New Delhi: It has been a trying year for Indian students appearing for national-level competitive exams, marked by allegations of paper leaks and concerns over aspirants dying by suicide. The government’s response has drawn criticism from many quarters for being inadequate. Financial Times reports on India’s “brutal testing process”, which millions of students participate in, hoping to get a “decent university education”.
“After an aspiring medic was refused entry to a national exam because she arrived a few minutes late, her despairing father charged the closed metal gates with his head and collapsed to the ground, his sobbing child beside him,” says the report.
She had reached late to sit for the NEET re-exam on 21 June after the medical test conducted earlier was cancelled following charges of question paper leak. The report says that as many as “20 students killed themselves before the retest,” adding that India’s exam system “typifies the ills of the world’s biggest education system”.
The report goes on to state that just 1.3 lakh of the more than 20 lakh aspirants who retook the exam will win a university place to study medicine. It goes on to add that the stakes are even higher with other competitive exams, especially the civil services where up to 10 lakh Indians compete for a career with India’s diplomatic service. “A tiny fraction—around 25-40 candidates—become diplomats each year.”
In the Indian Railways entrance exam, of the 1.87 crore people who applied for the job in 2024-2025, only 43,781 applicants were hired.
For the majority of the population, there’s only disappointment on the other side of these exams, it adds.
In another report, Financial Times examines why India is not able to make it to global premier football leagues. The world’s most populous nation has never made it to FIFA, and China only played once in the FIFA men’s world cup in 2002, it adds.
“In theory, a large population should translate into a broad talent pool. But few Chinese or Indian footballers have emerged on the global stage. Nor have the vast diasporas from either country featured prominently in elite European leagues. Both also underperform relative to their economic strength, which can serve as a proxy for a nation’s ability to invest in sports,” says FT.
The report concludes that looking at the roster of footballing nations, strong labour and capital pools are important but not sufficient conditions for success.
Along with the size of the economy and population, “institutions, access and culture matter” just as well, if not more.
According to the FT report, for India, expenditure on physical recreation was not a priority until recently. This meant that the infrastructure needed to groom football talent was never developed outside states such as West Bengal and Goa, “where colonial influences had embedded grassroots participation in football”.
The report goes on to highlight that The All India Football Federation (AIFF), the body that governs football in India, has been in the dock for what the report terms “poor decision making”. It then goes on to cite the example of the Indian Super League, the tournament launched in 2013 which is now plagued by low attendance and financial mismanagement.
“The last season had to be delayed and shortened after the AIFF struggled to secure an administrative and commercial partner,” it adds.
Another factor the report points to is the attitude towards sports that Indians generally display. The Indian education system requires students to participate in high-stakes competitive exams to access good college education. “This displaces leisure time and contributes to poor grassroots participation in football.”
The Economist looks at how failing infrastructure is turning Indian cities into death traps, and forcing citizens to always be on the lookout.
The column highlights that several people have died due to trees falling over them amid heavy rains in Mumbai. “By July 7th, 830 trees had fallen (compared with 855 in all of 2025) along with 1,238 branches. An 11-year-old was crushed inside his school bus; an 18-year-old on his bike; a 63-year-old outside his shop.”
However, trees are not the only threat, nor is monsoon the only time crumbling infrastructure is crushing people to death.
“Everything that can crush someone has crushed someone in India—including an actual anvil (in 2024). On just one day this month a jamun tree cracked a man’s skull, a tanker overturned and squashed two people in an autorickshaw and a trash mountain tumbled onto a building, which then collapsed, trapping 12. India is the land of death from above,” says the column.
It goes on to add that among the things that have fallen on Indians in recent years are “slabs of concrete, iron rods, iron pipes, iron plates, a 40,000kg block of iron, a piling rig, a crane’s trolley and various sections of under-construction bridges”.
The list goes on to include airport-terminal canopies that collapsed in Delhi, Jabalpur and Rajkot.
And when under-construction structures are not falling, it’s the old and flailing ones that are.
In 2024, the column notes, an illegal billboard, three times the maximum permitted size, collapsed and killed 17 people at a petrol pump in Mumbai. Nine workers were killed at a steel plant in June after a bucket dropped molten metal at 1,600°C on them.
“The response is usually to suspend some officials, arrest a scapegoat or offer “ex gratia” compensation and move on.”
The BBC reports on the Indian Muslim judge facing online threats after she convicted 14 “cow vigilantes” in a 2022 mob lynching case. “On 12 June, the additional district and sessions judge of a court in Madhya Pradesh state, Tabassum Khan, found the men guilty of offences including murder, attempt to murder, rioting and wrongful restraint,” it says.
In 2022, “50-year-old Nazir Ahmad was transporting cattle at night and was intercepted by a group of self-styled “gau rakshaks” (cow protectors), armed with sticks and rods,” it adds.
Ahmad later succumbed to his injuries while his two companions who were also assaulted “survived to tell the court what happened”.
Khan, in her judgment, noted that the incident was a case of mob lynching. However, her verdict has made her a target of religious hate. “In the days following the judgment, numerous videos abusing and threatening Khan, a Muslim, surfaced online. The videos implied that Khan had acted against the men because they were Hindu,” BBC reports.
In one video, a man warned of “bloodshed” across the country unless the convicted men were freed within 10 days, it notes.
The New York Times reports on Delhi’s “fabled” Gymkhana Club as fear of eviction grips its members. The club was asked to give show-cause by 7 July against the eviction orders.
“Founded more than 100 years ago as a whites-only social club for British colonial administrators and their wives, the Gymkhana is now a refuge for Delhi’s homegrown elite. But with its imperial past, the Gymkhana is facing extinction under Mr. (PM Narendra) Modi’s campaign to purge India of what he calls a residual slave mentality,” the report notes.
Members of the club say that Modi is trying to send a message through the eviction notice: The days when Delhi’s old elite ran India are over, it adds.
“It’s a specific type of westernised Indian who never bought Modi’s rhetoric, who Modi thinks never accepted him,” Abhishek Tankha, a businessman who frequents the club, told NYT.
“The stereotypical Gymkhana member, who sometimes had to wait more than 20 years before being offered a spot, is the kind of person who has lost the most clout in the New India Mr. Modi says is rising under his watch—a country where the secular, democratic principles of its founders are giving way to his vision of a Hindu-first nation,” the report notes.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)