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NL Hafta

NL Hafta

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Weekly wrap of events of the week peppered with context, commentary and opinion by a superstar panel. Click here to support Newslaundry: http://bit.ly/paytokeepnewsfree

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2558 - Hafta 607: Who Pays For UPI? Is The UCC Even ‘Uniform’?
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  • 2558 - Hafta 607: Who Pays For UPI? Is The UCC Even ‘Uniform’?


    This week on Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande and Rinchen Norbu are joined by Anupam Manur, Professor of Economics at the Takshashila Institution, and Mihira Sood, Supreme Court lawyer specialising in women’s rights.

    The panel opens the discussion by examining the government’s decision to introduce a 0.4% fee on UPI merchant transactions above Rs 2,000, asking what the move means for a payment system that has become central to everyday transactions in India.

    Anupam Manur acknowledges that UPI generates wider economic benefits, but argues that the current model also creates a problem: who ultimately bears the cost of running the system? He explains that the cost of operating UPI is substantial, while the government subsidises only a portion of it.

    Manur says, “When UPI came about, India was miles ahead of the world in some sense. It was truly revolutionary.” But he argues that the costs leave new entrants with insufficient incentive, which has affected private-sector innovation. “Private players are just not incentivized to innovate.”

    The discussion then moves from the economics of UPI to the politics of its messaging. Abhinandan argues that the government has often reduced complicated policy questions to easily marketable slogans: “I think the problem is, like many things that Mr. Modi does ever since he’s come, let’s count his slogans. He’s a fantastic ad man.”

    The panel then turns to the BJP’s push for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC).

    Mihira offers a qualified position. She makes clear that she supports the idea of a UCC in principle, particularly as a route towards greater equality.

    But she distinguishes that principle from the particular version being discussed. She says, “What I have a problem with is this particular type of Uniform Civil Code because it is not based in secularism and it is not based in feminism.”

    Rinchen questions whether we should even call this a ‘uniform civil code’, given the carve-outs that exist for Scheduled Tribes in states like Uttarakhand, where the BJP has implemented its version of it.

    He also argues that the focus on polygamy in the UCC debate distracts from the larger issue of inheritance rights for women. “This whole bigamy, this whole polygamy thing is a red herring, it’s overstated,” he adds, while Mihira breaks down the real legal questions surrounding inheritance if the BJP actually cared about women’s rights.


    Timecodes


    00:00:00 – Introduction

    00:07:03 – Headlines

    00:12:01 – MDR on UPI 

    00:44:03 – Anupam’s Recommendations

    00:48:32 – Manisha on Brazil politics 

    00:55:32 – UCC 

    01:25:52 – Mihira’s Recommendations

    01:28:32 – Letters

    01:46:08 – Recommendations 


    Check outprevious Hafta recommendations, references, songs and letters.


    Produced by Amit Pandey with production assistance from Saurav Kr. Ranjan & Sound by Anil Kumar.


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Sat, 19 Sep 2026 - 1h 53min
  • 2557 - NL Hafta 606 Snippet I Delhi’s Housing Crisis: Planning Failures and Unauthorised Construction

    This week on Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Raman Kirpal and Anand Vardhan are joined by urban geographer and researcher Rashee Mehra to discuss Delhi's continuing housing crisis.


    Rashee traces the problem to a structural failure in planning. Using the example of Satya Niketan, a “regularised JJ colony”, she explains how a neighbourhood can be made legal while the construction within it remains unauthorised. “It is actually a very confusing governance structure that we have created in the city,” she says, pointing to the overlapping jurisdictions of the central government, state government and municipal bodies. “That leads to questions of whose responsibility it is.”


    She argues that Delhi’s housing problem cannot be reduced to a question of illegal construction alone. “Housing has to be adequate, affordable, viable, sustainable. Where housing is affordable, it’s not adequate, and where housing is adequate, it’s not affordable. And that’s your catch-22 kind of situation.”


    Anand adds that the crisis extends well beyond university students. He notes that landlords in the city fall into two categories: “One who has made investments in these houses, and one who is living on the rent only... they have less incentive to invest because all the rent that they get, they spend somewhere.”


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    Sat, 12 Sep 2026 - 14min
  • 2556 - Hafta 605 Snippet : GDP Ka Khel: Decoding India’s 7.8% Quarterly Growth Claim

    The discussion opens with Abhinandan Sekhri talking about the flood of commentary around India's quarterly GDP figures over the past two days. 


    Much of it, he says, is “just completely wrong” – although still a healthier public debate than recent controversies over food or language politics. He calls it a small win for Indian media, even if the conversation isn’t always well-informed.


    Vivek Kaul addresses ex-finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg's viral ‘2.5% quarterly GDP growth rate' claim, saying Garg “did what the BJP has been doing to us all these years.” 


    “He made a quick point, he made a simplistic point, which was wrong,” Vivek says, adding that by the time fact-checkers responded, the claim had already spread widely. He then turns to the GDP methodology shift from a 2011–12 base year to 2022–23, a recalibration meant to reflect changes in the economy's structure. He notes that private consumption, recalculated under the new method, has been revised downward by close to $1 trillion over four years – a correction he says went largely unreported by business media.


    Puja Mehra builds on this, explaining that GDP estimates depend heavily on the data sources and proxies used, particularly for India’s large informal economy, which lacks reliable direct data. “GDP, you get to define what GDP is and then measure it in the way you have defined it,” she says, pushing back on the common misconception that GDP should behave like a fixed, universal measurement, “unlike weighing one kilogram of fruit”.


    Subscribe to watch the full conversation.


    Check outprevious Hafta recommendations, references, songs and letters.


    Produced by Amit Pandey with production assistance from Hassan. Sound by Anil Kumar.


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Sat, 05 Sep 2026 - 9min
  • 2555 - NL Hafta 604 Snippet: Student Suicides, Coaching Culture, and the Reservation Debate | Hafta Panel Discusses

    This week’s Hafta panel tackled two connected threads: the anti-reservation protests and the suicide of an IIT Delhi student, Rishikesh Kumar. 


    Joining the Hafta panel this week were Dr Aqsa Shaikh, one of India’s first transgender doctors and a member of the Supreme Court-appointed National Task Force on Student Suicide Prevention in Higher Education, and Dr Sameena Dalwai, a law professor, writer and researcher who specialises in gender, sexuality and law. 


    Panellists pushed back on the “merit versus reservation” framing, arguing it obscures how privilege is already built into ‘merit’, and noted how complicated affirmative action becomes in India’s caste and tribal contexts, unlike the US’s simpler racial binary. The discussion also delved into other reservation debates that include EWS, women, and transgender persons. 


    On student suicides, the panel cited data showing roughly 13,000 suicides a year nationally, with higher rates in hypercompetitive spaces like IITs and medical colleges. The panellists traced this pressure back to a coaching culture that begins in school.

    Subscribe to watch the full discussion.



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    Sat, 29 Aug 2026 - 14min
  • 2554 - NL Hafta 603 Snippet : BJP’s Gen Z ‘Outreach’ Problem | Hafta Panel Feat. Anurag Minus Verma

    This week, the Hafta panel discussed the BJP’s push to expand its presence on Instagram, a shift Manisha Pande linked to the party being caught off guard by the memes and reels that emerged from the CJP protests.


    Anurag Minus Verma argued the BJP’s problem isn’t taking Instagram seriously – it’s that its content is unsuited to the platform. Right-wing pages, he said, largely cycle through three or four genres: doxing, threats, punching-down humour and “catching hypocrisy”. 

    “These things have a shelf life because these things are not cool,” he said, adding that Instagram runs on a post-irony aesthetic that demands ideological looseness rather than stiffness, something he argued right-wingers struggle with.


    Abhinandan Sekhri connected this to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, suggesting being famous for sheer stupidity, as with Ravi Kishan’s viral moments, now functions as its own currency.

    Manisha argued that trolling, which works on X (formerly Twitter), doesn’t quite translate to Instagram because the latter is a visual, face-based medium, where putting a face to a thought requires courage in a way anonymous text does not. 


    She also said the BJP’s messaging remains stuck in a 2014 register, still invoking “urban Naxals” and Umar Khalid, and contrasted this with a Rajasthan schoolchild’s viral video on poor school infrastructure, arguing that dismissing such concerns as “dimaagi Naxal” sidesteps the real issue of young people demanding better education.

    Subscribe to watch the full discussion. 


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Sat, 22 Aug 2026 - 12min
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