The best ability of Indian refineries is that they can switch between Gulf crude, Russian Urals, and Venezuelan heavy oil. They were built with deep conversion capacity, with units that crack the heavy, sulphur-laden bottom of the barrel into clean diesel and petrol.
Article 324(1) hands the Commission the power of ‘superintendence, direction and control’ over elections. Honestly, it’s one of the most massive grants of authority you’ll find anywhere in the Constitution. Then comes Article 324(2). It says the President appoints the Chief Election Commissioner and other commissioners, but, and this is a crucial detail, it’s explicitly “subject to the provisions of any law made in that behalf by Parliament.”
Seshan dusted off the Model Code of Conduct. It was a campaign rulebook that had basically been sitting on a shelf gathering dust since the 1960s, but Seshan gave it teeth. Suddenly, sitting ministers and powerful ruling parties were getting slapped with violations. He ordered repolls. He disqualified politicians for blowing past spending limits. For the first time ever, the threat of cancelling an election wasn’t just empty talk. It was a loaded weapon.
At ONGC’s August 2026 AGM, Chairman A.K. Singh said the company will invest about ₹1 lakh crore in cash over five years to drill 87 deepwater wells by March 2031, roughly ₹20,000 crore a year. They’ll start slow with just four wells in FY26, but plan to crank it up to 27 in the final year. Singh didn’t mince words about why they’re in such a mad dash, either: India’s crude output has been sliding downhill for eleven straight years.
Down in the deep ocean, just being good at science is quickly becoming a new form of hard power. The maps, the sensors, and the baseline data a country gathers while they are ‘just exploring’ can very easily become the exact infrastructure they need to eventually control and exploit the deep ocean frontier.
India could close part of that gap by creating a dedicated Brahmaputra Dam Monitor, modelled on the Stimson Center’s Mekong Dam Monitor. It could combine satellite imagery with river-gauge readings, rainfall records and seismic data.
Whatever India intended by holding the treaty in abeyance, physically choking Pakistan’s water supply was never actually on the table; the infrastructure for it does not exist, and cannot be built quickly even if Delhi wanted to try. What India suspended was information and process, not flow.
In Chinese political culture, the ability to master a river has long served as a stand‑in for the legitimacy of the state, long before hydropower even existed as a technology.
Ask who owns a stretch of national highway, or an embankment, or the tunnel wall at Silkyara. The honest answer is often several departments, none of whom will admit it first. A road, a bridge, a drainage channel should each belong to one named office, the kind that gets credit when it holds and blame when it doesn’t.
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