The government was unpopular even before Pakistan’s economy was walloped by the Iran war. Since then fuel and energy prices have soared; in May year-on-year inflation reached 11.7%. Last month the ruling PML-N party lost ground in an election in Gilgit-Baltistan, a northern region. In time the country’s military leaders may feel the need for fresh faces. “If you look at Pakistan’s history, it is clear that you can’t keep an unpopular system in place for ever,” says Ali Zafar, a PTI senator. Some within Mr Khan’s party believe that they can plot a way back to working alongside the armed forces. But that has caused a rift over strategy. Mr Khan’s family have accused senior PTI figures of “complete silence” over his ongoing legal cases. Currently, the sworn enemies coming to an agreement is a distant prospect. In fact, although the PTI has been targeted most, figures from more establishment parties say it is becoming harder to criticise the government. “The space for opposition is closing,” says Miftah Ismail, a former finance minister and member of the broader opposition alliance. Field Marshal Munir is not yet in any mood for compromise. The latest sign of that came last month, when courts handed down long sentences to four PTI leaders and a high-profile Baloch activist. Mr Khan, for his part, remains defiant. Perhaps he is playing a long game. He tells his family that two hours of exercise a day means he has never been in better shape. The last time he issued a public message, via a visitor in December, he branded his nemesis “mentally unstable” and called on Pakistanis to “break the chains of slavery”. Radio silence thereafter suggests that his mindset has not changed. The two men are locked in a “battle of nerves”, says Aleema. Her brother’s outlook would not have sounded out of place on an Elizabethan stage: “Liberty or death”. ■ For exclusive coverage of Asian politics, economics and security, sign up to Asia Bulletin, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//asia/2026/07/02/pakistans-army-chief-battles-with-its- imprisoned-ex-prime-minister
India’s government overhauls a vast workfare programme Critics say it has been gutted July 2nd 2026 India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) loves a name change, a good acronym and flexing its Hindu credentials. Last December it combined all three to replace the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) with the Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin)—which translates from Hinglish as “Developed India–Guarantee for Employment and Livelihood Mission (Rural)”. As an acronym it is VB-G RAM G, a reference to Ram, a revered Hindu god. This was far from a mere rebrand. VB-G RAM G, which began officially on July 1st, revamps a scheme that has been a pillar of India’s rural- development policy since 2005. Combining social protection with public
works, it guaranteed 100 days of paid toil to any rural household that demanded it. Plenty did: in 2024-25 some 60m households were employed on an assortment of projects, from wells and ponds to rural roads. The scheme earned international acclaim for its scale and ambition: the World Bank has called it the world’s largest public-works programme, and the International Labour Organisation has recommended that other developing countries copy it; many, including Bangladesh and South Africa, have done so. The government argues that its new scheme is an improved version of the old one. Workers can now get 125 days of work, rather than 100, and they will work on a narrower set of tasks to build “productive infrastructure”; many of the previous projects, it argues, were of little real value. But opponents say the scheme is being gutted. “The government has essentially removed the legal guarantee of work that made MGNREGA so unique,” says Nikhil Dey, the founder of an advocacy group that helped draft the original act. The issue is how the programme is funded. Under the old law, the central government covered the full wage bill, but the new scheme sets a limited allocation of funds for each state every year—a fixed sum that, once exhausted, leaves the states to cover any further cost. That, says Mr Dey, converts a legal right into a capped scheme with a limited budget. State governments are pushing back: some may challenge the new law in the Supreme Court. It has also become an international cause: a coalition of global economists, including Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz, have signed an open letter urging that the new scheme be repealed, calling it a historic error. None of that has swayed the government. Many in the BJP’s leadership have long viewed the old scheme with contempt. Soon after coming to power in 2014 Narendra Modi, the prime minister, mocked MGNREGA as a “living monument” to the previous Congress government’s failures, jibing that it forced Indians into “digging holes in the ground”. The flaws were real. In many parts of the country, participants were denied the work they were supposedly guaranteed because of a lack of funds or
bureaucratic inertia. In such cases, they were entitled to an unemployment allowance; but only around 8% of what was owed between 2019 and 2025 has been paid. Even when work was provided, wages were delayed. Corruption was commonplace. Activists, however, do not believe the new approach will fix any of this. There is little clarity on how wages will be set. Moreover, the new financing structure could force cash-strapped states to ration work. The MGNREGA Sangharsh Morcha, an activist coalition, estimates that at the funding levels proposed for this year, several states will be able to provide barely a fifth of the promised 125 days of work. All this risks jeopardising a programme that delivered big benefits even with all its implementation problems. Since its inception a plethora of studies have examined the impact of MGNREGA and found positive effects. At a minimum, it gave the poor a cushion during economic shocks (demand for work surged during the pandemic, for example). But it was far more than that. Studies suggest it empowered women and India’s lower castes. It also raised private-sector pay, as employers were forced to put up wages to compete with the scheme. The erosion of such benefits would come at a difficult moment. The rural economy is under strain: wages have barely increased for more than a decade, despite rapid economic growth. The war in Iran has pushed up fuel costs and this year’s monsoon has been weak. A workfare scheme that no longer reliably provides work could leave Mr Modi’s government in a hole of its own. ■ Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential India, our free weekly newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//asia/2026/07/02/indias-government-overhauls-a-vast- workfare-programme
Why can’t India’s government build a decent website? Clunky online experiences reveal the failures of Indian officialdom July 2nd 2026 Before you read beyond this paragraph, grab a glass of water and 1,000mg of paracetamol. Walk over to your laptop—the supercomputer in your hand is not up to the task—and make yourself comfortable. Now navigate to indianvisaonline.gov.in and see if you can figure out how to apply for a visa. If you succeeded, welcome back, and apologies. Several questions are probably fighting for space in your addled brain. Let’s take them in turn. The answer to the first is no, the government of India does not hate foreign visitors. Its online services for Indian citizens—railway ticketing, voter registration, income-tax filings—are just as hostile. Those are among the better ones.
Many are worse. They feature a sadistic mix of pop-ups, moving text, flashing graphics, ministerial portraits and antique elements like text-based Captchas, a bot-prevention tool that these days only thwarts humans. If a citizen does find the useful section of a site, she encounters obstacles such as broken links or the railways’ infuriating 16-character limit for names. Things are no better in the backend. In May a 19-year-old “ethical hacker” exposed critical flaws in an important school-leavers’ exam system, causing a national uproar. On to your second question. It is indeed 2026 and the visa website of a country renowned for its people’s IT skills resembles a Geocities page from 1999. One reason is that India’s approach has long been to reproduce paper processes in digital form rather than rethinking them altogether. The concept of UX—jargon coined in 1993 to mean designing things to ease the user’s experience—did not enter the official guidelines for government websites until 2023. Another reason is that the National Informatics Centre, the government’s in-house technology provider (whose triumphs include the visa website), has little ability to push back on demands from ministries to fill their sites with everything except usable features. For projects beyond NIC’s capabilities, officials look to the private sector. A mid-level bureaucrat is usually put in charge of procurement. Most have no technical knowledge. Their solution is to hire the best the market has to offer. They rely on brand-name consultants to help design the project and draft requirements. The most ambitious jobs are often executed by the same IT services companies that build products for Western clients. Yet here, too, the result can be lacklustre. By expecting outsourcers to do both the thinking and the execution on its behalf, the government puts itself in a vulnerable position, argues Susan Thomas of XKDR, a think-tank in Mumbai, in a recent paper. It buys a system “but lacks the internal expertise to understand what it has bought or how to evolve it, turning a strategic asset into a costly, unmanageable liability”. Bureaucrats do not need AI to fall victim to cognitive surrender. As for your last question, official sites are unlikely to improve. They may soon offer better UX. But the real problem is institutional design rather than web design. Bureaucracy runs on risk aversion. Officials worried about anti-