Allegations that a sitting Supreme Court judge sought the transfer of the Acting Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court have reopened a structural question India's judiciary has never fully resolved: what mechanism, short of impeachment, can act on credible complaints against a sitting judge?

• Appointments: the Collegium system, operating without codified criteria and requiring informal Executive concurrence, is criticised in the piece as opaque and ill-suited to screening for integrity at entry.
• Investigation: under K. Veeraswami vs Union of India (1991), no FIR can be registered against a High Court or Supreme Court judge without the CJI's prior consent — a threshold the piece's cited commentary calls self-defeating, since investigators need evidence to seek permission, but need permission to investigate.
• Legislation: the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968 is described as practically defunct; the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill, passed by the Lok Sabha in 2012, lapsed with the 15th Lok Sabha's dissolution in 2014 and was never revived.
• Impeachment: the constitutional route under Articles 124(4) and 217(1)(b) requires a special majority in both Houses — historically near-unworkable, as the piece notes with the failed 1993 impeachment motion against Justice V. Ramaswami, defeated after one party's parliamentary abstention.

• Justice V. Ramaswami (1990–93): advised by then CJI Sabyasachi Mukharji to withdraw from judicial work during an inquiry; when the impeachment motion later failed in the Lok Sabha due to one party's abstention, then CJI Venkatachaliah still declined to allocate him any cases for his remaining tenure.
• Justice Yashwant Varma (2025): after unaccounted currency was reportedly found at his residence, then CJI Sanjiv Khanna transferred him to the Allahabad High Court and ensured he was given no judicial work.
• XXX vs Union of India (2025): the Supreme Court is cited as having affirmed the CJI's institutional responsibility in matters of judicial integrity.

• The episode illustrates a recurring pattern in Indian judicial accountability: administrative discretion by the CJI has substituted for a codified, predictable process — effective when exercised, but wholly contingent on individual will.
• The absence of a functioning statutory mechanism since the 2012 Bill's lapse means each fresh allegation is handled on an ad hoc basis, with no institutional memory or binding timeline for action.
• The piece is careful to distinguish aberration from indictment of the judiciary as a whole — a distinction UPSC answers on this theme should also preserve, given India's judiciary otherwise ranks among the more trusted public institutions in most domestic surveys.

Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) schemes aimed at women voters have proliferated across States since 2020, yet several governments that ran them lost elections in 2026 — prompting the authors to examine why targeted welfare, however well-intentioned, can carry a distinct political cost.

• Because most informal-sector income is unobservable to the state, governments rely on proxy indicators — land ownership, electricity consumption, household assets — to identify beneficiaries.
• Proxy-based targeting inevitably produces two error types: inclusion errors (ineligible households receiving benefits) and exclusion errors (eligible households left out) — a standard result in the welfare-targeting literature the piece draws on.
• The authors' key claim: political cost arises from perceived errors as much as actual ones — a household that fails formal eligibility may feel wronged regardless of whether the criterion was fairly applied.

• Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs): link benefits to a socially desirable behaviour (school attendance, health check-ups), allowing self-selection and reducing perceived unfairness.
• Illustration — Tamil Nadu's Midday Meal Scheme: because eligibility is simply school enrolment, there is little scope for the "why was I excluded" grievance that targeted UCTs generate.

• The argument privileges administrative/electoral stability over redistributive intent — CCTs are not immune to their own targeting and compliance-monitoring costs, particularly in states with weak last-mile delivery capacity.
• UCTs remain among the few instruments that reach women directly (rather than the household head), which the piece's political-cost framing does not weigh against the gendered intra-household allocation problem UCTs are partly designed to solve.
• The claim that UCT-implementing governments "lost" 2026 elections is treated by the authors as suggestive rather than causally established — multiple confounding factors (anti-incumbency, local issues, alliance arithmetic) make a clean causal read difficult, a caveat worth carrying into any Mains answer.

• SDG 5.4 — the Sustainable Development Goal target on recognising and valuing unpaid care and domestic work.
• Inclusion / exclusion error — standard welfare-economics terms for targeting mistakes in either direction.
• Expenditure switching — reallocating a fixed budget toward one head (e.g. cash transfers) at the cost of another (e.g. capital investment).