Table of contents for 13 October 2025 in India Today

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A MINOR EPILOGUE, an act of formal closure. But a court order has drawn the curtains back on one of the most controversial chapters in Rajasthan politics in recent times: Sachin Pilot’s revolt of 2020, which had almost split the then Ashok Gehlot government. Tough conversations have resumed around the ‘Pilot episode’. Innuendo and recrimination fill the air again; allegations and rebuttals are flying back and forth between various camps of the Congress, as well as between the ex-CM and top BJP leaders, the surround sound made more lurid by leaked audio clips and phone-tapping charges. ‘CASUAL CHATTER’ Months ago, the state Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) had filed a closure report before the trial court, saying it had found no evidence of bribery, horsetrading or conspiracy to…

GOLDEN AGES ARE USUALLY THINGS OF THE PAST. So it had long seemed for Bengal’s jute story. Once vivisected down the middle by Partition, the Indian side had of late been stalked by dwindling returns, farm distress, locked mills and layoffs. But after years, with nature and official nurture working in unusual concert, the state’s jute farmers are tasting a season of genuine profit. The decisive factor: in two steps through June-August, New Delhi imposed restrictions on imports from Bangladesh. The extra demand created thus has fortuitously coincided with a season that is seeing an uptick in local supply. Excess rainfall, which damaged crops elsewhere, worked as a blessing for jute—the crop thrives on abundant water. The result: not only better yields but finer quality fibre, fetching prices unseen in…

Q.In 1984, India seemed ahead in the semiconductor race, having set up the Semi-Conductor Laboratory in Mohali. But 40 years later, we seem to have missed the bus—we are importing 95 per cent of our chips. What went wrong? There is history behind that. It has been a period of missed opportunities, but I do not want to get into a political discussion on why. What is important, as our prime minister said, is that we should not be looking at the bus we missed, but must now become the drivers of this bus. And he has a very clear vision and laser-sharp focus on executing it. Q. How different is the Indian Semiconductor Mission launched by the Modi government from previous such initiatives? It is important to understand the…

As the twenty-first century blues spread their malaise, Gen Z (persons born between 1996 and 2010) is mounting a fightback. The descending steps into the abyss are well-delineated—a strenuous professional life leaving little time for other people, a compensatory immersion in social media to connect, yet the gradual drifting apart of friends, resulting in a creeping loneliness. Preeti Mehra, a 28-year-old management consultant, opted for a remedy. On a humid Thursday in Gurugram, she walked into a small Sector 29 café. The invite promised ‘dinner with strangers’, a curated supper seating you next to people you’ve never met—the antidote to late nights, early flights and Zoom fatigue. Friends had scattered—to jobs, marriages, childcare—and chats felt hollow. What Preeti wanted was laughter across a table and the warmth of a shared…

ADAKH, THE ICE-COLD DESERT WITH A MOONSCAPE, was one of the most placid places on the Indian map—till September 24, that is. That’s when arson and violence shattered its long calm, leaving four dead and dozens injured in its wake. If any other sign was needed to show how abnormal things were, Sonam Wangchuk—iconic innovator, Magsaysay awardee, climate activist—was in jail. Evidently, beneath Ladakh’s serene topsoil, there had been stirrings of a volcanic unrest. Its sudden eruption, if anything, exposes the fragility of New Delhi’s political experiment in this northern outpost. Since Ladakh’s separation from Jammu and Kashmir on August 5, 2019, and rebirth as a Union Territory, its demands have been getting louder: not only jobs, but full statehood, a legislature, inclusion under the Sixth Schedule (which provides for…

ATUMULTUOUS START. That’s what Karnataka’s latest attempt to map the socio-economic conditions of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) got off to on September 22. Depending on how the weather conditions develop, the question is whether it will elude the fate of its predecessor—the 2015 caste survey conducted during Siddaramaiah’s first term as CM, whose findings took ten years to see the light of day. Or will Karnataka be able and willing to produce something more enlightening than a long bureaucratic coma? The logistics of the door-to-door survey presently under way are already daunting: it aims to cover about 14.37 million households and 70 million citizens within a 16-day window, ending October 7. The report is slated to be out by December—if all goes well. More formidable than its demographic footprint is…

IN THE GOA OF THE MIND, there exists a surplus of all good things—and every frame of leisure is fringed by a coconut palm or two. From a cool glass of sol kadi to fish curry to beach shack pina coladas, the sweet tinge of coconut milk tempers everything. In reality, though, Goa’s state tree is struggling to cope with the rigours of playing everybody’s favourite seaside Eden. Coconuts, of all things, are in crisis. Goa needs an average of 100,000 coconuts every day but only around 40,000 are available locally. The rest—as much as 60 per cent—has to be imported from Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu et al. During the Ganesh festival in late August, when demand rose, the Goa State Horticulture Corporation imported 75,000 coconuts from Karnataka and sold…

1. DESIGN Process: Engineers create the chip’s circuit design using specialised Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software. Designs specify transistor layouts, logic gates and interconnects Difficulty: Requires extreme precision, advanced architecture planning and flawless nanoscale simulation—mistakes here ripple through the entire process 2. WAFER PREPARATION Process: Ultra-pure silicon is grown into cylindrical ingots, sliced into wafers and polished Difficulty: Demands flawless crystal purity and atomic smoothness to ensure defect-free chips Sand Silicon Silicon Ingot Silicon Wafer 3. FABRICATION (Front-end Processing) Photolithography: Circuit patterns are etched onto wafers using laser light, masks and photoresist Difficulty: Uses billion-dollar Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines to create features smaller than a virus Extreme Ultraviolet Mask Lens Photoresist Oxide film Wafer Etching: Unwanted material is chemically or physically removed to form the designed circuit patterns Difficulty: Requires selective…

The Karur rally stampede that took 41 lives has shaken up the Tamil superstar’s fledgling political career. How he navigates this crisis will determine his future in TN politics IN HIS 2020 NOVELLA VAAZHGA VAAZHGA, Sahitya Akademi-winning writer Imayam ends with a haunting image: the weary cadre, including women and children, stand for hours in the scorching sun, hungry and drained, waiting for the Great Leader. When she arrives, chaos erupts. People collapse under the crush of the crowd. In the end, all that remains is the exhausted chant “Vaazhga, vaazhga… (Long live, long live)” rising from the emptiness. Last week in Karur, that piece of fiction played out in real life: 41 fans of Tamil superhero-turned-neta Vijay, who had been waiting all day for a glimpse of the leader, were killed…

Durga Puja pandals in Bengal have had their share of jaw-droppers over the years, but this orange-maned foe could be the talking point this year. In Murshidabad’s Khagra Shamshan Ghat, amid the feasting and frantic pandal-hopping, visitors have been stumped by an unlikely tableau: Goddess Durga taking aim, not at Mahishasura, but a Trump doppelgänger. The Puja committee claims inspiration from the “great betrayal”—tariffs, visas, trade tantrums—and artist Asim Pal dutifully birthed ‘Trumpasura’. The satire and gore don’t stop there. A quick stroll to Sadhak Narendra Smriti Sangha unveils Durga unleashing unimaginable vengeance on the heads of our neighbouring countries—Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif and Bangladesh’s Muhammad Yunus. The theme ‘Dahan (immolation)’, organisers say gravely, is about “burning the enemies of the nation”. It seems this year’s pandals are all about slaying…

SINCE INITIATING THE BJP’S NORTHEASTERN EXPANSION NEARLY A DECADE AGO, Himanta Biswa Sarma has been the lord of all political tides in his precincts. That spell of dominance stands interrupted. On September 22, the Assam chief minister faced his first significant electoral rebuke at home. Or call it near-home, for the arena was the autonomous Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), not his primary turf. The Bodoland People’s Front (BPF) swept 28 out of 40 seats, many with huge margins. The BJP, which went solo, was down to a humiliating five. The ally it had built up and now abandoned, the United People’s Party Liberal (UPPL), managed only seven seats, nearly half of its 2020 tally. The outright majority for the BPF, under its 56-year-old chief Hagrama Mohilary, restores an ‘old normal’.…

UTTAR PRADESH is larger than countries like Britain and Uganda, and its vast sprawl is often scantily clad in the arteries that bring an even flow of things from elsewhere, material or otherwise. Add to that the centralised ways of our administration, and you have a distance between Lucknow and the local universe that’s far more than geographical. The Samajwadi Party has now come up with an innovation that may alter that with radical decentralisation—well, at least at the level of election campaigning. Shedding the broad strokes of statewide promises, the SP has promised what it calls “local manifestos”—hyper-specific documents tailored to the needs of each district. Mathura-Vrindavan, Hathras and Agra will be the first to get theirs, as party chief Akhilesh Yadav promised local partymen at a meeting in Lucknow. Soon,…

THE MODI GOVERNMENT’S `76,000 CRORE BET ON SELF-RELIANCE IN CHIP MANUFACTURING VIA PRIVATE SECTOR GAINS IMPETUS. CAN INDIA PULL OFF THIS HIGH-RISK STRATEGIC INITIATIVE? Bullock carts and bytes jostle together in the Sanand industrial belt on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. But don’t be misled by the rustic settings. Ever since Tata shifted its massive Nano factory almost overnight from Singur in West Bengal in 2008, the township has flourished as a manufacturing hub. Now with three of the world’s most sophisticated semiconductor chip factories being set up, Sanand is poised to become India’s newest Silicon lodestone. The shining example is the Murugappa Group’s semiconductor chip venture CG Semi whose compact factory complex seems to have sprouted up from the ground as rapidly as the verdant rice fields that surround it. Just…

On the afternoon of September 29, as families flocked to Patna’s teeming Durga puja pandals, poll strategistturned-neta Prashant Kishor offered a different sort of spectacle. Having called a press conference, he waved a dossier in front of reporters while rattling off a fresh set of allegations against some of the senior leaders in the ruling Janata Dal (United)-BJP government in Bihar. Kishor’s target was five senior figures: veteran JD(U) minister Ashok Choudhary, and deputy CM Samrat Choudhary, health minister Mangal Pandey, state unit chief Dilip Jaiswal and West Champaran MP Sanjay Jaiswal from the BJP. Each allegation, new and old, was accompanied by its own set of legal notices, threats of lawsuits and vows to publish more documents so that the disputes immediately became both legal contests and a media…