happy independence day
79 years today, the 80th independence day. flag's up, the whatsapp forwards are flowing, someone's playing maa tujhe salaam at 6am. but here's the actual state of the union.
data centers
in visakhapatnam, google and the adani group are building a $15 billion data centre. the pitch is up to 188,000 jobs. vizag currently gets 410 million litres of water a day against a requirement of 480 million. rationing is already normal for 2.5 million people. the campus goes up 860 metres from kambalakonda wildlife sanctuary, where there are leopards and pangolins.
about those 188,000 jobs. a data centre runs on somewhere between 20 and 100 staff. these buildings are automated; the 188,000 is construction plus "indirect". the jobs end when the construction ends. what doesn't end is a 20 mw facility drinking 1.4 million litres of water a day, every day, in a city that already can't fill its own taps. more than half of india's data centres sit in water stressed regions, because that is where the land is cheap.
vizag residents are marching with signs saying "we cannot drink DATA." there's a pil in the andhra pradesh high court and three more cases at the green tribunal. kids are on those marches. in thane, where amazon wants one, residents formed wake up thanekar and held a human chain on 18 july. they were told the water would come from sewage treatment plants, pointed out that the plants can't cover it, asked to see a blueprint of the pipelines, and got nothing. maharashtra has classified data centres an "essential service", basically when there isn't enough water to go round data centers get priority.
now, on 1 february, in the union budget, nirmala sitharaman announced a tax holiday until fy 2046-47 for foreign companies running cloud services out of indian data centres. twenty one years. aws, azure, google cloud. they take the water, they take the grid, they take priority when supply is short, and for two decades they don't pay tax on it.
we are not a country with spare water. we're a country that runs out of it every april.
the students
delhi, since june. the 2026 neet-ug paper leak and cbse marking irregularities put tens of thousands of students on the street, after students died by suicide. sonam wangchuk sat on hunger strike at jantar mantar from 28 june, was carried off by police on 18 july, and ended a 26 day fast on 23 july. on 20 july the sansad chalo march got tear gas and baton charges: police reported 118 personnel injured, hospital sources counted 100+ injured protesters. dharmendra pradhan resigned on 25 july taking "moral responsibility." within days the students were saying the government had gone back on its promise to drop cases against peaceful protesters.
in jharkhand, right now, students have been sitting in at jaipal singh munda stadium in ranchi since 29 july over jpsc and jssc exam leaks, with devendra nath mahto on hunger strike since 2 august. on 10 august the vidhan sabha gherao got lathi charge, tear gas and water cannon, and a statewide bandh followed with around 200 detained, women among those lathi-charged. the state has since cancelled three exams and all three jpsc members resigned.
note who's on which side in each state. the party that beats students in one state calls a bandh for them in another. everybody here is doing politics. the students are the only ones suffering.
and then there is ruchika
at that same jantar mantar protest, on 23 july, a girl shouted abusive slogans about the prime minister and his late mother. her name is ruchika singh. she is fifteen. the police paperwork says twenty five, which tells you roughly how much checking went on before anyone filled in a form.
a video of the slogans went viral, and watch how fast the country moved. a zero fir at noida's expressway police station, transferred to parliament street in delhi, under three sections of the bharatiya nyaya sanhita, the charge being that she demeaned a constitutional office. on 31 july the prime minister posted an instagram video calling the slogans "deeply disturbing" and saying young people should get the chance to learn rather than face the courts. then she filmed herself with folded hands: "i am only 15 years old. whatever i did was not worthy of forgiveness."
but look at this: in hailakandi, assam, this month, a 16 year old girl was raped and murdered; three boys have been arrested and locals blocked national highway 6 for two days demanding action. in march, in saran, bihar, a 16 year old class 10 student was gang-raped by five men and thrown into a well, where she died. one arrest, four absconding. the internet spent that week arguing about the castes of the people involved. no fir crossing state lines in eight days for either of them or any instagram videos.
1,77,335 crimes against children in 2023, up 9.2% in a year, 67,694 of them pocso cases. the rape conviction rate was 27.5% with about 1.2 lakh cases pending. the pocso act says the trial has to finish inside a year.
so they can find a girl, identify her, cross state lines and book her under three sections in eight days when the insult points upward. they cannot finish a pocso trial in a year though.
mumbai is cutting down the thing that stops mumbai from drowning
three separate clearances, three separate projects, in eight months. in december the bombay high court cleared the 26 km versova-bhayandar road, which hits more than 45,000 mangroves, about 9,000 of them cut outright. in march the supreme court cleared bmc for the separate rs 18,263 crore coastal road along the same stretch of coast. and ten days ago the high court allowed more felling for a bullet train transmission line, on the grounds that the project is of "national importance."
mangroves are the only reason large parts of mumbai stay above water during a bad high tide, and what the courts attached instead is compensatory afforestation, which is a promise to plant saplings somewhere to replace a forest that took decades to grow. we will find out how that goes during a july cloudburst.
assam is underwater right now
a hundred people are dead and more than 700,000 have been pushed out of their homes, close to 300,000 of them into relief camps. eight districts, 437 villages, 17,000 hectares of crops under water. several rivers are still above the danger mark.
another thing is, last week, while the state was still counting bodies, the assam chief minister said the government will ask the centre to shrink kaziranga's eco-sensitive zone from 10 km down to 1 km. his argument is that 10 km is only an interim default, that 1 km is what the supreme court framework allows, and that the current limit is holding up civic projects including a stadium at bokakhat. congress has noted it would also clear the way for the luxury hotels going up around a unesco world heritage site. there's a separate complaint before the supreme court's central empowered committee about construction already happening inside the haldhibari and panbari corridors.
the himalayas are coming apart
in chamoli, a metal bridge was picked up and carried off by the water.
himachal pradesh has lost 157 people since 30 june, 68 of them to landslides, drowning and falls, the rest counted as road accidents in the same window. 259 roads are still unusable, 120 in mandi alone. in jammu and kashmir there have been 35 cloudbursts this year and about 31 dead. on 1 august one hit chatroo in kishtwar and drove debris, uprooted trees and boulders through houses and the local market.
the union government's own position is that climate change is making extreme himalayan rainfall routine, and officials have also acknowledged that unscientific construction adds to the risk. both halves of that are true. only one gets acted on. we keep blasting slopes and widening highways in exactly the places that are already sliding, then file the result under natural disaster.
built to be inaugurated
yesterday a tunnel collapsed at the vishnugad-pipalkoti hydel project in chamoli. water and debris rushed in, and of the twenty two workers inside, seven died and fourteen were injured.
bihar alone lost 26 bridges in recent years, 15 of them in 2024, ten across six districts inside sixteen days. the aguwani ghat-sultanganj bridge over the ganga, rs 1,750 crore, managed to collapse in 2022 and again in 2023 and again in 2024, all while still under construction. the gambhira bridge near vadodara went down in july last year during peak traffic and killed 22 people, after years of warnings about its condition were ignored. one independent tally puts it at 170 collapses between 2021 and 2025 with more than 200 deaths.
the ganga expressway cost rs 36,230 crore and modi inaugurated it on 29 april. by july a seven metre stretch of link road near unnao had caved in with the first monsoon rain, with residents saying the slope protection was never built to spec. upeida's version is that this was a minor ten metre crack on an interchange loop, spotted on patrol and repaired the same day. the delhi-dehradun expressway, rs 12,000 crore, had potholes inside three months. and on 11 august the newly opened noida international airport flooded, rs 11,200 crore of phase one with water pooling between the car park and the terminal.
manipur is on year four
president's rule ended and a government was restored on 4 february. within days a new front opened: kuki-naga clashes at litan in ukhrul district, houses burnt, curfew, a five day shutdown of internet and broadband, 51 kuki students evacuated from a school and moved to another district. since may 2023 the conflict has killed around 260 people and displaced tens of thousands, and it is still going. with no word from the government.
the fuel they keep calling green
you've probably noticed your mileage dropping. e20 is the default at pumps now and there's no unblended option. people with vehicles built before april 2023 went to court arguing those engines were never designed for it, that they're seeing corrosion and rising repair bills, and that insurers are refusing ethanol-damage claims. the supreme court threw the plea out in their words: "we are not inclined to entertain the plea. dismissed." gadkari told parliament on 30 july that it costs 2 to 6% mileage, causes no engine failure, and cuts emissions by 30%. (the truth is far from that)
the ethanol comes from places like byrnihat, on the assam-meghalaya border, which is the most polluted metro area in the world. a journalist's video in june made the whole country notice at once, and a meghalaya minister's response was that nobody had filed a formal complaint about the health effects.
in kokodi village, kondagaon, chhattisgarh, on 13 february, seven to eight hundred villagers walked into the ethanol plant and smashed it up, after more than a year of complaints about effluent running into their fields. chhattisgarh has approved 42 more plants. punjab already suffered from it: the malbros distillery at zira was shut in 2023 after months of protest, and the pollution control board found hazardous waste in the groundwater.
crops diverted to make fuel, groundwater taken to distil it, effluent into whoever's fields are nearby, the worst air on the planet, and they had the gall to print "green fuel" on it.
so who is doing well out of this? congress has formally alleged a conflict of interest and demanded a lokpal probe. nikhil gadkari, the minister's son, runs cian agro industries, whose revenue went from rs 18 crore in june 2024 to rs 523 crore a year later, with the share price up more than 2,100% since january 2025. his brother sarang runs manas agro, also in ethanol. pawan khera's line was "the father drafts the policy, the sons cash in on it." gadkari denies all of it, says his sons' ethanol business is under 0.5% of the indian market, that he has no role in running it, and that the campaign against him is the work of an "import lobby".
and the rivers
there was a factory called miteni in vicenza, italy. it made pfas, the forever chemicals, and it caused one of the worst contamination disasters in european history, something like 350,000 people potentially exposed through their water and soil. criminal convictions followed. it was shut in 2018. in 2019 laxmi organic industries bought the equipment at the bankruptcy auction, and it was taken apart in italy, shipped here, and rebuilt at lote parshuram in ratnagiri. a cross-border investigation published late last year is how anyone found out. residents have been at the factory gates since, mla rohit pawar has demanded an inquiry into the use of banned equipment, and the industries minister denies pfas is being made there at all.
india has no specific regulation for pfas.
closer to home, ludhiana's buddha nullah has been an open chemical drain for years, and a movement called kale pani da morcha keeps having to physically show up about it: outside the pollution board office in january, a dharna on republic day, thousands marching on tajpur road to block the discharge lines of dyeing units. that water goes into the sutlej, and downstream the tribune has reported villages where nearly half of gidderanwali had jaundice and dangar khera counted 67 cancer patients. the hindon in western up is the same story with different names. we spent thousands of crores on namami gange and river cleaning schemes and we still have entire districts where the tap water is unfit to use.
the islands
the great nicobar project covers more than 160 sq km, and the environment ministry told parliament in 2023 that nearly 964,000 trees would be felled for it.
the forest is home to the nicobarese and to the shompen, a particularly vulnerable tribal group whose entire population is estimated at 200 to 300 people. contact with outsiders is a documented mortality risk for them. in video testimony they said if trees must be cut, cut only along the coast, not in their hills and rivers. jairam ramesh has pointed out those objections don't appear in government records at all. survival international calls it genocidal.
also happening, quietly
on 10 august the ten central trade unions and the samyukta kisan morcha held nationwide protests after a convention at talkatora stadium: rail and road blockades, workplace protests, human chains. they want msp written into law and relief on farm debt. a bharat bandh is next if nobody answers.
the scoreboard
the richest 1% of this country own more than 40% of it. the bottom half own about 3%. india added 57 billionaires in a single year and now has 308 of them, third most in the world, holding something like rs 112.6 trillion between them. the rupee meanwhile hit an all-time low around 95.8 to the dollar and is asia's worst performing currency this year.
the rankings say the same thing in a colder voice. 157th of 180 on press freedom, down six places in a year. 156th of 179 on academic freedom. v-dem has us 105th on liberal democracy and filed under electoral autocracy.
and what was the pm doing?
the monsoon session of parliament ran 19 sittings and adjourned sine die on 13 august, two days ago. lok sabha productivity was around 19%. rajya sabha, 39%.
on 11 august, jairam ramesh said amit shah had been absent from both houses for 17 days, calling it "truly unprecedented," including on days when house business was listed under his own name. that's 17 of 19 sittings. the opposition says the prime minister and the home minister turned up only on the final day, shortly before adjournment. shah's position is that he was willing to reply if the opposition formally moved a debate, and bjp says the opposition was disrupting proceedings.
take that at face value if you want. it still means that during a session in which students were being lathi-charged in two states, a hundred people drowned in assam, 157 died in himachal, a tunnel came down on seven workers, and the government handed foreign cloud companies a 21 year tax holiday on our water, the two most powerful men in the country were in the room for essentially none of it. in that same fortnight one of them found time to record a personal video about a fifteen year old's slogans.
meanwhile they'll both be on a podium today talking about what this country owes its freedom fighters.
we owe them better than this. happy independence day.
sources if you want to check any of this:
vizag data centre: https://kathmandupost.com/world/2026/08/06/google-s-15-billion-india-data-centre-project-battles-water-wildlife-concerns
what data centres actually cost us: https://m.thewire.in/article/tech/india-is-betting-big-on-data-centres-but-at-what-cost
india's data centre water use: https://www.carboncopy.info/india-s-data-centre-push-lacks-regulation
thane: https://www.localsamosa.com/news/amazon-date-centre-thane-12258264
the 21 year tax holiday: https://www.india-briefing.com/news/india-union-budget-2026-cloud-data-centers-tax-incentives-42311.html/
the delhi student protests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Delhi_Jantar_Mantar_protests
al jazeera on the student protests: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/24/indian-student-protests-whats-next-after-modis-promise-on-exam-leaks
jharkhand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Jharkhand_student_protests
ruchika singh's fir and the pm's video: https://www.outlookindia.com/national/i-am-only-15-years-old-teenager-apologises-for-slogans-after-pm-modi-urges-forgiveness
the dispute over her age: https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2026/08/01/is-ruchika-singh-15-or-25-girl-booked-for-abusing-pm-modi-apologises-confusion-arises-over-age.html
the hailakandi case: https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2026/08/04/assam-minor-girl-rape-murder-three-teens-aged-17-to-19-arrested-amid-protests-demanding-capital-punishment.amp.html
ncrb on crimes against children: https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/ncrb-data-on-crime-against-children/
mumbai mangroves: https://india.mongabay.com/2026/01/the-environmental-costs-of-replacing-mangroves-with-a-road/
the supreme court clearance: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/forests/disappointed-says-debi-goenka-as-apex-court-gives-go-ahead-to-cut-mangroves-for-key-road-project-in-north-mumbai
assam floods: https://www.npr.org/2026/08/10/g-s1-138015/flood-death-toll-in-indias-assam-reaches-100-as-thousands-lose-their-homes
kaziranga: https://www.groundreport.in/latest/elevated-highway-through-kaziranga-solution-or-new-threat-to-wildlife/
the kaziranga eco-sensitive zone cut: https://www.indiatodayne.in/assam/story/kaziranga-eco-sensitive-zone-may-be-reduced-from-10-km-to-1-km-himanta-sarma-1435156-2026-08-08
himachal: https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2026/08/11/himachal-pradesh-monsoon-deaths.html
j&k cloudbursts: https://kashmirthunder.in/index.php/2026/08/04/in-2026-35-cloudbursts-claimed-31-lives-across-jk/
the chamoli tunnel collapse: https://thefederal.com/category/states/north/uttarakhand/uttarakhand-tunnel-collapse-leaves-seven-dead-at-thdc-project-in-chamoli-253475
the tally of bridge collapses: https://www.moneylife.in/article/indias-frequent-infrastructure-failures-built-to-show-not-to-last/81051.html
the ganga expressway cave-in: https://www.deccanherald.com/india/uttar-pradesh/first-monsoon-rain-washes-away-portion-of-ganga-expressway-link-road-in-uttar-pradeshs-unnao-4062985
noida airport flooding: https://www.newsx.com/regionals/newly-inaugurated-noida-airport-flooded-after-heavy-rains-rs-11200-crore-project-faces-waterlogging-video-goes-viral-259434/
manipur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manipur_conflict_(2023%E2%80%93present)
the e20 plea dismissed: https://www.deccanherald.com/india/sc-throws-out-pil-against-centre-allowing-20-ethanol-blended-petrol-3707355
gadkari's e20 statement in parliament: https://www.republicworld.com/amp/india/e20-petrol-lowers-vehicle-mileage-by-2-6-but-no-engine-failure-reported-nitin-gadkari-tells-the-parliamen-2026-07-30-133746
byrnihat: https://theshillongtimes.com/2026/06/30/viral-report-on-byrnihat-ethanol-plant-pollution-faces-govt-denial/
the kondagaon ethanol plant: https://www.landconflictwatch.org/conflicts/industrial-pollution-non-compliance-and-violent-community-backlash-in-the-kondagaon-ethanol-plant-conflict-in-chhattisgarh
mongabay on the wider ethanol push: https://india.mongabay.com/2025/08/ethanol-push-sparks-concerns-about-food-security-environment-and-health/
congress's conflict of interest allegation: https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india%2Fconflict-of-interest-congress-alleges-gadkaris-sons-profited-from-ethanol-policy-demand-lokpal-probe-3712105
gadkari's denial: https://www.freepressjournal.in/business/nitin-gadkari-rejects-conflict-of-interest-claims-says-sons-ethanol-business-is-under-05-of-indias-market-politically-targeted
the pfas plant moved from italy: https://www.journalismfund.eu/news/banned-italian-pfas-plant-reopened-india-triggering-public-backlash
ij4eu, factories on the run: https://investigativejournalismforeu.net/projects/factories-on-the-run-from-italy-to-india/
buddha nullah: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/ludhiana-on-edge-as-buddha-nullah-activists-march-towards-dyeing-units/
down to earth on the hindon: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/pollution/a-river-lost-unchecked-discharge-of-industrial-effluents-and-inadequate-sewage-treatment-facilities-have-turned-the-hindons-water-toxic
great nicobar: https://thefederal.com/category/news/great-nicobar-mega-project-sparks-tribal-outcry-over-rights-ecology
oxfam on who owns india: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/richest-1-own-over-40-of-indias-wealth-oxfam-471074
308 billionaires: https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/hurun-rich-list-2026-india-now-has-308-billionaires-ranks-third-globally-126030700305_1.html
the rupee: https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/economy/story/the-rupee-has-emerged-as-the-worst-performing-currency-in-asia-523106-2026-03-30
press freedom index: https://m.thewire.in/article/media/india-is-157th-out-of-180-countries-on-rsfs-2026-world-press-freedom-index
