The research team, led by Sneha Sarah Mani of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India collaboration together with Yuan S. Zhang, Lindsay C. Kobayashi, and Alden L. Gross, drew on an unusually rich data infrastructure. The Longitudinal Aging Study in India, or LASI, is a nationally representative survey of more than 70,000 Indian adults aged 45 and above, conducted in 2017 to 2019. Within it, a specialized sub-study called LASI-DAD administered an in-depth neuropsychological battery to 4,096 participants aged 60 and older. The battery included the Hindi Mental State Examination, word list learning and recall, digit span tests, constructional praxis, and animal naming, all adapted and validated for India’s many languages and for respondents with little or no formal schooling. Family members were also interviewed to corroborate each participant’s cognitive status.

Using an algorithm based on the DSM-5 criteria for mild and major neurocognitive disorders, the researchers classified each participant as cognitively healthy, as having mild cognitive impairment, or as having dementia. The picture that emerged was sobering: nearly a quarter of older Indian adults had some form of cognitive impairment, with 17.4 percent showing mild cognitive impairment and 7.4 percent living with dementia. Among men, the prevalence of mild impairment was actually higher, at 18.5 percent, than among women, at 16.3 percent. But women carried a heavier dementia burden, at 8.0 percent versus 6.8 percent for men, and that gap widened sharply after age 70, when 11.8 percent of women had dementia compared with 9.3 percent of men.

To convert these snapshots into life expectancy estimates, the team applied the Sullivan method, a classic demographic technique from 1971 that apportions the years in a standard life table across different health states according to the prevalence of each condition at every age. Mortality rates came from the Sample Registration System, a continuous vital-events monitoring panel that India has operated since 1971, while caste-specific mortality had to be estimated separately from household death reports in the National Family Health Survey, because official life tables are not published by caste. The result is a measure called cognitively healthy life expectancy, or CHLE: the average number of remaining years a person at a given age can expect to live free of cognitive impairment, given current mortality and prevalence patterns.

The headline numbers are striking. At age 60, Indian women can expect 14.3 years of cognitively healthy life and men 13.5 years. Both genders spend roughly 75 percent of their remaining years free of cognitive impairment, with men spending slightly more time in the mild impairment state, 3.4 years versus 3.1 for women, and women spending more time with dementia, 1.6 years versus 1.2. By age 70, both men and women have about 8.5 to 9 cognitively healthy years left, and roughly 70 percent of their remaining life is lived with an unimpaired mind. These proportions are comparable to, or worse than, those seen in wealthy countries such as the United States and England, despite India’s much shorter total life expectancy at these ages.

The regional and social fault lines, however, are where the study becomes truly revealing. Urban women at age 60 could expect 15.8 cognitively healthy years, about 2.2 more than rural women, while urban men could expect 15.3 years, a full 3.1 years more than their rural counterparts. Urban men spent 80 percent of their remaining life cognitively healthy, compared with just 72 percent for rural men. Caste gradients proved even steeper. Women from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, historically marginalized communities, could expect only 11.6 cognitively healthy years at age 60, 3.7 fewer than higher-caste women, and they spent 31 percent of their remaining life with impairment versus 26 percent for higher-caste women. Among men, the gap was wider still: higher-caste men could expect more than five additional years of good cognitive health compared with Scheduled Caste and Tribe men, who faced roughly four times the disadvantage that Other Backward Class men did relative to the top group.

Perhaps the most technically innovative part of the study is its decomposition analysis. A gap in cognitively healthy life expectancy between two groups can arise in two ways: one group may die earlier, cutting short the years available for healthy cognition, or it may live just as long but spend more of those years impaired. Using stepwise replacement methods that swap age-specific mortality and prevalence parameters between populations, the researchers disentangled these pathways. The answer was consistent across most comparisons: mortality, not cognitive impairment prevalence, is the dominant driver of inequality. For the 3.1-year gap between urban and rural men, lower urban mortality contributed 1.6 years and lower urban impairment prevalence 1.5 years, but for caste gaps, mortality dominated overwhelmingly, contributing 2.5 of the 3.7-year gap among women and 3 of the 5.3-year gap among men.

The gender story is more nuanced. The overall gap between women and men at age 60 was small, just 0.86 years, because two opposing forces nearly cancel out. Women’s lower mortality pushes their cognitively healthy expectancy up by 0.68 years, but their higher dementia prevalence at older ages pulls it down. Only among higher-caste groups did women fare worse than men in absolute terms, with a net deficit of 0.68 years driven almost entirely by high levels of dementia among women over 70, which cost them 1.64 years and overwhelmed their survival advantage. The researchers suggest several mechanisms: women survive longer into the ages when dementia is most common, men with impairment face higher competing mortality, and men carry a heavier burden of vascular risk factors such as tobacco and alcohol use. Distinguishing among these explanations, they caution, will require longitudinal follow-up.

What explains the deep social gradients? Education looms large. Schooling is one of the most consistently protective factors against dementia, building cognitive reserve that buffers the brain against pathology, yet access to education in India has historically been rationed along precisely the lines the study examines: men over women, urban over rural, and higher castes over Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Although affirmative action policies and schooling expansion since the 1970s have narrowed some gaps, children from marginalized communities still lag in school completion today. Beyond education, the same social lines pattern early-life nutritional deprivation, occupational exposures in agricultural and informal manual labor, indoor and outdoor air pollution, and unequal access to diagnosis and management of hypertension and diabetes, all of which feed into both cognitive decline and premature death.

The policy implications are pointed. Because excess mortality, rather than dementia prevalence, drives most of the inequality in cognitively healthy life expectancy, the authors argue that interventions should prioritize the underlying causes of early death among disadvantaged groups: expanding healthcare access, controlling chronic disease through existing primary-care platforms such as Ayushman Arogya Mandirs and the National Program for Health Care of the Elderly, and addressing the social determinants that shape health across the entire life course. At the same time, reducing dementia risk remains vital, since evidence suggests prevention both adds healthy years and compresses the period of illness for those who do develop the condition. With global projections attributing a large share of the coming surge in dementia cases to South Asia, and with the Lancet Commission noting that a greater proportion of dementia risk is modifiable in low- and middle-income countries than in rich ones, the stakes could hardly be higher. The study has limitations, including the Sullivan method’s assumption of stable rates and a classification algorithm that likely underestimates impairment, but its central message stands: as India’s demographic tide turns, ensuring that the nation’s added years are thinking years will depend on closing the survival gaps that have divided its population for generations.

Subject of Research: Cognitively healthy life expectancy and dementia burden among older adults in India by gender, urban-rural residence, and caste

Article Title: Cognitively Healthy Life Expectancy of Older Women and Men in India

Article References: Cognitively Healthy Life Expectancy of Older Women and Men in India. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: India, cognitively healthy life expectancy, dementia, mild cognitive impairment, population aging, LASI-DAD, Sullivan method, health inequality, caste, rural-urban disparities, gender differences, mortality decomposition

The documentary at the heart of the study reconstructs the life and death of Dr. Balmukund Bharti, a student from a historically marginalized community who died by suicide within India’s competitive medical education system. The filmmakers document the accusations, stigma and social isolation that surrounded students admitted through constitutionally mandated reservation policies. In the dominant meritocratic discourse of Indian higher education, such students are frequently labeled quota students or beneficiaries of the reservation system, terms the study identifies as stigmatizing devices that frame Dalit students as intellectually incompetent and undeserving of their seats, regardless of their actual performance.

To build its theoretical framework, the study draws on three intellectual pillars. Ajantha Subramanian’s ethnographic work on the Indian Institutes of Technology, culminating in her book The Caste of Merit, demonstrates how upper-caste students convert generations of accumulated social advantage into apparently earned academic excellence. Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and reproduction explain how educational systems quietly reward the dispositions, languages and confidence transmitted within privileged families while penalizing those who arrive without them. Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model allows the authors to read the documentary itself as a mediated text whose meanings are actively produced and contested rather than passively recorded.

Through this combined lens, merit emerges as what the authors call an institutional construct structured by caste. Upper-caste students typically inherit English fluency, familiarity with elite academic cultures, coaching networks, professional role models and the unmarked comfort of belonging to the dominant social group. None of these advantages appear on an entrance examination scorecard, yet all of them shape who succeeds once inside the institution. When upper-caste privilege is converted into merit, the hierarchy that produced the advantage becomes invisible, and the Dalit student who struggles against unfamiliar codes is recast as the one who lacks ability.

The study pays close attention to the mundane mechanics of exclusion. Dalit students describe being segregated in hostels, avoided in laboratories and classrooms, subjected to open speculation about their admission scores, and denied the informal mentorship that carries privileged students through demanding professional programs. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s account of stigma and Harold Garfinkel’s analysis of degradation ceremonies, the authors show how repeated small humiliations function as public rituals that mark Dalit students as spoiled identities within the institutional community. The cumulative effect, they argue, is not incidental but structural: the dominant institutional culture is calibrated to upper-caste dispositions, rendering marginalized students as undeserving infiltrators in spaces that claim to be democratic.

The psychological toll of this environment is a central thread of the analysis. The authors cite research on the mental health impact of caste and structural inequality in Indian higher education, including work by Komanapalli and Rao on the psychiatric consequences of discrimination and studies linking caste-based exclusion to depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Stereotype threat, the well-documented phenomenon in which awareness of a negative group label degrades performance under pressure, compounds the burden. A student who must simultaneously master a rigorous curriculum and manage a daily assault on their belonging operates under conditions their privileged peers never encounter, yet only their outcomes are measured and judged.

The paper situates Bharti’s death within a broader and troubling pattern. The authors reference the 2007 report of the committee chaired by S.K. Thorat that investigated allegations of differential treatment of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, which documented hostility, social boycott and discriminatory practices. Subsequent scholarship, including ethnographies of Dalit students at elite Indian universities and analyses of multi-layered exclusion in premier institutions, has repeatedly found that reservation policies open doors that the internal culture of institutions then works to close. The study also invokes the concept of epistemic oppression developed by Kristie Dotson, describing how the knowledge and testimony of marginalized students are systematically discounted, making it difficult even to name the discrimination they experience.

Documentary film, the authors argue, plays a distinctive evidentiary role in this landscape. Citing scholarship on documentary as resistance, they treat The Death of Merit not merely as reportage but as a counter-archive that renders visible what institutional discourse renders invisible. Where university narratives celebrate meritocratic selection and official statistics obscure lived experience, the film preserves testimony, names stigma and locates individual deaths within structural causation. Hall’s encoding and decoding framework helps explain why such texts matter: audiences may read them in dominant, negotiated or oppositional ways, but the documentary intervenes in the public meaning of merit by insisting that caste is an active ingredient in academic outcomes rather than a residue of the past.

The timing of the study gives its argument contemporary urgency. The authors note recent controversy around the University Grants Commission’s 2026 Promotion of Equity in Higher Educational Institutions Regulations, which were stayed by the Supreme Court amid fierce public debate, alongside student protests and campus restrictions reported in the Indian press. These developments, the paper suggests, reveal how contested the politics of caste and equity in education remains, and how resistance to affirmative action frequently redeploys the language of merit to defend inherited advantage. The study’s bibliography traces a sustained scholarly conversation, from Satish Deshpande’s analysis of exclusive inequalities to recent work on the reproduction of caste privilege in elite institutions, indicating that the questions raised by Bharti’s death have only intensified over the past decade and a half.

The authors conclude with a call to re-imagine merit itself as a condition of social justice within India’s contemporary educational landscape. If merit is produced rather than merely revealed, they argue, then institutions bear responsibility for the environments in which students succeed or fail. That means interrogating how cultural capital is distributed before admission, how institutional cultures reward particular social dispositions after it, and how stigma transforms difference into deficit. The Death of Merit, read through this study, becomes more than a record of one student’s suffering; it is an analytical instrument that exposes the machinery by which caste survives inside institutions that claim to have transcended it. Until the conversion of privilege into merit is interrupted, the paper warns, India’s universities will continue to manufacture the exclusions they profess to have abolished, and the deaths of students like Balmukund Bharti will remain legible not as individual failures but as the signature of the system itself.

Subject of Research: Caste, merit and Dalit student suicide in Indian higher education analyzed through a documentary study

Article Title: Merit in the city: examining caste, suicide, and Indian higher education in Insight Foundation’s documentary text The Death of Merit: Dr. Balmukund Bharti (2011)

Article References: Kumain, S., Ganguly, D., & Anand, T. (2026). Merit in the city: examining caste, suicide, and Indian higher education in Insight Foundation’s documentary text The Death of Merit: Dr. Balmukund Bharti (2011). SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 510. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01812-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01812-y

Keywords: caste, merit, Dalit students, Indian higher education, suicide, documentary film, cultural capital, reservation policy, social exclusion, stigma, Bourdieu, Ajantha Subramanian

The research, led by Anindita Sarkar of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn together with colleagues in Germany, Nepal and India, combined four decades of satellite-based climate analysis with extensive fieldwork across nine villages in the Seti River basin. Precipitation records from the CHIRPS dataset and temperature data from TerraClimate covered 1984 to 2023, while land-cover change was tracked using European Space Agency satellite data from 1992 and 2022. Between April and May 2025, the team conducted twenty focus group discussions with 284 participants, split evenly between men and women, alongside semi-structured interviews with farmers, irrigation users, local officials and returnee migrants.

The quantitative findings are subtle but consequential. Annual rainfall in Bajhang, averaging roughly 1,262 millimetres, shows no statistically significant long-term trend. Yet the seasonal distribution is shifting in ways that matter enormously for rainfed agriculture. April rainfall has increased significantly, driven by intense pre-monsoon convective storms known as Nor’westers that can flatten standing crops and erode topsoil. December rainfall has declined significantly, leaving early winters drier. Meanwhile, July and August, the wettest months at more than 300 millimetres each, show declining trends, hinting at a shortening monsoon. Post-monsoon rainfall in October and November is extraordinarily variable, making the timing of the entire agricultural year less predictable.

Temperature tells a clearer story. Annual mean temperatures have sat consistently above the long-term average of about 14.3 degrees Celsius since the early 2000s, with the fastest warming in February, March and October at up to 0.07 degrees per year. Mann-Kendall trend tests confirm statistically significant warming during the monsoon and post-monsoon months, particularly September and October. In high-elevation villages such as Daarya, farmers report that winter snowfall has all but vanished. Where snow once lingered until February or March, rivers now run dry by early spring, cutting the pre-monsoon streamflow that feeds canals and springs and undermining wheat and barley cultivation.

The researchers call the resulting condition agroecological misalignment: a widening gap between inherited agrarian calendars and the climate that actually materialises. Crop-by-crop analysis shows the mismatch clearly. Lowland rice, transplanted in June and July, depends on sustained monsoon rainfall to keep paddies flooded, making it acutely vulnerable to late or excessive rain. Wheat and barley, sown after the monsoon, now grow through increasingly dry winters and ripen earlier under spring temperatures above 20 degrees, shortening the grain-filling period and depressing yields. Perhaps most strikingly, the traditional labour sequencing, in which barley in the high hills ripened after wheat in the valleys, has collapsed. In some years both crops now ripen simultaneously, and wheat harvest overlaps with rice field preparation, creating simultaneous labour peaks that households cannot cover.

The social consequences are visible from orbit. ESA land-cover data show that fallow or abandoned cultivable land expanded by roughly 24.3 square kilometres between 1992 and 2022, while total cropland remained nearly stable, indicating gradual de-intensification rather than permanent conversion. Terraces once planted with barley and wheat are left uncultivated for entire seasons. The drivers are intertwined: rainfall has become unreliable, male labour has migrated to India and the Gulf, cultural norms restrict women from ploughing, and mechanisation is either unaffordable at around 1,000 Nepalese rupees per hour or physically impossible on narrow, stony highland terraces. Land is culturally retained rather than sold, so households simply wait, sometimes for the seasonal return of migrant men, before ploughing can begin.

Traditional crops are disappearing with the old climate. Barley, buckwheat and even apple orchards planted over the past two decades under development programmes are failing as winters warm and snowfall declines. Farmers describe apple blossoms dropping and fruit shrivelling before ripening. These losses carry cultural weight beyond agronomy: buckwheat and barley were embedded in rituals, diets and collective memory, and their decline is experienced as a loss of identity as much as income. Some households have switched to potatoes, millet or wheat, and warmer conditions have even encouraged experiments with broadcast rice in areas where it was once unthinkable.

The burden of this reordering falls unevenly. With men gone, women now manage most farming tasks while continuing to shoulder livestock care, domestic work and caregiving, without corresponding access to credit, equipment or extension services. The study’s authors resist the term feminisation of agriculture, which implies expanded authority; what they document instead is responsibility without power. One creative response is a renewed form of parma, the traditional non-monetised labour exchange, now organised among upper-caste women as care-based reciprocity. Meanwhile, land abandoned by upper-caste households has opened selective, precarious tenancy opportunities for Dalit families, who lease land informally with no written contracts, gaining access to cultivation without security of tenure. Dalit women in particular face compounded burdens, returning to villages to manage leased farms while raising children under conditions of informal tenancy.

Underlying all of this is what the researchers term institutional thinness. Irrigation governance is informal and shaped by local power relations and elite capture, with communities left to dig their own channels. Climate information exists but is not trusted or usable: farmers hear weather updates on the radio but never adjust their farming accordingly, and there is no early warning system for rainfall. Government soil scientists visit but never follow up. Remittances are consumed rather than reinvested in farms, and cheap imported rice has depressed farm-gate prices, further weakening incentives for local production. Formal adaptation frameworks such as Nepal’s National Adaptation Plan exist on paper, but their implementation is mediated by fragmented governance and local hierarchies, leaving women and marginalised castes to carry increasing agricultural responsibility without institutional support.

The study’s central argument is that adaptation in places like Bajhang should not be measured against the arrival of climate-smart infrastructure or early warning systems. It is already happening, continuously, through seasonal fallowing, crop switching, informal labour exchange, residue burning and migration, practices that are not transitional failures but a stabilised, everyday adaptation regime. Migration and climate change reinforce each other in a loop: climatic uncertainty pushes men out, labour shortages then weaken irrigation maintenance and collective farming, deepening vulnerability to the next shock. The policy implication is sobering. The challenge is not simply to deliver better technologies, but to address the governance inequalities that determine whose knowledge counts, whose priorities shape institutional responses and who ultimately pays for climatic uncertainty. Until then, mountain farmers will keep adapting the only way they can, one uncertain season at a time.

Subject of Research: Climate change adaptation as everyday practice in mountain farming communities of Bajhang District, Nepal

Article Title: Reimagining adaptation as everyday practices: agroecological misalignment, institutional thinness, and shifting socio-cultural norms in climate-vulnerable mountain agrarian peripheries of Nepal

Article References: Sarkar, A., Kumar, A., Osemwegie, I., Akhtar, F., Kumar, N., Shrestha, S., & Borgemeister, C. (2026). Reimagining adaptation as everyday practices: agroecological misalignment, institutional thinness, and shifting socio-cultural norms in climate-vulnerable mountain agrarian peripheries of Nepal. Regional Environmental Change, 26(3), Article 185. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02669-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02669-w

Keywords: climate change adaptation, Nepal, Himalaya, monsoon variability, agroecology, subsistence farming, migration, gender, caste, irrigation, land abandonment, institutional governance