India

For the first time, F-35 stealth fighters have operated from Indian soil in an exercise with the Indian Air Force (IAF). Six of the U.S. Air Force jets joined Tarang Shakti 2026 at Jodhpur, in the northwest Indian state of Rajasthan, bringing a fifth-generation combat aircraft to an Indian airbase for the IAF’s biggest multinational air exercise.

Two years ago, the Indian Air Force hosted its first major multinational air exercise in over six decades. The plan to make Tarang Shakti a biennial fixture has held, and from September 26 to October 12, the exercise returned to the international airpower calendar — this time as a single, continuous event centered on Jodhpur and adjoining bases in Rajasthan. Seven foreign air forces sent flying detachments. Of these, France, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States sent fighters. Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, and Sri Lanka provided transport or special mission types.

The headline act, though, was undoubtedly American.

This edition marked the first time F-35s from any nation operated from an Indian airbase in an exercise with the IAF. Past outings for the stealth jet in India have been limited to Aero India displays in 2023 and 2025, and an India-U.K. exercise which saw British F-35Bs operating from their aircraft carrier (and a widely publicized RAF F-35 diversion to the southern city of Kochi).

The F-35 factor

Six F-35As of the 13th Fighter Squadron from Misawa, Japan, along with over 200 airmen and KC-135R support from Kadena, touched down at Jodhpur on September 26. “American airpower has arrived in Jodhpur!” posted U.S. Ambassador Sergio Gor, who later described the deployment as another example of trust between the two countries, noting that the F-35 “does not go just anywhere.”

One 13th FS pilot said that operating with forces from around the world exposed the squadron to new tactics, perspectives, and ways of operating. For the IAF, the payoff was arguably more pointed. Indian crews spent two weeks flying with, and against, a genuine stealth fighter — the closest available proxy for the J-20s and J-35s now fielded by China.

The IAF was understandably tight-lipped about what the F-35s actually did.

The IAF vice-chief, Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit, acknowledged the interest at the curtain-raiser in New Delhi on September 22, but declined to discuss specifics. While media commentary quickly cast the jet as a stand-in for the J-20 in mock engagements, Dixit offered a more measured view, arguing that an aircraft’s generation is not the sole arbiter of combat performance — training, networks, and weapons matter as much. He also noted that the IAF is developing its own means of detecting fifth-generation aircraft, alongside its backing for its domestically developed next-generation fighter, the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA).

The IAF and the U.S. Air Force are hardly strangers to one another. Their bilateral Cope India exercises, which began in 2002 and expanded into fighter combat training in 2004, have proved valuable to both sides. Early encounters saw Indian pilots flying Russian-built fighters against American F-15s, with the IAF’s performance prompting the U.S. Air Force to reassess some of its own assumptions about air combat tactics. Subsequent iterations broadened the relationship beyond fighter maneuvers to include large-force employment, airlift, airdrop, and disaster response. The result has been a deeper understanding of each other’s capabilities, procedures, and operating cultures. All this groundwork has helped make larger multinational engagements such as Tarang Shakti possible.

The F-35’s appearance in India comes against the backdrop of a potential, if complicated, future procurement relationship. For years now, some U.S. officials have suggested that the stealth jet could be offered to New Delhi. Most notably, back in 2018, the then-head of U.S. Pacific Command supposedly stated that he supported the sale of the stealth fighter to India. In February 2025, President Donald Trump announced that Washington was paving the way to offer the stealth fighter to India, as part of a broader push to deepen defense ties with New Delhi. The proposal was significant, given India’s longstanding reliance on Russian military equipment, including the S-400 air defense system. No formal sale negotiations have begun, and questions over technology security, Russian equipment, and India’s preference for domestic production remain major hurdles. For now, the deployment at Tarang Shakti represents something more immediate, namely an opportunity for the IAF to work alongside the aircraft, without any commitment to acquiring it.

Power in Partnership

‘Tarang Shakti’ translates to ‘wave of power,’ evoking both the electromagnetic spectrum and the combined force of cooperation. The 2026 edition leaned on the latter, running under the theme ‘Power in Partnership.’

With fighters from France, the UAE, and the United States sharing the skies with their Indian counterparts, the exercise was as much about testing interoperability as it was about signaling the growing depth of India’s defense partnerships.

The context, however, is very different from 2024. Since Operation Sindoor in May 2025, when the IAF briefly went to war with the Pakistan Air Force, Dixit has listed intelligence-led operations, precision, integrated air and missile defense, and jointness as the lessons that mattered most. The exercise, he said, would let Indian combat experience and that of partners test each other’s assumptions.

The two-phase structure of 2024 was born of convenience, catching European contingents on their way home from Exercise Pitch Black in Australia. No such happy coincidence presented itself this time, and the IAF consolidated everything at Jodhpur, which had hosted the bilateral Veer Guardian 2026 with Japan just four days earlier.

The roster shifted in the run-up. Greece was among eight flying participants named at the curtain-raiser, but had dropped off the list by the time flying began. Bangladesh, which withdrew days before TS24-2 amid the upheaval in Dhaka, made it this time with a C-130J.

The Exercise

Group Captain Manoj Yadav, Chief Operations Officer at Jodhpur, said TS26 “demonstrates the importance of bringing air forces together.” Flying began on September 27 with familiarization and visual-range basic fighter maneuvers, first one-versus-one, then two-versus-one.

From September 30, the large-force employment (LFE) phase took over, with up to 80 aircraft airborne in the most intense missions, set in contested airspace with beyond-visual-range and long-range air defense threats. The IAF fielded examples of its entire fighter inventory — Rafale, Mirage 2000, Jaguar, Tejas, MiG-29 Fulcrum, and Su-30MKI Flanker — and by its count, the exercise logged over 800 sorties and some 600 flying hours.

The IAF also put its recent combat experience on the table. Exercise Director Air Vice Marshal A. Raj Thakur said visitors were keenly interested in Operation Sindoor, and the IAF briefed them on its side of the story. The PACAF Commander, Gen. Kevin Schneider, said Sindoor had also been featured in his own discussions with Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh during a week spent as his guest.

Voices from the Flight Line

France again brought the largest visiting contingent, around 300 personnel under Mission Pégase 26: seven Rafales — four from France and three from a detachment in the UAE — plus three A330 MRTT Phénix tankers and two A400Ms.

“This exercise is quite important for us,” said Julien Sabéné, Deputy Commander of the French Air Defense and Air Operations Command, on arrival. A few days in, he was calling Tarang Shakti the highlight of Pégase 26, and was particularly keen on swapping combat lessons now that both air forces have flown the Rafale in anger. He noted that French and Indian tankers had successfully refueled each other’s fighters, and as a former Mirage 2000 pilot, had a soft spot for the Indian-made Tejas: “It reminds me of the Mirage 2000, which was my aircraft.”

Germany swapped 2024’s Eurofighters for an A400M, but the Luftwaffe made the most of it. Capt. Maurice Berns, an A400M first officer, said his crew was being folded into the large-force engagements — “we, as a transport aircraft, are being involved in big fighter jet exercises.” Lt. Gen. Günter Katz, commander of the German Air Force Forces Command, said his crews had found nothing to separate flying in India from flying at home: “It’s the same setup, the same flow, the same procedures.” France’s Gen. Stéphane Groen made a similar point, crediting years of bilateral exercises with the IAF for how smoothly the multinational drills ran.

For the two South Asian participants, the exercise was a significant step up. The Bangladesh Air Force sent 19 pilots and technicians in what the Indian High Commission in Dhaka described as the BAF’s first multinational air exercise on this scale. Sri Lanka’s King Air 360ER came with a six-member crew, and the SLAF highlighted the value of exposure to unfamiliar tactics and procedures.

Symbolic Finale

An open-house day coinciding with Air Force Day on October 8 drew over 20,000 visitors. Two days later, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh was joined by the Chief of Defense Staff and all three service chiefs for the Distinguished Visitors’ Day. Its set-piece was the ‘Tarang’ formation, an arrowhead led by an IAF Su-30MKI, with an American F-35 flying alongside a Tejas on its left, and a French Rafale paired with an Emirati F-16 on its right.

In his address, Rajnath Singh argued that future military power would depend less on the number of platforms a country fields, and more on the “speed of sensing, understanding, deciding, and acting.”

The final day brought a fitting bookend. On October 12, Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh flew his last fighter sortie in a Tejas, alongside aircraft of the visiting forces and the Suryakiran aerobatic team. He retired on October 31, handing over to Air Marshal Dixit — a neat echo of 2024, when the vice-chief running Tarang Shakti went on to become chief within weeks.

The Future

With its second edition, Tarang Shakti has made the leap from promising debut to established fixture. Dixit summed up the journey well, recalling that for years the IAF had operated with foreign forces bilaterally: “We learned to operate with one partner at a time.” Tarang Shakti, he said, changed that. Gen. Schneider made the case for why it matters: when partners are called on to act together, in a crisis or a disaster, “we don’t do it cold.”

There is room to grow, however. The visiting fighter contingent was thinner than in 2024, even if the debut of the F-35 more than made up for it in interest. The second edition of Tarang Shakti has firmly established the IAF as a host rather than a guest of the world’s air forces, and the force is keen to keep up the momentum toward establishing the exercise as something of a ‘Red Flag of the East.’

Contact the editor: thomas@thewarzone.com

Islamabad, Pakistan – In the spring of 2025, Pakistan and India severed most of their remaining links after years of acrimony.

Gunmen had killed 26 people in Pahalgam in India-administered Kashmir that April. New Delhi blamed Pakistan for the attack – Islamabad denied any role – and put the Indus Waters Treaty, governing the sharing of rivers flowing into Pakistan, in abeyance. Pakistan retaliated by closing its airspace to Indian airlines, shutting the Wagah border crossing and suspending trade.

By May, the nuclear-armed neighbours were exchanging missile and drone strikes. Four days of fighting ended in a ceasefire on May 10, for which United States President Donald Trump claimed credit.

Eighteen months later, data from Pakistan’s central bank suggested trade is gradually recovering.

Pakistan imported goods worth $61.7m from India from July to September this year, up 69 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).

Here is what the data show, what Pakistan buys from India and how the trade is continuing:

What do the latest figures show?

The SBP records payments made by Pakistani banks for imports, broken down by country. From July to September 2025, payments for Indian imports totalled $36.6m.

After the conflict, monthly payments fell from $20m in April 2025 just before the four-day war to $9.2m in June and $8.2m in July before recovering to $19.6m in September.

Over the full 2025-2026 fiscal year, which ended this June, Pakistan paid $203.8m for Indian imports, 7.6 percent less than the previous year.

Monthly averages suggest payments have largely recovered: $19.3m in the 12 months before the conflict and $19.1m in the 13 months from September 2025.

Government trade data, which break down imports by commodity, put the value of imports in the latest quarter slightly lower at $62.6m, compared with $66.6m a year earlier.

What does Pakistan import from India?

Organic chemicals and pharmaceutical products accounted for 96.2 percent of imports from India in 2025-2026, compared with 93 percent the previous year, government trade data show.

The largest category was vaccines, blood products and similar items worth $93.6m, up from $70.3m. Within this group, imports of vaccines for human use rose to $32.3m from $11.1m.

Khaqan Najeeb, a former adviser to Pakistan’s Ministry of Finance, said the reliance was driven by price and supply.

“India has developed a competitive pharmaceutical industry, particularly in active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), which are essential for medicine manufacturing,” he told Al Jazeera. “Pakistan’s pharmaceutical industry has historically sourced some of these inputs from India because of competitive prices, product availability and geographical proximity.”

How does trade continue during the ban?

Pakistan’s restrictions on Indian goods predate the 2025 conflict.

On August 9, 2019, days after India revoked the special autonomous status of India-administered Kashmir, Pakistan’s Ministry of Commerce banned the import of goods originating in India or shipped from the country.

Less than a month later, however, it exempted therapeutic products regulated by the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP).

After the 2025 Pahalgam attack and India’s decision to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan’s National Security Committee (NSC) imposed further restrictions.

“All trade with India including to and from any third country through Pakistan is suspended forthwith,” the NSC said in a statement on April 24, 2025.

But Muhammad Zubair Motiwala, a former chief executive of the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan (TDAP), a government body responsible for facilitating the country’s international trade and exports, said some Indian goods still entered Pakistan through third countries.

“Indian goods actually come through Dubai and Malaysia and others, but they are counted by country of origin,” he told Al Jazeera.

Najeeb, however, cautioned against drawing conclusions about the routes through which such goods reach Pakistan.

“Some supplies may reach Pakistan through international supply chains, but the precise routes and volumes are not publicly established,” he said.

A DRAP official speaking on condition of anonymity said that ultimately, despite the tensions with India, Pakistan’s trade decisions were determined by one factor above all: It would import from India if needed in the national interest.

Could Pakistan buy elsewhere?

Nowhere is that interest clearer than in the field of pharmaceuticals.

Overall, India accounted for only about 0.3 percent of Pakistan’s $64.5bn total import bill in 2025-2026, according to SBP data. Pakistan paid $19.5bn for imports from China, its biggest trading partner.

But the pharma sector is a different story. In 2024 before the four-day war, India was Pakistan’s second-largest supplier of pharmaceuticals, marginally behind Belgium, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

Motiwala said replacing Indian suppliers could significantly increase costs for some businesses.

“We actually want this [trade] to reopen. Our raw material comes from them, and it comes from other places. It adds 40 to 50 percent to the cost if we import from other places,” he said.

Najeeb said the impact of switching suppliers would vary depending on the product.

“Freight, insurance, quality certification, regulatory approvals and delivery reliability all influence the economics. Alternative sourcing may increase costs for some products although this will vary across ingredients,” he said.

Are there signs of a thaw?

Motiwala said relations between the neighbours appeared to be easing.

“I do think the ice is melting. It seems like it. Fishermen were recently released, and there was a handshake between the two teams,” he said.

On August 29, India repatriated 25 Pakistani nationals, including fishermen, through the Wagah-Attari border crossing.

Last week, Indian and Pakistani footballers shook hands before and after India’s 3-2 win in a SAFF Championship match in Dhaka, a departure from the recent practice of teams from the two countries avoiding such gestures in other sports.

Najeeb said closer economic ties could benefit both countries.

“However, economic considerations cannot be divorced from the prevailing political and security environment. Where conditions permit, a gradual and mutually agreed resumption of trade could be examined, beginning with areas of clear economic and humanitarian benefit,” he said.

Last week’s midterm elections made history across the country, and Los Angeles was no exception: Asian Americans will now hold all three citywide elective offices — mayor, city attorney and controller — for the first time.

Mayor-elect Nithya Raman came to the U.S. from India as a child. City Atty.-elect Marissa Roy’s mother also emigrated from India. And City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who is Filipino, won reelection to a second four-year term in June.

“This is a historic moment for the nation and certainly for our city and state, and for [Asian American and Pacific Islander] communities,” said Manjusha P. Kulkarni, executive director of the AAPI Equity Alliance, which advocates for resources and funding for the coalition of community organizations it represents. “We feel that the work that we’ve done across many decades has come to fruition in seeing progressive Asian American representation in our city.”

Kulkarni noted that Asian American voters have trended more progressive over the decades, after years of being pigeonholed as largely conservative. Raman and Roy were both endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, and Mejia was recommended by the leftist group.

Across the country, voters made history at the ballot box: California voted in its first Latino governor, Texas elected its first Latina governor and Georgia will have its first Black female governor. Michigan elected Abdul El-Sayed, who will become the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate.

The two largest U.S. cities will now be headed by South Asian Americans: New York City’s Zohran Mamdani, born to Indian parents, and Raman, who arrived from India to the U.S. at the age of 6. Raman became the first Asian American woman and the first South Asian elected to the City Council when she won her seat in 2020.

In her first address as mayor-elect last week, Raman acknowledged the significance of voters putting their faith in her at a time when the Trump administration has terrified immigrant communities with mass deportations.

“This city has opened its arms to people to come and build their dreams here, and the idea that Angelenos voted for an immigrant to be their next mayor at this moment in American history is so deeply moving to me,” she said.

Roy frequently invoked her mother’s immigrant story and her Indian heritage on the campaign trail. As a founding board member of the Asian Democrats of Los Angeles County, she had key Asian American backers, including California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and San Francisco City Atty. David Chiu.

Roy, whose campaign was infused with Bollywood needle drops on Instagram, is also the co-creator of a “Raman Rager” Bollywood dance mix for a South Asian-themed fundraiser that has since taken on a life of its own.

Roy said in an interview that her win in last week’s election represents a moment for the city’s broader immigrant community. When she won, she received Whatsapp messages from family members in India who were watching closely and was featured in an India Weekly article.

“I think this is really a significant moment, not just for the Asian American community, but for the immigrant community to have an immigrant mayor, to have a city attorney who is the daughter of an immigrant,” Roy said. “This is Los Angeles sending a message about who it is.”

Asians are the fastest growing population in the U.S., outpacing Black, Latino and white populations, according to the Pew Research Center. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders represent about 12% of the city’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

And they constitute more than 1 million eligible voters in L.A. County, according to an analysis of census data by Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California.

“Our communities have helped build Los Angeles, and it’s time our political leadership reflects the enormous role we play in shaping its future,” Dahni Tsuboi, chief executive of the organization, said in a statement.

On election night last week, Zahra Hajee, president of Asian Democrats of L.A. County, hopped from Roy’s election night party — which featured a henna station and a victorious Roy who flashed glittering bangles — to Raman’s, where Mejia gave an impassioned speech as a Raman win looked likely. After Raman took the lead by early Wednesday morning, Hajee, who is Pakistani American and Muslim, became emotional.

“To be able to see two South Asian women leaders — I didn’t think I’d see this in my lifetime,” Hajee said. “Being able to have those shared experiences with our next city attorney and next mayor is just such a surreal feeling and a connection I thought I’d never have.”

The group, which has about a thousand members, was among the first to endorse Roy’s campaign and supported Raman early on. The organization also has a working relationship with Mejia, who is a member of the Green Party. It also helped introduce Raman to key constituencies; she set up an event with small business owners in L.A.’s Little Bangladesh neighborhood near Koreatown, for example.

Nina Long, policy manager for AAPI Force, a progressive statewide coalition, said the candidates’ outreach reflected the nuances of the community, reaching groups including Chinese, Korean and Filipino voters.

“They did not treat AAPIs as a voter bloc to be taken for granted,” she said. “Each of the candidates was really savvy about the diversity of AAPI communities in Los Angeles.”

The dominance of Asian Americans in this election is also a display of the growing political influence of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters.

“For a very long time, the AAPI community was considered a quote unquote margin of victory in Democratic politics,” Hajee said. “We have shown our community is not just a margin of victory but a true base of voters.”

Mejia acknowledged the moment as a “huge feat” for progressive values being championed by Asian Americans.

“Representation is great, but it’s also showing that we have people running on great values centered on people, not special interests,” he said in an interview. “The fact that we are all AAPI is amazing, but the credit is what we stand for and what we believe in.”

He said his views were shaped by having parents who worked hard but were exposed to more conservative values and were expected to keep their heads down and not ask questions. But as life has become harder, more Asian Americans, especially young people, want better, he said.

“I believe what you’re seeing right now, this movement in politics, is that so many people are paying attention, especially those from immigrant communities,” he said.

There are currently three Asian Americans on the L.A. City Council, including Raman, who represents District 4. The other two are Ysabel Jurado of District 14 and John Lee of District 12.

Jurado became the first Filipina elected to the City Council when she won in 2024. In a statement, she said, seeing three Asian American leaders elected to citywide office felt deeply personal.

“It reflects generations of organizing by communities who fought to be heard and opened doors for those who would follow,” she said, adding that she looked forward to pushing for policies that would make living in L.A. more affordable. “We have an opportunity to show what greater representation can mean in people’s everyday lives.”

Times staff writers Noah Haggerty and Sonja Sharp contributed to this report.

Air quality in Indian capital reaches severe levels, posing heightened health risks for more than 30 million residents.

Heavy smog has blanketed New Delhi after firecrackers lit up the Indian capital during Diwali celebrations, worsening the seasonal pollution crisis.

Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, was celebrated across India on Sunday. Despite restrictions on fireworks, New Delhi residents celebrated the festival of lights with firecrackers throughout Sunday evening, releasing smoke and fine particulate matter into the atmosphere.

On Monday morning, the Air Quality Index exceeded 350 in several parts of the capital, categorised as “severe” and posing significant health risks, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended exposure thresholds.

Last month, India’s Supreme Court put in place restrictions to limit Diwali pollution, allowing only approved “green firecrackers” under specified conditions for three-hour windows on Saturday and Sunday. The approved crackers produce fewer emissions but are not pollution-free.

Seasonal pollution

On Wednesday, days before Diwali, toxic air pollution in New Delhi surged to more than 30 times the WHO’s recommended daily limit, data from air monitors showed.

New Delhi, home to 30 million people, persistently ranks among the world’s most polluted capital cities.

The issue is exacerbated during the winter, when cooler temperatures, low wind speeds and stagnant atmospheric conditions prevent pollutants from dispersing.

Vehicles account for 23 percent of New Delhi’s winter pollution, while biomass burning, including farm stubble fires, contributes 20 percent, according to India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.

The result is a thick haze that can linger over the capital and surrounding areas for days.

Diwali, the festival of lights, is being celebrated across India and among its vast diaspora, marking one of the most important days of the year for Hindus.

More than one billion people of different faiths take part in the celebrations in the world’s most populous nation, gathering for prayers, family reunions and the lighting of fireworks.

The name Diwali comes from “Deepavali”, meaning “a row of lights”, and many families place clay oil lamps outside their homes to symbolise the triumph of light over darkness and knowledge over ignorance.

The festival follows the Hindu lunar calendar and usually falls in late October or early November. This year, Diwali is marked on November 8.

While Diwali is rooted in Hindu tradition, it is also observed by Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists, with regional origin stories that share a common theme – the victory of good over evil.

Celebrations often include feasting, new clothes, rangoli floor designs, and the exchange of sweets and gifts with friends and neighbours.

New Delhi, India – Both daughters of S Budhiraja live in the United States. Yet, when he and his wife head out to the market in Gurugram, a bustling business district on the outskirts of India’s capital, a young man walks beside them.

It is 26-year-old Roney Raju, their “hired grandson”.

Across Indian cities, a small but growing number of companies are now selling what families once took for granted: someone to take care of ageing people. Chores include taking them to the temple, sitting with them during a hospital visit, playing cards, or simply listening to them.

Some firms call such workers “children for hire”; others call them a “grandchild for rent”.

India, the world’s most populous country, is growing older quickly.

People over 60 made up 10.5 percent of its population in 2022, a demographic projected to nearly double to 21 percent by 2050, according to the India Ageing Report 2023 by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Institute for Population Sciences.

That means about 347 million elderly Indians – a number almost equal to the entire population of the US, the world’s third most populous nation – will need specialised care by 2050.

Several Indian startups see the opportunity, with the Indian government estimating the senior care industry at about $7bn.

Raju, holding a master’s degree in social work, works for one such company in Gurugram. He has been looking after the Budhirajas for the last few months.

“I was comfortable with him from the get-go,” Budhiraja, who is in his 80s, told Al Jazeera. “I feel he understands me 200 percent.”

Raju describes the bond in the same vein. “Right now, he is family to me,” he said. The couple, he said, see him as “their proxy child, and much more than a service companion”.

The bond has deepened over the past months. When Budhiraja was admitted for surgery, Raju kept track of the doctors and the medicines. He would even call to check on them after his shift had ended.

Growing industry

Raju’s boss Gaurav Mittal says many clients actually come to treat their companions “like their own grandchildren”.

He charges 450 rupees ($5) an hour for 10 hours of service in a month, or 400 rupees ($4.5) per hour if it is 25 hours. Like a mobile phone recharge, unused hours are rolled over to the next month.

In a country with an average per capita income of about 220,000 rupees ($2,750) a year, Mittal’s service caters to a small minority of urban, financially secure families.

Mittal said the idea for his company came from home. After his father died four years ago, his mother had to leave their hometown and move in with him. She was sociable and had money to spend, but depended on family members to go anywhere.

“The world is not designed keeping the senior citizens as the central pillar,” Mittal said.

The idea for such startups, however, is not entirely new.

A 2017 report counted at least five startups offering young companions to seniors. In 2022, the late Ratan Tata of the Tata Group promoted a Mumbai-based startup whose tagline says: “Everything Grandkids Do!”

The companions who work for these companies undergo police verification before they start working for a senior person. Before working alone, they often shadow a senior staff member on home visits.

Most companions are trained in psychology, social work or hospitality.

Vinay Kumar works as a companion for a firm based in the southern city of Hyderabad.

“We are not just taskmasters, but we develop a relationship with our clients. We support them and spend quality time with them so that they don’t miss their close ones,” he told Al Jazeera. “They may still do, but we try.”

Lonely seniors

The 2023 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report projects that older Indians will outnumber the country’s children by 2046. And many of these seniors are lonely.

In 2022, India conducted the Longitudinal Ageing Study, a national survey of more than 72,000 people. It found that 20.5 percent of middle-aged and older adults reported moderate loneliness, while 13.3 percent categorised their loneliness as severe.

Among people over 60 who lived alone, more than a third (37 percent) reported feeling lonely, the study found.

Globally, a study commissioned by the World Health Organization in 2025 found that loneliness affects one in six people and is linked to about 871,000 deaths a year.

Santosh Abraham, CEO of a Bengaluru-based startup founded in 2015, says while the children of elderly people are worried about medical emergencies or market errands, their parents mostly had a different concern.

“I am lonely, I don’t have anyone to talk to,” Abraham recalled one of his clients as saying. “I have done so much for my family and society; there is no recognition for it.”

Abraham said the most common request he gets is one that “nobody says out loud”.

“A senior calls us claiming to feel unwell. A care manager arrives, finds nothing wrong, and is then asked to sit and talk for an hour,” he said. “They just want company.”

Kumar said companions like him have to “understand their pain”.

“Most of the seniors who are living alone are very lonely. They want someone to play cards or indoor games with. Someone wants to go to a movie, or a temple, or parks, or attend local programmes,” he said.

Abraham said some seniors find a stranger easier to confide in. “With a companion, there is no baggage,” he told Al Jazeera.

For the young people doing the work, the line between their job and a relationship blurs quickly.

Raju says the visits to the Budhirajas are harder than office work. “Forming an emotional connection is never easy and is different each and every time,” he said.

Kumar, in Hyderabad, agrees. He said his clients often tell him about health problems that they hide from their children living in another city or abroad so as not to worry them.

He recalled a client who went from shutting the door on his face because he did not know English or Hindi to paying for his driving lessons and introducing him to people as his “god-gifted son”. When the man died in 2023, his son asked Kumar to perform the final rites alongside him.

Kumar once even cut short his 12-day marriage leave because one of his clients kept calling, asking him to come. “I genuinely feel these seniors are my own parents and grandparents,” he said.

‘Older person feels seen, heard, safe’

Others are more cautious about what the job demands.

Prashanth Reddy, founder of the Hyderabad-based company that Kumar works for, said companions must understand boundaries.

“Companions are there to provide support, not to replace doctors or mental health professionals,” he said.

Abraham agreed. He said he underlines one golden rule during his training sessions with aspiring companions: “Talk less and listen more.”

The children of such elderly people who buy the services of these companies say paying takes out the awkwardness of asking neighbours or relatives for help.

“When you pay for a service, you don’t have to feel like you’re asking someone for a favour,” says Vinnay K, a US-based software professional, who has been hiring a companion for his ageing mother for five years.

Shilpa Bandyopadhyay, assistant professor at Jindal Institute of Behavioural Sciences near New Delhi, told Al Jazeera that hiring a companion “should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that their families have failed”.

She said a growing demand for professional elderly care raises harder questions about a family-centric society like India’s.

“Do we recognise ‘companionship’ as a legitimate and continuing need of our older family members or see eldercare mainly as food, shelter, healthcare and physical help?” she asked.

She argued for “a more balanced ecosystem of ageing” that brings together families, community networks, accessible public spaces and affordable professional services, without romanticising traditional family structures or dismissing new ones.

“At the end of the day, the question isn’t who lives with an older person,” she said, but “rather whether the older person feels seen, heard, safe, valued, and meaningfully connected”.

Back in Gurugram, Budhiraja is asked how he would feel if Raju did not show up for work tomorrow.

“I will make sure he comes after finding out why he couldn’t come,” he said. “I need him. As you grow older, the needs are more.”

Ritu Pant always made sure that her merchant navy officer husband told her two things before departing on an assignment.

“I always noted the details and the name of his ship and his emergency contact details in case of a crisis,” says Ritu, who is based in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

That’s what she did on April 25, when her husband Ajay left Paradip Port in the state of Odisha on board the MT Smyrtos, a crude oil tanker. Her husband had been a sailor for 18 years, and spent six or seven months a year at sea. But growing threats to seamen – amid the wars in the Middle East and between Russia and Ukraine, and from pirates roaming the high seas – had increased her jitters in recent years.

Yet it was through a social media post that she learned in mid-June that the ship had been captured. Not by pirates, but by the British armed forces, because the MT Smyrtos is under Western sanctions for allegedly working as part of Russia’s shadow fleet, a network of vessels that help Moscow evade United States and European economic restrictions to continue to sell oil and gas, amid the war on Ukraine.

Now Ajay Pant faces charges of flouting United Kingdom sanctions against Russia by commandeering the ship. It’s the first known instance when a European nation has kept a ship captain under arrest on such grounds, and could set a worrying precedent, say lawyers and groups advocating for the rights of seafarers. “This is a unique case,” said Tony Patten, the UK representative at the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), an organisation that works for the rights of seafarers.

Other European countries have also taken over ships that they accuse of violating sanctions against Russia, but while they’ve kept the vessels, they have so far let the sailors go. In March this year, a captain of a suspected Russian shadow fleet was prosecuted in absentia by a French court. In another case from Finland, a court dismissed charges against the captain of a Russian oil tanker accused of damaging undersea cables in the Baltic Sea on account of lack of jurisdiction. In other cases, European nations have set commercial sailors free with fines.

By contrast, Ajay faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

The case has also underlined a growing tension between maritime traffic through international waters – the Smyrtos was not in British territorial waters when it was captured – and the enforcement by countries of sanctions that are not approved by the United Nations.

‘Situation of the sea was very bad’

The open seas have always been dangerous, but the risks have mounted as wars and piracy have turned ships and their crew into active targets for militaries and mercenaries alike.

At least 24 seafarers have been killed in the Strait of Hormuz since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran in February. More than 120 commercial ships and tankers have been attacked in this period in the waterway, which used to transport a fifth of the world’s energy supplies before the start of the war.

The death toll in the Black Sea is even grimmer: At least 40 sailors have been killed in more than 570 attacks on vessels there. Piracy off the coast of Somalia has resurged, too.

For Ritu Pant, all of that meant increased insecurity each time her husband went on a ship.“I was quite worried,” she said, describing her thoughts while Ajay was at sea. “When I talked to Ajay, I would tell him that you need to keep in touch always; you need to tell me that you’re fine and everything is safe around because the situation of the sea was very bad.”

But it was not uncommon for her to not hear from her husband for days, due to network disruptions at sea. So Ritu would track updates of her husband’s ship online, a practice that has become increasingly common among families of sailors at sea.

On June 14, the MT Smyrtos was chugging through the English Channel when the Royal Marines Commandos intercepted it, in what was a first-of-its-kind operation authorised by then British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

At the time, the ship was in international waters, outside the territorial jurisdiction of the UK. Yet Chinook, Merlin Mk4 and Wildcat helicopters from the Maritime Air Group; a Royal Air Force P-8A Poseidon Maritime Patrol Aircraft; a frigate; and a mine countermeasures ship participated in the military operation to take control of the vessel, according to the British Ministry of Defence.

The ship was carrying oil from Russia and was on track to pass through the Suez Canal on its way to India, its destination.

“This successful operation delivers yet another blow to Russia and reminds those fueling Putin’s war in Ukraine that we will not let them hide,” Starmer said in a post on X.

What followed was equally unprecedented; charges of allegedly breaching Russian sanctions were brought against Ajay, who has since been in detention in the UK. After an initial court hearing, his bail was denied.

‘Criminalisation of seafarers’

Enforcement of maritime sanctions brought against Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has been tenuous at best, which makes the Smyrtos case “very unique”, said David Hammond, a lawyer and founder of Human Rights At Sea, a nonprofit and UN-accredited organisation advocating for the rights of people living, working, transiting and operating at sea.

“It is unique in terms of the interception and the interdiction of a vessel that had been sanctioned, having passed through the English Channel as an international transit corridor. It’s, in my understanding, not happened before,” he said.

On the one hand, Hammond explained, the outcome of the case will determine how coastal states enforce sanctions against vessels. But, he said, it also underscores the risks of “criminalisation of seafarers”.

Hammond said Ajay Pant’s case was part of a broader pattern of “shipping crews finding themselves in a position where they are arrested for many crimes, such as trafficking or movement of drugs that they’re not even aware of having been put on board the ship”.

He cited the example of Ali Albokhari, a Finnish-Syrian chief mate on a cargo ship, who was detained by Turkish authorities in 2023 after 137kg (302lb) of cocaine was found on board.

Patten of the ITF echoed similar sentiments. “Our stance is that seafarers being penalised automatically when something like this happens isn’t fair. We would always uphold the right of the seafarer,” he said.

Hammond said Ajay’s case was especially without parallel. “In the case of the Smyrtos,  it could be argued that Captain Pant is being criminalised for simply doing his job,” he said, adding that the direction in which the British courts rule will set a new precedent for masters’ accountability over movement of sanctioned goods.

The case, Hammond added, “is a perfect storm in a global storm of impunity; who is accountable and who enforces accountability”.

“And the unintended consequences of which are yet to be seen,” he warned.

‘Horrible year at sea’

The case also raises wider concerns, Hammond said, about how shipping companies and the countries vessels traverse often treat seafarers. “Undeniably, seafarers are seen as disposable assets,” he said, “disposable because they can be easily replaced but concurrently, as assets for assuring continuous global movement of goods by sea.”

The killings in the Strait of Hormuz and the Black Sea have underscored that sense among sailors and their families – that the lives of those who keep the global economy moving are seen as disposable by those in power.

In a statement shared with Al Jazeera, the International Maritime Organization confirmed at least 66 sailors were killed in various conflicts this year, and hundreds of others injured. Many sailors are also still missing and feared to be dead. “It has been a horrible year for people at sea,” Patten said. “Problems have always existed, but conflicts and geopolitical change have certainly heightened them.”

Ajay Pant’s case also shines new light on a growing number of instances where navies have gone outside their territorial waters to seize tankers that they claim are violating their domestic sanctions regimes.

Since February, when the US and Israel launched their war on Iran, US forces have intercepted and captured several cargo ships in the Indian Ocean. These vessels were seized not just far from US territorial waters but also far from the theatre of their war, on accusations that they were helping Iran evade US sanctions.

The US and the UK argue that they are acting within the bounds of international law.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea permits a warship to visit a cargo ship to verify its flag where there are reasonable grounds to suspect the vessel is without nationality. The British Defence Ministry, in its statement after the seizure of the Smyrtos, said that if a vessel is determined to be stateless, the UK can exercise criminal and maritime enforcement powers under its domestic Policing and Crime Act.

The Smyrtos, like many ships that are accused of belonging to Russia’s “shadow fleet”, has frequently changed its flag. The ship had once previously been registered in The Gambia, and then adopted a Cameroon flag in December 2025. When it departed from a Russian port, it had a Cameroonian flag, but Lloyd’s List Intelligence reported that the ship had been removed from Cameroon’s register earlier, in June. It is owned by a Chinese company.

According to the British Defence Ministry, Russia sells about 75 percent of its oil using such shadow tankers.

But whether militaries have the right to enforce their domestic sanctions and laws in international waters against individuals and vessels that are not registered in their territory remains a contested question in international law.

The capture of such vessels raises “a much bigger issue” of “the freedom of navigation at sea”, said Hammond.

To Ajay’s family and those advocating for him, it also raises a more human question: If a cargo ship captain passing through international waters can be captured and tried by nations for allegedly violating their domestic laws, is any sailor safe?

Anchored with hope

That’s a question that Ritu has lived with in the past few months, forcing the former school principal into advocacy not just for her husband’s release, but for seafarer rights globally.

“Ajay’s case goes beyond just our family, and could be a landmark judgement for seafarers worldwide,” she said. “It raises the fundamental question of whether a master of a ship can be criminalised for decisions that are beyond his authority, knowledge or control.”

The journey has been a difficult one, she said.

“Ajay was the primary breadwinner of his family, and I have also been forced to give up my work to focus on this case,” the mother of an eight-year-old and a one-year-old said.

“He has also been a caregiver to his elderly parents,” she added, saying that for the first few days after the arrest, she kept the news from them, worried for their health. “I wouldn’t allow the daily newspaper in the house and stopped sending my older daughter to school, afraid that someone would say something hurtful to her.”

Eventually, Ritu informed the family and prepared them for the struggles ahead.

“The hardest part is having to do this across continents. We have only spoken to him over short calls, and he has had no personal visitors since I went to meet him in August,” she said. “I don’t want him to feel that he has been forgotten.”

But despite the hardships, she remains hopeful, as support has poured in from the global seafarers community. “When I started posting on social media, I received so many messages from families and wives of sailors,” she said. “Every seafarer’s family I’ve talked to relates to this. So many sailors are getting targeted right now in conflict at sea; they are being made scapegoats.”

Now, she’s preparing for Ajay’s upcoming trial. “I have to bring him back home,” she said. “For his family, but also because no seafarer should be treated in this way.”

Iran has exempted ships from India, China, Iraq and Qatar from its Strait of Hormuz restrictions, a senior Iranian lawmaker said on Tuesday.

“Ships from these countries pass freely, and the Americans do not intercept them either,” Amir Hayat Moqaddam, deputy chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, told the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA).

Iran effectively shut the strait early in the US-Israel war on Iran, which began on February 28, and the United States reimposed a naval blockade on Iran’s southern ports in July.

So why have these four countries been granted passage through the critical strait, and can their ships really sail freely while the blockade remains in place?

What does Iran get in return for letting ships pass?

It will receive medicine from India and political backing from China, according to Hayat Moqaddam. Iran already receives diplomatic support from Qatar, which is leading mediation efforts to end the US-Israel war on Iran.

Hayat Moqaddam said Tehran will also collect transit fees from Indian and Chinese ships, while Qatari vessels pass free. He did not say whether Iraqi ships will pay a toll.

“Whatever the lawmaker says is the rationale – the big question is if it works and, if yes, to what extent?” Rouzbeh Parsi, an Iran analyst and affiliated researcher at Lund University’s Department of History and Human Rights Studies, told Al Jazeera.

“Iran has been under sanctions for a very long time, so bartering and quid pro quos in trade are nothing new,” he said. The difference now, he added, is that “it’s about poking holes in an embargo and getting crucial goods/services in and out”.

Nader Hashemi, an associate professor of Middle East politics at Georgetown University, said that “most likely Iran is charging a transit fee or a percentage of the cargo value to allow those ships to go through without being harassed”.

“It’s a clever move by Tehran for several reasons,” Wolfgang Pusztai, a security and defence analyst and Austria’s former defence attache to Libya, told Al Jazeera.

“If successful, this move will generate significant revenue for Iran, as China is by far the largest purchaser of Iranian crude oil, buying nearly 90 percent of Iran’s total oil exports,” he said.

By including Qatar, with its many liquefied natural gas (LNG) buyers, and India, Iran is also “trying to undermine acceptance” of Washington’s strategy in the conflict, especially as it charges Qatar no tolls, he added.

Why does it matter to these four countries?

All four are highly dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for exports.

Of the 10.23 million barrels a day of Gulf crude that passed through the strait in October, about 42 percent went to China and 13 percent to India, Muyu Xu, a senior crude oil analyst at the analytics firm Kpler, told Al Jazeera.

“China is the country most able to cross US interests. The question is whether Beijing considers it worth the potential political cost,” Parsi said.

Asia is particularly reliant on Gulf oil and gas usually shipped out via Hormuz. Countries there have much to offer in return for allowing ships to pass.

“For India, the shutdown of oil from the Gulf has been a great loss – and it is a big producer of the pharmaceuticals that Iran cannot manufacture itself,” he said.

Qatar, which is mediating between Washington and Tehran, shipped no LNG through the strait in August, but managed 1.8 million tonnes in October, Xu said.

Its crude transits fell over the same period, from 517,000 barrels a day to 193,000, while Iraq’s rose from 1.69 million to 2.65 million.

Kpler has been unable to trace the origin of up to two million barrels a day of Middle Eastern crude, so both countries’ flows may be higher, Xu said.

“India and Qatar have closer relationships with DC they need to maintain – while both of them also feel let down by Trump,” Parsi said, adding, “For Qatar, maintaining a relationship with Iran is also vital since it’s an unavoidable neighbour.”

“So for all of them, there are upsides for these exemptions from Iranian restrictions but also political dangers,” he said.

Is this announcement new?

Not entirely.

Iran began letting some vessels from countries it considers friendly pass within weeks of the war starting. And in April, its military command said “brotherly” Iraq was exempt.

With the Iraqi exemption, Iran “probably intends to support the economic recovery” of its western neighbour, a fellow Shia-majority country, Pusztai said.

Will ships be able to get past the US blockade?

That depends on Washington.

US Central Command (CENTCOM) has said the blockade applies to “all vessels of all nations entering or leaving coastal areas or ports in Iran”, while vessels avoiding Iranian ports are not affected.

It has also said humanitarian shipments, including “food and medical supplies essential for the survival of the civilian populations”, can pass after inspection.

But Hayat Moqaddam did not appear to limit the exemptions to ships trading with other Gulf states, Pusztai noted. “If this is really the case, this would also have a significant impact on the other Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia,” he said.

“This could make the continuation of the American naval blockade more difficult and less effective, assuming Washington accepts this Iranian move,” he said. The main change, he added, is that the exemption “would also cover Chinese/Indian ships from/to Iran”, if the US accepts it.

It is also unclear whether “ships of these countries” means the flag a vessel flies, its owner, its operator or some other link, Pusztai said.

Ending the blockade is one of Tehran’s demands before it will commit to broader peace talks with the US, which will include discussions about Iran’s nuclear programme. Qatar-mediated talks currently centre on an Iranian proposal to reopen the strait if the US meets seven conditions, including this and lifting sanctions.

“It seems to be that Iran tries to separate the questions of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz and oil exports from the nuclear question,” Pusztai said, adding, “The American reaction will show if this is successful.”

Will this make a difference to oil markets?

Not much, for now.

“I think they make only limited difference at present,” Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG Group, told Al Jazeera.

“Markets are back to pricing in a peace deal, but if conflict flares up at full tilt, then Iranian commanders may not have time to distinguish their targets,” he said, adding: “At present, the focus remains squarely on the prospects of a broader deal.”

An exemption has not guaranteed safety. On October 30, the Qatari LNG carrier Al Mayeda was struck by “unidentified objects” in the Gulf, said its owner, Qatar Gas Transport Company.

More than 120 commercial ships have been hit in the region since the war began, with October being the worst month, according to data from the International Maritime Organization and United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations.

Bengaluru, India — India lifted nearly 500 million out of poverty between 2011 and 2023, with extreme poverty dropping from 27.1 percent to 2.6 percent in the world’s most populous nation during the same period, according to a new report by the World Bank.

The only other parallel in poverty reduction on this scale is China, which lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty — though that was over a period of 40 years.

Yet despite the substantial fall in poverty in India — home to 1.4 billion people — the income and wealth inequality gap has widened significantly since it opened up its economy in the early 1990s.

According to the 2026 World Inequality Report, inequality in India remains among the highest in the world.

We take a look at how India managed to almost eradicate extreme poverty, and at the contrast between that accomplishment and the deep economic inequality that remains in the world’s most populous nation:

What does the World Bank data say?

Based on an extreme poverty threshold of $3 a day, the World Bank said extreme poverty in India declined from 27.1 percent to 2.6 percent between 2011 and 2023.

Extreme poverty is defined as the minimum amount of money needed to afford basic essentials such as food, water, shelter and clothing.

Estimating poverty metrics based on three official household surveys, the Bank also said that an estimated 496 million people have been lifted out of poverty as the share of India’s population living below the lower middle-income poverty threshold of $4.20 a day fell from 57.7 percent to 16.1 percent.

The authors of the report, led by World Bank’s South Asia poverty economist Ayago Wambile, wrote that poverty in India is “projected to continue declining, albeit more gradually with the poverty rate at the $4.20/day line expected to fall from 14.2 percent in 2026 to 12.1 percent by 2028.”

“This progress was mainly driven by strong consumption growth, rising employment, especially among women, and expanded social transfers, including food subsidies,” they added.

How significant is India’s poverty reduction?

India lifting nearly 500 million out of poverty in 12 years has been lauded as “remarkable progress” by the World Bank. It added that the downward trend represents “one of the fastest poverty declines in the world.”

To determine India’s poverty rates, the World Bank used Household Consumption Expenditure Surveys (HCES) which were conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), an Indian government body.

A 2022 report, jointly produced by the World Bank and the Chinese Finance Ministry, said that China had lifted 800 million people out of poverty, but it took 40 years to achieve.

Last month, the World Bank also raised its economic growth forecast for India to 7.1 percent.

In a post on Instagram on Sunday, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded the country’s progress in tackling poverty. “A historic fall in poverty. A generational rise in opportunity,” he said.

Last November, the southern state of Kerala, which has been ruled either by the centrist Congress party or a coalition of communist parties since independence, became the first in the country to officially declare itself free from extreme poverty. Kerala has the best education and health statistics of major Indian states.

Santosh Mehrotra, a development economist formerly in India’s planning commission, and currently a visiting professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, noted that India is the only low-middle-income country among G20 nations, which are otherwise upper-middle- or high-income nations.

“The absolute number of the poor in our country is still the highest in the world for sheer size of population. So therefore, if we are going to genuinely reduce the incidence of poverty and more importantly, the absolute number of the poor, then it makes a huge difference globally,” he told Al Jazeera.

Coming from the World Bank, the credibility of the analysis that has concluded India’s success in reducing poverty so majorly is also above question, said Surjit Bhalla, economist an a former executive director at the International Monetary Fund. Any data that comes from the World Bank, he said, is the “gold standard”.

He said the institution carries out a poverty analysis for every country using a per capita consumption level that is normalised globally by invoking purchasing power parity.

How did India dramatically cut poverty?

There are no easy answers.

But economists point to a series of factors and programmes that might have contributed to India’s success in pulling record numbers of people out of poverty.

Overall, poverty in India has, however, been declining since the country opened its economy in the early 1990s, when the Congress party was in power, setting the stage for more than three decades of fast economic growth. Successive governments have launched, continued or reworked a series of social welfare schemes that economists say have helped combat poverty.

Prime Minister Modi’s predecessor Manmohan Singh, for example, launched an employment scheme that guaranteed rural jobs for a minimum of 100 days per year.

Since coming to power in 2014, Modi has launched several other welfare schemes, including direct cash transfers, free rations and housing, to tackle poverty. While the Modi government has significantly diluted the rural job guarantee scheme that Singh had launched, the current administration now provides free food grains to about 800 million Indians.

Under Modi, the government has also significantly expanded the construction of toilets, especially in rural India, where open defecation has historically been common in many villages. Access to piped drinking water has risen from 17 percent of rural homes in August 2019 to more than 80 percent, according to government statistics.

“The reduced sickness from accessing safe water may have helped families earn more income,” economists Surjit Bhalla and Karan Bhasin wrote in a research paper on India’s poverty alleviation efforts for the Brookings Institution in March 2024.

Before the latest World Bank report, Bhalla — a former executive director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — and Bhasin had used Indian consumption data in early 2025 to also conclude that the country was making major gains in ending extreme poverty.

Why some economists are concerned

Despite the decline in poverty, Bhalla and Bhasin pointed in their 2025 paper that free food grains supplied by the Indian government to 800 million people only fulfilled their calorific needs. “More balanced food subsidies that are better targeted to the genuine poor will improve nutritional outcomes and would represent a better approach to food insecurity,” they wrote.

It is also unclear whether continuing to provide free food supplies indefinitely to more than half of the country’s population is sustainable for the government — and whether that programme points to deep economic distress mitigated only by state assistance.

Some economists, like Mehrotra, question why the Indian government no longer determines its own poverty level and its own estimates of the numbers of those below it.

Mehrotra said that since 2014 — when Modi came to power — the Indian government has stopped calculating its own poverty levels, instead relying entirely on World Bank estimates.

“We are a strange country in having adopted an international organisation’s poverty line as our own,” he said.

For a country as large, diverse and complex as India, he argued, a standard set by an international agency alone is not enough to capture shifting economic and consumer patterns. “For example, 10 years back everyone didn’t have phones; today even in rural areas people do. So consumption baskets [used to determine price indices and poverty levels] change over time and hence India should have done its own poverty line,” Mehrotra said.

But Bhalla pushed back against criticism of India’s use of World Bank data.

“The methodology that the World Bank uses and the estimates it comes up with are vetted by every country before the final data is published,” he told Al Jazeera. “So in this case India’s poverty analysis has been gone through by Indian scholars and the government of India. So there is no ideological basis for questioning this data.”

Jayati Ghosh, an economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, however said that India’s healthcare and nutrition indices also remained major causes for concern. The country spends just over 1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on public healthcare, ranking far behind global peers in per capita health investment and leaving public hospitals chronically underfunded and overburdened. Citizens also end up bearing the brunt of total health expenditures, a financial burden that pushes millions of Indians into poverty or debt every year.

Ghosh pointed out that real wages have stagnated in India. According to the World Bank report, while poverty has declined in India, wage disparities remain. “Median earnings among the top 10 percent of workers were about 13 times those of the bottom 10 percent in 2023,” the report said.

“These are not signs of a dynamic economy with falling poverty,” Ghosh said.

Nitin Kumar Bharti, a lecturer at the University of Western Australia, said that the World Bank’s report is encouraging. But he added that the drop in extreme poverty should not be seen as a mission accomplished, as “233 million people still live below” the $4.20 per day poverty line.

Bharti, who co-authored a study by the World Inequality Lab (WIL) on India’s income and wealth disparities published in 2024, also pointed to uneven growth within the country as a major challenge.

“Even if extreme poverty has declined, the extent of improvement in people’s overall wellbeing remains an important question,” he said.

Why is income inequality growing in India?

Bharti said that inequality is growing because gains from economic growth are distributed unevenly, with those at the top capturing a growing share of national income.

According to the 2026 World Inequality Report, India is among the world’s most unequal countries, with the top 10 percent of earners capturing about 58 percent of national income, while the bottom 50 percent receives only 15 percent.

“This is reinforced by longstanding structural inequalities — the historical caste system, unequal ownership of assets, and decades of inadequate attention to primary education have limited opportunities for disadvantaged groups,” he said.

“Insufficient public investment in quality education and healthcare — both important equalisers — means that family resources continue to shape access to skills, good jobs and economic security.”

Growing income inequality and a lack of job opportunities have triggered discontent among India’s youth, who have staged a series of nationwide protests in recent months.

According to government data released earlier this year, youth unemployment in the country stood at 13.8 percent in April 2025 and rose to 15.2 percent in March 2026.

The State of Working India 2026 report, from the Bengaluru-based Azim Premji University, noted that nearly 40 percent of young graduates aged 15–25 and roughly 20 percent of those aged 25–29 are unemployed. Among those who have a diploma or postgraduate degrees, the unemployment rate has climbed to 29.4 percent.

Does inequality matter if poverty is falling?

Yes, say economists.

“One reason is that the distribution of growth influences how effectively growth improves ordinary households’ lives. For a given level of average income, a more equal distribution generally leaves fewer people below a poverty line,” Bharti said.

“A second concern is inequality of opportunity. With rising inequality, families differ enormously in their ability to pay for education, healthcare, housing, capital to start a business or searching for a better job,” he added.

“A third concern is the concentration of economic and political influence. Large concentrations of wealth can create opportunities for a small group to shape policies and institutions in their favour.”

How can India tackle poverty and income inequality at the same time?

Dipa Sinha, a development economist at Azim Premji University, said that in order to tackle poverty and widespread inequality, India would need to prioritise some redistribution of wealth.

“India talks about poverty eradication only. But government policies need to implement a more progressive taxation policy that actually tackles inequality head-on,” she said.

“The second thing I think is very important is that the government should begin investing in universal public services like health and education. This can reduce both poverty and inequality,” she added.

Bharti said that one strong lesson for India is that sustained poverty reduction requires several policies working together.

He said China offers important lessons in economic transformation and rural income growth, pointing to its success in improving agricultural productivity, accelerating industrialisation, facilitating rural-to-urban migration, and investing heavily in both physical and human capital.

“In contrast, India’s current policy focus is more heavily tilted towards physical infrastructure, often addressing the needs of the top 10 percent rather than the bottom 90 percent,” Bharti said.

“Roads, transport, and basic infrastructure matter because they connect people to economic opportunities. But equally important are good government schools and hospitals that enable people to benefit from these opportunities.”

Bharti suggested that India’s government should pursue poverty reduction and broader economic inclusion together.

“Progressive taxation can help finance these investments while ensuring that the costs are distributed according to the ability to pay,” he added.

Tens of thousands of volunteers have taken part in building 108 Buddhist stupas in Bhutan’s new “mindfulness” city, as the Himalayan kingdom embarks on an ambitious project to boost economic growth.

The 15-metre-tall (50ft) stupas, sacred Buddhist monuments found across the Himalayas, were installed on Sunday along 12km (7.5 miles) of riverbank near the Indian border, at the site of the future Gelephu Mindfulness City.

More than 40,000 volunteers participated in building the structures as “a physical form of prayer made permanent in stone and earth”, after starting work after midnight, officials said. The number 108 is sacred in Buddhism, widely practised in Bhutan.

About 200,000 people attended the ceremony, or nearly a fourth of the population, officials told the AFP news agency.

“I was worried that raising 108 stupas in a single day might not succeed,” Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck said in a speech at the ceremony.

“But everything went successfully, and for that, I am truly grateful.”

Bhutanese leaders hope that Gelephu Mindfulness City, conceived by the king and designed by Danish architects, will boost the country’s economy and persuade more young people to stay, attracting investment in sustainable business, green technology, education, tourism and financial services.

Bhutan is facing massive economic challenges, from rising unemployment and falling birth rates to the mass migration of skilled workers.

The city, currently a small town with a population of about 10,000, is in southern Bhutan, along the border with India, about 240km (150 miles) south of Thimphu, the nation’s capital.

The king established the special zone by royal charter in 2024, saying its purpose was to “create a vibrant economic hub”.

The landlocked Himalayan nation, with a population of just under 800,000 and wedged between China and India, is known for its policy of prioritising “Gross National Happiness” alongside economic growth.

“This occasion will be recorded in our history for generations to come,” said Nima Gyeltshen, 65, head of the Organisation for Youth Empowerment, which helps young Bhutanese find work.

Cryptocurrency ambitions

Analysts have questioned whether Bhutan can attract sufficient investment to realise its vision for the new city.

But Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, head of the ports-to-power conglomerate, joined the project as a founding member in January.

The site is set to be connected to India’s rail network in neighbouring Assam, with an international airport slated to open in 2029.

The project is also linked to Bhutan’s cryptocurrency ambitions, with the kingdom mining Bitcoin using surplus hydropower and pledging to use digital assets to support the city’s development.

Bishnu Maya Moktang, a resident who attended Sunday’s ceremony, said she was excited about the upcoming mindfulness city.

“I hope to live long enough to see it,” Moktang, 56, told AFP.

“My parents died young, and they would never see the city. I feel fortunate.”

Thousands have marched through New Delhi demanding the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner over changes to voter lists that opposition parties say favour Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party.

Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress led Sunday’s protest, the latest in more than a month of demonstrations accusing Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of overseeing a biased revision of electoral rolls.

Opposition leaders say the removal of more than 130 million names disproportionately affected Muslims and other minorities, who are less likely to back Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The Election Commission has denied favouring any party and says voters whose names were wrongly deleted can re-register.

The BJP has accused the opposition of undermining democracy by challenging legitimate procedures.

India’s next general election is scheduled for 2029.

Hundreds of police, some carrying batons and shields, are deployed around the rally site.

Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in India’s capital, New Delhi, to demand the resignation of the election chief over changes to voter lists that opposition parties say favour Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party.

Indian National Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi led Sunday’s demonstration, the latest in more than a month of protests challenging the revision of electoral rolls and the conduct of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

Opposition parties alleged the exercise, which removed more than 130 million names from voter lists, disproportionately affected Muslims and other minorities considered unlikely to support Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The Election Commission has denied favouring any party and said voters whose names were wrongly removed may register again.

The BJP has accused opposition parties of undermining democracy by challenging legitimate electoral procedures. India’s next general election is due in 2029.

Officials ramped up security measures and announced traffic diversions before demonstrators marched from central New Delhi towards the historic Ramlila Maidan ground.

Hundreds of police, some carrying batons and shields, were deployed around the rally site alongside riot-control vehicles. Demonstrators waved Indian and party flags as opposition leaders travelled in an open-top jeep.

Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda dismissed the demonstration as a “carefully orchestrated drama”.

“What is unfolding today at Ramlila Maidan is not an act of respect for democracy,” he told the ANI news agency. “It is a calculated conspiracy to plunge the nation into anarchy, all in the name of democracy.”

Opposition parties, student organisations and the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party have staged near-daily demonstrations since late September, calling for Kumar to step down.

The protests began after Kumar’s two deputies raised concerns about revisions to voter lists, registration procedures and digital systems.

Analysts described the demonstrations and growing support for the opposition as Modi’s most serious political crisis since he took office in 2014.

Authorities evacuate 180,000 people as severe storm causes flooding, disrupting flights and train schedules.

Cyclone Arnab has made landfall on India’s east coast, causing widespread damage and bringing heavy rainfall and wind speeds of up to 135kph (84mph).

Trees fell onto highways and power supplies were disrupted after Arnab crossed into Andhra Pradesh early on Wednesday morning.

At least 180,000 people were evacuated from Andhra Pradesh and Odisha states a day earlier. Flights and train services were cancelled, and some schools were forced to close.

Authorities say more than 12 million people live in the cyclone’s expected path.

No casualties have been reported so far.

One resident of Kakinada district in Andhra Pradesh, which lies in the storm’s path, said: “No one knew whose house the water would rush into next or whose home would be submerged.”

India’s Meteorological Department forecast a storm surge of up to 1.5m above the tide level, warning that it was likely to submerge low-lying areas in Andhra Pradesh.

‘Very severe cyclonic storm’

Arnab made landfall as a “very severe cyclonic storm” – the third-highest category on its scale, before being downgraded to “severe” after moving further inland.

In neighbouring Nepal, authorities warned tourists on Tuesday not to enter high-altitude areas over fears Arnab could trigger torrential downpours, snowstorms and avalanches from Thursday through to Saturday.

Reuters news agency reported that authorities suspended issuing trekking permits for three days.

This is peak hiking season in Nepal, with about 750 hikers receiving permits daily.

Nepal is still recovering from a catastrophic glacial mountain collapse in August, which killed more than 1,400 people and left at least 5,000 missing.

Sri Lanka has also closed schools, with its Department of Meteorology warning the storm could trigger flash floods and landslides.

The opening pair put on 133-run partnership as India chased down 199 to wrap up the five-match T20I series.

An aggressive partnership between Abhishek Sharma and Vaibhav Sooryavanshi propelled India to a six-wicket win and a series victory over New Zealand in Wellington.

India sewed up the five-match Twenty20 International (T20I) series on Tuesday with two games to spare, chasing down New Zealand’s total of 198 in just 13.2 overs, with Abhishek blasting 113 and Sooryavanshi 45.

The opening pair’s 133-run partnership in just 7.1 overs obliterated the New Zealand bowling attack with one of the most destructive partnerships in T20I history.

Jacob Duffy’s first over went for 26 runs, and the openers never let up.

Abhishek hit nine fours and 11 sixes in his 38-ball knock, receiving a standing ovation when he eventually fell to the bowling of Kyle Jamieson.

By that stage, India had reached 178-2 in just 10 overs.

“The key was pretty simple: Vaibhav and I enjoyed our time,” Abhishek said of their partnership.

“When we were fielding, we saw there was some extra bounce. Vaibhav started off well, and we took the momentum from there.”

Sooryavanshi was promoted to open alongside Abhishek after batting at number three in the second T20I, hitting four fours and four sixes in his 19-ball innings.

“Getting 100 in five overs – I have not seen that before at the international level,” India captain Shreyas Iyer said.

“Credit where it is due, the way they played was exceptional.”

India won the toss for the third time in three matches and again elected to bowl.

Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Arshdeep Singh extracted prodigious seam from the pitch, beating the outside edge of New Zealand openers Tim Seifert and Finn Allen.

Seifert was removed top-edging Singh for two, before Daryl Mitchell joined Allen and combined for an 86-run partnership.

Mitchell was quick to assess the conditions and moved around the crease to counteract the seam movement.

He seized on any short deliveries with powerful strikes to the short square boundaries, hitting five fours and five sixes on his way to 89 from 52 balls.

Allen made 40 from 25 balls before departing, and Mitchell found another powerful partner in Bevon Jacobs, who hit an unbeaten 39 from 23 deliveries.

The fourth T20I is at Auckland’s Eden Park on Friday.

The cyclone is due to make landfall on Wednesday, with more than 12 million people living along its projected path.

India is evacuating tens of thousands of people from its eastern coast as a strengthening Cyclone Arnab bears down on its coastal states.

The cyclone has intensified since Monday and is expected to make landfall by Wednesday morning.

The India Meteorological Department has issued a warning for the coastal states of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, saying the “very severe” cyclonic storm was centred only 260km (160 miles) southeast of the port city of Visakhapatnam, the most populous in Andhra Pradesh.

The department expects Arnab to turn northwest and cross the coast by 11:30am local time (06:00 GMT) on Wednesday, with sustained winds of 115-125km/h (71-78mph) and gusts of up to 140km/h (87mph).

Arnab formed over the Bay of Bengal, which is among the world’s main breeding grounds for tropical cyclones, frequently affecting India’s eastern coastal regions.

More than 12 million people live along the cyclone’s projected path, which runs inland and north across India, according to Andhra Pradesh’s disaster management authority.

Nearly 50,000 people had been moved to shelters from vulnerable areas of the state by Monday night, out of an estimated 400,000 in need of evacuation, the authority’s managing director, Prakhar Jain, told the Reuters news agency.

“Evacuation is continuing,” Jain said.

Railway authorities in the region said on social media that at least 12 trains had been cancelled in eastern India and services on 53 routes along the southern coast had been suspended for Tuesday and Wednesday.

In Odisha, authorities have announced plans to evacuate 48,000 people out of harm’s way, according to local newspaper The Hindu.

Authorities in neighbouring Nepal have advised tourists to stay away from high-altitude areas over concerns that Arnab could trigger heavy rain, snowstorms and avalanches in the Himalayas from Thursday night to Saturday.

The advisory comes after a Himalayan flash flood in August killed about 1,500 people in the country.