Saturday, July 25, 2026

The government wants a law making it a crime to insult India's national song. On July 24, 2026, Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai tabled the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026 in the Rajya Sabha (Parliament's upper house), seeking to give Vande Mataram the same legal shield the national anthem already carries. The 1971 law it amends allows up to three years in jail for desecrating national symbols. Left MPs including the CPI's P. Sandosh Kumar and John Brittas opposed the introduction, casting it as an attempt to "manufacture patriotism" and to change the subject from the NEET paper-leak row (via ANI).

That exam-leak fight has spilled into the streets. Delhi Police detained Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi and Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on July 21 as they led a sit-in near Prime Minister Narendra Modi's residence, demanding accountability for a leak of the NEET-UG 2026 medical entrance exam and the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Both were released after a few hours. The Union Cabinet has since cleared a stricter anti-paper-leak bill it plans to bring to Parliament next week (via Business Standard).

India's stock benchmarks cannot find the exit. The Sensex closed down 331.62 points at 76,059.77 and the Nifty 50 slipped to 23,767.45 on July 24, 2026, a fifth straight losing session and the longest such run in more than six months. The trigger sat offshore: Brent crude blew past $100 a barrel after fresh attacks on Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, a costly turn for a country that imports most of its oil, and one that dragged the rupee toward a record low near 96.5 to the dollar (via Business Standard).

The central bank, for its part, is telling everyone to keep calm. In its July bulletin, the Reserve Bank of India said the economy "remains resilient" despite global turbulence, pointing to steady domestic demand and rising foreign investment inflows. The RBI has held its repo rate (the rate at which it lends to commercial banks) at 5.25 percent for a third straight meeting, and Governor Sanjay Malhotra has called current inflation pressures "largely supply-side," signaling no rush to shift course even with the rupee under strain (via Business Standard).

India just joined a club of three. On July 18, 2026, the Hyderabad startup Skyroot Aerospace launched Vikram-1 from Sriharikota, the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit and a milestone that puts India alongside the United States and China as the only countries with a private company able to reach space. The four-stage, seven-storey vehicle, flying a mission named Aagaman ("arrival"), carried technology-demonstration payloads to low Earth orbit, including a handwritten postcard from Prime Minister Modi reading "Vande Mataram" (via Business Standard).

The bellwether of Indian IT, meanwhile, dialed down expectations. Infosys, the Bengaluru software giant that earns most of its revenue abroad, posted a first-quarter net profit of about 7,769 crore rupees (roughly $805 million), up 12.2 percent from a year earlier, on revenue of about 48,211 crore rupees (around $5 billion). Both figures missed analyst forecasts, and the company trimmed the top end of its full-year revenue-growth guidance to 1.5 to 3 percent, from 1.5 to 3.5 percent. One bright spot: AI-linked work now makes up 8.2 percent of revenue, up from 5.5 percent in February (via Business Standard).

South Gujarat is underwater. The town of Umargam in Valsad district recorded about 1,064 mm of rain in a single day, among the heaviest one-day totals ever logged in India, as an unusually fierce monsoon spell battered the state. More than 22,000 people were evacuated, a red alert covered 10 districts on July 24, 2026, and the army, the National Disaster Response Force and the Coast Guard joined rescues after the Madhuban Dam released water into already swollen rivers (via The Federal).

India's hospitals run on exhausted junior doctors, and the Supreme Court is about to weigh in. The court is set to hear a petition on July 31 seeking enforcement of a 1992 rule that caps resident doctors' hours at 12 a day and 48 a week, limits routinely ignored as trainees pull 70 to 100 hour weeks. In a linked case, the National Medical Commission told the court that seven medical colleges were found not paying interns and resident doctors their mandated stipends (via LiveLaw).

India's medal hunt in Glasgow is on. The Commonwealth Games brought India's first medal chances of the meet on July 24, 2026, across para powerlifting, artistic gymnastics and para swimming. This is a slimmed-down Games: host Glasgow cut cricket, hockey, badminton, shooting and wrestling, so several of India's usual medal engines are missing, though Olympic javelin champion Neeraj Chopra headlines the squad (via Olympics.com).

So close, and another loss. India went down to England by 27 runs in the third and deciding one-day international at Lord's, handing the hosts the series 2-1, even as Rohit Sharma smashed 138, his 34th ODI century and the first by an Indian batter at the ground. England's 388, powered by Ben Duckett's 141, proved just out of reach (via ESPNcricinfo).

Vikrant Massey is back in soft-romance mode. Musafir Cafe, which began streaming on Netflix on July 24, 2026, casts him as a software engineer chasing a writer's life, opposite Vedika Pinto and Mahima Makwana, in an adaptation of Divya Prakash Dubey's Hindi novel. Reviews were warm if not rapturous, crediting the leads' chemistry in what one critic called a charming show about love and life-altering choices (via Scroll.in).