What's the ruckus all about?
Hey all,
Sorry not sorry for disappearing last week without notice. I had to take a break from spending hours engaging with the news every day. Well, to be fair, I kept engaging with it nonetheless but decided against writing about it. I wanted this writing to come from a place of calm rather than anger.
So here I am and this week I break down a bunch of things that are swirling around. Jharkhand protest, take back NTA, Punjab leak, E20... and the likes. I took some time to dive into each of these to understand what really was at the heart of it and once I understood it, I figured there must be more people like me who know these are contentious issues right now but don't exactly know why. So here you go. I hope after reading this issue, you feel better informed to engage with the online or offline discourses going on in India right.
Viva la revolución, of the soul, of the mind, of the country, of the world!
Just the gist
🔗 Jharkhand finally shows up on the people's maps
A week after the Jantar Mantar protest on July 20, another one had started brewing in Jharkhand. Jharkhand being a non-BJP allied state, the pro-BJP crowd had started making noise about how those who stood with the Jantar Mantar protests had lost their voice suddenly. That is not true. So let's look at it.
The immediate trigger was the 14th JPSC Combined Civil Services Examination. The commission advertised 103 vacancies, shortlisted 2,204 candidates for the main exam, and almost immediately aspirants started flagging problems: category-wise cutoffs were never published, the merit list circulated without commission members' signatures, and then an OMR sheet (not, that again!) went viral online, allegedly belonging to a shortlisted candidate who had reportedly attempted only 48 questions against a qualifying score of 144. Nobody has independently verified that OMR sheet, to be clear, but the trust in the system is already broken.
But this is not a one off incident. Protestors claim that for twenty-six years this exam has had similar issues. That is the entire lifespan of Jharkhand as a state, carved out of Bihar in 2000. So this is not a protest about one exam. It is a protest about a recruitment system that has apparently never functioned properly for the state's entire existence, and this particular exam just happened to be the one that finally broke people's patience. Well, that and I strongly believe that the movement initiated by the CJP reminded people that they CAN ask for accountability.
The government's response so far has actually moved reasonably fast, at least on paper. A Special Investigation Team arrested several people including a JPSC Deputy Examination Controller, the JPSC Chairman resigned, and the main examination along with several other recruitment exams have been postponed pending fresh dates. If you are grading the government on visible activity, that is not nothing. Certainly not nothing after how the central government handled the Jantar Mantar protest. Handled and is handling...
But the protesters are holding firm on one specific demand that the state has not met: a CBI investigation rather than a state-run one. And I think their ask here is pretty sound, if you think about it structurally. The alleged irregularities happened inside a state-run commission. The investigation into those irregularities is currently being run by a state agency, the CID. Asking the institution's own state government to investigate itself, even through a nominally independent wing, is a conflict of interest in today's time. A central agency stepping in would at least remove that specific structural problem, even if it introduces its own political complications given how CBI referrals tend to work in India.
The Cockroach Janata Party has extended support to the protesters, with CJP leaders speaking directly to the aspirants on the phone. This is worth flagging because it is a genuine test of whether CJP can function as something bigger than a single-issue Delhi-based movement.
The state has already started acting and Congress has also sent representatives to the protest site to meet with the protestors. What is also ironic is that the same people who wanted to know where every penny was coming from during the Jantar Mantar protest are now backing the Jharkhand protest because... well... it's not a BJP or BJP-allied state. Same is true for national media. This protest is now getting coverage while being smaller in scale than the Jantar Mantar protest because it fits their narrative.
➡️ Every state has some version of this story, a recruitment commission that aspirants have distrusted for years, waiting for one specific incident to become the flashpoint. Jharkhand's flashpoint happened to be visible enough to attract national attention this time. The deeper question this raises for me is not really about JPSC specifically, it is about how many protests it will take for the country to fix a system that is so obviously broken. The good thing is that the resistance has begun. It needs to be sustained.
So after Dharmendra Pradhan was made to resign, the state machinery in the form of the ruling party's IT cell, TV news, social media influencers started asking the protestors and their supporters why no one had said anything about the Punjab (AAP government) paper leaks.
CM Bhagwant Mann says "not a single paper leak" has happened in four and a half years. But that is not entirely true. The most recent one, a July 2026 pharmacy officers' exam, involved a sophisticated inter-state cheating racket: hidden pen cameras, real-time answers relayed via Bluetooth from operatives across three states. Punjab Police busted this themselves, on the same day, and arrested 35 people. The government's position, that this was a preempted cheating operation rather than a paper leak, is defensible. The paper was not distributed in advance; people cheated during the exam using smuggled technology.
Then the PSSSB Group B officers exam from December 2025. Twenty-two of the top 100 scorers came from a single district, including multiple members of the same families. That is the kind of statistical anomaly that just requires basic pattern recognition to become suspicious. A vigilance probe has been ongoing for over six months now with recruitments still frozen.
Then there is a naib tehsildar exam cancelled in 2022 after confirmed wireless cheating, an ADO exam where a whistleblower alleged a Rs 32 lakh bribe for a leak, and most damningly, the 2023 PSTET and Class 12 English board exam controversies, where in one case correct answers were literally pre-highlighted in bold in the question paper, and in another, a leaked paper that had already been cancelled once was mistakenly redistributed to 185 students due to staff negligence.
Mann's claim that there have been zero "paper leaks" specifically may be technically true depending on how narrowly you define that term. But calling this record clean requires ignoring cheating rackets, statistically inexplicable topper clusters, a bribery whistleblower complaint, a literally pre-marked answer key, and a redistribution error so severe some students took the same exam three times. What is different though is how quickly the state has moved in resolving most of these issues with some having resolved within a day.
➡️ Despite all of this, it is worth noting that Punjab has surpassed Kerala in becoming No. 1 in the country in the NITI Aayog School Education Quality Index 2026. Genuine infrastructure improvement and genuine, repeated exam integrity failure can both be true about the same administration simultaneously, and I think that is exactly what is happening in Punjab right now.
🔗 Why are so many protestors complaining about NTA?
Okay, so we have covered the NEET leak and CBSE's evaluation disaster and the JEE data breach in this newsletter individually, as they happened. But I think it is worth stepping back for a second, because when you look at the National Testing Agency's actual track record since 2017, this year is not an aberration. It is a pattern finally becoming impossible to ignore.
NTA was set up in 2017 by a Cabinet decision, not an Act of Parliament, which is a meaningfully different and less accountable route. The stated goal was to centralise exam conduct and reduce corruption, taking the burden off CBSE and giving India one trustworthy national testing body instead of many. Education, worth remembering, is on the Concurrent List, meaning both states and the Centre are supposed to have a say. Setting up NTA this way sidestepped that conversation entirely.
Now here is the part that actually surprised me putting this together: NTA's very first exam, a 2018 UGC NET, involved a Muslim woman being denied entry for wearing a hijab. Since then it has been one long list. Women asked to remove bras to enter exam halls. Admit cards with wrong exam centres and dates. A JEE topper caught using a proxy candidate, with an NTA-affiliated invigilator arrested for helping him. Doctored OMR sheets in Tamil Nadu. A racket of impersonators writing NEET for paying candidates. Technical glitches serious enough to trigger Supreme Court petitions. And that is before we even get to this year, when 67 candidates scored a perfect 720/720 compared to two the year before, eight of whom had attended the same coaching centre in Haryana.
What strikes me most is the inconsistency in how the government has handled each crisis. Pradhan refused to cancel NEET, saying it would affect too many students, while the government cancelled UGC NET the day after nine lakh students sat for it, citing "unavoidable circumstances." NEET-PG got postponed the day before it was scheduled. There is no consistent principle being applied here. Just crisis management, exam by exam, as things blow up.
And then there is the money question, which I think gets underreported. NTA started with a tender of Rs 25 crore. Its most recent tender says it has received Rs 525 crore. Its funds do not appear in the CAG report. It also only has a governing body and no general body, meaning the accountability structure you would expect for an organisation handling this much money and this many students' futures simply is not there.
Tamil Nadu tried this experiment already, in reverse. The state had its own entrance exam system in the 80s, scrapped it in 2007 after a government-commissioned study found entrance exams disadvantaged the rural poor, and reverted to board-exam-based admissions. It worked reasonably well until NEET was reintroduced there in 2017 against the state's wishes. A subsequent state committee found that after NEET, rural admission to government medical colleges dropped from 65% to 55% within a year, and the share of "repeaters," students who could afford to take a gap year and pay for coaching to retake the exam, jumped from 12% to 71% between 2016 and 2020. Over 400 NEET coaching centres sprang up in Tamil Nadu alone, generating an estimated Rs 5,750 crore business. Medical education got more expensive and more concentrated among families who could afford to buy their children years of preparation time.
➡️ Centralising something does not automatically make it fairer or more accountable, it just moves the point of failure to one place instead of many, and if that one place is badly governed, everyone downstream inherits the damage simultaneously. Also, that one place becomes much harder to reach than if you had several nodes of contact. NTA was sold as a solution to corruption. What it has actually done, according to its own decade-long record, is create a single, opaque, poorly audited chokepoint through which the futures of millions of Indian students now pass. Worth sitting with that the next time someone tells you centralisation is inherently the more efficient choice. Same is true for One Nation One Election.
🔗 Explaining E20 so you can enjoy the memes
So you must have heard about E20? If nothing else, you must have seen the memes if you spend any time on social media at all. Motorists are complaining about engine wear and lower mileage and the government is calling those complaints misinformation. There has now been a genuine shift: on July 10, the government finally admitted, for the first time, that E20 delivers 3 to 5% lower mileage than regular petrol.
What I want to walk you through is the actual economics here, because I think the government's framing and the underlying numbers are telling two slightly different stories.
The government's position now is essentially this. Stop expecting E20 (a litre of petrol is 20% ethanol blended into it) to be cheaper, think of it as energy security instead. Fair enough, except for two things. One, energy security of a country is the government's responsibility and should not become a burden on its citizens. Two, when you actually look at procurement numbers, ethanol itself is not actually the cheap input everyone assumes. Oil marketing companies pay roughly Rs 65 to 72 a litre for ethanol, compared to a pre-tax refinery cost of around Rs 53 a litre for petrol. Litre for litre, before tax, ethanol is currently the more expensive ingredient. Even the government's own FAQ admits this only flips in India's favour when crude oil climbs to $120 to 130 a barrel as it had during the peak of the recent West Asia conflict. At today's prices, closer to $90, blending does not save money. It costs more.
Then there is the energy content problem, which is the part actually showing up as lower mileage for your family in India. Ethanol simply carries less energy than petrol, and NITI Aayog flagged this back in 2021, recommending that E20 be priced lower than regular petrol specifically to compensate riders and drivers for that reduced calorific value. That recommendation was never implemented. You are paying the same price per litre for a fuel that gets you fewer kilometres, which is precisely the mismatch people have been complaining about since April.
The government's headline number, Rs 1.97 lakh crore in savings from crude substitution, is also worth scrutinising. It is the value of crude not imported but it does not account for what the government actually paid to procure ethanol domestically, the tax concessions given up on higher blends, or the subsidised power and water that went into growing the ethanol feedstock in the first place. A real savings number accounts for all of that. This one does not.
The forex saving from importing less crude is a national, balance-of-payments benefit. It shows up in India's macroeconomic health, not in people's wallets. The pump price you pay is governed by entirely separate levers, excise duty, GST, and oil marketing company margins. So the government is using the first kind of saving to justify not adjusting the second.
The farmer angle also gets more honest scrutiny here than it usually receives. The common defence for keeping E20 prices high is that lowering them would hurt farmers who grow the sugarcane and maize used for ethanol. But the price paid to farmers and distilleries is procurement, an entirely different administrative lever from retail taxation and OMC margin. The government could lower what you pay at the pump through excise adjustments without touching what farmers are paid by a single rupee. Framing this as a straight trade-off between cheap fuel and farmer income is not accurate, and it is a convenient framing precisely because it forecloses the actual conversation about tax policy.
And states are not eager to cut this either, for their own separate reason: petrol is taxed as a percentage of the final price, so a lower pump price automatically means lower state VAT revenue, regardless of which party runs the state.
➡️ I do not think reducing India's oil import dependence is a bad goal. It genuinely is not, especially given how exposed India's economy is to global oil shocks. But who benefits from the saving from E20 is of concern. It is our forex reserve, sure. But it is also ethanol manufacturers. One such company is owned by the sons of Union Minister, Nitin Gadkari, who has been at the forefront of India's E20 policy. If they benefit from this policy is still contested but that regular people certainly don't benefit from it directly is not contested.
🔗 When votes speak louder than Indian news anchors
Political strategist and the man behind the victory of six chief ministers across party lines, Prashant Kishor saw a historic win this week in Bihar. Running as the candidate for his party, Jan Suraaj, from Bankipur, a BJP bastion, for a by poll, he won.
He had a brutal start in Bihar. He did not even contest the 2025 Assembly elections himself, and his candidate for this exact seat got 7,717 votes, roughly 5% of the total. Across the state, Jan Suraaj lost security deposits in over 90% of the seats it contested, which in Indian electoral terms is about as unambiguous a rejection as you can get. So when I say this win was historic, I mean it in more than one way. It gives Kishor the credibility and stability to stay relevant in Bihar for the next four years rather than fading into the long list of political consultants who tried and failed to become politicians themselves.
Now on to what really happened. After 31 rounds of counting, Kishor secured 64,117 votes against the BJP's Neeraj Kumar Sinha, a margin of over 19,000. That margin alone would be notable in an ordinary contest. What makes it historic is the seat itself: Bankipur has been BJP territory since 1995, first held by Kishore Prasad Sinha and then his son Nitin Nabin (current BJP National President), who won it five consecutive times, most recently last year by nearly 50,000 votes. This is not a marginal or swing constituency. It has a consolidated upper-caste vote base and strong middle-class turnout, exactly the demographic the BJP typically counts on. Losing it at all is significant. Losing it to a party that scored literally zero seats in the state assembly nine months earlier is the part that should genuinely worry BJP strategists.
So how did this happen? A few things stacked up.
The BJP shot itself in the foot early. It originally fielded a candidate named Abhishek Bunty, who filed his nomination and then had his ticket withdrawn after it emerged his parents' names were connected to the infamous Fodder Scam. The party had no real defence for this and switched to Neeraj Kumar late, putting them on the back foot from the start of the campaign.
Kishor ran a genuinely disciplined ground campaign, deploying over 200 workers for micro-level election management, something his party had reportedly been preparing for since well before the seat became vacant after Nabin resigned from Bihar to join Rajya Sabha. Rather than running on emotional or identity issues, Kishor campaigned on education, jobs, and civic matters, focusing heavily on direct public interaction.
This is also the first electoral test since Samrat Chaudhary took over the chief ministerial post from Nitish Kumar. Upper-caste voters unhappy with the BJP's decision to sideline Nitish Kumar moved toward Kishor. At the same time, a chunk of Yadav and Muslim voters, traditionally RJD's base, also shifted to him, partly out of resentment toward Chaudhary over police encounters involving Yadav men, and partly because this was never really a strong RJD organisational seat to begin with.
There is also the timing. This is the first bypoll held after the Gen-Z protests against the NEET paper leak, protests that reached Bihar too, with students demanding Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation as education minister. The BJP seems to have lost real ground with younger voters, which may not just be a Bihar-specific problem. It is a warning sign ahead of state elections in Punjab, Gujarat, and elsewhere, where that same youth disillusionment could resurface.
➡️ This is not a sweeping realignment on its own. But it is an early alarm call for both the RJD and the BJP. It is also an indication that identity politics has its limits when nothing else about people's living condition changes. Whether Kishor can turn one strong result into a durable base ahead of Bihar's full state elections, and whether this becomes read nationally as a genuine signal about BJP's standing with young voters after the NEET protests, is the question. But for right now, this win buys Kishor exactly what he needed most: proof that Jan Suraaj is not dead on arrival.
I think I will do the next issue on data centres and big tech... what do you think?
Let me know? And see you next week.
Love, S.
