Dear Reader,

On 24 November, 2025, the Election Commission of India (ECI) told the Supreme Court that its deduplication software—once central to cleaning up the voter rolls—was “ineffective” and had been discontinued after 2023. The reversal is striking given that, in March 2023, the ECI’s own Manual on Electoral Rolls had mandated deploying the software in “campaign mode” for 100% voter verification ahead of the 2024 general elections.

In its November 2025 affidavit, the ECI said the software’s “strength and accuracy…were variable”, noting that many demographically similar entries were not flagged as duplicates. For the 2025 nationwide Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which began in Bihar, the Commission instead relied on a manual process—asking voters to self-declare they held only one Voter ID, and tasking local officials with verification.

This method has obvious limitations. Booth-level officers lack access to the full national database, making it impossible to detect duplicates across constituencies, districts or states—especially among migrants. Consequently, despite claims of a “purified” roll, earlier investigations by The Reporters’ Collective found that Bihar’s final list still appeared to contain roughly 14.35 lakh suspected duplicates, including many with exact demographic matches; some individuals still had two or more valid Voter IDs.

The story highlights that the ECI has released no public evidence—no audits, error-rate analyses or independent assessments—to justify scrapping the software. Abandoning computerised deduplication for self-declarations and manual checks leaves large gaps for persistent fraud, undermining the stated goals of the SIR and raising serious questions about the integrity of voter rolls nationwide.

On 18 November, 2025, the Supreme Court of India, in CREDAI v Vanashakti, reversed its own May 2025 judgment in Vanashakti v Union of India. The Court upheld two executive memoranda issued in 2017 and 2021 that allow “ex-post-facto” environmental clearances—letting projects obtain approval even after they have begun or expanded, despite the mandatory requirement of prior approval under the 2006 EIA Notification.

Earlier, in May 2025 a Supreme Court ruling had struck down these memoranda, holding that retrospective clearances were “alien” to Indian environmental law and inconsistent with established precedents in Common Cause (2017), Alembic Pharmaceuticals (2020), and Electrosteel Limited (2023).

In its latest order, the Court reasoned that the May 2025 judgment had not “correctly followed” these precedents because it overlooked portions relating to case outcomes. Supreme Court Observer argues that by validating retrospective clearances, the Court dilutes the robust procedural safeguards built into the EIA framework—such as public hearings, impact assessments, and multi-stage scrutiny—reducing them to near-optional steps and substituting them with monetary penalties.

Critics contend that this move weakens the preventive foundation of India’s environmental jurisprudence and undermines the constitutional right to a clean environment under Article 21 by allowing violations to be regularised after the fact rather than prevented through rigorous prior assessment.

In Kashmir, this year’s monsoon did not merely erode mountainsides, it swept away an entire season’s livelihood. In late August, record-breaking rainfall triggered landslides that shut the Jammu–Srinagar highway, NH-44, for nearly three weeks, leaving hundreds of migrant labourers—who power Kashmir’s apple and paddy harvests—stranded without work or wages.

The closure of the only all-weather road linking the Kashmir Valley to the rest of India has had a cascading impact on migrant workers who are critical to the region's agriculture. The harvest season, which ends just before winter, is crucial for transporting apples grown in the region to larger markets and processing hubs across the country. Paddy, another essential crop, is harvested simultaneously, making this period vital for both farmers and labourers. Workers from as far as UP and Bihar travel to Kashmir to harvest these crops, relying on the highway to reach their employment hubs. With NH-44 blocked, many had no choice but to live in their trucks or makeshift shelters while their livelihoods dwindled. As The Migration Story reports, by the time the highway fully reopened in October, much of the harvest had already been lost, highlighting the fragile dependency of the region’s economy on a single critical road.

In 1988, the Bargi Diversion Project—approved 17 years earlier as an irrigation initiative—was built in Madhya Pradesh, displacing people from 162 villages across three districts and promising irrigation for 437,000 hectares, including areas in Rewa and Satna. Decades later, water from the dam primarily supplies a thermal power plant and is earmarked for a pumped-hydro storage and a nuclear power plant. Irrigation remains a low priority, with only 5.4% of the intended area receiving water. Many displaced once for the dam now face displacement again for the pumped storage project, while still lacking electricity or the promised irrigation.

Ground Report spoke with affected residents from Rewa, Satna, and Mandla to find that farmers still rely on borewells and rainfall, and those facing displacement are distraught. Documents reveal that permission for the Mandla pumped storage plant bypassed mandatory gram sabha consent in Adivasi-dominated areas, violating laws such as the Panchayat (Extension of Scheduled Areas) Act and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act.

For more such stories from the grantees this week, please read on.

Warmly,

Sunil Rajshekhar
IPSMF