India’s engineering underemployment crisis reflects not individual unemployability but deeper structural failures in education, regulation, regional opportunity, and social inequality, exposing a persistent gap between India’s development ambitions and its constitutional promise of equal, dignified, and secure livelihoods.
U.S. retrenchment from multilateral institutions between 2017–2021 exposed critical vulnerabilities in the SDG framework, disrupting climate finance, global health, and development aid. While the EU, China, and Global South actors partially filled the gap, hegemonic absence remains costly and disproportionately burdens the world’s most vulnerable nations.
Authors: Yashita Dhaundiyal and Kakul Sharma Abstract The battlefield has always been a place of destruction where behind every act of war, there was always a human being who could judge, take responsibility, and was bound by law. But now, that assurance is fading. Artificial intelligence is developing rapidly in modern military systems. Systems like drones are no longer waiting for commands; they identify targets, select them, and engage them by themselves. We can no longer say that a human is behind every act of violence. As these systems move from movies into real life, the world has to ask: can a machine fight a war legally? Can a machine also be bound by law? This paper’s focus is to examine the legality of autonomous weapon systems under international law, focusing on the challenges they are going to bring to accountability, humanitarian rules, and global regulations. This is not just a theory; it is a real, practical problem. The United States, China, Russia, and Israel have already developed these systems, and AI-assisted targeting systems are already part of the defense strategies of major military powers, making real decisions with little to no human oversight. What is still missing is any real international accountability. As legal scholars have called it, this is a responsibility gap; a fundamental crack in the moral architecture of war itself. When a target is selected, when a life is taken, someone has to answer for it. Autonomous weapons challenge that premise at its very core, and the international legal order has not caught up. The main argument of this paper is that autonomous weapons as they exist today create serious conflicts with the foundational rules of international humanitarian law; and this responsibility gap must be addressed urgently, because war has always needed accountability, and that does not go away just because the combatant no longer has a face. Keywords: Autonomous Weapons Systems, International Humanitarian Law, Responsibility Gap, Accountability, Artificial Intelligence in Warfare
Author: Priyanshu Keshri Abstract This paper examines the causal architecture of the ongoing West Asia conflict involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, and its cascading effects on global energy markets and India’s energy security. India’s structural dependence on imported hydrocarbons—crude oil import dependency reaching nearly 89 percent in FY 2023–24 – renders it acutely vulnerable to disruptions along the Strait of Hormuz, a maritime chokepoint through which substantial share of global oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade transits. The paper argues that the crisis, and the resulting liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) supply shock in India, is not the product of unintended confrontation but of calculated escalation rooted in four interlocking causes: contested perceptions of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the collapse of diplomatic mechanisms such as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), militarization dynamics exemplified by the Twelve-Day War, and the broader theoretical relationship between petrostates and militarized interstate disputes. The analysis situates India’s energy predicament within a condition of “dual energy dependency,” in which continued reliance on fossil fuels coexists with an expanding renewable energy transition. Keywords: Strait of Hormuz, Iran nuclear program, energy security, petrostates, India LPG crisis, JCPOA, geopolitical escalation
A decade of rising import tariffs under Make in India built real capacity — mobile phone imports fell from 78% to 3% of the market, FDI into manufacturing crossed $148 billion, and consumer sectors like electronics and textiles saw the strongest protection. Yet manufacturing’s GDP share stayed flat at 14–17%, and inverted duty structures kept raising costs for import-dependent industries, curbing export competitiveness. The study concludes tariffs alone can’t drive sustained manufacturing growth without complementary infrastructure, technology, and PLI-based support.
Analysing 738,764 votes across 70 UNGA sessions from 1946 to 2025, this study reveals that the expansion of non-Western membership has fundamentally transformed voting dynamics within the General Assembly, signalling a measurable shift toward a multipolar international order.
Authors: Shohrah Kadwani, Swati Dahiya, Shivangi Bhupendra, Krishnapriya KS, Archit Bhattacharya, and Ayeni Sarah Biola Abstract The rapid expansion of digital health technologies through wearable devices, health applications, and AI-driven technologies has created a shift in how traditional patient health data is being handled. As health data increasingly shifts from traditional healthcare institutions to consumer-facing digital platforms, it creates regulatory challenges that existing legal frameworks were not designed to address. This paper examines how effectively the United Kingdom and European Union protect digital health data privacy in this evolving environment. This paper uses a qualitative and comparative approach to analyse the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018, the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the European Health Data Space (EHDS). Research was conducted into legislation, academic literature and case studies, and the paper is divided into three interconnected themes: wearable technologies, public trust and consent. The findings draw on the concept of regulatory lag, and suggest that despite comprehensive legal frameworks, both jurisdictions face a common structural problem: technological innovation seems to be advancing faster than policy can respond. Wearable technologies blur the distinction between lifestyle and health data to exploit the gaps in existing regulatory frameworks, and current consent mechanisms often fail to provide meaningful user control over data. This paper argues that both the UK and EU have largely adopted a reactive, rather than a proactive approach to digital health governance and emphasises a need to incorporate stronger consent mechanisms, oversight of wearable technologies and clearer accountability structures to adapt to an increasingly digital healthcare environment.
Author: Soumya Jha Introduction Cross-border financial consumer disputes (CBFCD) have become structurally complex as they unfold across overlapping domestic, regional, and international legal orders, each asserting regulatory authority without hierarchical resolution. Drawing on Martti Koskenniemi (2007) and Gunther Teubner (1997), this literature review treats legal fragmentation not as a background context but as a causal mechanism producing normative indeterminacy rather than coordinated governance. Using narrative analyses, it traces three evolutionary phases,including post-2008 paternalistic redress, fintech-driven contractualisation (2013–2018), and the current geo-financial sovereignty phase. It argues that CBFCD have shifted from domestic mis-selling adjudication to sovereignty-inflected exclusions through extraterritorial enforcement, often preventing consumer remedy. Each phase is anchored to a concrete dispute, so that the doctrinal shifts are traced to their effects on the consumer rather than treated as abstract regime change. Further, it identifies five literature gaps whose convergence at the intersection of fintech governance, Global South regulatory capacity, and algorithmic accountability remains unaddressed in existing literature. Keywords: Legal Fragmentation, Cross Border Financial Consumer Disputes, Financial Governance, Fintech Regulation, Sanctions, Extraterritoriality, and Global South.
Authors: Ananya Kukreja, Isa Mathew, Jay Kalra Abstract This paper examines and compares the soft power strategies of the United States of America and China in the twenty-first century while focusing on the role of digital platforms, algorithms and influencer culture as instruments of soft power projection. Using Joseph Nye’s framework of soft power as the primary lens, the study conducts a qualitative comparative analysis of China’s statedriven model, characterised by centralised content control and platform governance, and the market-led model in the United States of America, which operates through decentralised privatesector actors and influencer economies. The paper focuses on this comparison prominently within the geopolitical context of the South Asian region, where both nations constantly compete for cultural and political influence. Keywords: Soft power; United States of America; China; Joseph Nye; TikTok; ByteDance; Influencer marketing; Algorithms; Digital diplomacy; Platform governance
Author: Areej Mehdi, Megha Priya, Ananya Prasad Abstract Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013 does something quietly contradictory. It forces qualifying companies to redirect profit toward public welfare, and in the same clause leaves those profits free to stay under corporate control. This paper argues that the contradiction was not missed by the drafters, it was left in place. Rule 4(1)(a) of the CSR Rules expressly allows a company to route its mandatory two percent spend to a Section 8 foundation that it has itself created and staffed, and the 2021 Amendment, which rewrote nearly every other compliance detail in the regime, left that permission exactly where it was. That is not an oversight. It is a decision, and this paper sets out to prove it rather than simply assert it. Applying a governance overlap mapping protocol to five NSE-listed conglomerates for FY 2024-25, the paper finds fund concentration of 90-100% across all five, and four of the five implementing foundations without a single independent trustee. Three things follow. Theoretically, the paper extends the tunneling framework into the public welfare domain and proposes welfare tunneling as its own analytical category. Doctrinally, it names captive philanthropy as a legal concept and separates out inverted circular ownership as a structurally distinct variant. And as remedies, it argues for treating captive CSR transfers as deemed related party transactions under Section 188, for mandating independent trustee quotas on recipient foundation boards, and for a public governance overlap register run by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Keywords: Captive philanthropy, welfare tunneling, mandatory CSR, Section 135 Companies Act 2013, related party transactions, inverted circular ownership, governance overlap, Section 8 foundations, corporate social responsibility India, family conglomerates