Knock, knock! Who's there? ECI. ECI wh... *vote deleted*
Hello!
Yep, I am back! Never underestimate the power of a proper break. I used to shun the idea of a 'break' in a relationship. Like the strong, unsubstantiated with facts opinion of a neighbourhood uncle, my strong belief was 'break' is just a soft break-up. You just don't want to say it out loud yet. But after this one month of taking space from pretty much everything I love about my work and spending time only with 3 people (my parents and husband) and 1 cat, eating, traveling, taking extremely long walks, and doing very little else, I am of the opinion that breaks are pretty healthy. Distance does indeed make the heart grow fonder. I have come back to this newsletter and most of my work with a lot of love and gratitude in my heart.
Yaay for us, eh? Nope. -_- The world is still burning. There are little sparks of hope so hold on to those. Work on your community, whatever that might be. Meet new people, create spaces for people to come together. And most of all, do not look away. We might very well be living through a time that will become part of history that makes it to books.
✊🏼
Just the gist
🔗 Nero and his Election Commissioner
We have discussing the SIR voter roll mess all year, but the latest development goes beyond the deletions themselves. An Indian Express investigation that you have all definitely heard of by now highlighted that arguably the most important institution of the largest democracy is the world may be compromised.
Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi objected on file at least 14 times over 10 months, not to specific policy calls they lost on, but to the fact that decisions were being made and orders issued in the Commission's name without them being consulted at all. The two commissioners making up the Commission's own majority are saying the process itself is being bypassed. The law requires the three-member body to act "as far as possible, unanimously". For a body built almost entirely on the credibility of being procedurally untouchable, that's about as close to an institutional crisis as it gets.
Centralised control of ECINet, the software the entire electoral roll now runs on, meant a team in Delhi could override what ground-level officers decided. In Goa, for example, 97 people produced their documents, their own Electoral Registration Officer found them eligible, and the software simply would not let that decision get recorded, because the system itself was locked from headquarters. The ERO, the statutory authority the law actually assigns responsibility to, had no power to execute his own ruling. Eight separate communications to the Commission over seven days went unanswered, and the final roll was published without those 97 names anyway.
Then there is Form 6, the form every new voter fills out. In July, a question asking applicants whether their parents were on the roll after the last SIR was inserted to it.However, changing Form 6 requires the government to amend the Registration of Electors Rules. Nobody did that. Both commissioners flagged this as unlawful back in May and it stayed anyway, until just recently. Think about what that actually does to an 18-year-old trying to register for the first time whose parent got deleted in a contested SIR: there was no way to even complete the form.
Now that the alarm bells are ringing everyone, people are asking for Gyanesh Kumar's resignation, and a genuine question over BJP's recent state wins is looming, the Commission has met again and, in a four-page note, rolled out nine new decisions that map, point for point, onto the exact concerns Sandhu and Joshi had been raising for ten months. Agendas will now be circulated before meetings. Minutes will be issued after. Officer foreign travel will need Commission sign-off. New IT modules will go through a review committee first. ECINet itself will get audited by a committee including an independent expert. This is an institution admitting it had been ignoring its own statutory members and then fixing exactly the things it had just denied were broken.
Nothing in the Commission's response addresses who authorised appeals filed in West Bengal against voters whose inclusion had already been ordered by judicial officers. If that was done in the ECI's name, who signed off on it?
The Commission has now directed all 20 states where SIR is complete to run a "special drive" to enrol voters who were wrongly left out (!), using the plain statutory Form 6, not the debated online version. In Goa specifically, 81 of the 97 wrongly excluded voters have now filled that form and will be included. Maharashtra, where SIR is still underway and is the largest state in that boat, has told its officers not to exclude anyone in haste, to hold proper hearings, and to let Booth Level Officers collect documents at people's homes rather than demanding in-person hearings for routine discrepancies.
➡️ For a country this big with such a complex socio-political context, mistakes are bound to happen. But a mistake is one thing. A deliberate attempt to dismantle a democratic system is another. What CEC has done, what the BJP seems to be behind, goes far beyond corruption. I ask my readers to go vote which feels a bit hollow now in the light of this news if the game is being rigged against us all in real time. But I will still say, go vote. Vote while you can.
🔗 Gandhiji marched so we could protest
After the Election Commission story broke, everyone took to their roles earnestly. BJP jumped to the ECI's defence, which in itself is wild because why is one political party defending an independent institution like the Election Commission of India unless they have been involved in the happenings. Opposition jumped on the BJP. And the latest entry into India's political landscape, the Cockroach Janata Party, jumped on to roads to protest.
Multiple groups, AAP, student unions like AISA, SFI, DYFI, NSUI, the Indian Youth Congress, and the Cockroach Janta Party, called for protests at Jantar Mantar in Delhi and Shivaji Park in Mumbai on October 2. What do we want? Gyanesh Kumar's resignation. When do we want it? Before 2019 would have been nice. :P
Delhi Police denied permission for all of it and imposed Section 163 prohibitory orders across the entire New Delhi district, the modern successor to the old Section 144, banning any gathering of five or more people, processions, slogans, speeches, banners, even sticks, without prior written permission. AAP says it applied for that permission six days in advance. It didn't matter. What followed was close to a full lockdown of central Delhi: multi-layer barricades, 12 metro stations shut with no reopening timeline, and AAP leaders, including Saurabh Bharadwaj and Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha, detained and bundled into buses.
Then at 9:40 am, before the protest had even started, Jio subscribers around Connaught Place got a message saying internet services had been cut "till further notice", on government instructions. The Internet Freedom Foundation went looking for the actual suspension order and couldn't find one anywhere, not from the Home Ministry, not the Department of Telecom, not the Delhi government, not Delhi Police. Under the Telecommunications Act and the 2024 shutdown rules, and under the Supreme Court's own Anuradha Bhasin ruling, a shutdown is supposed to be written, reasoned, proportionate, time-bound, and issued only by a Home Secretary. "Till further notice" fails basically every one of those tests. This is now a pattern, not a one-off, following similar shutdowns around Jantar Mantar back in July.
➡️ An institution that holds the fate of the Indian democracy in its pages just got caught, in its own members' handwriting, centralising power away from the statutory officers the law assigns responsibility to. Protests against it is now being handled by shutting off information, shutting off movement, making it procedurally impossible to even assemble by the state. The EC scandal was about access being centralised and decisions being made without anyone being able to see or challenge them. The protest crackdown more than BJP's previous defense of the CEC is raising an important question: What does the BJP stand to lose if the Election Commission of India starts functioning fairly again?
🔗 Shorts strokes and broad complaints
USTR Jamieson Greer gave the kind of quote diplomats love: trade talks with India are, in his words, "in the short strokes", meaning close to done, but not imminent, because both sides have apparently found a whole "universe of items" they still disagree on. Trump and Modi had a call about it this week. Another call is reportedly coming soon just to check progress.
Trump has already signed the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act into law, which hands him authority to slap tariffs up to 100% on any country, India and China specifically named, still buying Russian oil and gas. Add to that the 10% tariff already in place over imports allegedly tied to forced labour, and a second Section 301 investigation on "overcapacity" expected to conclude any day now. So the deal isn't just being negotiated in a vacuum, it's being negotiated with a tariff gun pointed straight at us.
Meanwhile, Indian companies are doing their part to look like good faith trade partners. Essar Group's Mesabi Metallics just announced an $18 billion investment to build an integrated American steel company, which Trump himself called the largest single-location investment in an integrated steel complex in US history. Good optics, real money, happening right as the negotiators are in their final stretch.
But a fresh US State Department report on India's investment climate basically says yes, India is open for business on paper, 100% FDI allowed in most sectors without prior approval, but American investors keep running into a wall of "economic nationalism" and regulatory corruption risk, particularly in sectors India still gatekeeps: multi-brand retail, private banking, pharma, defence, media, satellites. US direct investment stock in India actually fell 3.37% in 2024, down to $58.54 billion.
A White House report from August also places India in "Tier 1" of a global shadow transhipment network, meaning the US believes Chinese goods are being rerouted through India (and Mexico, Canada, the EU) to disguise their true origin and dodge tariffs meant for China. Being named in a US government report about helping China evade its own trade restrictions is not exactly the kind of headline that makes "short strokes" sound convincing.
➡️ You've got a tariff sledgehammer hanging over India's head via the Russia sanctions law, declining US investment on the ground, a corruption-and-nationalism complaint from the State Department, and an accusation of helping China launder its trade numbers. None of these pieces individually kill the deal, but together they paint a relationship that is a lot more transactional and a lot less "two great democracies in lockstep" than the official photo-ops suggest. The vishwaguru image is crumbling and how.
🔗 AI has a hydration issue and Karnataka wants to regulate it
AI data centres and water is the talk of many towns around the globe and in India. Google's Visakhapatnam project, Amazon's Thane facility, both have run into residents asking the very reasonable question of why a water-stressed area is hosting a thirsty server farm. Karnataka's new Sustainable Data Centre Policy 2026-2031 reads like a direct response to exactly that, which is either proactive planning or a very well-timed PR exercise, depending on how cynical you are feeling.
Karnataka wants 1 GW of cumulative data centre capacity by 2031, aiming to capture 10-12% of India's AI-ready data centre market. However, before any more expansion, the state wants to map water and power availability across every existing and proposed site, building what it's calling a resource heat map to flag constraints before they become a heated issue.
Karnataka already has 32 data centres running, and neither the Bangalore Water Supply Board nor the state pollution board has ever separately tracked how much water those facilities actually use. So the state has just been taking companies at their word.
The new proposal requires data centres to report two metrics: PUE (how much total power a facility uses versus how much its actual computing equipment uses, 1.0 being perfect) and WUE (how much water it uses per unit of energy consumed). Hit a PUE between 1.00 and 1.20, consistently, for three straight years, and you get Rs 20 crore, paid out in year four. There is a similar carrot for water too: full reimbursement on treated water costs up to Rs 8 lakh a year for five years, and a separate, larger incentive, up to Rs 30 lakh over two years, for hitting a specific WUE efficiency band and holding it for three years. The common thread across both is that nothing pays out immediately. You have to actually sustain the efficiency.
The state is also planning three dedicated data centre parks, at Hoskote, Mangaluru, and Mysuru, with a combined 1,000 MW capacity, built with shared infrastructure like dual-grid power and assured water supply rather than each facility fending for itself. Mangaluru specifically is being positioned as a strategic hub because of its port access and potential for undersea cable landing stations, which tells you Karnataka isn't just thinking about Bengaluru's AI ambitions, it's thinking about India's broader internet infrastructure geography.
➡️ This policy is a remarkable improvement on the "build first, measure water usage never" approach, and tying real money to sustained efficiency rather than one-off compliance is smarter than most Indian infrastructure incentive schemes. But the problem here is that Karnataka is writing rules to responsibly manage water and power consumption for a sector whose current actual consumption the state has never properly measured in the first place. A resource heat map is only useful if the baseline data feeding it exists. Whether this policy produces real accountability or just a more sophisticated version of the same self-reported numbers problem depends entirely on whether Karnataka actually builds independent monitoring to go with it.
🔗 Lessons we learnt from water and her wrath
... and then there is too much water!
In August, a flood tore through Nepal's Lhende Khola and Bhote Koshi river system, killing hundreds and wiping out roads, bridges, and houses. It was first assumed to be earthquake-related. The US Geological Survey later found the actual cause was a glacial collapse and debris flow in a lake. So, in a way, avoidable tragedy if someone had sounded the warning bell.
Back home, Uttarakhand has its own unresolved version of this story. The 2025 Dharali flash flood in Uttarkashi killed people and devastated the area, and to this day nobody has nailed down the exact cause: some experts blamed a glacial lake breach, others pointed to rainfall, glacier processes, or a landslide. For a state that sits downstream of 344 identified glacial lakes, this is a gap in crucial intelligence.
So now Uttarakhand is doing something it's been slowly building toward since early last year: installing its first real-time early-warning system for a glacial lake, at Vasundhara Tal in Chamoli. The National Disaster Management Authority identified 13 high-risk glacial lakes in the state back in earlier assessments, five of them in the most dangerous Category A tier, Vasundhara Tal among them. The state then spent time doing surveys, mapping each lake's depth and water-holding capacity, at six of these sites, because you can't know how bad a potential outburst flood would be without first knowing how much water is actually there.
The system includes water-level sensors to catch abnormal fluctuations, a weather station that tracks rainfall, temperature, humidity and wind, snow-depth and sub-surface temperature sensors, and tilt and accelerometer sensors to pick up ground movement or vibration around the lake. Because there's no mobile network at that altitude, the whole setup runs on solar power and transmits data via satellite, feeding into a dashboard that is supposed to trigger alerts automatically when readings cross dangerous thresholds.
But detecting a dangerous change at the lake is only half the job. The much tougher piece of the puzzle is turning that detection into warning that reaches people living downstream before the water does. The state says it has equipped the team with satellite phones and low-Earth-orbit communication devices to stay in touch with disaster management authorities from the high Himalayas, but that only gets data out of the mountains, does not yet alert a village in time to evacuate. That last-mile communication problem is where even the most sophisticated detection system can render itself useless.
➡️ This is a genuinely good, overdue step, and installing real instrumentation at a Category A lake after watching Dharali and Nepal's devastation is exactly the kind of move you'd want a Himalayan state to make. But Vasundhara is one lake out of 344 identified across the state, and only one of 13 high-risk ones. The scientific monitoring infrastructure is being built lake by lake, year by year, while climate change keeps making these glacial systems unstable faster than new data centres prop up in resource scarce places.
