It was 2011. The national conversation was centred around accountability, but apart from some numbers that were routinely quoted, the narrative—for the large part—remained abstract, sans the information and context that can help provide the basis for action.

That is when IndiaSpend was born, with a clear and simple aim: using data to tell stories about India. Fifteen years later, we are one of the most widely cited publications in India and abroad.

We counted things that weren’t being counted. We put numbers where there were only opinions. And for 15 years, that work—slow, rigorous, often thankless—quietly shaped how India’s best journalists, policymakers, and citizens understood the country they lived in. We are proud of every word of it.

We’ve held power to account irrespective of dispensations, focusing on the foundational issues of the country—healthcare, education, gender, the environment and climate change, and livelihoods. We continue to believe when these basics are addressed effectively and consistently, India will have a baseline of opportunity and growth for every citizen.

Fifteen years later, the landscape is changing faster than ever. The internet is noisier than it has ever been, information moves faster, spreads wider, and gets harder to trust with every passing year. People are beginning to get their information from AI models prone to error, hallucination and sycophancy. All of this makes our job more important than ever.

In that environment, a name that said “we count India’s spending” started to feel like a description of a tool instead of a statement of purpose. We were doing so much more than counting. And the people who needed us most—younger, more online, navigating an information landscape we couldn’t have imagined when we launched—didn’t always know we existed.

We needed a name that announced what we stand for before anyone clicked a single link.

Why ISignal

We are now ISignal, because when you strip away the noise, all that survives is a precise, purposeful signal. It is the facts that dispel the rumours, and the data that inform the discourse.

We have spent 15 years doing that. The team hasn’t changed, nor have the standards or the commitment to verification.

What changes is the name. And with it, the scope of what we’re building.

ISignal is IndiaSpend with a broader mandate. We are investing in AI-powered tools that help readers navigate information in real time. We are building products for a generation that consumes news on their phones, in thirty-second bursts, between other things—and still deserves to be told the truth with clarity.

What doesn’t change

Our mission remains the same. As a small newsroom, we are not the first on the scene, nor are we the loudest voice. We are the most reliable. Everything that made IndiaSpend worth reading is still here.

We work with the same journalists who spend months reporting, writing and fact-checking to bring India’s stories to your screens. Our editors will continue to hold the standards, ever more important in these times. We bring to you facts, presented clearly and without agenda.

If anything, that matters more now than it did in 2011.

ISignal exists to cut through.

A note to our readers

If you have been with us since the beginning, thank you. You have been part of something genuinely unusual—a newsroom that believed rigour was a competitive advantage, and that the truth, told carefully, could find an audience.

If you are new here: welcome. You picked a good moment to arrive.

ISignal. India’s signal.

— The ISignal team, formerly IndiaSpend

More than a quarter of Indian men and women are overweight or obese. This is in a country where, as we reported last week, every third Indian child is still underweight. How can this happen together? The answer lies largely in what India eats.

First, India’s diets are cereal-heavy. And as households’ expenditure on cereals has fallen since the turn of the century—partly aided by food security entitlements—that money has not shifted to more nutritious food groups. At the same time, spending on beverages and processed foods has doubled. This also coincides with a 40-fold rise in retail sales of ultra-processed foods.

Second, in the West, lower socio-economic groups are more likely to be obese—a function of lower awareness and access to nutritious food. But in South Asia, as incomes rise, more sedentary jobs and diets high in carbohydrates, edible oils, sweeteners and animal-source foods increase, we had reported in 2019 based on a study published in the journal Nutrients.

“South Asia’s education systems are in effect passive bystanders to the unfolding of a hugely significant nutrition and health crisis; they must do more to inform, educate and promote improved dietary choices, physical activity and healthy behaviours,” said the study.

Elsewhere, as India proposes to set up mega textile parks in challenge mode, we look at the state of existing parks.

The Rise & Rise Of India’s Obesity

A full decade ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi first raised concerns about India’s rising obesity. After that, he’s mentioned obesity at least 18 times, appealing to his fellow citizens to eat better, calling on sportspersons and teachers to raise awareness, and repeatedly asking Indians to cut down on oil consumption.

Since then, India’s prevalence of overweight or obese—where the body mass index (BMI) is above 25 or 30, respectively—has increased by about 10 percentage points in both men and women.

The prevalence is rising across every category in India: rural and urban India, men and women, young and old.

Research shows that the increase is being driven by poor dietary diversity, high consumption of ultra-processed foods, and sedentary lifestyles. Improving diversity in food will help both with undernutrition or malnutrition and obesity or overweight.

Women are carrying a higher share of the burden. “Many women consume the least protein in the household while going through life stages such as pregnancy, where the risk of gestational diabetes increases, and menopause, where declining estrogen levels accelerate muscle loss,” Mrudul Deshpande, a Pune-based functional medicine physician specialising in metabolic health and nutrition, explained.

And that is no surprise. In many Indian households, the men eat first, the children next, and the women last. In 2017, we had reported on an intervention in Rajasthan which got families to eat together, and led to improved nutritional intake for women and children.

Vijay Jadhav analyses data from five rounds of the National Family Health Survey.

Textile Parks Half Empty

Two decades ago, India launched the Scheme for Integrated Textile Parks. Industrial parks aim to cluster manufacturing firms, in the process, helping them to generate efficiencies by accessing common infrastructure.

A 2023 Comptroller & Auditor General (CAG) of India audit found delays of one to more than 10 years in completion of the parks, cancellations of 43% of the sanctioned parks, and generation of 30% of the envisaged employment and 50% of the envisaged investments from the functional units.

The CAG asked why “without ensuring successful completion of the parks sanctioned during the 10th Plan period by March 2007 as envisaged in the Scheme guidelines, the Ministry proceeded with sanctioning more parks in the 11th and 12th Plan periods”.

Experts point to the same recurring problems—parks built far from cities where workers and investors don’t want to go, weak marketing efforts, and a lack of anchor investors willing to commit early.

It is not just textile parks that see delays. Of 4,257 industrial parks mapped on the India Industrial Land Bank as of earlier this week spanning 681,000 hectares, 134,000 hectares are still available. Yet, new industrial parks continue to be announced.

India has proposed a new round of mega textile parks—five years after announcing seven of them within a three-year timeline. Most are still under construction. Textiles employ 45 million Indians, the country’s second-largest employer, and contribute 2.3% of GDP.

Read Charu Bahri’s story here.

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back soon, with more.

Every three years or so, the National Family Health Survey gives us a detailed snapshot of health across India—based on interviews with hundreds of thousands of households.

The sixth round released this year covers over 680,000 households that form a representative sample of the national picture, and includes four schedules:

• the household schedule, with information such as access to electricity, drinking water, insurance coverage, etc.;

• the woman’s schedule, which includes indicators on marriage, fertility, contraception, child immunisation, and domestic violence etc.;

• the man’s schedule, which covers information such health issues, nutrition, sexual behaviour and attitudes towards gender role; and

• the biomarker schedule, which includes measurements of length/height and weigh, blood pressure and random glucose levels.

Earlier rounds also included data such as infant and early childhood mortality, but even without these indicators, the latest survey conducted during 2023-24 provides a wide picture of population health and healthcare trends. This week, we parsed NFHS data to understand the state of children’s health and delivery care.

First, the good news: Indian children are now taller than before, with data showing a decline in stunting rates. Stunting is an important proxy for overall cognitive and physical development, and studies have shown that stunted children face a lifetime of lost opportunities in education and work.

Elsewhere, births by Caesarean section have increased to 17% in public facilities, which indicates an improvement in emergency obstetric care.

But, children continue to have lower weights, and more than half the deliveries in private hospitals across India are through C-sections, we found.

Why Every Third Indian Child Is Still Underweight

Indian children are growing taller. Stunting fell from 35.5% to 29.3% between the two survey rounds. But nearly two in five children are still wasted (low weight for height), and a third remain underweight.

Some of the improvement in stunting traces back to better maternal care: antenatal visits rose from 59% to 65%, and immunisation coverage climbed from 77% to 83%. Early breastfeeding also improved sharply, up from 41.8% to 50.1%.

But exclusive breastfeeding for infants under six months actually fell, from 64% to 56%. And only 15% of children aged 6–23 months get what the survey calls an “adequate die”.

“Weight is such an important thing,” said Veena Shatrugna, former deputy director of the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) and advisor to Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA). “If children are growing taller but not putting on weight proportionately, then underweight and wasting remain concerns.”

Nutrition experts have long argued that dietary diversity depends not only on awareness and feeding practices, but also on whether families can regularly afford foods such as milk, pulses, fruits, vegetables and animal-source foods. “How can you improve dietary variety without improving incomes?” asks Shatrugna.

Overall, food accounts for about 46% of monthly spending, data from the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey show. But while the share of cereals fell from 22% at the turn of the century to about 5% in 2022-23, other food groups have not seen increased spending.

Prachi Salve reports on the gap between height gains and weight stagnation, and why India needs to move from food security to nutrition security.

Why C-Section Deliveries Are Rising in India

More than a quarter of Indian births now happen via C-section, up from 21.5% in 2019-21. The WHO recommends Robson classification, a checklist of 10 obstetric parameters, to determine the need for a C-section. These include factors such as the history of a pregnancy and gestational age.

Some of the increase is good news, considering that the profile of pregnant women has changed significantly over the past two decades. Women are having children later in life, fertility treatments such as IVF have become more common, and conditions such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension and other pregnancy-related complications are increasing. In this context, higher rates show improved access to emergency obstetric care.

But a 2015 WHO statement says C-section rates above 10% do not reduce maternal or newborn mortality at the population level. In public hospitals, the rate sits close to the WHO’s recommended threshold, at 17%. In private hospitals, it is 54%. “What we are seeing now is that three out of every five Caesarean sections in India’s private sector are medically unnecessary,” says Abhay Shukla of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan.

A normal delivery can take twelve hours of monitoring; a C-section is scheduled and quick. And the costs fall on families—private delivery costs 17 times more than public care, and states with high C-section rates also have among the highest delivery costs, data show.

Financial incentives may further explain the increase. Dileep Mavalankar, former director of the Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar, argued that payment systems often reward C-sections more than normal deliveries, creating incentives that favour surgery. Referring to earlier experiments in Gujarat, he noted that when private hospitals were paid a fixed amount regardless of whether a woman delivered vaginally or by C-section, surgical delivery rates remained comparatively low.

Read Prachi Salve’s analysis here.

Have a good weekend.

About 9,000 people arrested before the Covid-19 pandemic remained in Indian prisons at the end of 2024, with their trials still pending. Another 20,000 people had spent between three and five years in custody waiting for their trial.

Overall, India’s 1,333 prisons held over half a million inmates. Of these, 371,000 were under trial. Only eight other countries have a higher proportion of prisoners in pre-trial detention.

This week, we looked at the state of Indian prisons using latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau.

Undertrial prisoners are typically young, with low levels of education, and a majority are from marginalised communities. The reason for this profile, we had reported over the years, is indiscriminate arrests, limited access to legal assistance and difficulties in meeting bail conditions.

Elsewhere, Mumbai’s Kanjurmarg landfill made it to the list of 25 sites with the highest emissions of methane across the world. We explain how the trouble begins with a lack of waste segregation at source.

Who are India’s undertrial prisoners?

India’s prisons held 511,000 people at the end of 2024—13% above capacity. In addition, about 1.5 million undertrials were released on bail that year, indicating the constant overcrowding in jails.

Nearly three in four were undertrials: people in custody whose cases are still pending investigation or trial. Their share has risen from 66% in 2005 to 73%.

Two in three undertrial prisoners belong to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe or Other Backward Classes communities. Another 26% are Muslim, Sikh or Christian.

Nearly half are under 30. About 63% did not complete secondary school.

“When young undertrials are from poor socio-economic and educational backgrounds, their life chances get reduced,” Vijay Raghavan, professor at TISS’s Centre for Criminology and Justice, told us earlier. “Longer periods of imprisonment can affect their health including mental health.”

A provision under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita allows first-time offenders to seek bail after serving a third of the maximum potential sentence. In 2024, 968 undertrials were identified for release under these provisions, and 627 were released.

Vijay Jadhav reports.

How Mumbai’s garbage is contributing to global warming

Mumbai’s Kanjurmarg landfill—which receives most of the city’s waste—ranked 12th in a global list of 25 sites with the highest methane emissions from the waste sector. Methane’s warming impact is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is responsible for about a quarter of global warming. India ranks sixth among the world’s largest methane emitters.

Last year, the landfill in suburban Mumbai emitted 4.9 tonnes of methane per hour, on average. This is roughly equivalent to the warming impact of one million SUVs. For context, greater Mumbai has a total of 1.5 million cars.

The trouble begins before waste reaches the landfill. Mumbai generates around 6,300 tonnes of solid waste a day, of which 72% is food waste. Wet and dry waste are rarely separated at source, meaning biodegradable material that should be composted or processed ends up decomposing in landfills and releasing methane.

“The law clearly states municipal bodies will not collect mixed waste but segregation is neither being done nor is being enforced,” said activist Rishi Agarwal, who has worked on Mumbai’s waste crisis for over 30 years. Residents near Kanjurmarg continue to report foul odour, mosquito infestation and health hazards. The Bombay High Court has threatened to order the facility’s closure if urgent steps are not taken.

Read Tanvi Deshpande’s story here.

Have a good weekend.

India has nearly tripled health insurance coverage over the past seven years. Sixty percent of households now have at least one person covered under some form of health insurance. Yet, the average household spends more out of pocket on medical care than before.

This is because insurance in India is built almost entirely around hospitalisation, and usually does not cover outpatient care, medicines, or the transport and lodging costs that mount when a family must travel for treatment.

For the millions managing chronic disease—diabetes, kidney failure, cancer—who require continuous care between hospital stays, insurance changes little. Nearly half of India’s health expenditure is still borne directly by families, up from 45.1% the previous year. Among BRICS members, only Egypt has a higher share of out-of-pocket expenditure than India.

Elsewhere, we explore what government data show about who migrates for informal work, how far they travel, and why.

Why health insurance isn’t cutting India’s medical bills

Even the poorest Indian households spend an average of Rs 25,000 per hospitalisation—an amount that can exceed a family’s monthly income and push them into debt, asset sales, or reduced spending on food and education. Nearly three in five rural hospitalisations happen in private hospitals, where average costs can reach Rs 55,000 per stay, against about Rs 6,900 in government hospitals.

“Publicly funded insurance schemes are largely targeted at below-poverty-line populations. When they go to hospitals, they are told certain treatments or medicines are excluded, and they end up paying from their own pockets,” says Ravi Duggal, a Mumbai-based public health researcher.

PMJAY, the government’s flagship scheme, has authorised nearly 109 million hospital admissions since 2018. But “the scheme encourages people to seek care in the private sector, where costs are much higher. Care that is supposed to be “cashless” often ends up involving substantial out-of-pocket payments,” says Indranil Mukhopadhyay of the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy.

In rural India, kidney failure is the costliest ailment, averaging Rs 1.2 lakh per hospitalisation in private hospitals. Cancer follows at Rs 87,339. In urban areas, cancer overtakes all else at Rs 1.47 lakh in private hospitals—against Rs 21,802 in public facilities.

Non-medical costs compound the problem. Transport, lodging for attendants, and food can be a sustained drain for families managing long-term illness. “Unlike hospitalisation, which may be a one-time event occurring once every few years, chronic illnesses require continuous spending on daily medicines, regular doctor consultations, and periodic tests,” says Mukhopadhyay.

Prachi Salve reports.

‘Among Informal Workers, The Less Educated Travel The Farthest’

India’s migrant workers are an amorphous group, scattered across several states, moving for a variety of push and pull factors. To understand the profile of the average migrant, researchers at Azim Premji University looked at the eShram portal, a government registry of over 300 million unorganised sector workers.

I spoke with Tamoghna Halder, a co-author of the State of Working India 2026 report, to understand their findings. Halder teaches economics at the University and has a PhD from the University of California, Davis.

Informal workers are increasingly young and have relatively higher levels of education, reflecting a direct consequence of two decades of expanding educational enrolment across India, Halder told me.

But education shapes how far they travel. Less educated workers from eastern states travel the farthest, dominating destination districts across large parts of the country. More educated informal migrants stay closer to home, likely treating informal work as transitional while searching for formal opportunities nearby.

Halder identified three distinct migration channels: distress-driven dispersal from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; a combination of economic pressure and historically rooted corridors for migrants from Jharkhand and West Bengal; and spatial containment near Assam and Madhya Pradesh, despite similar poverty levels.

Underlying all of it is a demographic rebalancing. Ageing, richer states are absorbing surplus labour from younger, poorer ones.

Read the full interview here.

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

A single factory in Faridabad making automobile components saw 76 workers sustain life-altering injuries between 2018 and 2025, according to a new report released yesterday. This was despite repeatedly being flagged to the government and the auto brands that source material from it.

This one factory represents what’s wrong with the automobile supply chain sector, where workers suffer injuries—many of them ‘crush injuries’ losing two fingers, on average—working on faulty machines, often without formal training, for long hours beyond government stipulations. Two in three injured workers said their factory had been audited in the previous year, but 82% said auditors never spoke to them.

Many of these injuries never make it to government records, and workers face an uphill battle in accessing entitlements. About a fifth of workers and sixth of helpers who were injured said they did not receive a minimum wage. Only 5% received an appointment letter, about half do not receive salary slips, and most of those who do receive them report errors such as underreporting of working hours and lower wages for overtime.

And that’s just a part of the story. These data are based on workers assisted at SII’s Manesar, Faridabad and Gurugram centres in Haryana, and Mohan Nagar and Chakan in Maharashtra.

“SII posits that given its limited outreach nationally, many more thousands of workers continue to be injured in the automotive sector every year across the country,” the report states.

For our other story this week, we look at crime records for the year 2024 to understand the decline in domestic violence cases.

Preventable accidents in India’s factories

In 2025, the Safe in India Foundation assisted 2,514 injured factory workers across India—the highest in a decade. More than two-thirds were in the auto supply chain, working in factories that supply to India’s largest automobile brands.

Most workers who were injured were migrants, young, without formal training, putting in over 60 hours a week. Two in five knew their machines were malfunctioning and many had reported it to their supervisors. They were ignored.

Further, 93% of injuries involved power press machines—used to cut and shape metal—with no safety sensors. “Where sensors do exist, they’re often removed so the machine runs faster, and when workers raise the alarm, they’re ignored,” says Siddharth Raina of SII. “For a factory, the sensor is a small cost; for the worker, the cost is permanent—on average, two fingers lost.”

In Haryana, the Directorate General Factory Advice Service and Labour Institutes recorded 40 non-fatal factory injuries in 2023. That same year, SII assisted 1,041 injured workers in the state.

“Both government and buyer inspectors are essentially not reaching these factories, and when they do, they don’t talk to the workers,” says Dhanraj Balakrishna of SII.

Vijay Jadhav reports.

What declining domestic violence numbers conceal

Ganga (name changed), 31, starts her day at 6 a.m. She cooks and packs food for her children, drops them at school, and leaves for work. After nine hours, she comes home and cooks dinner. Most nights, her husband beats her. “I don’t think approaching the legal system will solve this,” she says.

Cases under “cruelty by husband or relatives” account for 27% of all crimes against women in India, according to the National Crime Records Bureau’s 2024 report. That year, India recorded, on average, 50 cases of crime against women every hour, down 10% from the previous year.

But legal experts say fewer complaints do not mean fewer incidents. “Cases are not reported or escalated, and intervention is not sought till the beating becomes life-threatening,” says Vibhuti Patel, social researcher and activist who has taught at TISS Mumbai. Even when women do come forward, most cases are dismissed as “family affairs” at the complaint stage, before an FIR is registered.

Attitudes help explain the persistence. A 2025 survey across 29 countries found 52% of Indian respondents agreed a wife should always obey her husband. Globally, Gen-Z men hold more traditional views on gender roles than older cohorts.

The National Family Health Survey 2023-24 found that 22% of ever-married women aged 18-49 had experienced spousal physical or sexual violence, down from 29% in 2019-21. Only 14% of women who face such violence ever sought help to stop it.

The legal system, Ganga says, offers little. Her one aspiration: to move out with her husband and children and live as a nuclear family. “I just want to be independent, my children to be educated well, and I want my husband to show some change.”

Saumya Tewari reports on what the numbers conceal and the distance that remains between law and lived experience.

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!