Yesterday, we had written on how India’s data centres are extracting a heavy toll on our environment while not providing a great deal in return. You can read about it in our Instagram post.

India’s data-centre capacity is on track to more than triple by 2030, from about 1.5 GW today to somewhere between 4.5 GW and 6.5 GW under the CEEW/Colliers/S&P base cases, with Deloitte projecting as much as 8–10 GW on the upside.

Around $95 billion has been committed between 2019 and 2025, and the pipeline is on track to exceed$100 billion by 2027. The Government of India has called data centres the “next oil economy” and is budgeting a tax holiday on data-centre profits to 2047. At least 15 Indian states have notified dedicated data-centre policies.

Power

Data centres consumed about 0.5% of India’s national electricity in 2024. At full build-out, the share is projected at 2.5–3% of total national demand by 2030, on installed capacity rising from 1,352 MW in 2024 to more than 8,300 MW by 2030. India’s grid is still coal-heavy. The IEA’s India profile has consistently put coal at roughly 70–75% of generation. So, every additional megawatt of data-centre load raises the embedded carbon of every LLM inference run on Indian soil. CEEW’s developer consultations put the practical ceiling for round-the-clock renewable matching, via geographically diversified solar–wind plus battery storage, at about 80%. The remaining 20% reverts to grid power, and through it to coal.

Water

CEEW puts current use at about 150 billion litres (15,000 crore litres) a year. Reccessary Dialogue Earth projects that rising to ~358 billion litres (36,000 crore litres) by 2030. A single 100 MW facility, by CEEW’s IEA-sourced benchmark and the Reccessary analysis, uses around 2 million litres a day for on-site cooling. Where does this water come from?

CEEW’s operator survey found that small facilities (under 5 MW) primarily rely on municipal supply. Larger ones often supplement from borewells (groundwater). Roughly [two-thirds of all new data centres built globally since 2022 have been in water-stressed regions. India’s four hyperscale hubs are all on the groundwater watch list:

Mumbai / Navi Mumbai: Hosts about a quarter of all Indian data centres. Maharashtra hosts about 45% of upcoming data-centre power capacity.

Bengaluru: Data centres alone use 26 million litres a year, against the backdrop of what residents and media called the city’s worst water crisis in nearly five centuries in 2024.

Hyderabad: Facing a [projected deficit of 870 million litres a day by 2027, even as Amazon continues to expand its campus there.

Chennai: India’s original Day Zero — the city’s main reservoirs [ran completely dry in 2019 — and still among the most-sought data-centre destinations.

To frame the volume against the CPHEEO urban standard of 135 litres per person per day , India’s projected 358 billion litres by 2030 is roughly the household water use of a Mumbai-sized city for a full week.

Land

As of January 2026, India hosted about 271 operational data centres occupying ~23 million square metres. The large hyperscale campuses coming up in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh — Reliance’s 1.5 GW Visakhapatnam hub, the Adani Group’s $100 billion pipeline to 2035 — will add substantial tracts of peri-urban land, typically prime agricultural or forest-fringe plots acquired via state single-window dispensations, that are not restored to non-industrial use afterward.

Diesel backup

CEEW’s stakeholder consultations are explicit: “Diesel generator (DG) sets remain an indispensable asset for meeting uptime and reliability requirements.” Hyperscale service-level agreements of 99.999% uptime cannot be met on a renewables-plus-grid-uncertainty stack without synchronous diesel backup. The pollution cost like particulate matter, NOx, and unburnt hydrocarbons, falls on the same urban municipalities that host the data centres, most of which already exceed WHO PM2.5 guidelines by multiples.

E-waste

Server refresh cycles of 3–5 years turn today’s build-out into tomorrow’s e-waste curve. India generated about 1.7 million tonnes of e-waste in 2024, with formal recycling capacity under 20%. The current CPCB framework does not single out data-centre server scrap, so it lands in the general e-waste stream and tracks poorly.

For every dollar the Indian state forgoes in a data-centre subsidy, it gets back ~$0.20–0.25 in permanent employment, ~2 million litres of freshwater consumption per 100 MW of capacity, and a slice of grid load that the country’s coal-heavy system will have to serve. Only 5 of 15 Indian state data-centre policies contain sustainability provisions, and water disclosure remains voluntary for most Indian operators. Given India’s 25% share of global groundwater extraction, and the [WEF’s designation of water scarcity as India’s top environmental risk for 2025–2027, three reforms are within reach:

(a) mandatory facility-level disclosure of water and power

(b) siting policy that steers new hyperscale load to coastal sites with seawater cooling, as Reliance is already doing in Visakhapatnam.

(c) converting a portion of state subsidies into equity or revenue-share stakes, as already piloted under the IndiaAI Mission’s compulsorily convertible debenture structure.

Sources:

PIB

The Ken

CEEW

Reccessary / Dialogue Earth

Countercurrents

IEEFA

IEA

Quartz

WEF

Our recent Instagram post: Delhi is the only capital on Earth where 91.2% of private schools sit within 5 km of a heavy-metal-contaminated site, and the city’s much-touted “green” garbage and air-quality solutions are part of the problem, not the fix.

Behind the headline AQI figure sits a much uglier one. Pure Earth’s India lead factsheet finds that 23 Indian states have a mean population blood-lead level above the 5 µg/dL reference threshold, and roughly 40% of India’s population carries a BLL of more than 7 µg/dL. At this level, children begin to lose measurable IQ, attention and behavioural regulation.

Vital Strategies’ analysis goes further: Half of all children in India have unsafe blood lead levels, and India accounts for over a quarter of all global deaths attributable to lead exposure.

That is a national registry that nobody is publishing school by school. And Delhi, with 91.2% of its schools nested inside the 5 km toxic radius, is the worst-affected capital on a list the CGD’s Lee Crawfurd compiled.

Translate the percentage into IQ points and the meaning sharpens. A 2022 systematic review found that even a BLL of 5 µg/dL is associated with decreased intelligence, behavioural problems, and learning deficits in children, and that the loss extends below that threshold. There is no safe floor. A Mexican cohort study pegged the average loss for lead-poisoned children (≥5 µg/dL) at about 6.42 IQ points per child, with some states losing more.

Multiply that across the South Asian population. A 2023 modelling study in The Lancet Planetary Health estimated that children under 5 globally lost 765 million IQ points to lead exposure. Pure Earth’s earlier global lead programme analysis put the LMIC-only fraction at 729 million IQ points lost — 5.9 IQ points per child, on average — and warned that lead poisoning may account for roughly 20% of the education gap between rich and poor countries.

So when 91.2% of Delhi’s private schools sit within a lead-and-heavy-metal radius, the affected cohort is not a few hundred children with elevated BLLs. It is a large fraction of the city’s school-age population, losing measurable IQ, attention and behavioural regulation at exactly the age those faculties are being built. Crawfurd’s 91.2% figure is a prediction about Delhi’s future workforce.

Where the Metal Comes From

Lead reaches those schools through the informal recycling network for used lead-acid batteries (ULABs). India has had rules on paper since 2001. The Batteries (Management and Handling) Rules, 2001, and their 2010 amendment, put Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and a Deposit Refund Scheme on the books, and set a 90% collection target that has rarely been met in practice. The Battery Waste Management Rules, 2022 replaced the older regime with stricter traceability, but the implementation gap remains the same: the formal EPR chain handles a fraction of the volume, and the rest bleeds into the informal 90%.

The Pahle India Foundation’s ULAB study documented what that gap looks like on the ground: an informal ULAB recycling unit operating below school premises, in residential and mixed-use neighbourhoods. Its exactly the type of toxic hotspot the CGD map identifies in Delhi. Pure Earth’s Toxic Sites Identification Program (TSIP) report frames the same picture at scale: informal ULAB recycling creates highly localised contamination hotspots that routinely sit next to schools and homes, because that is where the cost of land is lowest.

The Hindu’s reporting on a 2025 multi-state soil study confirms the soil signature. Researchers examined 23 soil samples around ULAB units across India, including Delhi-NCR, and found high lead contamination extending beyond the immediate fence line of the recycling operation — the same pattern that pulls the CGD 5 km radius into focus.

Okhla is Still Burning

In 2012, Delhi commissioned a waste-to-energy plant in Okhla. This plant is designed to convert solid waste to electricity. The waste is burned at a high temperature. The steam produced from the heat drives turbines connected to the generators, producing electricity.

The Okhla plant is operated by the Jindal Group in partnership with the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. The plant is in the neighbourhood of “some of the country’s most prestigious hospitals, schools and even a Ferrari dealership,” as per The New York Times. The plant burns around 3,000 tons of garbage a day, and belches out toxic smoke that affects rich and poor alike.

The plant is supposed to be regulated. It’s not. It is supposed to meet pollution control standards. It doesn’t. The ash from the plant is supposed to be disposed properly. It isn’t. An NYT article has investigated this plant for five years. It talks of children and adults suffering from asthma, more women in the area suffering miscarriages, and people requiring nebulisers to breathe.

The analysis revealed alarmingly high levels of harmful heavy metals like cadmium, lead, and arsenic. Cadmium levels were a staggering 19 times the safe limit, while manganese and arsenic were 11 and 10 times higher, respectively.

The NGT’s 142-page judgement on the Okhla waste-to-energy plant could have closed this chapter on Delhi. Instead, in 2017, it cleared the plant to operate, asked for tightened pollution-control equipment, and explicitly declined to shift or shut it down. NDTV reported that by the NGT’s own update, almost 90% of the work at Okhla had been completed, and the plant was allowed to resume operations in full. More recent filings before the NGT in 2024 note that the Okhla plant has a processing capacity of 1,950 metric tonnes per day, and is one of three waste-to-energy plants on the capital’s books, alongside Ghazipur and Narela.

In other words, the single facility whose dioxin emissions the NYT found at up to 10× the legal limit is still operating at near-full load, and the regime of toxic ash dumped under parks, schools and wedding halls has not changed.

Why India’s AQI Cannot See the Problem

The Indian AQI tracks eight pollutants — PM2.5, PM10, SO₂, NO₂, O₃, CO, NH₃, and Pb. Lead is the only heavy metal on that dashboard. CPCB’s National Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Programme (NAMP), as set out in the 2003 guidelines, runs a network designed primarily for criteria pollutants and TSPM. Independent academic monitoring in industrial cities has found that heavy metals in PM10/PM2.5 and road dust “often exceed safe limits”. But those metals don’t show up on the headline AQI number that drives odd-even, construction halts, and political panic.

So a Delhi parent watching the AQI tracker on their phone sees 764, takes some precautions, and walks their child past a ULAB unit or an Okhla ash dump without the dashboard ever blinking. The AQI is, in this sense, structurally honest about smog and structurally blind to lead — and lead is doing most of the IQ damage.

The Mexico City Counter-example and What Delhi Hasn’t Copied

Crawfurd points to Mexico City as a dense, populous capital with almost no toxic-site contamination because its industrial and recycling zones have been effectively regulated and physically separated from the urban core. India has the regulatory tools. It has used them — toxic sites have been shut down and relocated, but only when public pressure crested. The CGD finding is that this happens case by case, not as policy. The Indian government’s own CSIR-NITI Aayog assessment, 2022 Assessment of Lead Impact on Human and India’s Response, lays out the interventions — source control, air-quality improvement, occupational safety inspections — without committing to enforcement scales.

Until source control at ULAB units, ash disposal at Okhla, and the AQI’s blind spot are addressed together, every Delhi winter of AQI 764 / 700+ will be matched by a steady, much-less-visible rise in childhood blood-lead in the very zip codes that house the 91.2% of schools.

Sources:

Pure Earth — India’s Lead Crisis factsheet.

Vital Strategies

Heidari et al., 2022 (PMC)

Figueroa et al., 2024, ScienceDirect

Larsen & Landrigan, 2023, Lancet Planetary Health

Pure Earth — Global Lead Programme

The Batteries Rules, 2001 — HSPCB CEEW analysis of ULAB recycling rules in India

Corpbiz analysis of Battery Waste Management Rules, 2022 UN-Page note on the Draft Battery Waste Management Rules.

Pahle India Foundation ULAB report, 2024

Pure Earth TSIP India report, 2021

The Hindu — High levels of lead contamination near battery recycling units ETV Bharat coverage

Down To Earth — NGT judgement on Okhla waste plant: no lessons learnedSukhdev Vihar Residents Welfare Association v. State, NGT order text via CaseMine

NDTV Swachh India — Green Tribunal clears Okhla

NGT 2024 MCD comprehensive report NGT 2023 daily order text

CPCB Guidelines for Ambient Air Quality Monitoring, 2003 (PDF)

Kumari et al., 2021 (PMC) TERI heavy metals report, 2021

Pure Earth — CSIR-NITI Aayog 2022 Lead Report

Our Instagram post a couple of days back laid out the reasons why rains are making Assam floods worse. Rain-soaked catchments in Nagaland, silt-laden runoff flowing down into the smaller rivers of Assam, and a floodplain wetland system — the beels — that has been quietly drained, encroached and built over for half a century. This newsletter pulls back the camera. How many beels? How many hectares lost? How much money, how many lives, decade by decade? And what in the natural world is now missing because of it?

70 Years of Flood Math

Long before “climate change” entered Indian policy language, Assam’s flood numbers were already visible on a steepening curve. The State Water Resources Department’s own records, organised by decade, show that from 1953–59 an average of 1.13 million hectares were inundated each year and 8.6 lakh people were affected. The average annual flood damage was ₹ 586 lakh.

By 1999–2005, an average 1.07 million hectares were still going underwater, but the population affected had jumped to 45.86 lakh per year and damage had soared to ₹ 71,717 lakh — over 120 times the 1950s figure. The cropped-area share inside the flood footprint also evolved: in the 1950s only 9% of inundated land was cropland, by the 1980s it was 28%, because agriculture had moved into the floodplain that used to be wetland

The same department finds that 31.05 lakh ha — 39.58% of Assam’s land — is officially flood-prone, almost four times the national average of 10.2%, and Assam’s flood-prone area alone accounts for 9.4% of India’s total. Big recorded waves struck in 1954, 1962, 1972, 1977, 1984, 1988, 1998, 2002, 2004 and 2012, and average annual losses are pegged at about ₹ 200 crore, with 1998 hitting ₹ 500 crore and 2004 ₹ 771 crore.

Beels that Disappeared

The cleanest single dataset on the wetlands is the ICAR-Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute’s vulnerability study, which concluded that about 70% of Assam’s beels shrank in water-spread area over the past 30 years, largely through siltation, encroachment and road construction severing them from parent rivers.

Individual cases put a face on the number. Deepor Beel, Assam’s only Ramsar wetland, was once 4,000 ha; today it is approximately 500 ha, a roughly 87.5% loss, with landfill, encroachment and railway-ballast dumping cited as the main causes. Silsako Beel, on the edge of Guwahati, has collapsed from 450 acres to about 80 acres under illegal encroachments. Son Beel, the largest in the state at Karimganj (Sribhumi), historically expanded to over 9,800 ha in flood season and held 4,388 ha in the dry season — but in recent winters, when the wetland should be most ecologically productive, surviving open-water fragments total less than 500 ha.

The Asian Development Bank’s current restoration project covers 102 beels across 4,000 ha in 25 districts — roughly the area of one mid-sized beel that has been damaged or destroyed. At the national level, about one-third of India’s natural wetlands have been lost in the last four decades to urbanisation, agricultural expansion and pollution.

The Species Paying the Bill

The numbers become more than an environmental abstraction in the wildlife column. Deepor Beel has historically supported the largest wintering concentration of the Greater Adjutant Stork in Assam — a species with fewer than 2,000 mature individuals left globally, classified Endangered by the IUCN. The Bengal Florican, a critically endangered grassland bird whose viable Indian population clings to the char-and-beel fringes of Manas, Kaziranga, Orang and D’Ering, has fallen to fewer than 1,000 mature individuals globally, with the IUCN attributing the decline principally to grassland habitat loss.

The ICAR-CIFRI team also documented broken spawning cycles in native major carps tied to dry-season shrinkage, and the spread of the invasive Piaractus brachypomus — locally called Rupchanda — into beels such as Hakama, threatening small indigenous fish.

The Brahmaputra and Majuli Crises

While the beels were being filled in, the mother river was simultaneously eating Assam’s old alluvial land. Surveys put the Brahmaputra’s surface area inside Assam at 3,870 km² (1912–28), 4,850 km² (1963–75) and 6,080 km² (2006 NESAC survey) — a roughly 57% widening in less than a century. In cumulative terms, 4.27 lakh hectares of Assam — 7.4% of the state’s area — has been physically removed by the Brahmaputra and its tributaries since 1950, with average annual land loss near 8,000 ha.

The iconic casualty is Majuli, which was once 1,265 sq km and the world’s largest inhabited river island; today only about 525 sq km of stable land remains, and one 2014 Geomorphology study recorded 35.5% of the island’s land area lost during just 1997–2007. Among the 423 major embankments Assam has built since the 1950s, 295 have outlived their design life and breach routinely even in years of near-normal rainfall.

Recent Floods, Recent Numbers

The beel-and-breach machinery is fully visible in the modern record. In 2022, Assam floods killed 197 people, displaced over 200,000 and affected more than 5 million. In 2024, the most intense floods in over a decade triggered 2.5 million internal displacements, with Dhubri alone recording 5.6 lakh movements.

In July 2026, the Naga-hill catchments — Mon recorded 137 mm of rain during 18–20 July — drove runoff through rivers like the Burhi Dihing, Disang, Dikhou, Dhansiri, Bhogdoi and Kushiyara, with the Assam State Disaster Management Authority reporting 61–68 deaths and over 7.45 lakh people affected across 935 villages, and about 50,000 ha of cropland damaged in the first wave.

Water releases from the Doyang Hydroelectric Project in Nagaland worsened the surge downstream. The Brahmaputra at Dibrugarh was at 104.90 m against a danger level of 105.70 m as of late July, with Guwahati also recording a sharp rise.

What the next decade looks like

The data trilogy — wetter monsoons in the hills, vanishing beels in the floodplain, an aging armour of 295 embankments — has so far been answered principally through more embankments, more pumps, more ex-gratia. The ADB wetland project is more ecologically tuned but its 4,000 ha is a sliver of what has been lost. These numbers aren’t forecasts; they are the long-run curve any solution has to bend. Same monsoon, smaller buffer, bigger flood, again. Until the beels come back.

Sources:

Government of Assam, Water Resources Dept.

ICSF / ICAR-CIFRI

The Diplomat

Guwahati Plus / Sentinel Assam

Key Biodiversity Areas

Mongabay India

ADB Project 57042-001

Article-14

Earth Island Journal

Aaranyak Bengal Florican Project;

The Revelator

India Water Portal

Lahiri & Sinha 2014

PreventionWeb

Open Contracting Partnership

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre

The Statesman

The Hindu

Dibrugarh24x7 / Assam Water Resources Department

India’s ethanol policy is usually presented through three numbers: Lower oil imports, lower emissions and higher farmer income. The government’s own July 2026 Q&A says the Ethanol Blended Petrol Programme, running since ESY 2014-15, has already saved over ₹1.97 lakh crore in foreign exchange, substituted nearly 316 lakh metric tonnes of crude oil, reduced around 952 lakh metric tonnes of CO₂ emissions, and transferred more than ₹1.66 lakh crore to farmers.

The same official note says India moved from about 8.1% blending in ESY 2020-21 to 20% in ESY 2025-26 (Nov-June 2026). On those terms, ethanol is not a marginal experiment anymore. It is a large, embedded fuel policy with fiscal, agricultural and distribution consequences.

But ethanol is a hungry monster. It has gone beyond simple molasses. In August 2025, the government said it had approved allocation of 52 lakh metric tonnes of surplus FCI rice for ethanol production for ESY 2024-25, and another 52 LMT for ESY 2025-26 up to 30 June 2026. The same reply said diversion of 40 LMT of sugar for ethanol production had been allowed for ESY 2024-25.

A Water Hungry Beast

Separately, an India Today report in April 2026 said the government had allocated 52 lakh tonnes of rice for ethanol in 2024-25 and was targeting 90 lakh tonnes in 2025-26, while considering a reduction in the share of broken rice distributed under the public distribution system from 25% to 10%.

That shift is what gives the Madhya Pradesh allegations national significance. A Dainik Bhaskar investigation alleges that 5 lakh metric tonnes, or 50 lakh quintals, of government rice worth around ₹1,160 crore were drawn into a diversion chain instead of being converted into ethanol. The report says the stock was fortified rice meant for children, pregnant women and adolescent girls to address anaemia and malnutrition.

It also sets out an alleged mechanism: ethanol plant operators received government rice at the policy price, sold it onward to millers, and the grain was then allegedly repacked and moved back into the public system as custom-milled rice. The legal case will turn on evidence, but the policy issue is already visible: a programme that buys grain cheaply for fuel becomes far more sensitive when the grain is a welfare-linked nutritional stock and not ordinary surplus.

The pricing structure is central to why the allegation matters. Bhaskar says rice that cost the government roughly ₹3,900-4,000 per quintal to procure, store and process was being supplied to ethanol plants at ₹2,320 per quintal. That number is consistent with the Centre’s broader policy.

A report on the government’s Open Market Sale Scheme (OMSS-D) 2026-27 says FCI rice for ethanol distilleries has been priced at ₹2,320 per quintal until October 31, 2026, rising to ₹2,390 per quintal from November 1, while the estimated economic cost of that rice is around ₹4,100 per quintal. The same report says that old or broken rice should be used for ethanol “to the extent feasible”, which makes Bhaskar’s allegation about new fortified rice particularly serious if established.

The water arithmetic is where the policy begins to look different. The India Today report, citing Food Secretary Sanjeev Chopra, said producing one litre of ethanol from rice requires about 10,790 litres of water, most of it embedded in cultivation rather than distillation. The same report put the comparative figure at about 4,670 litres per litre of ethanol for maize and around 3,630 litres for sugarcane.

Even if one allows for methodological variation in water-footprint calculations, the directional point is difficult to miss: Rice is among the most water-intensive ways to make transport fuel. Once rice enters the ethanol system at scale, water scarcity stops being an indirect concern and becomes part of the policy ledger itself.

The government has been warned about groundwater stress for years. In its Composite Water Management Index, NITI Aayog said 54% of India’s groundwater wells are declining, and that 21 major cities were expected to run out of groundwater “as soon as 2020”, affecting about 100 million people.

That forecast is now dated, but the significance of the report lies less in the exact year than in the direction of stress it documented. Using grain-based ethanol to reduce exposure to imported oil may still be a defensible strategic choice. But if part of that strategy relies on crops with very high embedded water use, the policy should be discussed not only as an energy transition but also as a reallocation of scarce water through agricultural and industrial channels.

There is also a straightforward fiscal question. The government’s defence of ethanol is not that it always makes petrol cheaper at the pump. In fact, its own July 2026 Q&A says the opposite: If crude is trading at around US$70 per barrel, E20 is actually costlier to produce than pure petrol.

The official argument is instead that ethanol stabilises part of the fuel basket because ethanol is procured domestically at a relatively fixed administered price — the Q&A cites around ₹71 per litre — and therefore shields part of the fuel mix from international crude volatility. That is a coherent macroeconomic case, but it is different from a retail price-cut case. It means ethanol should be evaluated as a risk-buffer and import-management tool, not sold as a guaranteed cheaper fuel in normal crude conditions.

That same official note also addresses a demand now common in public debate: Offer pure petrol, E10 and E20 simultaneously and let consumers choose. The government says that is impractical because India operates over one lakh retail fuel outlets, backed by an extensive system of refineries, terminals, depots and pipelines.

Maintaining multiple grades of base petrol across that network, according to the note, would raise handling costs, complicate inventory management and reduce operating efficiency. Whether one agrees or not, that answer identifies another hidden cost in the ethanol debate. The trade-off is not simply “blended fuel versus unblended fuel”; it is standardisation across a national distribution system versus a more differentiated retail offering that would itself require investment and duplication. PIB

Politics versus People

The legal and political messaging around ethanol has also become harder to separate from the economics. On 30 June 2026, media reports said the Attorney General had told the Supreme Court that the E20 programme was “still an ongoing experiment” whose impact would become clearer by next year. The next day, the Union Law Ministry issued a formal clarification saying those reports were “completely false” and that “at no stage” had the government described the E20 programme as an experiment. The Indian Express report made clear that the underlying litigation concerned ethanol allocation to dedicated ethanol plants, not a fresh judicial review of the entire blending programme. The immediate result was a familiar policy problem: once a large programme enters court-linked reporting, ambiguity over what exactly is being defended — allocation rules, blending levels, or the fuel itself — tends to damage public confidence even when the government later clarifies the record.

What can be established from the official daily price-monitoring system is that the all-India average retail price of sugar was ₹47.66 per kg on 11 July 2026. What can also be established is that the government had allowed 40 LMT of sugar to be diverted for ethanol production in ESY 2024-25. What cannot be established from these pieces of evidence alone is the exact share of current retail sugar prices attributable to ethanol diversion, because that would require a longer series covering crop output, stock levels, export controls, mill economics and state-wise retail variation. The existence of an ethanol link is therefore a policy fact; the magnitude of its contribution to sugar inflation is still an empirical question that needs more transparent public data than is currently on the table. PIB

The government has published clear numbers on blending levels, import savings and farmer payments. It has been less forthcoming, at least in the material publicly available here, on plant-wise grain-to-ethanol conversion, state-wise water stress exposure linked to feedstock choice, and the practical consequences of moving subsidised foodgrain into the fuel chain. Those are not side questions anymore. PIB PIB NITI Aayog

The narrow policy case for ethanol remains intact: India imports a large share of its crude oil, and domestically produced blending components reduce that exposure. But the hidden costs are no longer hypothetical.

Sources:

PIB

India Today

Dainik Bhaskar

Dainik Bhaskar English

Rural Voice

NITI Aayog

PIB

Indian Express

fcainfoweb.nic.in

If approved, the Thane Integral Ring Metro Rail Project will become one of the most consequential infrastructure projects in Thane’s recent history. On paper, it is a ₹12,200.10-crore, 29-km circular metro corridor with 22 stations, 26 km elevated and 3 km underground, cleared by the Union Cabinet in August 2024 and targeted for completion by 2029.

In planning language, it is supposed to unlock circular mobility, integrate with the wider metro system, and reshape land use around stations. In environmental terms, however, it will destroy mangroves, tree cover, a slice of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, and be constructed inside SGNP’s eco-sensitive zone.

The Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority’s 199th meeting agenda for 29 June 2026 includes the “Proposed Thane Integral Ring Metro Project,” confirming that the line has come up for coastal-environment consideration. Does Thane needs better transport? Of course. But does it need it in this form?

What the project is supposed to do

Officially, the metro is pitched as a major urban connector for a city growing fast in population, employment and land values. The Centre says the ring line will connect prominent parts of Thane including Naupada, Wagle Estate, Dongripada, Hiranandani Estate, Kolshet and Saket, and eventually integrate with the wider metro-rail ecosystem.

Maha Metro’s project note says the line will run along the western periphery of Thane, with 22 stations and projected daily ridership of 6.47 lakh in 2029, 7.61 lakh in 2035, and 8.72 lakh in 2045.

The project’s own Detailed Project Report (DPR) — DPR meaning Detailed Project Report — situates this inside a much broader growth story. It takes Thane’s study area as 147 sq km, records a 2011 population of 18.4 lakh, and projects that population to rise to 27.3 lakh in 2027, 35.0 lakh in 2035, and 39.4 lakh in 2045. It also says the city’s density is already 12,527 persons per sq km. In other words, the planners’ case is not that Thane might grow, but that it is already dense and will become far denser.

But the route doesn’t actually match Thane’s actual travel patterns. Whether a circular metro is the right answer for a city many critics say still moves mainly in radial ways is a matter of debate. Thanekars travel toward the suburban rail spine, toward job centres, and toward key corridors like Ghodbunder Road and the Eastern Express Highway.

When you look at that travel, the project’s benefits don’t seem enough to justify its environmental footprint.

Mangroves Last

The number that has become the most politically explosive is 5,380 mangroves. A Hindustan Times report, based on project details before regulators, says the line would affect 29,871.87 sq m of direct mangrove area and another 40,926.53 sq m in the mangrove buffer zone. This is not a marginal or incidental overlap. It means the project footprint reaches into one of the most ecologically sensitive coastal systems available to Thane — a system that acts as flood buffer, nursery habitat and carbon sink in a city-region already repeatedly punished by monsoon stress.

The same report says no concluded compensatory afforestation proposal had been put in place for mangroves at the time, with the decision left to the Mangrove Protection Cell. That is a serious gap because it means the destruction is numerically specified, but the restoration framework appears deferred. In any high-impact urban infrastructure proposal, that asymmetry should set off alarms: the loss is concrete, while the remedy remains abstract.

Then the project reaches into Sanjay Gandhi National Park

The mangroves are only one layer of the conflict. The same project details cited by Hindustan Times say the alignment passes through 500.32 metres of Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), affecting 0.7863 hectares of forest land, and through 3.599 km of the park’s eco-sensitive zone, affecting 6.8721 hectares of non-forest land.

Why does this matter so much? The Environment Ministry’s final notification defines the SGNP ESZ as 59.46 sq km, comprising 19.25 sq km of forest land and 40.21 sq km of non-forest land, extending from 100 metres up to 4 km from the park boundary. Once a metro project cuts through that geography, the issue is not only direct forest diversion; it is also precedent, edge pressure, and the cumulative urbanisation logic that follows high-capacity transport into fragile terrain.

3,000 Trees to Face the Axe

Environmentalists cited by Hindustan Times say the project will affect more than 3,000 trees. But The Times of India reports a major discrepancy between official assessments: the Maha Metro DPR estimated 662 trees, whereas the municipal Tree Authority identified 3,224 trees for felling or transplantation. That is not a minor difference of method. It is the difference between a contained mitigation issue and a city-scale tree-loss event.

What exactly is being reviewed, on what data, and under whose assumptions? In urban megaprojects, credibility often collapses not when critics produce new numbers, but when two arms of the system produce radically different ones. If the DPR can say 662 while the Tree Authority sees 3,224, the minimum public expectation should have been a more explicit reconciliation before clearance-stage movement.

Does the Line At Least Serve the Places Where People Already Live?

Yes, but not comprehensively.

The official route map includes stations such as Raila Devi, Wagle Circle, Lokmanya Nagar Bus Depot, Shivaji Nagar, Manpada, Dongripada, Waghbil, Patlipada, Kolshet Industrial Area, Balkum Naka, Rabodi, Shivaji Chowk, Thane Junction and New Thane. The project therefore clearly overlaps western and central Thane zones that are already active, built-up and, in some cases, primed for further growth.

The DPR reinforces that point. It says Wagle Estate and Vartaknagar have the largest populations, describes Ghodbunder Road as a major growth corridor shaped by township and high-rise development, and identifies the intra-city parts of Thane as densely populated. But the DPR also notes that Mumbra and Kalwa are among Thane’s dense population concentrations — and these do not sit on the ring alignment. So the route is not a simple map of “serve the most people first.” It is better understood as a hybrid between a mobility project and a west-Thane/growth-corridor structuring project.

That is exactly why critics’ “radial vs circular” objection deserves more attention than it has received. According to the Times of India, transport planners and urban experts argued that Thane’s commuting patterns remain largely radial, not circular. If that assessment is right, then the line may do very well for land development, corridor restructuring and certain local trips, while still failing to address the highest-pressure everyday movement patterns that define how the city currently functions.

The Real-estate Story Under the Transport Story

This is where TOD — Transit-Oriented Development — becomes central. The DPR does not treat the metro merely as a ridership machine; it treats it as a development engine. It assumes a 500-metre TOD corridor on either side of the line, and in the absence of a notified Thane-specific TOD policy, it uses a Nagpur-style model for estimating value capture and development potential. Under those assumptions, the project’s TOD framework contemplates maximum permissible FSI up to 4.0 in parts of the influence zone, depending on road width and plot size.

The DPR builds actual revenue assumptions around development intensity. It estimates roughly ₹90.1 crore from premium on additional FSI, ₹207 crore from a 1% additional surcharge on property transactions, and ₹256 crore from development charges. It also projects 4.87 million sq ft of office absorption along the TOD corridor, with the most significant office upside expected in the Ghodbunder/Pokhran clusters and in Wagle Estate through industrial-to-commercial redevelopment.

The same logic underpins the much-cited 20.68 million sq ft residential number. The DPR first projects about 28,250 housing units of citywide demand over 30 years after existing unsold inventory is absorbed. It then assumes 70%–80% of that demand will shift into the metro TOD corridor, or about 19,500–22,500 units. After subtracting roughly 3,900 units that can be built on identified vacant TOD-corridor land, it arrives at about 17,250 additional units. Using an average unit size of 1,200 sq ft, the DPR converts that to roughly 20.68 million sq ft of additional residential built-up demand. This is not “land area” in the literal sense; it is a calculation of metro-linked developable floor space.

In other words, the project is making two bets at once. First, that it will move people. Second, that it will reshape the real-estate economy of west and central Thane around stations. Supporters may see that as smart integration of mobility and land use. Opponents may see it as a clue to the project’s real centre of gravity: not mobility justice for the whole city, but premium land unlocking along favoured corridors.

Paraphrasing our Instagram post: Pune is a city of hills and rivers, yet it is now running short of water on both counts. From 15 June 2026 the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) will supply water only on alternate days — and at the very same moment it is pushing roads and tunnels through Vetal Tekdi, the green hill that is one of the city’s most important natural water tanks.

All photos by Tuhin Rao.

To understand why that combination has alarmed scientists and citizens alike, you have to start with what the hill actually does.

Three Projects, One Hill

What threatens Vetal Tekdi is not one scheme but three overlapping ones, which residents say have often been discussed as if they were alternatives rather than additions.

The first is the Balbharati–Paud Phata (BBPP) link road, a roughly 2.1-kilometre, 30-metre-wide road meant to connect Kothrud and Senapati Bapat Road by skirting the foothills behind ILS Law College. A 2022 Detailed Project Report priced it at ₹252 crore; residents and reviewers say the figure has since crossed ₹300 crore as designs grew to include elevated stretches, a flyover and an underpass.

The second is a set of twin road tunnels through the hill — historically the Panchvati–Sutardhara and Panchvati–Gokhale Nagar links, with Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis directing in September 2025 that the Taljai–Pachgaon and Sutardara–Panchvati tunnels be fast-tracked, soil testing already done.

The third is the High Capacity Mass Transit Route (HCMTR), a ring road whose alignment the PMC general body approved in October 2021 and the state cleared in 2024 — with project pillars, according to the road’s own DPR, standing in the middle of the BBPP alignment. Taken together, experts cited in reporting warn of at least 7,000 trees lost, fragmented wildlife corridors and disrupted recharge zones across the hill complex.

A Hill That Doubles Up as Infrastructure

Vetal Tekdi is the highest point inside Pune’s municipal limits, rising to about 800 metres, and forms part of the Bhamburda Van Vihar on the western edge of the city. The broader hill complex spreads across roughly 10.5 square kilometres. Its real importance, though, is underground.

Pune sits on basalt. A strategic hydrogeological appraisal of the city identified a network of about 14 basalt aquifers of varying thickness and extent, some shallow and unconfined (tapped by dug wells), others deeper and confined (reached by borewells). The city’s annual urban groundwater footprint runs to more than 100 million cubic metres. Crucially, the natural recharge and discharge belt for western Pune is the ridge running through ARAI Hill, Vetal Tekdi, Chaturshringi, Bavdhan and the MIT College area. Exactly the high ground that planners now want to cut through.

One attempt to price all this — a valuation study of Vetal Tekdi’s ecosystem services — put the total value of the urban forest in the region of $171 billion, with the water stored in its aquifers alone valued at several trillion rupees, dwarfing every other service the hill provides.

Whatever one makes of the precise figure, the point is hard to dispute: the hill behaves like buried public infrastructure that no engineer can rebuild.

An Old Fight

The resistance is not new. On 14 July 1982, resident Lata Shrikhande received a letter from the then Director General of Road Development confirming that a highway across Law College Hill had been scrapped after public opposition — the first time Punekars saved this hill.

But the road kept returning. PMC revived it through a 1996 resolution; the forest department warned from 2000 onwards that survey plots along the route were forest land needing central clearance; construction began at Paud Phata in 2006 before the citizen group Nagrik Chetna Manch, led by retired Major General Sudhir Jathar, won a Bombay High Court stay. In January 2016 the High Court struck the project down, ruling that a man-made forest could not be destroyed without a proper Environmental Impact Assessment vetted by experts.

A six-member expert committee followed in 2018. Its two independent members — Jathar and transport expert Prashant Inamdar — concluded the road would cause irreversible ecological damage while, by the consultants’ own admission, easing traffic for only about 12 years. Jathar’s review documented native trees such as Khair and Kadulimb, 45 bird species, 13 butterflies and five reptiles, identified more than half the alignment as high or moderate conservation priority, and noted that the consultants had buried their own finding that the area is “a useful groundwater recharge zone.” The committee’s final report, the members say, was never properly convened before tenders were floated anyway.

Politics, Suspicion and the “Deemed Forest”

The project’s fortunes have tracked Maharashtra’s politics closely. The tunnel idea, first floated in the 2013–2041 City Development Plan, was rejected by an NCP–Congress-led committee in February 2015, then reintroduced after the state took over the Development Plan under the BJP in 2015–17, stalled under the Maha Vikas Aghadi, and revived again when the BJP returned to power in 2022.

When a PMC pre-feasibility survey actually asked residents near the tunnel mouths what they thought, 79% opposed the project and only 21% supported it.

Citizens have also questioned the motive. A lawyer quoted in reporting alleged the BBPP road’s real purpose is to give a private township off Paud Road direct access to Senapati Bapat Road, noting that the township was approved in 2019 but left out of the EIA, and that a 2020 request to realign the road to merge with the HCMTR was approved at an additional ₹16 crore.

The political tone has not helped: In April 2023, citizens raising green concerns say they were told by a state minister that if they loved jungles so much, homes could be built for them in Gadchiroli.

The legal picture remains live. In February 2025 the Bombay High Court disposed of Nagrik Chetna Manch’s petition while directing PMC to obtain forest and environmental clearances and to settle whether the land is “deemed forest.” In May 2025 the Central Empowered Committee instructed the state that no work proceed in deemed-forest stretches, invoking the Supreme Court’s 1996 T.N. Godavarman judgment. A separate Special Leave Petition is pending before the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile the ambitions only grow: the PMRDA’s proposed Yerawada–Katraj corridor envisions roughly 20 kilometres of tunnel passing beneath Taljai and Vetal hills.

For 40 years, residents have planted trees on Vetal Tekdi and gone to court to defend it. As Pune enters a summer of alternate-day taps, the choice in front of it is unusually stark: whether to bore through its own groundwater store for the sake of a faster commute, or to treat the hill as the piece of water infrastructure the science says it already is.

Sources:

India Water Portal

Newslaundry

Athens Journal study, PDF

PMC project page

Bridge Chronicle

Newslaundry

Punekar News

Newslaundry

Pune Pulse

NoBrokerage development blog

On June 9, 2026, we posted on Instagram how the South Lhonak glacial lake in the Himalayas burst causing ₹18,000 crore worth of damage in Sikkim. It’s not the only one.

India has identified 189 glacial lakes as high-risk, capable of triggering Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs). These are sudden floods that occur when natural dams holding a glacial lake collapse, releasing millions of cubic metres of water downstream. These floods can wipe out roads, bridges, villages, hydropower projects and entire river valleys within hours.

The concern is growing because Himalayan glaciers are retreating rapidly. As glaciers shrink, meltwater accumulates behind unstable dams made of ice, rock and debris. These dams can fail because of landslides, avalanches, earthquakes, intense rainfall or glacier collapse.

Is India preparing for a future in which such disasters become increasingly common?

The Himalayas Are Quietly Being Re-engineered

For most of human history, glaciers were viewed as permanent features of mountain landscapes. They moved slowly, but they were stable enough for generations to treat them as constants.

Climate change is breaking that assumption.

Across the Himalayas, glaciers are retreating, thinning and fragmenting. As they melt, they leave behind depressions that fill with water. What emerges is a growing network of glacial lakes perched thousands of metres above river valleys.

These lakes are often held back by moraines—natural dams made of loose rock, sediment and glacial debris. Unlike engineered dams, moraines were never designed to withstand extreme pressure. They are geological leftovers.

The danger is that these lakes can grow silently for years and then fail suddenly.

A landslide falls into the lake. An avalanche crashes into the water. An earthquake destabilises the moraine. A chunk of glacier breaks off. Within minutes, an enormous volume of water can surge downstream.

To people living in mountain valleys, the flood often arrives with little warning.

Scientists have documented hundreds of glacial lake outburst floods across High Mountain Asia over the last century. What worries researchers today is that climate change is increasing both the number and size of potentially dangerous lakes.

Sikkim Was Not A Surprise

When South Lhonak Lake burst in October 2023, much of the public viewed it as a freak disaster. Scientists did not.

The lake had been monitored for years. Researchers had repeatedly identified it as one of the most dangerous glacial lakes in the eastern Himalayas. Satellite imagery showed it expanding rapidly, and the possibility of an outburst was repeatedly flagged.

Then the scenario everyone feared materialised. A massive landslide and glacier collapse triggered a wave inside the lake. The moraine dam failed, and nearly 40 million cubic metres of ice-cold water rushed into the Teesta basin.

The results were devastating. Entire bridges and roads disappeared. NHPC’s hydropower infrastructure suffered extensive damage. Communities across the valley were cut off. More than 60,000 people were affected.

India has identified multiple dangerous lakes. 189 at last count. But the problem is translating scientific warnings into meaningful risk reduction. Knowing a flood may occur is not the same as preventing it.

The Dam Question Nobody Likes Discussing

India is turning the Himalayas into an infrastructure corridor. Roads, tunnels, military installations, tourism facilities and hydropower projects are spreading through valleys that were once sparsely developed.

As climate risk rises, economic exposure rises alongside it. A glacial lake outburst that might have damaged a remote valley fifty years ago can now destroy assets worth thousands of crores.

Government assessments have identified more than a hundred dams that may face varying levels of exposure to GLOF-related hazards. Now, tThis does not mean all of them are in immediate danger.

But, it does mean that planners are confronting a new challenge. Infrastructure needs to be designed away from historical climate assumptions. They have to include future risks that were never incorporated into its design. India is failing on this count.

The Teesta III hydropower project became an example of this dilemma. The project suffered catastrophic damage during the 2023 Sikkim disaster.

Most public attention focuses on large glacial lakes. That makes intuitive sense. Bigger lakes appear more threatening. But some researchers argue that this focus may be causing dangerous blind spots.

Recent studies suggest thousands of smaller glacial lakes receive limited monitoring despite occupying highly unstable terrain. A small lake situated above a steep valley can still generate destructive floods. In some cases, chains of connected lakes may amplify downstream impacts.

This creates a monitoring challenge. Large lakes can usually be tracked through dedicated programs and satellite surveillance but hundreds of smaller lakes cannot.

The Himalayas therefore present a classic risk-management problem. Policymakers know where some dangers are located. They are less certain about many others.

Can Technology Solve This?

India is increasingly turning to technology. Remote sensing satellites now track lake expansion across large portions of the Himalayas. Automated monitoring systems are being installed at selected sites. Early-warning networks are expanding. Scientists are using advanced modelling tools to estimate flood pathways and downstream impacts.

But technology has limits. The Himalayas remain one of the world’s most complex mountain systems where weather conditions change rapidly, landslides occur without notice, and glaciers are unpredictable.

Forecasting exactly when a moraine dam will fail remains extraordinarily difficult.

The discussion around glacial lakes is often framed as a disaster-management issue when it should be treated like a climate-adaptation issue.

For decades, policymakers focused primarily on reducing emissions. That remains important. But the Himalayas show that climate impacts are already here. Glaciers are melting and lakes are expanding.

Adaptation therefore becomes unavoidable.

The 189 lakes identified by Indian authorities are not guaranteed disasters.

The existence of these lakes tells us something larger about the future of the Himalayas.

The mountains are changing at a faster pace than earlier. The greatest danger may not be the next glacial lake outburst flood itself. It may be the belief that such floods are rare exceptions.

Sources:

1. Economic Times Prime (189 high-risk lakes)

2. South Lhonak GLOF analysis

3. Natural Hazards review of GLOF risk in the Indian Himalaya

4. IIT-Indore/AGU study on Himalayan GLOF exposure

5. Government assessment of dams exposed to GLOF risk

6. Study on overlooked risks from smaller glacial lakes
   

The Indore protests on water are not simply about dry taps in the peak of summer. They are the consequence of years of groundwater depletion, unchecked urban expansion, and an ill-researched and executed development model that assumed water is infinite.

Residents across the city have staged demonstrations over erratic water supply as borewells and tubewells run dry. Videos from multiple neighbourhoods show people blocking roads and demanding drinking water from municipal authorities. The crisis has become severe enough for the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) to begin seizing illegal pumps, taking over private hydrants, and penalising buildings without functioning rainwater harvesting systems.

Indore is becoming a case study of how Indian cities quietly exhaust groundwater long before they publicly acknowledge a crisis.

A City Built on Invisible Water

Most urban residents do not think about groundwater because they do not see it. Water arrives through taps, overhead tanks, apartment pipelines, or tanker deliveries. The infrastructure creates an illusion of permanence. But beneath every growing Indian city is an invisible reserve being constantly extracted.

Indore’s growth over the last two decades has been explosive. The city expanded into new residential corridors, IT parks, educational hubs, warehouses, gated communities, and commercial districts. Real estate growth transformed the city’s geography.

Areas around Super Corridor became symbols of Indore’s aspirational future — smart infrastructure, investment zones, private universities, and technology campuses. But much of this growth depended on groundwater extraction. More importantly, all of these new areas simply concretised everything in sight. Central India (and the whole world) needs rainwater to recharge groundwater tables. But when everything is concretised, the groundwater is not recharged.

Borewells became the default solution whenever municipal supply fell short. Every new housing society drilled deeper, and commercial complexes and housing societies installed backup extraction systems.

For years, this appeared sustainable because groundwater decline happens slowly. Then suddenly, borewells started running dry as underground aquefiers fell empty. Over 50% of the government’s 6,500 borewells are now dry.

In hard-rock regions like much of Madhya Pradesh, groundwater recharge is already limited compared to alluvial river plains. Aquifers do not refill quickly. The result is what hydrologists call “groundwater mining” — taking water out faster than nature can replace it.

Indore is now confronting the consequences.

Why Rain Is Not Enough Anymore

Many Indian cities are facing shortages even after receiving significant rainfall. The reason is simple: modern urbanisation prevents recharge. Concrete is a water barrier.

Roads, parking lots, malls, gated housing, paved compounds, and flyovers reduce the amount of rainwater that can seep underground. Instead of replenishing aquifers, rainwater is rapidly channelled into drainage systems.

Traditional landscapes once slowed water movement naturally. Lakes absorbed overflow, open soil allowed infiltration, wetlands acted like storage systems, and seasonal streams spread water across floodplains.

Urban expansion erases these buffers. Indian cities often celebrate rainfall only as surface supply — reservoirs filling, dams rising, rivers swelling. But groundwater depends on something slower and less visible: percolation. Once depleted, recovery can take years.

The Data Centre Question

Now comes the most uncomfortable part of the story. Even as Indore struggles with worsening water scarcity, the city is positioning itself as a future digital infrastructure hub.

The company at the centre of Indore’s emerging data-centre push is RackBank Datacenters — an Indore-founded infrastructure firm that began as a regional colocation provider and is now repositioning itself as an AI infrastructure company. Its founder, Narendra Sen, has publicly framed Indore as an alternative to India’s traditional data-centre hubs like Mumbai, Chennai, and Noida.

In July 2025, The Economic Times reported that RackBank had secured land in Indore for a new AI-focused facility as part of its expansion strategy into tier-2 cities. The project involves an 18 MW campus on six acres in Indore, alongside a much larger project in Raipur. Sen told ET that moving into cities like Indore could reduce operating costs by “2–3x” compared to metro markets. (The Economic Times)

Land is cheaper, power costs are lower, regulatory clearances are easier, and the state governments is aggressively competing to attract digital infrastructure investment.

But the economic advantages of tier-2 cities also overlap with ecological vulnerabilities.

Unlike Mumbai or Chennai, Indore does not sit on a coastline. It is heavily dependent on groundwater and long-distance river supply systems from the Narmada. The city already faces recurring summer shortages, tanker dependence, and falling borewell reliability. Even official municipal planning documents now revolve around expanding Narmada dependence because local groundwater reserves are weakening.

This is the context in which RackBank’s expansion is taking place. According to infrastructure database Baxtel, RackBank’s upcoming “Central 2” facility in Indore is being designed as a multi-phase AI-optimised campus scheduled for 2026. The project is expected to support up to 60,000 GPUs and target extremely high-density AI workloads. (Baxtel)

Training and operating large AI systems requires dense compute clusters running continuously. That increases both electricity consumption and cooling demand. Cooling demand, in turn, determines water demand.

RackBank says the Indore campus will deploy its proprietary “Varuna” liquid immersion cooling and rear-door heat exchangers. The company claims these systems improve energy efficiency and reduce cooling overhead.

That is important because the company is clearly aware of the sustainability criticism already surrounding AI infrastructure globally.

But there is a major distinction between improved efficiency and low total consumption. Efficient systems can still consume enormous quantities of water and electricity when scaled up.

The city is already experiencing severe groundwater stress. Against this backdrop, even relatively conservative data-centre water estimates become significant.

Industry estimates vary widely depending on cooling architecture. A widely cited Deloitte estimate discussed in Indian infrastructure forums places daily water use at roughly 68,500 litres per MW for conventional evaporative cooling systems. Independent discussions around Indian data-centre expansion have increasingly focused on these numbers because of how rapidly AI infrastructure is scaling. (Reddit)

Applied conservatively, an 18 MW facility could therefore consume over 1.2 million litres of water per day under conventional cooling assumptions. That translates to roughly 450 million litres annually.

Madhya Pradesh is not planning a single isolated facility. The state government is actively positioning itself as an AI and data-centre destination. In 2025, the Madhya Pradesh State Electronics Development Corporation signed an MoU with Spain-based Submer Technologies to jointly develop up to 1 GW of AI-ready data-centre capacity in the state. The agreement specifically focused on cooling technologies and sustainable infrastructure. (The Times of India)

When Indore is facing intensifying water stress, the state is simultaneously competing for one of the most resource-intensive infrastructure categories of the AI era.

The proposed Indore–Pithampur Economic Corridor alone is projected to require 40 MLD of water. (The Times of India)

AI infrastructure is often presented as “clean growth.” There are no smokestacks or visible pollution plumes. But resource consumption remains hidden behind walls, cooling systems, substations, and server racks.

Indore and India will have to decide if the price is worth it.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Times of India — Water crisis protests in Indore:
   https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/indore/water-crisis-sparks-protests-in-several-wards-across-city/articleshow/131285057.cms

2. Times of India — Groundwater depletion penalties:
   https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/indore/imc-to-enforce-penalties-amid-severe-groundwater-depletion/articleshow/131251445.cms

3. Times of India — Water scarcity in premium townships:
   https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/indore/water-scarcity-hits-premium-townships-across-indore/articleshow/131251449.cms

4. Times of India — IMC action against illegal extraction:
   https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/indore/imc-seizes-illegal-pumps-fines-errant-tanker-operators/articleshow/131285050.cms

5. Central Ground Water Board / PIB:
   https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2090573&lang=2&reg=3

6. Groundwater assessment overview:
   https://www.barc.gov.in/barc_nl/2025/2025030415.pdf

7. Mordor Intelligence — India data centre water consumption market:
   https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/study-of-data-center-water-consumption-in-india

8. Mongabay India — Data centres and water use:
   https://india.mongabay.com/2026/05/india-bets-on-data-centres-even-as-water-energy-use-concerns-mount/

9. ADRI India Water Facts:
   https://www.adriindia.org/adri/india_water_facts

India’s cities are feeling hotter every year, and not simply because summer temperatures are inching upward. The deeper story is that urban India is changing the way heat is experienced.

What used to be a hard afternoon is becoming an all-day burden. We are feeling a worsening heat crisis even when standard headline metrics do not always show a dramatic jump. In Bengaluru, for example, the all-time maximum temperature has not moved much in a decade.

Yet residents are not imagining the extra heat. In Is Bangalore Hotter?, Prasanna Krishnamoorthy shows that the more important shift is in duration: how many hours the city spends above stressful temperature thresholds, and how few hours remain cool enough for real recovery.

The Bengaluru numbers are stark. In the 1980s, an average April day offered about 3.5 hours below 22°C, described in the piece as the body’s “sleep-cool” window. In April 2026, that had dropped to just 48 minutes. Hours above 28°C rose to 12.6 per day, hours above 30°C climbed to 10.2, and hours above 32°C — marked as heat stress — reached 6.9 per day, up from 4.9 in 1985–89. Night-time conditions worsened just as sharply: hours above 26°C, which the piece says suppress deep sleep, rose from 0.6 to 2.2 per night. The city, in effect, is staying warm for longer and cooling too little.

This is the first important idea in India’s urban heat story. The body counts hours, not averages. A modest change in mean temperature can produce a much larger change in lived stress if it pushes a city across key thresholds for sleep, work and recovery.

The max-temperature chart looks steady but the body insists the city has changed. On that point, the Bengaluru analysis is persuasive: the issue is not only how high the heat rises, but how long it stays there and whether the night offers any escape.

The second important idea is that Indian cities are physically being remade in ways that intensify heat. Again, Bengaluru is an instructive case. Between 1973 and 2023, the city’s built-up area increased by 1,055%, while vegetation cover fell by 88% and water bodies by 79%, according to the article. Those numbers tell a familiar urban story: lakes filled or degraded, tree canopy reduced, open land paved over, and vertical and horizontal construction replacing porous, shaded landscapes with hard heat-retaining surfaces. A city like that does not merely register summer. It stores it.

Delhi is Boiling

The Artha Global report places this within a broader Indian context. Its core finding is that extreme heat in cities is not evenly distributed and should be understood as a “structural stressor” that amplifies existing inequality.

In Delhi, it finds, urban heat is shaped by the built environment — density, tree cover, ventilation, roof materials and built-up area. The report states that Indian cities can be up to 6°C warmer than surrounding rural areas because of the urban heat island effect, driven by concrete, asphalt, dense populations, shrinking green spaces and unplanned construction.

That framing is useful because it shifts the conversation from weather to design. Heat in cities is partly planetary, but it is also local and man-made. A street lined with trees, shaded walls and open airflow does not feel like a lane boxed in by concrete and metal roofs. A neighbourhood next to water behaves differently from one surrounded by paved lots. A low-rise cluster with shade and ventilation cools differently from a dense arrangement of heat-trapping surfaces.

The heat emergency, then, is not only about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It is also about what Indian urbanisation has chosen to preserve and what it has erased.

The third idea is perhaps the most politically important: Heat is unequal. The Artha report argues that households with fewer financial, physical and infrastructural buffers face higher exposure, more illness and greater productivity loss.

Only about 30% of surveyed Delhi households owned air-conditioners, and those that did had a measurable advantage. AC ownership, the report says, is associated with an 11.6% lower incidence of heat-related illness and an 18% lower incidence of work loss compared with households without AC.

That matters because India’s urban heat debate often slips into a middle-class frame: Buy an AC, stay indoors, work from home if possible, and endure the season. But that is not how heat works for much of the city. Many workers are outdoors, in transit, or in poorly ventilated spaces. Many homes are small, crowded and made of materials that intensify indoor heat. Cooling costs money. Electricity is not free. Rest is not always possible. When heat stretches into the night, the next day begins with exhaustion, not recovery.

Impacting People

The report quantifies some of that burden. A 3°C rise in experienced heat corresponds to a 15-percentage-point increase in people reporting illness lasting more than five days in the previous month. It also raises the share of households missing work because of heat from 18% to nearly 28%. Sleep disruption increases by 5 to 6 percentage points with a 3°C rise, and the share of people reporting changes in mental state or mood doubles from 15% to 30% as heat moves from 42°C to 45°C.

These are not marginal comfort effects. They are health, productivity and wellbeing effects that spill into incomes, schooling and public health systems.

The Delhi findings also hint at something Indian cities have not fully absorbed yet: heat must be mapped at the neighbourhood level, not just forecast at the city level. Surface temperatures, shade, housing quality, green cover and humidity do not distribute themselves evenly. One part of a city can endure a far harsher heat burden than another only a few kilometres away.

The report points to neighbourhood variation in Mumbai as well, including a 5.5°C difference between the hottest and coolest areas and significantly hotter conditions in neighbourhoods with metal roofs, which are common in informal settlements.

This neighbourhood perspective also explains why “feels hotter” is not a trivial or imprecise complaint. Humidity changes how the body experiences heat by reducing its ability to cool itself through sweating. Night-time heat changes recovery. Roof materials change indoor temperatures. Tree cover changes street-level exposure. Wind flow changes how quickly built-up spaces release stored warmth. The thermometer reading at an official station remains important, but it is not the whole story. Urban heat is mediated by infrastructure, housing and land use.

If all of this sounds daunting, the two sources also point toward practical interventions. The Bengaluru piece highlights reflective white roofs as a relatively low-cost urban-cooling measure. Citing research and Ahmedabad’s Heat Action Plan, it notes that white-coated roofs can reduce rooftop temperatures from 55–65°C to 30–35°C and bring indoor temperatures down by 2–5°C during heatwaves. Large-scale adoption, it says, could reduce citywide daytime air temperature by 1–2°C and lower peak residential cooling demand by around 20%.

The attraction of cool roofs is not only technical. It is political and administrative. Unlike lost lakes or vanished tree belts, roofs already exist and can be modified comparatively quickly. In a city where retrofitting the entire landscape is slow and expensive, roofs are one of the few large surfaces that remain governable. That does not make them a silver bullet. But it does make them one of the rare interventions that can scale faster than urban redesign.

The Artha report offers a complementary answer: more greenery, more localised heat action and more precise policy. Its finding that increasing tree cover from around 3% to 11% can lower experienced heat by approximately 1°C is especially significant. It suggests that modest but targeted greening can produce measurable cooling. It also suggests that the question is not whether cities need more trees, but where those trees are most urgently needed and which neighbourhoods have been left most exposed.

This is where urban heat policy in India is likely headed, or ought to be headed. Not just generic advisories during heatwaves, but ward-level heat plans. Not just citywide temperature alerts, but maps of vulnerable roofs, heat-trapping corridors, low-canopy areas and neighbourhoods with poor ventilation. Not just emergency responses, but land-use choices that treat shade, water and airflow as infrastructure rather than aesthetic extras.

What the two sources together show is that India’s urban heat crisis is already here in the form of harsher nights, longer exposure, lost tree cover, degraded water bodies and rising inequality in who can escape the heat. People are not only saying cities feel hotter because summers are emotionally memorable. They are saying it because their nights are shorter, their rooms are warmer, their streets are shadier in fewer places and their bodies are spending more hours in stress.

In April 2026, 95 of the 100 hottest cities on the planet were in India. Akola, Maharashtra, hit 44°C and held the title of the hottest place on Earth for three consecutive days. Naysayers will blame El Niño, geography, the clustering of massive populations, and bad urbanization. These are real factors. But there is one variable that is entirely within our control, one that we are actively, consciously destroying: trees.

A mature tree canopy is a biological air conditioner. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) confirms that urban areas with canopy cover above 40% experience temperature reductions of 3.5°C on average — and up to 5.7°C in the hottest microclimates. A 2025 study in npj Urban Sustainability found that increasing tree canopy lowered air temperatures in heat-prone zones by up to 1.5°C even at the neighbourhood scale. In Indian cities hitting 43°C, the difference between a shaded street and an exposed one is not comfort — it is survival.

Yet India is cutting down trees as if they were the cause of the heat. We are making a bureaucratic, box-ticking decision to prioritise short-term industrial convenience over the only infrastructure that actually cools the Earth. And the consequences are not abstract. They are measured in degrees.

The Tiger Paradox

Before we discuss how India is destroying its forests, let’s look at one of India’s greatest conservation success stories.

In 1973, with the tiger population having collapsed from an estimated 40,000 at the turn of the century to barely 1,800 individuals, India launched Project Tiger. It is now regarded globally as one of the most successful wildlife conservation programmes ever attempted. By 2022, India’s National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) estimated the tiger population at 3,682 — nearly doubling from 1,706 in 2010, and accounting for roughly 75% of all wild tigers on Earth. A landmark 2025 study in the journal Science, led by senior scientist Y.V. Jhala, credited the recovery to “rigorous monitoring, secure protected areas, and a culture of coexistence.”

A tiger is an apex predator that requires vast, connected, prey-rich forest to survive. The Wildlife Institute of India estimates that an adult tiger needs a home range of 60–100 sq km of quality habitat. For a viable breeding population, the corridors connecting one tiger reserve to another — stretching across hundreds of kilometres of forest — must remain intact. As Jhala himself warned in Nature: “It’s the slow burn of fragmentation and prey depletion... that worry me the most. These effects are cumulative and hard to reverse.”

India spent five decades and enormous political capital saving the tiger. It is now, through a parallel set of bureaucratic decisions, systematically dismantling the forest that makes the tiger’s survival possible.

The Guardian That Became a Rubber Stamp

The National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) is the institution mandated by the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 to serve as the final line of defence between a protected area and a bulldozer. It is supposed to be “the scientist in the room.”

An extensive investigative series by Article 14 reveals what the NBWL has become instead. Between 2014 and 2023, the NBWL’s Standing Committee approved 97% of the 2,193 projects brought before it — many of them located inside or adjacent to India’s most critical Protected Areas. The board’s composition has shifted steadily toward government officials, with independent ecologists and NGOs increasingly marginalised.

The primary vehicle for this dismantling is the “Linear Projects” policy, which fast-tracks roads, power lines, and pipelines through forests. The results are visible on the map. The Namdapha Tiger Reserve has seen 310 hectares cleared in core patches. The Rajaji Tiger Reserve has lost 139 hectares. Most starkly: in 2020, 47% of the Hastinapur Wildlife Sanctuary was simply removed from Protected Area status — not because the ecology changed, but because a zoning reclassification made it administratively convenient to do so.

When a body called the “National Board for Wildlife” approves 97% of all industrial encroachments into wildlife habitat, the name has become a misnomer.

Maharashtra: The State of “Any Excuse”

If India is a house on fire, Maharashtra is the room where someone has opened every window and is pouring accelerant on the floor.

Gadchiroli: The Mine That Eats a Corridor

In Gadchiroli, the state has approved an iron-ore mining project by Lloyds Metals across a 937-hectare contiguous block inside the Bhamragad Reserve Forest, requiring the felling of approximately 123,000 trees. This is not marginal scrubland. It is a southern tropical dry deciduous teak and bamboo forest that functions as the critical wildlife corridor linking the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra with the Indravati Tiger Reserve in Chhattisgarh. It is home to gaur, sloth bears, leopards, dhole, and tigers.

Understanding why this matters requires understanding corridor ecology. Tigers do not respect administrative boundaries. For isolated tiger populations to remain genetically viable — to avoid inbreeding and local extinction — individuals must be able to move between reserves. The Science study that celebrated India’s tiger recovery found that 4% of India’s tigers live specifically in these habitat corridors, and that “connectivity through corridors” is a foundational requirement for sustaining the population. Cutting through Bhamragad is not simply clearing a forest. It is sawing through a lifeline.

The project will create 32 permanent jobs, according to government records cited by The Indian Express.

Nashik Kumbh Mela: Sacred Rivers, Felled Banyan Trees

In Nashik, the Municipal Corporation has marked 1,825 trees — including 250-year-old banyans — for felling to facilitate “crowd management” for the 2027 Kumbh Mela. The Kumbh is a festival that, at its theological core, venerates the sacred rivers and elements of nature. The National Green Tribunal issued a stay on felling until April 28, 2026. Activists have documented that felling continued regardless.

Mumbai: Mangroves, Coastal Roads, and Pod Taxis

In Mumbai, 45,000 mangroves are being cleared for a coastal road. Mangroves are not merely trees. They are the city’s only structural defence against rising sea levels and storm surge — a function that becomes more critical with every degree of ocean warming. They are also among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth, sequestering up to four times more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforests, according to research published in Nature Geoscience.

In the Bandra-Kurla Complex, 500 trees face removal for “pod taxis,” a transit concept that has failed to achieve commercial viability in every city that has attempted it globally. In Pune, a riverfront “beautification” project has left 1,000 of the original 1,700 trees simply “missing” — unaccounted for in any official record as of April 2026.

The “Green Math” That Doesn’t Add Up

The government’s standard defence for all of the above is Compensatory Afforestation (CA) — the principle that trees felled in one place are “replaced” by planting trees elsewhere, administered through the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA). On paper, this is the safety net. In practice, it has three compounding failures.

The Geography Problem

For the Gadchiroli mine, the replacement forest is being planted 1,000 km away in Ratnagiri. Hindustan Times reports that much of that land is already classified by the state’s own forest analysis as “very dense” or “moderately dense” forest — meaning the state is proposing to “compensate” for destroying one standing forest by counting another standing forest as the replacement. Furthermore, Gadchiroli is a dry deciduous zone (approximately 1,000mm annual rainfall) while Ratnagiri is a moist semi-evergreen zone. Ecologists have a term for this: biome mismatch. You cannot swap an ecosystem like a piece of furniture.

The Accountability Problem

A CAG audit of CAMPA in Uttarakhand (2019–2022) found that ₹13.86 crore designated for compensatory afforestation was diverted to purchase iPhones, laptops, refrigerators, and coolers, and to cover renovation costs and legal fees. In 37 documented cases, afforestation was delayed by more than eight years beyond the mandatory timeline. The Supreme Court’s own Central Empowered Committee found that while 85% of the afforestation target had nominally been met nationally, only 67.5% of that area was actually verifiable.

The Biology Problem

The IPCC’s Synthesis Report has explicitly raised concerns about India’s compensatory afforestation policy, noting that planting trees in a different location cannot replicate the ecological functions of a destroyed primary forest. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology has flagged that the CAF Act has “no time frame” and is “highly bureaucratic.” Multiple experts have called CAMPA-funded monoculture plantations a form of greenwashing: they produce tree counts while destroying biodiversity, disrupting corridors, and eliminating the understorey and soil ecosystems that took centuries to develop.

The Transplantation Illusion

When outright felling draws too much scrutiny, the default has become “transplantation” — moving mature trees to a different location. Authorities treat trees like pieces of furniture. Botanists do not. Lok Sabha data from April 2026 shows that 43% (1,545 trees) of the heritage trees transplanted for the Central Vista redevelopment project in Delhi have died. A High Court-appointed committee found a 56% mortality rate for trees transplanted in Mumbai since 2017. Species like Amaltas and Chakrasia — majestic, slow-growing, and ecologically rich — rarely survive the move. A successful transplant requires months of root conditioning. Under tight construction deadlines, this process is almost never followed.

Mumbai’s Last Green Lung — Now Under “Regulated” Siege

Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), sitting within one of the world’s most densely populated cities, is home to 54 leopards and over 1,000 plant species. It is a biological miracle of coexistence and one of the most extraordinary urban wildlife sanctuaries on Earth.

On March 20, 2026, the Maharashtra state government approved a Zonal Master Plan (ZMP) for SGNP’s Eco-Sensitive Zone (ESZ). The numbers are alarming: of the ESZ’s 60 sq km, only 34% (2,032 hectares) is actual standing forest. The remaining 66% is already degraded. The rational response to this data would be a restoration mandate. The ZMP does the opposite — it opens the “Regulated Development Zones” to townships, hotels, and lodges.

Most critically, the plan reclassifies the northern Vihar Lake catchment — previously protected as a “natural area” — to allow construction. The Vihar Lake is one of Mumbai’s primary water sources. A catchment is not merely scenic land; it is the hydrological infrastructure that determines where rain goes after it falls. Build on a catchment, and the water table collapses. Monsoon floods become worse. The aquifer recharge that sustains the city year-round fails. The 54 leopards navigating the urban fringe do not care about zoning diagrams, and neither do watersheds.

The Aravallis: Dismantling India’s Desert Wall

The Aravalli range — formed between 1.2 and 3.2 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest fold mountain systems on Earth — is the only topographical barrier standing between the expanding Thar Desert and the densely populated plains of Delhi, Haryana, and the Indo-Gangetic belt. This is not metaphor. It is physical geography.

A study cited by Down to Earth puts it plainly: “Aravallis used to act as a green barrier and an effective shield against desertification. Today, the forests in the Aravalli hills no longer effectively act as a green barrier. The forests are now the most degraded forests in India; most of the indigenous plant species have disappeared.” Ecologist Pia Sethi has noted that the loss of vegetation cover in these hills is already “impacting local rainfall patterns and temperature, leading to increased heat stress throughout the Aravalli belt in North West India.”

The mechanism of destruction follows the now-familiar pattern. A November 2025 Supreme Court ruling adopted a definition of the Aravalli hills based on a 100-metre elevation threshold. The consequence, as researchers and conservationists have noted, is that over 90% of the Aravalli range could be excluded from protection, opening it to large-scale mining. Over 360,000 hectares — 8.2% of Haryana’s total area — had already been degraded as of 2018–19. In southern Haryana, dozens of hills have been literally quarried out of existence.

Sand migration — the physical advance of the desert — is already documented along the desert’s eastern boundary in Haryana. We are not just cutting trees. We are removing the wall that keeps the desert out of our cities.

The National Ledger

India lost 18,200 hectares of primary forest in 2024 — up from 17,700 hectares in 2023 — according to Global Forest Watch and the University of Maryland. Since 2001, the country has lost 2.31 million hectares of tree cover, equivalent to a 7.1% decline. These figures, it is worth noting, count only what satellites can detect. They do not capture the quiet death of transplanted trees, the ecological degradation of forests surrounded by mining, or the loss of canopy in cities.

According to government data cited in Parliament, over 3 lakh hectares (300,000 hectares) of forest land have been diverted for non-forest uses over the past 15 years. India’s forests are estimated to sequester approximately 7 billion tonnes of carbon — a buffer that is being steadily eroded.

What is particularly dangerous about India’s official forest cover figures is the gap between the headline and the reality. A Dialogue Earth investigation from April 2025 found that India’s official ISFR (India State of Forests Report) counts any land with tree cover as “forest” — including plantations, orchards, and agroforestry. The result is that losses of dense, biodiverse, primary forest can be masked by gains in monoculture plantation. As one analysis put it: India is losing its lungs and gaining its wallpaper.

A Flicker of Hope, and What It Cost

There is, in all of this, one recent victory worth marking. In Chandrapur, a proposed Lohardongri opencast iron ore mine — which would have obliterated 36 hectares of forest in a high-conflict tiger corridor for the net gain of 32 permanent jobs — was halted. This happened not because of policy, not because of a regulatory review, not because any institution functioned as it was supposed to. It happened because activist Bandu Dhotre went on a 10-day hunger strike, refusing food until the government provided a written assurance.

We should sit with that for a moment. The mechanism that saved a tiger corridor was a man starving himself.

The Moral Line

India’s tiger conservation success is one of the few genuine environmental triumphs of the modern era. The country proved that political will, scientific rigour, and community participation could pull a species back from the brink. It is cited in Science, celebrated at the UN, and held up as a model for the world.

That same India is, in 2026, approving 97% of industrial encroachments into wildlife habitat, transplanting trees with a 56% mortality rate, counting an already-standing forest as a compensatory replacement for a destroyed one, quarrying the mountains that stop a desert from swallowing North India, and cutting down 250-year-old banyans to manage crowds at a festival that venerates nature.

At 46°C, the only thing that matters is how much shade you can find. India built, over decades and at great cost, a system to protect the shade. It is now dismantling that system, one approval at a time, while wondering why it keeps getting hotter.

Sources

• Heat Rankings: Real-time global temperature rankings, April 2026

• Tree Canopy Cooling: Schatz & Kucharik (2019), PNAS; Rahman et al. (2025), npj Urban Sustainability

• Tiger Population: National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) All India Tiger Estimation, 2022; Jhala et al. (2025), Science, Vol. 387(6733); PIB, November 2024

• Tiger Habitat Requirements: Wildlife Institute of India; Jhala quote from Nature India, 2025

• NBWL Approval Rates: Article 14 Investigative Series (2014–2023)

• Gadchiroli/Corridor Ecology: The Indian Express and Times of India, April 2026; Science (2025) on corridor tiger population

• Mangrove Carbon: Donato et al. (2011), Nature Geoscience

• CAMPA Failure: CAG Audit Report, Uttarakhand (2019–2022); Central Empowered Committee Report on CAMPA (2025); IPCC Synthesis Report (AR6); Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology

• Transplantation Mortality: Lok Sabha data, April 2026; High Court Committee Reports, Mumbai

• SGNP Master Plan: Government Resolution, Maharashtra, March 20, 2026

• Aravalli Degradation: Down to Earth, December 2025; Countercurrents, January 2026; Save Aravalli; Haryana State Forest Department data

• Forest Cover Loss: Global Forest Watch / University of Maryland (2024 data); Business Standard, May 2025; Dialogue Earth, April 2025; Parliament (3 lakh hectares diversion figure)

• Chandrapur Victory: The Indian Express & Times of India, April 2026

Yesterday’s Instagram post was on how Jaipur residents from Shushilpura (just seven minutes away from the Chief Minister’s residence) have been drinking sewage for the last 10 days. Why? Because their drainage systems have been leaking water into their drinking supply.

A joint inspection by the Jaipur Development Authority (JDA), JMC, and the Rajasthan Pollution Control Board found that Sushilpura is one of the most critically contaminated stretches along the 40-km Dravyavati River corridor. Unauthorised sewage lines are discharging an additional 20 MLD (million litres per day) of untreated sewage into the system, exceeding the capacity of existing treatment plants. JDA has said it plans to divert this load to a restored STP at Taruchhaya Nagar and resolve the issue within three months.

The water that made hundreds of Sushilpura residents sick is the result of a system of crumbling pipes, overwhelmed drains, and a polluted waterway running through the heart of Jaipur.

The Dravyavati River is a 47-km rain-fed channel that was once a seasonal nullah called the Amanishah. It was rebranded as Jaipur’s answer to London’s Thames. Today, it churns with toxic foam, untreated sewage, and broken promises. And the Sushilpura crisis — where the river’s contaminated load has seeped directly into residential drinking water — is because the “Thames” project was abandoned mid-course.

The government stopped governing the moment it got an international trophy to display.

The Dravyavati project was conceived under the Vasundhara Raje-led BJP government, which allocated approximately ₹1,300 crore to transform the Amanishah Nullah into a scenic river corridor. It would have walking tracks, green belts, and restored water flow.

Tata Projects was engaged as the turnkey contractor. As part of the work, four Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) with a combined capacity of 170 MLD were built along the river to treat contaminated drain water before it entered the Dravyavati.

On paper, this was transformative. A new river. A new identity. A new Jaipur.

But what happened next tells you everything about how Indian urban

Almost as soon as the STPs became operational, the Jaipur Municipal Corporation (JMC) allegedly began connecting additional drainage lines to the river — without JDA approval and without linking them to any treatment plant. The result: Raw, untreated sewage began bypassing the ₹1,300 crore system entirely and flowing straight into the Dravyavati.

The volume of wastewater entering the river exceeded the handling capacity of the four STPs that had been built. The project — still technically “active” — was being undermined from within by another wing of the same government.

As of early 2026, an additional 10–15 MLD of untreated sewage was entering and polluting the river above and beyond what the STPs could handle.

A plan to build another STP along the riverbank has been frozen because a court case on land acquisition is pending. Nobody has resolved it. Nobody appears to be in a hurry.

Toxic Foam, Empty Promises

By late 2024, the Dravyavati had deteriorated to the point where toxic foam — similar to the infamous white froth seen floating on Delhi’s Yamuna — was appearing on its surface. Residents living along the riverbank described the stench as unbearable and constant. “The water is toxic and there’s a constant risk of diseases like dengue. By now, we have almost gotten used to it,” said Neeraj Singh Yadav, a riverside resident, told the Times of India

In September 2024, the JDA pledged to install a sewage treatment facility within 45 days and promised the river would be cleaned up before the Rising Rajasthan investment summit scheduled for December 9–11, 2024. The summit happened. Foreign dignitaries attended. The river did not get clean.

This is what governance looks like in Jaipur today: announcements timed to events, inspections timed to crises, and zero accountability in between.

The UNESCO Badge and the Great Abandonment

In 2019, Jaipur’s Walled City was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, a moment of pride. The Pink City was now, officially, in the same league as Machu Picchu, the Great Wall, and the Taj Mahal.

And then, almost as if the trophy was the destination rather than the starting line, the government effectively stopped governing.

The pattern since 2019 is consistent and damning. Garbage has piled up across wards for months at a time, with Ward 12 residents reporting six to seven months of uncleared waste on their streets. The historic inner lanes of the Walled City — the very heritage Jaipur was awarded for — see garbage hoppers arrive once every two to three days, sometimes skipping stops entirely.

The JMC issued 17 CCA chargesheets against over 25 sanitation workers after post-Holi lapses came to light — a punitive response that changed nothing on the ground. After the Municipal Corporation’s board term ended, the structured ward-wise sanitation system — each councillor had a sanitation inspector and four dedicated workers — collapsed entirely, with former councillors openly admitting the situation was “far worse” than before.

In the Walled City’s heritage lanes, garbage rots alongside the UNESCO-listed architecture. The government secured the certificate, held the press conference, and moved on.

The Dravyavati is the clearest symbol of this abandonment. A project begun with grand ambition and ₹1,300 crore — aimed at giving Jaipur a restored, living waterway — has been left to fester. The city has a UNESCO inscription. The river has toxic foam. Both statements are true simultaneously, and that is precisely the point.

Jaipur has a badge. Its rivers and its residents deserve better than that.

Sources:
Times of India

Times of India

Times of India

Times of India

Times of India

The Indian Express reported that Maharashtra’s Revenue and Forest Department, on March 20, 2026, issued a Government Resolution approving the draft Zonal Master Plan (ZMP) for the Eco-Sensitive Zone (ESZ) of SGNP. This document will govern land use, development, and ecology across 60 sq km of Mumbai’s last green lung.

Key takeaways:

1. Ecological Miracle Under Threat

SGNP houses 54 leopards in 103 sq km, 1,000+ plant species, 251 bird species, and 2,400-year-old Kanheri Caves. This biodiversity shouldn’t exist in urban Mumbai, yet it thrives despite decades of government neglect.

2. BMC’s Development Plan Destroys Buffer Zones

The draft zonal masterplan opens ESZ-1 and ESZ-2 (including Aarey Colony, Yeoor Hills, Kanheri region) for “lodges, homestays, wellness centres, and eco-friendly tourist villages”, allowing commercial development in 188 hectares of critical leopard habitat while mislabeling 27 Adivasi settlements as “slums.

3. 30 Years of Systematic Failure

From 1995’s admission of 773 hectares under encroachment to 2019’s confirmation that 10% of the park has disappeared, SGNP has endured illegal construction, timber smuggling, and administrative apathy. The park has had 3 name changes (1969-1981) but zero consistent protection strategy.

4. The Visitor Paradox

SGNP receives 2 million visitors annually (more than Yellowstone despite being 1% its size), creating a dual crisis: loved to death by foot traffic while simultaneously ignored by authorities. Mumbai’s hunger for nature persists, but the infrastructure to protect it doesn’t.

Thirty years of government failure, to save a park that has adapted itself to survive in Mumbai. In fact, the SGNP isn’t just surviving but thriving in ways that make no ecological sense whatsoever.

Consider this: SGNP currently houses 54 leopards in 103 square kilometers, creating the highest documented leopard density on Earth. It shouldn’t work, but it does. But you put any more pressure on the park and it will crumble. But that’s exactly what the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) wants to do with its SGNP draft zonal masterplan.

Here’s how the plan will impact the ESZs (Ecologically Sensitive Zones) in SGNP:

ESZ-1 (Settlement Zone) includes:

• Aarey Colony: Including tribal hamlets that have been forest guardians for generations.

• Yeoor Hills: The developed settlements within this critical leopard habitat area.

• Kanheri region: Areas around the historic 2,400-year-old Buddhist caves.

• 27 Adivasi settlements: Incorrectly labeled as “slums” throughout the buffer zone.

ESZ-2 (Regulated Development Zone) includes:

• Yeoor Hills: The forested portions (188 hectares out of 198 total hectares in TMC jurisdiction).

• Kanheri Hills: The natural forest areas surrounding the caves.

• Aarey’s natural areas: Tree-clad and undeveloped portions outside Film City.

• Tungareshwar corridor approach: Critical wildlife movement areas in Vasai region.

• All hilltops and slopes: Throughout the 59.45 sq km buffer zone.

What Development is Now Permitted

Under the new zoning, both ESZ-1 and ESZ-2 explicitly allow “lodges, boarding houses, serviced apartments, nature wellness centres, retreats, eco-friendly tourist villages, and eco-friendly cottages”. ESZ-2 areas (described as “environmentally rich” and scoring high on vulnerability assessments) permit virtually all the same commercial activities as ESZ-1.

This means 188 hectares of Yeoor Hills alone can now host homestays and lodges, directly threatening the habitat of SGNP’s 54 leopards who regularly roam these corridors.

The Five-Decade Timeline: A Park’s Identity Crisis

1969: The Original Vision

Born as Borivali National Park with just 20.26 square kilometers. This was the Nehru era’s approach to conservation: Optimistic, well-intentioned, and slightly naive about what would happen when you try to preserve wilderness next to one of the world’s fastest-growing cities. The park was established the same year Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

1974-1976: Name Changes

Renamed Krishnagiri National Park in 1974, then back to Borivali National Park in 1976 after expanding to 68.27 square kilometers. Two name changes in three years suggests an institution that didn’t quite know what it wanted to be when it grew up.

1981: The Political Name

Renamed Sanjay Gandhi National Park in memory of Indira Gandhi’s son. By this point, the park’s identity was more fluid than a Rajesh Khanna character’s moral compass.

1995: The Encroachment Admission

Government admits to 772.82 hectares of forest land under encroachment. This is roughly equivalent to admitting that a significant portion of your house has been occupied by squatters while you were busy watching cricket matches.

2002: Leopard Chaos

Twenty-five leopard attacks in a single year, most attributed to leopards relocated from other forest patches. This was conservation policy as implemented by someone who learned wildlife management from watching The Jungle Book.

2019-2025: The Slow-Motion Crisis

Ten percent of the park confirmed under encroachment while hosting 2 million visitors annually. The government’s response was to continue ignore this.

The Biodiversity Paradox: An Ecosystem That Shouldn’t Exist

Here’s where the story becomes genuinely surreal. Despite decades of encroachment, illegal construction, and administrative neglect, SGNP remains one of the most biodiverse urban forests on the planet. While the humans around it desperately want to destroy the park, the original residents of the park (flora and fauna) have managed to flourish.

• 1,000+ plant species (more than some entire countries).

• 251 bird species (roughly the same as Costa Rica’s Manuel Antonio National Park).

• 5,000 insect species (including some that probably haven’t been formally discovered yet).

• 150 butterfly species (more than most dedicated butterfly gardens).

• 40 mammal species (including those 54 leopards).

• 38 reptile species and 9 amphibian species.

• 109 ancient rock-cut Kanheri Caves dating back 2,400 years.

The ecosystem’s resilience showcases nature’s ability to adapt, but it also highlights how spectacularly we’ve failed to meet it halfway.

I keep going back to the leopard population density. But it is truly unbelievable. 54 leopards! This is higher than most pristine wilderness areas, achieved in a forest surrounded by slums, highways, and film sets. It’s as if the leopards looked at Mumbai’s chaos and decided, “Seh lenge thoda.”

The leopards of SGNP have figured out how to live alongside 2 million annual visitors without incident. They’ve essentially become the world’s most efficient urban planners, creating invisible boundaries that most humans never even realize exist.

The Encroachment Equation: Death by a Thousand Cuts

By 1995, 773 hectares of the park had been encroached upon. By 2019, that figure had reached 10% of the total area. The encroachment isn’t just slums, though that’s the most visible bit. It includes illegal construction by builders, unauthorized film shoots, timber smuggling, and what official reports call “various other activities” aka bureaucratic language that covers everything from garbage dumping to the occasional cricket match on forest land.

What makes this particularly Indian is the democratic nature of the destruction. Rich builders and poor migrants, Bollywood producers and timber smugglers. Everyone’s contributing to the slow dismantling of Mumbai’s last wild space.

The Visitor Paradox: Loving Something to Death

Two million visitors per year.

That number deserves to sit alone for a moment, because it represents something unprecedented in conservation history. SGNP receives more visitors annually than Yellowstone National Park, despite being roughly 1% of its size and located in the middle of a city with some of the worst air quality on Earth.

This creates a min-numbing paradox: The park is simultaneously being destroyed by neglect and by attention. People love it so much they’re literally wearing it down with foot traffic, while the government ignores it so thoroughly that 10% of it has simply disappeared.

The visitor numbers also reveal something beautiful about Mumbai’s relationship with nature. In a city where green space is scarcer than parking spots, 2 million people annually choose to spend their leisure time in a forest. This suggests a hunger for wildness that persists despite everything urban life does to eliminate it.

The Kanheri Caves: What We’re Really Losing

Buried in all the statistics about leopards and encroachment is perhaps the most significant detail: SGNP contains 109 rock-cut caves dating back 2,400 years. The Kanheri Caves represent one of the most important Buddhist archaeological sites in India, a monastic complex that was already ancient when the Mughal Empire was founded.

These caves were carved by people who understood something fundamental about the relationship between human spirituality and wild spaces. The monks chose this location not despite the forest, but because of it. They created a sacred space within wildness, rather than separate from it.

The caves serve as a metaphor for what we’re actually losing when we allow SGNP to be encroached upon. It’s not just biodiversity or recreational space. It’s a 2,400-year-old model for how humans can inhabit wild places without destroying them. The Buddhist monks figured out sustainable coexistence with nature millennia before we invented the term “sustainable development.”

That we’re now struggling to protect their example suggests we’ve somehow become less sophisticated about conservation than people who lived 24 centuries ago.

SGNP works because Mumbai’s residents and leopards have figured out an unofficial social contract that allows coexistence. It’s failing because the official systems designed to protect it have never quite learned to function.

For the Adivasi communities whose padas dot the hills, for the leopards navigating the urban fringe, and for the 16 million Mumbaikars who depend on this forest’s water table, air quality, and flood absorption, the stakes could not be higher.

If 54 leopards can figure out how to live peacefully in Mumbai, surely a few government officials can figure out how to protect the forest they live in.

Since I thought of this newsletter while watching Dhurandhar, I have broken it down into chapters, like the movie.

Chapter I: Pakistan’s Head Start

When the British left India, they did not simply pack up and go. They remained embedded in the security structures of both new nations. But they started off in Pakistan with the ISI.

Major General Sir Walter Joseph Cawthorn (1896–1970), an Australian-born officer commissioned into the British Indian Army had an unmatched record in military intelligence during World War II. Of the 384 British officers seconded to the fledgling Pakistan Army after Partition, Cawthorn was “probably the most experienced officer in Intelligence Planning and Operations in the entire British India Army during the Second World War,” according to Pakistani military historians.

Britain also worked extra hard to handicap India when she got independence. The seniormost British Indian police officer in the Intelligence Bureau, Qurban Ali Khan, left for Pakistan with what few sensitive files departing British officials had neglected to destroy.... The Intelligence Bureau, Lt Gen L P Singh has recorded, was reduced to a “tragicomic state of helplessness”. India was left with nothing but “empty racks and cupboards”.

Appointed Pakistan’s Deputy Chief of Staff from 1948 to 1951, Cawthorn worked in tandem with Colonel Syed Shahid Hamid, a well-connected Pakistani brigadier, to establish what was initially called the Directorate of Forces Intelligence (the direct forerunner of the ISI). The agency’s establishment is attributed specifically to Cawthorn, and the two men “aimed to remodel Pakistan’s military intelligence on the British JIB (Joint Intelligence Bureau)”. The model “consolidated military intelligence by incorporating economic and political intelligence into the agency’s remit.”

In 1948, after the debacle of the Kashmir conflict, where Pakistan was beaten by India and forced to swallow its pride (a recurring theme), it realized it needed a functioning inter-services intelligence apparatus.

The Defence Council, chaired by PM Liaquat Ali Khan, approved the new directorate as an operational necessity. Shahid Hamid was simultaneously invited by the British government to study the organisation and operations of MI6 in London.

A peer-reviewed paper published in Intelligence and National Security examines how Great Britain helped create Pakistan’s ISI with the goal of establishing a reliable intelligence partner and ensuring Pakistan’s strategic alignment with Western interests during the early Cold War.

ISI’s early leaders, such as Brigadier Syed Shahid Hamid, would later leverage Cold War anxieties to their advantage. A U.S. Embassy cable of the era describing Hamid as “dreaming up phantoms” to secure American funding for Pakistani intelligence operations.

Chapter II: India’s Colonial Hangover

India’s post-independence intelligence architecture suffered from an entirely different problem: Inertia. Rather than building a new institution, New Delhi simply inherited and continued with the Intelligence Bureau (IB). This was founded in 1887 as the Central Special Branch. It was established by the Secretary of State for India to monitor Russian troop deployments near Afghanistan. After independence, the IB was folded under the Ministry of Home Affairs and tasked with an impossibly broad mandate: Both domestic and foreign intelligence.

At first glance, it might seem that both countries got British institutions but Britain did not bequeath the same model to both.

Pakistan received the JIB. The British Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB) was created in 1946, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, specifically to centralise intelligence for the Cold War era. Led by Major General Kenneth Strong, General Eisenhower’s own wartime intelligence chief, for eighteen years, the JIB was inter-service in design, drawing on all branches of the military. Its mandate was analytical and proactive: it “gathered, collated, and processed topographic, economic, scientific, and atomic intelligence” on a national level. It absorbed the responsibilities of multiple wartime intelligence organs and consolidated them under one roof. It was, in essence, built for a world of state-on-state adversarial intelligence.

When Cawthorn and Hamid built the ISI, they replicated this model: multi-service, analytically driven, with a broad external remit that consolidated military, economic, and political intelligence.

India received the IPI. The Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), established in 1909 in London and run jointly by the India Office and the Government of India, was a wholly different creature. It maintained close contact with Scotland Yard and MI5, not with military intelligence, and was explicitly designed to monitor Indian revolutionaries in exile. By 1921, it had evolved into a domestic surveillance institution: tracking nationalist agitators, intercepting correspondence, sharing intelligence with colonial police forces. It held “close contact with Scotland Yard and MI5” — not with military intelligence.

When this became the IB after independence, the institutional DNA did not change. As intelligence scholar and former IB officer Maloy Krishna Dhar confirmed, the organisation retained the British model “with minor cosmetic changes”, and retained “the character of a police unit rather than an intelligence unit along the lines of the CIA, MI-6, or Mossad.”

The Structural Comparison at a Glance:

This divergence in institutional DNA is the deepest explanation for the 20-year gap. Pakistan received a blueprint designed to understand and combat external state adversaries. India inherited a blueprint designed to suppress its own people. One was built for war. The other was built for control.

Chapter III: The 1962 Blindspot

When China attacked India on October 20, 1962, the scale of the IB’s failure was total. The agency had raised its border posts from 30 to 77 between 1951 and 1962, but these posts “suffered from severe resource constraints and were merely symbolic and bereft of capabilities.” The failures were layered and structural:

• Language failure: There were only half-a-dozen Chinese speakers in the entire Indian intelligence community to interpret intercepted PLA communications.

• Analytical failure: The IB’s analysts, immersed in democratic culture, could not conceive that Mao Zedong would use war as a domestic political diversion. Former China analyst N. Narasimhan recalled that “much of their time was spent reading Chinese propaganda.”

• Capability gap: Officers described the IB’s military analytical capability as “rudimentary and semi-amateurish,” and its military analysts as “clueless jokers.”

• Diplomatic contamination: Intelligence-sharing with the CIA and UK’s JIC was suspended due to suspicions that Defence Minister V.K. Krishna Menon was a Soviet agent, only resuming after his removal from office.

China weaponised trade. Long before the first bullet was fired in October 1962, Beijing had understood a crucial geographic reality: The ancient India–Tibet trade routes were already traversed by merchants, pilgrims, and nomads on both sides. This created a perfect cover. The Chinese in Tibet had “trained operatives to masquerade as pseudo-traders”, deliberately cultivating language skills in Hindi, Nepali, and Bengali to blend seamlessly into India’s border communities. As Deccan Herald intelligence historian Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya has documented, “China’s operations were partly facilitated by the history of India-China trade ties.” China converted centuries of commercial interaction that China cynically converted into an espionage infrastructure.

Kalimpong, a traditional crossroads of trans-Himalayan commerce on India’s northeastern border, became a particularly active hub of intelligence activity, a place where the line between trader, traveller, and spy dissolved entirely.

As academic research into the period has shown, China’s Cold War operations in the Tibetan borderlands were rooted in exploiting these deep commercial and cultural networks that India’s IB had neither the resources nor the cultural fluency to penetrate in return.

The human intelligence balance on the eastern front in the lead-up to 1962 was starkly one-sided. As The Federal notes, “human intelligence coverage in the eastern sector favoured the Chinese over Indians.” While China had operatives with multi-language capability embedded in India’s border regions, the IB had only “half-a-dozen Chinese speakers” in the entire country, a grotesque disparity. The IB only managed to develop a comparable HUMINT network inside Tibet “closer to the war” — far too late to build the source depth needed to decode Beijing’s strategic intentions. The network could track troop movements but not decision-making. It reported capabilities but could not fathom intent.

China’s intelligence advantage was compounded by a Western intelligence failure that India paid for. The CIA, monitoring PLA communications in Tibet, had shared with the IB an order from the PLA’s regional headquarters in Tibet directing border troops “not to clash with Indian troops, whatever the level of provocation.” This single piece of intelligence, taken at face value, “strengthened the IB’s commitment to its analysis” that China would not attack.

What the IB failed to recognise was that this order applied to tactical-level provocations along disputed posts, not to a full-scale strategic offensive to capture territory. Beijing had, in effect, fed a pattern of tactical restraint that India’s analysts then projected forward as permanent strategic intent. The IB’s analysts were not reading China.

They were reading a pattern that China had curated for them. What the IB most catastrophically missed was the domestic political logic driving Mao’s decision to go to war. In 1962, China was reeling from the catastrophic failures of the Great Leap Forward, an economic and agricultural policy that had caused a famine killing an estimated 15 to 55 million people.

Mao needed a nationalist diversion. A short, victorious border war against India, a country widely respected in the non-aligned world, would consolidate domestic support, project Chinese power to a watching Asia, and signal to the Soviet Union (with whom Beijing was now in open ideological schism) that China could act unilaterally.

The IB, immersed in a democratic political culture where leaders rarely use foreign war to escape domestic failures, “immersed in democratic culture… did not conceive of an authoritarian like Mao using war as a diversion from internal troubles.” China’s most powerful strategic weapon in 1962 was not the PLA. It was India’s inability to think like Beijing.

Chapter IV: Politics Over Security

The IB’s failure against China and Pakistan was not simply a matter of insufficient resources or bad luck. It was structurally unsound. The IB was too busy surveilling India’s own people to watch its enemies.

The IB was a police force in a spy’s clothing. From the moment it was established in 1887 as the Central Special Branch, the organisation that would become the IB was a tool of social control, not strategic intelligence. It was built to monitor Russian troop movements and, far more consequentially, to suppress Indian nationalists.

IB historian and former officer Maloy Krishna Dhar confirmed that after independence, the agency retained the British model “with minor cosmetic changes”, maintaining “the character of a police unit rather than an intelligence unit.” Its officers were recruited “mainly from the police force.” Its tradecraft, “foot surveillance, secret writing, concealment, memory enhancement, agents recruitment and handling”, was the vocabulary of law enforcement, not foreign intelligence. SOFREP

The institutional capture of the IB by political power is embodied in one extraordinary figure: Bhola Nath Mullick, who headed the IB for an unprecedented 16 consecutive years between 1948 and 1964 — spanning almost the entirety of Nehru’s prime ministership. An intelligence chief serving the same political master for 16 years is, by the standards of any functioning democracy, deeply problematic.

Under Mullick, the IB evolved into what India Today described plainly as a tool “routinely used by ruling parties to snoop on political opponents.”

V. Balachandran confirmed that “the IB’s obsession with tailing communists continued until Mrs Gandhi ended it in 1975”. This obsession had made MI5’s Security Liaison Officer in New Delhi so valuable to Britain.

While the IB was busy monitoring left-leaning politicians, communist sympathisers, and even opposition members of parliament (tasks that senior IB officer Dhar himself described as “immoral and illegal orders”) China was deploying pseudo-traders along the Himalayas and secretly moving armoured divisions into Tibet.

Pakistan was covertly raising a second armoured division that India’s intelligence failed to detect until it appeared on the battlefield. The IB’s bandwidth — human, analytical, and financial — was being consumed by domestic political surveillance at the precise moment that two existential external threats were preparing to strike.

Crucially, this was not a problem unique to India. The ISI in 1965 was itself caught in an identical trap. GlobalSecurity.org records that when the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965 commenced, the ISI “was apparently unable to locate an Indian armoured division due to its preoccupation with political affairs.”

Field Marshal Ayub Khan was so alarmed that he “set up a committee headed by General Yahya Khan to examine the working of the agencies”. The pathology of intelligence agencies captured by domestic political masters, at the expense of genuine external threat monitoring, was not an Indian problem. It was a South Asian one.

Chapter V: The Wake-up Call

If 1962 exposed the IB’s analytical failures against China, the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War confirmed the problem was systemic. Pakistan’s Operation Gibraltar was the August 1965 infiltration of thousands of irregulars into Kashmir. It was entirely undetected by the IB in its planning phase. When Pakistan escalated with Operation Grand Slam, a powerful armoured thrust toward Akhnur, India was again caught reacting, not anticipating.

K. Subrahmanyam, one of India’s foremost strategic thinkers, later wrote bluntly: “The Indian Army failed to assess intelligence effectively in respect of construction of aqueducts under the Ichogil Canal and on Pakistan covertly raising a second Armoured Division.”

The IAF had “a poor idea of the deployments of the Pakistan Air Force at the onset of the conflict” and lost an “unconscionable number of aircraft on the ground” as a result.

The twin disasters of 1962 and 1965 finally forced a structural reckoning. Under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) was formally established on September 21, 1968, exactly 20 years, 1 month, and 4 days after Pakistan had first set up its own foreign intelligence directorate.

The man chosen to build it was Rameshwar Nath Kao, then a deputy director within the IB, known for his quiet brilliance and operational discretion. Appointed RAW’s first chief, Kao served until 1977 and became, in the words of The Indian Express, “India’s first true spymaster.”

Kao’s brief was transformational: create a dedicated, standalone foreign intelligence agency, separate from the IB’s politically-entangled domestic remit. The IB would henceforth focus on internal security. RAW would own external intelligence, counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, and covert operations abroad. It was placed directly under the Prime Minister’s Office, not the Home Ministry, to insulate it from the institutional pathologies that had paralysed the IB.

The structural logic worked. RAW’s first great success came within three years of its founding. In 1971, Kao’s operatives ran one of the most consequential intelligence operations in South Asian history: cultivating, training, supplying, and directing the Mukti Bahini, the resistance movement that precipitated the Bangladesh Liberation War and the permanent fracturing of Pakistan’s territorial integrity. The 20-year delay had cost India one war. The creation of RAW would, within a decade, reshape the subcontinent.

Sources & Further Reading:

• The Friday Times — Early Years of the ISI

• The Friday Times — The ISI Unveiled: A Concise Yet Incomplete History (2025)

• Grey Dynamics — Pakistan’s ISI: Rogue Intelligence Agency or State Within a State?

• The Federal — Sino-India War 1962: What Exactly Caused Delhi’s Intelligence Failure

• DefenceXP — India 1962 War: Defence Reforms, ITBP, RAW, BRO Modernisation

• ORF Online — Looking Back at the 1965 War With a More Objective Eye

• GlobalSecurity.org — ISI History

• ClearIAS — Intelligence Agencies: IB and RAW

• Indian Express — RN Kao: India’s First True Spymaster

• Tandfonline — The Perils of Multinational Intelligence Coalitions (ResearchGate paper)

• SOFREP — India’s Secret Wars Part 2: Intelligence Bureau (IB)

• Modern Diplomacy — Unmasking India’s IB and RAW

• Big Story Network — From Shadows to Strategy: Redefining India’s Intelligence Landscape

• Deccan Herald — 1962: The Fog of Espionage

• Wikipedia — Intelligence Bureau (India)

• Scribd/Huw Dylan Academic Thesis — British Joint Intelligence Bureau 1946–1964

Maharashtra’s government has opened a new front in India’s long-running human–wildlife conflict debate: A proposal to shift the leopard from the Wildlife (Protection) Act’s Schedule I to Schedule II.

Under Section 11 of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, the authority threshold for permitting hunting differs depending on whether an animal is in Schedule I versus Schedules II/III/IV when it is considered dangerous (and for non–Schedule I, also dangerous to property including crops). Wild Life (Protection) Act—India Code PDF. If a human kills an animal under Schedule II, they won’t face legal action.

The push is being justified in public, on the floor of the state legislature, as a response to escalating conflict in human-dominated landscapes—especially in districts where sugarcane cultivation is increasingly being described by officials and field staff as “new leopard habitat.”

Maharashtra is simultaneously expanding a “toolkit” of reactive measures—more cages, AI-based alerts, “shoot-at-sight” language for “man-eaters,” and transfers of captured leopards out of overcrowded holding facilities.

Each of those measures has its own political logic and operational constraints. But together, they illustrate the state’s central argument: That conflict management under the current regime has failed.

Why Maharashtra Says it Needs New Powers

The argument for downlisting is being made alongside political claims of increasing fatalities and heightened public fear. In one Assembly discussion, Independent MLA Sharad Sonawane is quoted saying “55 people have died” in leopard attacks in his constituency (Junnar), using the figure as a demand for expanded rescue-centre capacity. The number appears in the report as a legislator’s statement; it is not presented there as a separately audited dataset. Indian Express

Outlook India, citing official forest department data as reported in its story, says Pune recorded six confirmed human deaths between April 1 and December 24, and that 120 leopards were held in captivity in 2025—figures used in the article to argue that capture-and-hold is becoming a large-scale system rather than an exceptional response. Outlook India

In November 2025, Naik’s public posture hardened in Indian Express reporting: he is quoted saying that if a leopard has become a “man-eater” it should be “shot on the spot,” and he described urgent installation of 200 cages and procurement of 1,000 additional cages, alongside AI/satellite mechanisms to issue alerts about leopard movement. The report also notes the political environment around these statements—public anger after a child’s death and protests that included arson of forest department property—underscoring how quickly wildlife management becomes a law-and-order problem when conflict spikes. Indian Express

By March 2026, Indian Express reports Naik telling the Assembly the government would adopt AI-based solutions and issue regular alerts, while also describing the state’s stated need for a “middle path” that addresses human safety without abandoning conservation norms. The same report says Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis sought the Centre’s intervention on man-eaters and sterilisation programmes in conflict districts. Indian Express

Sugarcane fields are the Habitat Now

One reason sugarcane keeps returning to the debate is that senior officials are naming it directly. In the legislature, Naik is quoted saying: “Earlier, they were described as forest animals, but now their habitat has shifted to sugarcane fields.” In the same exchange, he discussed planting fruit-bearing trees and described changing behaviour patterns—again, as a political explanation for why conflict is escalating outside forests. Indian Express

Independent reporting expands the ecological mechanics behind that claim. A Times of India explainer describes sugarcane belts as “artificial forests” where visibility drops sharply, prey density can be high, and water is available year-round due to irrigation infrastructure. It quotes field officials describing how sugarcane rows make conflict operations slower and harder—an operational detail that, in policy terms, supports the state’s claim that existing conflict protocols are struggling in farm landscapes. Times of India

Scroll’s detailed reporting on Junnar provides the sharpest quantified land-use datapoint in the source set: It reports that sugarcane cultivation area in Junnar doubled from 8,000 hectares to 16,000 hectares between 2000 and 2010 and attributes conflict figures (deaths and injuries over time) to data shared by the Junnar forest department with the publication.

The report also describes farming practices (including drip irrigation and long harvest cycles) as reducing disturbance and providing cover—again, a narrative that aligns with why policymakers might see legal downlisting as a route to faster intervention where capture itself is difficult. Scroll.in

Encroachments and Eco-sensitive Zones

Sugarcane is only one piece of the “interface” story. Around Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), land-use disputes and habitation pressures are being litigated and protested as a separate but thematically related conflict: who is allowed to live where, what counts as encroachment, and how buffers are governed.

Land Conflict Watch reports that on 17 January 2026 the Maharashtra Forest Department issued eviction notices to 10 hamlets inside SGNP covering 385 houses, calling them “re-encroachments,” and notes that residents cite protections under the Forest Rights Act (including the Act’s bar on eviction until verification procedures are complete). Land Conflict Watch

Separately, a Question of Cities analysis argues that a draft ESZ master plan effectively treats large portions of the SGNP buffer as “developable” land, and highlights the plan’s reported acknowledgment that nearly 34% of the eco-sensitive zone is already encroached upon by slums, industrial activity, commercial use and transportation—then criticises the implications of normalising that status quo.

This kind of governance dispute matters to the leopard debate because it speaks to the broader conservation problem: not merely predator numbers, but the steady enlargement of overlap zones where predators, prey and people meet. Question of Cities

Mongabay similarly critiques the SGNP ESZ draft as enabling “regulated” development categories and mentions tourism and wellness-type uses, while quoting stakeholders who argue the methodology and safeguards are inadequate.

These reports do not “prove” a direct link to leopard attacks in sugarcane belts; they document a parallel conservation governance strain that shapes how quickly political systems pivot toward coercive control measures when wildlife conflict becomes frequent. Mongabay India

The Operational Reality

One of the clearest signs of system stress is what happens after capture. Indian Express reports that 20 leopards captured from Pune’s Junnar area were relocated to Vantara in Gujarat after a proposal to shift 50 leopards received Central Zoo Authority approval on 20 December 2025; it cites Manikdoh rescue centre capacity constraints and names forest officials overseeing the move. Indian Express

The Hindu reports, citing sources close to Naik, that the Maharashtra government decided to send 50 leopards to Vantara and that details would be finalised with the facility’s management.

Critics argue that this “capture-and-move” model can fail on its own terms. The Wire reports that a landmark study by Athreya et al. (2011) found that translocation could increase human–leopard conflict in release areas.

The India experience: The hotels are sub-par, the crowds are unruly, there is garbage everywhere, and no foreigner is sure that they are getting charged a decent price. If you are in Delhi, you can’t breathe. If you are in Mumbai, you have to look upwards so that a piece of the metro doesn’t fall on you. In Bihar and UP, pray that wrong-side drivers don’t cause accidents. And everywhere in India, hope that no rich person’s child has gotten behind the wheel of a very fast car. Jaipur is set to lose its UNESCO Heritage status because the city is getting dirtier by the day.

In 2025, India set a new outbound travel record: 3.27 crore (327.05 lakh) Indian nationals departed overseas, up 5.9% vs 2024 and 21.5% vs 2019, per the Government of India’s Ministry of Tourism Annual Tourism Snapshot 2025 (compiled from Bureau of Immigration data).

Yet inbound tourism moved the other way: Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) fell 9.4% to 90.16 lakh, and are still 17.5% below 2019. Clearly, India is underperforming against its own potential as a “once-in-a-lifetime” destination.

The Taj Mahal, the Ajanta and Ellora Caves, Khajurao, the Harappan Civilization excavation sites, Mahabalipuram, Jagannath Temple, the beaches of Konkan, Goa, and Kerala… the list of incredible India is endless. But the number of foreigners visiting these incredible sites is falling every year.

India is pricing itself out—while selling “Incredible” as a slogan, not a product.

India’s tourism product often isn’t priced like a developing-market value destination. Travel agents quoted by The Economic Times argue India is “outpricing itself” as domestic hotel tariffs climb. They cite travellers saying decent rooms abroad can be ₹5,000–₹8,000/night, while comparable Indian stays can cost at least twice as much even off-season. This is a structural competitiveness problem. If a middle-class Indian finds Thailand, the UAE or Vietnam cheaper than Goa or Kerala, foreign tourists doing the same spreadsheet math won’t pick India either.

And while outbound is booming [UAE (26.3%), Saudi Arabia (10.3%), Thailand (6.8%) are the top destinations by share], India isn’t learning the obvious lesson those countries have internalised. Tourism growth is engineered through frictionless logistics, consistent experiences, and aggressive global marketing, not just attractions.

The “last mile” is where India keeps losing the tourist

Even India’s own policy narrative admits the bottleneck. The Economic Survey (reported by Moneycontrol) notes that converting tourism potential into sustained outcomes depends on implementation capacity at state and local levels. This includes coordination across districts, municipal capability (sanitation, crowd management), and destination management models that don’t collapse at scale.

In plain language: India can market the Taj Mahal globally, but if the on-ground experience feels chaotic, exhausting, or inconsistent, tourists don’t return, and they tell others not to come.

A related uncomfortable question is whether India is even funding its global pitch adequately. The overseas promotion budget was cut to ₹3.5 crore (90% lower.

Bottom line: India has a lot of attractions but lacks a consistently tourist-first system

India’s cultural and natural inventory is world-class. But the 2025 data suggests the country is still treating inbound tourism as something that should happen organically, rather than something that must be designed, priced, managed, and marketed with discipline—especially when competitor destinations are doing exactly that. Source

First, India needs to create Tourism Service Zones around top circuits (Golden Triangle, Kerala, Goa, Northeast). They must have ring-fenced municipal funding for cleanliness, lighting, footpaths, toilets, wayfinding, and last-mile transit—measured publicly through monthly audits and tourist complaint-response times. The Economic Survey itself flags that tourism outcomes hinge on state/local implementation capacity; this makes that capacity measurable and accountable.

Second, fix the cost structure: Rationalise taxes/fees that inflate hotel and domestic flight prices, and expand quality mid-market supply through single-window approvals. If Indians increasingly find overseas stays cheaper than domestic hotspots, foreign tourists will do the same math.

Third, treat visas and promotion as infrastructure: Stable, frictionless processing plus sustained overseas marketing budgets, not token spends.

On a Monday morning in Mumbai, somewhere between Virar and Churchgate, a man is pressed so tightly against a train door that he can feel the wind of the tracks below. He will not arrive at work fresh. He will arrive alive, if he’s lucky. In 2025, 2,287 people died on Mumbai’s suburban railway network, most from falls caused by overcrowding. That’s roughly six deaths every single day. The year before, it was 2,468.

Meanwhile, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the Maharashtra government are building a ₹33,800 crore coastal freeway from Versova to Bhayandar — the northern section of a broader ₹64,920 crore road corridor — for cars. Cars that account for fewer than 10% of daily commuter trips in Mumbai.

The BMC is clear about who it prioritizes in this city. Your time and life doesn’t matter if you don’t have a car.

Who Actually Moves Mumbai

Mumbai’s suburban railway system is the most intensely used commuter rail network on the planet. It carries approximately 7.5 to 8 million passengers daily. This number is approaching one crore. The BEST bus network serves another 350,000+ daily commuters. Walking accounts for nearly 47% of all trips in Greater Mumbai, primarily by women, children, and low-income workers who cannot afford motorised transport, according to the 2021 Comprehensive Mobility Plan (CMP) for the MMR.

And cars? According to the BMC’s own traffic analysis, cited in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the coastal freeway, private cars accounted for just 8.5% of all daily trips in the MMR in 2017. Urban researchers and independent studies estimate that figure has crept up to perhaps 10% today. The Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative’s Mumbai Deep Dive pegs it at 8%. The Down To Earth analysis of 40 Indian cities found Mumbai’s car modal share at the low end nationally, 3.6% to 8% depending on the methodology.

The 90% who rely on trains, buses, and their own feet are not the beneficiaries of this ₹33,800 crore project. They never were.

The Deliberate Decay of Public Transport

The collapse of Mumbai’s public transport isn’t a natural disaster. It’s a policy choice, made repeatedly, over decades.

Take the BEST bus service. In 2011, the BMC owned 4,700 buses under BEST. Come September 2023, it’s approximately 1,500 buses. By April 2024, that had fallen to 1,100. By December 2025, BEST’s own fleet had shrunk to just 249 buses for a city of 26.9 million people. A city this size needs at minimum 4,000 buses on the road.

Daily bus ridership in Mumbai has fallen by 44% since 2011, from 35.8 lakh passengers to around 20 lakh, not because people don’t want to ride buses, but because the buses simply aren’t there. Meanwhile, average BEST bus overcrowding hit 1,000+ riders per bus daily in 2023-24.

The suburban railway has received marginal upgrades like some trains have gone from 9 coaches to 15, but the infrastructure is groaning under demand that has never been matched by investment. Between January 2014 and May 2025, 6,760 people died and over 14,000 were injured falling from overcrowded Mumbai local trains, according to Government Railway Police data.

The BMC’s own EIA acknowledges the decline: public transport’s share of daily trips dropped from 78% in 2005 to 65% in 2017. The EIA blames “neglect of the railway system, delays in metro construction, and increase in bus travel time.” These are self-inflicted wounds. And the solution being offered is not to fix public transport. It is to build a ₹1,202 crore-per-kilometre freeway that costs more per kilometre than Metro 3 (which cost ₹1,104 crore/km) to serve the 10% who drive.

The Freeway Doesn’t Fix Traffic. It Creates More.

The government’s stated rationale for the Versova-Bhayandar coastal freeway is that the incoming Versova-Bandra Sea Link (VBSL) will flood the existing road network with cars, and the freeway is needed to absorb this overflow. The EIA is explicit: without the coastal road, the VBSL “risks becoming a contributor to the very problem it is intended to solve.”

Read that again. The government’s solution to a road project creating traffic is… another road project. The public pays for both.

More fundamentally, this logic ignores the most well-documented phenomenon in urban transport economics: Induced demand. Research on Indian highway projects, published in peer-reviewed journals and confirmed by global urban studies, consistently shows that new road capacity generates new traffic. The elasticity is approximately 1.0 — for every 10% increase in road capacity, traffic increases by roughly 10% over time. Studies cited in the Indian context suggest demand can jump between 10% and 67% when new highways open. Environmentalist Debi Goenka confirmed this precisely, telling Mongabay India that “within six to 12 months, even that [road] gets saturated.”

No amount of road-building will un-jam a city of 26.9 million people who are increasingly being pushed into private vehicles because public transport has been systematically hollowed out.

Who Actually Benefits

The fine print of the EIA answers this question honestly, even if the project’s proponents won’t. The document states that the freeway will “unlock opportunities for development” and “increase property value of surrounding areas,” and that the benefit will be an “increase in wealth” of property owners.

Not commuters. Not workers. Not fisherfolk from Charkop, whose entire livelihoods depend on the 45,675 mangrove trees approved for felling to clear the corridor. Source Not the approximately 50% of Mumbai’s population that lives in informal or flood-vulnerable housing and will face greater climate risk as mangroves, Mumbai’s first line of coastal defence against rising sea levels, are stripped away.

Mumbai already has over 15 lakh registered cars and a total vehicle fleet approaching 50 lakh, adding nearly 2.94 lakh new vehicles every year. But owning a car is still a privilege of the upper-middle class and wealthy. Vehicle ownership data for India is stark: car ownership is negligible among the lowest income quintiles and concentrated almost entirely in the top quintile of household expenditure.

In other words: an 8–10% modal share that is heavily skewed toward the wealthy is getting a ₹33,800 crore public subsidy. The 90% who ride trains and buses, or simply walk — many of them women, daily wage workers, domestic workers, fisherfolk — are getting nothing but slower buses, more crowded trains, and a flooded coastline.

The Alternative Nobody Wanted to Build

This is not a situation where no alternatives exist. They were considered and deliberately rejected.

The EIA for the coastal freeway examined three options: Do nothing, build this freeway, or build a longer freeway. It did not evaluate a metro extension along the western corridor. It did not evaluate dedicated Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lanes on the existing Western Express Highway. This would cost a fraction of the price, require zero mangrove destruction, carry exponentially more people, and actually address Mumbai’s mobility crisis.

As urban researcher Sulakshana Mahajan told Down To Earth: “Only a strong and convenient public transport system can prompt a shift away from private vehicles.” Singapore’s model — where car ownership is prohibitively taxed and excellent public transit makes cars optional — is the template that a dense, land-starved city like Mumbai needs.

Instead, Mumbai is spending more money per kilometre than it did on its only underground metro line to build a freeway that will be congested within a year of opening — because the people who benefit from it also benefit from rising real estate prices along the corridor. The fisherwoman in Charkop said it plainly to Mongabay India: “This road is for people with cars. Nobody is thinking about those who live here.”

She is right. And the numbers prove it.

Sources:

Times of India

Mumbai Mirror

Down to Earth

Scroll

Times of India

BMC EIA report

Mongabay

ET Infra

On 16 February 2026, the NGT disposed of challenges to the Great Nicobar project’s environmental clearance, saying it found no “good ground” to interfere because the clearance had “adequate safeguards” and because of the project’s strategic importance. Read about it in our Instagram post here.

This was not the first time. In April 2023, the tribunal admitted there were “unanswered deficiencies”—including coral impacts, the treatment of thousands of coral colonies, and baseline data limitations—and ordered a High-Powered Committee (HPC) to “revisit” aspects of the clearance.

By 2026, the NGT accepted that the HPC process and the environmental clearance conditions were enough, and effectively converted “revisit” into “reassurance”, without reopening the full clearance.

The project affects a legally protected tribal landscape, home to the Shompen (PVTG) and Nicobarese. The NGT’s 2023 order records that petitions challenged the clearances partly because the “impact of the project on tribal population has not been considered” and because forest diversion and denotification would affect Shompen and Nicobarese settlements.

Yet the clearance narrative repeatedly leans on procedural milestones. For instance, the NGT held a public hearing on 27 January 2022 at Campbell Bay. The clearance documents cited in the NGT proceedings mention the hearing, but the core complaints—dispossession, cultural loss, influx, surveillance, and irreparable ecological change—do not dissolve because a meeting occurred.

Notably, the environmental clearance conditions themselves propose “geo-fencing cum surveillance towers nearby Tribal settlements” as a protection measure.

“Corals Were Moved Away From the Map”

One of the most disturbing episodes is about corals. Link here.

A Scroll investigation documented that between 2020 and 2021, government-prepared maps changed dramatically: corals that were earlier shown hugging Great Nicobar’s shoreline—including Galathea Bay—were shown “floating” offshore, away from the coast, and the most-protected coastal classification band (ICRZ-IA) around Galathea Bay shrank or vanished. Experts cited in the story said this offshore placement was “not possible biologically” given coral depth and light requirements.

This matters because ICRZ-IA is the category where many activities are prohibited, and “destruction of corals” is explicitly prohibited in general under the ICRZ framework (as reproduced in the NGT’s 2026 order). If corals and “most critical” coastal zones can be cartographically displaced, the legal friction around ports becomes easier to manage.

The NGT’s 2026 order ultimately accepted the government position that the project would be carried out in permitted coastal categories and that corals would be handled via translocation, even as public reporting showed serious disputes about what the maps originally showed.

The Coastal “No-go” Became a “Go”

Mongabay India reported that a previous NCSCM mapping exercise had found parts of the project—including the port—fell in CRZ 1A (“ecologically most sensitive”), but later, NCSCM “concluded” the project no longer fell in CRZ 1A, a shift revealed via affidavits during litigation. Crucially, Mongabay notes that the rationale/method and the HPC’s acceptance of it were not made public.

In 2023, the NGT explicitly flagged baseline limitations as an “unanswered deficiency” (petitioners argued the impact assessment was based on one season, not three). That is precisely why it ordered the HPC.

By 2026, however, the tribunal accepted the explanation that one season’s data could be sufficient under applicable guidance for ports in Andaman & Nicobar, and again declined to interfere.

Safeguards Don’t Undo Irreversible Loss

The clearances are packed with mitigation language—research stations, monitoring committees, wildlife plans, coral translocation budgets, and time-bound proposals.

But the same documents also concede the scale of uncertainty: the EAC noted that for many endemic flora and fauna, the “impact … is mostly unknown”, yet still recommended clearance given the project’s strategic nature. That’s not precaution; it’s permission under uncertainty—on an island where endemism and small ranges make “unknown impacts” potentially existential.

And while the government claims fewer than 9.64 lakh trees would be affected because some land is marked “green development,” Stage-I forest diversion still stands at 130.75 sq km—old-growth tropical systems cannot be “compensated” by distant plantations or paper green zones inside an urban-port masterplan.

Put together, the story looks less like “science cleared the project” and more like “the project cleared the science”.

Sources:
NGT order (3 Apr 2023 PDF)

Indian Kanoon (NGT order, 16 Feb 2026)

Scroll

Mongabay India

India’s demographic dividend is a simple idea with a hard condition attached. If a country has a high share of working-age people and relatively fewer dependents, growth can accelerate. But only if the working-age cohort is productive. Productivity, at a national scale, is built through education, health, and employable skills.

That “only if” matters because India’s youth bulge is moving through the system right now. And it’s moving in the wrong direction.

Schools are Disappearing, Enrolments are Shrinking

Government schools have been closed or merged at large scale, and school enrolment has declined even as population rises. The video driving this conversation cites a Lok Sabha reply by the Minister of State for Education (Jayant Chaudhary), summarising it as 93,000 government schools shut in 10 years. Video source

The underlying parliamentary answer confirms the framework: Education is a concurrent subject; opening/closing/rationalisation is largely done by states/UTs; and state-wise government school numbers for 2014–15 to 2024–25 are linked to official sources. Lok Sabha answer PDF

Even if closures are partly “mergers” intended to economise infrastructure, the macro trend is what should worry us: Fewer schooling nodes + fewer children enrolled.

What UDISE+ confirms (national totals)

The Ministry of Education’s UDISE+ 2024–25 report states that India’s school system in 2024–25 has:

• Nearly 14.71 lakh schools

• More than 1.01 crore teachers

• Nearly 24.69 crore students (pre-primary to higher secondary)
  UDISE+ 2024–25 report PDF

The UDISE+ 2023–24 report similarly reports nearly 14.72 lakh schools and nearly 24.8 crore students in 2023–24. UDISE+ 2023–24 report PDF

So, regardless of the debate about definitions (closed vs merged vs rationalised), we can say with confidence: India currently runs schooling for ~25 crore children, and small percentage swings here equal millions of children.

The most alarming stat is the enrolment drop versus population growth: enrolment falling by 2.41 crore between 2015–16 and 2024–25, while population rises substantially.

For population baselines, the World Bank’s total population series (drawing on UN World Population Prospects and national statistical sources) provides year-by-year figures used globally. World Bank population indicator

Here’s why this matters more than it first appears:

1. A child out of school is far more likely to:

• Enter low-skill work early,

• Earn less over a lifetime,

• Have weaker health and financial outcomes, and

• Be locked out of formal-sector jobs.
  At scale, that becomes a drag on growth and tax capacity.

2. Even schooling without learning doesn’t produce a dividend
   A demographic dividend is about productivity, not headcount.

3. A youth cohort without pathways is a governance problem
   Large cohorts of undereducated, underemployed young people increase the likelihood of social stress because aspiration rises faster than opportunity.

“Private Growth” Can’t Automatically Fill the Gap

• Access: Closing/merging government schools can push children to travel 5–7 km, which increases dropouts in poorer households (especially where safety concerns are real).

• Affordability: Private schooling may expand, but if fees are out of reach, private supply doesn’t convert into universal enrolment.

This is exactly how a demographic dividend turns into a burden: The labour force grows, but the capability base does not.

Even among those who do stay in the system, India faces a known challenge: Job creation and job quality have to match the education profile and aspirations of young people.

The ILO–IHD India Employment Report 2024 emphasises that while education levels have improved, educated youth can experience higher unemployment, reflecting a mismatch between aspirations and available jobs; it also flags the large share of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET), particularly young women. India Employment Report 2024 (ILO) PDF

That means India risks a “double bind”:

• A segment leaving schooling too early, and

• Another segment staying longer but not finding suitable work.

Either way, the dividend leaks.

What the Lok Sabha Answer Reveals About System Stresses

The Lok Sabha answer (02.02.2026) includes indicators the government uses to argue “access” has improved, such as Gross Access Ratio (GAR) and dropout and GER indicators for recent years, and it also provides infrastructure-related indicators (e.g., percentage of government schools without buildings; in dilapidated blocks; without drinking water; and primary schools with a single teacher).

Those details matter because they tell us the policy stance: closures/mergers are being defended as rationalisation under neighbourhood norms, while macro indicators are presented to show progress. But the political economy question remains: If access is improving, why does the public conversation keep returning to “missing students” and shrinking government school presence?

That is where independent scrutiny is essential because the demographic window won’t wait.

What Would “Saving the Dividend” Look Like?

1) Rebuild last-mile schooling access (especially rural belts)
If mergers are happening, transport, safety, and local hostels/satellite campuses become non-negotiable otherwise “rationalisation” becomes “exclusion.” (The access mechanism is the point, not the administrative label.)

2) Treat enrolment decline as an emergency metric
A fall of even 1% is millions of children. UDISE+ totals make this scale visible.

3) Link schooling to employability without reducing schooling to “training”
The ILO report’s emphasis on youth employment mismatches suggests India needs better school-to-work transitions, career guidance, apprenticeships, and local labour market mapping—while keeping foundational learning strong.

A demographic dividend is not something you “have.” It’s something you earn through the slow, expensive work of building human capital.

If India normalises a decade where government schools are shut/merged at scale and enrolment drops while population rises, then the youth bulge doesn’t become an engine of growth. It becomes a pressure cooker: More jobseekers with weaker preparation, greater inequality of opportunity, and rising social strain.

The good news is that this is still fixable. The bad news is that demographics don’t offer extensions.

The Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve is home to around 115 tigers and 151 leopards. It is one of the most ecologically sensitive regions in the country. The Reserve has a corridor that is used by these big cats to disperse, find mates, establish new territories, and maintain genetic diversity, preventing isolated populations from facing inbreeding or localized extinction.

But now that corridor is under threat. The Maharashtra State Board for Wildlife (SBWL), chaired by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has given the go-ahead for an opencast iron ore mine in the corridor near Lohardongri in Chandrapur district. The proposal now moves to the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL). under the guise of “development”. It isn’t.

It is a political decision to trade one of central India’s most critical wildlife linkages for an astonishingly small economic return. The iron ore project will generate a grand total of 32 permanent jobs.

The project pretends that the costs will be borne by “the environment” in the abstract. In reality, it will be borne by real communities living with real conflict, and will destroy one of the largest habitats of India’s national animal.

What Exactly is Being Cleared?

Official records on the government’s forest clearance portal describe the proposal as “DIVERSION OF 35.94 HA. FOREST LAND FOR OPENCAST MINING IN LOHARDONGRI IRON ORE BLOCK…” in favour of Sunflag Iron & Steel Company Ltd.

The same official filing lists employment likely to be generated—and here is the number the state should be forced to repeat out loud at every public hearing: “Permanent/Regular Employment (Number of persons): 32.”

Not 32 “direct jobs plus multipliers.” Not “thousands indirectly.” Not “prosperity.” Thirty-two permanent jobs.

And in exchange, reporting on the SBWL committee assessment indicates the mine would require felling 18,024 trees. This aligns with separate reporting citing “more than 18,000 trees” being cut across roughly 36 hectares.

The trees are habitat structure, shade, prey base support, water retention, and the quiet infrastructure that keeps forests functioning.

Why This Location is Uniquely Dangerous

The proposed mining site lies in Reserved Forest Compartment No. 439 (old compartment no. 95), and is explicitly described as a vital corridor linking Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve with the Brahmapuri–Gadchiroli landscape.

Corridors are the difference between a protected area that works and one that can become a fenced island where the wildlife is genetically isolated, behaviourally stressed, and will start entering human spaces.

Even the reporting sympathetic to “conditional clearance” acknowledges the corridor’s importance and the presence of key species: the area is described as supporting around five tigers and eight to 10 leopards, among other wildlife.

The simplest way to understand the stakes is this: If you sever the corridor, you change the wildlife movement logic of the entire landscape.

“Irreversible Damage” Isn’t Activist Rhetoric

Here is the line that should have ended the project immediately: The SBWL committee report, as quoted by The Indian Express, states: “Any mining in this forest will cause irreversible damage to the environment and wildlife, loss of a large tree cover, immense pollution to the air and water.”

Outlook reports the same warning language from the committee report.

Pause and absorb what that means: The state’s own mechanism—set up precisely to scrutinise wildlife impacts—has acknowledged irreversible harm. Yet the project is still being pushed forward. That is not how an evidence-based governance system is supposed to work.

Supporters of such projects like to talk as if wildlife simply “moves away”. But “away” is usually someone’s farm, someone’s grazing route, someone’s school commute.

In remarks to The Indian Express, Kishor Rithe (SBWL member and director at BNHS, as cited in the report) warns that giving corridor land for opencast mining would remove large surface area needed by tigers and prey, and that displaced animals will mount pressure on surrounding villages.

The Times of India also quotes former SBWL member Bandu Dhotre warning that blocking movement routes will push tigers into farms and villages.

Chandrapur is already known for deadly human–tiger conflict. TOI reports that official data and local records indicate an average of around 50 human deaths annually due to tiger attacks in recent years.

One of the most revealing details is that the committee’s recommendation included a condition: The entire 34,673.67 hectares forming the wildlife corridor (including Ghodazari Wildlife Sanctuary and Ekara Conservation Reserve) should be notified as a wildlife sanctuary.

Read that again: The corridor is so important that formal protection is being proposed, yet simultaneously, a mine is being allowed inside it. The government is is producing contradictory paperwork that lets decision-makers claim they are “protecting” a place while approving the very activity that destroys its function.

And note another key fact from the government portal: This is Opencast mining, not underground. Opencast mining’s surface footprint, noise, dust, transport movement, and associated infrastructure are precisely what make it so disruptive in wildlife corridors. Even the SBWL member quoted by The Indian Express highlights when contrasting opencast versus underground impacts.

“Development” for whom?

This is where the moral arithmetic becomes unavoidable. We are asked to accept felling 18,000+ trees and gouging out nearly 36 hectares of reserved forest in a tiger corridor, in exchange for 32 permanent jobs.

If this is the state’s idea of “development,” it is an indictment of the state’s horrible imagination.

This is is now squarely a national decision, because the clearance must pass through the NBWL. The Centre cannot posture about conservation while allowing corridor-level fragmentation under its own wildlife clearance regime.

What Should Citizens Demand?

First, the NBWL should reject the proposal on the committee’s own premise: if “irreversible damage” is the expected outcome, clearance is a violation of the purpose of wildlife governance.

Second, if the state believes the corridor is important enough to propose formal notification of 34,673.67 hectares, then it must act like it. Mining is incompatible with that objective.

Third, Maharashtra should stop selling the public a fantasy in which ecological destruction is “compensated” by token employment. Thirty-two permanent jobs is a joke.

And finally, citizens should demand a simple standard for all such projects: if a proposal sits in a functioning wildlife corridor, the default answer must be NO.

Fact-check:

Government report

Indian Express

Times of India

Outlook India

India is preparing a significant shift in how its national monuments are cared for. For decades, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has been the sole implementing agency for core conservation across roughly 3,700 centrally protected monuments. Now, the government plans to let private donors hire conservation architects and executing agencies directly, while the ASI remains the supervisor and final approver. You can read about it here.

This is a lot more than just a culture-policy tweak: It changes who gets to shape the “look and feel” of shared civic memory—forts, baolis, temples, tombs—many of which sit inside fast-growing cities where land is expensive and heritage is constantly under pressure.

What Exactly Has Changed (And What Hasn’t)

Under the new model, corporate donors contributing through the National Culture Fund (NCF) can pick a conservation architect from an empanelled pool and then engage an executing agency of their choice. The work still requires an ASI-approved Detailed Project Report (DPR) and must follow the National Policy for Conservation, 2014, with the ASI supervising to ensure compliance. A tripartite MoU is envisaged between the donor, the NCF and the ASI. The state is effectively shifting from “builder” to “regulator”—at least for donor-funded works.

The government also plans, at least initially, to offer donors a list of about 250 monuments that require conservation work, which donors can pick from (with flexibility to propose other sites by writing to the ministry).

Why Is This Happening?

The argument for opening conservation to private execution is straightforward: The ASI has a vast mandate, and conservation work has been slow when ASI is the only implementing agency. The Indian Express describes the ASI as “resource-starved and understaffed” and notes that even parliamentary scrutiny has flagged consequences like protected monuments becoming “missing/untraceable.” The Indian government has acknowledged that it has failed in conserving India’s history.

If conservation becomes partly donor-driven, will cities see a “beautification bias”? As in will there be more money for marquee, high-footfall sites, while low-visibility ruins continue to crumble?

The NCF (set up in 1996 with an initial corpus reported as ₹20 crore) has received about ₹140 crore in donations, funding roughly 100 projects; officials cited by The Indian Express say around 70 have been completed and about 20 are ongoing. Recent completed works mentioned include projects at Purana Qila and Red Fort site museums (Delhi), among others. IndianExpress

Times of India adds that the NCF has supported “about 100 works… around ₹150 crore,” and that its website lists about 250 monuments that require CSR support—another indicator of the scale of unmet need. TOI

Why “Adopt a Heritage” Didn’t Succeed

The earlier Adopt a Heritage programme focused mainly on visitor amenities—ticketing windows, toilets, signage, cafés, pathways—rather than core conservation. The outcome was limited uptake in many states. A Hindustan Times report on Maharashtra notes low response and records officials arguing the scheme wasn’t promoted strongly and, crucially, that many protected sites (especially state-run ones) don’t charge entry tickets, making revenue models weak from an adoption point of view. HT

This is a classic urban-policy lesson: “Public good” programmes fail when they rely on branding and goodwill but don’t solve operating economics (who pays for cleaning, security, lighting, repairs—year after year?).

Should national monuments charge entry tickets?

Charging entry can be defended as a “user-pays” tool, especially at high-footfall sites where wear-and-tear is real. Ticket revenue can fund essentials that cities routinely struggle to provide: Toilets that stay clean, waste management, trained guides, signage, conservation-friendly lighting, crowd control, and security. Even where the ASI is the supervising authority, predictable own-revenue can reduce dependence on sporadic CSR and annual budget cycles (both of which can be slow to mobilise). This is the logic that also appears indirectly in the Adopt-a-Heritage critique: Without a revenue model, participation stays low.

Ticketing can also support urban governance by giving managers a demand-management lever: Timed entry, capacity caps, differential pricing, and free/discounted access for students or locals. These tactics are used globally to protect fragile heritage spaces.

But there is a counter-argument that is deeply urban and democratic: Monuments and national museums are part of “the commons.” If entry prices rise, the burden falls disproportionately on nearby residents, students, low-income families, and casual city-walkers. These are people who should have the most routine access to public history.

In cities, paywalls also change behaviour: Locals stop dropping in, public spaces become “tourist zones.”

Many world cities treat access to national collections as a civic right, often through free admission models:

1. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (USA): The Smithsonian states there is free admission at all Smithsonian museums (except Cooper Hewitt in New York). This is a direct example of “history funded as a public good,” with costs largely socialised through public and philanthropic support.

2. National Mall museums, Washington, DC (USA): A civic tourism authority explicitly frames the National Mall’s museum lineup as “free” and highlights free access across major institutions (some requiring timed-entry passes).

Other countries do “hybrid access,” charging generally but providing regular free windows:

3. The Louvre, Paris (France): The Louvre page lists ticket prices and also states free admission windows (e.g., “first Friday of the month after 6 p.m.” and “14 July”), plus categories eligible for free entry (under 18s; EEA residents under 26). This is a model where history is monetized—but with deliberate equity valves.

So, Should History Be Monetized?

A civic/urban answer is: History shouldn’t be monetized as a gatekeeping mechanism, but it can be priced as a management tool.

What’s ethically difficult isn’t charging per se—it’s when pricing becomes the main logic of preservation, pushing institutions to optimise for revenue (footfall, events, branding) rather than for conservation, research, and broad public access.

A “commons-first” compromise many cities aim for looks like:

• Free or very low-cost baseline access for locals/students/school groups,

• Predictable free days/slots,

• Priced timed-entry for peak tourist demand,

Ring-fencing revenue transparently for conservation and visitor services (so the public can see what the fee buys).