Times of Better Bharat

The video is genuine. NDTV reports that a Rafale Marine has touched down on INS Vikrant for the first time, and that the Navy has signed for 26 of the aircraft, with delivery scheduled for the end of 2028 or early 2029, according to officials ([NDTV](https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/video-rafale-marine-jet-touches-down-on-ins-vikrant-for-first-time-12259518#publisher=newsstand)). That is a milestone in deck integration. It is not yet a capability.

Compatibility is not air power

A deck landing proves that aircraft, ship and crew can talk to one another. It does not prove sortie generation, weapons integration, sustained operations or wartime survivability. Those are the metrics that decide whether a carrier is a floating airbase or a ceremonial deck. The 26-aircraft order is the number in the report; whether it is enough is a contested judgement. For a single carrier, 26 sounds ample on paper. In practice, training, maintenance, attrition and the need to rotate aircraft through a deployment eat into numbers quickly. The point is not to score the order, but to insist that aircraft count is only one line in the ledger.

The system around the deck

A carrier without escorts, submarines, tankers, airborne early warning and a logistics chain is a target with a flight deck. The Indian Ocean is India's strategic theatre, and presence there is not a matter of sentiment; it is a matter of sustained, survivable deployment. That means the Navy's budget has to buy more than airframes. India spent 2.3% of GDP on defence in 2025 on SIPRI's measure ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS)). Within that envelope, every carrier rupee spent on imported spares is a rupee not spent on escorts, munitions or indigenous design. India's arms imports stood at 2.86 billion SIPRI trend-indicator value in 2025 ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.MPRT.KD)). That is the dependency the carrier programme must confront, not celebrate.

The indigenous case, honestly

Buying the Rafale Marine may be the right interim answer. The strategic error would be to treat the purchase as the answer. A contract that delivers aircraft by 2028-29 but does not deliver a domestic naval fighter pipeline, trained test crews and a weapons roadmap leaves India in the same position at the next upgrade. The indigenous case is not that everything must be built at home tomorrow. It is that a purchased platform must be used to build domestic capacity — through offsets that transfer work, through design authority for follow-on systems, and through a procurement process that rewards availability, not just signature.

The two-front contingency does not make carriers obsolete; it makes them more demanding. A carrier that cannot survive in a contested sea is a liability, not an asset.

What to watch

The test is not the next video. It is whether the 26 aircraft arrive with weapons, spares, simulators and trained crews; whether the escorts and logistics keep pace; and whether a domestic follow-on is funded before the procurement line becomes permanent. If those conditions are met, the landing will have been a beginning. If not, it will be a good photograph of a gap.

A modest plea, a large principle

A former bureaucrat has gone to the Delhi High Court over what the report calls the “large-scale” deployment of Central Armed Police Forces during protests in the capital. The prayer is narrow: directions to the authorities to disclose the requisitions made by the Delhi Police, and the sanction and extension orders of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/ex-bureaucrat-moves-delhi-high-court-against-large-scale-capf-deployment-during-protests/article71645606.ece)). The petition does not ask the court to forbid deployment. It asks to see the paper. That distinction is the whole case.

Why the paperwork is the constitution

The right to assemble peaceably, protected by Article 19(1)(b), is not absolute; the state may impose reasonable restrictions. But “reasonable” is a test, and a test needs evidence. A CAPF deployment is not ordinary policing: it moves a Union force, under Union command, into the day-to-day policing of a city, on the strength of an order. Those orders are the audit trail. Without them no court can weigh whether the restriction was reasonable, no legislature can ask who authorised it, and no citizen can know whether an arrangement begun as a temporary measure has become a standing one. Extension orders are the most important document of all, because a temporary power renewed quietly is how temporary power stops being temporary.

Scorecards are crude — the direction is not

India stands 86th of 143 on the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index 2025, scoring 0.49 and down seven places ([WJP](https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/downloads/WJPIndex2025.pdf)); the World Bank’s governance indicator puts rule of law at −0.13 on its −2.5 to +2.5 scale ([World Bank](https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/worldwide-governance-indicators)). External indices are blunt instruments and no constitutional argument should hang on them. But they measure something real — whether power is exercised by known rules — and a country that aspires to be governed by law should treat a slide, not merely a rank, as a question to be answered rather than dismissed. Disclosure is the cheapest answer available.

The same standard, applied both ways

Those who seek to force a political outcome on the street rather than at the ballot wrong the Constitution, and that judgement does not soften because the cause is sympathetic. But constitutionalism is not a one-way rule, and this desk will not wield it as a weapon for one side only. If the answer to this petition is that requisitions and sanctions need not be disclosed, then the state is claiming a power it will not describe — and a state that meets political disagreement with unnamed force has also left constitutional method behind. The grammar of anarchy has more than one author.

What the record already shows

The cost of undocumented coercion is not hypothetical. The Bombay High Court has ordered Maharashtra to pay ₹2 lakh to Arun Ferreira, arrested in 2007 across multiple cases and acquitted in all of them, who was to be released from Nagpur prison in September 2011 ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/high-court-orders-maharashtra-government-to-pay-2-lakh-compensation-to-activist-for-illegal-arrest/article71645705.ece)) — the remedy arriving years after the injury. Ahead of local body polls in Andhra Pradesh, over 1.05 lakh persons have been bound over, with 2,726 pending warrants executed ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/over-105-lakh-persons-bound-over-ahead-of-local-body-polls-in-ap/article71645325.ece)). Preventive powers are lawful instruments; but each use curtails liberty without trial, and only a written record separates lawful prevention from harassment.

The force itself deserves the same honesty. Karnataka’s police chief has ordered temporary toilets for personnel on bandobast duty, noting in his circular that withholding toilet use causes urinary tract infections, dehydration, digestive problems and avoidable fatigue, with emphasis on women staff ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/karnataka-police-chief-orders-installation-of-temporary-toilets-for-personnel-during-bandobast-duties-lays-emphasis-on-women-staff/article71643954.ece)). An establishment that treats its own deployed personnel as disposable will not be tender with the crowd in front of them.

Hand over the file

Transparency here protects the honest officer as much as the peaceful protester: it is the difference between a force that acted on a lawful order and one that is merely accused of acting without one. The petition asks for paper. The Constitution asks for no less.

The report is brief; the claim inside it is not. The Taliban has banned sight-saving eye operations, the Times of India reports, and the justification offered is that they are "against Islamic teachings" ([TOI](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/south-asia/against-islamic-teachings-taliban-bans-sight-saving-eye-operations/articleshow/135365042.cms)). That is the entire case as reported: no text of any edict, no named scholar, no citation of a school of jurisprudence, no route by which a surgeon or a patient might ask which teaching, read by whom, forbids the restoration of sight.

An assertion is not an argument

A government is entitled to its beliefs. It is not entitled to present a belief as a self-executing rule. When the coercive apparatus of a state is used to stop an eye operation, liberty is being restricted — the patient's, and the surgeon's — and the burden of justification sits with whoever restricts it. This column takes no view on what Islamic teaching holds, and would not presume to. It takes a view on a government that asserts a teaching in one unattributed phrase and publishes nothing another person could examine. The question is procedural before it is theological: where is the document, who signed it, and to whom does one appeal?

Rules have a form

Contrast, on the same day, the shape of an actual rule. The Reserve Bank of India has instructed banks to update their screening under Section 51A of the UAPA, 1967, following the UN Security Council's amendment of five entries on its 1988 Taliban sanctions list ([RBI](https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=13749&Mode=0)). One may agree or disagree with sanctions; but note the form — dated, numbered, published, attributable, and therefore arguable. That is what law looks like. The eye edict has none of these features, which is precisely why it cannot be argued with, only obeyed.

The cost of that formlessness is not distributed evenly. A blanket prohibition is cheapest for the household that can travel abroad for treatment and dearest for the one that cannot. That is an argument about consequences, and it is not an argument about any people.

Legality is the route, not the result

An Indian court supplied the same discipline this week from the other direction. The Karnataka High Court quashed a Commission's order allotting a site to a differently-abled person who had never applied ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/karnataka-hc-quashes-commissions-order-for-allotting-site-to-differently-abled-person-who-had-not-filed-application/article71645099.ece)) — a sympathetic outcome set aside because the procedure had not been followed. Even a good result must arrive by an examinable route. A decree that arrives by no route at all cannot claim the credit of good intentions, because it has published no intentions, only a prohibition.

Scientific temper, at home and abroad

The constitutional guarantee of equality before the law, and the constitutional charge to develop a scientific temper, are not local customs to be invoked when convenient. Nor should India preach from a pedestal: research and development spending stands at 0.6% of GDP ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS)) and researchers at 259.3 per million people ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6)) — figures that argue for humility. But humility is not silence. Stating the principle costs nothing and is owed anyway.

The demand is modest: publish the text, name the authority, provide an appeal. A government that will not do those three things has not made a religious argument. It has made an administrative one, and dressed it as religion so that it cannot be answered.

ISRO is set to launch GSLV-F18 carrying the navigation satellite NVS-03 from Sriharikota today ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/isro-gslv-f18-nvs-03-navigation-satellite-launch-sriharikota-october-30-2026-live-updates/article71645088.ece)). It will not produce the noise of a consumer launch, and that is precisely the point. Navigation satellites are the least photogenic infrastructure a nation builds. Their value is not in the spectacle but in a quiet fact: positioning and timing become a domestic public utility, and no one can switch it off, reprice it or restrict it.

A utility, not a trophy

My reading is that this is the clearest kind of strategic autonomy we have — not autarky, not a refusal to trade, but the ability to keep the clocks synchronised, the trains running and the survey maps honest when someone else's arrangements change. A country without its own system rents one, and a tenant does not set terms. That is a judgement, not a forecast, and it is the judgement on which the case for self-reliance in critical sectors actually rests.

The pipeline, not the launch

But a launch proves a capability, not a base. India spends 0.6% of GDP on research and development ([World Bank/UNESCO](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS)) and has 259.3 researchers per million people ([World Bank/UNESCO](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6)). We rank 38th of 139 on the Global Innovation Index — 52nd on inputs and 32nd on outputs ([WIPO](https://www.wipo.int/global_innovation_index/)). Read those two numbers together and the story is unflattering in a very specific way: we are a country that wrings a great deal out of very little. The impressive part is the conversion. The fragile part is the input. Resident patent applications stood at 63,217 ([WIPO via World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IP.PAT.RESD)) — respectable, and thin for an economy of our size.

Where the users actually live

The second half of the case is decentralisation. The customers of a navigation system are not in Bengaluru. They are district transport offices, surveyors, farmers, fishermen, and disaster-response teams working in the hours when everything depends on knowing exactly where something is. Yet our ground-level scientific base is narrow: three Indian universities sit in the world's top 500 ([THE](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2027/world-ranking)). A national programme of this kind should leave behind calibration labs, application centres and instrumentation workshops attached to State universities — a hub-and-spoke system in the sky matched by one on the ground.

Apprenticeship alongside the degree

Every such programme should carry a training load as a condition of its budget: technicians, timing specialists, fabricators, quality inspectors, drawn from ITIs and polytechnics and apprenticed to working engineers. Not instead of formal education — alongside it, feeding it, giving the degree something to attach to.

Patience as policy

Compare the attention we give to a quarter's numbers — Jio Platforms reporting net profit of ₹8,389 crore, up 13.7% ([TOI](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/jio-q2-results-profit-jumps-14-to-rs-8389-crore-revenue-up-11-4/articleshow/135365671.cms)) — with the silence around a satellite that will serve for a decade. Both are genuine achievements. But our headlines, and our capital, have shorter memories than our engineers. A standing decade-long commitment to R&D, rising steadily toward 2% of GDP, would do more for jobs and incomes than any single mission.

Self-reliance is not a slogan about refusing the world. It is the modest, unglamorous capacity to keep working when the world changes.

Three people died in a landslide in Odisha: a couple and their nine-month-old child, in Dangeshi village under Raikia block in Kandhamal district, as the State's flood situation remained grim ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/odisha/3-persons-die-in-landslide-as-flood-situation-remains-grim-in-odisha/article71644983.ece)).

We will call it a natural disaster. It is the kindest phrase available, and the most expensive. It moves the event outside human agency, and therefore outside human responsibility. Sometimes that is simply honest: nobody chooses the monsoon.

But between the rainfall and the burial there is a slope, and a slope is a record of decisions — what was cut and what was left, what was grazed, what was paved, where the water was allowed to go. I do not know the condition of that particular hillside; the reporting does not tell us, and I will not pretend it does.

What the numbers say about the class of slopes

What we do know is what the country's land and water look like in aggregate. Forest cover stands at 24.4% of land area ([World Bank / FAO, 2024](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS)). Tree cover is being lost at roughly 1,25,678 hectares a year ([Global Forest Watch via Our World in Data, 2024](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tree-cover-loss)). And 66.5% of available freshwater is already being withdrawn ([FAO via World Bank, 2022](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.H2O.FWST.ZS)) — a country running its water account close to the line even in a good year.

These are not the causes of one landslide in Kandhamal. They are the terms on which the subcontinent now meets its rain. The same week, a glacial lake burst in Bhutan sent a flash flood through the Gasa Tshachu hot springs ([Al Jazeera](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/30/bhutan-hot-springs-hit-by-flood-from-glacial-lake-burst?traffic_source=rss)), and the IMD tracked a second weather system over the Andaman Sea after Cyclone Arnab ([Hindustan Times](https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/after-cyclone-arnab-imd-tracks-second-weather-system-over-andaman-sea-depression-likely-by-october-31-101793366008391.html)). Different events, different geographies; the common thread is water arriving faster than the surfaces shaped to receive it.

India ranks 176th of 177 on Yale's Environmental Performance Index for 2026 — a [CONTESTED] placing, and one the Environment Ministry has rejected in the past as methodologically unsound ([EPI](https://epi.yale.edu/)). I would not hang an argument on it. But the disputed indices and the undisputed forest and water figures point the same way.

Balance as a budget

The dharmic vocabulary for all this — ṛta, the order that holds things; yajña, the offering that sustains the order — is usually heard as piety. It is better heard as accounting. A household, a village and a hill sit on the same balance sheet, and a society that withdraws faster than it renews is, in the plainest sense, living off capital. That is a judgement, not a measurement, and it should be argued rather than assumed.

But its consequences are measurable, and they are dull and specific: protect and regenerate vegetation on the steep slopes where water gathers; recharge aquifers where the rain actually falls, not where the pipe ends; fund drainage as infrastructure, with a line item and an engineer, rather than as a monsoon emergency; and count the survival of planted trees in the third year, not the sapling in the photograph.

The inward half

And then the part that is not policy. Three deaths in one village is a grief no scheme will touch. What is available to the rest of us is a discipline of not looking away — of holding attention on the unpleasant fact after the news cycle has moved on. That is a practice, not a feeling, and speaking of it as a practice is not a spiritual claim but a plain observation about how habits are built.

A hillside keeps accounts. So does a conscience. Both send the bill late, which is why we keep mistaking them for acts of God.