Editorial 1: Dubious Retreat – The NMC Withdraws its Own Teeth
Context
The National Medical Commission has denotified and withdrawn its 2023 Maintenance of Standards of Medical Education Regulations (MSMER), and with it the sharpest individual accountability instrument Indian medical education has ever had: fines of up to Rs 5 lakh on faculty members and administrators for submitting false information. The Hindu’s editorial of October 27 (‘Dubious retreat’) calls the move what it looks like – a regulatory relaxation dressed as simplification – and demands the NMC answer for the lacunae it leaves behind.
The MSMER was not an obscure rule. It was the framework designed to crack down on medical education’s oldest frauds – ‘ghost faculty’ who exist only on inspection day, ‘ghost patients’ hired to simulate clinical load, and infrastructure that materialises for assessment and evaporates after. Its withdrawal is defended by the NMC on the ground that the regulations created a parallel evaluation mechanism – undergraduate and postgraduate boards stepping on the toes of the Medical Assessment and Rating Board (MARB).
The editorial grants the overlap argument and then dismantles its sufficiency: if the NMC withdrew MSMER because its powers exist elsewhere, the public deserves to know whether those powers are actually exercised, and whether their outcomes are as publicly accessible as intended. On the evidence available, the answer is not reassuring – and that is why the withdrawal reads less like streamlining and more like retreat.
The stakes extend beyond the profession. India’s doctor-production pipeline feeds a health system that already runs short of qualified practitioners in rural and primary care; every seat filled through a gamed inspection is a graduate whose competence the system certified without verifying. Regulatory quality in medical education is therefore not a guild matter – it is the quiet determinant of whether the Ayushman Bharat era’s expanded access is matched by expanded competence.
Syllabus Mapping
GS Paper II: Statutory and regulatory bodies; health and education policy; governance and accountability. GS Paper IV: Institutional integrity, corruption. Essay: regulation in a welfare sector.
Multi-Dimensional Analysis
1. What was lost: individual accountability
- MSMER’s fines of up to Rs 5 lakh on individual faculty and administrators for false submissions were the only instrument that made dishonesty personally expensive; institutional penalties fall on colleges as entities, which treat them as a cost of business.
- The editorial notes that MARB retains the power to fine institutions up to Rs 1 crore under the 2023 Establishment of Medical Institutions, Assessment and Rating Regulations – but institutions can only be penalised, the editorial observes, which ‘risks creating a perverse incentive to accommodate rather than punish’.
- Individual liability is the fear that keeps administrators honest; removing it while seats expand rapidly is a deliberate choice about whose comfort regulation serves.
- The comparative record supports this: jurisdictions that cleaned up medical-education fraud – from the UK’s GMC processes to China’s recent medical-school audits – relied on personal consequences for false attestation, because institutional fines are absorbed while personal penalties are felt.
2. The transparency black hole
- A Central Information Commission proceeding revealed that the NMC stated in 2024 that MARB had neither formally assessed nor rated medical colleges, and that its standard forms need not be made public; a revised reply in October 2025 said the responding officer’s records did not include the corresponding reports.
- This is the editorial’s most damaging exhibit: the 2023 MARB regulations themselves require the Board to publish its latest annual assessment results – a statutory transparency duty apparently unmet.
- A regulator that does not assess, does not publish, and now does not penalise individuals has, functionally, vacated the field while retaining the signage.
- The RTI-route discovery of this failure is itself an indictment: transparency about assessment arrived not through the regulator’s own mandated disclosures but through an information-law detour – the least efficient way a democracy should learn that its medical colleges are unassessed.
3. Procedural incoherence left behind
- MSMER specified timelines to appeal penalties; the surviving MARB regulations carry a 15-day appeal deadline that could conflict with the 60-day period under the NMC Act – a drafting collision that invites litigation precisely where penal action should be swift.
- The 2023 Postgraduate Medical Education Regulations remain in force with their own provision to fine individual faculty at PG colleges – an arbitrary survival that underlines the withdrawal’s inconsistency: if individual fines are right for PG, why not for UG?
- The NMC’s justification – avoiding parallel evaluation – could have been met by harmonising the boards’ roles; wholesale withdrawal chose the option that minimised regulatory friction for colleges, not for the public.
4. The context: expansion without quality assurance
- India’s medical seats have expanded at historic pace – new government and private colleges every year – while the honesty of the inspection and assessment system has lagged; non-compliance, the editorial notes, is ‘not uncommon and seldom nipped in the bud’.
- Ghost faculty and ghost patients are not aberrations but market responses to a regulation-by-inspection model that colleges learned to game; MSMER was the first serious attempt to change the incentive structure.
- Withdrawing the instrument mid-expansion guarantees that the next cohort of colleges enters a weaker compliance regime than the last.
- Rural and aspirational-district colleges – the expansion’s stated priority – are precisely where inspection capacity is thinnest and where a weakened penalty structure will bite first; the geography of deregulation is never neutral.
5. The NMC’s institutional credibility
- The NMC replaced the discredited Medical Council of India in 2020 on the promise that a new architecture would cure regulatory capture; the MSMER withdrawal reopens the capture question.
- Regulators earn authority by being seen to inconvenience the regulated; a commission seen retreating from its own anti-fraud framework invites the inference the editorial’s title makes.
- The MCI’s discrediting was itself a saga of inspection corruption and judicial intervention; the NMC was designed to break that lineage, which is why any step backwards is read against the full history – the institution does not have the accumulated trust to spend on ambiguous withdrawals.
- The public-interest test is simple: patients and students cannot inspect colleges themselves; they delegate that entirely to the regulator, which is why the regulator’s transparency duties are not optional.
- International benchmarking raises the bar further: the World Federation for Medical Education recognition that the NMC secured was premised on standards being maintained, not merely adopted; retreats of this kind put that global standing – and Indian graduates’ mobility – at avoidable risk.
Way Forward
Restore individual liability in harmonised form: if MSMER’s mechanism overlapped with MARB’s, the correct response is a unified regulation that preserves personal fines for false submission, not their deletion. The harmonisation argument, taken seriously, points toward consolidation with teeth – not toward a toothless single framework.
Publish MARB’s assessment results as the 2023 regulations already require – immediately and retrospectively – so the claim that powers exist elsewhere is matched by evidence they are exercised. Compliance with an existing publication mandate should not require an editorial to prompt it.
Reconcile the appeal-timeline conflict between the MARB regulations and the NMC Act by amendment, removing the litigation excuse for delayed penalties.
Explain the withdrawal: the NMC owes a reasoned public order addressing why harmonisation was impossible and how the lacunae will be covered – silence is itself a regulatory failure. A one-paragraph denotification for a regulation of this significance is not administrative efficiency; it is avoidance.
Institutionalise surprise and continuous assessment – data-linked faculty attendance, Aadhaar-seeded verification, patient-load analytics – so inspection gaming is structurally harder, reducing dependence on any single regulation.
Publish the NMC’s own regulatory-impact assessment before any future withdrawal of standards, so deregulatory steps carry their evidence with them from the start.
Parliamentary standing committee oversight of the NMC’s regulatory record should become annual and public, converting the editorial’s questions into a standing accountability mechanism.
Conclusion
The Hindu is right to call this a dubious retreat. A regulator may consolidate overlapping powers, but it may not withdraw deterrence while the offences it targeted are alive and the seats it supervises are multiplying. The NMC’s answer must be demonstrated, not asserted: published assessments, harmonised individual liability, and an explanation that survives scrutiny. Until then, the withdrawal will be read as what it appears to be – the medical-education establishment regulating its regulator.
Practice Question
Q: ‘A regulator that surrenders its penalties has surrendered its purpose.’ Examine the NMC’s withdrawal of the MSMER in the light of medical-education regulation in India, and suggest a framework that combines simplification with accountability. (250 words)
Editorial 2: Nepal’s $21.6 Million – Climate Justice Gets a Receipt, and a Rebuke
Context
Nearly two months after devastating floods tore through Nepal, the UN climate convention’s Fund for Loss and Damage (FLD) has allocated $21.6 million to the Himalayan nation – the first time the Fund has earmarked a grant for a disaster-affected country. The Indian Express editorial of October 27 treats the grant as both milestone and indictment: a first step that also exposes how far the machinery of climate compensation is from the urgency it was built to serve.
The numbers frame the injustice the Fund exists to answer. Nepal accounts for barely 0.1 per cent of global emissions, yet sits on the frontline of Himalayan climate change: the ice-and-rock avalanche that triggered flash floods in the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river systems claimed more than 1,400 lives, swept away villages, and destroyed at least 10 per cent of the country’s hydropower capacity. Conservative estimates put recovery needs at $5 billion. Against that, $21.6 million is a receipt for an obligation, not its settlement.
The Fund’s genealogy explains both its promise and its paralysis. Vulnerable states first proposed an international insurance pool for sea-level rise in 1991, when the Alliance of Small Island States put it on the negotiating table; loss and damage then spent two decades as the demand rich countries would not hear. The Warsaw International Mechanism of 2013 gave the concept an institutional address without money or mandate, the Paris Agreement of 2015 recognised it in Article 8 while simultaneously shielding developed countries from liability language, and only at Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022 did the decades-long campaign by climate-vulnerable nations force the Fund into existence. Operationalisation followed a year later – and the first test of the operational Fund has now arrived in Kathmandu.
The editorial’s harder point is procedural: Nepal’s application nearly failed not on merit but on mechanics – the application window had closed in June, 119 countries’ claims were queued ahead, and developed countries initially argued that emergency funding would let Kathmandu ‘jump the queue’, relenting only on the condition that the allocation be treated as an exception rather than precedent. A fund that cannot absorb an emergency without a waiver is not yet a fund for loss and damage; it is a fund for patience.
Syllabus Mapping
GS Paper II: International Relations – climate diplomacy, UNFCCC. GS Paper III: Environment – climate change, disaster management. Essay: climate justice and the Global South.
Multi-Dimensional Analysis
1. The principle at stake: compensation, not charity
- The FLD, established at COP27 in 2022 and operationalised a year later, rests on the principle that climate damage carries responsibility – that the Global North’s historical emissions created risks the Global South now pays for in lives and infrastructure.
- The editorial stresses the distinction is not academic: humanitarian assistance is discretionary and unaccountable; a loss-and-damage grant is an acknowledged obligation – which is precisely why the Fund was contested for three decades before it existed.
- Nepal’s application explicitly invoked climate justice: 0.1 per cent of emissions against 1,400 dead and a tenth of hydropower destroyed is the cleanest possible statement of the asymmetry.
- The humanitarian-assistance route was always available to Kathmandu – India and others would have answered a request within days; by choosing the FLD, Nepal deliberately asserted that this loss was owed, and the Fund’s acceptance of the application concedes the point in principle even where its size concedes nothing in practice.
2. The queue that nearly beat the emergency
- The application window had closed in June; 119 countries’ claims awaited approval; developed countries resisted an exception until they extracted a no-precedent condition – the episode reads as a system designed for orderly applications colliding with a disorderly climate.
- The editorial’s inference is structural: delays aggravate hardship, slow restoration of essential services, and inflate rebuilding costs – and they fall hardest on poorer countries whose budgets cannot absorb sudden losses.
- A permanent rapid-response mechanism is the obvious institutional fix; that donors insisted Nepal’s case not establish one reveals the Fund’s real constraint – money, and the will to commit it.
- Two months between disaster and allocation is, by the standards of multilateral finance, almost brisk; by the standard of a displaced family in a Himalayan winter, it is an eternity – and every future disaster will rerun this arithmetic of institutional time versus human time.
3. The arithmetic of inadequacy
- The FLD has received pledges worth $822 million – about a third of the claims pending before it – against estimated annual loss-and-damage needs in developing countries that run into hundreds of billions of dollars.
- $21.6 million against $5 billion in Nepali recovery needs is less than half a per cent of the bill; the grant’s value is precedent, not proportion.
- Pledges, moreover, are not contributions: multilateral climate finance has a long record of announced solidarity outpacing delivered cash – the still-unmet $100-billion-a-year promise to developing countries, made in 2009 and missed for years, is the standing warning label on every new pledge total.
- The composition of the gap matters as much as its size: loss-and-damage estimates for developing countries run into hundreds of billions annually by some assessments, which means the Fund is capitalised at a scale suitable for a pilot, while the need it was created to meet is already at full scale.
4. The Himalayan dimension India cannot ignore
- Nepal’s floods are the same Himalayan risk India faces: glacial-lake outburst floods, avalanches and extreme precipitation do not respect the open border, and the Bhotekoshi’s behaviour is a warning for every downstream basin.
- India positions itself as first responder and net security provider in the neighbourhood; climate disasters are now the most probable large-scale emergency in the Himalaya, and India’s preparedness, early-warning sharing and reconstruction role are part of the FLD’s regional context.
- India’s own climate-finance diplomacy – as a Global South leader that also courts developed-country investment – gives it a stake in making the Fund work rather than merely in criticising it.
5. The road to COP31
- Compensation for the hardest-hit countries is on the agenda at COP31, beginning November 9 in Antalya, Turkey; Nepal’s case will be the reference exhibit for every delegation arguing that the Fund must become faster, bigger and more predictable.
- The editorial’s closing warning is the correct frame: as extreme weather becomes more frequent and intense, delays in addressing the FLD’s shortcomings will undermine the central principle of UN climate negotiations – climate justice itself.
- A Fund that moves at bureaucratic speed in an accelerating climate is a promise being kept too slowly to matter; Antalya must change the operating model, not just the pledge totals.
- The precedent question cuts both ways: donors fear a rapid-response precedent because they expect the emergencies to multiply – which is precisely the admission that makes the rapid-response mechanism indispensable.
Way Forward
Institutionalise a permanent rapid-response window in the FLD with pre-agreed triggers – mortality, displacement, infrastructure-loss thresholds – so emergencies are funded by rule, not by negotiated exception.
Convert pledges into binding multi-year contribution schedules with public delivery tracking; the Fund’s credibility is a cash-flow question before it is a principle question.
Build direct-access and simplified-application tracks for the least-developed and mountain countries, whose administrative capacity should not determine whether their dead are compensated.
India should champion the rapid-response reform at Antalya: as the Himalaya’s largest state and the Global South’s most credible voice, it gains standing and security from a functional Fund.
Link FLD disbursement to resilient reconstruction standards – build-back-better conditions that reduce the next disaster’s toll, making each grant an investment in smaller future losses.
Develop regional early-warning and risk-pooling complements – Himalayan cryosphere monitoring shared across India, Nepal and Bhutan – since the cheapest loss-and-damage payment is the one early warning prevents.
Conclusion
The Indian Express is right that Nepal’s grant should become a case study for reforming the Fund. The $21.6 million proves the principle can move from communique to cash; everything about how it moved – the closed window, the queue objection, the no-precedent condition, the pledge shortfall – proves the machinery is still built for a slower world than the one the climate is making. Antalya’s test is whether the Fund learns Nepal’s lesson before the next Himalayan valley pays for the delay.
Practice Question
Q: ‘Climate justice delayed is climate justice denied.’ Discuss with reference to the first Loss and Damage Fund grant to Nepal, and outline the reforms needed to make climate compensation match the speed of climate damage. (250 words)
Editorial 3: Lions, Donkeys and the Zero-Error General – Ajai Shukla’s Indictment of Military Leadership
Context
Retired Colonel Ajai Shukla’s op-ed in The Hindu, ‘A leadership deficit in the military’, is an insider’s charge sheet against the senior leadership of the Indian armed forces. Its first argument is about ideology seeping into uniform: Shukla describes a seminar in New Delhi last July on atmanirbharta where the then maintenance chief of the Indian Air Force, Air Marshal Sanjiv Ghuratia, delivered an address containing, as one attendee reported, ‘more Sanskrit than English or Hindi’ – prompting the question of whether he was addressing the entrepreneurs and engineers present or demonstrating his credentials to the Sangh Parivar.
The op-ed’s sharpest exhibit is post-retirement reward. Last month, Air Marshal Jeetendra Mishra, who masterminded Operation Sindoor as the Western Air Command chief, was appointed to run the Ram Janmbhoomi temple – a job for which, Shukla notes, nothing in an IAF pilot’s career equips him. He traces the pattern back: on May 13, 2025, at a crucial IAF media briefing on Operation Sindoor, the force’s operations chief, Air Marshal A.K. Bharti, invoked the Ramayan and opened with the Shiva Tandava Stotram delivered in rock-concert style. Military audiences, he writes, are no longer surprised when government-affiliated speakers pepper speeches with Sanskrit shlokas – but not every soldier is comfortable, and juniors’ disillusionment with seniors ‘taking the Hindutva route to the top’ is now detectable.
The op-ed’s second and, in Shukla’s own assessment, graver argument is about courage. Borrowing the post-World War I British phrase ‘lions led by donkeys’ – the citizenry’s resentment of generals who committed soldiers to attacks certain to fail – he locates a growing ‘zero error syndrome’ among senior Indian commanders, a widening disconnect between the ends of the rank pyramid, and a leadership-training failure that turns gallant captains and majors into generals who fail to seize the moment. The analysis below engages both arguments on their merits and their limits.
Syllabus Mapping
GS Paper III: Internal security, defence modernisation, civil-military relations. GS Paper IV (Ethics): probity, institutional integrity, moral courage. Essay: apolitical military and democratic values.
Multi-Dimensional Analysis
1. Ideology in uniform: the Hindutva-isation argument
- Shukla’s documented instances – the Ghuratia seminar, the Bharti briefing, the Mishra appointment – are specific, dated and attributable, which distinguishes the op-ed from generic alarmism about politicisation.
- The mechanism he identifies is incentive, not order: no directive commands Sanskrit shlokas; officers read the environment, and a system that rewards ideological signalling with post-retirement patronage teaches the lesson without issuing it.
- The counterpoint the op-ed underweights: cultural referencing in Indian public life is common across institutions, and a briefing’s stylistic choices are not, by themselves, evidence of operational compromise – the Mishra appointment is the stronger exhibit precisely because it is a material reward.
- The professional risk is real regardless: a force whose juniors believe advancement runs through ideology rather than competence has begun to spend down its most important asset – internal trust in the fairness of promotion.
2. Lions and donkeys: the rank-pyramid disconnect
- The ‘lions led by donkeys’ frame – born of British resentment after the mass slaughter of World War I – describes soldiers’ belief that incompetent generals wasted their lives; Shukla is careful to note India is not there, and the institution retains public respect.
- What he reports instead is reciprocal estrangement: junior officers murmur that the brass looks out only for itself, while generals complain about the ‘poor quality’ of young officers – a mutual contempt that corrodes the chain of command’s legitimacy from both directions.
- Shukla’s own diagnosis of why this matters is psychological: contemporary conflict shows weaker forces – Ukraine against Russia, Iran against the U.S. and Israel – stalemating stronger ones on intangibles: belief in the justice of one’s cause, fairness in processes and methods, and the conviction that soldierly skill prevails over sycophancy.
- A military where soldiers doubt the fairness of promotion has begun to surrender exactly those moral factors that decide wars between otherwise comparable forces.
3. The zero-error syndrome and its operational cost
- The op-ed’s central operational claim: when China intruded into Ladakh in 2020, Indian commanders shrank from immediate offensive action, and the modern general ‘opts to defend vulnerabilities, underscoring weakness’ rather than displaying the aggression and risk-taking that deterrence requires.
- Shukla supplies the institutional evidence that risk-aversion is a choice, not a necessity: commanders who showed conspicuous aggression against China – Nathu La in 1967, Sumdorong Chu in 1986, Doklam in 2017, and the occupation of the Kailash Range in 2020-21 – were praised, not castigated; operational boldness has not blighted careers.
- The zero-error logic is self-reinforcing: if no mistake is survivable, no risk is rational, and the officer corps optimises for blamelessness across thirty-year careers – arriving at flag rank with caution as its only trained instinct.
- The cost is paid in deterrence: an adversary that reads caution as institutional doctrine gains freedom of action at the line of actual control without firing.
4. Civil-military relations: the Truman-MacArthur standard
- Shukla’s normative benchmark is the 1951 dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur by President Harry Truman – Truman insisting on a limited war to avoid massive Soviet or Chinese intervention, MacArthur demanding expansion into China, and the elected leader’s authority prevailing.
- The example carries a double edge the op-ed intends: Truman could dismiss MacArthur precisely because MacArthur had publicly upheld his convictions – the general’s duty to disagree openly is the premise that makes civilian control meaningful rather than mere compliance.
- The Indian brass, Shukla argues, retains leeway to disagree with elected governments even in communally polarised times – but conviction without the willingness to pay its price is not conviction; it is commentary.
- The balance is delicate and worth stating plainly: an apolitical military is not a silent one – it is one whose professional dissent stays institutional, and whose public voice is reserved for professional judgment.
5. Where the op-ed is strongest – and where it needs more
- Its strongest ground is what it documents: named officers, dated events, an observable incentive structure – this is checkable institutional criticism, not nostalgia.
- Its weakest ground is generalisation from the IAF: Shukla himself notes the IAF appears more Sanskrit-ised than the other two services – ‘one wag’ at a seminar is cited for the joke that ‘they serve closer to God’ – and a three-service indictment built largely on one service’s anecdotes invites the rebuttal.
- The Ladakh judgment is also contestable: 2020’s restraint can be read as zero-error timidity or as deliberate escalation control in a nuclear-shadowed dyad – the op-ed asserts the former without engaging the strongest case for the latter.
- These limits do not defuse the core warning: when a retired colonel of Shukla’s standing writes that something is ‘gravely flawed’ with leadership training, the institution’s answer must be institutional – examination of incentives – not the reflexive dismissal of the messenger.
Way Forward
Audit the incentive structure, not the ideology: the real reform target is post-retirement patronage – a mandatory cooling-off framework and transparent, merit-based criteria for all government appointments of retired flag officers would remove the reward that teaches the lesson.
Make promotion visibly merit-based: publish selection-board criteria and statistical outcomes so juniors can verify fairness rather than infer it; trust in the pyramid is rebuilt with evidence, not exhortation.
Institutionalise moral courage in command evaluation: assess flag-rank candidates on documented willingness to give unwelcome professional advice in writing – the MacArthur test applied prospectively.
Reform leadership training as the op-ed demands: war-gaming and command curricula should reward justified risk-taking and penalise reflexive caution, so that seizing the moment is trained, not hoped for.
Protect professional military dissent: strengthen formal channels – chiefs’ written advice to the political executive, parliamentary oversight of defence – so disagreement has an institutional home and never needs a public stage.
Keep the uniform out of the culture war: a clear, service-wide code on religious and ideological expression in official capacity protects both the majority’s sensibilities and the minority’s equal standing in the ranks.
Conclusion
Shukla’s op-ed will be dismissed in some quarters as one disgruntled veteran’s polemic. That dismissal is available only to those who ignore its evidence: dated events, named officers, and a causal mechanism – patronage incentives producing ideological signalling producing junior disillusionment – that is testable and, if heeded, correctable. The deeper question he leaves is the one every serious military must answer periodically: what happens to the captains of gallantry on the way to the general’s tent? An institution that trains courage in its juniors and punishes it in its seniors will eventually discover, at the worst possible moment, which lesson was learned.
Practice Question
Q: ‘An apolitical military is not a silent military.’ Examine in the light of recent debates on ideological influence and risk-aversion in India’s senior military leadership. (250 words)
