The political landscape in Punjab is heating up with each passing day in the run-up to the upcoming Assembly polls, which are slated for next year. With the recent video controversy raising its ugly head every day with new revelations and counter-charges, will Bhagwant Mann be able to weather the storm and prove his innocence. The coming days will define the character of the election campaign ahead, writes Editor-in-Chief Jyoti Malhotra in her weekly column The Great Game (As the ground shifts in Punjab). Under-fire CM is fighting back, while the BJP is looking to make inroads in the state. SAD’s big challenge is whether Punjab has been able to forgive it for not taking strong action against those accused of “beadbi” or sacrilege. As the ground shifts in Punjab, where does Waris Punjab De (WPD) fall in the new narrative, she asks. If Punjab has to be saved, an exhaustive action plan must have everyone, both the ruling party and the Opposition, on board.Meanwhile, the appointment of a three-member committee by the Congress high command to assess the ground reality of the party’s functioning, eliminate factionalism and gauge the voters’ pulse shows that the Congress is serious about fighting the Punjab Assembly elections. The big question is whether the Congress leadership will be able to take the electorate into confidence on different issues and how it will tackle indiscipline within the party that led to its poor performance when it was in power in 2017-2022, writes former GNDU Professor Jagrup Singh Sekhon in his Op-Ed piece The challenge for Congress in Punjab.In good news for the AAP government in Punjab and for the people of the state, Punjab has shown measurable improvements across several educational indicators. Punjab emerged as a leading state in the National Achievement Survey (NAS) and the Performance Grading Index (PGI), highlighting improvements in learning outcomes, governance and institutional effectiveness. Punjab invested simultaneously in school infrastructure, digital access, governance reforms, teacher accountability, community participation and student support systems. Punjab’s reforms also challenge a deeply entrenched assumption in India that government schools are inherently incapable of delivering quality education, write Aarushi Jain and Nikhat Khalid from the Bharti Institute of Public Policy, Indian School of Business, in the Op-Ed article Punjab school turnaround has lessons for India.Political parties must answer difficult questions. They must explain their choices, justify their alliances, and demonstrate coherence in their political conduct. The problem arises when this scrutiny becomes selective. The Opposition, particularly the INDIA forum, often attracts greater scrutiny than the ruling establishment, writes RJD MP Manoj Kumar Jha in his Op-Ed article The politics of selective scrutiny. The tendency to examine the Opposition in isolation is itself a form of intellectual dishonesty. When accountability is demanded only of the Opposition and not of those who govern, democracy risks shifting from a system of checks and balances towards something that ranges from managed consent to coercion and violence, he writes. The challenge before INDIA is not simply organisational but also philosophical. It must convince citizens that democracy is not merely a mechanism for choosing rulers but a framework through which power remains accountable, institutions remain autonomous and citizens remain free to disagree, he adds.It is an open secret that candidates from larger parties spend Rs 80-100 crore on an Assembly election. If this is how much it costs to contest an Assembly poll, a candidate will have to spend Rs 150-200 crore on a Lok Sabha seat to put up a strong fight. The Congress will need at least Rs 50,000 crore to win the 2029 General Election.  The funding hurdle is something that Rahul Gandhi has to address immediately, writes Senior Economic Analyst Aunindyo Chakravarty in his Op-Ed article How much does it take to win an election. And for that, he will either have to mend bridges with India Inc, or empower party leaders who already have more business-friendly images than he does. Without winning the trust of India’s richest, Rahul Gandhi has very little chance of putting up a fight in 2029, he writes.The Ministry of External Affairs recently clarified that a passport is primarily a travel document and not a conclusive proof of citizenship. The confusion arises because we often conflate three distinct concepts — identity, residence and citizenship, writes former Chief Election Commissioner of India SY Quraishi in his Op-Ed article What document makes me an Indian citizen. The Aadhaar experience is instructive. It was designed as a unique identity instrument for residents to improve welfare delivery and eliminate duplication. However, it was deliberately kept separate from citizenship, he writes. The Assam experience regarding National Register of Citizens (NRC) raises a larger question: if such difficulties arose in one state with a population of 3.3 crore, can a nationwide exercise involving 145 crore people be undertaken without causing widespread hardship? The burden should not fall on ordinary citizens to prove their citizenship; it should rest on the State to establish, on credible grounds, that a person’s status is genuinely in doubt, he suggests.Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) V Anantha Nageswaran has said that old automatic premium attached to software degrees and MBAs is vanishing. The CEA’s warning is well taken. But the policy message must be not to bury the degree but to redesign it, writes noted economist Ajit Ranade in his Edit article Job guarantee is dead, not the degree. Instead of producing generic MBAs who chase the same corporate jobs, we could create district development analysts, municipal finance associates, procurement specialists, health systems managers, education data officers and climate adaptation officers.In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court (SC) has declared that the right to walk on demarcated footpaths is a fundamental right of citizens. The apex court ruling has provided an opportunity to review policies & programmes concerning footpaths and plug the gaps to ensure fair use of road space, writes science commentator Dinesh C Sharma in his Edit article Let walkers have their way. The infrastructure designed for motorised transport is projected as a symbol of development, while improving pedestrian infrastructure is not considered headline-grabbing work. Creation and maintenance of pedestrian infrastructure should receive top priority, he avers.The 16th BRICS National Security Advisers’ (NSA) Meeting, which brought together 11 member nations, was hosted by New Delhi. This was a preparatory meeting in the run-up to the BRICS summit to be held in India in September. The underlying message emerging from the BRICS forum was that Delhi would highlight security issues relevant to the Global South, writes C Uday Bhaskar, Director, Society for Policy Studies, in his Edit piece India holds its ground on BRICS turf. The global forum is becoming India’s preferred platform to highlight issues relevant to the Global South without being seen as anti-West.