The Teachers on Trial: How Ayurveda’s Cleanup Became a Culture of Fear

Present, But Not Believed — Reform Without Dignity Is Not Reform, It Is Just a Different Kind of Harm

Dr. Aakash Kembhavi

MD (Ayu-Shalya), PGDMLS, MS (Counseling & Psychotherapy) Academician, Clinician & Researcher Chief Editor, International Journal of Ayurveda

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the author’s personal opinions, formed in his individual capacity as a long-serving Ayurveda academician. They do not represent the official position of any institution, journal, board, or organisation the author is affiliated with, and nothing in this piece constitutes medical, legal, or regulatory advice. This article was developed in collaboration with AI tools for research assistance, structuring, and drafting; the ideas, judgements, and final conclusions expressed here remain the author’s own.

“I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.” — Arthur C. Clarke

A Preamble

The National Commission for Indian System of Medicine was set up with a genuinely good intention: to upgrade and professionalise Ayurveda education, at a time when allegations and discrepancies in the functioning of the erstwhile Central Council of Indian Medicine had made that upgrade overdue. That decision, in itself, was the right one, and nothing in this article is meant to argue otherwise.

But the reality the Commission is regulating is more tangled than any single policy can easily capture.

Across India, new colleges are being permitted every year, and a new college today must be sanctioned for a minimum of one hundred seats, with tiers extending to one hundred and fifty and two hundred.

Each tier carries its own, different faculty requirement, at a time when there is already a shortage of senior faculty across almost every cadre, and an acute shortage of Associate Professors and Professors in particular.

Departments such as Rachana Sharira, Kriya Sharira, Agada Tantra, Roga Nidana, Kaumara Bhritya, and Shalakya Tantra face this shortage most sharply, to the point that an unwritten understanding has grown up around them: these are treated as rare branches, and managements compete to retain whatever senior faculty they have in them by paying salaries well above what other departments receive. That, in turn, breeds its own resentment among colleagues in other departments doing comparable work for comparable years.

The same scarcity cuts the other way as well.

Faculty in these so-called rare branches have, in not a few cases, used their scarcity to negotiate, or in blunter moments to effectively pressure, managements into granting them considerable leeway in attendance, timing, and duties, arriving at something close to a protected, patronage-like status within their own institutions.

NCISM is not unaware that this dynamic exists.

Layered on top of it is the effect of new colleges being permitted each year: new institutions, in order to meet their own faculty requirements quickly, routinely offer more attractive salaries than existing colleges can match, and the result is a continual horse-trading of senior faculty between institutions, with established colleges losing exactly the people they can least afford to lose.

None of this excuses the underlying problem on the other side of the ledger: a great many managements, across Ayurveda colleges generally, have not treated their faculty with the professional respect the profession deserves.

The prevailing attitude in too many institutions has been that a teacher can be hired and let go at will, because a replacement can usually be found for less than the present incumbent is being paid.

This is not a cruel exaggeration; it is, a reflection of a job market in which people trained in Ayurveda are frequently willing to work for far less than they are worth, simply because clinical practice alone does not reliably support a livelihood.

That willingness to compromise extends further than salary: faculty routinely accept being unpaid for two or three months at a stretch without raising a complaint, because the alternative, no income at all, is worse.

A regulatory cleanup conducted without attention to this underlying power imbalance will not land evenly.

It is far more likely to catch the faculty member who had no leverage to begin with than the management practice that put him/her in that position.

The intention behind NCISM’s cleanup is, as stated earlier in this piece, appreciated.

The manner of its execution is what this article takes issue with, and the risk in getting that manner wrong is a particular and perverse one: genuinely passionate, committed teachers, the ones with the least patience for being treated as suspects, are the ones most likely to simply leave.

What tends to remain behind, in institutions that lose their most committed people this way, is precisely the faculty most practised at telling an institution, and now perhaps a regulator, whatever it wants to hear.

It is said, half as a joke and half as a lament, in the corridors of Ayurveda colleges, that anyone who has survived the politics of an Ayurveda college could comfortably contest a state or national election.

If this cleanup ends up rewarding exactly that kind of survival skill over genuine teaching commitment, it will have achieved the opposite of what it set out to do, at the direct expense of the students these colleges exist to train.

These observations are offered as the author’s own lived experience and personal observation, over three decades in Ayurveda education, **and are not intended to question the integrity of any individual, management, or institution by name. **

The author is aware that a good many colleagues in Ayurveda may not agree with parts of this article, and asks only that it be read in full, and in the spirit in which it is intended: as a call for the time to have come for Ayurveda faculty, across institutions and across these old divisions, to stand together with those currently aggrieved, and for an amicable, transparent way through this period to be found, including a graded, clearly published system of warning and correction from NCISM rather than the current flat, one-size-fits-all enforcement.

The author is also aware that writing this places his own standing as a serving faculty member at some risk, and has chosen to accept that risk, because the number of teachers who have begun reaching out with their own versions of this same story has reached a point where staying silent was no longer something the author was willing to do.

A Text at Half Past Three

It is past three in the morning when the message arrives. A teacher, someone who has given years to a classroom and a clinic, is awake and cannot stop being awake. He/She is not asking for advice on a difficult case or a curriculum problem. He/She is asking for help because he/she is frightened, and because he/she does not know who else to ask. Somewhere in the last few months, the plain fact of showing up to work every day for a decade has stopped being enough to prove that he/she showed up to work every day for a decade.

This article exists because of that message, and because he/she is not the only one sending it. Across Ayurveda colleges right now, teachers are being summoned to hearings, asked to account for their own presence in institutions they have served for years, and finding that the explanation they offer, however true, however documented, is simply not accepted or questioned for its validity.

This piece is an attempt to say, in public, what a great many of us have only been saying to each other in private: that something has gone wrong in how this cleanup is being carried out, and that the wrongness is landing, disproportionately, on the people who did nothing wrong.

What We Are Not Disputing

Let it be said plainly, because it matters for everything that follows: the problem of the ‘on-paper’ teacher is real.

Faculty who exist only in institutional records, who draw a salary and lend their name to a sanctioned post while never once entering a classroom, have done genuine damage to the credibility of Ayurveda education.

They have deprived students of instruction, propped up colleges that should not have been permitted to run, and given ammunition to everyone who wants to dismiss Ayurveda education as a paper exercise.

The National Commission for Indian System of Medicine was not wrong to go after this. Accountability was overdue, and the impulse behind the Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System, to replace a system built on trust that had been badly abused, was a defensible one.

This article is not an argument against oversight. It is an argument that oversight has, in its execution, stopped distinguishing between the teacher who was never there and the teacher who was there every single day but cannot produce the exact form of proof a distant committee has decided, after the fact, to demand.

When Ordinary Life Gets Mistaken for Misconduct

A faculty member’s absence on a given day, or a delay in uploading leave onto a portal, or in sending an email from an official college address, can have any number of entirely legitimate causes that have nothing to do with dishonesty: a sudden family illness, a bereavement, a connectivity failure in a rural college that has no reliable broadband provider, a genuine oversight made under stress, or simply not knowing, in the moment, that a particular form of documentation would later be demanded as proof. None of these circumstances indicate that a teacher does not exist or does not work. They indicate that he/she is a person, operating within the ordinary unpredictability of a life and a household, and a compliance system that cannot accommodate that unpredictability will end up treating good-faith human beings exactly as it treats deliberate fraud.

Consider the specific and now familiar case of extended childcare leave. Faculty members, having gone through their sanctioned maternity leave without dispute, needed to extend that leave because the child born to them had medical complications. They held certificates from their own doctors and from the child’s paediatrician. Their leave was applied for and approved through the ordinary channel of their institution, in writing, countersigned by the Principal. By any reasonable standard of institutional record-keeping, that is a complete paper trail: a stated reason, a competent medical authority backing it, and sign-off from the person legally responsible for approving it.

And yet, when these teachers were called before NCISM for hearings, this was treated as insufficient, and in some cases as further evidence that they were ‘on-paper’ faculty. The suggestion put to them, that they should have resigned and been reappointed once their leave concluded, does not survive contact with how staffing actually works. No replacement faculty member accepts a post advertised as temporary and gives it up the moment the original teacher wants to return, and no management discards a working replacement to reinstate someone whose leave has just ended. The proposed remedy is not an alternative; it is an impossibility dressed up as a compliance requirement.

There is also a harder legal question sitting underneath this. India’s Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, as amended in 2017, entitles a woman to twenty-six weeks of paid leave and makes it a punishable offence to alter an employee’s service conditions to his/her detriment during that period. That statute reflects a considered national policy that motherhood should not become a professional liability. A regulatory disciplinary process that treats a mother’s medically necessitated extension of leave, for his/her child’s own illness, as grounds to suspect him/her of not being a genuine employee is not merely unkind. It sits in real tension with the spirit, if not the letter, of a Parliamentary labour protection that exists precisely to prevent this kind of consequence.

The Paper Trail That Wasn’t Asked For Yet

There is a second problem, more procedural but no less troubling. NCISM’s own AEBAS Leave Policy for teaching faculty, approved at the Medical Assessment and Rating Board’s meeting on 29 January 2026 and circulated shortly after, formally requires that leave be applied for through the AEBAS portal and forwarded from the college’s official email address to a designated NCISM helpdesk. That is a reasonable rule to have going forward. It is not a reasonable rule to apply backward.

Several of the teachers called for hearings had applied for and been granted their extended leave before this circular existed. Their applications were handwritten, in the way institutional leave has been handled in Indian colleges for decades, and were countersigned by the Principal, the person whose signature has always constituted institutional approval. To now discount that leave because it was not routed through an email protocol that had not yet been announced is to judge past conduct by a rule that did not exist at the time the conduct occurred. That is not accountability. It is retroactive punishment, and it deserves to be named as such, regardless of how administratively tidy the new email requirement may be going forward.

If the concern is genuinely about verifiability rather than form, a countersigned, dated, institutionally retained leave letter is not weaker evidence than an email. It is, if anything, harder to fabricate after the fact than a forwarded message. Treating one as valid proof and the other as none at all suggests the objection is really about channel, not substance, and channel should not be allowed to erase a genuinely and properly sanctioned leave.

A Day’s Notice, and a Flight Ticket

Even where a teacher was willing and able to present his/her case, the process of doing so has, in practice, imposed its own quiet punishment. Some faculty received personal emails informing them of an in-person hearing at the NCISM office in New Delhi with barely a day’s notice. For someone based in the south of India, that leaves exactly one practical option: a flight, booked at the last possible moment, at whatever price the market chooses to charge that day. Prices at that notice can be prohibitive, and in many cases the management offered no support toward the cost, leaving the individual teacher to absorb an unplanned and often significant expense simply for the right to defend his/her own record.

The disruption does not stop at the ticket price. Teachers have had to arrange taxis at short notice, sometimes with young children and husbands in tow, to reach the nearest airport in time to catch a flight that could not be rebooked without further cost. An entire household’s routine gets upended for a hearing that was, at its core, about whether that same person had been doing his/her job. The emails informing teachers of these hearings have, to their credit, invoked the language of natural justice, stating that the faculty member is being given a fair opportunity to present his/her case. That language is genuinely appreciated. But natural justice is not only about being permitted to speak. It is also about being given a realistic chance to prepare, and a single day’s notice for cross-country travel does not meet that standard, however sincerely the invitation is worded.

Compounding this, there was, in many instances, no advance list of the specific documents or evidence a teacher was expected to bring.

Teachers arrived to find themselves asked for a Google Location Timeline they had never turned on, because nobody had told them, before the fact, that such a record might one day be required, and a location history cannot be switched on retroactively.

Others were asked for geotagged photographs of classes they had taught months or years earlier, which, again, no one had asked them to take at the time.

A hearing that expects specific documentary proof should say, in writing and in advance, exactly what that proof needs to be. Asking for something for the first time in the hearing room, when it can no longer possibly be produced, is not a test of a teacher’s honesty. It is a test he/she was never given the chance to prepare for.

Proof Beyond Proof: When No Evidence Is Enough

Perhaps the most disorienting part of these hearings is what happened when teachers did arrive with documentation. Faculty who presented their official attendance registers and their teacher’s diaries, records maintained continuously, in the ordinary course of institutional life, over months and years, were told that such documents could have been written up in a single day and therefore did not count as evidence at all. This is a serious claim to make about an institutional record, and if it is genuinely believed, it deserves to be tested rather than simply asserted; if a register is suspected of being backdated, that is a specific, checkable claim about ink, paper, sequencing, and cross-referencing against other records, not a general licence to disregard the entire category of documentary evidence.

In place of the written record, teachers have instead been questioned, in the manner of an oral examination, on the names of their departmental colleagues, their Heads of Department, the students in their classes, and other non-teaching staff, as a way of testing whether they are genuinely embedded in the institution. As a method, there is nothing wrong with this in principle; a teacher who cannot name a single colleague or student would rightly invite suspicion. But the same objection that was used to dismiss the register applies here with equal force. Names, like dates in a diary, can be memorised in advance by anyone determined to pass a test, including someone who is not, in fact, a regular teacher. If a written register kept over years is inadmissible because it could theoretically have been fabricated in a day, then a list of names recited from memory in a room is, by the same logic, no more reliable, and arguably easier to prepare for.

This is worth naming plainly: an evidentiary standard that can always find a reason to distrust whatever is placed in front of it is not a standard at all. It is a test with no floor. If a formal register can be waved away as forgeable, and a personal recollection can be waved away as memorised, and a countersigned leave letter can be waved away as informal, and even a biometric log can be undermined by a rural college’s own unreliable internet connection, then there is, in practice, no form of proof a genuine teacher could ever produce that this process could not find a reason to reject. Where does it stop? A regulator is entitled to be sceptical. It is not entitled to make scepticism itself unfalsifiable, because at that point the hearing stops being an inquiry into fact and becomes a test that only the outcome, not the evidence, can settle.

The pattern extends to the personal digital searches that some hearings have also demanded: private WhatsApp exchanges with a Head of Department or colleagues, and a personal phone’s Google Location Timeline, offered up as though they were the next necessary tier of proof once an official record already exists. India’s Supreme Court, in the Puttaswamy judgment, held that any intrusion by a state or state-created body into personal privacy must be necessary and proportionate to a legitimate end, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 separately requires that data collection be limited to what a stated purpose genuinely requires.

A biometric attendance log, backed by CCTV timestamps and an institution’s own timetable, already establishes presence through a far less invasive route than a teacher’s private messages or the location history on his/her personal device. Reaching for the second, more intrusive layer of proof, on top of a record that was itself introduced for exactly this purpose, is difficult to justify as proportionate under either standard, and it compounds the sense that no evidence, however reasonable, will ever be treated as final.

The Empty Chair Beside Them

A further, almost structural, oversight compounds all of this: in a great many cases, neither the Principal nor a representative of the management was asked to attend the in-person hearing alongside the faculty being questioned. In one such instance, an earlier hearing had in fact been conducted online with the Principal present. The follow-up in-person hearing, called specifically to examine individual faculty members, offered no explanation to the Principal or the management as to why they were not similarly required to attend this time, or why the burden had shifted entirely onto the teachers.

Where a Principal or a management representative did choose to accompany their faculty, even without being instructed to, they were often able to present the institution’s case far more convincingly than the teacher alone could, because administrative decisions, salary structuring, leave policy, recruitment timing, are simply not matters a classroom teacher is privy to. Where that accompaniment did not happen, because nobody had told them it was expected, the teacher was left to answer, alone, for decisions he/she had no part in making. This has left many faculty with the additional, corrosive feeling that their own institutions do not value their years of contribution enough to stand beside them when it mattered. That perception may not always be fair to the management, since many were simply never told their presence was required. But the effect on trust within these institutions is real either way, and it is a cost NCISM’s process has generated almost as a side-effect.

Who Gets Called to the Hearing

Perhaps the clearest sign that something in this process is misdirected is who is summoned and who is not. When a teacher is found irregular, the institution is penalised through a reduction of sanctioned seats, at a ratio of probably three seats for every irregular faculty member identified. That is a real cost to the management.

But it is the teacher, not the management that set the salary structure, approved the leave, or decided to disburse pay in delayed instalments during a period of financial strain, who is called to a personal hearing, asked to account for himself/herself, and left carrying the suspension of both his/her teaching code and his/her clinical registration.

A college that pays its staff in instalments during a difficult month is not thereby proving that those staff do not exist; it is showing financial fragility, which is a management problem to be examined as a management problem. Instead, the fact of delayed payment has, in some hearings, been read as corroborating evidence of ‘on-paper’ status; the causation has effectively been read backward. Meanwhile, the people who made the actual decisions being scrutinised, the managements, are rarely if ever brought before a hearing to explain themselves. The individual who had no authority over any of these decisions is made to answer for all of them.

A Regulator That Used to Know Better

It is worth noting that NCISM’s own earlier approach to this exact problem was more calibrated than what is now being applied. In 2021, the penalty for a confirmed ‘on-paper’ teacher was the withholding of the teacher’s code for one year alongside a monetary penalty equivalent to six months’ salary. By 2023, the Commission had moved to an explicitly graduated framework: a warning for a first offence by a less experienced teacher, escalating through monetary penalties and non-consideration for a session, reserving permanent withdrawal of the teacher’s code for repeat, experienced offenders. That older framework at least tried to distinguish between degrees of culpability and to give a first-time or ambiguous case room to be resolved short of career-ending consequences.

The flat penalties now being reported, suspension of both teaching code and clinical registration for a full year, and fines running into lakhs, applied without evident regard to whether the underlying ‘irregularity’ was a certified medical leave or an actual ghost appointment, represent a regression from NCISM’s own prior, more proportionate design. This is not a case of asking a regulator to import a foreign standard of leniency. It is asking a regulator to return to a calibration it had already worked out for itself, and abandoned.

Elsewhere, in fields with far higher stakes than a teaching roster, compliance frameworks such as the United States’ Office of Inspector General model for healthcare organisations place education, self-audit, and graduated correction ahead of punitive enforcement, reserving the harshest measures for confirmed, wilful, repeat violations, and explicitly building in open channels of communication before any penalty is imposed. Nothing about that approach is incompatible with the goal of eliminating ghost faculty. If anything, it is more likely to achieve that goal, because it does not spend its authority indiscriminately on people who were never the problem.

The Loneliness of Being Right About Something You Cannot Fix

Part of why this situation has been allowed to continue is that neither the teachers nor the managements have stood together on it.

Faculty associations have organised before, briefly and locally, usually around a single grievance like unpaid salary, and dissolved once that particular fire was put out.

Managements, for their part, have historically relied on political connections or the courts to manage their own difficulties with the regulator, rather than on any collective, principled engagement with faculty welfare.

That history of fragmented, self-interested responses on both sides is part of what has allowed a punitive, one-size-fits-all enforcement culture to take hold without meaningful pushback. It does not excuse what is happening now, but it explains why it has been possible.

For a teacher with thirty years in a classroom, watching younger colleagues weigh whether to resign rather than risk being labelled a fraud for taking care of a sick child, the temptation to simply step away is understandable.

Some of us, fortunate enough not to depend entirely on a teaching salary, can afford to consider it. Most cannot. Their only income, their pension eligibility, their professional identity, all of it runs through a system that has, for the moment, stopped distinguishing between negligence and misfortune.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

It needs to be said, clearly and without qualification, that there are institutions in Ayurveda doing genuinely excellent work: colleges with strong infrastructure, committed faculty, and teaching and clinical standards that meet every regulatory requirement NCISM has set, and meet them comfortably.

These institutions are something the Ayurveda fraternity has every reason to be proud of, and nothing in this article should be read as diminishing that.

But that very standing carries an obligation. No institution that has reached this level of security should allow itself to feel superior to the colleges still struggling to get there, and none should stand by, in silence or in satisfaction, while faculty elsewhere are being put through what this article has described.

Institutions and managements that currently wield influence and credibility within the system have a responsibility to extend a hand to aggrieved faculty, regardless of which college badge those teachers happen to wear, so that the fraternity as a whole grows stronger rather than more stratified.

With great power comes great responsibility, and the response from a position of strength should be solidarity, not the quiet satisfaction of ‘these teachers deserve what they are getting.’ That is not the spirit of growth that Ayurveda education needs right now; it is the spirit that keeps the profession fragmented exactly when it most needs to speak with one voice.

What We Are Not Disputing, Again

It bears repeating, because it is easy for an article built from grievance to be read as one-sided: none of this is an argument that ghost faculty should go unaddressed, or that biometric verification itself is illegitimate.

It is an argument that a system built to catch deliberate fraud has, through rushed timelines, retroactive standards, an unfalsifiable evidentiary bar, disproportionate personal-data demands, and an absent institutional voice, ended up extracting a toll from people who were never its intended target.

A regulator can hold both positions at once: that the underlying problem is real, and that the current method of solving it is causing harm that was avoidable.

Proposed Solutions

None of this needs to remain a standoff. A great deal of it could be resolved, even as a one-time corrective measure, without weakening NCISM’s underlying goal of accountability.

  1. Regional, in-person outreach workshops, held separately for managements, for principals, and for teaching faculty, so each group understands what is expected of it and how the system is actually meant to work, before enforcement escalates rather than after.

  2. Centrally published templates for leave policy and for appointment letter terms and conditions, so every teacher and every management knows, from the day of appointment, exactly what they are agreeing to and what will be expected of them.

  3. Reasonable, written notice ahead of any personal hearing, with a published, advance list of the specific documents or evidence a faculty member is expected to produce, rather than a demand made for the first time in the hearing room for something that can no longer be produced after the fact.

  4. A minimum notice period, and some consideration of travel support or reimbursement, for faculty summoned from a different part of the country, recognising the real cost and disruption of last-minute, cross-country travel to a single office in New Delhi.

  5. A fixed, defined, and consistently applied standard of proof, so that documentary evidence such as attendance registers and teacher diaries is not dismissed ad hoc as theoretically fabricable without a specific, checkable basis for that suspicion, and so that no category of proof is treated as inherently worthless simply because it is, in the abstract, capable of being faked.

  6. Mandatory presence of the Principal or an authorised management representative at any personal hearing that touches on institutional or administrative decisions, so that questions the individual teacher cannot answer are not simply held against him/her by default.

  7. An explicit, written margin of tolerance for ordinary human and logistical contingency, built into policy rather than left to the discretion of whoever happens to be conducting a given hearing.

  8. A properly reinstated, visible use of the grading and classification machinery NCISM already has but appears to have sidetracked in practice. Colleges are already assessed and rated under Grades A, B, C, and D through NCISM’s own Assessment and Rating framework in collaboration with the Quality Council of India, with clear regulations on what each grade is meant to mean; that framework deserves to be applied consistently and transparently, rather than left dormant while enforcement proceeds as though no such differentiation exists. Alongside it, colleges could usefully be classified by location, as Tier 1 for metro cities, Tier 2 for cities, Tier 3 for towns, and Tier 4 for villages, and separately by years of institutional existence, for instance Category A for institutions older than fifty years, Category B for twenty-five to fifty years, Category C for fifteen to twenty-five years, and Category D for one to fifteen years. A college can hold a QCI Grade A rating while still falling into Category D by age, and both facts are relevant: enforcement of norms should take this fuller picture into account rather than applying one undifferentiated standard to a fifty-year-old urban institution and a five-year-old rural one. Younger and more remote colleges should be actively encouraged to upgrade, with genuine hand-holding from NCISM rather than only inspection, including support, grants, and possibly low-interest loans to help them grow into full compliance rather than being penalised for not yet having arrived there.

  9. Communication that goes beyond email circulars. As a regulatory body responsible for the credibility of an entire system of medicine, NCISM’s outreach obligation should be an ongoing, proactive function, not a one-time notification followed by enforcement.

None of these measures would protect a genuine ghost faculty member.

What they would do is stop a compliance system from treating a delayed email, a missed photograph, or a countersigned leave letter as though it carries the same weight as fraud.

Marks on a paper do not certify the qualities or the clinical judgement of a physician; nobody in Ayurveda would accept that reduction for a moment.

A few days of documented absence, or an imperfect paper trail born of ordinary circumstance, should not be allowed to do the equivalent to a teacher: to stand in for, and erase, years of a life spent actually teaching.

Sources and Further Reading

  • National Commission for Indian System of Medicine Act, 2020, and associated Ethics and Registration (Amended) Regulations, 2023.
  • NCISM, AEBAS Leave Policy for Teaching Faculty of ASUS Medical Colleges, approved at the 157th Medical Assessment and Rating Board meeting, 29 January 2026, circulated 10 February 2026.
  • NCISM disciplinary circulars on ‘on-paper’ faculty, 2021 and 22 July 2023 (revised, graduated disciplinary framework).
  • The Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, as amended by the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017.
  • Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1, on the fundamental right to privacy and the proportionality standard.
  • The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
  • Contemporary media reporting on NCISM enforcement actions and AEBAS implementation, 2025-2026.

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