12 October marked the second death anniversary of a former Delhi University professor. He had spent about a decade in prison under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) before the Bombay High Court acquitted him in 2024, and he died soon after his release. A legal commentary uses the anniversary to argue that the UAPA needs urgent reform. The central issue is how India balances national security against personal liberty.

• TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1985/1987) was allowed to lapse in 1995 after widespread complaints of misuse. In Kartar Singh v. State of Punjab (1994), the Supreme Court had upheld the law while warning against its abuse.
• POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002) was upheld in PUCL v. Union of India (2003) and repealed in 2004. Its core terror provisions were then moved into the UAPA, a permanent statute that, unlike TADA and POTA, has no sunset clause.
• 2008: after the Mumbai attacks, an amendment added Section 43D, with tighter bail and longer custody, and the NIA Act was passed.
• 2012: threats to “economic security” were brought within the definition of terrorism.
• 2019: an amendment allowed the Centre to designate individuals as terrorists. It also let the NIA seize property connected with terrorism.
• International obligations: UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001) and FATF standards require States to criminalise terror financing.

• Vague definitions: terms such as “membership” are not defined. At their widest, they can reach slogans or the mere possession of literature.
• Bail is nearly impossible: under Section 43D(5), a court must refuse bail if the accusation appears “prima facie true” on the police record. Undertrials therefore spend years in jail before trial.
• Long delays: the article cites the Bhima Koregaon case (2018), in which charges had still not been framed eight years later. It also cites the 2020 north-east Delhi riots conspiracy case, in which some accused have been in jail for more than six years without trial.
• Courts have reversed attempts to narrow the law:
  • Arup Bhuyan (2011) limited “membership” to active membership involving incitement to violence. A larger Bench overruled it in 2023.
  • A Delhi High Court bail ruling in 2021 read the terrorism clauses narrowly. The Supreme Court directed that it should not be treated as precedent.
• Inconsistent bail decisions: some judges closely scrutinise chargesheets, while others accept the police version. Courts also differ on how much delay justifies bail. Outcomes therefore depend heavily on which judge hears the case.

• Nature of terrorism: terror networks are covert, cross-border and increasingly online. Proving such conspiracies needs longer investigation than ordinary crime.
• Risks of release on bail: accused persons may intimidate witnesses, abscond or re-offend.
• Constitutional validity: the Supreme Court has upheld special anti-terror laws, from Kartar Singh to PUCL, as valid exercises of State power.
• Built-in safeguards: the law has independent sanction review, tribunal confirmation of bans and special courts. On this view, the problem lies in implementation, not in the design of the law.

• Write the Najeeb principle into the statute, so that bail becomes presumptive after a fixed period of undertrial custody.
• Define “membership”, “support” and “conspiracy” precisely, keeping a requirement of intent and nexus with violence.
• Set time limits for trials in special courts, provide enough judges, and require quarterly disclosure of pending UAPA cases.
• Provide compensation for wrongful prosecution, as the Law Commission’s 277th Report (2018) recommended.
• Strengthen the sanction review so that it acts as a real filter, not a formality.

In June 2025, the governments of Assam and Meghalaya jointly proposed a 55 MW hydropower-cum-irrigation project on the Kulsi river, a habitat of the endangered Gangetic river dolphin. More than 2,000 people from the Bodo, Garo, Khasi and Rabha communities have now rallied against it, on a border that the two States themselves have disputed for decades.

• For: the project would provide irrigation and clean power to an under-served border region. Joint planning could also become a confidence-building step between the two States.
• Against — consent: on the Meghalaya side, the project has no consent from customary institutions, and it would affect forest rights on the Assam side.
• Against — ecology: it would damage dolphin habitat and harm fisheries downstream.
• Against — the border: communities fear the project could settle the disputed boundary through construction, before any negotiated agreement.
• Regulatory threshold: under the EIA Notification, 2006, a hydro project of 50 MW or more is Category A. It therefore needs appraisal by the Union Environment Ministry’s expert committee and a public hearing.

• Seek free, prior and informed consent of the affected communities, following the spirit of the Niyamgiri (2013) judgment and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007).
• Carry out a cumulative basin-level impact study and set ecological flow requirements suited to dolphins.
• Settle the boundary before allocating land for the project.

Financial regulators have recently tightened cyber-resilience rules.

• The RBI issued a cybersecurity and technology-resilience framework for commercial banks in July 2026.
• SEBI introduced an IT Resilience Index for market infrastructure institutions in August 2026.

The next threat is of a different kind. Quantum computers could break the mathematics on which today’s encryption rests.

• Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL): an attacker can copy encrypted data today and decrypt it once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) exists. The Digital Threat Report 2025-26 (by CERT-In, CSIRT-Fin and SISA) says that HNDL strategies are already active, even though the wider quantum threat has not fully arrived.
• “Quantum deadline”: some industry voices put it at 2029–30. There is, however, no agreed date for when a CRQC will exist.
• A complex technology base: banks run legacy core systems, cloud services, third-party vendors, payment platforms and hardware security modules. Each of these contains cryptography that would need to be found and replaced.
• Crypto-agility: the ability to swap algorithms and protocols without rebuilding systems. It is now treated as a core resilience capability.

• Uncertain timing: because no one knows when a CRQC will arrive, institutions may either delay or overspend.
• Smaller lenders: co-operative banks, NBFCs and fintechs lack the budgets and skills for migration.
• Interdependence: UPI, card networks and SWIFT links mean the system is only as secure as its weakest link.
• Global standards: standards are still evolving, and India has a stake in sovereign standards and indigenous capability under the NQM.

Two papers in Nature report the world’s first working nuclear clocks. One comes from teams in China (Beijing and Shanghai) and the other from teams in Austria and Germany. Both clocks keep time using the nucleus of thorium-229 rather than an atom’s electrons.

• China (Beijing and Shanghai): the team embedded thorium-229 in calcium fluoride crystals. It fired an ultraviolet laser at them, with a feedback loop constantly correcting the laser.
• Austria and Germany: the team built a thorium-229 clock and ran it alongside a ytterbium atomic clock to search for ultralight dark matter. Some theories predict that such dark matter would make fundamental constants fluctuate slightly. Because the two clocks would respond differently, any change in their relative tick rates would be a signal. No signal was found.
• Why the clock is so sensitive: the transition energy is low because the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force nearly cancel each other in this nucleus. This makes the clock highly sensitive to tiny changes in either force.
• Current status: the prototypes are not yet as precise as the best atomic clocks, but they show the design works. Better laser power and crystal quality are expected to let them overtake atomic clocks.

Indonesia is facing its most intense wildfires in 11 years on Sumatra and Borneo, made worse by El Niño. Conservation teams are moving critically endangered orangutans out of burning habitat, and the haze has spread across South-East Asia.

Figure 6 — Indonesia: Sumatra and Borneo (Kalimantan), the fire-hit islands

The fires are concentrated in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) and Sumatra. The haze drifts north-west towards Singapore and Malaysia. Map courtesy BBC News; reproduced with credit for educational use.

• Past crises: the 1997–98 haze was a turning point, and in 2015 fires burned about 2.6 million hectares. The present season is the worst since then.
• ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution: signed in 2002, it came into force in 2003. Indonesia ratified it last, in 2014. Singapore passed its own Transboundary Haze Pollution Act in 2014.
• Underlying drivers: the main causes are draining peat and clearing land by fire for oil palm and pulpwood plantations. One of the orangutans in this year’s rescues died after being found on a palm-oil plantation.

• Palm oil: India is among the world’s largest importers of edible oil. Palm oil is the largest share of these imports and comes mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia. This links Indian demand to how plantations are run in South-East Asia.
• Domestic substitution: the National Mission on Edible Oils – Oil Palm (2021) aims to replace imports with domestic production. Expanding oil palm in the North-East and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands must avoid repeating the same deforestation problems.
• Climate: peat fires are among the largest single sources of carbon emissions in some years. They undercut climate commitments under the Paris Agreement.

A study of agile frogs in Hungary, published in Science Advances, finds that heat-induced sex-reversed males father fewer offspring. Their offspring are also more vulnerable to heat and disease. Together, these effects could bring populations to extinction earlier as the climate warms.

Figure 7 — The agile frog (Rana dalmatina)

The agile frog is a European brown frog that breeds in early-spring ponds. Its tadpoles are exposed to heatwaves in shallow water. Photograph: Petar Milošević (CC BY-SA), as published in The Hindu; reproduced with credit for educational use.

• Mating experiments: sex-reversed (XX) males could mate and fertilise eggs. However, about one-third of females paired with them laid only part of their eggs, a “split clutch” strategy that saves eggs for a better mate.
• In the wild: across 16 populations, sex-reversed males made up about 20% of males but fathered only about 4% of egg clutches.
• Offspring: 61% of the offspring of sex-reversed males themselves sex-reversed, against 17% for offspring of normal males. Under an artificial heatwave, these tadpoles also carried higher ranavirus loads.
• Population models: some populations could disappear within 60–70 years. When ranavirus deaths were included, decline began about 10 years earlier and extinction came about 9.5 years sooner.

• A hidden cost of warming: climate change can affect reproduction and sex ratios, not only temperature tolerance. This matters most for ectotherms, the cold-blooded animals whose body temperature follows their surroundings.
• Small populations at greatest risk: losing even a few breeding females can make a small population collapse.
• What managers can do:
  • protect cool microhabitats such as shaded and deeper ponds;
  • monitor genetic sex as well as visible sex;
  • include disease in climate-risk assessments.
• India’s relevance: the Western Ghats and the North-East are amphibian hotspots with high endemism. Many species there live in narrow thermal ranges.

Two powerful earthquakes, of magnitude 7.7 and 6.6, struck southern Panama on Friday, 9 October. They collapsed buildings near the epicentre and led to evacuations across the country, and were felt as far away as Colombia.

Figure 9 — Epicentres off southern Panama, and Panama’s regional setting

Panama is an S-shaped isthmus between Costa Rica and Colombia, with the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific to the south. Both quakes struck on the Pacific side. Upper map courtesy The Indian Express (AP); lower map courtesy BBC News; both reproduced with credit for educational use.

• Plate setting: Panama sits on the small Panama microplate (block), surrounded by four larger plates:
  • the Caribbean Plate to the north;
  • the Cocos Plate to the west;
  • the Nazca Plate to the south;
  • the South American Plate to the east.
• The Panama Fracture Zone: this transform fault between the Cocos and Nazca plates, together with the deformed belts along the coasts, makes southern Panama seismically active. The region is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire.
• A young land bridge: the Isthmus of Panama rose about 3 million years ago, separating the Atlantic from the Pacific. This triggered the Great American Biotic Interchange, the exchange of species between the two Americas, and changed ocean circulation.
• Panama Canal:
  • it is about 82 km long and opened in 1914;
  • under the Torrijos–Carter Treaties (1977), it was handed over to Panama on 31 December 1999;
  • its locks were expanded in 2016;
  • it depends on the fresh water of Gatun Lake, which is why droughts in 2023–24 forced limits on transits.
• Darién Gap: this roadless rainforest on the Panama–Colombia border is the only break in the Pan-American Highway.

The Bay of Kotor in Montenegro is often marketed as Europe’s southernmost fjord. Geologists classify it differently: it is a ria, a drowned river valley, and no glacier ever shaped it. The distinction is a standard test of coastal landforms.

Figure 11 — A true glacial fjord, for comparison

A Norwegian fjord, showing the steep, ice-carved walls and hanging-valley waterfalls that Kotor does not have. Representative image. Image as supplied; reproduced for educational use.

Figure 12 — Locating the Bay of Kotor on the Adriatic

The bay lies on Montenegro’s short coastline, about two hours by road south-east of Dubrovnik. Bosnia and Herzegovina reaches the sea only at Neum. Legacy IAS map; base geography Natural Earth (public domain).

• Bay of Kotor:
  • the sea enters through the narrow Verige Strait, about 300 m wide;
  • Kotor’s walls run for more than 4 km up to the Fortress of St John, about 280 m above the town;
  • the region is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1979. It was on the List in Danger after the 1979 earthquake and was removed in 2003.
• Montenegro:
  • the name means “Black Mountain”;
  • it became independent in 2006 after a referendum ended the State Union with Serbia;
  • the capital is Podgorica and the main port is Bar;
  • it joined NATO in 2017, has been an EU candidate since 2010, and uses the euro without being in the eurozone.
• Montenegro’s neighbours: Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Albania. It also borders Kosovo, whose 2008 declaration of independence India does not recognise.
• Neum corridor: Bosnia’s only coastline, about 20 km long, splits Croatia’s coast in two. The Pelješac Bridge (2022) now connects the two parts of Croatia without crossing Bosnian territory.
• Karst: the limestone Dinaric Alps give the region its karst landscape, with sinkholes, poljes and underground drainage. The word “karst” comes from the Kras plateau in Slovenia.