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.

How do abstract crises—rising temperatures, emerging viruses, disappearing green cover—translate into everyday struggles?

This week, two stories answer that in starkly different ways.

The first, a two-part series, is about something you can feel: heat. In Chennai, a retired nurse watched her neighborhood’s shade trees disappear over 40 years. In Bengaluru, a delivery worker feels temperatures her phone doesn’t register. In Delhi, a tailor lost two-thirds of her income because indoor heat makes work unbearable.

The second is about something you can’t see yet: a potential pandemic. Researchers modeled what happens if bird flu spills over from poultry to humans in India. Their finding: Once the virus escapes farm workers’ families, only lockdowns can contain it.

Both stories reveal how invisible transformations—satellites document cities turning from green to grey; researchers simulate virus transmission through synthetic populations—manifest as lived realities for real people.

It’s Getting Hotter

D. Tamilselvi worked as a community health nurse in Chennai for 40 years. “In the beginning, I remember always having tree shade to park my cycle. Around the turn of the century, the trees disappeared. I began to sweat and struggle in the heat even in October.”

Her experience isn’t isolated. Indians were exposed to 19.8 heatwave days on average in 2024—a third of which wouldn’t have occurred without climate change. Heat exposure led to a loss of 247 billion labor hours, or $194 billion in income. By 2030, India will lose 5.8% of daily working hours to rising temperatures.

The governance failures are stark: master plans exist but experts say government departments don’t coordinate on heat stress. Heat Action Plans are underfunded and poorly targeted. On the ground, builders violate green cover rules through “connections and corruption.”

Cool roofs can lower temperatures 4-5°C. But experts warn retrofitting tier-1 cities may be nearly impossible. “Where is the space to improve green cover? There is rampant illegal construction. Tier 1 cities are almost beyond repair,” says climate resilience consultant Abhiyant Tiwari.

The hope lies with tier-2 cities. Tamil Nadu is studying heat block by block. Madurai is creating urban forests. Patna’s 2031 master plan focuses on urban greening. Priyanka Thirumurthy reports.

The Heat From Up High

In part two of the series, we analysed satellite data from nine cities spanning up to 50 years:

• Bengaluru: Built-up area grew 1000% while vegetation shrank 88%. Land surface temperature rise: 15.13°C in 30 years—classified as “severe and hazardous”

• Vijayawada: Temperatures rose from 25.51°C to 41.35°C (+15.74°C) in 22 years

• Hyderabad: Green cover tripled yet temperatures rose. Why? “Forest cover lost to rapid urbanization can’t be replaced by scattered planting. They grow eucalyptus because it matures fast but evapotranspiration capability is low,” explains urban researcher D. Sabarinath

• Mumbai: Water bodies declined 24%, creating 6-8°C temperature differences between neighborhoods just 2 km apart

• Chennai: Water bodies encroached from the 1990s, now records Tamil Nadu’s highest nighttime temperatures

Tier-1 cities may have exceeded their thermal capacity to reverse heat intensification. Tier-2 cities still have a choice—but only if they act on what satellite data has made impossible to deny. Read Priyanka’s story here.

Preparing for the Next Pandemic

While cities grapple with heat today, researchers are modeling a crisis we can’t yet see: a potential bird flu pandemic.

Gautam Menon, professor at Ashoka University, and his team used BharatSim—an ultra-large-scale simulation—to model H5N1 spillover in a Tamil Nadu poultry district. The finding: timing is everything.

“If we imposed quarantining when the number of cases was between 2 and 10, we could ensure the disease did not spread,” Menon told me in an interview. “But beyond 10 cases, it would have escaped the immediate circle of contacts, to expand far more unpredictably and uncontrollably. At this point, only large-scale interventions such as lockdowns can help.”

The virus can’t yet pass sustainably between humans. But if it acquired that ability, the spread could resemble COVID-19—with one crucial difference: a fatality rate of 30-40% versus COVID’s 1-2%.

“The costs in terms of mortality would be far larger,” Menon explains. “It would be more reminiscent of the 1919 Spanish Flu pandemic in India, which saw the largest number of deaths in the world.”

India has infrastructure from COVID—testing capacity, vaccine production, oxygen plants. But, much of it may have deteriorated.

“Government interventions should be light-touch and not heavy-handed,” Menon says. “Communication is paramount. Above all, public health messaging must remain transparent and accountable. People have a right to know.”

He emphasises avoiding COVID-era mistakes: performative measures like night curfews that made no public health sense, demonisation of communities (Tablighi Jamaat), lack of transparency that eroded trust.

“It is also easy to squander trust. If political messaging is the goal and not validating what people can see through their own eyes, trust will suffer.”

Read the full interview here.

The cost of delayed action rises sharply over time. Whether it’s preserving green cover before concrete sets or quarantining infections before they escape family circles, the easiest interventions work only if implemented early—before crises become visible to everyone.

Have a good weekend!

It’s become our ritual to look back at what the year revealed—not just about India’s challenges, but about how we track and understand them.

This year brought a familiar frustration: Important data either arrived late, changed methodology mid-stream, or simply stopped being published. We saw citizens take to the streets over environmental failures while policies moved in conflicting directions. One system quietly works in the face of several challenges—90% of India’s births now get registered, largely due to an army of faceless frontline workers.

These three stories capture different facets of 2025: the data we’re missing, the records we’re building, and the environmental contradictions we’re navigating. The thread connecting them: the gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered. Whether 2026 begins closing the gaps that remain depends on choices made in the coming months.

On behalf of everyone at IndiaSpend and all our contributors, I thank you for reading with us this year.

This holiday season, please consider making a donation to help us cover more ground. We’ll be watching, reporting, and holding the line on evidence-based journalism.

Programming note: Since this is a mid-week edition, our next newsletter will reach you on January 10.

New Data, Old Problems

Ten critical datasets were released in 2025 after several delays, including the Consumption Expenditure Survey, Sample Registration System outputs, and crime data for 2023.

But for some of these, the change in methodology was not accompanied by bridge surveys, making comparison with previous data untenable. The consumption survey, for instance, expanded item lists, used three separate questionnaires, and shifted from single to multiple visits.

Prachi Salve spoke to four experts—people who have worked to formulate, use and analyse public data—to understand the current state of data quality, periodicity and transparency, and what that means for the larger landscape of evidence-driven policymaking in India.

“The problem is not that methods have changed—that is inevitable—but that they keep changing in ways that break the ruler we use to measure trends, while the choices about what to publish look increasingly selective,” says Parakala Prabhakar, political economist and formerly a cabinet-ranked communications advisor in Andhra Pradesh.

Development economist Dipa Sinha says that while “definitions, questionnaires and sampling strategies have all changed,” there were no parallel surveys to link the old and new methods, leaving analysts able to report current consumption levels but unable to clearly assess how living standards have changed over time.

P.C. Mohanan, former acting chairperson of the National Statistical Commission gives the example of poverty estimates—analysts have used the new consumption data and applied the Tendulkar and Rangarajan poverty lines, which were at a lower level of expenditure. “So if you use this new data on the old poverty line, naturally your poverty estimates will go down drastically,” he explains.

Then there’s the census. Last conducted in 2011, with the next one scheduled for 2027, “all large surveys now rest on a sampling frame built on 2011 demographics,” says economist Arun Kumar, “even as age structures and rural-urban patterns have changed.” This “has direct consequences for welfare schemes, poverty lines and per-capita allocations,” Sinha explains.

Finally, there’s the issue of transparency. “Over the last decade, what has changed most is not just the numbers, but who decides what gets seen and when,” says Mohanan.

Read Prachi’s analysis here.

The Climate Emergency

This year, Delhi-NCR residents protested chronic air pollution in November. Some were detained. Students and activists in Hyderabad protested 400-acre forest clearing from March onward. The Supreme Court halted tree-felling. In Nashik, residents organized Chipko-style protests against felling 1,700 trees.

All this while, India’s policy actions remained contradictory.

The government introduced progressive policies such as the Environment Audit Rules and mandatory Greenhouse Gases Emissions Intensity Targets to align with global climate goals. But it simultaneously faced sharp criticism for the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Amendment Rules. Critics argue this forest amendment will reduce transparency and facilitate net forest loss by allowing “offline” approvals for strategic projects and relaxing compensatory afforestation requirements.

Ultimately, the year 2025 reflected a widening tension between India’s development ambitions and the urgent need to mitigate the escalating impacts of the climate crisis. This, at a time when India experienced extreme weather on 99% of days in the first nine months of 2025—heat and cold waves, lightning, storms, heavy rains, floods, landslides.

Tanvi Deshpande tracks the year’s environmental protests and policy shifts.

Counting India

Several Indian states are going through a counting exercise—the revision of electoral rolls—which is leading to exclusion and disenfranchisement. Come 2027, and the Census will aim to count every individual living in the country. But on a daily basis, India’s frontline health workers take on the challenge of counting every child born here.

“I know ASHAs who have walked through snake-infested fields in the rains to visit women who gave birth in hospitals just to make sure that the newborn has a birth certificate,” says Suvarna Kamble, an accredited social health activist (ASHA) in Palghar, Maharashtra. ASHAs are paid an honorarium that is barely sufficient to help meet ends.

More than 90% of births and deaths are now registered. That still leaves 2.8 million births—Bhopal’s population—and one million deaths unregistered each year. There are regional variations: Sikkim had the lowest birth registrations in 2023, at 64%.

ASHAs, auxiliary nurse midwives, and health assistants do this work. They fill Civil Registration System forms, spelling parents’ names exactly as they appear in Aadhaar. “If it is not, the certificate is not issued,” Kamble says.

Birth certificates unlock school admission, Aadhaar cards, passports, government schemes.

But workers face resistance. “New mothers and infants are entitled to benefits that we are willing to take to their doorstep. Yet, some people object to our frequent visits,” Kamble says. Families worry ASHAs will weigh the mother and infant and chide them over inadequate care.

Nushaiba Iqbal profiles the frontline workers behind 90% registration—and why 10% still slip through.

Here’s wishing you a happy, healthy and fulfilling year ahead.

In previous editions, we discussed how changing climate is affecting lives, livelihoods and entire communities across India. But that’s not all—there are second order effects that do not make it to official statistics, but are quickly becoming part of lived experience.

One of them is on India’s nutrition security. Between record paddy and wheat production, and a vast food distribution programme, fewer Indians now go to sleep on an empty stomach. But the lack of dietary diversity means millions do not get enough nutrition. And extreme weather events are affecting the crops that farmers choose to grow, their extent and output, availability and affordability.

Elsewhere, we look at India’s CSR spending, which has the potential to touch lives at scale but ends up being concentrated in a few sectors and regions.

Our daily nutrients

India hit record paddy production in 2024-25, but a survey of 6,615 marginal farmers found that half the paddy farmers lost more than 50% of their crop to extreme weather—every year for five straight years. And 65-87% of districts growing nutritious crops—millets, pulses, vegetables, oilseeds—show high production instability due to climate change.

Then there’s the cost dimension. IndiaSpend’s Food Price Watch shows a family of four needs Rs 9,421 monthly for a balanced diet in Mizoram—57% more than Madhya Pradesh’s Rs 6,002. Remote and climate-vulnerable states pay premium prices because extreme weather disrupts supply chains.

In India’s most vulnerable districts, food insecurity is already adversely impacting health indicators. A study of 575 rural districts found that children in climate-vulnerable areas are 1.25 times more likely to be underweight. Remedial measures need to be urgently rolled out across the country but the paucity of funds, farmer awareness and implementation support hinder these efforts, Charu Bahri writes.

Corporate Giving

India mandates that companies meeting certain thresholds spend 2% of profits on social projects. In 2023-24, firms spent Rs 34,000 crore on corporate social responsibility, but most of this flows into low-poverty areas, and larger firms are leaving funds unspent.

Ninety percent of district-level CSR goes to areas with relatively low poverty. India’s 112 aspirational districts—identified by NITI Aayog for high poverty and underdevelopment—receive under 5%.

Why? CSR increasingly follows corporate convenience: Companies are taking it in-house; funding flows to industrial districts, aligned with business interests; and compliance is weak. Vijay Jadhav explains in five charts.

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back next week, with our year-end reviews of critical sectors and issues.

What do water and buses have in common? Time.

In Tripura’s hill villages, women spend 4-6 hours daily fetching water. In metropolitan cities, they spend hours in poor public transport. And both these activities shape their life choices—where they study and which jobs they can take, whether daughters continue education, how far from home they dare to venture.

This week, we bring you two stories that, at their core, are about the same thing: how inadequate infrastructure—missing water connections, unsafe public transport—dictates how women spend their days. Government dashboards show impressive numbers: 86% tap water coverage in Tripura, free bus schemes across multiple states. But the gap between data and reality is where women’s time disappears.

Water or Nothing

Anita Tripura wakes at 3.30 a.m., straps a bamboo basket of aluminium pots to her forehead, and walks downhill in darkness to a mountain spring. Each trip takes 2-3 hours. She makes two trips daily. Most of her waking hours are spent on water.

According to Jal Jeevan Mission data, 82% of households in her district have functional tap connections. In a nearby village, taps were installed three years ago. They’ve never seen water. In North Tripura villages, supply is erratic.

The problem extends across Tripura’s hill villages. Springs are drying due to climate change and deforestation. Summer monsoon rainfall has dropped 355 mm over 36 years in northeast India. Women now spend 4-6 hours daily fetching water—a quarter of their lives.

Girls miss school waiting in queues. At one government boys’ hostel with 86 students, there’s no tap water; students walk 1.5 km downhill to bathe at a spring where fights erupt with villagers over access.

This isn’t just Tripura. An estimated 200 million Indians depend on spring water, and 50% of springs in the Himalayan region have already dried up or reduced discharge. Nidhi Jamwal reports.

Beyond Free Rides

Several Indian states now offer free bus travel for women. The economic impact is measurable: Women save Rs 500-1,000 monthly. In Delhi, women’s bus ridership increased 20% since 2019. Among economically marginalised women, employment increased by 24 percentage points.

But the schemes don’t solve safety, accessibility, or service design.

Street sexual harassment remains endemic—56% of women across 140 cities reported harassment on public transport. Yet 91% never filed complaints. Infrastructure is hostile: poor lighting at bus stops, damaged footpaths, steep steps that exclude women with disabilities.

Then there’s the backlash. Despite schemes being funded through taxes, 54% of women report discriminatory behaviour—bus drivers refusing to stop, male passengers making insulting remarks, being told to take the next bus.

The design problem runs deeper. Public transport is planned around peak-hour male commute patterns, not the “trip chaining” women do—combining multiple tasks in one journey. Women travel at off-peak hours when frequency is lower and need first- and last-mile connectivity that often doesn’t exist.

Fare subsidies eliminate the economic barrier. But without addressing safety, dignity, and design, they remain incomplete solutions to women’s mobility crisis, Priya Verma writes.

That’s all for this week. We’ll see you next week with more stories.

Do you remember what you were doing when the Prime Minister announced the scrapping of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes back in November 2016? I was at the IndiaSpend office in Mumbai, editing copy and watching a colleague on TV explain the findings from our #Breathe network of low-cost air quality monitors.

That night, I borrowed Rs 200 from a friend and got home. The next morning, I started using digital payments. It wasn’t just me, of course. The country saw wide adoption of digital payments over the next few weeks.

So when my colleague Vijay Jadhav pointed out that India saw a 77% increase in cyber crime reporting in 2017, it all fell in place. These were the years that India saw rising mobile phone and internet access, without a corresponding increase in digital literacy and safeguards—leading to an increase in incidents. This was also when the JAM trinity—or Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar and mobile—was being aggressively implemented.

A caveat: Crime data are rarely straightforward. An increase in registration does not necessarily mean more crime. It could be the result of higher reporting and easier registration. But corresponding data from the Reserve Bank of India on volumes of financial fraud also concur. We explain the trends in four charts.

Elsewhere, we bring you more insights from our realtime dashboard, Food Price Watch.

Fraud, Digital Arrests & Other Crises

There are two major sources of data for cyber crime. First, citizens can report cases on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal. The portal categorises cyber crime into three broad categories: Women/children-related crime, financial fraud, and other cyber crime. Complaints rose from 452,000 in 2021 to 2.3 million in 2024, a five-fold increase.

Second is the National Crime Records Bureau’s annual report, which collates case data from across the country. Cases of cyber crime more than tripled between 2018 and 2023. The sharpest increases, as I said, came after 2016.

RBI data show that digital payment frauds in cases involving losses above Rs 1 lakh are now 11 times higher, and the total money lost is 12 times more than in 2020-21.

Finally, cases of digital arrest scams jumped from 39,925 in 2022 to 123,672 in 2024, while reported losses rose from Rs 91 crore to Rs 1,935 crore.

Research suggests there are several reasons for the increase—from lack of awareness and increasing sophistication of frauds, to untrained police personnel and evolving state of laws. Vijay Jadhav analyses the data.

In the Distance, Dearth

Food prices in India have been subdued this year. However, not all citizens have had a chance to experience this reprieve: in Kerala, Lakshadweep and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, food prices rose by more than 4% compared to last year, as per the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

This is also borne by data from the Ministry of Consumer Affairs. The cost of essential food items fell everywhere in the country, but some foods were more expensive in the North East and Ladakh in October this year. Rains disrupted supply chains in Himachal Pradesh, whereas bandhs and strikes are a frequent phenomenon in the north east—highlighted in a parliamentary standing committee report as well.

In November 2025, Mizoram recorded the country’s highest daily grocery cost (Rs 77.5) for the simplest diet that meets nutrition requirements, far above the all-India average and driven by logistical constraints typical of Himalayan and northeastern states. Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Ladakh also faced elevated prices for essential pulses, vegetables and oils, Food Price Watch shows.

The climate of the Himalayan region is favourable for growing fruits and vegetables. If put to sustainable use, these areas can play a crucial role in ensuring food and nutrition security in India, Nushaiba Iqbal writes.

Have a good weekend.

A decade ago, when I joined IndiaSpend, we set up #Breathe—a network of low-cost air quality monitors, which at its peak, had 28 stations in Delhi and a total of 110 across 14 cities.

The resulting easy access to realtime data informed the discourse around pollution, with policymakers taking note. This was an era before the ubiquitous AQI or air quality index numbers became popular markers, and before particulate pollution was discussed in detail.

The learnings were several. For instance, we found that:

1. winter mornings were the worst time of day for outdoor exercise;

2. the emergency odd-even measure in January of 2016, when half of Delhi’s cars were ordered off the streets, was not enough to reduce the city’s pollution levels; and

3. that pollution is a year-round problem for many parts of the country.

Several policy measures ensued including a graded action plan for the capital, and a national clean air programme. Yet, year after year, winter months see pollution at dangerous levels and reactive measures do little to help. In this context, our story of the week looks at the gaps in monitoring in Delhi.

Elsewhere, COP30 concluded a mixed bag and we explained the take-aways from the conference.

Few and far between

About two-thirds of Delhi’s area falls outside the purview of an air quality monitor, which means that a large population in the national capital does not know the extent of pollution it faces, according to our spatial analysis. Estimates suggest that Delhi should have at least 52 stations, but there are 38. Even those are unevenly placed.

Areas such as Civil Lines, Chandni Chowk, Mandir Marg, India Gate and Lodhi Road have overlapping monitoring zones, effectively giving them multiple layers of measurement. But farther from the city’s core, the coverage thins out dramatically.

Large parts of outer Delhi—especially Bawana, Chhattarpur, Aya Nagar, Karawal Nagar, Kakrola, Gokalpur, and the rural-urban fringe in the North and Southwest districts—fall almost entirely outside these catchments. These are also the areas where informal industries, brick kilns, waste burning, and traffic from inter-state freight movement converge—making monitoring even more critical.

Similarly, large stretches along the Yamuna floodplains, peri-urban pockets on the eastern edge bordering Ghaziabad, and belts in the northwest between Mundka and Tikri show very low or no direct coverage, despite hosting waste-to-energy plants, industrial godowns, and major highways.

Experts say that a tiered monitoring system—regulatory, reference and local-area planning—will help give an accurate picture of the pollution. The last tier is what Delhi does not have: This means hyperlocal pollution spikes often go unnoticed.

Local monitoring isn’t just about numbers; it makes pollution personal. When residents can see the air they actually breathe, they can take safety measures and demand accountability, Anuj Behal writes.

The Mutirão text

The 30th global climate conference or Conference of Parties (COP30) concluded last week and there are some interesting takeaways. But irrespective of whom you ask—the developed or developing countries—the outcomes in what came to be known as the ‘Mutirão text’ (referring to the Portuguese word for collective effort) fell short of expectations.

First, climate finance commitments were much lower than needed. The 2025 Adaptation Gap Report estimates that developing countries will need between $310 and $365 billion annually by 2035, while current flows are only around $26 billion. Developing countries require about $5.8-5.9 trillion up until 2030 in order to meet their climate goals and comply with what they promised as per the Paris Agreement, as we reported in October 2024.

The final text called for efforts to at least triple adaptation finance by 2035—which, experts say, is vague with no specific accountability of contributors.

Second, while parties sought to impose a binding roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels, developing countries like India and China had argued that developed countries should lead emissions cuts given their historical responsibility. In the end, the matter did not make it to the final text.

Finally, India and like-minded countries argued that “unilateral climate-related trade measures risk becoming instruments of protectionism and undermine multilateral cooperation”, an argument that developed countries opposed. (An example of such a measure is the European Union’s carbon tariffs, which we explain below).

The final text “reaffirms that measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade”.

Tanvi Deshpande takes stock of the outcomes.

The other tariffs

From January 2026, the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) will start charging a tariff on six products (including steel and iron imported from India) to plug “carbon leakage”. That is, a fee on imports from countries where emissions on the goods is higher.

CBAM has given the EU the power to recognise and influence climate policy in other countries. It has also used it as a negotiating tool: giving the US—the world’s highest historical emitter of carbon—concessions as part of a trade agreement.

While other developed countries mull about their own versions of CBAM, developing countries oppose such measures. The core of the objections is that it subverts the idea of Just Transition, a framework to help economies become environmentally sustainable but in an equitable manner that doesn’t burden poorer nations.

This flows out of the principle that developed countries—who account for a majority of historic carbon emissions—agree to take the lead in climate action, including financing and transfer of sustainable technologies to poorer countries. Mrinali explains.

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