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How Punjab Police dismantled Khalistani terror networks

Anurag
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How Punjab Police dismantled Khalistani terror networks

The Punjab Police that eventually dismantled organised Khalistani terrorism did not begin the insurgency as a dominant force. Terrorists assassinated officers, attacked police posts, killed suspected informers and operated across district boundaries using safe houses and automatic weapons. By the time Julio Ribeiro and later KPS Gill took command, conventional policing had become inadequate for an armed campaign that had weakened both state authority and local intelligence networks.

Ribeiro, who became Punjab Police chief in 1986, focused first on restoring morale and convincing personnel that the force would fight back. The phrase “bullet for bullet” became associated with him, although Ribeiro later said those were not his precise words. Police stations were fortified, weapons and vehicles improved, and commanders received greater operational freedom. Ribeiro himself narrowly survived a terrorist attack on the Punjab Armed Police headquarters in Jalandhar in October 1986.

Under Gill, the transformation became systematic. Punjab Police moved personnel away from static pickets towards mobile patrols, expanded from roughly 35,000 to around 60,000 personnel and increasingly relied on intelligence-led operations. “Focal point patrolling” and later “Operation Night Dominance” were designed to increase mobility, reclaim areas after dark and make it harder for terrorist groups to move, reorganise or intimidate villagers.

Local intelligence became the centre of the strategy. Punjab Police knew village geography, family networks, transport routes and local relationships in ways outside forces could not quickly replicate. Informers, spotters, surrendered cadres and joint interrogation teams helped identify commanders, couriers, safe houses and weapons routes. Intelligence was increasingly shared across districts and with agencies including the IB, R&AW, CBI and central security forces.

Gill’s model targeted not only individual gunmen but the ecosystem that allowed terrorist organisations to function: leadership, financiers, extortion networks, couriers, shelter providers and arms routes. Sustained pressure, factionalism, leadership losses, declining civilian cooperation with terrorists and the restoration of elections gradually produced what the article describes as organisational suffocation.

The campaign was effective in restoring state control, but its legacy remains contested. Allegations of torture, disappearances and staged encounters cannot be dismissed, and courts have convicted police personnel in specific cases. At the same time, those crimes do not establish that every encounter was fabricated. Punjab’s counterterrorism model emerged from an extraordinary security crisis, succeeded in destroying the organisational strength of Khalistani terrorism, and left behind difficult questions about effectiveness, legality and accountability.

Read the full article on Chapter One Magazine.

The coordinated drumbeat: Tracing the foreign funding targeting India’s Data Centres

Divyansh Tiwari
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The coordinated drumbeat: Tracing the foreign funding targeting India’s Data Centres

Why do so many water crisis and land rights stories about Indian infrastructure seem to break at exactly the moment investors are deciding whether to commit? This final piece in the series argues that’s not a coincidence, it’s a pattern.

Imagine rumours about your new store’s water use and noise pop up right before opening day, and you later find the same person spread identical rumours about the store next door last year. That’s how the media coverage of India’s data centre boom, a $180 billion investment wave that’s tripled the country’s capacity since 2020, looks like.

The centerpiece is a 2024 investigation called ‘Dirty Data,’ published by the Environmental Reporting Collective and carried by outlets like Mongabay. The article traces its funding back to the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Journalism Fund, and from there to bigger funders, the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network, all of which have publicly documented histories of funding environmental and civil-society journalism in India. The argument isn’t that editors are taking orders, it’s that when grant money consistently rewards stories about infrastructure’s downsides rather than its trade offs, that’s simply the kind of journalism that gets pitched, funded, and published.

The article traces the familiar pattern through earlier similar incidents: the Sterlite copper plant shutdown in Thoothukudi, the collapse of POSCO’s $12 billion steel project in Odisha, the Niyamgiri bauxite mining dispute, and years of delay on Kerala’s Vizhinjam port. In each case, it argues, real local grievances existed, but they were, in its telling, picked up and amplified by international networks in ways that similar projects in other countries never experienced.

Then comes the timing argument: a Mongabay water-scarcity story right as the Google-Adani Vizag data centre deal was taking shape, a BBC water-stress piece in November 2025 just as global capital was weighing India’s next investment wave, and a burst of critical coverage during the exact window India was finalising its 2026-27 budget tax incentives. It calls for a public MeitY portal tracking real water and cooling data across data centres, a 48 hour rapid response fact check unit for major international stories, and formal disclosure of who funds the outlets covering Indian infrastructure.

The full article can be read in Chapter One Mag.

Why India’s Data Centres must answer to Indian law, not Washington’s

Divyansh Tiwari
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Why India’s Data Centres must answer to Indian law, not Washington’s

Who actually sets the rules for India’s data centre boom, and are they good enough? India’s data centre capacity has nearly tripled since 2020, pulling in almost $95 billion in investment. But the policies meant to govern this industry- data protection, cross-border data flows, sustainability standards- are still catching up. So what can India learn from everyone else who’s already been through this?

Europe offers the strictest playbook. GDPR forced any company handling EU citizens’ data to prove its facilities met tough security standards, which ended up funneling serious investment toward high compliance data centres. The EU has since gone further, mandating that big facilities report energy and water efficiency, and building a public rating system, think energy labels, but for data centres. Ireland’s story is a cautionary one, data centres ballooned to nearly 14% of the country’s electricity use, and regulators eventually froze new grid connections in Dublin until facilities agreed to bring their own renewable power. The Netherlands hit similar grid limits and responded with targeted moratoriums.

The US took the opposite path, almost no federal policy, just states competing on tax breaks and fast permitting. That’s how Northern Virginia ended up hosting roughly 35% of the world’s data centre capacity. But the cracks are showing, grid operators have warned capacity is running out, and New York recently paused new hyperscale data centre permits statewide, the first such freeze in the country.

Singapore took a more surgical approach as it froze new approvals in 2019, built a strict sustainability framework, then reopened only for facilities using recycled water and meeting efficiency benchmarks. The result is a premium, world-class industry. The UAE, meanwhile, paired fast approvals with clear data sovereignty rules.

Where does India fit? On data protection, the journey from the 2017 Puttaswamy privacy judgment to the 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act was long and bumpy, but the law is now rolling out in phases through 2027. On infrastructure, India has made real moves, declaring data centres essential infrastructure for cheaper financing, tying capacity growth to the IndiaAI Mission, and offering a tax holiday through 2047 for foreign cloud providers using Indian facilities. 

But gaps remain. There’s no unified national data centre strategy, no mandatory energy or water efficiency standards like Europe’s, and state policies vary widely, making multi-state investment tricky. The bigger stakes: laws like the US CLOUD Act mean American authorities can access data on US-company servers, anywhere, including data on Indian citizens. That makes keeping India’s data on Indian soil, under Indian law, a matter of genuine digital sovereignty.

The full article can be read in Chapter One Mag.

Busting the big myth: Why data centres aren’t the water villains they’re made out to be

Divyansh Tiwari
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Busting the big myth: Why data centres aren’t the water villains they’re made out to be

Are data centres really draining India’s water supply? The numbers tell a very different story than the headlines.

When word got out in 2025 that a major data centre was coming to Visakhapatnam, locals panicked, and understandably so, given the city’s chronic water shortages. Similar fears have flared up in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad. The narrative that’s taken hold, tech companies are quietly siphoning off water that should go to homes and farms. The scary numbers driving this story are real. India’s data centres could use around 150 billion litres of water a year, and a BBC report citing S&P Global found that 60-80% of the country’s future data centre capacity may be built in high water stress zones. Compared to household usage, that sounds enormous.

But here’s the catch, almost all of this coverage confuses ‘withdrawal’ with ‘consumption,’ and that distinction changes everything.

A 2026 report from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water found that data centres account for just 0.02 to 0.03% of India’s total water demand. For context, agriculture alone eats up 78-80%. The 150 billion litre figure isn’t wrong, but it’s measuring water passing through cooling systems, not water permanently lost. Most of that water evaporates in cooling towers and returns to the atmosphere as rain, the same water cycle a lake or irrigated field participates in. A smaller portion goes out as treated, regulated wastewater. Only a sliver escapes as stray droplets. Actual permanent loss is far smaller than the headline number suggests.

Regulation is already tighter than people assume, too. Groundwater use requires official clearance, discharge is governed by pollution control standards, and states like Rajasthan now mandate wastewater recycling and zero liquid discharge for new facilities. India’s IT ministry has said it hasn’t seen widespread complaints of unsustainable water use from the sector. Other water-stressed places offer a preview of where India could head: Singapore leans on recycled wastewater for cooling, Microsoft is targeting water positive status by 2030, and Equinix has pushed some facilities’ water-efficiency scores below the industry benchmark using recycled water and hybrid cooling.

There’s also an angle almost nobody raises: data centres increasingly run on solar and wind power, which use virtually no water, unlike coal and gas plants, which are heavy freshwater users for cooling. That’s a water saving nobody’s currently counting.

The full article can be read on Chapter One Mag.

Cool by design: How India’s data centres are learning to run on far less water

Divyansh Tiwari
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Cool by design: How India’s data centres are learning to run on far less water

Ever wondered why data centres guzzle so much water? Here’s the story in plain terms.

Walk into a big data centre and the first thing that hits you isn’t the tech, it’s the noise. Thousands of servers, packed into towering racks, running non-stop and throwing off heat like commercial ovens. Keeping all that hardware from melting down is basically the second most important job in the building, right after keeping the power on.

The trick engineers use is surprisingly elegant: hot air and cold air are kept strictly separate in ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ aisles, and units called CRAHs blow chilled air across the cold side using coils full of cold water. But where does that cold water come from? That’s where things get interesting, there are actually two separate water loops. One circulates cold water indoors between chillers and those air handlers. The other carries the heat outside to cooling towers, and it’s only in this outdoor loop that water actually gets used up for good. Cooling towers work exactly like the desert coolers common in Indian homes, just industrial sized. Hot water trickles over a wet surface, fans pull air through it, and as some water evaporates, it drags heat away with it, the same reason sweat cools your skin. Most of what’s called water consumption (as opposed to just withdrawal) happens through this evaporation. A smaller portion is deliberately drained off as “blow down” to stop mineral buildup, and treated properly before disposal. Only a tiny fraction, under 0.01%, escapes as stray droplets called drift.

Now here’s the twist, AI is upending all of this. A single rack of AI chips can draw as much power as 100 Indian homes, and plain air just can’t carry that much heat away anymore. That’s pushing the industry toward newer, far less thirsty methods, Direct Liquid Cooling (piping coolant straight onto chips), full on immersion cooling (dunking servers in non-conductive fluid), and even free cooling that just uses naturally cool outside air. Microsoft has even tested underwater and orbital data centres to sidestep the water problem entirely.

For India, hot, water-stressed, and racing to build AI infrastructure, this isn’t academic. States like Rajasthan are already mandating recycled water and zero-waste discharge for new facilities.

The full article can be read in Chapter One Mag.

Data Centres are the new highways: India is racing to build them

Divyansh Tiwari
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Data Centres are the new highways: India is racing to build them

Think about the last time you paid for something with UPI, sat through an online lecture, checked crop prices on your phone, or booked a train ticket. None of that just magically happens in the cloud. It all runs through data centres, those big, carefully cooled buildings packed with servers that store, process, and move our digital lives at lightning speed. You don’t notice them on your daily commute, but they’re the quiet engines powering modern India. What’s striking is how quickly this engine is ramping up. Back in 2020, India’s total data centre capacity was a relatively modest 0.5 gigawatts. By 2025, it had nearly tripled to around 1.5 gigawatts. 

Looking ahead to 2030, experts expect it to reach somewhere between 6.5 and 10 gigawatts. The money follows the growth; between 2019 and 2025 alone, nearly $95 billion was committed to the sector. That’s not marketing talk, that’s serious capital betting on India’s digital future.

This boom didn’t appear out of thin air. The government has deliberately treated data centres the same way it treats roads, railways, and power plants, as critical infrastructure. Policies now offer tax breaks, faster approvals, and easier access to land. States have joined the competition, offering cheaper electricity, land incentives, and single-window clearances to attract projects. The result is a genuine race to the top rather than a race to the bottom. The human impact shows up most clearly in jobs and opportunity. Every large data centre needs engineers, cybersecurity specialists, network administrators, and facility managers. By 2030, the sector could create more than one lakh direct jobs, plus many more indirect roles in construction, power, water, and support services. These facilities are also the backbone of India’s digital economy, which the government expects to contribute an extra $1 trillion to GDP by 2030.

There’s a security dimension too. When bank details, health records, and government data stay inside India, they remain under Indian law instead of foreign rules or surveillance regimes. As the United States and China compete for tech dominance, India is positioning itself as a stable, democratic third option for global companies looking for a reliable place to host their data. Of course, the rapid growth raises legitimate questions about water and electricity use. Operators are already responding by shifting to recycled water, more efficient cooling systems, and greater use of renewable energy. 

The map is expanding beyond the usual hubs. Mumbai and Chennai are no longer the only names in the conversation; Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, and other cities are joining the list, helping spread digital infrastructure and opportunity more widely across the country.

The full article is available in Chapter One Mag.

Shipbuilding for the future world: India’s navigation path

Sanghamitra
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Shipbuilding for the future world: India’s navigation path

In a rapidly changing world, the global contest in shipbuilding is not only about who produces the most bulk tonnage, but who can build the specialised ships the new economy actually needs. Modular subsea construction vessels laying cables for data centres or supporting deep-sea mining as per needs already exist in small numbers. Demand for them is rising because two forces arrived together: explosive growth in undersea fibre for AI and data centres, and a scramble for seabed minerals that power batteries and electronics. 

The technological bar is rising fast. Leading shipyards now use robotic welding, digital twins and ammonia- or methanol-ready propulsion. China has already launched Blue Sea Navigator, billed as its most advanced electric cable-layer of the world. 

A bold 2022 salvage of a crashed US Navy F-35C from 12,400 feet in the South China Sea illustrates how specialised vessels are driving power projection now. The only suitable diving-support construction vessels available for the salvage are China-built ships operated by a Singapore firm. Dominance now includes building the odd, high-value ships nobody else has built until everyone suddenly needs them. 

New routes and theatres are opening. A warming Arctic is making the Northern Sea Route commercially viable where Russia already controls access through Rosatom and a nuclear icebreaker fleet. Deep-sea mining will require collector and support ships. Energy transition is creating demand for ammonia, methanol, hydrogen and nuclear-powered designs. In each domain, the countries that build the ships will also sit closest to the resources and the profits. India is not starting from zero. It holds International Seabed Authority contracts for polymetallic sulphides on the Carlsberg Ridge and nodules in the Central Indian Ocean Basin, backed by the Deep Ocean Mission and the Matsya 6000 submersible. It has a working group with Russia on the Northern Sea Route. Combined with the ₹69,725 crore package, new clusters and early foreign partnerships, the ingredients for a long game are already at play. Rajendra Chola built ships strong enough for the goal in front of him. This article explains how policy alone will not close a thousand-year gap for India. Policy aimed at the ships the world will need in future is needed to put India back on the global shipbuilding map.

The full article can be read in Chapter One Mag.

CJP appoints former AAP functionaries to its National Working Committee: Know who they are

Shraddha Pandey
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CJP appoints former AAP functionaries to its National Working Committee: Know who they are

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has formally announced its National Working Committee on 6th August 2026, after a two-day core team strategy meeting at founder Abhijeet Dipke’s residence in Maharashtra. The formation of the CJP National Working Committee marks the next step toward structured national expansion. It has also announced a ‘Kya Bolti Public’ outreach campaign. The CJP’s expansion as a youth-led public pressure group, however, is being spearheaded by former Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) functionaries.

Beginning as an online satirical response to Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant’s courtroom “cockroaches and parasites” remark in mid-May 2026, the CJP gained serious public attention during its protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. The CJI had said that young people who cannot find employment in their professions, “like cockroaches,” turn to RTI activism, social media, and journalism, becoming  “parasites of society” who attack the system. 

The CJP protest catapulted into a wider movement after climate activist Sonam Wangchuk launched a 26-day hunger strike to demand the resignation of former Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the NEET paper leak and to push for broader educational reforms.

OpIndia reported earlier that the CJP picked up a genuine issue concerning students and rallied their support through “Laughtivism” only to further the anti-BJP/Modi agenda of the political Opposition. Although the CJP has said it has plans for state coordination committees, Lok Sabha, and city-level units over the next six months, the CJP’s expansion as a pressure group itself is quite revealing of how it is but an anti-BJP political party in the making.

Before elaborating on the CJP’s full-fledged pivot towards anti-BJP politics, it is important to know who all are on the CJP’s National Working Committee.

The announced CJP NWC roster includes:

  • Founder & National Convener: Abhijeet Dipke (30)
  • Co-Conveners: Ashutosh Ranka (30) and Saurav Das (27)
  • National Organisation In-Charge: Ajinkya Shinde (35)
  • Organisation Co-in-Charge: Deepak Baliyan (26)
  • National Secretary: Aafreen Nawaz (34)
  • Media Lead: Vijay Reddy Mallangi (30)
  • Legal Affairs Lead: Ratna Singh (31)
  • Research and Policy Lead: Vaishnavi Gaur (29)
  • Technology Lead: Rohan Deshpande (31)
  • Finance Lead: Yogesh Ingale (33)

The CJP has also appointed zonal leads. These include: Deepak Baliyan (North), Vijay Reddy Mallangi (South), Ankit Bharadwaj (East & Northeast), Yogesh Ingale (West).

Most CJP National working Committee office bearers are former AAP functionaries: The formalisation of AAP’s B-Team

Ever since the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) came into existence, OpIndia has been highlighting how the CJP is the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in a new Gen-Z appealing packaging. Appointed as the National Convenor of the CJP, its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, previously served as AAP social media coordinator between 2020 and 2023. In 2023, Dipke left for the US to do an MS in Public Relations from Boston University.

Several reports during the 2020 Delhi Assembly elections identified him as a member of AAP’s social media and digital campaign machinery. Reports described him as a key figure involved in creating memes, short videos and digital content designed to promote Arvind Kejriwal and counter political opponents.

Dipke is also a part of AAP’s wider election war-room operations and social media coordination efforts. He was quoted in media interviews discussing campaign strategies aimed at millennials and first-time voters and worked with AAP’s IT and media teams during election campaigns.

Abhijeet Dipke is also known to have been a disciple of AAP leader and former Delhi Deputy CM Manish Sisodia. Dipke has been a part of AAP’s ‘war room’ and has consistently held an anti-BJP political line. It was seen how the Aam Aadmi Party aggressively supported the CJP protests, and AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia visited Jantar Mantar to show solidarity with the ‘cockroaches’.

Meanwhile, CJP Co-Convenor Ashutosh Ranka is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and the London School of Economics, with prior experience as a management consultant at McKinsey in London. After returning to India last year, he has been engaged in civic campaigns in Jaipur focusing on environmental issues, education reforms, and youth concerns. Ranka gained wider attention during the NEET controversy due to his association with the CJP.

Ashutosh Ranka is no stranger to politics. In fact, his most notable political credential is his earlier role as a national spokesperson for the Aam Aadmi Party, where he aggressively defended Arvind Kejriwal and the party against allegations in the liquor policy scam, often dismissing them as ‘politically motivated’. Ranka was actively associated with AAP’s 2025 Delhi assembly campaign.

Ranka has previously written op-eds for leftist propaganda outlets like ThePrint and Newslaundry.

Appointed by the CJP as National Organisation In-Charge, Ajinkya Shinde is also an AAP functionary. He had resigned from his job to become a full-time AAP member. Shinde is a former AAP Maharashtra Youth Wing State President and state committee member.

Announced around May 2025, Ajinkya Shinde also served as AAP Goa Sah Prabhari before transitioning into the CJP’s organisational role.

In fact, reports are suggesting that Shinde continues to serve as the Convenor of AAP’s Maharashtra Youth Wing

The CJP has given the charge of Media Lead and South Zone to Vijay Reddy Mallangi, who, unsurprisingly, happens to be an active AAP Telangana member.

Social media is replete with his videos and photos showing involvement in supporting AAP fundraising, leadership, and electoral campaigns last year.

The CJP’s Finance Lead Yogesh Ingale is also reported to be a functionary of the Aam Aadmi Party in Maharashtra’s Pune.

Moreover, Ankit Bhardwaj, the CJP’s East and North Zone Lead, has also worked as a volunteer for the Aam Aadmi Party.

Clearly, the CJP indirectly formalised itself as probably the ‘youth wing’ of the Aam Aadmi Party by inducting maximum present or former AAP functionaries into its National Working Committee.

While CJP has claimed that past political associations of its members are irrelevant and that the group is ‘independent’ and ‘standalone’, picking persons with a recorded past with a particular political party and ideological bias points to the fact that the CJP is essentially an extension, rather a reinvention, of the Aam Aadmi Party.

OpIndia analysed earlier how, beyond the comedic surface, the CJP systematically advances opposition stances, targeting the judiciary, Election Commission, corporate interests, media, and political defectors, thus disguising partisan messaging as satire. It is evident that the CJP is nothing but an anti-BJP experiment with a ‘cool’ and ‘Gen-Z-appealing’ outlook.

The ‘cockroaches’ had made their political ideology and anti-Modi stance abundantly clear in May itself when they engaged in a self-imposed Instagram followers count competition with the BJP. During the protest, the CJP welcomed the support of known anti-BJP politicians like Mahua Moitra, Chandrashekhar Azad, and Kirti Azad, to Islamo-leftists like Yogendra Yadav, who expressed joy over CJP cockroaches successfully “occupying” Jantar Mantar and the streets leading to the Parliament. Kunal Kamra, who delivered derogatory remarks against Maa Sita from CJP’s protest stage; Delhi University professor Nandita Narayan sang “Bas naam rahega Allah ka” and glorified Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Islamic supremacist poem “Hum Dekhenge”; AISA, SFI, and other leftist student groups, which raised anti-national slogans of “Azadi-Azadi” and “Brahmanwad se azadi”.

The CJP also received support from notorious Hinduphobes and anti-BJP ‘activists’ like Prakash Raj, Swara Bhasker, Shabana Azmi, Arundhati Roy, and Nivedita Menon.

In fact, during the violent CJP protest on 20th July, Samajwadi Party, Azad Samaj Party, and workers of other anti-BJP parties actively participated in the so-called ‘student protests’. The protest was also joined by MACOCA-accused AAP-linked gangster Haji Afzal.

 The CJP’s top leadership boasts that people from across political ideologies supported the CJP during the July protests. In this view, the CJP inducting former AAP functionaries as its top office bearers lends credence to what was already speculated: the CJP is a B-Team of the Aam Aadmi Party.

From policy to factories and jobs: How India became a hub of new technology manufacturing

Raju Das
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From policy to factories and jobs: How India became a hub of new technology manufacturing

In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched Make in India with a simple but ambitious claim: India would no longer remain content as a vast market. It would become a producer, designer and innovator. That promise travelled from a speech at Vigyan Bhawan to factory floors, assembly lines and chip plants. It is the story of a sequenced policy push that tried to convert Atmanirbhar Bharat from a political idea into manufacturing capacity.

Make in India was never only a slogan. It was accompanied by concrete measures. Under the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, the govt launched localisation measures such as the Phased Manufacturing Programme for mobile handsets, capital-support schemes like M-SIPS and SPECS, and later the Modified Electronics Manufacturing Clusters programme. These were meant to do the unglamorous work: change duties, create industrial parks, and nudge companies to make more in India instead of merely selling here. These steps expanded the manufacturing map, but still left a shallow value chain.

Then came the decisive turn. The Production Linked Incentive architecture, spread across fourteen sectors, was the instrument that rewarded actual production rather than announcements. This framework covered electronics, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, telecom, solar modules, batteries, textiles, white goods, food processing, steel and drones. Other schemes announced went further down the value chain. The Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme was designed to bring displays, camera modules, circuit boards and other missing parts onshore. The India Semiconductor Mission, the Design Linked Incentive, and then Semicon 2.0 sought to move India from assembling gadgets to packaging chips and, eventually, fabricating them. A newer Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme is the next stage: not just more handsets, but more Indian design, brands and component sourcing.

Foxconn, Tata Electronics, Samsung, Dixon and others are not isolated corporate headlines but as part of a larger industrial map stretching across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and beyond. Telecom, IT hardware and drone manufacturing are feeding into defence and dual-use technologies. The cumulative employment impact of the Make in India and PLI-driven electronics push is now substantial and visible across the country. 

You can read the full article in Chapter 1 Magazine.

Are PM Modi’s foreign visits extravagant? Here’s how his global outreach outpaced Manmohan Singh’s without a proportionate rise in travel expenditure

Aditi
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Are PM Modi’s foreign visits extravagant? Here’s how his global outreach outpaced Manmohan Singh’s without a proportionate rise in travel expenditure

The Ministry of External Affairs’ latest disclosure on PM Modi’s foreign visits has once again triggered a familiar cycle of outrage on social media. Within hours of the data being tabled in Parliament, opposition leaders and anti-Modi commentators began circulating isolated expenditure figures, portraying the Prime Minister’s overseas engagements as extravagant exercises at taxpayers’ expense.

However, a closer examination of the data reveals that much of this criticism is built on selective numbers stripped of context. Far from exposing wasteful spending, the available figures suggest that PM Modi has undertaken a far more ambitious diplomatic outreach than his predecessor while keeping expenditure broadly comparable, and, in some respects, even more restrained.

The disclosure came in response to questions raised in the Rajya Sabha by AAP MP Sanjay Singh and CPI(M) MP Dr V Sivadasan. The MPs sought details of PM Modi’s country-wise visits since 2021, the expenditure incurred on each visit, bilateral agreements signed and the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) received during the period.

According to the MEA, PM Modi’s foreign visits in 2026 up to July cost around ₹74.5 crore. During these six months alone, he travelled to 13 countries, including Malaysia, Israel, the UAE, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Italy, France, Slovakia, Seychelles, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand.

Predictably, critics ignored the broader picture and instead highlighted the expenditure on individual visits. Some insufferable detractors questioned how more than ₹17 crore was spent on the Norway leg of the Prime Minister’s European tour, attempting to portray the figure as evidence of extravagance.

That criticism ignores the fundamental nature of official prime ministerial visits.

Looking beyond the headline figures

The expenditure disclosed by the government is not simply the cost of flying the Prime Minister from one country to another. It includes charter aircraft, security arrangements, advance teams, official delegations, communication infrastructure, logistics, protocol requirements and numerous operational expenses associated with high-level diplomatic engagements. Multi-country tours involving meetings with several heads of government naturally cost more than ordinary travel.

Looking at one destination in isolation while ignoring the larger itinerary creates a misleading impression.

More importantly, the criticism begins to unravel when the expenditure is compared with that incurred during the tenure of former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.

Available parliamentary records show that Dr Singh undertook 73 foreign visits between 2004 and 2014. During those ten years, approximately ₹795.18 crore was spent on air travel alone.

The words “air travel alone” are critical.

The comparison critics rarely make

Unlike the figures disclosed for PM Modi’s visits, which broadly include charter flights, security, official delegations and logistical expenditure, the ₹795.18 crore figure relating to Dr Singh accounts only for aviation expenses. It excludes security deployment, accommodation, transport, communication systems, advance teams, protocol arrangements and numerous other costs that necessarily accompany visits by a serving Prime Minister.

Consequently, the actual expenditure incurred on Dr Singh’s foreign visits would have been considerably higher than the available figure.

Several of Dr Singh’s individual trips cost more than PM Modi’s recent tours

The comparison becomes even more revealing when one examines individual visits.

Dr Singh’s June 2012 visit to Mexico and Brazil cost approximately ₹26.94 crore in air travel expenditure alone. His 2010 visit to Washington DC and Brazil incurred around ₹22.70 crore on aircraft operations, while his November 2009 visit to the United States and Trinidad and Tobago cost approximately ₹21.27 crore. Another visit to the United States in 2013 involved air travel expenditure of around ₹23.30 crore.

Each of these figures pertains only to aircraft costs.

By contrast, many of PM Modi’s recent multi-country tours—including security, logistics and official delegation expenses—have cost less than or roughly the same as these air travel bills from the previous government.

This alone demonstrates why drawing sensational conclusions from isolated expenditure figures is intellectually dishonest.

The broader comparison is equally significant.

More diplomacy, comparable expenditure

Between 2015 and 2025, PM Modi undertook more than 100 overseas visits, substantially more than Dr Singh’s 73 visits over a comparable ten-year period. Yet the cumulative expenditure on PM Modi’s foreign visits has been estimated at around ~₹800 crore.

In other words, a Prime Minister who has travelled considerably more frequently and engaged with far more countries has incurred overall expenditure that remains lower than the available air travel figure alone for his predecessor.

Unless one assumes that Dr Singh’s security arrangements, hotels, logistics, official delegations and local transportation were somehow free of cost, the conclusion becomes difficult to escape: the total expenditure during the UPA years would almost certainly have exceeded the available aviation figures by a substantial margin.

One major expense PM Modi eliminated: Taxpayer-funded ‘foreign junkets’ for journalists

Another important distinction rarely acknowledged by PM Modi’s critics relates to the composition of the official delegation.

During the UPA government, it was common practice for journalists representing leading media organisations to accompany the Prime Minister on overseas visits. Their travel formed part of the official delegation, requiring seats aboard the special aircraft and additional logistical arrangements.

Soon after assuming office in 2014, PM Modi ended this practice. Journalists no longer routinely travel with the Prime Minister aboard official aircraft, and media organisations generally make their own arrangements if they wish to cover foreign visits.

This policy change inevitably reduces one component of expenditure that existed during previous governments.

Yet critics comparing the two administrations rarely acknowledge this distinction.

Instead, they selectively publicise expenditure figures relating to PM Modi while overlooking both the larger diplomatic agenda and the differences in the way official visits are organised today.

Diplomatic outreach cannot be measured merely by expenditure

The criticism also ignores the scale of India’s international engagement under the Modi government.

PM Modi’s overseas visits have extended beyond bilateral diplomacy to include G20, Quad, BRICS, SCO, ASEAN, COP and numerous multilateral summits. His diplomatic outreach has covered regions that received comparatively limited prime ministerial attention in earlier decades, reflecting India’s growing geopolitical ambitions and expanding strategic partnerships.

The MEA further noted that India received Foreign Direct Investment worth approximately US$381.8 billion during the April 2021 to December 2025 period. While it would be incorrect to attribute the entire inflow directly to the Prime Minister’s foreign visits, successive governments have consistently viewed high-level diplomacy as an important tool for attracting investment, strengthening trade relations and advancing India’s strategic interests.

Modern diplomacy is not merely ceremonial.

Prime ministerial visits facilitate negotiations on defence cooperation, technology transfers, semiconductor manufacturing, critical minerals, energy security, mobility agreements, supply chains and investment partnerships. They also provide opportunities for direct engagement between world leaders during periods of geopolitical uncertainty.

This is particularly relevant at a time when India is positioning itself as a leading voice of the Global South while simultaneously deepening engagement with advanced economies.

Scrutiny of public expenditure is entirely legitimate in a democracy. Parliament exists precisely to ensure accountability.

However, scrutiny should be based on complete and comparable information rather than isolated figures circulated without context.

The latest MEA disclosure does not support the narrative that PM Modi’s overseas diplomacy has been recklessly expensive. On the contrary, it suggests that India has pursued a far more active global diplomatic agenda while keeping expenditure broadly comparable with, and potentially lower than, that incurred during the previous government, despite undertaking significantly more visits.

Ironically, the parliamentary data ends up strengthening the very case that detractors sought to undermine. Instead of proving that PM Modi’s foreign travel has been extravagant, it highlights a Prime Minister who has travelled more extensively, expanded India’s diplomatic footprint, curtailed certain ancillary costs such as the practice of carrying media delegations on official aircraft, and done so without any disproportionate increase in public expenditure.

When viewed in their entirety rather than through selectively amplified headlines, the numbers tell a story not of extravagance, but of a more active foreign policy pursued with a relatively conservative approach to official travel costs.

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