Home

Featured Articles

Oct 24, 2026
Lt Gen L N Singh (Retd)

Manipur’s Expanding Conflict & Recommended Strategies

Manipur’s prolonged ethnic crisis has entered a dangerous new phase. What began on 3 May 2023 as a violent confrontation between the Meitei and Kuki communities has evolved into a wider conflict involving the Nagas. By mid-2026, and again in October 2026, the emergence of violent Naga–Kuki confrontations, alongside the killing of Meiteis by Kuki militants, had further inflamed an already fractured state. This has compounded the challenges facing both the state and the Centre. The crisis reflects a convergence of ethnic insecurity, the proliferation of armed groups, and the weakening of institutions that once connected Manipur’s diverse populations. From a Bipolar Conflict to Multiple Fronts The latest escalation has been particularly alarming because of renewed clashes between Nagas and Kukis. Since February 2026, clashes, abductions, and the burning of homes have transformed the security landscape. Nearly 60 people have reportedly been killed since beginning of this year. The latest escalation is the killings of three Meiteis by Kuki militants on 19 October. The renewed violence is not confined to isolated confrontations. What began as a local dispute between Nagas and Kukis in the general area of Litan soon spread west of the Imphal–Dimapur highway, remaining largely confined to that area for some time. In September and October, however, it spread east of the highway into Tangkhul areas, including Kamjong and Chasad. The killing of Meiteis by Kuki militants further reignited the Meitei–Kuki conflict. On 19 October 2026, at the Khongban Sunurok Uyok hill range near Nungsum village in Khundrakpam Assembly Constituency, Imphal East, along the Kangpokpi–Imphal East border, people who had gone to collect firewood were reportedly fired upon by Kuki militants. Three people were killed and three injured. Angered residents brought the bodies to the entrance gate of the Chief Minister’s official residence. Since then, Meiteis have been demanding justice. Land Disputes and the Availability of Weapons Among Groups in Talks with the Government At the heart of these confrontations lies a dispute over land ownership. The absence of accepted mechanisms for land demarcation and adjudication compounds the problem. Renewed violence has also encouraged the militarisation of local communities. The availability of weapons among groups engaged in talks with the government, as well as weapons reportedly brought from militant groups in Myanmar, has made it easier for local disputes to escalate into armed confrontations. Reports of beheadings, mutilation, abductions, and hostage-taking have further deepened mutual distrust. The result is a cycle in which attacks trigger retaliatory mobilisation, retaliation reinforces collective insecurity, and community pressure makes any conciliatory approach politically costly. The Government of India has Suspension of Operations (SoO) agreements with some militant groups. However, cadres belonging to these groups are reportedly permitted to retain sophisticated, military-grade weapons even after signing the agreements. SoO cadres are supposed to remain in designated camps. More than ten such camps are reportedly located in positions overlooking or dominating many of the approaches to the Imphal Valley. This raises an obvious question: why are cadres who have entered an agreement intended to support peace permitted to retain so many sophisticated weapons? The government also pays for camp maintenance and stipends. If these groups have entered the SoO process for peace, what purpose do their weapons serve, and against whom might they be used? Furthermore, how can the government be confident that these cadres will remain in their designated camps when security forces do not guard the gates or perimeter? The camps appear to operate on a system of trust. Such a model depends on compliance by the cadres; it cannot rely on trust alone. If the SoO framework is to be credible, the movement of cadres and the storage of weapons must be subject to effective oversight. According to local media reports, following the 19 October attack, the CRPF visited the Sanai SoO camp, located near the site of the attack. The camp was reportedly expected to house about 150 cadres. The CRPF allegedly found one listed cadres, and a small number of unlisted people were present. If accurate, this raises questions about compliance and whether similar issues may exist at other SoO camps too. The SoO framework therefore appears to have serious shortcomings and requires a fundamental review rather than automatic extension. Insurgent Fragmentation and the Myanmar Connection Manipur’s internal crisis cannot be separated from developments across the Myanmar border. The porous border offers armed groups opportunities for movement, shelter, and access to illicit arms supplies, although the precise role of individual networks in particular incidents require independent verification. The strategic significance is clear: instability in Manipur risks becoming entangled with cross-border insurgency, trafficking, and the changing security environment in Myanmar. It also threatens border trade and transport corridors, including the Moreh area, which is important to India’s connectivity ambitions in Southeast Asia. Governance Problems The conflict has increasingly impaired the functioning of the state itself. Officials from different communities may be unable to serve in areas perceived as hostile. This fragmentation undermines the impartial delivery of public services and weakens the state’s ability to exercise authority across its territory. The formation of a new government under Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh in February 2026, with Deputy Chief Ministers representing the Kuki and Naga communities, was an attempt to broaden political representation. Yet representation at the top cannot, by itself, overcome entrenched insecurity. Renewed violence, political differences, and a limited ministerial structure have continued to constrain effective governance. The Union government’s engagement, including the Chief Minister’s meetings with senior central leaders in October, signals recognition of the crisis. Nevertheless, repeated security deployments and political interventions have not yet produced a durable settlement. The Way Forward: Security Must Lead to Political Reconciliation During various discussions on resolving Manipur’s problems, many experts argue that dialogue among the various ethnic groups is the best approach. While dialogue is essential, meaningful talks require preparation, confidence-building, and a willingness to soften entrenched positions. This may require robust security operations to disarm armed cadres and prevent them from intimidating communities, alongside appropriate political and financial incentives. Immediate priorities include disarming, settlement of displaced people, removing so-called ‘buffer zones’, opening all roads to give freedom of travel, protecting vulnerable settlements, conducting credible investigations into killings and abductions, and enforcing the law impartially. Security operations must be accompanied by transparent communication to prevent rumours and collective reprisals from triggering further violence. Equally important is structured dialogue involving Meitei, Kuki, and Naga representatives, alongside civil society, women’s organisations, and local authorities with a view to restoring transport links, addressing buffer zones, enabling displaced people to return home, facilitating mixed-community administrative postings where feasible, and ensuring access to public services. This would help rebuild confidence in the state. New Delhi must also address the cross-border dimension through stronger border management, intelligence coordination, and cooperation against arms and narcotics trafficking, while recognising the limitations imposed by instability in Myanmar. A caution is that - in addressing Manipur’s crisis, those in power, sometimes, treat the mere absence of large-scale fighting as a return to peace. Recent events show how misleading that assumption can be. The state may appear outwardly functional while its communities remain separated by fear, its administration operates along ethnic lines, and its borderlands become increasingly vulnerable to armed actors. The central challenge is therefore not simply to suppress violence, but to restore a political and administrative order in which communities can coexist without relying on armed self-protection. Until that happens, Manipur’s conflict will remain a humanitarian tragedy and a significant strategic vulnerability on India’s eastern frontier.

Oct 21, 2026
Rudra Dubey

The Singularity Has Begun: Indian Scientists Must Command AI-Powered Virtual Armies—Before the Window Closes

In October 2026, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark delivered a stark message to economists and policymakers gathered at the IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok. The technological singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence accelerates scientific and technical progress faster than humans can comfortably follow, has already begun. He cited specific measures: scores on Humanity’s Last Exam, a battery of expert-level questions, rising from roughly 8 per cent at its 2025 launch to 67.7 per cent; FrontierMath, a set of research-grade mathematics problems, climbing from 2 per cent to approximately 94 per cent; and AI systems that not only solved unpublished theoretical physics problems but correctly identified errors in the reference answers supplied by human experts. These benchmark improvements are more than incremental: they indicate that greater-than-human intelligence is beginning to drive discovery in shorter periods.3 Clark’s comparison has particular significance for science and technology policymakers in India: the world’s approximately 10 million scientists will soon direct a billion, or even ten billion, virtual scientists. Intelligence and ideas are no longer scarce. The shortages are in physical laboratories, robotic experimental capacity, high-quality data loops, and the human judgment required to steer vast automated systems productively and safely. Countries that continue to organise science around the individual investigator painstakingly forming and testing hypotheses will be operating at human scale. Those that reorganise around scientists as commanders of virtual armies backed by automated laboratories will operate at machine scale. The productivity gap will compound quickly. In Clark’s assessment and in the view of many frontier researchers, countries have only a few years to adapt, rather than decades. Adding more AI tools to existing scientific work is not enough. The fundamental workflow of science is changing. The Collapse of the Classical Scientific Workflow For most of modern history, the basic unit of scientific progress has been the human researcher or small team. A scientist reads the literature, forms a hypothesis, designs an experiment, performs or supervises the physical work, analyzes the results, and iterates. Instrumentation improved, computational power grew, and collaboration expanded, yet the cognitive and manual bottlenecks remained human. Even large pharmaceutical R&D organisations essentially expanded this model: more scientists, more sequential stages, and more parallel projects, all still limited by human attention and laboratory throughput. That model is now breaking down. The emerging workflow reverses the division of labour: Large groups of specialised AI agents perform the bulk of hypothesis generation, literature synthesis across millions of papers, multi-omics data integration, molecular and protein design, experimental protocol optimisation, failure analysis, and iterative refinement. These agents can operate continuously, explore vast combinatorial spaces, and maintain perfect memory of prior attempts. Physical experimentation shifts toward robotised, closed-loop, self-driving laboratories capable of executing design–build–test–learn cycles with limited human intervention between cycles. High-throughput synthesis, automated cell culture, robotic screening, integrated analytics, and adaptive experimental design allow the virtual armies to receive rapid, high-volume feedback from the real world. The human scientist’s irreplaceable contributions become problem selection and framing, strategic direction of the AI agent groups, critical evaluation and correction of AI outputs, ethical and safety oversight, integration of tacit and contextual knowledge, and translation of validated discoveries into products, services, and clinical or industrial practice. Under this model, a single highly capable researcher can productively supervise the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of expert colleagues while keeping multiple automated laboratory systems running. The effective size of the scientific workforce is no longer limited primarily by the number of trained humans but by the availability of computing resources, high-quality data, automated experimental capacity, and people skilled at directing these systems. This change marks the early singularity in the life sciences and other fields. Not every domain will automate at the same rate. Wet biology remains messier than pure mathematics or certain areas of chemistry. Data quality, distribution shift, rare events, and the need for causal rather than correlative understanding continue to constrain pure in silico progress. Regulatory requirements, manufacturing scale-up, and clinical validation impose additional practical constraints. Human creativity in identifying truly novel questions and in exercising judgment under uncertainty will remain essential. Even so, the trend is clear: the fraction of scientific labour that can be productively performed by virtual agents is rising steeply, and the organisations that redesign their work accordingly will pull ahead. Evidence from around the world is already accumulating. Discovery programs built around AI or using it extensively have compressed the time from target identification to a preclinical candidate from the traditional multiyear span to 13–30 months in leading cases. More than 170 AI-originated programs are in the clinic. Early analyses show elevated Phase I success rates for some AI-discovered molecules. Agentic systems are being deployed across literature review, target prioritisation, molecular generation, trial design, and manufacturing optimisation. Self-driving laboratory concepts are moving from prototypes to working systems. Economic projections include tens of billions in annual value from generative and agentic AI in pharmaceuticals, potential double-digit productivity gains in clinical development, and the possibility of dozens of additional novel therapies over a decade. These projections rest on the assumption that the new workflows can expand. India’s Foundations: Substantial, Yet Oriented Toward the Old Model India has both ambition and policy tools. The national vision is to move from leadership by volume in generics, vaccines, and active pharmaceutical ingredients to leadership by value in biologics, biosimilars, complex generics, advanced therapies, and high-performance biomanufacturing, while growing the bioeconomy toward $300 billion by 2030 and substantially higher figures thereafter. Concrete strategies and resources include: Biopharma SHAKTI, a five-year program with a budget of ₹10,000 crore focused on biologics and biosimilars. It includes expansion of the National Institutes of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) (three new institutes and upgrades to seven existing ones), creation of a network of 1,000 accredited clinical trial sites, strengthening of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) with specialised scientific capacity, and support for discovery, development, and manufacturing infrastructure. The BioE3 Policy (Biotechnology for Economy, Environment and Employment), which targets high-performance biomanufacturing across six thematic areas, including precision biotherapeutics. Implementation centres on Bio-AI Hubs, Biofoundries, and Biomanufacturing Hubs, with significant public co-funding for private participation and multiple calls already supporting hundreds of projects. The ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation scheme, managed by the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) is designed to mobilise private capital for deep-tech projects at Technology Readiness Level 4 and above, explicitly including biotechnology, synthetic biology, pharmaceuticals, and AI applications. Early commitments through selected fund managers already run into thousands of crores. Complementary mechanisms such as the Promotion of Research and Innovation in Pharma & MedTech scheme, existing CSIR laboratory networks, DBT/BIRAC incubators and biofoundries (including a national network of biofoundries), GenomeIndia’s population-scale sequencing resource, a large manufacturing base with hundreds of USFDA-compliant facilities, and Global Capability Centres operated by many of the world’s leading life-sciences companies. India has hundreds of thousands of professionals across research, engineering, and manufacturing, plus a growing number of biotech startups. These resources give the country a strong foundation, but they are not yet organised around the singularity workflow. Most training still prepares scientists to be primary hypothesis generators and experimenters. Most laboratory infrastructure remains conventional rather than highly automated and closed-loop. Most funding and promotion metrics still reward traditional outputs. Clinical and translational capacity, while expanding, is not yet large enough for the volume of candidates that machine-scale discovery can generate. India is strengthening capacity within the classical model just as that model is being superseded. Fundamental Changes That Cannot Wait. Don’t Wait Until Rendered Obsolete If the diagnosis of an early singularity is even approximately correct, the required changes go beyond marginal efficiency improvements. They require restructuring how science is organised. First, the professional identity and training of the Indian scientist must change. Doctoral programs, NIPER curricula, CSIR and DBT institutional cultures, and evaluation systems need to treat the ability to direct large groups of AI agents and to operate or design automated laboratory workflows as core competencies. A scientist’s value will increasingly lie in the quality of the problems posed to the virtual army, the rigour with which outputs are examined, the efficiency with which automated experimental capacity is used, and the success with which discoveries are translated into practice. Promotion, tenure, and grant criteria should reflect these changes. Both institutional culture and technical practices must change, starting immediately in the institutions that train the next generation of researchers. Second, automated and self-driving laboratory capacity must be treated as critical national infrastructure. Virtual scientists without rapid, high-volume physical feedback loops produce limited real-world progress. A substantial portion of capital under Biopharma SHAKTI, BioE3 Biofoundry and Bio-AI Hub programs, and the RDI scheme should prioritise shared, high-throughput robotic platforms, integrated multi-omics and cellular assay systems, adaptive experimental design software, and nationally accessible automated facilities. The objective is enough experimental capacity for thousands of research groups to keep virtual scientists working productively. Scarcity of robot hours and automated wet-lab capacity will otherwise limit Indian scientific output. Third, clinical, regulatory, and translational infrastructure must expand in parallel. Faster preclinical discovery simply shifts the bottleneck to later stages if trial networks, ethics systems, regulatory review capacity, and manufacturing scale-up cannot absorb higher volumes of candidates. The planned expansion to 1,000 clinical trial sites and the strengthening of CDSCO are necessary but must be explicitly designed for higher-throughput, AI-originated pipelines, including greater use of hybrid and decentralised models, real-world evidence, and adaptive designs. Fourth, India must deliberately build sovereign advantages in data and models. Population diversity, clinical volume, and initiatives such as GenomeIndia are strategic resources. They should be converted into high-quality, privacy-preserving, multimodal datasets and domain-adapted foundation models that allow Indian-directed virtual scientists to outperform generic global models on problems of national relevance, including infectious disease, metabolic disorders, affordable advanced biologics, and regionally prevalent conditions. Bio-AI Hubs and public-private data collaborations should prioritise these datasets and models. Fifth, mission design, metrics, and governance across SHAKTI, BioE3, RDI, and related programs must be revised for the new workflow. Funding calls should score proposals on the scale of virtual scientific labour to be directed, the degree of laboratory automation, how closely the design–build–test–learn stages are linked, and the credibility of the path from discovery to practical use. Institutional performance indicators should reward increases in effective experimental capacity rather than solely traditional publication or patent counts. Public-private partnerships should broaden access to automated laboratories and the skills needed to direct AI agents rather than concentrate them in a few elite centres. Nuances, Risks, and the Cost of Gradualism Human insight remains relevant, and not every laboratory must be fully autonomous tomorrow. Biology is complex, and many experiments will still require skilled human hands and eyes. Safety, dual-use, and ethical considerations demand strong human oversight, while manufacturing and clinical requirements impose practical constraints. The transition will be uneven across disciplines and institutions. Premature or poorly governed automation could waste resources or introduce new failure modes. Data biases and model limitations must be actively managed. The greater risk, for the speed and scope, however, lies in gradualism. Treating AI as an incremental productivity tool while preserving the classical organisation of scientific labour will produce only modest gains and is a sure path to obsolescence. Meanwhile, leading groups elsewhere are already multiplying effective research capacity and shortening research cycles. The nations and institutions that first learn to direct virtual scientific armies and automated laboratories effectively will shape the next wave of therapeutics, agricultural solutions, industrial biotechnologies, and scientific tools. Those that delay will find themselves importing both the products and the platforms. India has the policy tools, skilled workforce, manufacturing base, and demographic scale to compete. It must now develop the organisation and infrastructure needed for the new scientific workflow. The scientist is no longer primarily the person who personally constructs and tests hypotheses. The scientist directs vast virtual workforces and keeps the robot laboratories running so that those workforces can deliver validated products and services faster than ever before. Making this transition is the main task facing India’s science ministries, NITI Aayog, DBT, DST, CSIR, ICMR, the leadership of Biopharma SHAKTI, BioE3, and the RDI scheme, and the directors of the nation’s research institutions. The singularity has begun, leaving little time to reorganise Indian science. Delay means accepting a widening gap by choosing not to adapt to the pace of effective scientific power.

UPI in the Era of Agentic Payments

Durga Puja in the North-East

'Foreign Hand': Myth, Excuse or Reality? The Hidden Hand: External Interference in India since 1947 Part 1

Featured Articles

Manipur’s Expanding Conflict & Recommended Strategies

The Singularity Has Begun: Indian Scientists Must Command AI-Powered Virtual Armies—Before the Window Closes

Reports View All

UK launches ‘Be Ready’ campaign, urges households to stock food, water and cash for emergencies

Rajnath Singh unveils Land Warfare Doctrine 2026, puts focus on AI and drone warfare

India condemns deadly Jordan Church shooting, pledges strong stand against terrorism

IRGC claims full control over Strait of Hormuz as Trump threatens fresh military strikes

Jamia shifts classes online amid student protests, ‘Free Kashmir’ slogans trigger political row

Four pilots died in mid-air as two Philippine Air Force training aircraft collide

Search

Top Authors

Archives

Featured Articles

Reports View All

Search

Podcast / Videos

Popular Posts

Top Authors

Archives