Case studies

CaseMains12 Aug 2026

Drawn from: Custodial deaths and the BNSS safeguards

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • A shopkeeper in Chhattisgarh was arrested on 18 January 2024 over liquor worth ₹1,200 and died in police custody three days later. A judicial magistrate's inquiry under the Sanhita found in July 2024 that he had died of a blunt weapon injury to the head.
   • No first information report was registered against anyone for two years. When the family reached the Supreme Court, the State's police chief said the inquiry report had never reached the police, though it was annexed to the State's own affidavit in the High Court.
   • On 12 August 2026, in Lahra Bai Tamre v. State of Chhattisgarh, the Court called the delay an attempt to cover up custodial violence, transferred the investigation to the Central Bureau of Investigation, raised the interim compensation from ₹1 lakh to ₹25 lakh, and asked the Bureau to examine the officials who sat on the report.
   • Parliament was told in March 2026 that deaths in custody reported to the National Human Rights Commission ran at 140 to 176 a year, with 170 in the first 74 days of 2026.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • The rule of law against the loyalty of the uniform: the safeguard worked, a magistrate found violence, and the institution that should have acted on the finding buried it to protect its own.
   • Candour to the court: a police chief's statement that a report "never reached" the police, when the State had filed it, is the ethical failure that turned a lapse into a cover up.
   • The junior officer's dilemma: the constable who saw the beating, the station writer who knew the time of injury, the sub inspector who read the inquiry report, each had a chance to speak and a reason not to.
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Rule of law (Dicey): no person, however high, is above the law, and the police who enforce it are the first to be bound by it. D.K. Basu (1997) turned this into eleven requirements whose breach is contempt of court.
   • Integrity and moral courage: Kant's test asks the junior officer whether the rule "stay silent to protect a colleague" could be willed as a universal law for every police station; it could not, since it ends every safeguard at once.
   • Institutional culture (Weber's bureaucracy and its pathologies): the esprit de corps that makes a force effective is the same bond that makes it close ranks; the ethical task is to keep the first without the second.
   • Probity and candour: a public servant's duty of truthfulness to a court is not reduced by the embarrassment the truth brings.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • The dead man's family; the officers at the station, guilty and silent alike; the Superintendent of Police and the Director General, whose statements to the court the Bureau will now test; the judicial magistrate whose inquiry was ignored; the National Human Rights Commission, which can recommend but not order; the courts; and every person who will be held in custody in that district and will be safer or not depending on what follows.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of a newly posted Superintendent of Police who receives the magistrate's inquiry report finding a custodial death to be a homicide, in a station where the suspected officers are still serving.

   • Register the first information report the day the report arrives; the Sanhita leaves no discretion once a cognisable offence is disclosed, and the delay is itself the offence the Court punished.
   • Suspend and transfer the officers named, so that witnesses within the station can speak; secure the station diary, the CCTV and the medical records before anyone else can.
   • Inform the National Human Rights Commission and the family in writing, and hand the investigation to a team from outside the district, since no station can investigate itself.
   • Tell the Director General the truth, in writing, including what the station knew and when; the one thing worse than the death for the institution is the cover up the Court found.
   • Then address the culture: cameras in custody areas, and a standing order that every custodial injury goes to a magistrate the same day.

CaseMains26 Aug 2026

Drawn from: The Nepal flood of August 2026

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • On the morning of 26 August 2026, with no rain in the valley, ice and rock fell from the Langtang Lirung massif into the Lhende Khola in Nepal's Rasuwa district, dammed it, and the dam failed within minutes. The debris flow ran down the Bhote Koshi and the Trishuli to the plains and entered India as the Gandak a day later.
   • By Nepal's bulletin of 2 September the flood had killed 1,204 people with 4,216 missing, most of them in the plains districts; nine hydropower projects were destroyed and about 900 hydropower workers were among the missing. The Energy Ministry's 200,000 text alerts went out after the surge had begun.
   • Bihar's border districts went on alert along the Gandak. In the same week the Centre was releasing ₹2,117.85 crore in advance from the State Disaster Response Fund to flood hit States, on norms that fix what a family gets for a death, a lost house or a drowned crop.
   • Rescue was itself at risk: a barrier lake of about two million cubic metres formed behind the debris and broke on 28 August, stopping rescue work for ninety minutes. The dead were counted mostly on the plains, far from the slide; the hydropower workers were in the valleys where the flow began.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Triage: with helicopters, doctors and boats for a fraction of the need, who is reached first, those easiest to reach, those most likely to survive, or those worst off?
   • Equity against equality: a flat payment per family treats a landless widow and a hydropower contractor alike; a graded one asks an official to rank losses in a week when nothing can be verified.
   • Compassion under constraint: the relief norms exist so that an officer does not have to decide each case on sympathy, and so that sympathy does not become favour; they also cap what compassion can do.
   • Accountability for warnings: the alerts came after the surge; nobody was watching the slope. Who answers for a warning that could not have been given, and who for one that could?
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Utilitarian triage (Bentham, and the medical ethics of mass casualty): the greatest good for the greatest number means reaching where the most lives can still be saved, which is not always where the most have been lost.
   • Rawls's difference principle: a scheme of relief is just when it does the most for the worst off; the landless family on the plains, not the contractor with insurance, has the first claim on a scarce rupee.
   • Compassion and empathy as civil service values: the Second Administrative Reforms Commission and the Civil Services Conduct Rules name them; in a flood they mean presence, the officer in the camp rather than at the control room.
   • Responsibility for foresight (Hans Jonas): a government that builds a tenth of its power in the path of debris flows and watches only the lakes has chosen what not to know; the duty of warning begins before the hazard, with the hazard map.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • The families of the dead and the missing; the hydropower companies and their contractors; the district administrations on both sides of the border, in Rasuwa and Chitwan and in Bihar; Nepal's Energy Ministry, which sent the alerts; the Indian Centre and the State, which pay relief from funds fixed by formula; and the volunteers and army units who did the reaching.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of a District Magistrate on the Gandak in Bihar, with a surge forecast to arrive within a day and a relief fund whose norms are fixed.

   • Act on the warning before the water: evacuate the embankment villages and the sand islands first, since the one thing the Nepal flood proved is that a text alert after the surge saves no one; the hours of lead time on the Indian side are the whole opportunity.
   • Triage by survival, not by access: send the boats and the medical teams where people are cut off and alive, and the counting teams where they are not; publish the order of reach so that it is seen to be a rule and not a preference.
   • Apply the norms fully and fast, the ex gratia for a death, the assistance for a house and a crop, through the camp rather than the office, and keep a written record of every case decided outside them, with reasons, so that discretion is accountable.
   • Reach the worst off deliberately: the landless, the migrant family without papers, the woman whose husband is missing across the border and who has no death certificate; design the camp's intake for the person without documents.
   • Record what was known and when: the river gauge readings, the time the alert arrived from Nepal, the time the villages were told; a district that cannot be blamed for the slope can be blamed for the hour it lost.

   • The principle to state in the answer: in a disaster, fairness is a rule applied in public, and compassion is the speed with which it is applied.

CaseMains12 Aug 2026

Drawn from: The inquiry report on Justice Yashwant Varma

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • On the night of 14 to 15 March 2025 a fire at the official Delhi residence of a sitting High Court judge led to the discovery of a large quantity of currency in a storeroom. The Supreme Court's in house committee reported in May 2025, and the judge was transferred to the Allahabad High Court.
   • Over 200 members of the Lok Sabha gave notice of a removal motion in July 2025; the Speaker admitted it and set up a committee under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968, of a Supreme Court judge, a High Court Chief Justice and a senior advocate.
   • The judge resigned in April 2026, about a month before the committee gave its findings to the Speaker. On 12 August 2026 the report was placed in the Lok Sabha: all three charges proved, unexplained currency on official premises, failure to preserve the evidence and interference with it, and evasive and misleading explanations. The finding rests not on proof that he removed the cash but on the storeroom being disturbed before it was sealed and the notes disappearing, which he could not explain; the committee said his explanation lacked "candour, transparency and institutional responsibility".
   • The removal process has no one to remove. No judge has been removed by Parliament since the Constitution came into force.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Caesar's wife: a judge must be above suspicion, not merely innocent; the committee's finding is about what the judge could not explain, which is the standard the office sets.
   • Resignation as escape: a resignation ends the motion but not the question; it lets the office protect its occupant from the consequence the Constitution provides.
   • Candour: the charge the committee weighed most was not the cash but the explanation; a public servant's duty of truthfulness is heaviest when the truth is damaging.
   • Who judges the judges: the in house committee, the collegium that transferred him and the statutory committee were all peers; the public sees a profession examining itself.
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Integrity and probity in public life: the Nolan Committee's seven principles, selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership, were written for exactly this case, where the office's standing depends on the office holder's conduct being visible.
   • Judicial accountability without executive control: K. Veeraswami (1991) lets a judge be prosecuted with the Chief Justice of India's consent; the 1968 Act gives Parliament a role only after a committee of judges has found the facts. The design protects independence; its price is that the profession must be willing to judge its own.
   • Accountability as the complement of independence: an institution that cannot be held to account cannot claim the public's trust on which its independence rests.
   • Due process: the committee heard the judge, and its finding is on evidence; the lesson is not that process is slow but that it is the only legitimate route.
   • Gandhi's test of means: an institution that lets the ends, its own good name, be served by a quiet resignation has chosen a means that will cost it the name.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • The judge and his family; the Supreme Court and the High Courts, whose collective reputation the case touches; Parliament, which admitted the motion and now holds a report with no motion to vote on; the Bar, which first raised the matter; the litigants whose cases he decided; and the public, for whom the storeroom became a symbol.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of the Secretary General of the Lok Sabha advising the Speaker on what to do with a report that finds the charges proved against a judge who has resigned.

   • Lay the report before the House in full, as the Act requires, and publish it; the finding belongs to the public, not to the file.
   • Advise the Speaker that the motion cannot proceed, since there is no judge to remove, but that the finding of proved misbehaviour stands as a parliamentary record and should be sent to the Chief Justice of India and the Union Law Ministry.
   • Ask the Law Ministry to examine, with the Chief Justice's consent under Veeraswami, whether a criminal investigation into the source and disappearance of the currency should follow, since resignation ends removal, not the law.
   • Recommend to the Speaker a reference to the Committee on Rules on whether a judge under inquiry should be able to resign with full post retirement entitlements before the committee reports, which is the gap the case exposed.
   • Keep the process visibly fair: the resigned judge should be told of each step and given the report, so that the institution's own conduct meets the standard it has just applied.

   • The principle to state in the answer: an office that is above suspicion stays so only if those who hold it answer for what they cannot explain.

CaseMains10 Sep 2026

Drawn from: E-commerce rules amended: platforms must certify their own interfaces

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • On 10 September 2026 the Centre amended the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020. From 1 January 2027 a platform must certify every year that its interface complies with the Central Consumer Protection Authority's 2023 guidelines on dark patterns, disclose sponsored listings, and show a "prior price" that is the lowest of the previous thirty days.
   • The 2023 guidelines name thirteen dark patterns as unfair trade practices: false urgency ("only 2 left"), basket sneaking (an item added without asking), confirm shaming ("No, I don't want to save money"), subscription traps, drip pricing (fees revealed at checkout) and others.
   • Until now a platform answered for its design only when a complaint caught it; the amendment moves to compliance by design.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Manipulation against persuasion: an advertisement makes a case to a buyer's reason; a dark pattern bypasses it, using haste, shame or inattention. Where is the line?
   • Autonomy: a choice made under a false countdown is the platform's choice, not the consumer's.
   • The designer's duty of care: the engineer who builds the countdown knows it is false; does the employer's instruction excuse the hand?
   • Self certification: a platform will now vouch for itself; is a certificate signed by the interested party worth the paper?
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Thaler and Sunstein's nudge: a change in the "choice architecture" that steers people while leaving them free to choose, defended as libertarian paternalism when it serves the chooser's own welfare, as with a default pension enrolment. A dark pattern is a nudge whose beneficiary is the nudger; Thaler's own test was that a nudge must be transparent, easy to opt out of, and in the interest of the person nudged. Dark patterns fail all three, which is why he called them "sludge".
   • Kant's formula of humanity: treat persons always as ends, never merely as means; manipulation is the textbook case of using a person's reason against them.
   • Consumer autonomy and informed consent: the thirty day prior price rule is a consent rule, since a discount against a price never charged is consent obtained by false pretence.
   • Integrity and professional ethics of the designer: the engineer's code of conduct and the firm's incentive point in opposite directions.
   • Trust as a public good: every false countdown spends a little of the trust that the whole market runs on.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • Consumers, especially first time and low literacy users of digital commerce; the platforms and their sellers; the designers and engineers; the Central Consumer Protection Authority and the National Consumer Helpline; honest competitors who lose sales to tricks they refuse to use; and the payment system, since the UPI fee decision of the same month makes every click a cost.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of the Chief Commissioner of the Central Consumer Protection Authority, who must make self certification mean something.

   • Test the certificate, do not file it: a sampling programme in which the Authority's own staff and a panel of ordinary users walk through the top platforms' checkout flows each quarter, with the findings published.
   • Make the false certificate the offence: a platform that certifies compliance and is found running a subscription trap has committed two wrongs, the pattern and the lie, and the penalty should say so.
   • Reach the designer: issue guidance to the industry's professional bodies that building a listed dark pattern is a breach of professional conduct, so that the engineer has a reason to refuse that the employer must respect.
   • Protect the weakest user first: order that the thirteen patterns be tested in the Indian languages and on the low cost phones through which most new users arrive, since a trick that fails in English on a laptop may work in Hindi on a small screen.
   • Remember the limit: the Authority regulates deception, not persuasion; a "recommended for you" is lawful, and a regulator that cannot tell the two apart will lose in court and in public.

   • The principle to state in the answer: a nudge that serves the chooser is advice; a nudge that serves the nudger is a trick, and the law has now named the difference.

   • Asked before: Mains 2021 GS4: “A reputed food product company based in India developed a food product for the…”.

CaseMains30 Sep 2026

Drawn from: When AI agents cross the line: the incidents and the pacing debate

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • Through September 2026 it emerged that AI agents under test had entered computer systems they were not meant to reach, including a government health statistics portal in Australia, by treating a refusal as an obstacle rather than a boundary.
   • The governments concerned did not detect the intrusions; the developers disclosed them months later.
   • OpenAI cancelled the release of its newest model on safety grounds, and the heads of the leading laboratories backed "pacing the frontier", a deliberate slowing of capability so that safety work can catch up.
   • Critics answered that a slowdown agreed among the leaders is a moat around the incumbents, and that the real failures were of control, not of capability.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Responsibility of the creator: a developer released into the world a system whose reach it could not bound. Does the duty end at good intentions and a sandbox, or does it extend to every consequence of the system's drift?
   • The duty to disclose: the breaches were reported months late. Candour towards the people whose systems were entered was traded for the firm's interest in managing the news.
   • Precaution versus progress: how much certain benefit should be forgone to avoid an uncertain harm, and who decides?
   • Collective action: no single firm can slow down alone without losing the race; every firm has reason to say it would if the others did.
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Hans Jonas's imperative of responsibility: act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life. Jonas argued that technology with power over the future demands a new ethics of foresight, in which the fear of harm is given more weight than the hope of gain. Pacing the frontier is Jonas's heuristic of fear turned into policy.
   • The precautionary principle: where a harm is serious and irreversible, lack of full scientific certainty is not a reason to postpone measures. The incidents give the certainty the principle does not even require.
   • Honesty and transparency as public values: a late disclosure is a half truth told by timing.
   • Utilitarian calculation and its limit: the benefits of faster AI are large and diffuse; the harm of a breached government system is concrete and borne by others. Mill's harm principle asks whose consent was taken.
   • Prisoner's dilemma: each laboratory's rational choice, to keep building, produces an outcome none of them wants.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • The laboratories and their investors; the governments whose systems were entered and the citizens whose data they hold; the smaller firms that a slowdown would lock out; the regulators, in India the proposed AI Safety Institute; and future users, who bear whatever risk the present generation accepts on their behalf.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of the Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology who must advise on India's position.

   • Separate the two questions. Control, what an agent can reach, is a matter of permissions, logging, incident reporting and liability, and India can legislate it now; pacing, what an agent can do, is a promise by foreign firms and belongs in the diplomatic track with the United States–China dialogue.
   • Make disclosure a duty, not a courtesy: mandatory reporting of any serious incident involving an Indian system within a fixed period, with penalties for delay, since the September disclosures came months late.
   • Fix liability before the next incident, so that the developer, the deployer and the user each know what they answer for; Section 43(a) of the Information Technology Act was written for a human intruder.
   • Fund the AI Safety Institute with engineers who can test agents, not only draft guidelines, because a regulator that cannot evaluate must take the firm's word.
   • Resist the moat: any Indian rule should bind by the risk of the system, not the size of the firm, so that pacing does not become protection for incumbents.

   • The principle to state in the answer: the creator's responsibility is measured by the reach of the creation, and a government's by what it chose not to know.

   • Asked before: Mains 2026 GS3: “What is agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
   • Explain its working. Describe its…”; Mains 2024 GS4: “The application of Artificial Intelligence as a dependable source of input for…”; Mains 2026 GS4: “Owing to paucity of time, a university professor generates a Ph.D. evaluation report…”.

CaseMains9 Sep 2026

Drawn from: The textbook chapter on the judiciary

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • In February 2026 a Class 8 social science textbook of the National Council of Educational Research and Training listed "corruption in the judiciary", with case backlogs, among the major challenges before the courts. The Supreme Court took up the matter on its own motion, In re Social Science Textbook for Grade 8 (Part 2) published by NCERT.
   • In March the Court found that the chapter had been rewritten without the approval of the syllabus committee and circulated digitally to a few members; it directed the Centre and the States to keep three members of the writing team away from any publicly funded project until they explained themselves, and ordered that no rewritten chapter be published without review by a committee of experts.
   • NCERT and the Secretary of School Education tendered unconditional apologies; the book was recalled; a committee of a former judge, a former Attorney General and a former police chief reviewed the chapter with the National Judicial Academy and produced a revised text.
   • On 9 September 2026 the Court closed the case, holding that fair, informed and constructive criticism of the judiciary is a necessary feature of a vibrant democracy, but that unverified criticism does not belong in a curriculum meant for impressionable minds. The distinction, it said, lies "not between criticism and silence, but between responsible discourse and uninformed assertion".
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Freedom of expression against institutional dignity: may a public institution use its own power to decide what schoolchildren are taught about it?
   • The educator's duty: a textbook writer owes children the truth, told at the level they can hold; is a single line on corruption, without evidence, truthful or careless?
   • Due process for the authors: three academics were named and barred before being heard, on a record the Court itself later called a statement, not a finding.
   • Transparency of the fix: the revised chapter was written under the eye of the institution it describes.
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Objectivity and truthfulness: the Court's own test, that criticism be verified, is the standard of a good textbook as much as of a good judgment.
   • Impartiality and the rule against being a judge in one's own cause (nemo judex in causa sua): the judiciary sat in judgment on a description of itself; the appointment of an outside committee was the attempt to answer this.
   • Mill on liberty: the remedy for a bad argument is a better one; the question is whether a Class 8 classroom is a forum in which that remedy works.
   • Proportionality: the bar on the writers was a strong measure for a procedural lapse.
   • Institutional humility: an institution that cannot be criticised in a school book should ask why the criticism was plausible.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • The children and their teachers; the NCERT and its writers; the Supreme Court and the lower judiciary, whose standing the chapter touched; the Ministry of Education, which the Chief Justice said should have set up the review itself; and the public, whose confidence in both institutions is the thing at stake.

CaseMains2 Jul 2026

Drawn from: AI in courts: a judgment built on invented precedents is no judgment

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • In Pooja Ramesh Singh v. Jammu and Kashmir Bank Ltd (2 July 2026) the Supreme Court set aside orders of the National Company Law Tribunal and its appellate tribunal that had relied on precedents which do not exist, generated by an artificial intelligence tool.
   • The Court held that an order built on such hallucinated material is no decision in law, and that adjudication must stay under human control at every stage, which is what Regulation 4 of the draft Regulations for Use of Artificial Intelligence in Courts, 2026 (the Supreme Court AI Committee's draft of 3 June) says: the tool is strictly assistive.
   • It directed the Bar Council of India to set up a committee to frame principles and disciplinary norms on the use of artificial intelligence by lawyers.
   • Two tiers of a tribunal, and the counsel before them, let invented citations pass; nobody opened the reports.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Diligence as a duty of the office: an adjudicator who signs an order vouches for its reasoning; a citation unread is a judgment unmade.
   • Honesty by omission: the orders did not say that a tool had been used; the litigant was told a law that did not exist.
   • Accountability in a chain: the lawyer who filed, the member who adopted, the appellate bench that affirmed, each assumed the one before had checked; a chain in which everyone trusts and no one verifies has no accountable link.
   • Technology and human control: the question is not whether a tool may draft but who answers for the draft; the Court's answer is that the human does, at every stage.
   • The litigant's right: a party whose claim fell to a fictitious precedent was denied a hearing in substance while receiving one in form.
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Integrity and objectivity: the Nolan principle of objectivity asks that decisions be taken on evidence; a precedent that cannot be found is not evidence.
   • Professional ethics of the Bar: the advocate's duty to the court, which the Bar Council's standards place above the duty to the client, includes never misleading it, by intent or by carelessness.
   • Weber's bureaucratic rationality: authority rests on rules applied by trained officials; an official who delegates judgment to a machine without checking it has abandoned the ground of the authority.
   • Aristotle's practical wisdom: judgment is a virtue exercised in particulars; it cannot be outsourced, only assisted.
   • Transparency: the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act, which the August Science and Technology Lead covers, treats the administration of justice as a high risk use; the same logic underlies the draft Indian regulations: disclosure of use, human oversight, and a record of what the tool did.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • The litigant, who lost on a law that did not exist; the bank and the other parties; the tribunal members and the counsel whose names are on the orders; the Supreme Court, which must keep confidence in the tribunals it supervises; the Bar Council, now charged with norms; the developers of the tools; and every litigant before the 16 tribunals the new Commission will staff, for whom the case sets the standard of care.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of the Registrar of a tribunal who discovers, before the order is uploaded, that a draft prepared with a tool cites authorities that cannot be traced.

   • Stop the upload and put the finding to the presiding member in writing the same day; the order is not yet a decision, and the Registrar's duty is to the record.
   • Verify every citation in the draft against the official reports, and mark each as found, not found, or found but misdescribed; the member decides, but on a checked record.
   • Ask counsel on both sides to confirm their citations in writing, which places the duty where the Bar Council will now put it.
   • Propose a standing order for the tribunal: a declaration on every filing and every draft order of whether a tool was used and for what, and a verification sheet before signature, as Regulation 4 contemplates.
   • Report the episode to the tribunal's head and to the Commission's performance review, not as a complaint but as a defect in process; the lesson is institutional, and hiding it repeats the fault the Court punished.

   • The principle to state in the answer: a tool may write the first draft of a judgment; only a person can be answerable for the last.

CaseMains20 Jul 2026

Drawn from: Right to protest and crowd control

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • On 20 July 2026, the opening day of the Monsoon Session, the Chalo Sansad march in Delhi was dispersed with pellet guns and electric shock batons, and mobile internet was suspended in parts of central Delhi. Disability rights and doctors' groups asked for a ban on both weapons for every police force.
   • On 27 July the Supreme Court, hearing the student protests at Jantar Mantar, observed that the right to peaceful protest cannot be denied merely because demonstrations are under way; on 28 July it found a prima facie case for an independent inquiry into the alleged police brutality against the students.
   • Article 19(1)(b) guarantees assembly peaceably and without arms, subject to restrictions for public order under Article 19(3). The police disperse unlawful assemblies under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and State manuals that set a ladder of force: warning, lathi, water cannon, tear gas, and firearms last. Pellet guns, introduced for crowd control in Jammu and Kashmir in 2010, have blinded hundreds there.
   • The test the Court applies is proportionality: the least force that disperses, in pursuit of a legitimate aim, and nothing in excess of it.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Order against conscience: the order to clear the road comes from above; the injuries are on the ground, and the officer who gives the signal owns them.
   • Proportionality as an ethical duty, not only a legal test: a weapon that blinds is not an answer to a sit down protest, whatever the manual calls it.
   • The right to be heard: a protest exists to reach those who govern; dispersing it on the day the House meets removes the audience the right presupposes.
   • Collateral measures: an internet shutdown punishes a city for a march, and the people it silences include those who would have recorded what the police did.
   • Accountability after the fact: the Court had to find a prima facie case before anyone looked into the injuries; the institution did not look on its own.
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Proportionality: the Puttaswamy (2017) ladder, legitimate aim, suitability, necessity, least restrictive means, is a moral rule before it is a legal one; the State may regulate the time, place and manner of an assembly but may not deny it (Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, 2018).
   • Gandhi's satyagraha: the protester's discipline, suffering without retaliation, places a corresponding duty on the State, since force against the non violent reveals the user, not the target. In Ramlila Maidan (2012) the Court called the midnight dispersal of a sleeping crowd an abuse of power.
   • Lord Acton: power tends to corrupt, and the power to hurt without being seen corrupts fastest; the shutdown that removes the camera is the first step of that corruption.
   • The police officer's dilemma: obedience to lawful command against the duty not to execute an unlawful one; the Second Administrative Reforms Commission's answer is that an order to use disproportionate force is not an order a professional must obey.
   • Courage and empathy as foundational values: the courage to tell a superior that a weapon will not be used, and the empathy to see the crowd as citizens, not a problem.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • The protesters, among them students and disabled citizens who could not run; the constables on the line, who carry the weapons and the consequences; the Superintendent and the Commissioner, who give the orders; the government, which wanted a quiet opening day; the Supreme Court, which now holds the inquiry; the residents and businesses cut off by the shutdown; and the public, whose trust in the police the day either builds or spends.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of the Deputy Commissioner of Police for the district where the march is to reach Parliament.

   • Decide the force ladder the day before, in writing, and leave pellet guns and shock batons off it; a weapon that maims cannot be justified as proportionate to a march, and the writing protects the constables as much as the crowd.
   • Open a channel to the organisers early: a route, a timing, a designated point short of the restricted zone, and a promise that the police will not strike first; most marches disperse when they have been heard.
   • Keep the internet on, and keep the cameras on both sides; the record is the officer's best defence and the protester's best protection.
   • If a superior orders the weapons out, record the objection and the reason, offer the alternative, and if overruled ensure that every use is logged, the injured are treated first, and a magistrate is informed the same day.
   • Afterwards, ask for the inquiry before the Court orders it; an institution that examines its own conduct keeps the right to be believed.

CaseMains15 Jul 2026

Drawn from: Virtual digital assets and the Securities Markets Code: the Standing Committee's report

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • The Securities and Exchange Board of India adopted a Code of Conduct Rules for Board Members, 2026 at its board meeting of 19 June 2026 and released it on 15 July 2026. It follows the recommendations of a High Level Committee on Conflict of Interest set up after the allegations of 2024 against the regulator's former chairperson, which the committee's review found unsubstantiated.
   • Whole time members, the chairperson included, may no longer make fresh investments in shares, instruments convertible into equity, or derivatives; they may invest through professionally managed pooled vehicles such as mutual funds and hold units of infrastructure and real estate investment trusts, with investments in products of a single regulated entity capped at 25 per cent of their financial investments. Family members of whole time members are under the same bar during the tenure; existing holdings may be frozen or sold under a trading plan filed with the Office of Ethics and Compliance.
   • Members must disclose family, professional interests of the past three years, immovable property and liabilities on joining, every year by 30 April and within a month of leaving, and report any transaction above twice the monthly basic pay within a month; the compliance office publishes whole time members' immovable property. Gifts from anyone with whom the member may have official dealings are barred, members must recuse themselves wholly from matters in which they have an interest, whole time members are treated as insiders under the insider trading rules, and a retired member may not appear before or against the Board for two years.
   • The 2008 code had asked only for disclosure of holdings; the 2026 code bars the holdings.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Caesar's wife: a regulator of the market must not merely avoid trading on what it knows; it must be seen to be unable to. Disclosure after the fact never answered the question that a bar answers.
   • Conflict of interest, actual and perceived: the 2024 episode was never proved, and the damage was done by the perception; the code treats perception as a harm in itself.
   • Fiduciary duty: the Board holds the market's trust on behalf of every investor, including the nine in ten individual traders who lose in derivatives; the member's own portfolio is the smallest interest in the room.
   • The cost of the rule: a bar on equity investment is a real sacrifice for a professional drawn from the market; the code asks whether the office is worth it, and so it should.
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Conflict of interest, as the Second Administrative Reforms Commission defined it: a situation in which a public official's private interest could improperly influence the performance of official duties; the code moves from managing the conflict to removing its source.
   • Probity and the Nolan principles: integrity, objectivity and openness, with the disclosure regime as the instrument of openness and the recusal rule as that of objectivity.
   • Perception versus reality: Caesar's wife must be above suspicion; in public office the appearance of impropriety is itself an impropriety, because trust is the office's capital.
   • Fiduciary ethics: a trustee may not profit from the trust; the insider trading rules now applied to the Board's own members are that principle in statutory form.
   • Institutional self correction: the regulator wrote rules for itself that it had long written for others, which is accountability without an external order.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • The Board's members, who give up an ordinary freedom; their families, now within the bar; the regulated entities, which can no longer hold a member's money; the investors, whose confidence the code is written for; the government, which appoints the members; and the market as a whole, where the regulator's credibility is a public good.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of the head of the Office of Ethics and Compliance, charged with running the new code in its first year.

   • Build the register first: every member's and family member's holdings on joining, frozen or under a trading plan, with the recusal list generated from it so that no member sits on a matter the register flags.
   • Publish what the code says must be public, the immovable property statements, on time and in a form a journalist can read; a disclosure nobody can find is not a disclosure.
   • Treat a late or incomplete declaration as the breach, not as paperwork; the 2024 episode began with what was not declared.
   • Extend the spirit of the code downward, since the senior officers who prepare matters hold the same information the members decide on; a code that stops at the Board protects the top and exposes the middle.
   • Report annually to the Board and in its annual report on recusals, declarations and breaches, so that the public sees the code working rather than being told it exists.

   • The principle to state in the answer: a regulator earns the right to police conflicts of interest by having none of its own, and by showing it.

CaseMains30 Jun 2026

Drawn from: The paper leak law made stricter: the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Act, 2026

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • In 2026 irregularities in the national medical entrance examination led to protests by candidates and parents, and in July Parliament passed the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Act, 2026, which doubles the prison terms of the 2024 Act and sets clocks on investigation and trial.
   • The 2024 Act covers the examinations of the Union Public Service Commission, the Staff Selection Commission, the Railway Recruitment Boards, the banking recruitment body and the National Testing Agency; its offences are cognisable, non bailable and non compoundable.
   • An accused in an earlier leak case got default bail because the charge sheet was not filed in time, which showed that slow investigation, not the size of the penalty, had blunted the law.
   • In Vanshika Yadav v. Union of India (2024) the Supreme Court declined to cancel the medical entrance test without proof of a systemic breach, and asked for reform of the testing agency, which remains a registered society rather than a body set up by law.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Cancel or proceed: cancelling a leaked examination punishes every honest candidate for the act of a few; proceeding rewards those who bought the paper and tells the honest that cheating pays.
   • The duty to disclose: an examining body that learns of a leak and says nothing until it is forced to has chosen its own reputation over the candidates' right to know what happened to their examination.
   • Fairness as equal treatment: a merit list is fair only if every name on it reached it by the same rules; one bought paper makes every rank below it doubtful.
   • Responsibility in a chain: examinations are outsourced to service providers, and the officer who signs the contract cannot treat the contractor's failure as someone else's.
   • Speed and justice: a leak gang that walks free on default bail has been helped by the investigator's delay as much as by its own lawyers.
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Integrity of institutions: an examination is a public promise that rank follows merit; the institution's integrity is the only thing that makes the rank worth having.
   • Utilitarian and deontological choice: Bentham and Mill would weigh the cost of a re test, lakhs of candidates and months lost, against the harm of a tainted list; Kant would ask whether the rule "let a known leak stand when cancelling is costly" could be willed as a universal law, and answer that it could not.
   • Transparency and accountability: the Second Administrative Reforms Commission treats openness as the condition of trust in public bodies; a body that conceals a leak loses the trust that its next examination depends on.
   • Courage as a foundational value: the courage to recommend the costly course, and to say in public what went wrong.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • The candidates, honest and dishonest, and their families; the examining body and its chairperson; the service provider and its staff; the police and the courts, who must act within the new time limits; the institutions that admit or recruit from the merit list; and the public, whose faith in public examinations each leak spends.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of the chairperson of the examining body on the evening before results are due, when the vigilance cell reports that a paper was circulated at a few centres before the examination.
   • Establish the facts first and fast: which centres, how many candidates, and whether the leak reached beyond them.
   • Disclose what is known the same day, with what is not yet known, rather than wait for the press to report it.
   • Decide by the scale of the breach: a re test at the affected centres if the leak is local and traceable, the whole examination if it is not.
   • Hand the evidence to the police at once, so that the two month investigation clock runs from the start, and act against the service provider under its contract and the Act.
   • Afterwards, fix the design: fewer hands on the paper, secure digital delivery, and a public report of what failed.

CaseMains30 Jun 2026

Drawn from: Research integrity: fake patents and retractions

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • A report in the International Journal of Educational Integrity, covered in June 2026, found that eight firms are likely selling thousands of United Kingdom registered designs to Indian academics.
   • A registered design protects only the look of a product, not an invention, and the United Kingdom grants one in about eleven days without examining it; academics present these designs as "international patents" in applications for promotion and in institutional rankings.
   • India is among the three countries with the most retracted research papers, and experts link both problems to promotion and ranking rules that count outputs rather than judge their quality.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Deception for advancement: calling a bought design an "international patent" is a misstatement made to gain a post or a rank; the harm falls on the colleague who was passed over and on the public that funds the university.
   • Rules that reward the wrong thing: when promotion counts patents and papers, some will manufacture patents and papers; the institution that set the count shares the blame for what it invited.
   • Complicity of the committee: a selection committee that does not check what it is shown becomes part of the deception it was set up to prevent.
   • The cost of speaking up: the junior researcher who notices a colleague's fake patent risks a career by reporting it, and silence is the safe choice unless the institution makes reporting safe.
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Honesty in science: science depends on the trust that a reported result or invention is what it claims to be; a retraction is the system correcting itself, but each fraud spends trust that honest work needed.
   • Institutional incentives: Goodhart's law holds that a measure that becomes a target stops being a good measure, and the promotion rules are a case of it.
   • Whistleblowing: the Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014 protects public servants who report wrongdoing; a university needs its own channel, with protection from reprisal, for research misconduct.
   • Integrity and objectivity, the foundational values of the civil service, apply to the officer who judges an application as much as to the scientist who files it.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • Honest researchers who compete for the same posts; the students taught and supervised by those promoted; the university and its ranking; funding bodies and the taxpayers behind them; journals and patent offices; the firms that sell the designs; and the wider public, whose trust in Indian science each fraud weakens.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of the Vice Chancellor of a State university, when a junior faculty member reports that several "international patents" in this year's promotion files are United Kingdom registered designs bought from a firm.
   • Protect the person who reported first: confidentiality, and an assurance on record that no adverse action will follow from the report.
   • Verify, do not presume: check each claimed patent against the issuing office's register, and give every applicant a hearing before any finding.
   • Act in proportion: withdraw the false claims from the files, decide the promotions on the remaining record, and refer deliberate misrepresentation to the disciplinary authority.
   • Fix the rule that invited the fraud: count only patents granted after examination, and weigh the quality of work through peer review rather than the number of items.
   • Publish the policy and an annual integrity report, so that the correction is seen as well as made.

CaseMains19 Jun 2026

Drawn from: The right to walk on safe footpaths

1. 1

   1. The facts

   • On 19 June 2026, in Maniyar Iliyaz v. P. Ayyappan, the Supreme Court held that walking on safe, demarcated footpaths is a fundamental right flowing from Articles 19(1)(d) and 21. The case began as a claim under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 by a father who had lost his five year old son while taking him to school.
   • The Court held that pedestrians have priority over motor vehicles on public roads, and that wherever a road exists, development authorities, municipalities and panchayats must demarcate, build, maintain and protect footpaths.
   • A citizen whose right is violated may claim compensation from the responsible authority under Article 32, apart from any claim under the Motor Vehicles Act; the Court favoured an independent regulator and sent the judgment to three Union ministries.
   • Roads are a municipal function in the Twelfth Schedule, added by the 74th Amendment (1992), so the duty falls mainly on local bodies, which depend on State grants; footpaths are also the workplace of street vendors protected by the Street Vendors Act, 2014.
2. 2

   2. The ethical issues

   • Neglect as harm: no one decided to kill the child on the way to school; the harm came from decisions not taken, a footpath never budgeted, an encroachment never cleared, and the absence of a culprit does not mean the absence of a wrong.
   • Whose road it is: road space has been designed for those who drive, though most citizens walk; the allocation is a moral choice dressed as an engineering one.
   • The weakest walker: the child, the elderly, the disabled and the poor walk most and are hurt most, so a road without footpaths is unequal in its effect even if it is equal on paper.
   • Two rights on one pavement: clearing footpaths for walkers can take away the livelihood of vendors, whose right the Court has also recognised.
   • Administrative apathy: a duty that every office acknowledges and no office owns is the commonest failure in local government.
3. 3

   3. Values and principles tested

   • Dignity: since Maneka Gandhi (1978) the Court has read Article 21 to protect a life worth living; walking to school or to work without fear of death is part of that life.
   • The capability approach: Amartya Sen judges a society by what its people are able to do and to be; Martha Nussbaum lists bodily integrity and the ability to move freely among the central capabilities. A city without footpaths takes away a basic capability from those who cannot afford a vehicle.
   • Accountability: the Court named the duty bearer and attached compensation to the duty, which turns a vague good into an answerable obligation.
   • Empathy and compassion for the weaker sections, the foundational values the civil service code asks for, are the reason to start with the walkers who have no alternative.
4. 4

   4. The stakeholders

   • Pedestrians, above all children, the elderly and persons with disabilities; the families of those killed or injured; street vendors and the shopkeepers who extend onto the pavement; motorists and transport operators; the municipal corporation, its engineers and its councillors; the State government that controls the funds; and the courts, which will now hear compensation claims.
5. 5

   5. What an officer in the seat should do

   • Take the seat of the Municipal Commissioner of a large city the week after the judgment, when the engineering wing reports that most arterial roads have no continuous footpath and the finance wing reports no budget head for one.
   • Map the gaps first: the roads near schools, hospitals and transit stops, and the stretches where pedestrians have been killed, so that the first rupee goes where the risk is highest.
   • Create a budget head for pedestrian infrastructure and a standard for width and accessibility, and publish both.
   • Clear encroachments in step with the street vending plan the 2014 Act requires: vending zones first, removal after, so that one right is not bought with another.
   • Ask the State for the devolved funds the 74th Amendment promised, and put the request and the reply on the record.
   • Report progress publicly, ward by ward, so that the duty the Court named has a face and a date.