A slow record of how most Indians live

Life in India

Long View 7 Opened 3 October 2026

Who stays on the voter list: India's Special Intensive Revision किसका नाम रहेगा, किसका कटेगा

From June 2025 the Election Commission rebuilt India's voter list, asking every voter to fill in a form again. More than 13 crore names fell off the draft rolls, most marked absent or moved. This record follows why it was done, who was left off, and how they get back.

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Women queue to vote at a polling booth at Modern High School, New Delhi, in India's first general election, 1952. Photo Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1952; via Wikimedia Commons

The register

रजिस्टर

Every Long View we keep, with its latest entries. One that goes quiet for four months is marked dormant. It stays online and can open again.

6 Open · 57 entries

Who owns India's hospitals now: private equity in health care

अस्पतालों के नए मालिक

Since about 2020, private equity funds and foreign investment companies have bought control of many of India's largest hospital chains, and of fertility, eye, dialysis and cancer chains. Studies abroad, mostly American, find prices rise under such owners and quality is mixed to worse. No Indian study has yet measured what this ownership does to patients.

5 Open · 56 entries

Nights that do not cool, deaths that go uncounted: India's heat

रातें तपती हैं, मौतें गिनी नहीं जातीं

India's nights are warming and humid heat is spreading, while official counts of heat deaths stay small beside every study of deaths above normal. Researchers, reporters and the state record who heat falls on, what it costs, and what protects people.

4 Open · 40 entries

India’s business groups and the argument over their power

कुछ घराने, कई बाज़ार

India’s largest family business groups have spread into more industries since 2000, and the top 25 groups’ revenues grew from 11% to 15% of GDP even as concentration across the economy fell. Economists disagree on whether their size lets them raise prices. The record also follows India’s argument over monopoly since the 1960s, and how America, Japan and Korea dealt with big business.

2 Open · 30 entries

After walking became a fundamental right

जब पैदल चलना मौलिक अधिकार बना

In June 2026 the Supreme Court declared walking on a demarcated footpath a fundamental right, in a case that began with a five-year-old boy struck by a tanker on his way to school. The record follows the footpaths India never built, the pedestrians killed on its roads, and the walking that runs through pilgrimage, the freedom struggle and Vinoba Bhave's land tours.

Gandhi, bareheaded, a short walking stick held down at his side, walks at the head of a column of men in white khadi and caps along a tree-shaded road; behind him a man carries a tambura upright.

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1 Open · 5 entries

The Banchhadas, and what is expected of their daughters

बांछड़ा

Girls of the Banchhada community in Neemuch, Mandsaur and Ratlam are expected to enter sex work. A running record of family debt, the marriage market, jati panchayats, and the resistance led by community youth.

No photographs in this Long View, by design. Nobody in it should be identifiable.

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