Editorial

The US Department of Homeland Security has proposed a fresh $103,265 fee — nearly `99 lakh, rounded off to “a crore” — on every H-1B petition subject to the annual cap. This is formal rulemaking, not an overnight proclamation: it follows the collapse of the $100,000 entry fee Donald Trump imposed last September, which a federal court declared an unlawful tax in June and which the First Circuit Court of Appeals refused to revive on July 24 — precisely why Washington is now trying the sturdier route of regulation. Unlike the original order, it would also strike petitions from workers already inside the US — students on F-1 OPT converting to H-1B, among others — a group the first round had spared. Nothing is final yet: DHS has opened a 30-day comment window. But the direction is unmistakable, and it points at India. Indian nationals take home roughly seven in ten H-1B approvals every year, so the arithmetic lands hardest here. If the older fee is eventually revived on appeal, alongside this new one, an employer could face upwards of $200,000 per hire before legal and relocation costs. For India’s $315-billion IT services industry, the direct exposure is narrower than the headlines suggest — Nasscom notes large Indian firms have spent five years cutting H-1B dependence through local US hiring — but onsite deployments, deputation-heavy delivery models and thousands of individual careers still sit in the fee’s path. The right response isn’t outrage, which changes nothing in Washington, but accelerating a shift already under way. India’s Global Capability Centres — over 2,100 of them, employing more than two million people — are proof that high-value technology work no longer needs an American zip code to serve American companies. Every fee hike that raises the cost of onsite deployment is, perversely, an incentive to shift that work to Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad instead. New Delhi has shown this can work: trade diplomacy already talked US tariffs on Indian goods down from 50 per cent to 18 per cent in February. The broader Bilateral Trade Agreement talks that followed remain open — the right table for a rules-based mobility chapter, rather than leaving skilled migration hostage to proclamations that courts can strike down and Washington can reissue within the same year. India is also not fighting alone: twenty US states, the Chamber of Commerce and healthcare-sector plaintiffs are already contesting the fee in court, their interests aligned with India’s for now. The larger lesson concerns Trump’s method, not only this measure. A one-year proclamation, struck down in court, resurrected as regulation — a recognisable pattern now, one India cannot build its economic strategy around. The answer is redundancy: deeper trade and talent corridors with the Gulf, Europe, the UK and Japan, so no mood swings in Washington can unilaterally reprice Indian talent. Diplomacy should stay steady and unshowy behind closed doors. But the real response has to be structural, not seasonal — built once, not rebuilt after every proclamation. (Source: The Pioneer)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi begins a four-day Central Asian trip on August 29 with a state visit to Uzbekistan, ahead of the twenty-sixth Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek on August 31-September 1. The timing is apt: the SCO turns twenty-five this year, and the region is more volatile than ever before. In Tashkent, on his fourth visit to Uzbekistan, the agenda is familiar: trade, investment, defence, digital connectivity, energy and education. What is new is the framing – aligning India’s Viksit Bharat 2047 with Uzbekistan’s own 2030 vision, alongside symbolic stops at the Lal Bahadur Shastri memorial and the Gandhi Centre at Tashkent State University. At Bishkek, host, Kyrgyzstan has set the theme, “25 Years of the SCO: Together Towards Sustainable Peace, Development and Prosperity.” The agenda is ambitious on paper: an international centre against organised crime, cybercrime cooperation, a proposed SCO development bank, climate and disaster-response mechanisms, and connectivity flagships like the $4.7-billion China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway. India will press its own additions to widen the grouping beyond hydrocarbons and hard security. Judged by scale, the record is not trivial. From six founding states in 2001, the SCO has grown to ten, plus a wide circle of dialogue partners, together accounting for roughly a third of global output. It has kept China and Russia in structured dialogue and given counter-terrorism cooperation an institutional home via its Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure. But scale has not brought capability. Institutional thinness and scant common financial resources are long-flagged weaknesses; the SCO has never furnished troops or material support in a crisis, and its consensus-based design – a virtue when sold as non-confrontational – doubles as a recipe for paralysis whenever members disagree. And disagree they do. The India-Pakistan impasse has hollowed out the counter-terrorism cooperation the SCO was built around, stalling joint exercises and intelligence-sharing, while China’s quiet tilt towards Islamabad has repeatedly let Pakistan blunt India’s language on cross-border terrorism. India’s Central Asia trade, at roughly two billion dollars, is a rounding error beside China’s near-hundred-billion-dollar footprint there, and connectivity India actually needs – the International North-South Transport Corridor chief among them – remains stalled for reasons no communiqué will address. Layered atop this, India’s multi-aligned foreign policy sits uneasily inside a grouping centred on a Russia-China axis. None of this argues for disengagement; walking away would simply cede Central Asia to Beijing and Moscow by default. It argues for calibrated expectations instead. India’s security concerns are better pursued bilaterally than through a forum where Pakistan is present. Routes that bypass Pakistan altogether, via Chabahar and Iran, deserve more sustained attention than another round of summit rhetoric. On present evidence, the Tashkent leg will likely outlast the Bishkek one in consequence – itself, twenty-five years on, the most honest verdict on the SCO. (Source: The Pioneer)  

On the morning of August 26, a slab of glacier broke off a mountainside on the Nepal-Tibet border, crashed into a valley and blocked the Lhende River. The lake it formed burst almost instantly, sending ice, rock and water down the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers into Nepal’s Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts, and across into Tibet’s Gyirong County. Nepal’s police have confirmed over 160 dead and hundreds missing, among them more than a hundred Indians, many on the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage, and foreign nationals from half a dozen other countries. Bridges, highways and roughly an eighth of Nepal’s hydropower capacity were knocked out within minutes. The immediate trigger was natural, violent enough that seismographs first mistook it for an earthquake. But natural is not the same as normal. Nepal’s glaciers are retreating up to 15 metres a year, and glacial-origin floods across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, once expected roughly once a decade, numbered three in just two months last year, according to ICIMOD, the region’s mountain-research body. What has shifted is temperature, not geology. Layered on top is a man-made factor: hydropower stations, roads and settlements pushed into unstable valleys with almost no early-warning cover, in a country that emits less than a tenth of one per cent of the world’s carbon. Cutting the toll of the next flood, and there will be one, means treating glacial lakes as the infrastructure risk they are: systematic mapping of the region’s most dangerous lakes, sensor-based warning systems extended from a handful of pilot valleys to every settlement below a glacier, zoning that keeps construction off riverbanks, and hydropower design built for catastrophic failure, not average monsoon rainfall. Nepal and its neighbours have already piloted much of this; what’s missing is scale and money. This flood crossed from Tibet into Nepal in minutes, and from Nepal into India within hours, since the Trishuli becomes the Gandak, putting Bihar on flood alert before rescue teams had finished searching Rasuwa. A hazard indifferent to borders needs cooperation that matches it: real-time hydrological data-sharing between Nepal, China and India, built on existing frameworks such as ICIMOD’s glacial-lake inventories and the Koshi Basin Initiative, not one-off goodwill after each disaster. The UN’s response has followed the standard emergency script: Secretary-General António Guterres’s condolences, followed swiftly by the WFP, WHO, UNICEF, UNDP and OCHA deploying rations, medical kits and satellite mapping. Nepal needed monitoring and money years before this week, not sympathy after it. India moved with familiar speed: Modi’s call to his Nepali counterpart Balendra Shah, the promise of all possible humanitarian assistance with NDRF teams on standby. India has as much at stake in Himalayan glacier monitoring as Nepal does. First response should now make room for first investment: shared early-warning networks, not relief flights after the water has fallen. (Source: The Pioneer)  

Soaring sugar prices over recent weeks have started to hit domestic budgets, causing worries ahead of the festival season. Retail prices have gone up by about 35-40%, from Rs 48 per kg reported last month to about Rs 65. Prices have touched Rs 70-75 in some regions. Multiple factors have led to the price spike, but the most prominent among them is the Union government’s inability to foresee the production and supply crunch and to take timely corrective steps. Some important decisions may also have contributed to the situation. The country has recorded a significant fall in domestic production: output estimates for 2025-26 came down to about 306 lakh metric tonnes (LMT) from an initial projection of 343 LMT. Government estimates place the country’s sugar consumption at 280-290 LMT. While climatic factors, including waterlogging caused by excessive rainfall in key producing states such as Maharashtra, reduced cane yields, pest and fungus attacks reduced yields in another major state, Uttar Pradesh. The government controls every stage of production, and much of the supply is organised and managed by sugar co-operatives. However, prompt measures to address the shortage were largely absent – imports in time, for instance, could have averted the current situation. High festival demand during the next few months will likely put pressure on depleting supplies, further impacting the prices. Speculation and hoarding by a section of traders may have added to the pressure. International prices also rose over 16% in recent weeks. The government has decided to import 10 LMT of raw sugar but it will take time for the stocks to materialise and reach the market. It has also imposed stock limits on dealers and bulk consumers, announced physical verification of mill inventories, halted exports, and called for early crushing. While the diversion of cane for ethanol production has been cited as another reason for the fall in supply, the government has claimed that the share of sugar diverted for ethanol has fallen from about 12% in 2022-23 to 9% in 2025-26. It has also clarified that nearly three-fourths of the ethanol produced in the country now comes from grains, most of it from maize. However, the diversion from the current pool has had an impact. Sugar prices will need close monitoring in the coming weeks, given their potential impact on household budgets and food inflation. The prices and production scenario should push the country to devise a comprehensive policy that balances the demands of food security and fuel needs. (Source: DH)

National Security Advisor Ajit Doval’s arrival in Beijing for the 25th round of Special Representatives (SR) talks with Foreign Minister Wang Yi looks, on the calendar, like routine business under a mechanism running since 2003. It is not. This is the first SR round in a full year, and it comes weeks before Xi Jinping is expected in New Delhi for the BRICS Summit on September 12-13 — a visit that would be his first to India in years. The border talks are, in effect, ground-clearing for a summit both capitals want to succeed. The recent record shows real, if narrow, movement. The October 2024 disengagement at Depsang and Demchok ended a four-year military standoff and revived an SR channel dormant since 2019. Modi’s visit to Tianjin last August, his first to China in seven years, was followed by direct flights resuming after a five-year gap, eased visas, a revived Kailash Mansarovar Yatra, reopened border trade, and a partial easing of Chinese curbs on fertiliser, tunnel-boring machines and rare-earth exports. The Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on border affairs has already met twice this year to prepare the ground for this round. Yet the irritants are many. The 3,488-km Line of Actual Control remains undemarcated, and disengagement at flashpoints has not been matched by genuine de-escalation of the forces both sides massed after the deadly 2020 Galwan clash. Beijing continues to claim Arunachal Pradesh as “South Tibet,” renaming its towns, and recent reports of Chinese troop movements there — dismissed by New Delhi but not forgotten — keep resurfacing. China’s tilt toward Pakistan during last year’s conflict following the Pahalgam terror attack has not helped. Nor has the economics: India’s trade deficit with China has crossed $100 billion, a record, and is still widening this year, even as New Delhi remains dependent on Beijing for as much as 90 per cent of its rare-earth magnets and permanent-magnet imports. This is why 23 years and 25 rounds have produced management, not resolution. For China, the boundary is one lever among many in a wider contest with India; for India, it is a matter of sovereignty that cannot be traded away for economic convenience. That asymmetry of stakes, layered on a trust deficit Galwan made permanent, means both sides now negotiate for stability rather than settlement — a tactical thaw, as most analysts describe it, not a strategic reset. History The way forward lies in accepting that reality rather than resisting it. New Delhi should press the SR and WMCC channels to make de-escalation — not just disengagement — the next concrete milestone, while building the domestic capacity in rare earths and manufacturing that makes engagement with Beijing a choice rather than a compulsion. Xi’s possible visit should be judged by whether it locks in verifiable troop reductions, not by the optics of a handshake. Diplomacy with China has always demanded patience without illusions. Nothing in Beijing this week suggests that changes. (Source: The Pioneer)

NITI Aayog’s latest report highlights an emerging national challenge: an estimated 8.7 crore people in India aged 15-29 are not studying, working or undergoing any employment-related training. Findings in ‘Reimagining Skilling for Viksit Bharat@2047’ categorise these youngsters under the acronym NEET (Neither in Education, Employment or Training). The description is ironic, given that the recent youth protests centred on demands for accountability and reforms in the education sector, following the NEET question paper leaks. The findings are based on data from the National Sample Survey of 2021 (78th round); these numbers have likely risen. They provide a reality check for planners and policymakers who bet on India’s young population as a demographic dividend of immense social and economic consequence. With a large component of the country’s youth remaining outside the productive landscape and dependent on others for their needs, the narratives around demographic dividend demand a reevaluation. These youngsters remain suspended in a system without employment and, crucially, without the requisite qualifications for employment. They point to a systemic failure in channelling human potential. Excluded from a productive labour force, this cohort, which spans about 15 years, comes with an economic cost borne by society. A large section of the youth remaining unemployable can also translate into substantial social and political costs. The report calls the NEET youth “constrained by the absence of income and the sunk cost of prior education”. Its findings indicate that the dividend now risks turning into a liability. NITI Aayog recommends greater emphasis on skilling and vocational education to navigate this challenge. It proposes early-stage skilling embedded in the school system (from grade 6 through grade 12) to ensure employability. The report points out that a stated objective of the National Education Policy (NEP), to integrate skilling and employability into early school years, has not been effectively pursued. The planning body has recommended a shift towards demand-driven skilling aligned to high-growth sectors such as EVs and green industries, and the mainstreaming of apprenticeship programmes. However, skilling will not help if there is no employment requiring those skills. India’s development model has not created jobs on a scale that meets the needs of its burgeoning population. The findings should act as a pivot for the government, helping it shape policies to create jobs in industry, services, and other key sectors. A skilled and unemployed population can be no better than the NEET group. (Source: DH)

The scope of India’s upcoming population census is more expansive and its design more detailed than the 2011 exercise. With the number of questions increased from 29 to 40, the 2027 census now covers the respondent’s Aadhaar, voter identity and passport details, driving licence, phone numbers, permanent address, nationality, parents’ religions and other details, bank accounts, vaccination records, educational qualifications, and digital literacy. It also comes with an open-ended column to record caste. Most of the data sought in the new questionnaire is in the domain of privacy. These details currently exist in separate records; the census proposes to bring them all under one consolidated data unit. They are protected by the Registrar General of India, which is oath-bound to the confidentiality of census data, but the risks of a system breach also warrant caution. At the centre of the apprehension is the possibility of this information pool being repurposed as an update on the National Population Register (NPR), and supplementing efforts towards a National Register of Citizens (NRC). A census assesses an overall demographic landscape through aggregate data to facilitate policy planning, formulation of welfare schemes, etc. The collation of personal data and micro-level identifiers mapping individual citizens to meet policy requirements is contentious. A combination of data relating to religion, caste, economic status, family, region, and unique personal identification can be vulnerable to political intervention. These details can aid state surveillance and profiling. Interlinked identifiers can take the form of citizenship filters. With millions of phones, computers, and other digital devices involved in the exercise, the risk of violation is real – sensitive data may land in the wrong hands, leading to impersonation, fraud, and other offences. Enumerating caste through an open-ended question is a flawed approach. The process requires the enumerators to register what the respondents say, not to record them as belonging to a recognised caste category. The absence of a dropdown or a comprehensive caste classification can make the results a complex jumble of castes, subcastes, surnames, and other divisions. Enumeration can become meaningless without standardisation in a country that has about 46 lakh ‘caste names’. This number will increase substantially when respondents misspell the names. The data overload involved in the exercise will place a heavy burden on the enumerators. Many citizens are likely to resist giving away sensitive personal data. An efficient and credible census should be a transparent exercise that evokes the trust of citizens and does not leave them with fears of their rights being infringed on. (Source: DH)

The registration of an FIR over the use of pellet guns against a youth at the July 20 students’ protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi is as much a forced gesture as Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation in the wake of the protests. Both the police and Dharmendra Pradhan conceded only under pressure to demands that were fair and legitimate. Just as the minister resisted demands for his resignation for weeks, the police refused to file an FIR despite a youth suffering an eye injury from pellet firing. Dharmendra Pradhan should have resigned on moral grounds for the paper leak, and the police was duty-bound to register a case once a complaint was lodged. Both cases underscore accountability and responsibility in a democracy governed by the rule of law; but in both cases, decisions had to be extracted from unwilling authorities through popular pressure. It reflects poorly on law enforcement that the police agreed to a normal legal procedure, which is every citizen’s right, only after Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi sat on a six-hour dharna on August 21. Sahil Lochab, the student allegedly hit by pellets, had submitted a written complaint on August 14 and pursued his request every day. There was no justifiable reason for the police to refuse to file an FIR, especially when it had filed hundreds of cases against protesting students. Rahul Gandhi took up the case when the police failed to do its duty. The BJP’s criticism that he was resorting to ‘’cheap and diversionary politics’’ and was promoting anarchy is not valid. It was the police that presented a case to be picked up by the Opposition leader, and protests seeking justice and fair State action cannot be dismissed as anarchic. The government and the police have denied the charges about excessive use of force during the July 20 protests. Yet evidence of brutal and disproportionate force was evident, including the use of pellet guns. The Delhi Police initially denied it, but references later surfaced in a police diary. The Supreme Court has since appointed a high-powered committee led by Justice R Subhash Reddy to investigate allegations of excessive force and mistreatment of women by the police. The committee’s findings will be crucial in establishing the truth, fixing accountability, and addressing the violence unleashed on protesting students. It is the sense of accountability that the police tried to avoid in the case of the FIR. (Source: PTI)

The BJP’s new national team is less a rupture than a carefully calibrated reset. Of the 65 office-bearers announced under party president Nitin Nabin, 51 are new faces. The list includes 13 vice-presidents, eight general secretaries, 16 secretaries and a reworked media and social-media apparatus. Yet the retention of BL Santhosh as general secretary (organisation) — one of the party’s most powerful posts—makes clear that continuity remains as important as change. With crucial Assembly contests approaching and the 2029 Lok Sabha election already shaping organisational calculations, the BJP needs a team capable of managing states, social coalitions and campaign narratives simultaneously. Uttar Pradesh receives particular attention, while experienced leaders such as Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Piyush Goyal and Ram Madhav provide political weight. Smriti Irani’s return as a general secretary adds a forceful communicator with a strong public profile. But the most important backdrop is not merely electoral. It is the widespread youth anger expressed through recent protests over examination irregularities, paper leaks, unemployment and institutional accountability. The protests demonstrated that the new generation is not politically aligned with the BJP by default. Online reach, nationalism and welfare delivery may mobilise support, but they cannot substitute for credibility on jobs, education and opportunity. The change in the social-media leadership — Deepak Mhaskey replacing Amit Malviya, who had occupied the post since 2015—is therefore significant. The BJP appears to recognise that its digital strategy cannot remain focused only on message amplification and partisan combat. The creation of additional social-media positions suggests an effort to make the party’s digital communication more distributed and responsive. The message to the new generation is unmistakable: the BJP wants to look younger, more diverse and more technologically alert. The new team includes six members below 40 and 15 between 40 and 49, along with a notable presence of women and minority-community leaders. These numbers are intended to convey mobility within the organisation and to reassure younger voters that the party is not closed to generational change. The BJP has changed its personnel, its communication structure and, to some extent, its social signalling. What has not changed is the centralised decision-making model, the continuing influence of the RSS network and the reliance on a familiar ideological vocabulary. Santhosh’s retention confirms that the organisational core remains intact. The new team, then, is an attempt to refresh the vehicle without changing its engine. Whether it succeeds will depend not on how many new names appear on the list, but on whether the party can convert generational anxiety into genuine political dialogue. The protests have shown that India’s youth are not merely an audience to be addressed. They are a constituency demanding to be heard. And the political party seeking their support must listen to them. (Source: The Pioneer)

The publication of the audited financial statements of the PM CARES (Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations) Fund for financial years 2023-24 and 2024-25 revives a few familiar and largely unanswered questions. The statements show that the fund had a closing balance of Rs 8,452 crore at the end of FY 2024-25. However, the total spending during the fiscal stood at Rs 87.9 lakh – a mere 0.01% of the corpus. In the previous year, the fund reported spending of Rs 15.6 crore. Both payments were made towards the PM CARES for Children scheme. The PM Cares Fund was set up during the Covid years, in 2020, as a public charitable trust to provide relief during health emergencies, natural disasters or man-made calamities. Its stated objectives also included the creation of relevant infrastructure and financial support for research. It is estimated that the fund received about Rs 13,000 crore in its first three years. Domestic donations and foreign contributions declined in 2024-25, but the corpus expanded to Rs 8,452 crore by March 31, 2025. Of this, Rs 7,846 crore is in fixed deposits, earning over Rs 469 crore in interest during the fiscal. Criticism of the relief mechanism has centred on the minuscule spending, given that the country faced multiple challenges over the past six years when contributions from the corpus could have significantly boosted the relief and assistance efforts. The Union government has not been forthcoming about the source of contributions. The lack of transparency regarding the fund’s operational details and areas of expenditure has also been a point of contention; this is the first disclosure of audited financial statements since FY 2022-23. A fund run on public contributions, operated from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) with the Prime Minister and senior cabinet ministers as ex officio trustees, needs more transparency in its working. The government has maintained that the fund does not come under the ambit of the Right to Information (RTI) because it is not a public body defined under the Act. In February this year, the PMO told the Lok Sabha Secretariat that questions about the fund are not admissible in Parliament. This means information would remain limited to what the government chooses to make public. The numbers tell a story of serious inaction. It will take a structural shift towards transparency and accountability to restore public trust. Regular disclosures on contributions and expenditure will be an important first step in that shift. (Source: DH)