive: a foreign degree without a foreign visa. But look closely at the fees.

The University of Southampton’s Gurugram campus charges between roughly 13.86 lakh and 23.10 lakh rupees a year, compared with 21 to 38 lakh rupees for the equivalent course in the United Kingdom. That is a genuine discount against the home campus, but it remains three to five times costlier than a comparable Indian institution, and these are figures that sit far beyond what most Indian families earn in a year.

Deakin itself was forced to retroactively grant a 20 to 25 per cent fee waiver to its entire first cohort in May 2025 after conceding that its initial pricing had been too aggressive for the Indian market. There is a useful, if uncomfortable, way to read this trend.

Several foreign universities, particularly in the United Kingdom, are facing real financial pressure from declining domestic enrolments and falling international student numbers, and many are now looking beyond their own borders for growth. Their home economies are squeezed by inflation, their traditional revenue base of overseas students is shrinking under tighter visa regimes, and India, with its scale and its aspiration, has become the next frontier market.

It is worth naming this plainly: this is a postcolonial inversion in which the old centres of empire are now opening storefronts in the territories they once governed, monetising the same aspiration for a “foreign degree” that colonial education once instilled in the first place. The packaging has changed. The extraction logic has not entirely disappeared.

How bad is privatisation?

None of this is an argument against private participation in education as a principle. Privatisation, when paired with genuine oversight, has expanded access, built infrastructure faster than the state ever could, and introduced a degree of competitive accountability that government institutions have historically lacked.

The argument here is narrower and sharper: privatisation without a price ceiling, without a quality floor, and without honest disclosure has produced an unchecked market where cost has detached entirely from value. And nowhere is that detachment more visible, or more emotionally exploitable, than at the very bottom of the academic ladder, in nursery admissions.

A recent study found that the total cost of educating a child from nursery through Class XII in Mumbai alone now ranges from 7.9 lakh rupees at an affordable school to 61.2 lakh rupees at an elite one, with schools across India routinely hiking fees by 10 to 12 per cent every year and some individual cases reaching as high as 42 per cent in a single revision.

An urban Maharashtra couple earns approximately 5.44 lakh rupees annually on average, and nursery fees alone at a mid-range Mumbai school can consume over 20 per cent of that household’s entire yearly income, at roughly 1.13 lakh rupees a year for a child who has not yet learned to write their own name.

One financial researcher put the psychology of this market with unusual candour: India’s middle class has always treated education as the one expense it does not question, and schools raise fees year after year precisely because they know parents will not pull a child out in the middle of school over a fee hike. That is not a description of a functioning market. It is a description of a captive one, where six-figure fees for a four-year-old are justified by branding, waiting lists, and the manufactured anxiety of falling behind, rather than by any demonstrable improvement in early childhood pedagogy.

And here is where the story closes its loop with bitter irony. The same private school ecosystem that charges six-figure nursery fees has spent years in court resisting paying its own teachers fairly.

As of 2019, nearly 80% of private-run schools in Delhi were not paying their staff salaries in line with the Seventh Central Pay Commission, despite a 2017 government circular directing all recognised schools to do so. The legal back and forth has continued for years since.

In October 2025, a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court set aside an earlier single-judge order that had directed private unaided schools to implement the Sixth and Seventh Pay Commission recommendations for their teaching and non-teaching staff, sending the matter back for fresh hearing.

The schools’ own argument before the court was that they are not government-funded and cannot be forced to adopt Central Pay Commission scales without corresponding fee adjustments, even as fee adjustments upward have rarely needed a court order to happen on their own.

Where is the salary for faculties?

Beneath even these full-time teachers sit an entire informal layer of contractual and guest faculty. Such contract teachers are typically hired for a year or less at a salary that is half or less of what a regular teacher earns, and because their salaries do not form part of formal payroll, no reliable official statistics on their numbers even exist.

A sector that can charge a toddler’s family more than a lakh a year, and that fights pay parity for its teachers in court for over a decade, has revealed exactly where its priorities sit. The classroom is the last place the money lands.

Lay all seven of these moments end to end and a single, coherent picture emerges. More institutions did not produce more capability, because nobody fixed the curriculum or the practical training pipeline underneath them. Weak placement records were hidden, not addressed, because brochures sell better than honesty. Faculty were pushed into a numbers game with research, because promotion metrics rewarded volume over value.

The ministry watched the data accumulate and chose silence over course correction. The regulators, when they finally acted, dismantled their own quality checklist rather than strengthen it. Foreign universities arrived offering a partial solution at a price most Indians cannot afford, themselves driven here by inflation and shrinking demand at home.

Privatisation, which could have been the answer, became instead an unchecked toll booth, charging parents lakhs for nursery seats while shortchanging the very teachers meant to deliver that education.

Every stage made the next stage worse, and at no point did any single actor in this chain feel sufficiently accountable to stop and ask whether the goddess at the centre of all this, the one whose image sits in every school’s prayer room, would recognise what has been built in her name.

There is no shortage of intelligence, ambition, or capital in Indian education today. What is missing is the institutional courage to align incentives with outcomes, to reward learning over publication counts, transparency over brochures, and teaching over toll collection.

Until that alignment happens, the rituals will continue, the shlokas will be recited, the samosas will be served at every convocation, and underneath the ceremony, the actual machinery of learning will keep quietly failing the very children it claims to serve.

Goddess Saraswati deserves better than a footnote in her own temple.

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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