SUNA! stands for the Slightly Useful Newsletter for ASIA. The name is deliberate.

We think usefulness does not always mean having an answer. Sometimes it means finding a better question, noticing a number that does not quite fit the story, discovering a book that changes how we see a familiar problem, or encountering an idea that stays with us after the page is closed.

That is what SUNA tries to do.

Each issue brings together some of the questions, evidence, books, data and conversations that have caught our attention across ASIA. They may come from a research project, a government report, a dataset, an archive, a new book, or a conversation with someone whose work makes us look at an old question differently.

This issue moves across some very different terrains. We look at India's dependence on China for pharmaceutical inputs; ask whether rising intellectual-property filings necessarily mean a stronger innovation ecosystem; examine analogue paneer through the lens of standards, information and health equity; and consider what Chabahar tells us about strategic autonomy. We also look at student suicides, patent-examination delays, India's unacknowledged urbanisation, and the changing ways in which Indians get their news.

Through ASIA SenseMaker, we bring conversations into SUNA. In this issue, we explore D. D. Kosambi through a conversation with Prof. R. Ramaswamy on history, science, mathematics, and interdisciplinarity.

The subjects may seem different. The impulse is the same: to inquire before concluding, to connect what may initially appear unrelated, and to make ideas useful beyond the room in which they were first discussed.

If an issue leaves you with one new question, one surprising number, one useful reading, or one idea worth carrying into your next conversation, research project or ASIA SenseMaker session — SUNA has done its job.

Team SUNA

The Centre for Law & Critical Emerging Technologies has completed a research brief on one of India’ s most serious, and still unresolved, strategic weaknesses: how much India relies on China for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, or APIs, the chemical compounds that give medicines their therapeutic effect.

India is the world's third-largest pharmaceutical producer by volume and the largest global supplier of generic medicines, supplying around 20% of global generic drug volume. However, India remains heavily dependent on China for APIs, and it is a matter of concern that this dependence has increased rather than decreased despite the COVID-19 pandemic exposing our production vulnerabilities. Our review of seven years of trade data, from FY 2018-19 to FY 2024-25, found that China's share of India's total API imports by value rose from 67.5% in FY 2018-19 to 74.1% by FY 2024-25. In FY 2024-25 alone, India imported about $4.35 billion worth of bulk drugs and drug intermediates, with China supplying 73.7% of that total. For several essential medicines, our dependence on China is even more concentrated: China supplied 89% of India's Rifampicin (a first-line tuberculosis drug) and 98% of its Erythromycin in FY 2024-25.

This dependence is not new for India, but what's concerning is that our reliance on China has kept increasing over the years. Before India's 1991 balance-of-payments reforms, it sourced under 0.3% of its API needs from China; by 2010, China's share had already risen to roughly 57%, and India's National Security Advisor formally flagged the dependency as a national security concern in 2014. By volume, a separate measure from the value share above, China accounted for 58.5% of the APIs India imported in fiscal year 2018-19, and that share rose to 79.7% by 2024-25, meaning nearly four-fifths of everything India imports by weight in this category now comes from China.

This can be traced back to a fermentation-technology gap dating to the 1980s and 90s and a persistent 35-40% Chinese cost advantage sustained by subsidised inputs, an advantage Indian manufacturers cannot easily counter given the price-control rules the government keeps in place on finished medicines.

The government has responded by implementing schemes such as the PLI scheme for critical APIs, Bulk Drug Parks, and the COVID API Mission run by CSIR. As of December 2025, these efforts had built domestic manufacturing capacity for 28 of the 41 critical products identified under the scheme, a step in the right direction, but one that does not yet meaningfully reduce India's overall burden on Chinese APIs.

This import vulnerability is not limited to APIs; it extends to medical devices too. India currently imports 70-80% of its medical devices rather than manufacturing them domestically, and that share rises to around 90% for advanced technology such as cardiac implants and imaging systems. The United States, China, and Germany are the three largest source countries for India's medical device imports, in that order. On a brighter note, India's domestic device manufacturing has grown from about 10% of total demand five years ago to around 30% today, meaningful progress on import substitution, even though it's a separate goal from the National Medical Devices Policy 2023 target of capturing 10-12% of the global medical device market within 25 years, which remains a distant ambition. 

The Centre continues to track this as a live policy question: whether India can reform quickly enough to turn self-sufficiency ambitions into measurable import substitution.

Table 1: China's share of India's total API imports by value and quantity, FY 2020-21 to FY 2024-25

Table 2: China's API quantity imports, total imports, share, and year-on-year growth, FY 2020-21 to FY 2024-25

CLET is currently working on the State of IP in India Report, commissioned by the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks (CGPDTM), Government of India.

India’s intellectual property landscape has expanded significantly over the past five years, with increasing filings across patents, trademarks and designs and a growing emphasis on innovation-led economic development. But a central question remains: does rising IP activity necessarily indicate a stronger innovation ecosystem? 

Between 2021 and 2025, India has witnessed substantial growth in intellectual property filings. Yet filing numbers alone do not reveal whether these rights are translating into meaningful technological innovation, commercialisation, investment or market value. The gap between obtaining an IP right and effectively using that right may therefore be one of the most important issues in assessing the health of India’s IP ecosystem.

The patent system presents a particularly useful lens for examining this question. An increase in patent applications can reflect greater research activity, but it can also coexist with challenges such as low commercialisation, limited industry-academia linkages, uneven access to IP support and difficulties in taking inventions from registration to market. The same question arises in relation to trademarks and designs: whether increasing registrations reflect sustained creative and entrepreneurial activity, or whether the system is also witnessing accumulation of rights with limited economic utilisation.

Institutional capacity is another critical part of this picture. The effectiveness of an IP system depends not only on the number of applications it processes, but also on the speed, quality and predictability of examination, adjudication and enforcement. The functioning of IP offices, courts and enforcement institutions therefore needs to be considered alongside filing and registration trends. Delays, procedural complexity and uneven institutional capacity can affect the practical value of IP protection, particularly for smaller businesses, individual creators and emerging innovators.

The five-year period also raises a broader policy question about the distribution of India’s IP activity. Growth at the national level can conceal significant differences across sectors, regions, institutions and categories of applicants. Understanding who is generating IP, who is able to protect it, and who ultimately derives commercial value from it is essential to determining whether India’s IP ecosystem is becoming more inclusive as it grows.

The State of IP in India, therefore, is not simply a measure of how much IP India produces. It is an assessment of what that IP represents, how effectively the system supports it, and whether intellectual property is translating into wider innovation and economic value.

Paneer is widely seen as a nutritious, milk-based food. But when a product that looks like paneer contains non-milk ingredients, can consumers clearly know what they are buying? 

CHE’s research looks at analogue paneer not only as a food-adulteration issue, but as a question of food standards, product composition, labelling, surveillance, enforcement and health equity.

What does the regulatory framework say?

India has a defined FSSAI standard for Chhana/Paneer, with composition-based categories: Paneer: ≥50% milk fat on a dry-matter basis, Medium-fat Paneer: >20% and <50%, Low-fat Paneer: ≤20%. The regulations also prescribe naming and labelling requirements. Importantly, compliant low-fat or medium-fat paneer is not, by itself, a dairy analogue. The distinction is not simply about fat content—it also depends on what the product is made from and how it is presented to consumers. FSSAI also has provisions for dairy analogues, including requirements around their identification and disclosure. Its recent regulatory work has focused particularly on preventing analogues from being presented as milk or milk products and improving consumer disclosure. (FSSAI)

What does the evidence show?

Maharashtra food-safety surveillance conducted between April 2025 and March 2026 found that 109 of 308 tested paneer/dairy-analogue samples failed to meet prescribed standards including 79 sub-standard and 30 unsafe samples. 35.4% of tested samples failed prescribed standards This is a finding from a defined surveillance sample, not an estimate of analogue-paneer prevalence across India. The finding raises important questions about product composition, testing, classification, surveillance and enforcement.

Why does this matter for health equity?

Consumers do not have equal access to information, trusted food sources or verified alternatives. When it is difficult to know what a product contains or what it really is, the ability to make an informed choice can depend on income, information and where people live. The concern is not that every dairy analogue is inherently unsafe. A dairy analogue can be a distinct product; the policy concern arises when its identity or composition is unclear, or when it is presented to consumers as a conventional dairy product.

From CHE research to policy

CHE’s report, Analogue Paneer in India: A Food-Systems Threat to Health Equity, brought together evidence on composition, standards, labelling, testing, surveillance and enforcement and was submitted to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). The NHRC subsequently sought information from FSSAI and States/UTs on the safety, ingredients and composition, testing methods, labelling and enforcement surrounding analogue paneer. The key question now is not whether a regulatory framework exists. It does. The question is whether it is being implemented consistently and whether consumers actually receive the information needed to make an informed choice.

What needs attention? 

Clear naming & labelling — Consumers should be able to distinguish dairy products from dairy analogues.

Reliable testing & surveillance — Testing should accurately identify product composition and different types of non-compliance.

Consistent enforcement — Standards should be implemented across packaged foods, food-service establishments and informal markets.

Equitable consumer protection — Consumers should have access to clear, usable information regardless of where or how they purchase food.

India has a regulatory framework for dairy analogues. The next policy challenge is implementation: ensuring that product identity, composition and labelling are clear, testing is reliable, and consumers across the country are protected from being misled.

The latest chapter opened not with an announcement but with paperwork. As the U.S. waiver neared its expiry on 26 April 2026, New Delhi began negotiating a handover rather than a walkout, reportedly weighing a temporary transfer of its operational stake to an Iranian entity, with talks aimed at an arrangement under which operational rights would return to India once US sanctions restrictions are removed, backed by a sought-after Iranian commitment to honor that return.

Read against the arc of the project, the pattern is not sudden but cumulative. India transferred its entire $120 million commitment before sanctions even took effect, then sought a waiver, then watched that waiver run down to its final months, and is now negotiating an exit dressed as an interim pause. Each step was individually defensible; together they describe a gradual withdrawal executed in installments precisely so that no single moment could be called a failure. This is where Chabahar becomes a case study in extraneous reach where commitments extended beyond what a state's actual leverage could secure. India's $120 million and a decade of diplomatic capital bought access to a terminal, not immunity from a third country's sanctions regime. The port's fate was contingent all along on a variable India did not control, which meant the project's real ceiling was never Iranian goodwill but American forbearance. 

India's official doctrine has increasingly been described in terms of multi-alignment, simultaneous, transactional partnerships. Chabahar was multi-alignment's flagship proof. But what has actually unfolded looks more like classical hedging under duress: not balancing multiple partners from a position of strength, but managing one dependency inside the constraints set by another, with little room to actually play them off each other. Multi-alignment presumes optionality; what Chabahar reveals is that the optionality was narrower than advertised and narrowed further with each renewal cycle. The cumulative risk, then, is not that Chabahar fails on a given date in 2026. It is that a project built to demonstrate strategic autonomy has instead demonstrated its absence.   

Nearly 1.4 million men from India served during the First World War, travelling from the subcontinent to fight on the Western Front, at Gallipoli, in East Africa, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Palestine. The scale of this mobilisation is well documented. The National Army Museum describes it as the largest all-volunteer force the world had seen at the time. What is much harder to recover is how the soldiers themselves understood their participation in an imperial war fought thousands of miles from home.

This question sits at the centre of our current research for The Forgotten Front. Indian soldiers possessed agency, but exercised it within the constraints and inequalities of colonial rule. What did enlistment, military service and travel overseas mean to them? How did ideas of duty, livelihood, honour, faith and loyalty intersect with their position as colonial subjects? What did they think they were fighting for, and did encounters with other parts of the world alter the way they understood Britain, empire or India?

The contradictions of 1914 make these questions especially striking. On 23 May, the Komagata Maru reached Vancouver carrying 376 passengers of Indian origin, all British subjects, including 340 Sikhs. Canadian authorities denied them entry under a discriminatory immigration regime and, after a two-month standoff, the ship was forced to leave. The Parks Canada account of the Komagata Maru incident describes the episode as an important challenge to immigration policies that discriminated on the basis of race. Only weeks later, with Europe at war, Indian troops were being mobilised for imperial service, and by September the Lahore Division had arrived in France.

The juxtaposition does not imply that the passengers of the Komagata Maru and the soldiers who arrived in Europe understood themselves in the same way. Rather, it exposes a broader imperial contradiction worth investigating: Indians could be excluded from equal mobility and citizenship within the empire even as their military service was indispensable to it. How did soldiers themselves negotiate this unequal relationship?

Recovering their answers is difficult because the surviving archive is fragmented. The Indian Army collections at The National Archives include First World War unit diaries from the Western Front, Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine and East Africa. These records can reconstruct the movements and experiences of particular units, but they are institutional records rather than personal diaries. They tell us where soldiers went and what their regiments did, but much less about how individuals understood those experiences.

A different kind of evidence survives in the British Library's Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France. Produced between 1914 and 1918, the 27-volume collection contains extensive extracts from letters sent to and from Indian troops in France and England. Here, soldiers appear not simply as components of military formations but as correspondents writing about unfamiliar places, battle, illness, money, family and the prospect of returning home.

These letters nevertheless present their own methodological problem. They survive because they were intercepted by a colonial censorship system, translated, selected and reproduced for military officials interested in the morale and political attitudes of Indian troops. The archive therefore gives us access to soldiers' words while simultaneously filtering those words through the institutions of the colonial state. Reading them requires asking not only what the soldiers were saying, but why particular words were preserved and how they reached us.

This is why The Forgotten Front approaches the historical record as a network of fragments rather than a single archive. A soldier may survive as a name in a casualty record, as part of a regiment in a war diary, in a few paragraphs of a censored letter, in a photograph or medal retained by his family, and eventually in the memories of descendants. Bringing military records together with correspondence, photographs, objects, memorials and oral histories allows us to move beyond the aggregate figure of the "Indian soldier" towards the varied lives it encompasses.

No two-year project can recover every one of these histories. The objective is instead to create a digital experience in which rigorous archival research and historical storytelling work together. The larger question is not simply how many Indians fought in the First World War. It is what participation in that war meant to the men who fought it, how they understood their own agency within an unequal imperial world, and why so many of their individual stories subsequently disappeared from public memory.

On 17 April 2026, the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill — which would have expanded the Lok Sabha and reset constituency boundaries on the basis of the 2021/2026 Census — was defeated on the floor of the House. Of 528 members present, 298 voted in favour and 230 against, leaving the government 54 votes short of the two-thirds majority a constitutional amendment requires. The companion Delimitation Bill, 2026 and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill were subsequently withdrawn. This is the question CSDC is tracking most closely this month: not whether delimitation happens, but on what principle.

The constitutional freeze on redrawing seats — first imposed in 1976 and extended in 2001 — expires this year, forcing Parliament to confront a problem it has postponed twice. A strictly population-based reallocation would shift roughly 43 seats toward Hindi-heartland states and cost southern states — which stabilised their populations decades ago — an estimated 24 seats, even though Article 81 requires "as far as practicable" a uniform population-to-seat ratio across states. Southern governments and demographers have proposed a "Demographic Performance" (DemPer) model that would weight allocations to avoid penalising states for successful family-planning and human-development outcomes; critics counter that this dilutes the one-person-one-vote principle the freeze was designed to eventually restore.

CSDC's working view is that this is less a population arithmetic problem than an institutional design problem: comparable federations (the US Senate, the German Bundesrat, degressive proportionality in the European Parliament) manage the same tension by decoupling representation of people from representation of states through a second chamber, rather than distorting the lower house. We are preparing a longer note examining whether a strengthened, more genuinely federal Rajya Sabha could do that work for India — watch this space next month.

Sources: Lok Sabha voting record, 17 April 2026; Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026; Delimitation Bill, 2026; Article 81 & 82, Constitution of India.

14,488 student suicides recorded in 2024 - a preventable tragedy

What if help were one button away?

A number tells us the scale of a crisis. It does not tell us what happens in the minutes when someone needs help.

ASIA is exploring a simple question: what if a mental-health emergency could be responded to as easily as other emergencies?

The idea is to provide immediate assistance to a large population by introducing a panic button feature in smartphones to connect individuals directly and confidentially to a mental health helpline during psychological emergencies, especially suicidal crises. Panic buttons request emergency assistance from local ambulances, police, or other emergency services. Unlike apps in our smart phones, this inbuilt feature would provide universal access without requiring downloads, leveraging existing emergency infrastructure like the "112" helpline.

The idea of panic button raises a larger policy question: if emergency systems can be designed to respond immediately to a physical crisis, why should a mental-health crisis be any different?

Benefits:

Immediate Assistance: A panic button in phones can provide immediate assistance to individuals struggling with mental health issues. By pressing the panic button, individuals can connect to a mental health helpline and receive immediate support.

Confidentiality or Privacy: The panic button can provide a confidential way for individuals to seek help. It can connect to a mental health helpline without disclosing their identity, which can be particularly helpful for individuals who are hesitant to seek help due to the fear of stigma.

Accessibility: A panic button in phones can make mental health services more accessible to individuals who may not have access to mental health services due to geographical, cultural or financial barriers.

India’s patent examination timeline stands out for its long overall pendency despite reaching the first office action relatively quickly. In 2024, India took 12.6 months to issue a first office action, faster than the US, South Korea and EPO, though slower than Japan and China. The larger concern is the 37.8-month average to a final decision, the longest among the offices shown. This gap of 25.2 months between first action and final decision suggests that the major delay arises after the initial examination stage rather than at the point of first action. By comparison, Japan reaches a final decision in only 12.9 months, while China does so in 15.5 months. The figures therefore suggest that India has made progress in initiating examination but continues to face a substantial challenge in moving applications from first examination to final resolution.

What can D.D. Kosambi’s life and work teach us about thinking across disciplines? In this ASIA SenseMaker conversation, Prof. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy discusses his book D.D. Kosambi: One Life, Many Worlds and the remarkable intellectual journey of one of India’s most unconventional thinkers. The conversation explores: Kosambi’s polymathic work across mathematics, history, statistics and numismatics His years at Ferguson College and TIFR His fieldwork-based approach to understanding Indian history His mathematics and its influence on his interdisciplinary thinking His pacifism, cryptography work and evolving Marxist ideas The challenges of interdisciplinarity in modern academia Why Kosambi’s methods remain relevant today The session also features an engaging audience Q&A on whether Kosambi’s approach can be taught, why his conclusions are often cited more than his works, and how his ideas compare with other global Marxist historians. ASIA SenseMaker is a conversation series bringing scholars and thinkers together to explore ideas that help us make sense of Asia and the world.

 Watch the full conversation on YouTube:

Between 2001 and 2011, India’s number of towns rose sharply from 5,161 to 7,935. But the more interesting story is hidden inside that increase. The number of statutory towns, places formally recognised and governed as urban local bodies, rose only marginally from 3,799 to 4,041. In the same decade, the number of census towns nearly tripled, rising from 1,362 to 3,894.

This makes for a simple but revealing visualisation: a stacked bar chart comparing India’s statutory towns and census towns in 2001 and 2011.

The finding matters because census towns meet urban criteria, such as population size, density, and non-agricultural work, but are not necessarily governed as municipalities. In other words, many places became urban in how people lived and worked before they became urban in how they were governed.

A visualisation could therefore ask: what happens when India urbanises faster than its institutions recognise? These are places that may need urban planning, waste management, roads, water systems, public transport, and municipal finance, but may still sit within older rural administrative frameworks. The dataset opens a larger question about India’s “unacknowledged urbanisation”: not just how many people live in cities, but how many urban places remain administratively invisible.

Drawing on findings from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, this infographic highlights the growing role of digital platforms in shaping news consumption in India. With 58% of Indian respondents using YouTube and 56% using WhatsApp for news, social and video platforms have become central gateways to information. The visual also situates India's experience within a broader global shift toward platform-mediated news access and outlines CCER's interest in examining digital gatekeeping, platform concentration, and the influence of recommendation systems on information flows.

Reference: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (2026). Digital News Report 2026 https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2026-06/DNR%202026%20FINAL_2.pdf

Advanced Study Institute of Asia (ASIA) is currently developing an online Grant Tracker aimed at increasing awareness of funding opportunities among researchers, academic institutions, think tanks, universities, NGOs, and other research-oriented organisations. The platform is being designed to provide a centralised and regularly updated database of grants, fellowships, and funding opportunities relevant to the research community.

ASIA operates under a governing framework called the "3I Framework" — Inquire (beginning every project with a genuine question rather than a predetermined conclusion), Interpret (connecting regional events to global patterns and situating policy in context), and Illuminate (conveying genuine complexity to audiences who need to act on it, rather than simply publishing research that sits unread).

Despite being only three years old, ASIA has already placed research in major outlets like The Hindu, Financial Express, Economic Times, and Der Spiegel; convened conferences including national and international and secured formal recognition as a partner in the WHO/UNEP-led Global Alliance to Eliminate Lead Paint. The Institute is governed by a board chaired by Najeeb H Jung, with Dr Indu Bhushan as Vice Chairperson, and members including Dr Rajat M. Nag, Sandhya Vasudevan, and Prof. Amogh Dev Rai serves as Research Director and Ex-Officio Board Member.

What It Does

ASIA's work is organized across six research centres, each committed to a defined five-year research question rather than broad thematic coverage:

Beyond research, ASIA produces publications (journals, policy briefs, monographs, working papers), hosts podcasts and webinars (including the SenseMaker series), and convenes conferences and dialogues.