Editorial

With the southwest monsoon in an extended pause, India may be bracing for the consequences of deficient rainfall across sectors. The current deficit is in the range of 40-45% in most regions, and as high as 66% in the western and central regions, including Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh.  Sowing of kharif crops such as paddy, cereals, pulses, and soybean has already been affected, with the shrinking in the overall sowing area estimated at around 4%. In Karnataka, sowing has covered only 30% of the seasonal target. In many regions, farmers are waiting for the rains to start planting. Projections of a fall in farm output and a rise in the prices of food items are getting increasingly real. Strong foodgrain stocks offer respite, but it will take more to keep the food inflation down.  The impact on rural livelihoods and demand will show across diverse sectors of the economy. Since rural incomes are likely to feel the first shocks of a weak monsoon, monitoring support schemes and employment programmes needs to be prioritised. Reservoir levels have started coming down, with about 80% reported at less than half their capacity. This signals water stress and shortfalls in power generation. As irrigation remains a major area of concern, a persistent rain deficit and further depletion of the reservoir levels threaten to extend the fallout to the rabi season. Drought conditions have also been projected in isolated pockets. The Union Ministry of Agriculture has identified 326 districts across 12 states as highly vulnerable to severe agricultural impacts and potential drought conditions. The government has released a revised manual detailing drought management. It has also factored in the El Niño estimations in its assessment of the emerging situation. There is still time for the monsoon to recover and mitigate some of the damage caused by its faltering start. The current pause does not necessarily mean that rainfall will remain deficient across regions. The India Meteorological Department (IMD)’s broader seasonal outlook suggests that the overall picture may not be as grim as present conditions indicate. But hope cannot substitute for preparedness. Governments must plan for the worst-case scenario now, not after the reservoirs run dry. Drought-resistant seeds, fertilisers, and other critical inputs should be made available without delay. A prolonged rainfall deficit can trigger crop losses, deepen rural distress, and erode already fragile farm incomes. It is in such periods of uncertainty that farmers become most vulnerable to debt, making timely government support essential. (Source: DH)

Fourteen young people, most of them students and staff at a coaching-cum-gaming centre in Lucknow’s Aliganj, died on June 22 when fire tore through the building they were working in. The visuals were chillingly familiar: panicked youngsters jumping from windows, fire tenders struggling through narrow lanes, a chief minister cutting short his tour to visit the dead. It had happened before — barely three weeks earlier, in Delhi, where 21 people, many of them foreign nationals who had come to the city seeking medical treatment, burned to death in a guesthouse with no valid fire safety certificate. Two cities, two tragedies, one unchanged answer to the question of why: India has still not learned to keep its buildings from killing the people inside them. The two fires look different on the surface — a gaming zone and coaching institute in one city, a budget hotel in another — but strip away the location and the post-mortem is identical. A commercial activity was running inside a structure never built, inspected, or certified for it.  A narrow staircase was often the only way out. Combustible material — foam seating, plastic partitions, electronics, bedding — fed the flames once they started. And nobody in the chain of approval seems to have asked whether the building could empty itself in an emergency. That is the real culprit, and it is not one person. It is a system that treats fire safety as paperwork rather than physics. Municipal bodies issue occupancy and trade licenses without verifying clearances from the fire department; fire departments, chronically short-staffed, cannot audit even a fraction of the buildings under their charge; owners convert residential and storage spaces into hotels, coaching centres, and gaming arcades because the rent is higher than the cost of compliance; and enforcement, when it happens at all, follows the fire rather than precedes it. In Delhi, a cook has been arrested and a case has been registered against unnamed persons — a formulation that conveniently keeps the officials who cleared or ignored the building’s status out of the dock. Lucknow’s probe has barely begun, but the script rarely changes: a few low-level arrests, a compensation cheque, a promise of audits, and silence once the cameras leave. This is not India’s first warning. Uphaar Cinema in 1997, the Surat tuition-centre fire in 2019, the Anaj Mandi factory blaze that same year, hospital fires since — each produced the same commissions, the same recommendations, and the same inertia. Fire safety byelaws already exist on paper. What is missing is the political will to make violating them costlier than complying with them, and the administrative capacity to actually check. What would change this is unglamorous but specific: independent, surprise fire audits instead of self-certification by owners; criminal liability that reaches the municipal and fire officials who sign off on unsafe buildings, not only the staff on the ground; a public, searchable database of which commercial buildings hold a valid fire clearance; and prosecutions fast enough that cases don’t quietly die in years of litigation. Until that changes, the next fire is not a possibility — it is a certainty waiting for an address. The only question is which city’s name fills the headline next. (Source: The Pioneer)

A two-judge bench of the Allahabad High Court has addressed serious threats to personal freedom posed by the arbitrary use of the provision of preventive detention. A division bench of the court recently ordered penalties on officials who misuse the provision under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), and issued guidelines on how detentions should be carried out. Police have been widely found to detain people, at times indefinitely, on the grounds of suspicion that they may commit an offence. The court ruled that compensation of Rs 25,000 be paid to the victims for every day of unlawful confinement beyond the statutory 24 hours, and that officials responsible for such detentions be held personally liable. It said the amount should be recovered from the salaries of the officials, who should also face disciplinary proceedings for dereliction of duty under the service rules. The directions were issued in connection with a case in Ghaziabad, in which a physically challenged Dalit advocate was taken into custody after a dispute over the construction of a gate, and was sent to jail, though he was willing to furnish a bond as required by the law. The court decided, based on an inquiry, that the detention was unnecessary. It found that the Ghaziabad police had used the provision to keep in detention about 2,500 people over a period of one year. It has been noted that the detentions are normally followed by demands for the execution of expensive bonds for release. Many detainees find these sureties unaffordable. The court ruled that the detained persons should be required to furnish only a personal bond, without depositing the money, and that the amount should not exceed Rs 20,000. No surety should ordinarily be demanded. If a detainee refuses to execute the bond, it should be recorded in writing and through audio-visual means before they are sent to jail. These are essential safeguards that will help ensure people are not unnecessarily harassed by the police or the administration. At the centre of the issue is the paradox of people being sent to jail only because the system decides they might be involved in offences yet to occur. But the larger concern is about the subversion of established practices that make their release increasingly difficult. The court said citizens should not be mechanically deprived of their right to personal freedom guaranteed by Article 21. Its guidelines also have a national significance in potentially preventing these subversions in other states. (Source: DH)  

The government order requiring that cough syrups be sold only on a doctor’s prescription is a welcome intervention to address the threat of poisoning from contaminated syrup-based medicines. Cough syrups have been removed from Schedule K, which earlier allowed them to be sold even in general stores in villages, and over-the-counter sales from pharmacies have been prohibited. They can only be sold from licensed pharmacies on a valid medical prescription. Cough syrups have caused deaths and sickness, especially among children, as they were readily available as popular medication. Many deaths have been reported from within India and from other countries where the syrups were exported. Last October, 22 children died after consuming cough syrups in Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh. There were many other cases of deaths from different states. Cough syrups exported from India were linked to the deaths of dozens of children in Gambia, Uzbekistan, and Cameroon. The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued an alert about Indian cough syrups. Many people consume cough syrups without understanding the risks. Making a doctor’s prescription mandatory might help to curb sales, but such rules are commonly flouted. The order does not address the real problem at the manufacturing stage, where the syrups are contaminated with dangerous chemicals. There are no effective safety regulations and guidelines, and an efficient system for monitoring and supervision of processes. The statutory mechanism for quality control and inspections does not work for various reasons, including lack of necessary infrastructure, facilities and manpower, loopholes in the legal framework, delays in the working of the system, and corruption and malpractices. Cases are forgotten soon, and erring units come back into business. Penalties and other punitive actions are often reversed on various grounds. Even after incidents of contamination become public, cough syrups made by the same company continue to be available in the market. The solution to the problem must begin at the source, not at the point of sale. There are over 2,000 cough syrup manufacturers in India, including major pharmaceutical units and small and third-party units. It must be ensured that they follow the right processes, backed by a rigorous regime of testing, monitoring, and quality assurance. Rules demand that the raw materials and every batch of the product should be tested for their quality, but that is not done. The responsibility for the implementation of the rules and regulations rests with the state agencies and regulatory bodies in the sector. There is no effective co-ordination between central and state agencies in the field. Unless these weaknesses are addressed, a restriction at sales points will not achieve the intended results. (Source: DH)

For a generation that has grown up under the relentless pressure of competitive examinations, the recent spate of paper leaks has fractured something fragile: the belief that merit, not manipulation, decides who gets to become a doctor, an engineer or a civil servant. When lakhs of students who have spent years preparing discover that a result can be bought or stolen, the damage extends beyond one exam cycle. It corrodes faith in the entire system of public examinations. The pattern across recent controversies is depressingly familiar. Question papers have been printed and transported through poorly secured logistics chains, sometimes via private vendors with minimal accountability. Centres in remote towns have weak digital infrastructure, making real-time monitoring difficult. There is often a troubling gap between when a paper is finalised and when it is administered — a window long enough for leaks to occur and circulate on messaging apps. Investigations, when they happen, are slow, fragmented across state and central agencies, and rarely result in swift, visible punishment. Most damagingly, the bodies conducting these exams have repeatedly responded with denial rather than transparency, eroding credibility further with every defensive press statement. Gen Z’s fury is not simply about a single exam gone wrong. It reflects a generation that has watched coaching-centre economics balloon, that has poured family savings into preparation, and that increasingly experiences exams as the only ladder of social mobility available to them. When that ladder appears rigged, the betrayal feels personal and systemic at once – amplified and accelerated by social media, which turns local grievances into national outrage within hours. Rebuilding trust requires structural change, not just reassurance. First, examination bodies must adopt secure, encrypted digital question-delivery systems with decentralised, randomised paper sets, reducing the value of any single leak. Second, an independent statutory authority – insulated from political and administrative pressure – should oversee high-stakes national exams, with clear accountability separate from the ministries that benefit politically from smooth exam conduct. Third, the chain of custody for papers, from the printing press to the exam hall, needs forensic-level tracking, audited by external agencies, not self-certified. Equally important is the speed and visibility of justice. Leak investigations must run on fixed timelines with public reporting, and those responsible — whether vendors, officials or examination staff — must face consequences that are seen, not just announced. Finally, students deserve a credible grievance and re-examination mechanism. Anything less leaves an entire generation rightly unconvinced. (Source: The Pioneer)

In a fresh round of political defections, six MPs of the Shiv Sena (UBT) are likely to join the Sena’s breakaway faction led by Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde. Shinde, who split the Shiv Sena and formed a government in the state in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2022, has induced more defections now. The Uddhav Thackeray-led faction of the Sena alleges that the exercise – termed Operation Tiger – involves a price of Rs 50 crore for each MP, with Rs 15 crore paid in advance. It is being claimed that the deserters will escape disqualification under the anti-defection law since two-thirds of the party’s MPs are switching camps. This contention will be tested by provisions in the anti-defection law which stipulate that a bloc of MPs can join another party only after their parent party formalises a similar merger. These defections follow recent crossovers from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Trinamool Congress (TMC). In April, seven of the AAP’s 10 MPs in the Rajya Sabha joined the BJP. Following the TMC’s rout in the West Bengal Assembly elections in May, 20 of the party’s 28 MPs in the Lok Sabha announced their merger with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India (NCPI), an obscure political outfit based in Tripura. Ironically, some of the leaders of the NCPI, which has no MLAs or MPs, were not aware of this high-profile defection. No party appears safe from desertions now. Reports indicate possibilities of a repeat in the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar), leaving their leaders on the edge. The two outfits have 37 MPs and eight MPs, respectively, in the Lok Sabha. In the backstage of this churn is its biggest beneficiary, the BJP, as it steps up efforts to increase support in Parliament. The defections flout the accepted rules of political conduct and violate the basics of parliamentary democracy. These shifts are not grounded in political convictions or ideologies; they are about power and a fear of harassment and persecution. The Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, which was introduced to curb political opportunism and defections, is a dead letter now. When legislators elected as representatives of parties with stated ideologies switch over to other parties, they normalise a political culture of brazen transactionalism, further eroding public trust in the electoral process. Notably, the conduct of the Lok Sabha and Assembly speakers and the Rajya Sabha Chairperson in the relevant cases has not inspired confidence in restoring this trust. (Source: DH)

By suspending Telegram services until June 22, a day after the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test Undergraduate (NEET-UG) retest, the Union government is shifting responsibility for the question leakage that led to the cancellation of the May 3 examination. Investigations had led to suspicion that the leaked papers were widely circulated via the messaging application. While the government seems to be pre-empting a repeat of the breach, the National Testing Agency (NTA) remains insular to strong official action.  Telegram has also been directed to switch off message-editing features until June 30. These measures amount to blaming the messenger for the message; by ordering them, the government has sought to find a scapegoat for the agency’s failure to prevent the leak. At the centre of the paper leak is a governance issue; the violation is not about technology, or the dissemination and circulation of information. It exposed the agency’s inadequate preparedness and operational lapses. The government is yet to initiate any credible action to fix accountability for this serious failure. Top NTA officials have been transferred, but transfers are no punishment for a lapse of this scale. Meanwhile, despite widespread protests calling for the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the issue, the Minister remains in office. The government has invoked Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, to block the messaging application. Under this section, the prescribed grounds for action include threats to the sovereignty, integrity, and defence of the country, and incitement to the commission of cognisable offences, etc. The action against Telegram can hardly be explained on these grounds. The government has been casual and reactive in its actions against social media platforms, many of them initiated without citing credible grounds. It has a history of indiscriminate bans on internet use. India has the dubious distinction of being ranked among countries with the most internet shutdowns. The Internet Freedom Foundation and other digital rights bodies have strongly criticised the action against Telegram, describing it as unconstitutional and disproportionate. Telegram has approached the court for relief, contending that the suspension undermines constitutional free speech protections. It also said 150 million users of the platform are being punished arbitrarily based on the government’s assumptions. Blocking an external messaging application in response to a systemic failing defies logic.  The intermediary is a soft target here. Curbs on its functioning also reveal the dispensation’s view of free internet expression and its propensity to impose checks on that expression. (Source: DH)

By assigning a notional value to a homemaker’s labour, the Supreme Court of India has established an important guideline for monetising women’s household work. This is, critically, a recognition of the social and economic value of the labour. A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N Kotiswar Singh described homemakers as “nation-builders”, ruling that unpaid domestic work should be monetised at a minimum of Rs 30,000 per month, with a 10% increase every three years. The ruling came in a 25-year-old case involving a road accident in Punjab. A claims tribunal awarded an insignificant amount as compensation for the death of the victim, a woman. After her family filed appeals in higher courts, the Supreme Court finally decided the case. The principle laid down by the Court is set to guide decisions in similar cases. The Court said: “…it is ironic to describe a homemaker as dependent on earning members when, in reality, the household’s functioning depends substantially on the homemaker”. It said the Rs-30,000 benchmark should serve as the basic minimum monthly income for calculating the loss of domestic care, which should be considered a separate head of compensation. The apex court also directed that in cases where the homemaker is a part of the family’s earning workforce, the value of domestic care as prescribed should be added to the monthly income. This ruling will have far-reaching implications not only for calculating compensation in accident cases but also in situations where women’s role as an economic agent must be considered. According to the Time Use Survey conducted in 2019, women aged between 15 and 59 years spend over seven hours daily on unpaid domestic and caregiving work, compared to less than three hours by men. The Court cited the survey, which also found that women perform 2.6 times more unpaid domestic and caregiving work, even when they contribute economically. Women’s unpaid work is estimated to contribute 15-17% of India’s GDP. These figures point to entrenched patterns of a society where domestic work is taken for granted, and where traditional roles assigned to women are normalised, significantly lowering their participation in the labour force. While the ruling is unlikely to change the financial dynamics within families, it should lead to a better understanding of women’s contributions to the household. It has done well to provide a legal framework to measure the value of women’s work in situations where it did not count until now. (Source: DH)

  Football is the beautiful game that knows no borders and brooks no divisions. It evokes the unity of races, languages, nationalities, and religions, and transcends politics and ideologies. The FIFA World Cup has long been a celebration of humanity, testing the limits of the body and the mind. The game’s pace and lulls, hits and mishits, and highs and heartbreaks reflect human life. The tournament – jointly hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico – has brought to life galleries across time zones. It is the celebration of a truly universal game: there are Brazils in distant Kerala, and children play Pele, Maradona, and Messi on streets in the far corners of the world. Times may, however, have changed. The colours in the many-hued ball, which blend to make a seamless globe, also threaten to stand out, pointing to a divided world. While there are more nations than ever before moving the ball now, there is also the irony of mental and national barriers preventing and restricting those movements. Omar Artan, a FIFA-appointed referee from Somalia, was denied entry by the US Customs and Border Protection, despite travelling on a valid visa. The war in West Asia has travelled to the place where it originated, entangling the Iranian team in matters which the game has always subsumed. Shadows of diplomatic disputes and disagreements have fallen over many travel plans. Vozinha, Cape Verde’s goalkeeper hero in its historic 0-0 draw with Spain, cried because his mother could not afford to go to the US to watch his greatest moment. There is more commerce in the World Cup than there ever was, with ticket prices having soared beyond the reach of many fans. Questions arise regarding the high prices when there are more tickets and more games to watch. The irony is that the world’s most-watched game has just become less affordable for most people than ever before. That is part of the bigger question: whether an increasingly divided, nationalistic, and conflict-ridden world is seeing its reflection in the brightest of cups of the most representative game. Football has been a bridge between peoples and nations, and has held the world together. The most competitive of games has also been the most reconciliatory. The rising anxieties and concerns of a shifting world may be affecting the course of the ball on its best grounds. But there is always the hope that the ball, and the times, will pass and the game will remain bonding and beautiful. (Source: DH)      

Earlier this year, Anthropic – one of Silicon Valley’s most consequential artificial intelligence companies – chose Bengaluru as its second Asia-Pacific headquarters, signalling India’s arrival as a serious AI destination. The company also outlined plans to support education, agriculture, and other public-interest applications, reflecting its ambition to use AI beyond purely commercial purposes. Now, Washington has intervened with a wake-up call that India’s IT establishment cannot afford to ignore. Citing national security concerns, the United States has restricted access to Anthropic’s newest and most powerful AI models for foreign users, amid fears that vulnerabilities could be exploited in sophisticated cyberattacks. Unlike earlier export controls aimed at semiconductor hardware, this marks one of the first instances where an AI model itself has been treated as a strategic asset. Anthropic is one of the world’s leading developers of large language models alongside OpenAI and Google. Its flagship Claude models power advanced conversational and coding tools that businesses increasingly rely upon for research, software development, and automation. The implications extend well beyond one company. For Bengaluru, India’s largest technology ecosystem, which houses over 40 per cent of the country’s Global Capability Centres (GCCs), the restrictions highlight the risks of building products and services on foreign-controlled AI infrastructure. Hundreds of start-ups that were integrating these frontier models into their products and workflows now face uncertainty and may have to rewrite development roadmaps, migrate to alternative platforms or rely on less capable versions. While the disruption may be temporary, it serves as a reminder that geopolitical decisions can instantly alter access to critical digital tools and shatter the myth that the world’s most advanced AI models will always remain available. Globally, the move may accelerate a trend towards countries seeking greater technological self-reliance instead of depending entirely on overseas AI platforms. India, too, must confront an uncomfortable truth. For years, the country’s largest technology companies have generated extraordinary revenues servicing Western AI systems rather than building their own. The resources, the engineering talent – much of it concentrated in Bengaluru – and the market need have existed. What has been conspicuously absent is the strategic will to invest in sovereign AI capability. The Anthropic episode should serve as a warning bell that access to frontier AI can no longer be assumed to be permanent or universal. For Bengaluru and India, the challenge now is to move beyond being service providers to the world and become creators and owners of the technologies that will define the next era. (Source: DH)