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There is a scene in almost every Bollywood film that baffles the Western viewer. The hero is mid-conversation, grief-stricken or lovesick, and then, without any warning, the scene dissolves; he is now on a Swiss mountainside or a rain-soaked rooftop in London, surrounded by dancers, and is singing.

The plot has not moved. No information has been conveyed. And yet the audience is fascinated, engrossed, swaying, sometimes weeping. A Western viewer, trained on the grammar of Hollywood, reaches for an explanation and finds none. This is not a flaw in the film. It is the film telling you something about the civilisation that made it.

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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), writing in 1872 in The Birth of Tragedy, identified two opposing impulses in Greek art. The Apollonian was the impulse toward form, individuation, the sculpted image, the dream made visible; the Dionysian was something older and more dangerous: the dissolution of the self into collective ecstasy, the intoxication that precedes all rational thought, the music that does not represent feeling but simply is it. Nietzsche argued that Greek tragedy was great because it held both in tension. Apollo gave it structure; Dionysus gave it life. When Socratic rationalism (the ideological current introduced by Socrates (470–399 BCE) tipped the balance permanently toward Apollo, tragedy died.

Nietzsche was writing about ancient Athens. Without knowing it, he was also writing about modern Mumbai.

Bollywood is the only major cinema tradition in the world that has institutionalised the Dionysian as its default grammar. This is not a romantic claim. It is a structural one. The sudden song-and-dance sequences that bewilder the foreign viewer are not a convention borrowed from the Hollywood musical, where song is always marked as a departure from reality. In Bollywood, the song is reality. It is the moment when the Apollonian machinery of plot and character stops pretending to contain what it cannot contain, and the Dionysian floods through. The individual on screen ceases to be a character with a name and a backstory and becomes a vessel for collective feeling. The audience does not observe this; it participates in it.

This matters far beyond film criticism because Bollywood is not merely a cultural product of India. It is the most precise map available of how the Indian consumer actually behaves. Western firms have been misreading the Indian market for decades, and the misreading follows a pattern. They arrive with frameworks built in Chicago and London, frameworks that assume a rational consumer optimising for utility, an individual making choices in isolation, aspiration expressed through restraint and minimalism.

They apply these frameworks to a civilisation whose aesthetic philosophy was fully developed before Greece had finished building the Parthenon, and they are confused by what they find. Indians, they conclude, are complex. Emotional. Unpredictable. The language of bafflement is always the same.

The actual problem is philosophical. The Western consumer is broadly Apollonian. The Indian consumer is constitutively Dionysian. And the distinction Nietzsche drew between these two modes is not merely aesthetic. It is a description of two different relationships to the self, to pleasure and to the act of wanting.

The Apollonian self is bounded. It knows where it ends and the world begins. It purchases in order to project a coherent individual identity. It responds to aspiration framed as elevation, as the movement from a lesser self to a greater one. Its pleasures are, at root, pleasures of form. The Dionysian self is unbounded. It does not want to be elevated; it wants to be dissolved. It purchases in order to participate in something larger than itself, a festival, a family, a feeling shared by millions. Its pleasures are not pleasures of form — they are pleasures of intensity.

Bollywood produces intensity industrially. The three-hour runtime, the five songs, the melodrama scaled to cosmic proportions, the villain whose cruelty is operatic, the love whose tenderness is unbearable. Nothing in Bollywood is calibrated; everything is maximised. And this is not because Indian film-makers lack sophistication. It is because they understand their audience with perfect precision. The Indian audience does not want a carefully modulated emotional experience. It wants to be overwhelmed.

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This instinct has a name older than Nietzsche. Bharata’s (1^st century BCE–3^rd century CE) Natyashastra, composed somewhere between 200 BCE and 200 CE, describes the purpose of art through the concept of rasa, which translates roughly as juice or essence, though neither translation is adequate.

Rasa is the felt experience that good art produces in the audience. There are nine rasas: love, joy, wonder, courage, peace, anger, sorrow, fear, disgust. The ideal audience member is the rasika, literally ‘one who can taste feeling’. The highest praise available to an artist in the classical Indian tradition is that they produced rasa in their audience. Not that they showed skill, not that they told the truth but that they made the audience feel. That they had an effect, an emotional impingement on their viewer.

This is Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle, stated 2,000 years earlier in Sanskrit. The primacy of felt experience over rational form. The dissolution of the watching self into the felt event. The soul as the site of knowledge, not the rational mind. Bollywood is rasa delivered at industrial scale to 1 billion+ people who were philosophically prepared for it by a civilisation that always believed feeling was the point.

Foreign firms that have understood this, even intuitively, have won in India in ways that still surprise their own strategists. Brands that designed for emotional peaks rather than rational journeys, that invested in spectacle where their global guidelines demanded restraint, that embedded themselves in the Bollywood economy not as sponsors but as participants in its stories, found that the Indian consumer rewarded them with a loyalty for which their Western models had no available category. Because what the rasika gives to the art that produces rasa in them is not preference. It is devotion.

The firms that failed are equally instructive. The luxury houses that priced for exclusivity and found Indians wanting visible abundance. Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies that led with functional benefit and lost to local brands that led with festival and colour and the suggestion of collective joy. The tech platforms that built for the individual user journey and discovered that in India the relevant unit is almost never the individual. The pattern in every failure is the same. They brought Apollo to a Dionysian market.

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Nietzsche believed the Dionysian impulse was not destroyed by Socratic rationalism. It was suppressed and driven underground, where it waited. He was looking for its return in German music, in Wagner (1813–83). He did not find a satisfying answer in Europe.

The answer was always elsewhere. It was in a country where the suppression never quite took hold, where the philosophical tradition never fully conceded the primacy of reason over feeling, where a civilisation of extraordinary complexity and antiquity had built its aesthetic life around the proposition that the purpose of art is to make you feel something so completely that for a moment you stop being your rational, bounded self.

You want to understand the Indian market. Understand what it means to stop being yourself inside a darkened cinema hall in Patna or Pune, surrounded by strangers who are all feeling the same thing at the same time, watching a man sing on a Swiss mountainside for no narrative reason whatsoever.

Nietzsche would have understood immediately. The McKinsey deck will take longer.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 28 September 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

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Over the last few years, digital technologies have completely transformed the way we engage with the world at all levels — individual, community and national. Across South Asia, this is reshaping what education, civic engagement and employment will look like in years to come. Increasing access to the internet and digital sphere, especially for women in Pakistan, has increased their visibility in public and professional spaces.

However, the very digital environments that are meant to be sources of empowerment and ‘visibility’ for women across the country have also introduced new avenues for perpetuating existing gender inequalities and abuse. This is cause for serious concern given the rapidly evolving digital landscape with access to AI platforms becoming increasingly common yet lacking in accountability.

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Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is the weaponisation of online platforms to attack individuals based on their gender, and takes many different forms. Non-consensual image-sharing, blackmailing or threatening to release personal data, threats of rape or sexual violence, cyber-stalking and cyber-bullying or stalking, hate speech related to the individuals’ religious, sexual or ethnic identity or orientation, and wrongful impersonation are just some ways by which TFGBV happens.

Pakistan is no stranger to such forms of Gender-Based Violence, with repercussions that extend beyond online spheres in which they occur. It is common for many Pakistani women to be burdened with cultural norms that associate familial honour with their behaviour. TFGBV can magnify social consequences for women, and may lead to exclusion, restraint from future participation in social and professional spaces, restricted use of internet and technology and, in extreme cases, physical and psychological abuse.

It is important to realise that digital violence does not impact everyone equally. While women who utilises online spaces as part of their careers — including activism and advocacy, journalism and communications and even personal businesses and entrepreneurship are subject to critical and often unforgiving observation, those from other marginalised communities suffer as well. Online hate speech and discrimination often translates to offline abuse and can increase risk to the personal safety and well-being of religious minorities, and gender-diverse communities in Pakistan.  Limited digital literacy, varying socio-economic circumstances, fear of ostracisation, stigma, and general mistrust in existing means of reporting further intensify vulnerability.

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While Pakistan has taken some legislative steps when it comes to laying out new frameworks for addressing digital governance, data protection and cyber-crimes through the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (2016), the proposed Personal Data Protection Bill and, most recently, the Digital Nation Pakistan Act 2025, concerns remain about what it means for the rights and digital safety of the users.

Human rights groups have highlighted the ambiguity in application of these legislations especially when it comes to privacy and prevention of misuse. This emphasises the need for ongoing dialogue between vulnerable groups and legislative bodies to ensure national effort stems from a rights-based lens, and ensures transparency and accountability across all fronts.

National frameworks on controlling the use of AI-enabled technology, considering the increasing rise in the production and dissemination of harmful deepfake images of women and young girls, is a critical need. In the new (post-Covid 19) environment, as schools and families slowly adapt to the evolving digital landscape for their young ones, a proactive approach instead of a reactive one is needed to increase digital safety and privacy for them as they learn to navigate online platforms.

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Strengthening existing resources like improving the reliability of anonymous reporting may also increase trust in systems. The risk of misusing personal data can be reduced by greater scrutiny and revision of current data privacy legal frameworks with stronger implementation, and ensuring they are inclusive of the needs of vulnerable groups.

Most importantly, we need to recognise that TFGBV is a serious and relevant threat in Pakistan today. This can be achieved by raising awareness, challenging narratives that place the blame on victims,  organising peer support networks and partnering with on-ground organisations at individual and community levels to be able to better navigate digital risks. Integrating  mental health support for survivors into our collective response and providing digital education in schools that emphasise privacy and consent can be initial preventive measures.

In Pakistan’s evolving digital landscape, ensuring that these spaces are safe, inclusive and remain accessible to those from marginalised communities or varying socioeconomic circumstances is crucial. This is not just a digital issue, but a human rights issue, and remains influenced by the current social, economic, and cultural environment. By recognising these gaps and the measures that need to be immediately taken, Pakistan has the opportunity to provide all its citizens with a digital space that is built to empower rather than exclude.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 21 September 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

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Two years ago, in an act of great courage, young Bangladeshis ousted a long-reigning autocrat in the hope of creating a politics free of fear, violence and favour. Ultimately, however, the popular uprising has barely altered the institutions that underpin the country’s politics.  

This failure matters. The newly elected Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) government faces two immediate challenges: the economy, once feted as one of the world’s fastest growing, has stalled, with the International Monetary Fund projecting GDP growth to fall below 3 per cent over the medium term in the absence of decisive reforms; and the potential return from exile of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina has added a source of political uncertainty.

These developments risk fuelling exactly the sort of political turmoil and economic inertia that many had hoped a new kind of politics would eliminate. Much of the reason it has turned out like this is down to the institutional gridlock holding back change.

The Interim Government of Muhammad Yunus (2024–26), which took office after the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, found itself in a favourable position. Unlike reformers in many other countries, it enjoyed a broad public appetite for a systemic overhaul. Deep frustration with corruption, economic mismanagement and political dysfunction had created a strong demand for a new direction. Seizing the momentum, the Interim Government presented an ambitious agenda to match the national mood. Its aim was to restructure state institutions, overhaul the way infrastructure is run and redesign the political framework. 

Yet most of these initiatives stalled, were diluted, or remain only partially implemented. This is not due to a lack of political will. The Interim Government enacted more than 100 ordinances and repeatedly challenged entrenched interests. But institutions are hard to change. After all, they tend to be the sum of decisions chosen for their consequences.

This challenge is illustrated by Bangladesh’s struggles to reform its tax authorities, modernise its biggest port and overhaul its constitution. 

The Power of Organised Insiders 

Bangladesh’s tax administration has long blurred the line between revenue collection and political patronage. Tax exemptions are often granted through discretion rather than transparent rules while tax policy is shaped to favour the élite. Reform was essential not only to improve governance but also to strengthen public finances in a country where the tax-to-GDP ratio is one of the lowest in the world. The Interim Government’s proposal was straightforward: separate tax policy from tax administration, a model widely used in modern revenue systems. 

Yet revenue officials responded with strikes, work stoppages and disruptions at customs facilities that threatened to paralyse trade. The resistance showed that the obstacle was not administrative design but entrenched institutional power. The existing structure concentrated authority and informal rents within a tightly organised bureaucracy. Those who stood to lose from reform were organised and capable of swift collective action; the far larger group that stood to benefit remained politically fragmented. 

Although the new BNP-led government has formally reaffirmed the separation of tax policy from tax administration, implementation remains in limbo. The broader lesson is that organised insiders can exercise an effective veto not only over the adoption of institutional reform but also its implementation. 

The Politics of Narrative 

Institutional resistance does not always originate within a single entity. The failed attempt to modernise Chattogram (Chittagong) Port shows how disparate groups can unite to defend the status quo. 

Chattogram Port, Bangladesh’s principal gateway to global trade, suffers from chronic congestion and inefficiency. The Interim Government sought to modernise it by bringing internationally reputed operators such as DP World and Maersk into container terminal management. The aim was to improve efficiency, attract investment and weaken entrenched rent-seeking networks.  

The initiative encountered resistance. Labour unions feared losing bargaining power, bureaucrats fought to protect their discretion, and business intermediaries resisted disruption of established patronage networks. Despite their different interests, they united to preserve the status quo. 

More striking was how the resistance was framed. Critics argued that foreign management of strategic port facilities would undermine national sovereignty and public control. The debate quickly shifted from operational efficiency to national identity, obscuring the vested interests that stood to lose from reform.

Critics also portrayed Non-disclosure Agreements (NDAs) with prospective operators as evidence of secrecy even though such provisions are standard in major infrastructure negotiations. In a low-trust environment, they became an effective vehicle for recasting reform as a threat to transparency and public accountability. 

The episode illustrates a broader challenge in polarised polities. Where citizens have repeatedly experienced opacity and corruption, even routine governance practices become objects of suspicion. Entrenched interests can exploit that scepticism, turning potential supporters of reform into reluctant opponents. 

The BNP government has not abandoned the reform. Negotiations with international operators remain formally alive, but competing proposals from politically connected domestic interests have left the process politically unresolved.

The lesson is not that concerns about sovereignty or transparency are insincere. Rather, institutional reform is fought as much through public narratives as through formal political processes. Once such narratives take hold, they can delay or dilute reform long after governments have reaffirmed their commitment to it.

Public Support is not a Coalition 

The July Charter — a broad reform agenda to reshape Bangladesh’s political institutions after the 2024 uprising — revealed a different obstacle to institutional change. Although the proposed reforms received broad public endorsement through a referendum, that support proved insufficient to sustain momentum. 

The debate quickly shifted from the substance of the reforms to the legitimacy of the process. Critics argued that the referendum lacked constitutional validity because such a mechanism was not explicitly provided for. The result was to shift attention from institutional change to competing understandings of constitutionalism and democratic authority. 

The weakness of the reform coalition also reflected the fragility of political commitments. The July Charter emerged from more than nine months of negotiations involving all major political parties, many of which endorsed key institutional reforms and campaigned for a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum. But after the BNP won an outright parliamentary majority, its incentives changed. Senior BNP leaders later stated in the parliament that the party had backed the charter primarily to avoid delaying elections. Once in power, it had less incentive to pursue reforms that would constrain a majority government.

The BNP government continues to reaffirm its commitment to the July Charter, arguing that its implementation remains part of its reform agenda. Yet many of the document’s core institutional provisions have lapsed, been repealed or await redrafting after further consultation. The result is that, despite continued rhetorical support, the Charter has yet to translate into substantive institutional change.

The episode illustrates a broader lesson: political endorsement is not the same as institutional commitment. Reform coalitions are only as durable as the incentives that sustain them and public reaffirmation does not guarantee implementation.  

Beyond Political Will 

Taken together, these episodes reveal a recurring pattern. Reform threatens existing distributions of power and privilege. Those who stand to lose are concentrated, organised, and capable of collective action. Those who stand to gain are typically more numerous but less organised, leaving their support vulnerable to competing narratives about sovereignty, legitimacy and procedure. 

Consequently, institutional change becomes far more difficult than reformers anticipate. 

Institutional transformation requires more than sound policies and public support.  It requires durable political commitments that survive changes in electoral incentives, coalitions able to withstand organised resistance and persuasive narratives that legitimise change. Without these three, reformers in Bangladesh and beyond will continue to discover that the greatest obstacles to change are not a lack of ideas but the political forces that sustain the status quo.

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The views expressed here are those of the authors and does not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 14 September 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Bornil Amin, Dhaka, 5 August 2024, Unsplash.

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The post The Stalled Remaking of Bangladesh first appeared on South Asia @ LSE.

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In my 15 years as field researcher, every time I have had to pull out a Consent Form in front of a participant, I have felt squeamish, sheepish, overbearing, and guilty. Why is it that, despite my sincere efforts to make my research as collaborative as possible, the simple act of requesting a signature on a form has often felt hierarchical, contractual, even exploitative — and fundamentally at odds with the spirit of collaboration?

During a Human-Centred Design (HCD) research on adolescent girl health in Chamarajanagar district of Karnataka (India), we found ourselves looking for ways to seek consent which caused less discomfort/hesitation and greater participation. The project sought to understand if adolescent girls’ health was a critical public health concern in the district, what realities influenced it and how communities themselves could help define the most pressing needs and solutions. To explore this, we held seven focus group discussions (FGDs) with 90 adolescent girls.

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Standing in school corridors, community halls and village squares, trying to start conversations about menstruation with girls and their families, it became clear that standard ethical requirements designed for Western/institutional contexts often do not work when researching sensitive issues in non-Western/Indian communities. Ethics is not just a matter of compliance and documentation; it is the difference between being invited in or being quietly shut out.

The on-the-go adaptation of participatory human-centred tools significantly shaped the participation we were able to build, improved the quality of data collected and may ultimately enhance the effectiveness of the interventions we go on to design in India’s diverse contexts.

What makes HCD an Ethical Research Choice?

HCD is a problem-solving approach (rather than a knowledge-generating one) that centres people’s needs, behaviours and lived experiences. In public health, HCD involves engaging communities to identify health challenges and co-create context-specific interventions through iterative prototyping, rapid feedback and constant adaptation.

At its core, HCD is hands-on, context-dependent and focused on creating practical solutions with and for communities. It is increasingly celebrated as a more ethical and effective way to improve healthcare in underserved settings because of its emphasis on collaboration, empathy and responsiveness. Multidisciplinary teams often use HCD methods that draw from traditional research while adapting them to the faster, more iterative pace of design.

However, this very pace and its design-driven ethos challenge conventional notions of research ethics. While HCD borrows from established research methods, it diverges significantly in ensuring ethics in data collection.

This post reflects on how holding on to HCD principles helps navigate the limitations of conventional research ethics, offering lessons from our exercise of embedding ethics into community-driven problem definition.

Consent Beyond Signatures

It is common knowledge that written consent inhibits even initial levels of participation. As we began discussing consent protocols with our field-based colleagues and local NGO partners, we were cautiously advised that reading out formal Consent Forms and asking for signatures might discourage both girls and their guardians from participating in discussions.

We had anticipated that conversations around menstrual health — especially in a district where female literacy is just over 54 per cent — would be sensitive and challenging. Yet, we felt compelled to first consider the most ‘foolproof’ and ‘credible’ method of recording consent: signatures on written forms! And once we were in the community and schools, our concerns were confirmed; written forms made participants visibly hesitant and uncomfortable.

However, the agility that HCD provides quickly came to the rescue and we soon engaged differently to seek and confirm consent in more intuitive, context-sensitive ways. In several FGDs, girls used emoji cards — sad, angry, neutral, happy, excited — to indicate whether they had been ‘sent’ to participate or were genuinely interested in talking. Those who selected ‘happy’ or ‘excited’ opened up with striking honesty about a subject usually wrapped in silence or shame.

Participants shared taboos, myths and local remedies like using Sprite (fizzy drink) or Eno (digestive salts) for cramps, along with deeper experiences — fears of harassment, lack of toilets and/or water at home, discomfort with sanitary pads, and other anxieties like fear of the father hearing about menstruation in ‘his’ household. These tools did not dilute ethical standards but adapted them to respect the girls’ literacy levels, social contexts and the sensitivity of the topic, making ethics both operational and empowering.

Group Consent for a Culturally Fit Participation

In remote, rural, tribal villages like Hongapura,* consent is not an individual act but a collective one. Western-biomedical ethical frameworks do not align with diverse local cultural contexts (in this instance, of India). HCD processes and tools honour communities’ collective decision-making when determining participation.

We therefore moved to group consent formats, where we engaged both groups of adolescent girls and groups of their guardians in open, collective discussions to express their willingness (or lack of it) to participate or let their wards participate. These conversations not only made consent more culturally appropriate and less intimidating but also became rich spaces for dialogue. The settings allowed inter-generational narratives and peer influences that would have been entirely missed in traditional consent-seeking mechanisms like signatures on written forms.

Collaboration > Trust > Accuracy

In places like Dalit-dominated Malligebetta,* where historically marginalised communities have had prior negative experiences with research extractivism of strangers coming to seek information, trust was understandably fragile. As we kept waiting for the participants to arrive, we realised standard protocols of a structured FGD with relatively unknown facilitators may be the cause of reluctance to participate.

Thankfully, our months-long community immersion and commitment to HCD principles — collaboration, empathy and context-sensitive engagement — made us understand that community-based representatives from NGO partners and frontline health workers (Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) and Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (ANM)), who were already known and trusted in the community, were the best agents to facilitate discussions with adolescent girls. Held in a safe and familiar space of the local community hall, the restructured FGDs helped make participation feel less intimidating.

This shift in who led the engagement significantly increased trust and participation, and led to honest conversations. Girls who were initially unsure of joining the discussion began sharing personal experiences: untreated menstrual pain, infection-related white discharge, challenges of accessing menstrual health services, and lack of hygiene facilities.

Ethics as Design

Over two months of planning these FGDs and encouraging participation, we were once again reminded that ethical procedures around consent, power and inclusion are not just formalities. They shape everything: who feels safe enough to come for these discussions, what is shared and how deeply we can understand what is shared. The emphasis on working  with, and not on, communities turns research from an extractive process into a co-created one. And with that shift, participation rises, quality of data improves and ethical engagement becomes the foundation (and not just the framework or a procedural requirement) of the research project.

By centring local forms of consent, participation and trust, HCD allows research to align with indigenous and non-Western moral worlds rather than imposing external frameworks of compliance. In doing so, it not only makes research more ethical but also more effective because what is co-created is also more likely to be embraced, sustained and transformative.

Caring by design, then, is not just an ethos; it is a pathway to decolonising how we imagine and practice ethics in public health research in non-Western contexts like India.

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* Acknowledgements: Names of research sites have been anonymised. The author acknowledges the invaluable support of Karthikeyan Gopinathan, Mallikarjuna and Nagendra P toward planning and execution of FGDs, and translations from Kannada into English.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science on 7 September 2026.’

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, 2024, Unsplash.

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The post Caring by Design: Human-Centred Design and Research in India first appeared on South Asia @ LSE.

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Bangladesh–India relations run deep. The two countries share a heritage of history, language, culture, and contiguous geography — an organic, deep-rooted bond. Over the decades, India has supplied Bangladesh with cotton, cereals, minerals, refined petroleum, vehicles, iron and steel, electrical equipment, energy, medicines, and medical supplies. India has also offered reduced tariffs, allowed goods transport through its territory, and helped build infrastructure. Yet, this goodwill — and India’s crucial support for Bangladesh’s independence in 1971  — is often overshadowed by one unresolved issue:  the long-pending Teesta River Water-Sharing Agreement.

Politics, Perceptions and Protests

The rise of anti-India sentiments in Bangladesh is complex. While the tenure of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was termed a ‘golden era’ for Bangladesh–India bilateral ties, her resignation amidst widespread youth-led protests and subsequent ouster from power, followed by her flight to India in August 2024, has sparked fresh waves of mistrust.

When protests erupt in Bangladesh — even regarding internal political issues and the tragic incidents of youth leader assassinations — fingers are often pointed at India’s alleged involvement in Bangladeshi politics. However, political alliances are only part of the story. The visible, tangible root of dissatisfaction is on the unsolved transboundary Teesta River Water-Sharing Agreement that has become a symbol of grievance and mistrust. Many protesters view India as the upstream  ‘hegemon’. Such an emergence of anti-India sentiments in Bangladesh is a reminder of how quickly water and politics mix with one another.

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India and Bangladesh share 54 rivers that cross their borders. The unresolved Ganga River Treaty sparked anti-India sentiments before 1996; Bangladesh, being downstream, blamed India for diverting water through the upstream Farakka Barrage, leaving less water for Bangladesh during the dry season when demand is at its highest.

It took years to recognise the Ganga as an international river since Indians consider it their national sacred river. Only in 1996 did both countries reach consensus on equitable (50–50) water-sharing, with India following a ‘neighbourhood first’ policy to strengthen relations.

In Bangladesh, 93 per cent of water demand is for agriculture, while 40 per cent of the population is involved in farming. The northern region, where the Teesta flows, is prone to drought, making it a decisive water resource. Bangladesh has built its own barrage to divert Teesta water to irrigate 750,000 hectares in the northern districts. Unfortunately, during dry seasons when water demand peaks for rice cultivation, this infrastructure cannot supply enough water. The apparently drying riverbed makes people suspect that upstream Indian dams are depriving Bangladesh of its fair share of Teesta water.

The Teesta Question: Why Not Replicate the Ganga Formula?

Globally, treaties often use a quantitative/volumetric formula for sharing river waters. South Asian transboundary water treaties,  without exception, rely on equitable quantitative frameworks — essentially, a  ‘50–50’ splitting of water, focussing narrowly on water division. In 1996, both nations agreed to the Ganga treaty to satisfy their people, and was politically gainful — especially to former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who used its  success for electoral advantage for decades.  But after the Ganga treaty, both sides felt pressure during low-flow years, while demand kept rising:

• When river flow is low, a fixed split in the Treaty satisfies neither upstream nor downstream water needs, causing dissatisfaction and growing mistrust.

• Climate change and variability make dry-season flows even less reliable.
• The Joint River Commission (JRC) was formed to manage 54 shared rivers; however, restricted data-sharing, inadequate joint operational mechanisms, and an absence of adaptive management strategies have fuelled water-sharing tensions.

After the Ganga treaty, Bangladesh hoped for a similar agreement on Teesta:  a 50–50 water split. In the Teesta, the dry-season flow has reportedly fallen sharply since the 1990s. Upstream, India faces challenges for its own irrigation and hydropower needs, so downstream dependence on reducing Teesta’s flow for massive irrigation expansion is unrealistic. Consequently, groundwater use is surging, with 80 per cent of Bangladesh’s agricultural development now depending on groundwater rather than surface water. This shift reduces surface water dependence in practice, yet the politics of rivers remains powerful.

In South Asia’s post-colonial legacy, borders and resource controls stir deep emotions, resulting in shared rivers often becoming political rivers. Hence, anti-India sentiment and provocation among Bangladeshis is common, based on the widely held belief that the upstream water hegemon deprives the downstream nation of development opportunities.

Beyond  ‘Water-Sharing’, Toward  ‘Benefit-Sharing’

If treaties are only about dividing water, they will keep failing in dry years under changing climate conditions. An alternative approach is to move from sole water-sharing to benefit-sharing. This will  mean that both countries work together to get the most value from the river system — then share those benefits in a mutually acceptable fair way, taking into consideration the river’s ecology. This aligns with the principles of equitable and reasonable use, and the no-harm principle. For example, Bangladesh’s massive groundwater extraction needs (clean) energy. If India shares hydroelectricity equivalent to the dam-induced flow reductions in the Himalayan Teesta while transparently explaining the challenges of extracting hydroelectricity and managing flood risks, it might foster mutual understanding about challenges both nations face in extracting river benefits, reducing mistrust.

This only works when joint river basin management led by an independent JRC with multidisciplinary teams gets priority, backed by strong political will for regional cooperation through shared river treaties.

Why This Matters Now

This year (2026) is decisive for Bangladesh–India relations. The Ganga Water Treaty is due for renewal. India’s long-term development goals depend on stable, cooperative ties with neighbours. Rivers can either deepen divide or build trust ensuing shared river diplomacy.

A goodwill gesture from India on Teesta water-sharing by overcoming domestic political hindrances — paired with a practical benefit-sharing strategy could transform public opinion in Bangladesh. Likewise, Bangladesh can recognise the real constraints of dry season flows and the shared risks from climate change. Both sides gain by moving from zero-sum politics to win-win cooperation.

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India and Bangladesh cannot change geographical realities. They cannot change their shared history either. But they can choose how to manage their shared rivers by learning from history. If India leans forward — reviving the spirit of 1996, backing the JRC, embracing benefit-sharing on Teesta and beyond, it can ease anti-India sentiments and open the door to wider cooperation. If Bangladesh meets that goodwill gesture beyond politics and joint problem-solving, bilateral relations will be stronger.

Nations may alter allies and enemies but they cannot choose their neighbours. For Bangladesh and India, the choice now is simple: to turn rivers from political flashpoints into shared ties.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science on 31 August 2026.’

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Kazal Mahmood, ‘Boat on the Teesta River at Mahipur, Rangpur (Bangladesh)’, 2025, Unsplash.

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The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Index Report 2025 by Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) shows that rate of adoption of AI is unprecedented, as millions now use AI on a regular basis. Alongside, Stanford University’s Global AI Vibrancy Tool (GVT) offers a comprehensive comparison of AI readiness and strengths across 36 countries. The ranking of these countries in GVT is determined on the basis of multiple factors such as Research and Development (R&D), talent, infrastructure, policy, and societal engagement.

According to the latest rankings of GVT, the United States of America is currently leading in AI across multiple domains with China a close second, followed by India at third place. Pakistan does not feature in the 36 listed countries that are ranked, indicating significant gaps in the country’s AI progress.

AI is no longer an optional technology; it has become one of the central pillars of modern governance, economic productivity, military modernisation, and geopolitical power. Nations that will lead in AI will also set global standards, achieve high-value economic growth and govern digital norms in future. Logically, therefore, countries that lag in AI development will face risks of becoming mere consumers of foreign systems.

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Over the past few years, the policy discourse in Pakistan has repeatedly invoked AI-driven governance and digitisation of public services calling for smart policing, biometric identity management, digital public services, and even digital courts. However, these ambitions largely remain disconnected from basic structural and governance constraints that hinder AI development in the country.

One key challenge is the lack of required infrastructure. AI development, especially training of large models and their deployment, depends on stable energy supply, reliable high speed internet, data centres, and advanced computational power. The digital infrastructure of Pakistan is currently struggling in all these areas. Energy instability is one of the basic challenges in AI development as sustainable research and deployment of AI demands huge amount of energy. In May 2025, Pakistan announced an allocation of 2,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity to Bitcoin mining and AI data centres, which signals the national priority towards the development of AI. However, such initiatives can only be effective if key underlying structural issues like frequent power outages, rising electricity cost, circular debt, and an over-burdened power grid, are resolved first.

Similarly, the country also struggles with securing uninterrupted high-speed internet, with service degradation and loss of connectivity being a common occurrence. Although Pakistan is now moving toward 5G and satellite internet, the overall pace has been lethargic so far. Next, while indigenous data centre infrastructure is emerging slowly and gradually,  it remains comparatively small as of now. Currently, there are 27 data centres spread across the major cities of the country. One of the most notable developments is the hyperscale data centre, which is to be established in partnership with National Aerospace Science & Technology Park (NASTP) and Khazana Cloud. However, despite the growing local data centre infrastructure, majority of users in Pakistan remain dependent on foreign cloud services (like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure) due to reliability, scale and cost-effectiveness offered by these platforms.

Access to high-performance computational tools, including Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), is also limited in Pakistan. Thus, the AI ecosystem in Pakistan remains largely dependent on foreign services, tools and platforms, which carry serious risks of data sovereignty and security. Such dependency also leads to passive consumption of AI models rather than being an active leader in the development of AI. In terms of talent, around 73 thousand students graduate in Information Technology (IT) and Computer Sciences (CS) annually in Pakistan; however, it struggles to retain skilled workers due to lack of research funding and growth opportunities.

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The global tech ecosystem is also becoming increasingly exclusionist and competitive with contrasting tech ecosystems in the West, and in China. Developing countries like Pakistan have minimal participation in the global governance of emerging technologies such as AI; as such, Pakistan’s technical oversight and regulatory capacity is limited for now. The country therefore faces the risk of being exposed to unregulated AI tools, weakly moderated information systems and data exploitation.

AI is bound to revolutionise the global economy, governance, defence, growth, and society in the years ahead, irrespective of the readiness of individual nation-states. The technology is already integrated in governance, economic, political and security practices around the globe. For Pakistan, the window of opportunity is closing fast. With AI development taking place at breakneck speed globally, Pakistan needs to act urgently if it wants to catch up and secure a place in the global AI race.

Pakistan needs to actively build AI governance and regulatory capacity as it serves as a prerequisite for AI development. The underlying structural issues related to stable energy supply and high speed internet connectivity also need to be addressed. Similarly, access to high performance GPUs and expansion of local data centre infrastructure are highly critical for building national computational power for AI. Finally, Pakistan needs to explore South–South AI cooperation which could be highly effective in addressing shared challenges. Such cooperation could also offer a greater participation of the Global South in setting customised norms and standards of AI globally.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 24 August 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Igor Omilaev, 2023, Unsplash.

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In the West, rhetoric is often perceived to be a set of universal techniques governed by common rules.  In practice, these rules reflect particular intellectual traditions that do not always travel easily across cultural contexts.

Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and their Greco-Roman contemporaries still anchor most mainstream Western thinking about how we argue and how we convince. Yet what lies at the heart of rhetoric — reasoning, arguing, persuading — is not confined to any single intellectual tradition. Every society has developed its own ways to debate, evaluate, claim, and convince. Then how and why did one tradition come to dominate how persuasion is practiced internationally?

Part of the answer is disciplinary. Comparative rhetoric, the field that studies parallel traditions outside the Greco-Roman world, remains small, strictly academic, and largely invisible to the layperson. The other part, one could argue, is that the average person has no interest in reading about dense, esoteric texts that supposedly have no relevance to their modern lives. Yet that would fail to explain the plethora of books on the topic that use classical Western stalwarts as the basis for teaching the art of persuasion.

But that is far from the full story.

The central problem is how different cultures build trust, construct arguments and persuade one another. Indian philosophy offers a compelling parallel tradition, offering a depth of thought that is rarely acknowledged in mainstream narratives of rhetoric especially in the West.

India’s Parallel Tradition

There is no Indian equivalent of Aristotle’s Rhetoric or Cicero’s De Oratore. But there is a wide body of work in which reasoning and debate feature prominently. But the absence of a single canonical text is not evidence of a missing tradition; quite the contrary, it is, rather, proof of how deeply these practices are rooted in the cultural psyche such that they are dispersed (and embedded) across multiple works through the ages.

Take, for example, the Nyāya Sūtra (compiled in Sanskrit c. 6th century BCE–2nd century CE in India), which analyses how we know what we know, how we justify claims, how we test evidence, and how we resolve disagreements. It offers a five-step model of argument and a thorough account of how arguments can go wrong.

Nyāya and Aristotle: Two Different Approaches

Let us take a simple claim to dissect the difference in approach.

Claim: ‘The hill has fire.’

Aristotle’s method focuses on how to secure the audience’s acceptance of a claim. His primary tool is the ‘enthymeme’, a compressed argument that omits a premise the audience already accepts. The full reasoning would be: ‘Wherever there is smoke, there is fire. This hill has smoke. Therefore, the hill has fire.’ But an enthymeme drops the general rule and states only the part the audience needs to draw a conclusion: ‘This hill has smoke; therefore, it has fire.’

This method is quick, efficient and persuasive because it draws the audience into the reasoning, allowing them to feel they have arrived at the conclusion themselves.

Nyāya takes a different route where analogy and shared experience are critical. Its standard five-part structure would look like this:

• Proposition (pratijñā):
  The hill has fire.
• Reason (hetu):
  Because it has smoke.
• Example (udāharaṇa):
  Wherever there is smoke, there is fire, as in a kitchen.
• Application (upanaya):
  This hill has smoke, just like the kitchen.
• Conclusion (nigamana):
  Therefore, the hill has fire.

Although Aristotle links rhetoric to careful reasoning elsewhere in his work, his Rhetoric is largely focussed on shaping arguments for particular audiences. He values examples and analogies, but does not treat them  as a structural necessity.

The contrast between the approaches becomes clearer when we look at the classification of arguments. Nyāya classifies debates by their underlying intention. Vāda is a genuine search for truth, jalpa is a competitive contest aimed at victory, and vitaṇḍā is a destructive mode concerned only with refutation. These categories describe how participants conduct themselves within an argument.

Aristotle’s divisions, by contrast, map the social arenas in which speech takes place. Deliberative for politics, judicial for the courts, and epideictic for praise or blame.

This distinction suggests that Nyāya’s central concern is the quality and rigour of reasoning, where a relatable example from daily life is essential to bringing people on board. Aristotle, by contrast, is primarily (though not exclusively) concerned with the uses of speech and the most efficient means of persuasion.

A Missed Dialogue

What is striking is that when 20th-century Western theorists reconstructed modern rhetoric (such as Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman), they developed models remarkably close to Nyāya’s insights. Toulmin’s argument structure (designed to reflect how people argue in daily life rather than through formal, abstract logic) echoes Nyāya’s step-wise reasoning. Perelman’s ‘new rhetoric’, centred on audience-based justification, overlaps strongly with Nyāya’s insistence on common, shared experience. Yet, as Keith Lloyd, a leading scholar on comparative rhetoric, observes, ‘Western rhetoric has long ignored India’s Nyāya Sūtra, dismissing it as “primitive logic”.’

This matters now because the world is entering an era in which persuasion can no longer be understood through a single cultural lens. Effective international cooperation increasingly requires what might be called rhetorical multilingualism — the ability to recognise not only different languages, but different logics of persuasion. Translation (into a Western language) alone is insufficient, because an argument that is coherent and compelling in one tradition may need to be fundamentally restructured, rather than simply reworded, to be convincing in another.

For example, imagine a scenario in which the scientific basis for urgent action is widely accepted and supported by extensive expert consensus. Yet consensus on the evidence fails to produce binding commitments.

In this hypothetical negotiation, some participants frame the issue primarily as a technical and legal problem, emphasising models, quantified risk, and formal obligations. Others do not dispute the scientific findings. Rather, they challenge the premises underlying the proposed obligations, highlighting questions of historical responsibility, prior commitments, trust, and the distribution of costs.

The disagreement is therefore not over evidence, but over the basis on which obligations are understood. Some actors reason forward from projected future risks; others reason backward from past experience. Even the meaning of ‘success’ may vary, from legally binding commitments to more flexible political arrangements.

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This scenario illustrates a broader dynamic in contemporary diplomacy. Many negotiations continue to rely on a Western tradition of persuasion that presumes shared standards of evidence, authority, and reasoning. Where these assumptions are not shared, arguments that appear compelling in one context may be interpreted differently in another.

A Nyāya-informed approach to diplomacy would not treat scientific consensus as a self-sufficient argument. It would explicitly build persuasion around shared cases, acknowledged histories and clearly articulated intentions. In practice, this means structuring negotiations around agreed examples, demonstrable cooperation or instances where responsibilities were fairly distributed, ensuring that commitments are both understandable and accepted.

Applying insights from multiple rhetorical traditions to contemporary challenges could offer a more effective approach to persuasion in a multipolar world. The Nyāya Sūtra offers a compelling model by grounding arguments in shared experience and relatable examples, showing how persuasion can cross cultural divides. Cultivating this kind of rhetorical awareness could prove to be highly beneficial in an era where success depends both on what we say and how we make others see and accept our reasoning.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science, and should not be taken as an expression of policy of His Majesty’s Government. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 17 August 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Sergiu Valenas, ‘Old Book’, 2018, Unsplash.

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Sri Lanka’s education story cannot be understood without its crisis history. The country has endured not one emergency but a compounding sequence of them — each arriving before the last has been absorbed, each eroding the institutional capacity needed to withstand the next. The 26-year civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which ended in 2009, left the Northern and Eastern Provinces educationally devastated. Approximately 800,000 people were displaced; schools were destroyed or militarised; and post-conflict curricula entirely avoided the historical roots of the conflict, leaving a generation without the tools to understand its own country.

Then came the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 which killed over 35,000 Sri Lankans and destroyed schools across the southern and eastern coastlines. In 2019, the Easter Sunday bombings killed at least 269 people, including children attending Sunday school services. Schools closed immediately, a state of emergency was declared and, as the International Crisis Group noted, social media was shut down at a level not seen even during three decades of civil war.

Before communities had recovered, Covid–19 arrived. Approximately 4.3 million school-age children experienced prolonged school closures — among the longest in South Asia. Remote learning was introduced without the infrastructure to sustain it: internet-based education reached only 45 per cent of students, and device ownership in estate sectors was as low as 4.6 per cent. The digital pivot that might have cushioned the blow became another vector of inequality. By 2022, economic collapse had arrived. Sri Lanka defaulted on its external debt — the first time since her independence in 1948 — and, as Human Rights Watch (2025) documents, education spending fell to just 1.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the third-lowest in the world. School meals were cut by two-thirds. Attendance has not fully recovered in 2026.

A QR Code System, and What it Reveals

In July 2022, at the height of the fuel crisis, Sri Lanka’s Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) built and deployed a nationwide QR code-based National Fuel Pass in under three weeks. Working with the Department of Motor Traffic and private sector partners, the system linked every registered vehicle to a verified digital quota, eliminating queues, black market trading and hoarding. Sri Lanka’s monthly fuel import bill fell from US$500 million to US$240 million. By March 2026, when the Middle East conflict disrupted global oil supply and triggered fresh fuel shortages, the government reactivated the system within days.

The contrast with the education sector is stark. The same government that mobilised cross-sectoral digital infrastructure for fuel in three weeks has not applied that urgency to the learning loss affecting 4.3 million children over the same period. The Educational Publications Department’s Smart Textbook platform and e-Thaksalawa e-learning portal are genuine innovations but they were built over years without emergency mandate or commensurate funding. As one analyst observed, the readiness to deploy digital public infrastructure is unevenly distributed: resource emergencies trigger it; learning emergencies do not. The barriers to agile education response in middle-income countries are not primarily technical. They are political. Learning loss is invisible until a generation later. Policy-makers respond to what they can see.

Two Covid Lessons for the Classroom

The pandemic generated two lessons Sri Lanka has yet to institutionalise. First, that the digital divide is a rights issue, not a logistical inconvenience. A LIRNEAsia survey in 2021 found only 63 per cent of enrolled students had accessed online learning at any point during the pandemic. Colombo Urban Lab research showed that working-class families could not facilitate learning on shared devices because parents needed those same devices to earn a daily wage. The Ministry of Education’s  National Education Policy Framework (2023) set ambitious digital targets but was criticised for treating device access as a market problem rather than a public infrastructure obligation.

The second lesson is the structural cost of a dense public holiday calendar. Sri Lanka observes up to 26 public holidays per year — including 12 full-moon Poya days (holiday on full moon day each month) — placing it among the countries with the highest number of school holidays in the world. The 2025 school calendar included 22 public holidays falling on weekdays. When crises compress the school year, this calendar provides no slack. This is not an argument against Sri Lanka’s rich multi-religious traditions. It is an argument that the school calendar — like the fuel allocation system — should be subject to dynamic, crisis-responsive management, with pre-agreed recovery protocols when emergencies consume instructional time.

Looking Ahead

The Education in Emergencies (EiE) field has moved beyond minimum standards toward what researchers now call ‘systems resilience’ — the capacity to absorb repeated shocks without permanently degrading educational outcomes. Sri Lanka’s experience, from post-conflict reconstruction through to the energy crisis, points to three concrete reforms:

Build a National Education Continuity Protocol (NECP):  The Fuel Pass worked because there was a clear trigger, a known beneficiary population, and pre-existing infrastructure. The Ministry of Education should develop an equivalent NECP — a tiered plan that activates automatically when school closures exceed two consecutive weeks. It would pre-position offline curriculum packs on e-Thaksalawa, community learning hubs in temples, mosques, and community centres, and a teacher welfare fund covering transport costs — eliminating the reliance on the improvised coping strategies documented among principals during the 2022 crisis.

Establish a Student Digital Entitlement Register:  The Fuel Pass worked because every vehicle was registered and traceable. Sri Lanka has no equivalent for student device and connectivity access. A disaggregated national register — mapping each enrolled student’s household device ownership, connectivity, and language medium — would identify excluded students before a crisis strikes, target subsidies where they are needed most, and enable real-time monitoring of whether digital education policies are actually reaching their intended beneficiaries.

Adopt a Crisis-Responsive School Calendar:  The Ministry should embed into every annual school calendar a pre-agreed Crisis Recovery Schedule — designated make-up days activatable by ministerial declaration within 48 hours of a trigger. Countries including Bangladesh and Pakistan have introduced comparable mechanisms following flood and earthquake cycles. This framework should be developed in genuine consultation with religious and community leaders, so that the cultural significance of Poya days is respected while children’s right to education is equally protected.

From Reactive Response to Standing Readiness

Sri Lanka has demonstrated, through the National Fuel Pass, that it possesses the state capacity, digital infrastructure, and cross-sectoral coordination to respond to emergencies with speed and precision — when political will is mobilised. The INEE Minimum Standards remind us that education in emergencies is not a second-order concern, it is a rights imperative. For countries like Sri Lanka navigating polycrisis conditions, the traditional EiE framework of linear phases must give way to standing institutional readiness: pre-designed protocols, pre-positioned resources, pre-agreed triggers. The Northern Province’s post-conflict education recovery showed what sustained investment can achieve but it did not embed preparedness for the next crisis. When Covid–19 arrived a decade later, the province suffered disproportionate learning loss.

A next shock will arrive at some point in time. Sri Lanka has already proved it can respond: a simple QR code tamed the fuel queues. It does not need a grand solution for education. It needs the same thing: a small innovation, applied with urgency, before the next emergency arrives.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science, and should not be taken as an expression of policy of His Majesty’s Government. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, on 10 August 2026.

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Javier Saint Jean, 2021, Unsplash.

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On 29 October 2025, in the small village of Mirzapur (Itail Union, Jamalpur Sadar) of Bangladesh, a farmer knelt in the muddy field, his hands trembling over the lifeless body of his cow.  Three more lay still around him, their breath taken by acid-poisoned water.  The pond and its surrounding grass, which had supported them for many years, had become poisonous due to heavy metals (lead in particular) and acid from discharge from a neighbouring battery recycling factory.

The farmer’s story is told in human terms: his livelihood is destroyed, his daughter’s education is now uncertain. His vulnerability is a stark human tragedy. However, if we shift our gaze from the owner’s financial loss, we feel a more profound, more silent tragedy. These cows were not mere assets but sentient beings who endured terror and agony before death — a suffering that calls for justice grounded in animal rights and the prevention of cruelty.

The Animal Welfare Act 2019

The Animal Welfare Act 2019 is the principal legislation in Bangladesh that aims to ensure animal care, prohibit cruelty, and foster compassion.  Wilful poisoning of cattle is a clear instance of deliberate cruelty and the imposition of needless suffering, covered in Section 11 of the Act.  However, the law does not address acts of negligence and fails to acknowledge animals as legal beings with rights.  Further, upon considering the severity of these acts, the prescribed penalty (per Section 16) for deliberate cruelty is simple imprisonment for up to two years, or a fine of BDT 50,000 (US$410 approx.), both unduly light punishments.

The  ‘Property’ Trap in the Penal Code

Section 429 of the Penal Code, 1860, deals with ‘mischief by killing or maiming cattle’. While it frames the crime as damage to property, the prescribed punishment — imprisonment of up to five years — reflects the serious economic and social value of these animals. For the farmer, this section is a path to ensuring the polluter is punished for its tangible loss. However, treating cows merely as property feels inadequate. It ignores their suffering. This is where the global evolution of animal law provides a more compelling framework.

Internationally, the conversation has moved beyond just preventing cruelty to actively upholding welfare. While no single international court prosecutes cases like this, powerful soft laws and principles set a global standard. The most important of these are the Five Freedoms, a globally accepted benchmark for animal welfare. The poisoned cows were brutally denied every single one:

• Freedom from Hunger and Thirst: Replaced by consuming a toxic, burning substance.
• Freedom from Discomfort: Replaced by the acute physical distress of poisoning.
• Freedom from Pain, Injury, and Disease: This was the direct cause of their death.
• Freedom to Express Normal Behaviour: Their natural behaviour of drinking water led to their death.
• Freedom from Fear and Distress: Their final moments were undoubtedly filled with both fear and distress.

Bangladesh, as a member of the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), is committed to advancing these very standards. This tragedy is not just a violation of national law but a breach of a global ethical compact.

Bridging Environmental Justice and Human Rights

The case of the battery recycling plant highlights a critical gap in Bangladesh’s legal regime. Legal cases related to environmental pollution are often handled by the Environment Courts. Under the  ‘Polluter Pays Principle’, companies are held liable for ecological damage and human health impacts. However, the law rarely quantifies the  ‘sentient loss’ of non-human life. Industrial negligence that poisons an ecosystem harms both humans and animals. Justice, therefore, should not only compensate the farmer’s economic loss but also address the suffering of sentient creatures. By incorporating animal welfare standards into environmental lawsuits, Bangladesh can develop a holistic  ‘Ecological Justice’ framework that recognises the interdependence of all life.

Global Precedents and the Way Forward

Courts around the world are increasingly acknowledging that the law must see animals as more than property. Landmark judgments provide a powerful precedent for what justice could look like in Bangladesh; in Animal Welfare Board of India vs A. Nagaraja And Ors (2014), the Supreme Court of India declared that, like citizens of the country, animals too have ‘Right to Life’, one of five fundamental rights guaranteed in Article 21 of the Constitution of India. The court also stated that  ‘Every species has an inherent right to live’. A court in Argentina granted a writ of habeas corpus in the case of Cecilia the Chimpanzee — a tool used to free humans from unlawful detention — to a chimpanzee, declaring her a ‘non-human legal person’. These rulings establish animal welfare as a constitutional obligation of the state and its people, rather than merely a rule or ethical value.

For the farmer in Jamalpur Sadar, compensation may be a form of justice. Real justice, however, necessitates holding authorities and the firm responsible to environmental and animal welfare standards.  It will not be accomplished until the legal system recognises not just the material loss but also the four sentient ‘persons’ who shared his struggle and hope, as well as their stolen lives and extreme pain.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of the ‘South Asia @ LSE’ blog, the LSE South Asia Centre or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please click here for our Comments Policy.

This blog is published under the Creative Commons License and may be reposted by anyone with the following Acknowledgement (including hyperlinks): ‘Originally published in ‘South Asia @ LSE’, the official blog of South Asia Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science on 3 August 2026.’

Please e-mail southasia@lse.ac.uk for queries.

Banner image © Jaman Asad, 2024, Unsplash.

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The Aravallis have long served as the geological foundation of the Indian subcontinent. For northern India it is an ecological lifeline, offering much-needed protection against the intense heat and rapidly spreading desertification in states like Delhi, Haryana and Rajasthan. The Constitution of India under Articles 48A (‘Protection and Improvement of Environment and Safeguarding of Forests and Wildlife’) and 51A(g) (‘Protection and Improvement of Natural Environment’) has imposed a duty on the state and citizens to safeguard the natural environment, including forests. However, the Aravalli range has long been the subject of legal discussion, with the central question being deceptively simple yet crucial: what exactly constitutes the Aravalli range?

The Aravallis

Maps show a lengthy but fractured mountain chain stretching 650 kms from western to northern India. It starts close to the Delhi Ridge, travels across the rocky plateaus of southern Haryana, crosses the expansive, scorching Rajasthani landscapes, and ends close to Ahmedabad in Gujarat. This mountain range is the Aravalli. In some places it is almost invisible while in others it is fragmented.  

Formed over centuries by tectonic movements, erosion, wind, and rain, its dust, ash and soil contain remnants of the planet’s early eras. It acts as a buffer against desertification and prevents the Thar Desert from expanding into eastern Rajasthan and the Gangetic plain. The Aravallis are abundant with sandstone, limestone, marble, granite, and minerals including lead, zinc, copper, gold, and tungsten. Additionally, by preserving watersheds that supply the Chambal, Luni and Sabarmati rivers, it helps alleviate water scarcity in drought-prone Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Disagreement over precise identification of the Aravalli range has come up over the years in the context of mining limitations and environmental regulations in judicial and policy discourse, with practical ramifications for the level of protection granted to the range.

Legal Boundaries of the Aravalli Range

The Supreme Court of India has been considering the issue of defining the Aravallis for nearly three decades. However, what started as a sincere attempt by the Court in the late 1990s to preserve and protect this unique habitat may now accelerate its degradation.

An earlier ruling (M.C. Mehta v. Union of India & Ors (2006)) prohibited mining in the Aravalli Hills; while the prohibition was clear in intent, the absence of a uniform definition meant that states interpreted the term ‘Aravalli Hills’ differently. Haryana, Delhi and Gujarat either followed different criteria or none at all, whereas Rajasthan adopted a formal definition in 2006 (based on a study from 2002 and previous geological classifications). This approach weakened enforcement mechanisms and created loopholes that have been consistently misused by mining mafias, arguing that certain hillocks did not legally qualify as ‘Aravallis’, even if they were linked to the ecological system.

In 2010, Rajasthan submitted the ‘deemed definition’ of the Aravallis to the Supreme Court according to which only peaks or parts of hills that are 100 metres above ground level (based on the Richard Murphy Classification) were to be considered as Aravalli hills, which would also make mining easier. However, this was not accepted by the Supreme Court.

In May 2024, the Supreme Court while deliberating over the mining issue in the Aravallis, observed that, ‘one of the major issues is with regard to the different definitions of the Aravalli hills/ranges, as adopted by different States.’ The Court requested a more precise, consistent and scientific definition of ‘Aravalli Hills’ and ‘Aravalli Range’, observing that conflicting descriptions had made land-use planning, environmental control and enforcement against illicit mining more difficult over time.

The New Definition

The MoEFCC-led expert committee, constituted pursuant to the Supreme Court’s order of May 2024, submitted a Report on the Uniform Definition of the Aravalli Hills and Ranges, stating that ‘a uniform definition of the Aravalli hills and ranges could not be arrived at based on hardcoded slope and elevation criteria.’ Even as deliberations were ongoing, the Supreme Court bench led by Justice Gavai heard the T. N. Godavarman Thirumulpad vs Union of India & Ors (2025) case on 12 August, and emphasised the need for a ‘policy decision with respect to the definition of Aravalli hills and ranges’.

Pursuant to this, the Committee, without providing any justification for departing from its initial view that a ‘uniform definition’ is not possible, abruptly came to the conclusion that in order to ensure sustainable mining, ‘any landform in the Aravalli districts having an elevation of 100 metres or more from the local relief shall be termed as Aravalli Hills’.

Controversy began as soon as the Supreme Court accepted this definition in November 2025 because a seemingly small change in fact represented a fundamental shift. Per the logic of the definition, any landform in the Aravallis that was less than 100 metres of elevation or located more than 500 metres from adjacent peaks would not be considered a mountain or part of a mountain range.

It should be noted here that lower slopes, foothills and transition zones, frequently lying much below these arbitrarily determined heights, are where biodiversity is concentrated, heat is controlled, moisture is stored and recycled, and hydrological processes are most active. Peaks may be considered mountains on paper, but the lower and mid-elevation landscapes are what allow mountains to serve as climate systems.

Further, at least 90 per cent of the Aravallis would no longer have legal protection under this revised definition. According to a report in The Indian Express, internal documents of the Forest Survey of India (FSI) showed that only 1,048 of 12,081 Aravalli Hills, spread across 15 districts in Rajasthan, are 100 metres or more in height. This indicates that only 8.7 per cent of Rajasthan’s Aravallis would be protected under this criteria.

The Aravalli Notification (1992) and the National Capital Region (NCR) Planning Board’s Natural Conservation Zone declarations (2021) had protected the entire range based on its ecological value, not merely by its height. This was undermined by the new definition, a fundamental shift in India’s environmental governance, giving technical definitions precedence over ecological importance.

The 0.19% Clarification and Subsequent Abeyance

The judgement triggered widespread protests from Rajasthan to Haryana; politicians, environmentalists, social media influencers, and citizens cautioned that this would have a detrimental effect on the environment and the economy. Activists demanded that the entire Range be declared an Ecologically Critical Area, and called for an end to the quarrying of raw stone from the hills.

Following this backlash, the Central Government issued a clarification denying allegations that the definition had been altered to permit large-scale mining. Additionally, it was said that no relaxation had been granted for mining activities and that more than 90 per cent of the ecologically delicate mountain system would remain protected. In a press conference on 22 December 2025, Union Minister Bhupendra Yadav stated that,

‘In the total area of 1.44 lakh sq. kms of the Aravalli, mining eligibility can only be in 0.19 per cent of the area. The rest of the entire Aravalli is preserved and protected […] people have created confusion that you can mine below the 100-metre elevation in a hill, but it is not so […] areas lying within 500 metres between two hills would also be treated as part of the same range. After this definition, more than 90 per cent of the area will be protected.’

General Secretary of the Opposition Indian National Congress, Jairam Ramesh asserted that the 0.19 per cent figure equated to a sizable area of 68,000 acres, and that the 1.44 lakh sq. kms figure was misleading because it covered the whole area of the 34 Aravalli districts in four states that the Ministry had specified. This denominator was incorrect since the area within these districts, which is under the Aravallis, should have been used instead. ‘If the area under the Aravallis is used as a base, then 0.19 per cent will turn out to be a very huge under-estimate’, he stated, asserting that the Aravallis make up almost 33 per cent of the total landmass in 15 of the 34 districts where statistics can be verified. Further, and as mentioned earlier, according to FSI documents, just 8–9 per cent of the Aravallis in Rajasthan qualified for protection as per the new definition, leaving over 90 per cent of the forests unprotected. On being asked, the Minister failed to provide a definitive response on how many hills would be protected and how many affected.

Environmental activists remained unconvinced by official assurances. They contended that hills, woods and watershed areas serve as interconnected landscapes, and that ecological systems cannot be reduced to mathematical criteria. A number of organisations called on the government to take a preventive stance and treat the Aravalli ecosystem as a whole, regardless of its height or slope.

In response to mounting pressure, the Ministry of Environment ordered the states to enlarge the protected zones and completely prohibit new mining licenses in the Aravalli range, aiming to safeguard the Aravallis as a continuous geological crest and prevent unregulated mining across the region. However, Ramesh (on X) criticised the measure as inadequate, arguing that the core issue (of redefinition based on height) remained unaddressed.

The controversy eventually reached the Court itself. On 29^th December 2025, the Supreme Court stayed its own judgement in a suo motu proceeding, keeping the 100-metre definition in abeyance pending review by a High-Powered Expert Committee of domain experts yet to be constituted. The Court acknowledged that the Report of the Committee and its own judgement had failed to clarify certain critical issues, and that the definition had the risk of narrowing rather than securing the range’s protection.

The Way Forward

This controversy demonstrates how a legal definition can shape ecological features. A height-and-distance classification may be suitable for mapping and mining purposes but it fails to capture how mountains actually function as climate systems, where different parts work together rather than in isolation. At a deeper level, the debate highlights a larger problem in India’s environmental governance: how to balance development demands with the preservation of natural systems that do not fit neatly within administrative borders or numerical thresholds.  

Environmentalists have noted that decades of legal and illegal mining have already damaged the Aravallis severely. Any dilution in protection, they contend, might hasten the extinction of wildlife, deteriorate Delhi–NCR’s air quality further, and exacerbate the region’s already severe water shortage. Articles 48A and 51A(g) of the Constitution impose a clear duty on the state and citizens to protect the environment, which has been consistently reinforced by the Supreme Court through Article 21 (‘Right to Life’), making environmental protection an integral part of it. By excluding a substantial portion of the range from legal protection, the current approach risked diluting the safeguards established under the Indian environmental jurisprudence. While the Supreme Court has temporarily restored the previous framework, the underlying risk of definitional dilution remains unresolved pending the Expert Committee’s assessment.

Ultimately, whether the Aravallis endure as a living climate shield or fade into fragmented quarries will depend on how seriously the judiciary and the bureaucracy choose to prioritise ecological reality over administrative convenience.

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Banner image © Aditi Gupta, ‘Leopard Trail (Aravalli Hills)’, Haryana, 2024, Unsplash.

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The post Defining a Mountain Range: India’s Aravalli Range as a Climate Shield first appeared on South Asia @ LSE.