India's children and incomplete policies

Hey there,

Thanks for your understanding last week. It was great! It was so good that I have very little to add beyond the main content of this newsletter this week.

So without further ado, let's get to it!

Just the gist

🔗 Just when you think they can't go lower, lower they go

A BBC Eye investigation published this week found that Instagram had been running paid advertisements in India promoting the sale (!!!) of child sexual abuse material, with links to Telegram channels where such content was available for as little as Rs 99. The ads passed through Meta's moderation system, which reviews every advertisement before it goes live. When the BBC reported one ad to Instagram, the platform responded 24 hours later saying it did not violate community guidelines!

Meta subsequently disabled accounts and removed content after the BBC sought comment, which is the company's standard pattern - do harm and then apologise.

Meta's own policy states that every advertisement is reviewed before being approved. That review relies primarily on automated technology, with human escalation for uncertain cases. In March, Meta announced it was reducing its reliance on third-party human moderators in favour of AI. Shockin! -_- The result, in this case, was advertisements depicting the sexual abuse of children being approved for distribution on one of the world's most-used platforms.

A former Facebook vice-president who helped build Meta's advertising business said the algorithm was designed to keep users engaged by showing increasingly extreme content.

India received 1.9 million NCMEC cybertipline reports in 2025, second only to the United States. The Indian government summoned Meta representatives after the investigation was published.

Meta said child exploitation is a horrific crime it works aggressively to fight, denied prioritising revenue over safety, and said it was categorically inaccurate to suggest it knowingly targeted such ads at users with inappropriate interests in children. At some point when you have been accussed of everything from inciting a genocide (Rohingyas) to child sexual abuse, you gotta ask your, "maybe I AM the problem." But no, not Meta.

➡️ The Indian government's response so far has been to summon Meta representatives. Whether this produces accountability, or whether Meta pays a fine, issues a statement, and continues as before, remains to be seen. In the meantime, if you have young family members on Instagram, parental controls and open conversations about what they are seeing on the platform are not optional extras.

🔗 From hunger strike to hospital, a movement is brewing

The Cockroach Janata Party's indefinite sit-in at Jantar Mantar entered its 19th day this week, and the physical toll is becoming serious. Sonam Wangchuk, who joined the protest, has lost over 7 kg on his 11th day of hunger strike. His blood pressure and blood glucose readings are low enough to concern doctors, though he remains mentally alert.

The protest began on June 20 with CJP's central demand: the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over repeated examination irregularities and paper leaks. The Samyukta Kisan Morcha, the farmers' union that sustained its own Delhi protest for over a year before winning concessions, visited the site this week to express solidarity, a signal of cross-movement credibility that is important to sustain any movement. The list of demands has also expanded to include scrapping the National Testing Agency entirely, compensation for families of students who died by suicide over exam pressure, and accountability for those responsible for the NEET leak.

On a separate front, the Delhi High Court this week restored CJP's original X handle, which had been withheld since May. Dipke called it a win for free speech. It is also a reminder that the movement has been fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously, including against digital suppression although their central call remains paper leaks and accountability for it.

➡️ People are now putting their bodies on the line for something, which changes the nature of what is being asked of everyone watching from a comfortable distance, including from abroad. Whether the government responds before someone is seriously harmed, or waits the protest out as it has done with others, is the question this week. The issue is that if the govt. makes Pradhan resign then it sets a precedent and all its future actions will be judged against this one. That would mean they'd have to be accountable for all their failures.

🔗 A crisis made worse

Two weeks after the US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, Indians were queuing for cooking gas. Cylinders were selling for Rs 7,000 on the black market. In industrial cluster, units began shutting down. Migrant workers queued outside train stations again, echoing the worst of COVID.

Three months into the war, as the last pre-loaded oil shipments arrived and Gulf refining capacity, damaged by up to 40%, stopped being replaced, the full weight of India's energy dependence became apparent. Poorer families were spending up to a third of their income on LPG or reverting to firewood, driving up both pollution and deforestation. Diesel shortages stranded trucks. Industrial production fell. Job losses rose.

India imports 88% of its crude oil, 51% of its natural gas, and nearly 19% of its coal. These numbers are all higher than they were in 2012, two years before the Modi government came to power. Oil dependence was 71% then. Gas dependence was 22%. Coal was 11%. Every single figure has gone up under a government that has repeatedly invoked Atmanirbhar Bharat and energy independence as central pillars of its vision.

The usual explanation is that India's domestic reserves are limited and its economy is growing fast, so more imports are inevitable. That is partly true. But this investigation from The Wire argues that a specific set of policy decisions made things worse than they needed to be.

On natural gas, the government decided to increase consumption despite low domestic reserves and high import costs, creating a new dependence rather than managing an existing one. On renewables, the Production Linked Incentive scheme was directed toward Adani, Ambani that promised unrealistically high local manufacturing and failed to deliver, leaving India's dependence on Chinese solar cells and battery technology unchanged. On nuclear, the government sidelined indigenous thorium development to tie up with a US firm for nuclear fuel supply, and is pursuing foreign Small Modular Reactor partnerships instead of backing the Bharat SMR being developed by NPCIL and BARC, against the explicit advice of India's own atomic scientists. On strategic reserves, it neglected to fill its crude oil buffer adequately. Under US pressure, it stopped buying from Iran, and then complicated its Russia relationship further.

The result of these choices, compounded by a war India had no say in starting, was that the people least able to absorb an energy shock absorbed it most directly.

➡️ This is a long-form investigation and The Wire is publishing it in parts, so we will return to it as more comes out. India's energy security is structurally weaker than the government's rhetoric suggests, the gap between Atmanirbhar Bharat as a slogan and as a policy has real costs when an external shock arrives, and those costs travel fastest to households that run on LPG cylinders rather than piped gas.

🔗 The chemistry of glacial retreat

Everyone knows glaciers are shrinking. What is less understood is that as they melt faster, the water coming off them is also chemically different, in ways that affect the rivers, farms, and drinking water supplies that over a billion people depend on downstream.

A new study on Rulung Glacier in Ladakh examined meltwater at four sites during the 2023 and 2024 melt seasons. The study shows that the meltwater itself is currently within safe drinking water parameters but the chemistry is changing as warming accelerates.

When glacier ice melts, the water flows over freshly crushed rock surfaces exposed by glacial erosion. This contact dissolves minerals rapidly, picking up calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, sulphate, and other ions. Faster melting means more of this water-rock interaction, and longer exposure of fresh rock surfaces as glaciers retreat further. The study found that this intensified weathering is already altering the dissolved mineral content of meltwater flowing into the Indus river basin.

Some of what is happening is actually beneficial. But increased sediment and ion concentrations can stress aquatic ecosystems adapted to cold, chemically stable water. Certain trace metals, aluminium, zinc, copper, and others, are being mobilised at higher rates, though currently within permissible limits. Over decades, excessive dissolved salts reaching agricultural land could gradually reduce soil quality and contribute to salinisation in already water-stressed regions. Communities in upper Ladakh that drink directly from glacier-fed streams with minimal treatment are the most immediately exposed to any quality changes.

➡️ The Himalayas are called the Water Tower of Asia for good reason. The Indus, the Ganga, and the Brahmaputra all draw from glacial melt. In Ladakh specifically, where rainfall is scarce, glacier-fed streams are the water source. Glacier health is no longer a matter of abstract environmental concerns. It is about water availability, agricultural viability, and what the tap will deliver in the coming decades. Scientists studying this are asking for long-term monitoring infrastructure and community-level awareness. Neither is particularly expensive relative to the stakes but both are currently underserved.

Desi hinterland

🔗 Women carry the weight of poor planning, always

Your girl is back to talking about her home state. One that I have learnt many Indians can't point at on the Indian map. So I feel some extra sense of responsibility to keeo you posted about it.

Government data says Jharkhand's LPG coverage stands at 76.1%. The National Family Health Survey says only 31.9% of households use clean fuel as their primary cooking source. That gap between a connection and actual use is the gap between a policy announcement and a life.

A journalist who spent months in the Dumka, Pakur, and Godda uplands surveyed 40 households across four forest-edge villages. Thirty-one of those households had LPG connections. Not one used LPG as their primary cooking fuel. Only four had refilled a cylinder even once in the past year. Thirty-five households collected firewood daily. In every single household, that collection was done entirely by women, most of them walking more than five kilometres each way, two or three hours per trip, five to six times a week.

The reasons are not difficult to understand. A cylinder refill costs Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,200. For families surviving on daily wages and seasonal migration, that is roughly a week's worth of food. Moreover, cylinder vans cannot reach ridge roads, distributors are far away, extra transport costs stack up, and when a pipe or regulator breaks, the nearest repair centre is 10 to 15 kilometres away. After encountering these barriers enough times, people stop trying.

Firewood, by contrast, is free. It cooks slow meals and heats homes in winter. In the absence of an affordable, reliable, repairable alternative, using it is not a cultural preference or a failure to modernise. It is the only rational choice available.

The health cost is embedded in the architecture of these homes. Low ceilings, blackened walls, soot on plates, children sitting near the stove with watering eyes. The medical officer at the local community health centre says indoor smoke is so normalised that people do not report it as illness, and when they do, symptoms get attributed to malaria, tuberculosis, or mining dust.

The forest absorbs a cost too. Daily household extraction rarely appears in deforestation discussions, but its cumulative effect on Jharkhand's sal-dominated forests is significant: suppressed sapling growth, altered forest structure, open patches spreading near villages every year.

➡️ This story matters to the diaspora for a reason that goes beyond sympathy. India's clean cooking push has been presented as one of the successes of the last decade, with hundreds of millions of connections distributed under the Ujjwala scheme. Jharkhand shows what a connection statistic actually means when affordability, delivery, and repair infrastructure are not part of the programme. The gap between a cylinder in the corner and a meal on the table is filled every day by a woman walking kilometres in the dark before sunrise. That labour does not appear in any statistic when it should.

Thank you for meeting me here. Stay well, stay safe. ;)

Thanks,

S.