Times of Better Bharat

The Minister's statement, reported today, is worth reading slowly. The Malabar Devaswom Board is to get “full institutional autonomy” — and the reason given is the telling part: at present the board “has no powers, with trustees handling its affairs,” and this could be changed only by enacting a law and granting it full powers (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/malabar-devaswom-board-to-get-full-institutional-autonomy-says-keralam-minister/article71627139.ece). Read that again: the body that carries the name of a custodian is, in law, a shell. Whatever authority operates in its place is held personally, by trustees, at discretion.

That is not a small administrative wrinkle. It is a heritage problem.

What is actually being held

A devaswom board does not merely supervise worship. It holds fabric — stone, timber, mural, bronze, palm-leaf — along with festival calendars, ritual practice, temple records and the local economies that cluster around them. This is the argument of this column: such holdings are a civilisational archive, kept not in a museum case but in use. The point is easy to test. Ritual continuity is live and dated, not nostalgic: the Pavitrotsavam has just begun at the Lower Ahobilam Sri Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy temple (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/pavitrotsavam-begins-at-lower-ahobilam-sri-lakshmi-narasimha-swamy-temple/article71626531.ece). In India the past is not an exhibit; it is a schedule.

Autonomy is five powers, not one word

If the board is a creature of statute — and by the Minister's own account only a law can give it powers — then its authority is a grant, not an inheritance. A grant should be drafted as an engineer drafts a specification. Five powers, at minimum: title to assets, so that property cannot drift; control of income and a real budget; power to appoint and pay staff, including conservation professionals; an in-house conservation capacity, so that decisions on repair rest on architectural and epigraphic evidence rather than on taste; and published accounts.

Leave out any one and “autonomy” transfers discretion without responsibility.

The danger in the word

The honest case for devolution is subsidiarity: decisions belong closest to the artefact and the ritual calendar. But autonomy can become a euphemism. Where trustees presently handle affairs without statutory limits, full powers without a ledger can mean capture by a small circle — a real risk, not a rhetorical one. Kerala's own local bodies show the pattern: a CAG audit detected 10 unauthorised constructions in four urban local bodies and 193 unauthorised additions or alterations in selected urban bodies, indicating deficiencies in the monitoring mechanism (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/cag-notes-building-rule-violations-in-audit-of-local-bodies-in-keralam/article71627527.ece). Devolution is right; devolution without audit is not.

The stake is material as well as cultural

Heritage stewardship is not a decorative line item. India recorded 98,24,000 international tourist arrivals in 2024 (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/international-tourist-arrivals), and ranks 31st of 110 on the World Economic Forum's Travel and Tourism Development Index, up eight places (https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Travel_and_Tourism_Development_Index_2026.pdf). The custodians of Malabar's temples are, whether they wish it or not, managers of an asset the whole country draws on.

A test for the coming law

It is a judgement, not a fact, that the case for devolution here is strong — I think it is. But the draft should be judged on three questions. Does it give the board legal personality and clear title? Does it write conservation expertise into decision-making rather than leaving it to consultants hired after damage? Does it publish accounts?

And one boundary worth stating plainly. The past of Malabar is not one community's possession to be guarded against others; a well-run board is a trustee for every citizen who wishes to know what was built here and how it was kept. Continuity is measured in centuries. This law will be judged in decades. Get the ledger right, and the centuries look after themselves.

The Defence Minister leads the Indian team at the ASEAN Defence Ministers' Meeting in the Philippines, and is expected to hold bilateral discussions with counterparts to review ongoing defence cooperation and explore avenues for strengthening strategic partnerships (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/rajnath-singh-to-lead-indian-team-at-asean-defence-ministers-meeting-in-philippines/article71627072.ece). The easy reading is that this is atmospherics — another multilateral room, another set of handshakes. The useful reading is narrower. This is one of the few forums where India's claim to be a security provider is audited against what it can actually deliver.

The region does not want a patron

Southeast Asian states are not shopping for an alliance. They are shopping for capability: training slots, spares, maintenance, credit lines, hydrographic survey data, white-shipping information, and a partner that does not demand a treaty or a basing arrangement in return. India's comparative advantage in that market is real but modest. It has no colonial history in the region, seeks no bases, and has spent two decades building a naval reputation in the Indian Ocean as a first responder. Its disadvantage is equally real: distance, and a land border that consumes attention and formations.

The judgement here — and it is a judgement, not a finding — is that India's leverage in the western Pacific is derivative. It flows from credibility in the Indian Ocean, not from rhetoric about the Pacific. A navy that cannot sustain a deployment far from home should not pretend that a ministers' meeting changes the correlation of forces.

Autonomy is a balance sheet

India spends 2.3% of GDP on defence (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS) and still imports arms worth 2.86 billion in SIPRI trend-indicator value (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.MPRT.KD). That is the central contradiction of Indian defence diplomacy: an importer cannot be a supplier, and a supplier is what the region is looking for. On a GDP of US$3.96 trillion (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD), the constraint is not the headline figure but the composition of the spend and the speed of procurement.

The indigenisation case must be acknowledged honestly. Domestic programmes, from missiles to warships, have delivered, and the political push behind them is correct. But indigenisation without delivery timelines becomes a slogan with a budget line, and partners in Manila, Hanoi or Jakarta judge us by delivery, not by intent.

The two-front arithmetic

Planning for a two-front contingency is now standard, and it imposes a discipline. Every commitment in the eastern theatre has to be paid for elsewhere — in the Himalaya, or in the Indian Ocean. That is not an argument for abstention. It is an argument for sequencing: presence in Southeast Asia should be built around what we already do well — training, exercises, maritime domain awareness, and the sale of equipment we can actually support over a decade — rather than around declaratory positions that cost nothing and buy nothing.

Some will argue that any defence engagement east of Malacca invites retaliation on the northern border. That is a legitimate reading of the risk and should be argued, not dismissed. The counter is that a presence which raises the cost of adventurism elsewhere buys time on the front that matters most. Neither view is treasonous; both deserve a hearing.

The measure of this trip will not be the communiqué. It will be whether three or four concrete instruments come out of the bilaterals — a training package, a maintenance arrangement, a credit line, a survey commitment. Autonomy is not the refusal to choose. It is being worth choosing, and being able to deliver when chosen.

What the Court actually said

The Supreme Court's remarks on a murder investigation in Uttar Pradesh, reported today, deserve to be read slowly. The Court said it was appalled by the manner in which the investigation had been carried out, ordered ₹6 lakh in reparation, and observed that the State police would do well to educate their officers in the process of investigation ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/supreme-court-slams-up-police-over-slipshod-murder-probe-orders-6-lakh-reparation/article71626534.ece)).

That last sentence is the mildest in the order and the most damning. A court does not tell a police force to educate its officers unless it has concluded that the failure was not the aberration of one bad apple but a habit of the institution. The word the report uses is ‘slipshod’. It is a gentle word for something grave. A murder file is the point at which the State's promise of equal protection either holds or breaks, and it broke.

Reparation is the right instinct

Ordering money is not a soft option. It treats a botched investigation as an injury the State must make good — which is what it is. Article 21's guarantee of life and personal liberty, and Article 14's promise of equal protection, are not satisfied by the existence of a police station; they are satisfied only by an investigation that is competent and honest. When the machinery fails, the citizen has been wronged by the State, not merely disappointed by it. Compensation acknowledges that. It is a judgement of this paper, not a finding of the Court, that this is the correct direction: the remedy must reach the family, not stop at a departmental note.

Who pays for a careless file

But ask who carries the cost of the next slipshod file — the one that never reaches a Supreme Court bench. It is the family that cannot afford a senior counsel, cannot file a special leave petition, cannot travel to Delhi. India ranks 86th of 143 on the World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index, with a score of 0.49 and a fall of seven places on 2024 ([WJP](https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/downloads/WJPIndex2025.pdf)). Meanwhile 72.6% of India's prison population is made up of pre-trial detainees ([World Prison Brief, citing NCRB](https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/india)). That combination — weak investigation and heavy pre-trial custody — describes a system that arrests briskly and investigates slowly, and the people who bear it are rarely the ones with lawyers on call.

The remedy is institutional, not rhetorical

The answer is not a larger cheque. It is capacity and accountability: trained investigators, forensic and scientific support that arrives in time to matter, and a clear separation between investigation and the policing of public order — so that a probe is not shaped by what is politically convenient. It also means protecting those who come forward. In Kerala, a student was reportedly attacked for reporting drug use ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/student-attacked-allegedly-for-reporting-drug-use/article71627445.ece)). A system in which reporting a crime is dangerous will not solve crimes.

None of this is a comment on one party or one government. The administration in Lucknow will change; the file will remain. That is precisely the argument for institutions over personalities, and for a constitutional morality that is demanded of a station house officer as sternly as it is of a judge. Fraternity is not a preamble ornament. It is the duty to investigate the murder of the poorest citizen as if the Republic depended on it — because, in the only sense that matters, it does.

The charge, stated precisely

Congress leaders say Urmila Sanawar's arrest in a Uttarakhand murder case is an attempt to save a VIP, and that she is being implicated in fresh cases to silence her because she holds crucial information about the murder ([report](https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/congress-says-urmila-sanawars-arrest-an-attempt-to-save-vip-in-uttarakhand-murder-case-101793022639425.html)). That is an allegation, not a finding, and it should be read as one. But it is a testable allegation, and the test is not political.

The constitutional question is narrow. Is the machinery of investigation being used for the purpose it exists for — establishing the truth about a killing — or as a means of neutralising a person inconvenient to someone more powerful? Article 14 does not permit two investigations, one for the connected and one for the awkward. Note that the VIP in the allegation is unnamed in the report. That is not a minor detail; it is the crux. A claim of protection cannot be answered by anyone except the agency that decides whom to arrest and whom to leave alone.

The courts have already said it

The Supreme Court's rebuke to the U.P. Police, reported today, over a "slipshod" murder probe — with ₹6 lakh in reparation ordered and a direction that officers be educated in investigation — is the same story in a different state ([report](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/supreme-court-slams-up-police-over-slipshod-murder-probe-orders-6-lakh-reparation/article71626534.ece)). Courts can and do call out investigations that fail the basic test of competence.

Our rule-of-law indicators are not flattering. The World Justice Project's 2025 index places India 86th of 143 with a score of 0.49, down seven places ([WJP](https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/downloads/WJPIndex2025.pdf)). Judicial checks on government stand at 0.67 on V-Dem's 0–1 scale ([Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/judicial-constraints-on-the-executive-index)) — the judiciary, in other words, remains the part of the system doing the checking. That is not a reason to lean on it indefinitely; it is a reason to keep it supplied with honestly investigated cases.

The cost of a bad probe is not abstract. Pre-trial detainees make up 72.6% of India's prison population ([World Prison Brief](https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/india)). People wait in custody while an investigation that should have taken months takes years — or takes a convenient direction.

Double standards cut both ways

Here the desk parts company with the press conference. A party that discovers the sanctity of fair investigation only when its own person is named is not defending a principle; it is defending a client. The same standard must apply when the person in custody is inconvenient to the other side, and the same demand — a monitored, court-supervised inquiry — must be made then, with equal volume.

The test for Uttarakhand is simple and public. Will the fresh cases survive judicial scrutiny on their own facts, produced before a magistrate with records, timelines and evidence that do not depend on anyone's usefulness? If they will, the cover-up allegation collapses. If they will not, no quantity of political noise will save them, and a court will say so.

That is the unglamorous, correct answer: not "save the VIP" against "jail the witness", but one standard of investigation applied to everyone. India has rarely lacked outrage. It has lacked the ordinary procedure that makes outrage unnecessary.

The headline

Telangana is reported to be hopeful of attracting a few major semiconductor projects, pitching its advantages under a Semicon 2.0 policy (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/telangana/state-hopeful-of-attracting-few-major-semicon-projects/article71627219.ece). The ambition is legitimate. Semiconductors are a strategic sector, and every serious economy wants a foothold. But the phrase “a few major projects” is the tell. A fabrication plant is an anchor tenant, not an ecosystem.

What a fab actually needs

A modern fab consumes ultra-pure water, uninterrupted power, precision chemicals, specialised gases, metrology services and packaging capacity. Most of these come from clusters of small and mid-sized firms. If those firms are imported, the plant is an assembly of foreign supply chains on Indian soil. If they are built here, the project becomes a seed. That distinction is the difference between a factory and strategic autonomy.

The latest World Bank/UNESCO figure in our data puts India’s research and development spending at 0.6% of GDP in 2020, with 259.3 researchers per million people (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS; https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6). India ranks 38th of 139 on the Global Innovation Index 2025, but 52nd on innovation inputs and 32nd on outputs (https://www.wipo.int/global_innovation_index/). That is the shape of the problem: clever outputs, thin inputs. Semiconductor fabrication is the most input-intensive manufacturing on earth. A subsidy can buy a plant; it cannot buy a process culture.

The district model

The alternative is not to spurn the fab. It is to negotiate it as part of a hub-and-spoke bargain. The state provides land, water, power and a time-bound approvals regime. The investor commits to local sourcing targets, to placing process engineers in local polytechnics, to a joint R&D facility with state universities, and to a supplier-development fund. Around the anchor, districts can host packaging and test units, precision machining, clean-room services and chemical handling — work that employs diploma holders and ITI graduates, not only PhDs. That is decentralisation in practice: not a campus in a capital city, but a chain of suppliers in tier-two towns.

Skills, not just subsidies

India’s gross higher-education enrolment was 34.4% in 2025 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR). The missing layer is apprenticeship alongside formal education: two-year process technician programmes run inside the plant, with a certificate that travels. This is not an argument against universities; it is an argument for the applied middle. A fab that imports its technicians has not created an Indian semiconductor industry. It has created a tariff-free enclosure.

The test

The test of Semicon 2.0 is not how many projects are announced. It is whether, five years on, a Telangana firm can supply the gas cabinet, the ultrapure water loop or the test service without a foreign joint-venture partner. If the answer is yes, the subsidy was seed capital. If no, it was rent. That is a judgement, not a forecast — but it is the judgement that should govern the negotiation. Manufacturing is 13.5% of GDP (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS); a few fabs will not move that number. A supplier base might.

An orderly retreat, honestly done

On the Kakinada coast, 89,000 people are being moved out of the path of cyclone Arnab. Schools across the Godavari region have been given a two-day holiday; in Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Konaseema district the residents of 67 villages are being shifted to relief camps, and 88 pregnant women have been taken to nearby government hospitals ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/kakinada-coast-braces-for-cyclone-arnab-89000-people-being-evacuated/article71627293.ece)).

It is worth saying plainly that this is good administration, and it should be said without grudging. The 88 women are the detail that tells you someone planned by imagining the worst case rather than merely announcing a protocol. A state that moves its most vulnerable first is a state behaving as it should.

Evacuation is what you do when the earlier defences are gone

But an evacuation is the last line of defence, not the first. The first is the land itself: the coastal vegetation that takes the first shock of a surge, the channels that give water somewhere to go, the soil that holds what rain it can, the tree cover that slows the wind before it reaches a roof.

Consider the direction of that base. Forest cover stands at 24.4% of land area (FAO via World Bank, 2024, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS), while tree cover loss runs at 1,25,678 hectares a year (Global Forest Watch via Our World in Data, 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tree-cover-loss). Water stress stands at 66.5% of available freshwater withdrawn (FAO via World Bank, 2022, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.H2O.FWST.ZS).

These are national figures, not district ones, and I do not claim that any of them summoned Arnab. The claim is narrower and harder to dodge: a country losing that much tree cover a year is quietly spending down the margin it will need the next time. That is a judgement about direction, and readers may test it against their own numbers.

Preparedness has an interior

The outer work and the inner work are not two projects. Anxiety about weather is, very often, simply the absence of preparation for it; calm is what preparedness feels like from the inside. This is why the unglamorous decisions matter more than the dramatic ones.

In Keralam, a ministerial meeting chaired by Agriculture Minister T. Siddique has decided to form a state-level monitoring unit to assess the impact of climate trends on agriculture, with short- and long-term plans ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/state-level-monitoring-unit-to-be-formed-to-assess-impact-of-climate-trends-on-agriculture/article71627636.ece)). Elsewhere, farmers are being urged towards soil testing and balanced fertiliser use to protect soil fertility and cut cultivation costs ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/soil-testing-balanced-fertilizer-use-vital-for-sustainable-farming/article71626797.ece)). Neither will produce a photograph. Both are the actual work.

Balance, taken literally

In this tradition, balance is not a mood; it is a schedule of obligations. A society that treats a river as a pipe and soil as a substrate ends up evacuating its villages by the tens of thousands. Contentment as an organising idea is not quietism — it is the discipline of not demanding from the land more than the land can renew.

Our per-person emissions are modest: 2.17 tonnes of CO₂ (World Bank, 2024, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.GHG.CO2.PC.CE.AR5). Our exposure is not modest at all — 112th of 190 on the ND-GAIN adaptation index (2024, https://gain-new.crc.nd.edu/country/india), and 23rd of 67 on the Climate Change Performance Index, down thirteen places (2026, https://ccpi.org/country/ind/). The country least responsible per head is among the most obliged to adapt.

This evacuation is being run with evident competence. The next one should not need to be so large. Between storms is where a civilisation actually lives: plant, hold water, test soil, keep the channels open — and do it in the ordinary months when nothing is on fire.