The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) form sounds like something designed to make democracy feel interactive, but for many voters it is more like a riddle printed on government stationery. While the ECI calls it an exercise to clean up and verify the electoral rolls, it has millions of people staring at a piece of paper and wondering whether their democracy runs on acronyms.

The Union home ministry reportedly held talks with two armed Kuki-Zo groups on November 6 and 7. The groups said they could no longer live under the Manipur government. The Centre said it understood their pain but would not create a new Union territory. That policy now stands at odds with the reality of Manipur.

Chronic kidney disease, or CKD, has become one of the fastest growing health threats in India, with over 138 million adults now affected, according to a major new study published in The Lancet. India ranks second only to China in the number of people living with CKD, making it one of the worst-affected countries in a global crisis that has seen total cases more than double since 1990.

The Supreme Court has ruled that any person who is arrested must be given the reasons in writing, and in a language they understand. The rule now applies in all cases, across all laws, no matter how serious the crime is.

The 2025 assembly election in Bihar is being widely portrayed in the media as a face-off between the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Mahagathbandhan (MGB), with little mention of the state’s long-standing governance failures.

The Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, has accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of facilitating mass voter fraud to benefit the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2024 Haryana assembly election. Speaking at a press conference in New Delhi on November 5, Gandhi alleged that there were 2.5 million fake entries in the state’s voter rolls, saying the figure is significantly larger than the combined margin of BJP’s victories in key constituencies.

The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party in Tamil Nadu has filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court challenging the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) expansion of a voter list verification drive known as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The petition claims that the SIR exercise, now extended to 12 states and Union Territories, threatens the right of citizens to participate in elections and imposes burdens that resemble a citizenship test without legal authority.

The Indian government’s forensic laboratory has told the Supreme Court that audio tapes allegedly implicating Biren N. Singh, former chief minister of Manipur, in ethnic violence were tampered with and cannot be used for voice comparison.

A new report from the government’s think tank NITI Aayog shows that even though services account for more than half of India’s total economic output, they employ less than a third of the country’s workforce. The imbalance signals a deeper structural fault in India’s development model, where growth is accelerating without offering meaningful or secure work to most people.

As Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan prepares to formally declare the state the first in India to be entirely free from extreme poverty on November 1, a group of economists, statisticians and public intellectuals have posed a basic and unavoidable question: how was this conclusion reached?