Poison pill and rich man's till

Hello,

So we are one more issue from our one year anniversary issue. How is that possible? I feel like I started writing this only four months ago. As it turns out, no ma'am! It has been a year. Almost. In this one year of consistent writing I have learnt a lot. I might share a lesson per issue for the month of June.

Lesson one of writing a diaspora focussed newsletter for the largest diaspora in the world is that I will never be able to meet everybody's needs. Even as first generation immigrants, our experiences are so different and unique and as are our needs. Needs around community, needs around information, needs around cultural identification. In this one year we have built a community of people here who have only one thing in common and that is that they are away from home. Or at least one of their homes. So this is one way of staying in touch.

Somedays I feel really lonely. I have a great community around me, of Indians and non-Indians. I am sure the same is true for you all. But I don't think most of us ever fully realise the entire depth of what it is to uproot and reroot. Whether you moved for job, for education, for family, it is still an insane feat to have undertaken. A majority of the world's population has never done it. So on some days this can feel lonely. I also feel guilty on those days. Guilty that I left my parents. Like a traitor because I could have been more useful in my country. Maybe I will be. Someday. That day is not today and that is okay.

So one of the reasons behind starting DoorDesi was to create a grounding space for those days. Days when you feel like you are a traitor or that you are too far, to bring home just a little closer. But like I said, I have realised over this past year that not all of us need the same things. But that's okay. I needed it. This newsletter has helped me feel connected, feel less guilty, feel actively engaged in Indian affairs. And if that is true for even some of you, I am happy for it. If it isn't thank you for letting me have this space nonetheless.

A special shout out to our latest paid subscribers. You know who you are! ❤️

Just the gist

🔗 CBSE's experiment comes at a cost

If you have probably heard something or the other about the CBSE drama so far.

This year, for the first time, over 98 lakh answer books belonging to 18 lakh students were evaluated digitally through a new On-Screen Marking system. The idea was sound enough: scan the answer books, upload them to a portal, have evaluators mark them digitally, let the system calculate totals automatically, eliminate human error. Works, in theory. But does it? Does it?

In practice, 13,000 were found to be illegible and had to be evaluated manually. But that's not the problematic bit. This year the pass percentage dropped to 85.29% from 88.39% last year. The number of students scoring above 90% fell by 16%. Students who requested copies of their answer books received someone else's entirely, or with missing pages, blurred answers. There there was the the payment portal that either overcharged or undercharged applicants and then collapsed under traffic. Nearly three lakh applications for 8.56 lakh answer books, more than double last year's numbers, which tells you how many students and parents sensed something was wrong.

The CBSE Governing Body, its own highest decision-making authority, had noted in its June 2024 meeting that on-screen marking "may be implemented in all subjects only after completion of pilot projects in some subjects across various regional offices". The board then implemented it across all subjects simultaneously, for all 18 lakh students, in the same year. Why test a new system on one of the highest-stakes exams Indian school students take? Why not, apparently.

➡️ NEET leaked. CBSE's new evaluation system malfunctioned. And then we wonder why an entire generation has mentally checked out of the system. The thing is, when young people do engage, even if it is through memes and the Cockroach Janata Party, we ask more of them than the sitting government has ever delivered. These are not apathetic kids. They are kids who have watched the institutions responsible for their futures treat those futures as acceptable collateral for administrative experiments. If your family has a student waiting on re-evaluation, the portal is open and the fee has been reduced. Apply, keep records of everything, and do not assume the system will correct itself without being pushed.

🔗 The Quad of losing relevance

The foreign ministers of Australia, India, Japan, and the US met in New Delhi on May 26 for the latest Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. The Quad started as disaster relief coordination after the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, formally became a security dialogue in 2007, never really picked up steam, was revived in 2017, and has been sputtering along since.

The core problem is that all four members want to use the Quad to balance out China's dominance in the Indo-Pacific, but none of them want to fully commit to that goal out loud. Australia is economically dependent on China and cannot afford a clean break. India guards its strategic autonomy and is wary of being pulled into someone else's confrontation. Japan sees the Quad as a genuine security necessity given Beijing's behaviour in the South China Sea. The US under Trump is simultaneously trying to assert dominance in the Indo-Pacific while pursuing a bilateral deal with Beijing, which rather undercuts the whole exercise.

The May 26 meeting did produce some concrete things. Maritime surveillance coordination was announced. An energy security framework and cooperation on critical minerals, aimed at reducing supply chain dependence on China, were unveiled. And the Quad announced its first joint project: port infrastructure development in Fiji. That last one is fascinating because it is the first time the grouping has moved from dialogue to an actual deliverable, which is not nothing after nearly two decades of mostly talking.

The complication is the global economy's deep dependence on China, which is not going to help any mission to reduce Chinese dominance in the region. You cannot build a coalition against Chinese supply chain control while every member of that coalition is still heavily integrated into those same supply chains. That contradiction does not have an easy answer, and the Quad has not resolved it.

➡️ For India specifically, the Quad is a useful diplomatic tool precisely because it stops short of a binding military commitment. India gets the optics of strategic alignment with democracies, access to technology partnerships and maritime cooperation, without having to sign anything that would compromise its ability to also deal with Russia, Iran, or whoever else it needs to deal with. Having the US in the Quad can also go either way. It brings resources and reach, but at a time of such power competition, a Trump-era US that is cosying up to China while asking allies to fall in line is going to be a hindrance as much as a help.

🔗 A rock, a hard place, and a poison pill

The US has launched two Section 301 investigations against India. One for not restricting imports of products made through forced labour, and one for "excess capacity," which is essentially a charge that Indian industries produce more than the market needs, undercutting American competitors. A 12.5% tariff has already been announced, with more potentially coming when the excess capacity probe concludes.

I don't understand how this is the first time this approach has been used so brazenly. If using tariff threats to bully countries into aligning their entire trade policy with American interests is this effective, why haven't past administrations tried it at this scale? The answer might simply be Trump's audacity. Past administrations wanted the same things but had enough diplomatic restraint to pursue them more carefully. Trump just says it out loud and puts it in executive orders.

The fine print of what a deal might contain is alarming. On oil, Trump's executive order rolling back the 25% penal tariff explicitly stated that India has committed to stop buying Russian oil, and that US officials will monitor compliance, with reimposition of tariffs as the consequence if India slips. On agriculture, India is being pushed to reduce or eliminate tariffs on American food and farm products, which is a direct threat to the protections Indian farmers depend on. And buried in the trade framework is a poison pill: provisions in recent US trade agreements that could effectively collapse a deal if India signs trade arrangements with countries Washington considers adversarial, read China, on terms the US does not approve of. Given that India imports over $112 billion from China annually, that provision alone could reshape India's entire industrial supply chain by American diktat.

➡️ India is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Accept the deal and you hand the US significant control over sovereign trade decisions. Walk away and the rupee, already in a downward spiral, continues to fall, foreign investment keeps leaving, and the additional tariffs pile on top of an economy already stressed by the West Asia war and high oil prices.

🔗 May the rich never starve even if the rest do

Here is a tell-tale sign of a government working for private parties and not for the tax paying public. India has a food grain storage gap. The Food Corporation of India launched a Rs 20,000 crore silo programme to fix it by building modern storage facilities across the country under a public-private partnership model. The programme is called Hub and Spoke. After two phases of bidding two companies, Adani Agri Logistics Ltd and Leap India Food and Logistics, together have won 110 out of 134 contracts worth over Rs 16,500 crore.

What makes this more than a procurement story is how it happened. FCI had initially proposed an anti-monopoly clause that stated that even if a company bid lowest on multiple contracts, it could only win one. There are very few silo operators in India and concentration of this kind creates dangerous dependency. In a May 2022 meeting of the Public Private Partnership Appraisal Committee, NITI Aayog and the Department of Economic Affairs opposed the clause. Their argument was that market forces should prevail. The clause was dropped. In the very next round of tenders, Adani won EVERY SINGLE TENDER.

The bundling of contracts also played a role. DEA and NITI Aayog had recommended bundle sizes of Rs 800 to 1,000 crore to attract serious players. The actual bundles in Phase 1 reached nearly Rs 3,900 crore in some cases. At that scale, only companies with very deep balance sheets can participate. The same meeting also removed reverse auctions, a mechanism that would have forced continuous competitive price reduction, on the grounds that it might not yield benefits for infrastructure projects. The combined effect of removing the anti-monopoly cap, inflating bundle sizes, and eliminating price competition through reverse auctions was a structure that systematically favoured the largest players.

The Department of Expenditure did raise a concern at the same meeting: that promising private operators a 15% return on equity while bank borrowing costs were around 9% would significantly increase FCI's long-term payment burden over 30 years. That concern was not addressed in the final recommendations.

Phase 2 followed the same pattern, with Leap India winning 38 of 48 available contracts worth Rs 6,173 crore. Some of these are now under show-cause notices for failing to meet preliminary contract conditions, and some of the locations involved have already been through two cycles of awards and terminations in previous programmes. The same sites, tendered, terminated, re-tendered, terminated again, now awarded again.

➡️ The public distribution system that subsidised food reaches hundreds of millions of people runs through FCI. When the infrastructure underpinning that system is concentrated in the hands of two private companies, with 30-year contracts and guaranteed government payments, the risk is structural. If either company fails to deliver, as has already happened with several Leap India locations, FCI has to re-tender, causing delays in storage capacity that the country demonstrably needs. And the removal of the anti-monopoly safeguard that might have prevented this was a deliberate policy choice. At this point we are not even hiding our crony capitalism anymore.

Trending on the internet

🔗 Cockroaches on the move

Three weeks ago, the Cockroach Janata Party was a meme page started by a guy in the US after the Chief Justice called unemployed youth cockroaches. This week, it held a press conference at the Constitution Club of India in New Delhi, appointed a spokesperson with degrees from IIT Kanpur and the London School of Economics, demanded the sacking of the Education Minister, and announced a protest at Jantar Mantar for June 6, with climate activist Sonam Wangchuk expected to join.

The immediate trigger for this week's press conference was the JEE Advanced 2026 data breach. A teenage cybersecurity researcher discovered that the results portal, run by IIT Roorkee as this year's nodal body, had a cloud storage configuration issue that left the names, phone numbers, and images of nearly two lakh students accessible without any authentication. IIT Roorkee's response was that the data was in "read-only" format, meaning it could be accessed but not altered. The CJP's response to that response is simular to mine: are we a joke to you? A 16-year-old found the vulnerability and reported it to CERT. The institution running one of India's most competitive examinations could not secure its own portal.

The CJP is now demanding that the government disclose all data exposure incidents and cybersecurity lapses under its watch, including those with national security implications. It is also demanding the immediate sacking of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan (AGAIN!). For context, Pradhan oversees the ministry responsible for NEET leaks, CBSE's OSM debacle, and now a JEE data breach discovered by a teenager. The CJP's argument that this constitutes a pattern of incompetence is not a difficult one to make.

Founder Abhijeet Dipke is flying in from the US to be at the June 6 protest and will seek permission for a demonstration at Jantar Mantar.

➡️ I wrote a few issues ago that I hoped the CJP would not fizzle out online. It has not fizzled. Whether a press conference at the Constitution Club and a Jantar Mantar protest translate into sustained political pressure is still to be seen, but the movement has done something harder than going viral: it has stayed coherent long enough to have a spokesperson, a physical presence, and a specific set of demands. The education system angle is smart because it is impossible to defend. NEET leaked. CBSE misfired its own new evaluation system. JEE's portal was cracked open by a teenager. These are not separate incidents. They are a pattern, and the CJP is naming it clearly. June 6 will tell us whether this has legs beyond social media.

Thanks all for today, folks!

See you next week as the countdown to the anniversary issue continues!