Last week, we looked at India’s fertiliser scenario, and the potential ramifications of a shortage from supply chain disruptions due to the war in West Asia. This week, we turn to edible oils, prices of which are already high as Food Price Watch, our tracker of what a healthy diet costs in India, has been showing for weeks.

Since 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has appealed to his fellow citizens to reduce the consumption of edible oils by 10%, first for health reasons, and last month, with the added objective to conserve crucial foreign exchange reserves.

But household surveys suggest that the average Indian is consuming just about the recommended amount of oil. The other part of the consumption story is industrial—think soaps and cosmetics, biofuels, lubricants & greases, paints & coatings.

India meets only 44% of its demand for edible oil. In 2024, the government launched the National Mission on Edible Oils, to increase oilseeds production 79% by the end of the decade. But that is not as simple as it sounds, we report.

Elsewhere, we analysed national crime data released recently for the year 2024, and found that cases of crime against children are at a decadal high, chargesheeting rate is low, and pendency in courts persists.

The impending oil crisis in your kitchen

Packaged sunflower oil prices across India are up 15% year-on-year, mustard oil up 12%, palm and soya up 9% each. India farms 15-20% of the world’s oilseed acreage but produces just 6-7% of its vegetable oil. It then imports $20 billion worth a year to make up the gap.

The government launched a mission two years ago to boost domestic oilseed production by nearly 80% by 2031, but experts say the numbers don’t add up without solving deeper problems: inputs don’t reach small farmers, procurement centres are absent in remote areas, and prices fell below MSP in 2023 with no government intervention.

As a result, farmers tend to allocate better land, irrigation, and inputs to cereals and cash crops, and “oilseeds are often cultivated in residual moisture conditions, on relatively poor soils and in less-favoured production regions,” explained Ravi Mathur, director of the ICAR-Indian Institute of Oilseeds Research. Consequently, India’s productivity is lower than other countries.

With price volatility and inadequate post-harvest infrastructure leading to distress sales and losses of up to 10% for oilseeds, beyond support prices, instituting ways to add value to farm produce can play a key role in incentivising farmers to adopt these crops.

Charu Bahri reports on what it will actually take to close India’s edible oil gap.

In 6 Charts: Crime Against Children In India

In 2024, India recorded, on average, one case of crime against children every three minutes. Most cases were related to ‘kidnapping and abduction’ or under the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

India’s National Crime Records Bureau collates data on crime, accidental deaths and suicides from all states and Union territories. The latest data, for 2024, were released last month. Our analysis for the last decade shows some patterns that persist.

Chargesheeting rate is falling:

Each year over the last decade, police have filed chargesheets in about half the cases registered during the year.

In 2024, the police disposed of 181,446 cases of which 111,426 ended in chargesheets against the accused, a rate of 61.4%. This was the lowest rate in the last decade.

Pendency in courts is rising:

Nine in 10 cases up for trial remained pending at the end of the year. Overall, cases pending before courts have risen from 165,853 in 2015 to 644,887 in 2024, nearly three-fold increase in a decade.

A caveat when working with crime data is that a rise in cases does not necessarily mean a rise in crime. It could be due to multiple factors including more reporting and easier registration.

Read Vijay Jadhav’s analysis here.

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back next week with more stories.

Indians are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the monsoon. This summer has been deadly, quite literally for hundreds of people, and several parts of the country continue to reel under heatwave conditions. In this context, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has released an updated forecast for the monsoon, and it is not good news.

The IMD projects that India will see a below-normal to deficient monsoon, with rainfall totals estimated to be 90% of the long-period average with a 4% margin of error. But even this hides spatial variations. Some regions may see much lower rainfall, and—as our experience over the past few years has increasingly shown—the season could see long dry spells accompanied by a few days of extreme rainfall events.

And, that’s not all. An intense El Niño could further derail the monsoons, and lead to increased temperatures in parts of the country. In an economy that is beginning to see the impact of the war in West Asia, this could lead to further distress—more than half of India’s area under cultivation is rain-fed. In an interview, we explain what this means for India, and how we can prepare for it.

Further, in the face of fertiliser shortages due to the war, we examine what a shift to natural farming can look like, and where policy is falling short.

Bleak monsoon

Changing climate has made monsoons increasingly erratic. In some years, overall rainfall for India as a whole has been stable, but wide variations have come to be the new normal. Many parts receive a large chunk of annual rainfall over a fortnight, a phenomenon that disrupts crops, tests urban drainage systems and resilience, and does little to recharge depleting groundwater levels.

This year, the complication of what is being called a ‘Super El Niño’ or ‘El Niño Godzilla’ imperils the monsoon. El Niño is a powerful atmospheric-ocean phenomenon. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes the phenomenon as follows:

This causes wide disruptions—from increased rainfall and flooding in regions such as South America, East Africa, and the southern United States; to drought conditions in eastern and northern Australia, Indonesia, southern Africa, and parts of South Asia due to suppressed monsoon activity.

The war in West Asia is expected to further hit fertiliser supply. Combine that with a weak monsoon and increased fuel prices, and it is a perfect storm for India’s agriculture, and consequently, food production and prices.

But models are notoriously bad at predicting the amplitudes very well, explained Raghu Murtugudde, an earth systems scientist, Emeritus Professor at the University of Maryland, and visiting faculty at the Kotak School for Sustainability at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur.

In an interview, Tanvi Deshpande spoke with Murtugudde on what the science says so far about this year’s El Niño and what steps India could take to better prepare for its impacts. Read the full interview here.

‘Policy Changes, Not Prayers’

In his Independence Day speech in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on farmers to reduce the use of chemical fertilisers by 10-25%. He repeated this appeal six years later, again from the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day. Most recently, earlier this month, he called for a 25-50% reduction in fertiliser use.

But appeals without accompanying policy moves achieve precious little, experts say. During this time, India’s fertiliser consumption as a whole has risen 15%. Reducing the use of chemical fertilisers in soil that is habituated to their use causes a significant drop in yield. And if farmers are not protected from the yield drop, their already fragile incomes can dwindle further, leading to widespread distress.

A Union government-sponsored scheme launched in November 2024 to promote natural farming has so far covered 880,000 hectares, which is less than 1% of India’s cultivated land.

“To scale natural farming, we need policy changes, not prayers,” Avinash Kishore, senior research fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), told IndiaSpend.

If in 2010 a farmer had to sell 27 kg of rice at the prevailing minimum support price to buy 50 kg of urea; today a farmer could buy it for only 12 kg of rice, pointed out Kishore. “At such low prices, it simply doesn’t make economic sense for farmers to use urea judiciously or consider the alternative, natural farming, which involves much more hard work.”

The government should promote small scale rural enterprises to manufacture the inputs needed for natural farming, make alternative nutrient solutions at scale, and provide subsidies at least on par with chemical fertiliser to cover their costs and losses when they first make the switch, says G.V. Ramanjaneyulu, executive director, Centre for Sustainable Agriculture.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research has identified potential domains for a transition to natural farming—balancing sustainability and national food security—to cover 25.8% of India’s net cultivated area. But scaling up from 1% area is impossible without policy change, Charu Bahri reports.

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back in your inbox next week with more stories.

The India Meteorological Department has forecast heatwave to severe heatwave conditions in 17 states and Union territories until May 27.

Temperatures are breaking records in several cities, including minimum temperatures—which is particularly dangerous because, as we reported in May 2023, bodies need cooler nights to recover from the heat of the day, and when minimum temperatures remain high, we are stuck in persistent thermal stress.

Heatwave advisories ask people to stay indoors, but in informal settlements and affordable housing complexes, poor ventilation leads to trapped heat inside the home, making it intolerable. For patients with chronic illness, it adds to the stress, exacerbating their condition.

Our story this week looks at people with conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, cardiac issues, and disabilities to understand how extreme heat is affecting their health, livelihood and lives.

Meanwhile, the LPG crisis is forcing women to return to the chulha or traditional cookstoves. Cooking gas cylinders are in short supply, and are selling for a premium on the black market. Working on a chulha in this heat can become dangerous very quickly.

Elsewhere, India’s road accident victims struggle to access legal compensation, due to a lack of awareness, long delays, and complicated procedures.

Living with chronic disease in the summer

Vidya (name changed) can no longer work outside home. Her leg has a persistent wound from a burn injury, and her sugar levels remain high. Every summer, she says, “I feel this fear. My heart starts palpitating sometimes. What problems are waiting for me in these months?”

For Radha (name changed), who lost the function of her legs after spinal surgery four years ago, the summer means something worse: mostly confined to her bed in Guntur’s Sarada colony, with a single fan and corrugated iron roof overhead, she cannot cool herself, bathe, or do the most basic things without her 10- and 11-year-old children’s help.

And for Krishna (name changed), who had heart valve surgery three years ago and can no longer work, the heat inside his house brings a specific dread. “I feel tense during the heat inside,” he said. “Like something adverse will happen.”

Everyday life is already a struggle for people like them, living in informal settlements with poor ventilation, roofs that trap heat, and limited access to cooling methods. But summers make it worse.

Research shows that heat stress raises blood sugar, can trigger sudden drops in blood pressure, damages kidneys, and strains the heart—risks that multiply for those with comorbidities in poorly ventilated homes. Frontline doctors often don’t recognise exhaustion or weakness as heat-related illness, prescribing painkillers that further harm the kidneys, experts say.

And it is bound to get worse. About 57% of Indian districts, home to 76% of the population, are at high to very high heat risk. Hemanth Chandu and Pavani Pendyala report from Vijayawada and Guntur.

Back to the chulha

The West Asia war has choked India’s LPG supply—India imports 60% of its liquefied petroleum gas—and cylinder prices have nearly doubled. A commercial 19-kg cylinder that cost Rs 1,768 in March now costs Rs 3,071, and on the black market, gas is selling for Rs 350-400 per kilogram. Delhi’s poorest women have gone back to wood and coal.

Parveena Khatun, 45, who runs a tea stall in Munirka, built a brick stove when supplies ran out in March. On a day when Delhi hit 43°C, the smoke and heat left her dizzy enough that she had to sit under a tree and wash herself with cold water. Her hands have burn marks—she had never cooked on a chulha before.

“If I buy Rs 100 worth of gas for Rs 400,” she said, “I would have to raise the price of a cup of tea from Rs 10 to Rs 40. Who would buy it?”

Each time a woman cooks over a chulha in this heat, her body is fighting two battles: trying to cool down while breathing harmful smoke. “It is a killer combination,” said Vidhya Venugopal, professor of occupational and environmental health. “This is far more dangerous than either problem alone and can quickly lead to exhaustion, dizziness, and breathing difficulties.”

A 2022 estimate places deaths from household air pollution at 1.65 million a year in India. Research published last month found that air pollution becomes significantly more dangerous as temperatures rise. For Reena Kumari in Vasant Vihar, who has no gas connection and two small children who cry from the smoke, the choice is stark: the chulha or starvation. Shivam Bhardwaj reports.

The compensation dead-end

India recorded 480,583 road accidents in 2023, resulting in 172,890 deaths. Two-thirds of those killed were aged between 18 and 45—the prime working years. For poor families, the financial burden can quickly compound.

Shoba Kshirsagar, a 55-year-old waste-picker in Pune, became her family’s sole earner overnight when her son was hit by a dumper truck. The family spent Rs 2.75 lakh out of pocket. She has filed for third-party insurance, but the case is ongoing. She has moved her family into a smaller place to survive.

Laws exist: mandatory third-party insurance, a Motor Vehicle Accident Fund, cashless treatment in the golden hour after a crash. In practice, 70% of low-income victims are unaware these mechanisms exist. Only 205 claims were filed against 25,000 eligible hit-and-run crashes in 2022-23. The average compensation timeline is 3.6 years—often stretching to 8-10 years. Meanwhile, Rs 80,455 crore in pending claims sit in courts across the country.

For Mitali (name changed), a professional in Gurugram whose scooter was struck by a car on the wrong side of the road, pursuing compensation required physical court appearances she couldn’t manage for months, a lawyer charging 30% contingency fees, and a case that still hasn’t concluded. “The key issue is not just the amount, but access,” said Ranjit Gadgil of Parisar. “By the time compensation arrives, families may already have taken on debt at high interest rates.” Prachi Salve reports.

Have a good weekend.

Hospital waiting rooms are depressing, and depending on where you are, can get intolerable. And in the hours of waiting for updates from doctors outside an ICU, you tend to read the advisories and informational material pasted in the room.

This week, I spent some time in the waiting room outside an ICU in Hyderabad, where we lost a friend’s father. There was a six-foot standee advocating organ donation, with text in English and Telugu, and illustrations showing which organs could be donated. But when the time came, and we asked if the hospital could connect us for further process, no one around knew what to do.

At IndiaSpend, we have written about such gaps several times before—between a noble, well-intentioned policy or idea and lax implementation. This week too, we have two stories that look at such gaps.

The first is a recommendation by the 16th Finance Commission to include heatwaves in the list of disasters, so that states can unlock critical financing. But definitional issues persist, and without resolving them, the most vulnerable may never see benefits.

And the other is a story on how medical boards set up to review cases of abortion are turning into final arbiters of rights.

The fine print in disaster relief

India’s disaster management laws currently recognise 13 types of natural disasters, providing access to emergency funds for states reeling under the impacts.

Over the years, experts and state governments have called for heatwaves to be included in this list, but this has not yet happened. The Finance Commission has, for the first time, made this recommendation, but the government is yet to accept it. If and when it is accepted, definitional problems could cut off access to funds for the most vulnerable.

Take the case of drought: Declaration of a drought in a state, assessing its extent, damage and issuing compensation to those affected often becomes a problem and many who suffered losses are not recognised.

A heatwave is declared by the India Meteorological Department, but extreme heat can affect the health of vulnerable populations even below the heatwave threshold. In such scenarios, states will not be able to access disaster relief funds to provide compensation or support.

“So far, lightning and heatwave are local disasters and the number of casualties are low, so the states don’t need large-scale resources such as the NDRF,” said Krishna Vatsa, member and head of the department at the National Disaster Management Authority. “But when it comes to mitigation, which are the long-term measures where we need to set up early warning systems, improve awareness, the resources required may be larger… Besides, it could help in the implementation of heat action plans.”

As India is expected to see more heatwave days and warmer nights in several parts of the country, Tanvi Deshpande explains what it will take to provide access to critical funds.

How medical boards control access to abortion

On April 24, the Supreme Court allowed a 15-year-old in her third trimester to terminate her pregnancy. A medical board pushed back citing rights of the unborn child, a concept not recognised in Indian law. The Supreme Court stood firm, but the minor gave birth to a baby boy on May 2.

India’s 2021 amendment to the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act expanded access to safe abortion by increasing the gestational limit from 20 to 24 weeks for special categories of women, including rape survivors, minors, and women with disabilities, and also mandated the establishment of state-level medical boards to evaluate complex cases.

Nikhil Datar, a Mumbai-based obstetrician and gynaecologist, had challenged the original 1971 MTP Act, the 2021 amendment and the rules in the Supreme Court. Datar said the “shoddy drafting” of the abortion law itself is “problematic” and that the creation of medical boards not only violates fundamental rights but is also “another layer of paternalism whereby the law wants doctors to also be the legal gate keepers besides being medical advisors”.

“A woman’s right over her own body is absolute, subject to only one condition that she cannot cause harm to her own body,” senior advocate Colin Gonsalves said. “If there is no harm caused, she has an absolute right to decide on an abortion and nobody, not the government, not the medical board, nobody can actually overwrite that decision of a woman.”

A 2025 report, which studied 1,114 cases in the Supreme Court and the high courts between 2019 and 2024, revealed that permission to abort a pregnancy was denied in 11% cases. Of these, courts relied on the medical board opinion in 81.5% cases. Ritika Jain reports.

Have a good weekend!

Elections to the legislative assembly in Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have concluded, with counting scheduled for Monday, May 4. Campaigns in all regions were intense, but there was little focus on climate and its impact on the health and livelihoods.

Ahead of the second phase of voting in West Bengal, we looked at Purulia district on the western edge of the state. Erratic rainfall, soil erosion and lack of irrigation makes agriculture unviable for most in the region. In addition, for years now, work under the world’s largest rural jobs programme was unavailable.

While people have historically migrated for work from Purulia, changing climate is driving up distress in the region. Left behind are the elderly, women and children, who pay a heavy social price while the men toil away in faraway lands.

Elsewhere, we look at Delhi’s gig workers and the impact of heat on their health and earnings.

The Long Road to Survival

Pijush Bauri earns Rs 14,000 waterproofing roofs in Surat. But he was forced to return home to West Bengal’s Purulia as the LPG crisis unfolded. Now back at home, he has no income.

Pasupati Majhi works in construction in faraway Goa. He dreads the uncomfortable and expensive 40-hour train journeys back home to Purulia in West Bengal. “Nobody really knows how precarious our lives are,” he says.

For 33-year-old Kanika Mahato, most days are lonely without her husband, who works in Jharkhand’s Bokaro sorting and loading metal. She dreads the possibility of a health emergency for her children.

Purulia is drought-prone, and receives 60% of its annual rainfall in a fortnight. Agriculture is rainfed, and poor fertility and lack of irrigation facilities means nearly half the area under cultivation is under a single crop.

“Migration becomes a survival strategy,” Umi Daniel, director, migration and education at the non-profit Aide et Action International, says, but “does not really give them better opportunities—they do manual labour and are paid less wages,” says Daniel.

From Purulia’s Hura, Manbajar and Puncha blocks, Ritwika Mitra documents the livelihood crisis and the social cost of distress migration

The Algorithm Doesn’t Take a Heat Break

The National Disaster Management Authority has a standing advisory to protect gig workers from the impacts of heat, which among other things calls on platforms to not mandate work during the peak afternoons.

But gig workers, at the mercy of algorithms they do not fully understand, are incentivised to stay logged in during this peak time, and accept all orders. Lunchtime is a critical part of the platforms’ service, and therefore, incentivising workers makes business sense. Staying logged in is technically voluntary, but workers say that without the incentive amounts, their incomes are not enough to make ends meet in the metros they cater to.

But without critical amenities such as rest or cooling areas, UV-protective clothing, and provision of drinking water and ORS, workers face intense heat stress every shift, putting their health and life at stake. “When we climb three to five floors in apartment complexes, we get dizzy. In many buildings, they do not even allow us to use the elevator,” says Ankit Soni from Bihar’s Siwan district.

“It is not possible to take a two- or three-hour break during a heatwave under company policy. If I take a break, I won’t earn enough,” says Rinku Kumar (name changed), a Zomato delivery agent.

“For workers who depend on daily income with no wage security, heat safety cannot work unless income loss is addressed directly,” says Vidhya Venugopal, professor of occupational and environmental health at the Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research.

As several parts of India are seeing high temperatures, Shivam Bhardwaj reports on the worker heat stress subsidising India’s delivery economy. (Explore this interactive quiz to navigate through a gig worker’s day).

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back next week with more stories.

Meet Rudrani Chhetri, a transgender woman and project director of the Garima Greh (shelter home) in Delhi run by Mitr Trust. We have been following Chhetri’s work for years now.

In 2023, she recounted how her friend Rupali, who needed dialysis, could not get blood from anyone from her community because of a HIV/AIDS-era blood donation ban. Rupali died in 2017.

The following year, she spoke about the difficulties the shelter home faces: delayed funds, borrowed credit, staff working without salaries, and—in one instance—police harassment: In July 2022, the police took a transgender man housed at the shelter home with them at the request of his family. When other residents went to the police station to enquire, they were assaulted by the police, she had told us.

Even before a new amendment to the transgender protection law, there were significant gaps in implementation, and a lack of awareness about rights. “Although there are chapters addressing discrimination, denial of education, and healthcare, there is no recourse for individuals when these rights are violated,” Chhetri had told us. But now, self-identification and support are both at risk, as we explained this week.

Elsewhere, as schools begin to shut for the annual summer vacation, we look at the patterns on spending on school education.

From Rights to Red Tape

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, passed in March, has left shelter homes like Chhetri’s in an information black hole. Residents who had started to settle are quietly leaving. “We are stuck in uncertainty,” she told us.

For instance, the Ayushman Bharat transgender health plan—which had promised Rs 5 lakh in health insurance for surgeries and hormone therapy—had not even completed hospital empanelments when the law changed the definition of who qualifies. “You made the plan yourself, after understanding the definition of gender,” Chhetri says. “Now you’re saying that whatever you had learned was wrong.”

The amendment does several things at once: It removes trans-man, trans-woman and gender-queer from the legal definition—retroactively, as if they were never included.

It makes legal recognition contingent on a medical board’s recommendation followed by district magistrate approval, replacing the right to self-identification that the Supreme Court affirmed in 2014.

It introduces provisions criminalising anyone who “compels” a person to adopt a transgender identity—a clause that guru mas in traditional trans households now fear could be used against them for sheltering young people who come to them.

The rationale for the amendment, the government said, was the misuse of benefits meant for transgender persons. But even before this amendment was enacted, getting an ID card was difficult. Only 33,000 identity cards have been issued so far—7% of the estimated population. Between 2021 and 2024, just 11% of allocated welfare funds were spent.

“How can the government or a medical board affirm or reject my identity?” Ayaan, 24, a transman, asks.

Divya Tiwari reports on what the change means for community members, shelter homes and healthcare providers.

The Cost of Schooling

The Right To Education Act provides for free and compulsory elementary education (grades I to VIII) to each and every child. But that does not mean children are studying for free. A government survey of 52,085 households shows that parents are increasingly spending on coaching and private school. Even those whose children are studying in government schools spoke of associated costs such as books and stationery, transport and uniforms.

On top of tuition, nearly four in ten secondary students are enrolled in private coaching, with spending rising almost fourfold between primary and higher secondary level. Private school fees average ten times government school fees.

“Entry to higher education is now almost totally driven by entrance examinations,” says Kishore Darak, a senior educationist, “and the coaching industry is the gatekeeper.”

Taken together, families with school-going children spend between 5% and 10% of their monthly expenditure on education and related costs, our analysis shows. And marginalised communities spend a higher percentage of their incomes for a shot at the same opportunities. Vijay Jadhav reports in six charts.

We’ll be back next week with more stories.

I am writing from sweltering Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where 30 journalists from across South and Southeast Asia convened for a workshop on heat and its impact on human health.

As my colleague Tanvi Deshpande reported last week, extreme heat particularly affects the most marginalised groups and communities. Construction workers and farmers are acutely impacted, as are street vendors, factory workers, gig and platform workers, and home-based workers.

For many of them, missing even a few hours of work means lost incomes in the face of increasing expenditure and, with the onset of the summer vacation, more caregiving duties, especially for women who bear a disproportionate burden.

And this is just the beginning. All predictions show that several parts of India are set to see high temperatures, more heatwave days and normal to below normal rainfall this monsoon. Over the next few weeks, we will continue to tell the stories of how vulnerable populations are coping with extreme heat.

Meanwhile, we saw a heated parliamentary debate on an amendment to increase the number of seats in the Lok Sabha to 850. Several parties that lead state governments have opposed the move, citing a potential decrease in the proportion of seats. The motion was defeated as it failed to garner the two-thirds majority necessary for constitutional amendments.

This move was meant, the government says, to fast-track the implementation of a law to provide 33% reservation for women in the parliament and legislative assemblies. This week, we examine the current state of women’s representation at different levels of government and the barriers that women face in moving up the ranks.

Elsewhere, we look at the worsening urban crisis and how the wealthy are seeking oases in the middle of cities—gated communities, integrated townships and other exclusive enclaves. As a result, they withdraw from civic participation, leaving the rest to deal with failing city infrastructure.

From Village Councils to Parliament

More than 1.5 million women hold elected positions in Panchayati Raj Institutions, with representation exceeding 50% in many states. This is largely due to a 1992 amendment to the Constitution reserving a third of seats for women in rural and urban local bodies. In 18 states, women now occupy more than half of all PRI seats. Only the Union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Ladakh have less than 33% representation of women in these grassroots institutions.

But even in these institutions, women routinely face gender prejudice, financial constraints, discrimination and physical threat, as we reported over the years.

And the path up to the higher levels of government is rocky. Even states with higher representation of women in PRIs see fewer women MLAs. In Himachal Pradesh, for instance, women account for 50% of PRI representatives, but only one of 68 members in the state’s legislative assembly is a woman.

In Lok Sabha, women’s representation has increased from 22 of 489 members (5.5%) in 1957, to 75 of 544 members (13.79%) in 2024. Vijay Jadhav explains in five charts.

Inside the Gates: India’s Urban Inequality Crisis

Indian cities are crumbling. The Economic Survey for 2025-26 calls them “sites of daily strain: long commutes, uneven services and shared spaces that often fall short of collective expectations”. This state of affairs and growing aspirations are driving India’s urban affluent to gated communities to experience a more organised version of their city.

Advertisements for upcoming or exclusive communities promise landscaped open spaces, play areas, gyms, club houses, sports centres, all of which are supposed to be part of city development plans, but aren’t. Two in five households in India’s top 50 cities today opt to live in a gated complex, up from one in three households five years ago, according to a new report from Redseer Strategy Consultants on the rise of gated communities in India.

But their exit leaves urban local bodies less accountable to the less privileged who lack the means to question service delivery lapses.

“When a city’s most resourceful residents disengage, it can create conditions where the needs of the less affluent are more easily deprioritised and over time, the city’s sense of shared responsibility can quietly narrow,” said Amit Kapoor, chair, Institute for Competitiveness.

City governance reform needs the empowerment of urban local bodies to implement the functions they have been constitutionally entrusted with, higher funding for service delivery, citizen participation and greater accountability, Charu Bahri writes.

Have a good weekend.

Parts of coastal and southern India are bracing for a heat wave, or hot and humid conditions next week. The India Meteorological Department has forecast more heatwave days and warmer nights this summer in several parts of the country.

The most vulnerable are often overlooked in mitigation and planning. Particularly affected are India’s informal workers who have no paid leave, no air-conditioned workplaces, and no financial buffer, leaving them with little room to navigate health impacts and income loss.

This week, we look at the impact of heat stress on two specific groups of workers: street vendors, already living at the margins in the face of vending-free zones and limited access to social security, and garment workers who work in cramped spaces with little ventilation, often in workshops covered with heat-trapping asbestos roofs.

India is projected to lose about 5.8% of working hours in 2030, up from 4.3% in 1995. Given its large population, the country is expected to lose 34 million full time jobs in 2030 as a result of heat stress—with agriculture and construction, the sectors with the highest number of workers, expected to be most affected.

Elsewhere, India’s Green Credit Programme—which aims to encourage voluntary plantations on degraded lands—is mired with implementation gaps, with internal documents suggesting evictions, possible violations of the Forest Rights Act, procedural lapses, selection of unsuitable sites and delays.

No Shade, No Water, No Protection

Shobha Devi is a flower seller in Mumbai’s Santacruz area. She does not have a fixed station—she just stands in the busy market areas holding flowers and gajras (flower strings) for sale.

“This heat is nothing. May is the worst,” said Devi, who carries water and food from home. Sometimes, she brings her four-year-old son along. “Kya karoon? (what should I do)” asked Devi, when asked if the toddler can be protected from the heat.

There is a municipal toilet nearby. She lives in Virar, an hour away by local train, and cannot return home during the peak heat hours.

A study by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organising (WIEGO), of more than 400 street vendors in Delhi-NCR, showed that 70% of vendors lacked access to toilets, clean water and shade, and that access worsened during the heat period. Nine in 10 vendors reported no access to free, clean water while working.

Nearly every respondent (96%) reported seeing fewer customers, and 90% said they reduced their working hours due to extreme heat. Borrowing nearly doubled, with women taking on more debt than men.

Another study, conducted by Heat Watch and Tata Institute of Social Sciences, surveyed 115 garment workers in Tamil Nadu and Delhi, and found that in the last 12 months, 87% workers reported facing heat-related issues such as headaches, dizziness, weakness and muscle cramps.

Nearly two in five workers reported that the toilets are often unclean, 73% reported they do not have running water, 78.3% workers reported that it is difficult to get permission to use the toilets. Women are particularly affected, with a vast majority reporting urinary tract and menstrual health issues.

To mitigate these impacts, experts are calling for urgent reforms, including the classification of heat-related illnesses under the Employees’ State Insurance Act, the implementation of parametric insurance for informal workers, and the deployment of industrial hygienists to enforce workplace temperature standards. Tanvi Deshpande reports.

What’s Ailing India’s Green Credits

India’s Green Credit Programme, launched in 2023 as a market-based climate solution, has been positioned as a tool to incentivise environmental action. However, internal documents suggest it is coming at the cost of local lives and livelihoods. In Assam, plantations have been carried out on lands from which villagers were evicted, while in Gujarat, land claimed by tribal communities has been fenced off, raising concerns over rights and access.

While the scheme hoped to enrol individuals and private sector industries, until now, it has attracted investments from only state-run oil, coal and power companies. Seventeen public sector units—including, Indian Oil Corporation and other petrochemical corporations, Coal India Limited and its subsidiaries, National Thermal Power Plant Corporation—have bought green credits.

Since its launch, eco-restoration has begun in 225 sites across 12 states covering about 48 square kilometre of “degraded land”, government data show.

Documents obtained under the Right to Information Act—inspection reports for 169 sites across 10 states spread over 35 sq km involving Rs 117 crore worth of green credits—highlight implementation gaps, including a “mismatch” between species listed in cost estimates and those actually raised in nurseries. Several identified sites were also found to have dense canopy cover, unsuitable for plantations, and involved activities adjacent to approved areas.

Experts argue that, as a potential replacement for compensatory afforestation (CA), which mandates companies to offset forest diversion by bringing non-forest land under plantation, the GCP departs from its original intent by promoting plantations on “degraded” forest land. It also lacks safeguards to ensure that such forest parcels, many of which are used by tribal and forest-dwelling communities, are not taken up for plantations before their rights are recognised under the Forest Rights Act. Sukriti Vats reports.

That’s all for this week. Until then, stay hydrated.

Let me take you back to early 2021, a few months before the horrors of the second Covid-19 wave, when much of the world was waiting for approval and/or widespread availability of vaccines.

Clinical trials were being conducted widely, but there were problems: Many lacked rigour, some trial participants said they did not understand that they were taking part in a trial, some agreed assuming that it was a vaccination drive, still others said they were offered Rs 750 as payment. “I needed the money,” one participant had told us.

Fast forward to today, and the Union government wants to “create a network of over 1000 accredited India Clinical Trials sites”. This is under the newly announced Biopharma SHAKTI, aimed at building an “ecosystem for domestic production of biologics and biosimilars”, and developing India as a global Biopharma manufacturing hub.

But low patient awareness is still a concern, as are participant recruitment, trial finances and ethics committee membership and operations, our reporting found. Filling these gaps is critical to ensure that patient’s rights are upheld.

Elsewhere, with shrinking habitats and narrowing migration corridors, human-elephant conflict has become frequently, often with deadly consequences. We follow a group of volunteers who spend days and nights tracking elephant movements, and help prevent encounters.

From ‘Guinea Pig’ to ‘Aware Patient’

Over the last 13 years, India’s clinical trial framework has been significantly strengthened. New rules include provisions for compensation to trial participants, and recording consent on video, especially among vulnerable populations. These, and mandatory registration of ethics committees with the central licensing authority were to improve safeguards for patients.

That is on paper.

Studies show that anywhere between 60% and 75% of the population is insufficiently informed.

“Many patients who participate in clinical trials in India aren’t aware that they could suffer an adverse drug reaction, contrary to getting better, nor are they aware of their rights in such an eventuality,” explains Amulya Nidhi of the Swasthya Adhikar Manch, a not-for-profit working in the clinical trials space.

A Supreme Court-recommended apex committee to approve new trials has never met. And there are issues with trial finances and ethics committee membership and operations. At Ahmedabad’s Sheth VS General Hospital, for instance, a probe found financial irregularities across 58 trials involving over 500 patients: 15 doctors had diverted Rs 1.87 crore to personal accounts over four years.

As 1,000 new accredited trial sites come online, Poonam Bagai, founder and chairman, CanKids…KidsCan, which also hosts the Pediatric Cancer Research Institute (pCRI), an initiative focused on patient-centred paediatric oncology research, pointed out that the government will need to strengthen monitoring. “Oversight should be risk-based and enabling, ensuring ethical standards without discouraging responsible research.”

Read Charu Bahri’s story.

Tracking Elephants In The Dark

One morning in 2023, Manwari Bareth and her husband left their village in Chhattisgarh to collect mahua seeds—oil from the seeds can bring a family Rs 6,000 in a month. They heard a sound in the forest. Her husband said it must be a falling twig. It wasn't.

"Around 9 a.m., they found his body. His chest and shoulder crushed, his body was in a twisted position," Bareth said.

His was one of 135 human deaths recorded in the Dharamjaigarh forest division of Raigarh district between 2000 and 2023. In the same period, 33 elephants died there from electrocution by the fences farmers use to protect their crops.

This is what human-elephant conflict looks like on the ground: a shrinking forest, farmers desperate to protect harvests, elephants with nowhere left to go, and communities caught in between.

Six volunteers—paid Rs 10,000 a month, with no insurance—spend days and nights tracking elephant herds. "If you think of this work as a source of livelihood, it is impossible,” says 40-year-old Javed Sheikh, a member of the Hathi Mitra Dal.

When not tracking elephants, Sheikh and his team visit villages and spread awareness, discouraging villagers from using electrical fencing, and informing them about changes in elephant movement patterns.

Farmers whose livelihoods depend on their harvests can become frustrated when herds damage fields overnight. “If crops are damaged, people become angry. We have to face that too,” he adds.

The Hathi Mitra Dal is a state government initiative started in 2018, and works with forest officials to track herds and alert villages. But as forests fragment and elephants lose corridors, the volunteers are managing a crisis that structural investment has not kept pace with, Stephin Thomas reports.

Have a good weekend!

For the first time in four decades, young Indian men are withdrawing from education. Graduate earnings are stagnating. Half of new jobs are in agriculture. And India expects its demographic dividend to peak before 2030.

A new report from Azim Premji University traces 40 years of youth employment and education data, and the picture it draws is more complicated than the headline growth numbers suggest. The economy is expanding. The jobs it’s creating aren’t what a young, educated workforce needs.

Elsewhere, a different kind of target missed: India recorded 185 TB cases per 100,000 people in 2025—more than four times its own elimination goal.

Young, Educated, Waiting

Half of the 83 million jobs added between 2022 and 2024 were in agriculture, a sector that contributes least to output and earnings, according to a new report released earlier this month. The demographic dividend India hopes to cash in before 2030 depends on a labour market that isn’t ready.

I spoke with Rosa Abraham of Azim Premji University, lead author of the State of Working India 2026 report, about what four decades of data reveal.

Abraham pointed to three surprising trends: the gender pay-gap narrowing not from a surge in women's income but from declining men's earnings; young men withdrawing from education for the first time in four decades; and a heartening shift of SC and ST workers away from traditional occupations into modern industries.

Abraham is an associate professor of economics at the University, and heads its Centre for Sustainable Employment. In this interview, she explains why earnings are stagnating, who waits longest for salaried work, and what AI might do to entry-level jobs next. Read the interview.

The Long Road To TB Elimination

When Rajendra Nayak, a driver in Odisha, developed a persistent cough and started losing weight, he did what most patients do—he went to a health facility. Three tests came back negative for tuberculosis (TB). Those around him assumed his drinking was to blame. He was ready to give up on seeking care.

It took a community volunteer and one more test—a molecular one this time—to find the TB that sputum microscopy had missed. Nayak's experience is not an exception. Experts say half of all patient losses in India's TB care system happen at this very first step.

India’s TB elimination target for 2025 was 44 cases per 100,000 population. But that year, India had 185 cases per 100,000, more than four times the target.

Increased notifications are not necessarily a result of higher incidence, but could be attributed to India’s active casefinding. The problem lies in the gap between intent and execution.

Smear microscopy, which misses half of all TB cases, accounted for three in four tests in 2023, the latest year for which such data are available. Molecular testing remains unevenly available. Experts describe a testing pathway "designed for leakages"—patients referred across multiple facilities, returning for results, referred again.

Further, nearly 40-50% of microbiologically confirmed TB cases show no typical symptoms, meaning symptom-based screening alone cannot find them.

Clinicians and researchers say the answer lies in reaching patients earlier, through active community screening. The government’s updated strategy says this too. The distance between strategy and practice is where patients disappear. Prachi Salve takes stock.

That’s all for this week. Have a good weekend!

I’m writing this sipping my third cup of coffee today—instant, black, no sugar. I’ve had two consistent reactions to this choice: either that it’s too bitter to have without milk, or condescension from connoisseurs that I’m using instant coffee. I’ve only recently begun experimenting with a French press and a Moka pot, and look forward to getting a pour-over setup.

But here’s what struck me last month: Coffee is getting harder to grow around the world, thanks to rising temperatures and erratic rains. I spent four days in Araku, a centre of India’s famous coffee, to find out what the small-holder farmers were doing to tackle changing climate.

Elsewhere, India counts road deaths but the people who survive crashes, and spend years rebuilding their lives, are largely invisible in our data.

A Storm in Your Coffee Cup

India saw 30 additional days a year of coffee-harming heat in the last five years, on average, according to a Climate Central report released last month. Andhra Pradesh had the highest overall days with temperatures above 30°C, at 257. By 2050, the area suitable for coffee farming could shrink by half without adequate adaptation.

But Araku’s model of smallholder farmers growing organic coffee holds promise. It found a mention in the Prime Minister’s speech in June 2024. The story behind it is 20 years of hard work by tribal smallholders in Andhra Pradesh’s Paderu Agency area. In 2005, farmers sold coffee cherries to moneylenders for Rs 2 a kilogram. This year, Naandi Foundation, which works with 100,000 farmers in the region, paid up to Rs 140.

Buridi Sundaramma has grown coffee for 25 years. This harvest, she made Rs 1.7 lakh from her produce on three acres in Gondivalasa. “Earlier, we were not pruning, mulching etc. and we used to get small yields, but now we are getting better yields,” she says. Her family still carries a debt of Rs 1 lakh, taken for children’s education.

Over 72,000 farmers now make a net profit of over Rs 1 lakh annually. But as of 2022-23, the government was procuring from just 1% of the region’s 218,000 farmers. Ramarao Dora, a tribal leader who has watched turmeric and forest produce lose their markets here, sees a familiar pattern potentially repeating. The government, he argues, needs to make tribal farmers custodians of the value chain, not just suppliers to it.

I report on what’s working, what isn’t, and whether the Araku model can scale.

The Crash That Never Ends

India reported 462,825 road crash injuries in 2023. A third of these—158,576 people—were grievous: brain injuries, amputations, spinal damage. And experts say even this is likely an undercount, because India relies on police records rather than a trauma registry, and many crashes go unreported.

What the numbers don’t capture is what happens after.

Kalidas Khilare’s son was hit by a rickshaw on his way to college. The family has spent Rs 3 lakh so far. Another Rs 3 lakh surgery awaits. He still walks with pain. Nirmala Sakat’s son, a pizza delivery rider, had his foot crushed when a motorcyclist coming from the wrong direction fled the scene. The surgery cost Rs 2 lakh. His employer refused compensation because he had a learner’s permit. He is now back delivering pizzas, saving for a new two-wheeler.

Two-wheeler riders account for 54% of road injuries. Delivery workers are disproportionately exposed—about 50% of 400+ gig riders surveyed in Mumbai reported experiencing a crash. Many hold licenses for less than six months. Untrained riders on e-bikes under 25 km/h need no license.

Government cashless treatment schemes help with emergency costs. But brain trauma, spinal injuries, crush injuries—these require months or years of rehabilitation that no programme adequately covers. Prachi Salve reports.

Have a good weekend!

There’s a particular kind of policy failure that doesn’t announce itself. No scandal, no collapse, no moment of reckoning. Just a guideline sitting in a government document, a technology waiting to be deployed, a pill sitting behind a pharmacy counter that most people who need it have never heard of. Things that exist on paper, and not much else.

This week we have two stories, though they pull in different directions. One is about PrEP — a daily pill that reduces the risk of HIV infection by over 99%, for which India has had official guidelines since 2022. Four years on, government health centres still don’t distribute it, awareness remains low, and access is largely a function of how much money you have and which city you live in.

The other is about carbon capture—a path India has just committed Rs 20,000 crore to developing, at an early but arguably well-timed moment: The science is maturing, costs are falling, and for a country that will be burning coal for decades yet.

The Pill Nobody Talks About

India has had official guidelines for pre-exposure prophylaxis—PrEP, a daily pill that reduces HIV infection risk by over 99%—since 2022. Four years later, government health centres still don’t distribute it.

If you want PrEP today, you’re looking at Rs 2,200 to Rs 3,000 a month out of pocket, or you need to live close to one of the handful of NGOs offering it at subsidised rates in select cities.

This matters because India’s HIV numbers have plateaued. New infections have not fallen in years. And the populations most at risk—men who have sex with men, transgender persons, people who inject drugs, female sex workers—have HIV incidence rates many times higher than the national average. Among people who inject drugs, incidence runs at 34 per 1,000 uninfected people. The national average is 0.05.

The picture gets more complicated with chemsex—the use of stimulants like crystal meth during sex, rising among queer and transgender communities. Standard drug intervention programmes focus on opioids; They’re not designed for stimulants or the private, hookup-app-based networks through which chemsex travels.

PrEP could provide real protection here, but only if people know it exists. Most don’t. A multi-city survey found that only 6–8% of high-risk groups had even heard of PrEP—but once told about it, over half said they’d use it if subsidised.

The irony is that injectable PrEP, approved by the US FDA last year and recommended by the WHO, is now licensed to generic manufacturers including India’s own Dr Reddy’s. At an estimated $40 for a full year—cheaper than the current monthly pill—it could reach more people. Manu Moudgil reports from New Delhi.

Carbon Capture’s Long Bet

India has committed to net zero by 2070. Getting there will require some combination of renewable energy, efficiency gains—and according to the government’s own modelling, capturing roughly 11.4 billion tonnes of CO₂ from industrial sectors over the coming decades. Last month’s Union budget allocated Rs 20,000 crore to Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage over five years.

The technology is early-stage everywhere, not just in India. Globally, CCUS currently captures only 0.1% of total emissions. The government’s own December 2025 roadmap is candid that India can currently mitigate a “negligible amount” through CCUS.

Vikram Vishal, who runs the National Centre of Excellence in CCUS at IIT Bombay, is building it. His team recently completed India’s first test wells for geological CO₂ storage—drilling into sedimentary rock to understand whether captured carbon can be buried underground safely. An atlas of coal fields suggests India could store 395 to 614 billion tonnes in the subsurface. The next step is a pilot injection test.

The challenges are well understood: high upfront costs, an energy penalty in the capture process, and the need to retrofit existing industrial infrastructure. Critics argue CCUS gives countries an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels.

Vishal doesn’t entirely disagree with the concern, but holds the line on the underlying logic. Eighty percent of global energy still comes from fossil fuels. Steel and cement emit CO₂ as an inherent part of their chemistry—renewables can’t simply substitute for that. And costs do come down: direct air capture has dropped from over $2,000 per tonne to under $300 as the technology has matured.

The Rs 20,000 crore allocation is a signal that India is serious about developing this capability. Whether that’s enough, and whether it arrives in time, is the question the next five years will answer. Read more in this interview with Tanvi Deshpande.

Have a good weekend!

Do you remember the last time you visited an elderly relative who lives alone? The quiet of the house. The slightly too-careful way they move around furniture they’ve known for decades. There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with old age in India—and increasingly, a particular kind of vulnerability.

India is ageing fast. The population aged 60 and above is projected to more than double from 100 million in 2011 to 230 million by 2036. By 2050, there will be more elderly than children in this country. This week, we published a two-part series examining what that means in practice—and the answer is not reassuring.

The Home That Isn’t There

Sixty-five-year-old Elina Ghosh lives alone in Delhi. Her husband died three years ago. Her daughter lives abroad. She was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She has found a home-based caregiver—for now. But she worries about what happens as the disease progresses. Her aunt in Jabalpur, paralysed after a stroke, has struggled to find trained, reliable help at all.

Ghosh’s situation is not unusual. It is, increasingly, the norm.

The government supports 696 senior citizen homes across the country. There are no reliable figures for private facilities—the government doesn’t track them. A study by Tata Trusts, Samarth and UNFPA estimated that existing facilities can house around 97,000 elderly residents. That number needs to grow eight to ten times over the next decade. Many homes that do exist are unregistered and unregulated.

Home-based care—the kind Ghosh relies on—is in even worse shape. It is unregulated, unstandardised and, as geriatric specialist Antarikhya Bordoloi told Azera Parveen Rahman, “either not well trained or well managed.” The primary objective of many caregiver service providers, she said, is simply to earn money from families who live far away and have no alternative.

Seventy percent of India’s elderly population live in rural areas. The silver economy—goods and services aimed at the elderly—is valued at Rs 73,000 crore. Almost none of it reaches them. Read Azera’s story here.

When Home Care Doesn’t Come

The second part of our series, by Ayman Khan, picks up where the first leaves off: What happens when no care reaches home at all.

India’s national policy for palliative care is designed to keep the chronically ill and elderly out of hospitals, with trained primary healthcare workers making home visits for symptom management and basic nursing. In practice, the numbers tell a different story.

When home care doesn’t come, families turn to hospitals. It is not because patients need hospital care—it is, as Shanmugapriya P. of Pallium India Trust says, because “families have no alternative.”

The burden falls on families. Specifically, it falls on women. Caregiving frequently requires women to reduce paid work hours or leave the workforce altogether. The costs are invisible in official data—lost income, repeated hospital travel, accommodation near health facilities—but very real for the households that carry them.

“Families don’t just need medicines or physiotherapy,” said public health researcher Parth Sharma of ASAR. “They need support for mental health, nutrition, schooling and livelihoods.”

Ayushman Bharat covers inpatient care but offers minimal coverage for palliative or home-based services. Insurance is nominally available but “poorly defined and inadequately packaged,” as palliative medicine specialist Anuja Damani put it. There is, she said, “a significant gap between policy intent and real financial protection.”

Kerala offers a model: community networks of volunteers—shopkeepers, teachers, students—trained to provide medical and emotional support to seriously ill people at home. But Kerala’s network took decades to build, supported by high literacy, strong local governance, and civil society. It is not easily replicated.

“If all healthcare continues to be delivered from hospitals,” said Sharma, “a major proportion of the elderly will remain without access to care.” Read Ayman’s story here.

That’s all for this week. Have a good weekend!

Do you remember the last time you donated blood? Or perhaps the last time someone you know needed it urgently—and you put out a frantic message in a WhatsApp group hoping someone, anyone, would respond?

Most of us think of blood donation as an act of goodwill, something you do at a camp outside your office or college, once a year if you remember. We don’t think of it as a system. And that, it turns out, is part of the problem.

This week, we published a two-part series on blood availability in India. Reading both parts together is important, because they show two sides of the same failure: What it looks like for children who need blood every fortnight and cannot reliably get it, and why the government’s claim that India has enough blood doesn’t quite add up.

A 16-Year-Old’s Monthly Emergency

Manisha Kumari has thalassemia, which means her body cannot produce enough haemoglobin on its own. She needs a transfusion every two weeks. In November, when she went to Sadar Hospital in Jharkhand’s Giridih district, she was told O-negative blood was not available. By the time her mother took her to a hospital in Dhanbad, Manisha’s haemoglobin had fallen to 2.5 grams per decilitre. The normal level is 12. Below 6.5 is life-threatening.

She eventually got one unit—after a resident doctor volunteered to donate on her behalf.

India has between 100,000 and 150,000 children with thalassemia major, the largest number in the world. Government guidelines say haemoglobin should be maintained between 9 and 10.5 gm/dL. In reality, we found that children in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh routinely arrive for transfusions at 7 gm/dL or lower—because blood simply wasn’t available earlier.

That’s not all, the children carry infection risk from transfusions. Five children with thalassemia in Jharkhand, and six in Madhya Pradesh, contracted HIV allegedly through blood transfusions. Since then, 17 blood bank licences in Jharkhand have been cancelled. Menaka Rao reports in Part 1 of the series.

Govt Says India Has Enough Blood.

In August 2025, the government told Parliament that India’s annual blood requirement of 14.6 million units was met in 2024-25. But that requirement figure comes from a 2018 study using a population estimate of 1.31 billion—India’s population in 2025 is 1.46 billion.

A 2024 study in the BMJ found that states covering 46% of India’s population “represent an effective blood desert”—areas where local demand cannot be met in at least 75% of cases. Bihar fared worst, with just 0.17 units per 1,000 population within a 60-minute radius. In Bihar’s district hospitals, C-sections are performed at 3.6%—less than half the WHO-recommended rate—in part because only 26% have access to a blood bank.

The government claims 70% of blood donated nationally is voluntary. Experts flatly reject this. In Jharkhand, state data submitted to the High Court showed voluntary donation at approximately 15%.

Replacement donation—where patients’ families must find their own donors—remains the de facto system, and is not just inconvenient but unsafe: replacement donors have higher rates of blood-borne infections than voluntary ones.

Read part 2 of the series by Menaka Rao.

That’s all for this week. Have a good weekend!

There is a quiet way that public health crises stay invisible: People suffer, but not in ways that appear on official dashboards. This week, our stories examine what happens in the space between what the state provides and what people actually receive.

One explains how sky-high prices of drugs for rare diseases impoverish millions of Indians every year. The other finds that one in four tap water samples from rural households failed microbiological safety tests in 2024, while three in four households drink that water without any treatment.

In both cases, the gap between promise and reality falls hardest on people who have the fewest options.

The Impossible Math of Getting Sick

When Kusum Devi felt sudden pain on the night of her daughter's wedding, doctors eventually diagnosed her with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. The medicine she needs costs about Rs 8,500 a month. Neither her state insurance scheme nor the Union government's flagship PMJAY scheme covers it. She is stable today only because an NGO stepped in.

Kusum is one of around 2.5 million Indians living with cancer. In addition, there are about 100 million Indians with a rare diseases—a group the government's own documentation acknowledges may need Rs 1 crore or more in treatment annually. Government assistance caps out at a one-time Rs 50 lakh payment.

India's drug pricing framework is built around the National List of Essential Medicines. This is a reasonable starting point, but it leaves entire categories of unaddressed. Some drugs for lung cancer and melanoma cost Rs 1-2 lakh per vial and face no government price ceiling.

Countries such as Australia and Germany use health technology assessment to set drug prices against clinical benefit and public affordability, not just production costs. India does none of this.

Millions like Kusum—without NGO support, without reimbursement schemes—face the same impossible math: treatment, or financial ruin. Charu Bahri reports.

What a Govt Tap Connection Actually Means

As of January 2026, the Jal Jeevan Mission had connected over 158 million rural households to tap water—roughly 82% of rural India. But a 2024 government assessment covering 761 districts tells a more complicated story underneath the headline figure.

One in four water samples from those household taps failed microbiological safety tests. In schools, anganwadi centres, and health facilities—where children, pregnant women, and patients receive care—the failure rate was higher still, with about 27-28% of samples falling short. Three in four households do not use any treatment method before drinking their tap water.

The combination is striking. Contaminated water, almost no community-level infrastructure to detect it, and the majority of households drinking it raw.

Infrastructure failures compound the picture: broken pipes were the most common reason cited by households with non-working connections, followed by pump failures. More than four in ten villages lacked skilled manpower to maintain the systems that do exist. Vijay Jadhav reports.

That's all for this week. Have a good weekend!

I’ve always enjoyed February in Mumbai, from where I am writing this week. This year is no different. It’s easier to walk, the evenings are balmy, and I find myself much more focused and productive. Summers, of course, are oppressive—but for me and nearly everyone reading this email, they affect little more than thermal comfort.

But for millions of Indians working in the informal sector—particularly women—it means poor health, lost incomes, and getting one step closer to poverty. Summers are also when the children are at home, raising costs of food and snacks, and leaving less time and space for women who take up home-based work.

Our story this week looks at the structural issues that makes this happen year after year, and how vulnerability planning does not take that into account.

Speaking of poverty, most families in India are one health event away from financial ruin. And 70% of out-of-pocket health expenditure is on medicines. Why does this happen in a country known as the ‘Pharmacy of the World’, for producing the largest volume of generics and affordable medicines? We explain in the first of a two-part series.

Taken together, these are systemic failures that leave vulnerable populations behind. Both stories expose the same pattern: Infrastructure exists, policies are announced, schemes are launched—but the intended beneficiaries can’t access them.

When Every Degree Costs Money

Last month, we told the story of Anshu Thakur, a tailor in Delhi’s Bakkarwala, who is losing income due to increasing heat. “I am unable to work due to the discomfort I feel inside my home. This is despite having an air cooler and using reflective paint on the roof,” she says.

Thakur used to make Rs 600 a day for six hours of work. Now, she barely makes Rs 200. She is not alone. In 2023, extreme heat cost India an estimated 181 billion potential labour hours—about Rs 13 lakh crore in lost income.

Women bear a disproportionate burden. While they comprise only 23% of India’s informal workforce, 92% of working women are in informal jobs. A 2025 survey by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation found that 97% of informal women workers reported income losses during peak summer, with average wage losses exceeding Rs 1,500.

For piece-rate workers, the impact is direct: a 20-25% productivity drop from heat means a 20-25% income drop.

And when heatwaves force women to cut back on paid work, their total workload doesn’t decline. Women spend over five hours daily on unpaid domestic labour and more than two hours on caregiving, compared to just over an hour each for men.

Governments have introduced Heat Action Plans, but a 2024 review of 37 plans across 18 states found that only two conducted vulnerability assessments and only 11 included funding mechanisms. None addressed income loss or provided paid heat leave for informal workers.

“Heat Action Plans focus on preventing illness and death but largely ignore work conditions, income loss and gender-specific risks,” says Vidhya Venugopal, professor at Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research.

Small civil society programmes are trying to fill the gap. In 2024, SEWA’s heat micro-insurance initiative supported about 50,000 women across three states, disbursing nearly Rs 5 crore. But these remain tiny interventions against a crisis affecting millions. Jahnavi Dhanasri writes.

The Pharmacy That Doesn’t Serve Its Own

India is the world’s largest supplier of generic medicines. Yet medicines account for 70% of all out-of-pocket healthcare spending in the country, and between one-third and half of Indian households face catastrophic health expenses.

The Jan Aushadhi stores stock about 2,110 medicines across 17,000 outlets. But doctors aren’t prescribing generic medicines. In August 2023, the National Medical Commission issued a regulation requiring doctors to prescribe drugs using generic names. Three weeks later, the government withdrew it.

Even when generics are available, many don’t trust them. National sampling surveys showed that 10% of unbranded generic samples were ‘Not of Standard Quality’ compared to 3% of branded generics.

“Patients, uninformed about the therapeutic attributes and substitutes for drugs, lack the knowledge and agency to exercise choice,” noted the Competition Commission of India’s 2021 market study.

The National List of Essential Medicines covers only about 384 medicines. Manufacturers can evade price controls by producing unlisted strengths or formulations. Many irrational fixed-dose combinations remain on the market, not subject to price control. Charu Bahri reports in the first of a two-part series. Next week, we will look at the extreme cases—those of drugs for rare diseases.

That’s all for this week. Have a good weekend!

The Union Budget 2026-27 was presented last weekend, and if you only read the headlines, things look promising. Health spending is up 9%. Welfare programmes saw small increases. The finance minister’s speech emphasised empowering marginalised groups and expanding access to essential services.

India is budgeting more but achieving less. The problem isn’t how much gets allocated in February—it’s what happens in the months that follow: Money announced but not spent. Infrastructure built but not staffed. Schemes designed but not reaching people who need them.

Across health, education, housing, and welfare, a pattern repeats: ambitious targets, persistent gaps, and systems that expand on paper while outcomes stagnate on the ground.

Why Healthcare Suffers While Budgets Keep Growing

India’s health budget is now Rs 1.06 lakh crore, up 9% from last year. Some 183,000 health centres have been upgraded and 157 new medical colleges approved in the past decade. Yet 50% of Indians still avoid public healthcare facilities, citing poor quality, long waits, and staff shortages.

Fund utilisation is low. Increasing money is not the answer, says Nachiket Mor of Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health. “The problem is how the health system is designed and run.”

Community health centres face an 80% shortfall in specialists. Radiographer shortages at health centres increased from 35% in 2005 to 58% by 2022-23. What this means is that millions of Indians end up having to approach tertiary centres even for a simple X-ray, often losing a day’s wages and spending money and to get there.

Out-of-pocket health spending has declined—which sounds like progress until you understand why. “If people choose not to seek treatment at all, out-of-pocket expenditure will fall,” Mor explains. “Lower spending in such contexts reflects avoidance of the system, not better protection.”

Until quality, staffing, accountability and system design improve, higher budgets will coexist with low utilisation, weak trust, and persistent gaps in access, Prachi Salve reports.

The Shrinking Social Sector

India’s social sector budget as a share of GDP is now at its second-lowest point in over a decade—lower even than 2014-15, when the Modi government presented its first budget. Even so, eight key ministries saw parts of their budgets unspent in 2024-25.

“Within social sector ministries, it is those focused on the marginalized—minority affairs, social justice, development of north-east—that see the most cuts,” says Dipa Sinha of Azim Premji University.

The minority affairs ministry—which administers programmes for basic amenities in minority-concentrated areas, skilling, and scholarships—saw 78% underspending. Labour and employment spent just over half its budget.

Infrastructure-heavy schemes fare no better. Jal Jeevan Mission (household tap water), rural housing (PMAY-G), urban housing (PMAY-U), and rural roads all utilised less than two-thirds of their budgets in 2024-25.

The pattern is consistent: programmes announce allocations, then underspend. States report high opening balances. Schemes receive similar or slightly increased amounts each year despite persistent underutilisation. Read our analysis by Avani Kapur and Sharad Pandey.

Have a good weekend!

It is now a little over 10 years ago that we started our deep-dive reporting into India’s air pollution crisis, aided by IndiaSpend’s #Breathe network of low-cost monitors.

The learnings were simple: Air pollution is a year-round problem; it is not limited to metros and north Indian cities; few cities meet India’s already lax limits for particulate matter concentrations; mornings are more polluted than you think.

Yet, every winter, Delhi’s air pollution continues to make headlines. The AQI crosses 400, schools close, construction stops, cars get restricted.

This week, we’re looking at a pollution story that doesn’t make the news cycle: India’s Northeast. Assam’s cities now have PM 10 levels as bad as Delhi’s. Byrnihat, an industrial town on the Assam-Meghalaya border, was ranked among the world’s most polluted places in 2024. Tripura and Meghalaya exceed national air quality standards nearly year-round.

The solutions are well-known: Experts have consistently called for better monitoring and widespread source apportionment to understand and quantify the crisis. The next step involves long-term moves such as better enforcement of emissions norms, and support for cleaner tech including EVs. But implementation lags behind.

Elsewhere, we bring you a different kind of environmental story—how India counts its tigers.

When Clean Air Isn’t a Given

A 2024 satellite-based assessment found that in Tripura and Meghalaya, every district exceeded national standards for PM 2.5 except during monsoon months. In Nagaland, 11 of 12 districts exceeded limits. Assam contributed 11 districts to India’s 50 most polluted—the same number as Delhi. Guwahati’s PM 10 levels hit 205.4 µg/m³ in 2019—double what they were in 2013.

The sources aren’t mysterious. Construction dust, road dust, vehicular emissions, hill cutting, commercial cooking, open waste burning—the same culprits as in most Indian cities. Add geography: the Brahmaputra River Valley traps emissions, worsening the problem.

“We are still calling pollution in Northeast an ‘emerging concern’ but largely because monitoring in most places started only a few years ago,” says Manoj Kumar of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. “When monitoring began, we realised many of these places show very high pollution levels.”

The data gap is real. Guwahati has just three continuous air quality monitoring stations. Silchar and Nagaon have one each. Many cities rely on manual monitoring, making real-time assessment impossible. Byrnihat’s continuous monitor became operational only last year. But even where data exist, action lags.

Kumar argues for shifting from city-based to regional or airshed-based approaches. “Pollution is transboundary. Without regional coordination, cleaner air is not possible.”

Tanvi Deshpande reports on why the Northeast’s air pollution crisis needs urgent attention—and why monitoring alone isn’t enough.

Counting Tigers

How do you count 3,167 tigers across 641,000 sq km of forest?

India’s All India Tiger Estimation happens roughly every four years. It’s a massive exercise involving forest rangers, officers, research biologists, technical assistants, interns, and volunteers walking through potential tiger habitats looking for signs: pugmarks, scat, scratch marks, prey presence.

The process unfolds in two stages. First, extensive ground surveys record tiger presence, prey availability, habitat quality, and human disturbance. Then, in selected areas, camera traps capture individual tigers, which are identified by unique stripe patterns and analyzed through statistical models.

Viv Sharma, a volunteer at Madhya Pradesh’s Bandhavgarh National Park, recorded his experience during the exercise. What does one look for? How do you recognise different signs? What to do if you encounter a wild animal?

Watch our video on how India’s tigers are counted—and what it takes to be part of this nationwide conservation effort.

We’re tracking the Union budget this weekend. Watch our social media handles (and those of our friends at The Core) for updates. We’ll be back next Saturday in your inbox with insights.

It’s late January—that point where New Year’s resolutions start to fade. Gym memberships bought with good intentions go unused, morning walks get postponed, fitness apps gather digital dust.

But for most Indians, the question isn’t whether they’ll stick to their resolutions. It’s whether they had the time, money, or energy to make them in the first place.

And this has larger implications. India is going through a disease transition—where even as infectious diseases continue to take a toll, lifestyle diseases are now among the deadliest.

In recent months, we’ve written about the country’s nutrition security and the factors that affect who eats what. Today, we look at who exercises and when. This is the result of extensive data analysis: My colleague Vijay Jadhav parsed 23 million rows of data across three government surveys conducted decades apart. And the results are sobering.

9 in 10 Indians Don’t Exercise

Only 1 in 10 Indians exercised on a given day in 2024. That number has barely budged since 1998, when 8% reported exercising. The data underneath reveal something more troubling: exercise in India follows familiar lines of gender, wealth and caste location.

Men were nearly three times more likely to exercise than women—14.5% versus 4.9%. The burden of unpaid domestic and care work falls disproportionately on women, leaving little time or energy for exercise. Many believe household chores count as exercise—fitness experts say they don’t.

Urban residents exercised twice as much as rural ones—14% versus 7%. Exercise rises with education and household spending. It varies by caste: 13.3% in the “others” category versus 6.9% among Scheduled Tribes.

Among those who did exercise, most did so briefly. About 42% exercised for 30 minutes or less, another 38% for 30-60 minutes. Only 10% of adults, 20% seniors, and 1.7% children met the WHO’s daily activity recommendations.

Sports participation is even lower—less than 1% of Indians played a sport on the reference day, with more than 80% of participants below age 20. Once people leave school, organised sports largely disappear from their lives.

The health implications are serious. Physical inactivity contributes to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and mental health conditions. Globally, insufficient activity could cause 500 million preventable diseases by 2030, with treatment costs exceeding $300 billion, WHO warns.

Last Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi cautioned that “obesity is becoming a very grave crisis” and cited experts saying “in the coming years, one in every three people will suffer from obesity.”

Our analysis breaks down who exercises, who doesn’t, and what structural barriers—not personal motivation—explain the gaps. Read Vijay’s analysis here.

Burying What We Could Build With

Elsewhere this week: India generates 150 million tonnes of construction and demolition (C&D) waste annually and recycles just 1%. The rest gets dumped illegally—polluting rivers, burying land, wasting reusable materials even as the construction industry strips half the country’s natural resources.

Consider this: Building a 1,000-sq-ft home generates, on average, 3 tonnes of construction waste. Razing the same structure generates 30 tonnes.

The aggregates obtained after processing can be used instead of sand and gravel—though for non-structural applications at present, like manufacture of paver blocks and kerbstones—by the construction industry.

This in turn helps us conserve the scarce resources of virgin sand and gravel, reduces carbon emission by 40%, besides reducing raw material cost. Though rules mandate the use of C&D waste in certain works, India needs more processing plants to better utilise the resource. Jency Samuel reports.

Have a good weekend.

This week, I found myself thinking about A, who I went to college with. For a good part of four years, friends carried A—who needed crutches to walk—from the bus to his classroom on the second floor. It was a systemic failure that was clear as day to about 2,500 students, but something that the never-ending, swanky renovations did not notice or take into account.

What happens when architecture and planning ignores people with disabilities, or ‘special needs’? Our story of the week takes you through the data for Indian schools.

Elsewhere, African Swine Fever is devastating farms and destroying livelihoods in Assam, a state that has about 23% of pigs.

Access denied

Two-thirds of India’s 1.5 million schools do not have toilets that are accessible to children with special needs (CWSN). Four in five schools said they have ramps, but nearly half do not have handrails, rendering them practically unusable.

In practice, says Deepali Kapoor of the inclusive education team at Pratham, teachers, helpers, or peers often step in to assist children. “This informal accommodation can inadvertently mask the underlying design problems.” (This is exactly what happened in the case of A.)

The absence of accessible infrastructure is leading to a decline in enrolment of students with special needs: Overall, children with special needs form 1% of enrolled students in elementary school (grades I-VIII), 0.9% in secondary (IX-X) and 0.5% in higher secondary (XI-XII) grades—indicating that fewer children with special needs make it to higher grades.

In addition, says Neeraj Trivedi, who heads organisational effectiveness at Pratham, children may be enrolled on paper but attend irregularly, leave early, or eventually drop out. What appears as “low enrollment” in administrative data may often be a series of rational withdrawals by families responding to an environment their child does not benefit from and succeed in. Vijay Jadhav takes stock, in this visuals-led analysis.

What’s ailing Assam’s pig farmers

In 2010, Binita and Mridul Buragohain started pig farming with two pigs. It took them 15 years to get to a herd of 75. In October last year, six pigs died and the others had to be culled—to prevent the spread of African Swine Fever (ASF). At the peak, the Buragohains earned a monthly profit of up to Rs 30,000-40,000 from piggery. Now, that income has vanished, and they are yet to receive the compensation of about Rs 6 lakh for this culling.

Pig farming grows faster and yields quicker returns than goat rearing, making it central to rural economies in many parts of Assam and Northeast India. Assam itself has about 23% of India’s pigs, livestock data show. Experts call for stringent biosecurity measures and handling to prevent spread. Sanskrita Bharadwaj reports how ASF—now endemic in India—is devastating the Northeast’s pig farming economy.

Before I sign off for this edition, I have a question for you. Did you make a resolution to exercise or play a sport this year? If so, how is it going so far?

And if you’re using public gyms, parks, or sports facilities—take a moment to notice who’s there and who isn’t. More on this next week.