Times of Better Bharat

The report from Srisailam reads like an administrative notice, which is precisely why it deserves a closer look. From November 10 the temple town in Andhra Pradesh begins its Karthika Masam festivities, and the management has said that 'Sparsha Darshan' will be suspended on Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays and other auspicious festival days, and permitted only in specified time slots on the remaining days ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/srisailam-gears-up-for-karthika-masam-festivities-from-november-10/article71682566.ece)).

Most of us will skim that as a queue-management line. Read it instead as evidence of a particular kind of institution — one whose calendar is old enough that it still has to be recalculated, and whose management still knows how to recalculate it.

The calendar is the artefact

Note that the date had to be announced at all. Karthika Masam does not sit on a fixed day of the Gregorian year; the observance moves because the system behind it is lunisolar — months counted by the moon, the year tethered to the sun, and periodic intercalation to stop the two drifting apart. I offer that as a reading, not a revelation; the reader can test it against this year's start date and next year's. The point is that the arithmetic is still being done, in public, by people whose job it is to do it. A calendar that is still worked is a calendar that is still alive.

Sparsha Darshan and the price of intimacy

Then there is the substance of the decision. Touch is the most sought-after form of access at any shrine, and therefore the most expensive in every sense: in crowd pressure, in time per devotee, and in slow wear on stone, metal and surface. Suspending it on the heaviest days is an engineering judgement dressed as a ritual one — throughput against the fabric, intimacy against safety. My judgement, plainly marked as one: the call is right, and it would be better still if the criteria were published — hourly capacity, condition of the sanctum, queue times — so that a devotee asked to forgo contact understands what is being protected and why.

This is where the inherited habit of reading such institutions as relics rather than as working systems does real damage. The case to be argued is that colonial-era description tended to classify these establishments as curiosities or as decayed remnants, and that the classification stuck long after the scholarship moved on. Judge the record for yourself; the corrective is not sentiment but method.

What pride actually owes

Three things, concretely.

Document. Every shrine of this scale needs measured drawings, material surveys and condition logs kept as institutional memory, not as a one-off project. India spends 0.6% of GDP on research and development, with 259.3 researchers per million people ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS)) — heritage science draws on the same shallow bench as everything else and must argue for its place on it.

Measure the demand. India ranked 31st of 110 on the Travel and Tourism Development Index, up eight places ([WEF, 2026](https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Travel_and_Tourism_Development_Index_2026.pdf)), on 98,24,000 international arrivals ([UN Tourism, 2024](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/international-tourist-arrivals)). Pilgrim volumes will rise. Capacity is finite and should be planned as such.

Let temple administration be modern without apology. The Tirumala board now takes online bookings for its 2027 calendars and diaries ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/ttd-enables-online-booking-of-2027-calendars-diaries/article71682994.ece)); the Travancore board is negotiating ghee supply after failing to find eligible bidders ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/sabarimala-ghee-supply-in-a-bind-tdb-opens-talks-with-milma/article71682727.ece)). Procurement and portals are not a betrayal of the sacred; they are how the sacred is kept going.

Continuity is not a museum claim. It is an operating claim, and the test of it is whether a tradition can still be run well under load. Srisailam this month is sitting that examination.

The Prime Minister has spoken to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, covering the Kyiv-Moscow conflict and bilateral relations, and conveyed India's readiness to contribute to all efforts aimed at a peaceful resolution ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/pm-modi-speaks-to-ukrainian-president-zelenskyy-on-kyiv-moscow-conflict-bilateral-relations/article71683116.ece)). Companion reports describe a discussion of efforts towards a Russia-Ukraine peace deal ([Times of India](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/pm-modi-speaks-with-zelenskyy-discusses-efforts-for-russia-ukraine-peace-deal/articleshow/135684263.cms)) and a reaffirmation of New Delhi's readiness to support a peaceful resolution ([Hindustan Times](https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/pm-modi-speaks-with-zelensky-reaffirms-india-s-readiness-to-support-peaceful-resolution-of-russia-ukraine-conflict-101794231938776.html)). All three accounts converge on one conditional word: readiness.

That is the correct register, and it should stay that way.

The value of an unpriced option

In diplomacy, "readiness to contribute" is not a commitment. It is an option, deliberately left unpriced. Keeping it unpriced is sound statecraft, because the moment India converts it into a role — convener, guarantor, honest broker — it takes on obligations without acquiring the means to discharge them. A mediator without leverage does not end wars; it absorbs the blame when they continue.

India's convening power is real but finite. The Lowy Institute's Global Diplomacy Index places it 11th of 66 with 194 diplomatic posts ([Lowy Institute](https://globaldiplomacyindex.lowyinstitute.org/downloads/GDI_Key_Findings.pdf)) — a serious network for managing interests, not a substitute for the leverage that only the principal parties to a war possess. My judgement is that India's comparative advantage is that it can talk to everyone; that advantage is spent the instant it is converted into a fixed position.

The China variable

The strongest Indian interest in how this war ends is not European. It is Asian. The terms of any settlement will shape how far Russia can manoeuvre in Asia and how dependent it becomes on Beijing. A Russia with options is a different strategic problem for India than a Russia without them. That is an argument about consequence, not a prediction. Our long-term competitor is China, and the two-front contingency is the planning assumption our military establishment must hold. Every sentence Delhi utters about European peace should be tested against that frame, not against European approval.

Capability is the currency of the table

None of this is free. Military expenditure stands at 2.3% of GDP ([World Bank / SIPRI](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS)) within a US$3.96 trillion economy ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD)), and arms imports remain at 2.86 billion SIPRI trend-indicator value ([World Bank / SIPRI](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.MPRT.KD)). Import dependence is the first thing any would-be mediator must reckon with — it is awkward to arbitrate between parties whose goodwill touches your supply chains. That is the indigenisation case in one line. The trade-offs are genuine and analysts contest particular programmes and timelines; the direction of travel is not in serious dispute.

What India should do

Keep the call, and keep the qualifier. Offer humanitarian and post-settlement reconstruction roles, which impose no enforcement duty. Decline any architecture that would have India guarantee terms it did not write. And spend the diplomatic capital where Indian interests are direct — the neighbourhood and the Indian Ocean — rather than where the photographs are better.

A phone call costs little and signals much. The discipline lies in keeping it that way.

The facts as reported are narrow, and for that reason instructive. The Karnataka High Court has issued guidelines to the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd (BMRCL) to ensure access to the remaining portion of properties acquired for the metro project. It declared some provisions of the corporation's Way Leave Policy unconstitutional, and it imposed costs of ₹10 lakh on the corporation ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/karnataka-high-court-issues-guidelines-to-bmrcl-for-ensuring-access-to-remaining-portion-of-properties-acquired-for-metro-project/article71683078.ece)).

A severance is not a formality

When an agency takes part of a plot for a rail alignment, it leaves a residue. Compensation is paid for the part taken; the owner keeps the part not taken. But a residue one cannot physically reach is a residue on paper only. The citizen has, in substance, lost the whole while being paid for the fraction. That is why the court's direction is not administrative housekeeping — it goes to the only thing property rights are worth in practice, which is use.

The metro is a public purpose and nobody seriously disputes it. But public purpose is the ground on which the power to acquire is granted; it is not a licence to dictate every subsequent term on which the displaced owner must live. The Constitution's Article 300A permits deprivation of property only by authority of law. A corporation's internal policy is not that authority, and cannot be stretched to become it.

Policy is not law

The finding that parts of the Way Leave Policy are unconstitutional is the doctrine applied to facts. A body exercising statutory powers may not use an executive policy to extract conditions the statute does not authorise, still less to defeat an entitlement the citizen already holds. This is the ordinary discipline of administrative law, and it is the discipline that separates a constitutional order from an arrangement of convenience.

Why the costs matter

₹10 lakh is not a rounding error in a public utility's books, and courts do not award costs casually. Costs are how a court says that what happened was not a drafting slip but an assertion of power. A corporation armed with compulsory acquisition should be held to a higher standard than an ordinary litigant, not a lower one, precisely because the asymmetry between it and a homeowner is so complete.

India's rule-of-law record is not flattered by the data. The World Justice Project puts India 86th of 143, with a score of 0.49 and a fall of seven places on the previous year ([WJP](https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/downloads/WJPIndex2025.pdf)). V-Dem's measure of judicial constraints on the executive sits at 0.67 ([Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/judicial-constraints-on-the-executive-index)) — better than the aggregate, and the very reason orders like this one still get passed.

The constitutional method, vindicated

It matters how this dispute was settled. The affected owners did not blockade the alignment or make their grievance a public spectacle. They litigated, and the court answered with guidelines of general application rather than a one-off favour. That is what constitutional morality looks like when it stops being a phrase: the same standard, applied to the powerful, written down so that the next applicant need not start from zero.

Political democracy without economic democracy is a hollow shell, and the smallest unit of economic democracy is a citizen's ability to walk onto his own land. The metro should be built, and built fast. But infrastructure becomes a public good only when it is also publicly fair.

The report is short and, on its face, unremarkable: a sitting MLA, Papiya Adhikari of the Tollygunge constituency, defended a remark that firecrackers cure diseases by describing it as an "old saying from ancestors" — and then, in the same breath, conceded that such talk is not appropriate for an age in which science has progressed so much ([NDTV](https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/old-saying-from-ancestors-bjp-mla-papiya-adhikaris-on-firecrackers-cure-diseases-remark-12304114#publisher=newsstand)).

That concession is the most interesting sentence in the story, and it is where I would begin.

The argument ends at the concession

Once a public representative accepts that a claim must be judged by the standards of an age in which science has progressed, the substantive dispute is over. What remains is only the question of whether the concession was a principle or a retreat under questioning. The "old saying from ancestors" formula is not evidence; it is a way of changing the subject from whether a thing is true to who said it first. Ancestry is a fine reason to study a practice. It is not a reason to believe a medical claim.

The yardstick is constitutional, and it is universal

Article 51A(h) of the Constitution makes it a fundamental duty of every citizen "to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform". That duty is not attached to any faith, region, party or community, and it is precisely because it is universal that it can be insisted upon without insult to anyone. My argument here is with a claim and with the habit of public deference that shelters it — not with any tradition, and certainly not with any people. The test is procedural: the same demand for evidence must be made of every legislator, minister and campaigner, whichever party they belong to and whatever vocabulary they reach for.

Why this claim in particular

Firecrackers are a combustion product. India's population-weighted PM2.5 stood at 48.9 µg/m³ in IQAir's 2025 assessment, ranking the country sixth of 143 and close to ten times the WHO guideline of 5; Delhi, at 82.2 µg/m³, remained the world's most polluted capital ([IQAir](https://www.iqair.com/world-air-quality-report)). In that setting, a claim that inhaling smoke is curative is not harmless folklore. It asks citizens to weigh an inherited saying against their own lungs, and it should have to produce something better than inheritance.

Scientific temper is a budget line

It is easy to treat scientific temper as a matter of attitude. It is also a matter of money. India spent 0.6% of GDP on research and development and counted 259.3 researchers per million people in the UNESCO-backed figures for 2020 ([R&D](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS), [researchers](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6)) — while ranking 38th of 139 on the Global Innovation Index, and a striking 32nd on innovation outputs against 52nd on inputs ([WIPO](https://www.wipo.int/global_innovation_index/)). We are a country running on wit rather than on laboratories. A legislature that wants fewer ancestral remedies should fund more unglamorous ones.

Defend the speech, refuse the deference

I would not have anyone prosecute this remark. Freedom of speech belongs to the MLA as fully as to her critics, and the remedy for a bad claim is a better one, argued publicly. But equal application cuts both ways: the indulgence shown to this claim must be shown, or withheld, identically for the next one. Selective deference — a wink here, a summons there — is the real injury to public reason.

Hold the standard she herself named. Apply it to everyone.

The bottleneck nobody photographs

The least glamorous story about artificial intelligence is also the most instructive. As AI companies' electricity demand strains conventional power infrastructure, data centres — which must run continuously — are running into shortfalls that can delay projects. Firms are turning to on-site generation, gas turbines have become the favoured choice, and a shortage of new units has bid up second-hand ones ([Times of India](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/ais-growing-energy-appetite-revives-market-for-ageing-turbines-jet-engines/articleshow/135684717.cms)).

The most talked-about technology of the decade is being held back by machinery from a mature industrial era. Compute is downstream of turbines, compressors, switchgear and steel. That is an unglamorous truth, and it is the one Indian policy should absorb.

What it implies here

India's digital ambitions are now argued largely in announcements of data-centre capacity. But a data centre is, physically, a very large order for firm power and the equipment that produces it. Our electricity use stands at 1,423 kWh per person per year ([Ember, via Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-demand)); as industry, cooling and computation grow, that figure will rise, whatever else happens. The relevant question is not whether we will need the machines, but whether we will build, service and repair them.

The constraint is visible in the older, slower numbers. Manufacturing is 13.5% of GDP ([World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS)). Research and development spending is 0.6% of GDP, with 259.3 researchers per million people ([World Bank/UNESCO](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS), [here](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6)). These are not indictments of Indian capability — the Global Innovation Index places us 38th of 139, over-performing on income for fifteen consecutive years ([WIPO](https://www.wipo.int/global_innovation_index/)). They are a description of where the binding constraint sits.

The second-hand market is a dependence story

When new turbines are scarce, the rich buy them and everyone else waits, or buys third-hand, or rents capability by the service contract. Refurbishment, spares, hot-section inspections, software locks on controls — none of it is yours. Strategic autonomy in a critical sector rarely means making everything. It means not being unable to maintain your own infrastructure.

A ladder, not a leap

Four buildable prescriptions. First, build domestic maintenance, repair and overhaul capacity for gas turbines and aero-engines; the lower rungs are commercially viable and they train people at scale. Second, place apprenticeship alongside formal education — on the shop floor, complementing the engineering degree, never replacing the college. Third, fund public materials research in superalloys and coatings on a ten-year horizon, treated as infrastructure rather than as a scheme. Fourth, take distributed generation at district scale seriously: the on-site logic firms abroad are being forced into suits a country whose loads are already spread across districts.

There is a related signal worth weighing. Andhra Pradesh ranks second on an Access Equality Index covering infrastructure, health, education, social security and justice, yet thirteenth in per capita income ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/andhra-pradesh-ranks-second-in-access-equality-index-but-13th-in-per-capita-income/article71682708.ece)). My reading, offered as a judgement rather than a finding, is that we have become competent at delivering access while remaining slow at generating productive income.

A used turbine is an arbitrage; a forging press is a capability. The first flatters this year's accounts. The second pays wages for thirty years.

A forest is the one form of property that does not improve by being owned.

That is why the Supreme Court's ruling, as reported, is worth more attention than a routine land dispute usually earns. The Court has held that the Forest Rights Act, 2006 protects forest-dwelling communities who have depended on forests for generations — not commercial cultivators and plantation owners ([The Hindu](https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/commercial-cultivation-within-forest-land-not-protected-under-fra-2006-supreme-court/article71682866.ece)).

Use and extraction are not the same thing

My reading — and it is a reading, not a finding — is that the distinction the Court has drawn is the oldest and most useful one we have. A household that gathers firewood, fodder and leaf, that fishes the tank and keeps bees at the field's edge, takes from the forest and gives back to it. Its own interest lies in the forest standing next year. A plantation inside forest land takes the capital of the soil and returns a ledger entry. Both touch the forest. Only one remains.

The stakes are not abstract. Forest cover stands at 24.4% of land area ([World Bank / FAO, 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)). We withdraw 66.5% of available freshwater ([FAO, via the World Bank, 2022](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.H2O.FWST.ZS)). On the Environmental Performance Index we sit 176th of 177 with a score of 22.46 — a ranking marked [CONTESTED], since Yale cites weak biodiversity protection while the Environment Ministry has rejected earlier editions as methodologically unsound ([EPI, 2026](https://epi.yale.edu/)). A country of this size cannot keep testing the patience of its watersheds.

A shield, not a licence

The careful point, and one worth stating plainly: a protected right is not an unlimited one. The Act, on the Court's reading, shields dependence. It is not a route to conversion. Those who have kept a forest for generations have generally been its cheapest guards; the pressure to convert has more often arrived with capital and paperwork than with a basket and a sickle. That is a judgement about incentives, not about people, and it should be argued as one.

The line must also feed

But a line on a map feeds nobody. If the only dignified option on the protected side is poverty, protection will not hold, and no courtroom will be able to enforce it. The positive agenda is unglamorous and measurable: record rights honestly and quickly, build value chains for forest produce that let a gatherer earn from standing trees, and put soil and water works into the catchments above the villages. It costs a fraction of the litigation it prevents.

There is an older word for this. Indian ethical traditions count contentment among the disciplines of a well-lived life — not resignation, but the practical knowledge of what is enough. A society that cannot say "enough" will not be able to say "forest".

The Court has told us who may hold forest land. The rest of us must decide what we are holding it for.