The covid-19 pandemic may have impacted India more severely than previously estimated, with the life expectancy of women, certain social groups and younger demographics experiencing the most severe declines.

Previous mortality estimates during the covid-19 pandemic in India relied on official death records. Yet lockdowns disrupted this system, which already even before the pandemic. It doesn’t collect certain information like caste or ethnicity either, says at Hunter College in New York.

So Vyas and her colleagues gathered information on deaths in India from the National Family Health Survey. This country-wide survey asks participants whether anyone in their household died in the past four years and if so, to provide data like the person’s date of death, age and gender – only including options for men and women.

The researchers analysed data from more than 765,000 participants who completed the survey in 2021. They found that deaths in 2020 were about 17 per cent higher than in 2019. If similar increases occurred across the country, that indicates almost 1.2 million excess deaths in 2020 – eight times the official number of covid-19 deaths in India in 2020 and 1.5 times the World Health Organization’s , according to the study.

Between 2019 and 2020, overall life expectancy at birth declined by more than 2.5 years in the sample, compared with a in the US during the same period. Life expectancy changes differed by gender, age and social group, too.

For instance, it fell about three years in women compared with just over two years in men. This contrasts with global trends, which show men had greater increases in mortality than women during the covid-19 pandemic. “These unique patterns in India can likely be explained, at least in part, by gender inequality,” says Vyas.

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shows Indian households spend less on healthcare for women relative to men, so the pandemic may have amplified these pre-existing disparities, says at the University of Oxford, who was a co-author on the study. Strict lockdowns also hindered access to maternal healthcare, potentially increasing maternal mortality rates, she says.

Unlike in other countries, life expectancy declines observed in this study were largely driven by deaths in younger demographics. Increases in mortality among women and girls under 20 years old contributed approximately one year to the decline in life expectancy in 2020 – roughly the same amount as deaths in women between ages 60 and 79.

“We think that those increases in mortality are coming from indirect effects of the lockdown in India,” says Vyas. The effects could include disrupted access to childhood vaccines and treatments for tuberculosis, which is a leading cause of death in India.

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There were also stark differences between social groups. High-caste Hindus experienced a 1.3-year decline in life expectancy, while those who were Muslim or belonged to a lower caste saw 5.4-year and 2.7-year declines, respectively.

Public health experts have long been aware of India’s health inequities, yet these findings highlight the magnitude of those disparities, says Vyas. “Seeing how different populations are impacted differently is important for developing policy responses,” she says.

However, the study had limitations. Due to disruptions during lockdown, the survey respondents only came from 14 of India’s 36 states and union territories, and the sample was demographically representative of only about one-fourth of India’s population. Also, the study didn’t look into cause of death. “We can only speculate on why these patterns may be,” says Kashyap. “But we can’t say conclusively what is causing them.”

If India seems like a latecomer to space flight, it is only because the country’s space agency has been slowly and steadily growing for decades, catching up with the original major players. When the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft managed the first ever soft landing near the south pole of the moon in 2023, it marked a triumph for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and a sign that the agency’s unique way of operating makes it capable of great things.

The strategy that has made all of this work was championed in the 1960s by Vikram Sarabhai, often considered the father of the Indian space programme. He rejected the idea that the country had to work its way up through every stage of learning how to do space flight, instead insisting on “leapfrogging”, using knowledge that had already been gained by other nations along with expertise developed at home.

“What you’re seeing now is the product of four decades of serious investment in this programme that a lot of people dismissed as being inappropriate for a developing country, but turns out to have been a smart decision all along,” says at Arizona State University. “It’s done a great job of absorbing technologies from different countries and stitching them together to make something that’s uniquely Indian.”

The Chandrayaan-3 mission is a perfect example of this. ISRO has stated that the budget for the mission was only £60 million ($74 million), less than the cost of a commercial aeroplane and an astonishingly low price tag for a spacecraft. This was enabled in part by the use of more cost-effective off-the-shelf parts alongside custom-built ones, as well as contracts with private companies for some of the spacecraft development and manufacturing.

That private company involvement is relatively new for ISRO, a change heralded by Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister since 2014. “Where Modi has made a difference is that he has encouraged the private sector to step in in a way that is very unusual for Indian government programmes,” says Abraham. “If you look at the other government projects, the private sector is there but in a very small way.” ISRO didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But more broadly, India’s election is unlikely to change ISRO’s direction, given the geopolitical prestige that comes with success in space. “The space programme has managed to remain independent for so long because it’s been successful,” says Abraham. “In this case, it doesn’t matter who’s in charge – they’re all going to throw money at it.”

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Artificial intelligence is enabling India’s politicians to be everywhere at once in the world’s largest election by cloning their voices and digital likenesses. Even dead public figures, such as politician and actress Jayaram Jayalalithaa, are getting digitally resurrected to canvass support in what is shaping up to be the biggest test yet of democratic elections in the age of AI-generated deepfakes.

India’s nearly 970 million eligible voters started going to the polls on 19 April in a multi-phase process lasting until 1 June that will select the next government and prime minister. It has meant booming business for , whose company typically uses AI techniques to create special effects for ad campaigns and Netflix productions.

His firm is handling more than a dozen election-related projects, including creating holographic avatars of politicians, using audio cloning and video deepfakes to enable personalised messaging en masse, and deploying a conversational AI agent that identifies itself as AI, but speaks in the voice of a political candidate during calls with voters.

“For the first time, it’s going to be happening on a large scale,” says Jadoun. “There are some political parties that want to try out everything, and even we don’t know what impact it will have.”

Much has changed since India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, used 3D hologram technology to broadcast prerecorded speeches at multiple campaign rallies around India in 2014. Now, his AI-generated avatar speaks to voters by name in WhatsApp videos as the use of AI technology in Indian politics has ballooned.

The AI-generated content tends to present campaigners positively, rather than being used for attacks on the opposition, says at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The messages may well be believed by audiences who are unfamiliar with cutting-edge AI content, while also creating memes for voters who realise AI is behind them, but enjoy and share them because they align with their political beliefs, he says.

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But it isn’t all so squeaky clean. The World Economic Forum’s 2024 found that Indian experts flagged misinformation and disinformation as the “biggest threat” for their country in the next two years, warning of how inaccurate AI-generated videos could influence voters and fuel protests. In 2018, fake news messages and videos spread through WhatsApp spurred mobs to lynch dozens of people in India.

Jadoun says his company immediately turned down about half of the 200 or so election-related requests it has received as they were “unethical”, such as creating false deepfake videos intended to harm the images of political figures.

But he points out that anyone can make lower-quality deepfakes within minutes using online tools. Policing them is nigh-on impossible.

“In India, the main difference is that the resources expended by policy-makers and companies to examine and deal with these challenges are completely dwarfed by their scale and intensity,” says at University College London. “The political context is also one where parties encourage extreme speech and hate speech.”

Much will depend on how US tech companies deal with deepfakes on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube and Telegram during India’s election. Meta, the owner of Facebook, has teamed up with a third-party to evaluate possible misinformation in 16 Indian languages and English and plans to more broadly on its platforms starting in May this year.

Meta says it has also launched a on WhatsApp to flag deepfakes and other AI-generated misinformation, in coordination with a new established by the Misinformation Combat Alliance in India. The tip line team will let WhatsApp users know whether a submitted audio or video sample is AI-manipulated and will forward any potential misinformation to fact-checking partners, says , head of the Deepfakes Analysis Unit.

But the bigger challenge is whether the Election Commission of India – which is working with tech companies to address misinformation and disinformation – can manage to ensure that the election remains fair, says Pal. Part of its role is to prohibit any discrimination or incitement based on religion or castes, and to prohibit impersonation.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is still attempting to re-establish communications with its Chandrayaan-3 mission’s moon lander and rover, but experts say hopes are fading as suspicions grow that the spacecraft have succumbed to brutally cold temperatures during the lunar night.

ISRO’s Vikram lander touched down on the surface on 23 August before releasing the Pragyan rover. Both craft successfully carried out their scientific experiments and transmitted data back to Earth, and the mission had already proven a great success.

But after the landing, senior engineers said they were confident that the craft would be able to survive the lunar night and carry out more work. Around two weeks after the mission began – one single period of lunar daylight – both devices went into “sleep mode” and prepared for conditions as low as -238°C that could destroy their electronic components.

Following a long wait, the lunar terminator – the line between night and day – crossed the Chandrayaan-3 landing site around 22 September, bathing the craft in sunlight and theoretically allowing them to use their solar panels to charge their batteries and boot up their onboard computers once again. But there have been no signs of life.

ISRO tweeted on 22 September that it had been attempting to establish contact with the craft without success. Since then, it has provided no further updates and ISRO’s press office didn’t respond to a request for comment. On 25 September, former ISRO chief A. S. Kiran Kumar that the “chances of reawakening are dimming with each passing hour”.

at Cranfield University, UK, says it shouldn’t be considered a failure if Vikram and Pragyan don’t wake up, as the Chandrayaan-3 mission was designed to achieve its objectives in a single lunar day.

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He says that designing craft to survive the vast temperature swings between lunar night and day, which can cause batteries and electrical components to literally crack as they expand and contract, can involve measures like adding radiation sources to provide warmth – but these also add complexity, cost and weight. Often, it is more pragmatic to land a leaner, simpler craft that quickly carries out science before the brutally cold nighttime temperatures destroy it, he says.

“To make sure it can survive is an enormous engineering challenge,” says Cullen. “So quite a few missions will be designed with no serious expectation of surviving the lunar light. And then if, by some chance, you do survive the lunar night, it’s a nice added-on extra.”

“It would seem logical to assume that if it didn’t respond during its second lunar day, then, when it comes to the third lunar day, the chances of responding are significantly less,” he says.

at the University of Leicester, UK, says it is now unlikely that the craft will reawaken. “You maybe expect some little bit of delay because things don’t warm up as fast as you’d like or, you know, there’s awkward shadows. But by now, I think you would have expected everything to have warmed up, so it sounds as though the cold was maybe too much.”

But she says that the project should be considered a huge success. “They’ve done everything they set out to do,” says Casewell. “How inspirational is this for a nation that has a relatively young space programme? I think that is just phenomenal, that’s such an achievement.”