Every year, the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting sets the tone for where oncology is heading. This year, one theme cut across multiple presentations in a way that felt less like incremental science and more like a genuine inflection point: GLP-1 receptor agonists — the same class of drugs originally developed for type 2 diabetes and later adopted for obesity — may meaningfully reduce cancer risk and slow cancer progression.

A large retrospective study presented at ASCO 2026 found that women with overweight or obesity who were on GLP-1 medications had approximately 30% lower odds of developing breast cancer compared to non-users. The study analysed over 111,000 women and the association remained significant after matching for key risk factors including age, BMI, breast density, and diabetes status — suggesting this wasn't simply a confounding artefact.

That finding alone would have been noteworthy. But a separate presentation went further. Real-world data showed that GLP-1 receptor agonists may reduce metastatic progression in certain obesity-related cancers, particularly lung, breast, colorectal, and liver cancers. The largest effects were seen in lung cancer — people on GLP-1s were 50% less likely to progress to stage 4 compared to those on a comparator drug.

And there is a biological signal that adds weight to all of this: high tumour GLP-1 receptor expression was associated with a 33% lower risk of death overall, and a 45% lower risk specifically in breast cancer. This suggests the GLP-1 pathway isn't incidental to cancer biology — it may be genuinely implicated in how certain tumours behave.

What we know and what we don't

As a physician, I want to be careful here. These are observational studies. The lead researcher herself noted that while the findings add to a growing body of evidence, the study does not definitively confirm that GLP-1 medications reduce breast cancer incidence. Randomised controlled trials are now being planned, and that's the right next step.

A review published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation late last year gathered the available evidence and concluded that GLP-1 drugs do not increase cancer risk and may reduce the incidence of several types — including colorectal, liver, prostate, and endometrial cancers — particularly in people with obesity or type 2 diabetes. But the researchers were clear: these are observational findings, not proof of causation.

The open question is mechanism. Is the cancer risk reduction happening because these drugs cause weight loss and improve metabolic health? Or do GLP-1 receptors have direct anti-tumour properties — through anti-inflammatory effects, modulation of insulin signalling, or something else entirely? The tumour receptor expression data suggests the latter may be at least partly true. But we don't have certainty yet.

What we do have is a convergence of signals across multiple cancer types, multiple study designs, and multiple biological plausibility arguments. That is enough to take seriously.

Why this matters specifically for India

India is approaching a cancer crisis that few of our public health conversations are adequately confronting.

Cancer burden projections from the National Cancer Registry Programme estimated 29.8 million DALYs by 2025, with breast, liver, and colorectal cancers among the seven leading contributors to total cancer burden. And the trajectory is worsening — incidence rates for colon, rectum, liver, breast, and corpus uteri cancers have been increasing over time, consistent with India's ongoing epidemiological transition.

Critically, many of these are obesity-linked cancers. Obesity is now recognised as a cause of 13 distinct cancer types, including breast, endometrial, colorectal, liver, kidney, gallbladder, and pancreatic cancers — and globally, obesity ranks second only to tobacco as a contributor to cancer diagnoses, accounting for roughly 40% of cancer cases.

India's obesity numbers are not trivial. NFHS-5 data show that approximately 24% of Indian women and 23% of Indian men in the reproductive age group are overweight or obese. Urban India is accelerating this trend further. The metabolic risk pool — people with obesity, type 2 diabetes, or both — who carry elevated cancer risk is enormous, and growing.

This is precisely the population in whom GLP-1 receptor agonists are being studied. If the cancer-protective signal holds up in RCTs, the implications for India's NCD burden would be substantial.

The clinical lens

Cancer, for a large part of India's population, is almost always a late diagnosis. Patients arrive at tertiary care when disease is advanced, when options are limited, and when the window for intervention has largely closed. This is not an exception — it is the rule across much of rural and semi-urban India.

In that context, what excites me about this GLP-1 data is not the treatment angle — it is the prevention angle. The possibility that a drug class already being used for diabetes and obesity might simultaneously reduce cancer incidence and slow progression in early-stage disease is not a small thing. It reframes how we might think about metabolic medicine — not as management of one condition, but as upstream protection against a cascade of downstream harms.

India's cancer control strategy has historically leaned heavily on tobacco control and cervical cancer screening. Both are important. But obesity-linked cancers are rising faster than our policy frameworks are acknowledging them. If GLP-1s do prove preventive in RCTs, India will need to have already been thinking about how such drugs fit into a broader NCD prevention architecture — not just as treatments for the metabolically wealthy, but as tools with genuine population-level relevance.

What to watch for

The clinical trial announced following the ASCO breast cancer findings will be important. So will longer-term cohort data that follows patients over years rather than months. The mechanism question — weight loss versus direct receptor effect — matters enormously for how we eventually think about dosing, duration, and patient selection.

For Indian clinicians and public health practitioners, the ask right now is simply: stay close to this literature. The story is moving fast, and its implications for a country with our metabolic burden and cancer trajectory are significant. We may not be the ones running these trials. But we will be the ones managing the consequences — or the benefits — of what they find.

The National Family Health Survey-6 (NFHS-6), released last week, carries a headline that would have seemed aspirational a decade ago: 90.6% of births in India now take place in healthcare facilities. Up from 88.6% in NFHS-5. A nation that once delivered most of its babies at home, under dim lanterns, has — by this measure — transformed itself.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is pleased. The policy community is encouraged. And on paper, they are right to be.

But I have been inside those institutions. And the number, while true, is incomplete.

The Register and the Reality

During my posting as a Medical Officer at a Primary Health Centre in Madhya Pradesh, I watched institutional deliveries get recorded dutifully — every birth logged, every entry made. The data going upward through the system was clean.

What the data did not capture was the corridor outside the labour room where a pregnant woman waited on a bench because every bed was occupied — not by obstetric patients, but by the general ward cases that a PHC must also manage. A PHC is not a maternity home. It is a general facility asked to do everything, with beds that cannot be ring-fenced for pregnant women alone.

The delivery happened in an institution. The number went up. The experience of that woman did not make it into any survey.

Built Without Asking Us

There is something quietly absurd about the construction of PHC labour rooms in India that I have never seen discussed in any policy document.

During my posting, a new labour room was constructed at our PHC. I watched it being built. No one — not once — asked the doctors or nurses who would work in it what we needed.

The result was a room with uneven flooring. Water pooled in the depressions. During deliveries, as is inevitable, there is blood. That blood mixed with the pooled water on the floor. Our nurses had no choice but to cross it.

In a space where infection control is not optional — where a newborn's first breath and a mother's open wound demand the highest standards of hygiene — we had a floor that made hygiene structurally impossible.

There was more. The labour room had been built as an addition to an existing structure. The contractor, rather than demolishing the adjoining room's chajja — the overhead projection — simply built around it. It now jutted into the labour room space. Anyone who has studied basic infection control knows that labour rooms must have smooth walls and clean surfaces to minimise dust accumulation. A chajja is the opposite of that: a ledge designed, almost perfectly, to collect dust, debris, and everything you do not want near a delivery.

These were not oversights born of ignorance. They were the predictable outcome of a system where infrastructure decisions travel from district offices to state capitals to contractors — and the clinician who will live inside that room is never consulted once.

We count the facility. We do not count whether the facility was built to function.

The Three Days Nobody Stayed

In tribal areas, government policy mandates that mothers remain in the facility for three days after delivery — a well-intentioned measure to monitor for postpartum complications and ensure early breastfeeding support.

In practice, I watched this provision go quietly unfollowed. Families had fields. They had children at home. They had distances to cover. The mother delivered, the paperwork was completed, and by the next morning she was gone.

No one in the system pushed back. The delivery was institutional. The stay was not. The data recorded one; life recorded the other.

What NFHS-6 Is Telling Us — And What It Isn't

NFHS-6 is a serious, well-designed survey. Its improvement in institutional deliveries reflects genuine work — by ASHA workers, by JSY incentives, by years of sustained policy effort. That should not be dismissed.

But a survey measures what it measures. It counts whether a birth happened inside a facility. It does not yet have a reliable way to measure:

• Whether that facility had a functioning labour room

• Whether the woman had a bed, or a bench

• Whether the clinicians who staffed it had any say in how it was built

• Whether the mandated postpartum stay was actually completed

These are not criticisms of NFHS. They are the next questions that NFHS, and the policymakers who use it, must begin to ask.

A Number is a Beginning, Not a Conclusion

90.6% is a genuine achievement. Let us not be churlish about that.

But if we stop at the number — if we allow it to close the conversation rather than open it — we will spend the next decade building more facilities that look right on paper and feel wrong on the ground.

The women of rural India deserve both: the institutional delivery and the institution that was actually built to receive them.

The data says they are getting the first. The second is still a work in progress.

Dr. Kuldeep Baria is a physician and the author of Nadi Parikshan — a Substack on public health, governance, and policy. He previously served as a Medical Officer at a PHC in Madhya Pradesh.

I have been practicing this art for years at my clinic. But on May 15, 2026, I found myself reading a different kind of pulse — the pulse of a civilisation that had been wounded for nearly a thousand years, and was finally, slowly, beginning to heal.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court delivered its verdict on Bhojshala that day. 242 pages. Two judges. One historic conclusion.

But to understand why this verdict made millions of Indians weep with something between grief and gratitude, you have to go back. Far back. Not to 2003. Not to 1875. All the way back to a king named Bhoj, who ruled Malwa between 1010 and 1055 AD, and built something so magnificent that even a thousand years of invasion could not fully erase it.

Raja Bhoj and the Seat of Knowledge

History remembers Raja Bhoj of the Parmar dynasty as one of the greatest philosopher-kings Bharat ever produced. He was not merely a ruler — he was a scholar, a poet, an architect, and a patron of learning so generous that the word “Bhoj” itself became synonymous with scholarship in Hindi — “Kahan Raja Bhoj, kahan Gangu teli.”

Between 1010 and 1055 AD, he built Bhojshala in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh. It was not just a temple. It was a living university — a Saraswati Sadan, a hall of learning where Mata Vagdevi, the goddess of knowledge, speech and wisdom, was the presiding deity.

Imagine the scene for a moment. Scholars arriving from across Bharat. Sanskrit shlokas echoing through stone corridors. The Vagdevi murti — white marble, four-armed, 128.5 centimetres tall, weighing 250 kilograms — standing at the centre, radiating what our ancestors called Saraswati shakti — the power of pure knowledge.

This was Bharat’s Oxford. Bharat’s Cambridge. Built not with colonial ambition but with civilisational devotion.

The idol itself was a masterpiece. Carved in Vikram Samvat 1091 — approximately 1034 AD. Inscriptions on its base in Sanskrit and Devanagari script mention a scholar named Varuchi who commissioned it. The craftsmanship — the karanda mukuta on the deity’s head, the intricate kesh vinyasa, the four arms each carrying sacred symbolism — spoke of an artistic tradition at its absolute peak.

For nearly three centuries, Bhojshala stood as one of the brightest centres of Indic learning.

Then came the invasions.

When Knowledge Was Silenced

Between 1305 and 1409 AD, Malwa fell to successive invasions. What followed was not merely military conquest — it was a systematic cultural erasure that we in Bharat have been conditioned, over centuries, to either forget or forgive too quickly.

Bhojshala was attacked. Its sacred structure was dismantled. But its stones — the very bones of Raja Bhoj’s dream — were not discarded. They were reused. Repurposed. Incorporated into what would later be called Kamal Maula Mosque.

As a doctor, I understand what it means when a wound is covered rather than healed. It does not disappear. It festers beneath the surface, waiting for the day someone finally looks beneath the bandage.

The ASI scientific survey of 2024 looked beneath the bandage.

What it found was staggering — 106 pillars and 82 pilasters, all architecturally connected to the original temple structure. Over 150 Sanskrit and Prakrit inscriptions, all demonstrably older than the Arabic-Persian inscriptions found on the same site. Ground Penetrating Radar revealing structures beneath the current surface consistent with a large pre-existing temple complex.

The ASI report — submitted in 10 volumes, over 2,000 pages, the result of 98 days of scientific survey led by Additional Director General Alok Tripathi — concluded with quiet but devastating clarity: the later structure was built hastily using the remains of earlier temples.

Hastily. That one word carries centuries of violence within it.

The Idol That Never Came Home

In 1875, during excavation in the Dhar region, workers unearthed something extraordinary.

The Vagdevi murti. Mata Saraswati herself. 128.5 centimetres tall. 250 kilograms of white marble. Four arms. Nearly 992 years old. Sanskrit and Devanagari inscriptions still legible on her base after almost a millennium beneath the earth.

She had survived invasions. She had survived centuries of burial. She had survived everything history had thrown at Bharat.

But she could not survive the British Empire.

British colonial officers, recognising the idol’s antiquity and artistic significance, took her to England. She was transported across the ocean — away from the land of her creation, away from the civilisation that had worshipped her, away from Bhojshala where she belonged.

She has never come back.

Today, Mata Vagdevi sits in the British Museum in London. Labelled, catalogued, displayed — a cultural artifact in a foreign land.

We call her our mother.

I think about this often as a doctor. We speak of informed consent — the principle that nothing should be done to a patient’s body without their knowledge and agreement. What consent was given when Bharat’s sacred murtis were taken across oceans? What agreement was signed when our civilisational memory was packed into British museum crates?

The May 2026 verdict has directed the Central Government to consider formal petitions for repatriation of the Vagdevi murti. MP Advocate General Prashant Singh confirmed that petitions can now be officially filed with the Centre.

The Kohinoor. Mata Vagdevi. Countless stolen murtis and artifacts.

The demand for their return is no longer just emotional. It is now legally grounded.

74 Years of Vasant Panchami

Here is what I find most moving about the Bhojshala story — and what I think the English-language media almost entirely missed in its coverage of the verdict.

This was not a sudden legal battle. This was a 74-year civilisational movement carried on the shoulders of ordinary people — farmers, teachers, women, shopkeepers — in the small city of Dhar, Madhya Pradesh.

It began quietly in 1952 when a group of Hindus organised Vasant Panchami puja at Bhojshala. No lawyers. No political party machinery. No media cameras. Just faith, and the stubborn refusal to let a sacred place be forgotten.

Year after year, through the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, the tradition continued. In 1994, it formally became the Saraswati Vandana movement — spreading village by village across Malwa, carried by RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and Hindu Jagran Manch workers who built a network of 13,000 Dharmarakshaks across the region. Critically — and this is something that rarely gets mentioned — women were the backbone of this movement. Their participation, the newspaper accounts tell us, was the movement’s single biggest source of strength.

But it was not without cost.

On 6 December 1996, Bajrang Dal called a state-level Shaurya Diwas at Bhojshala. The administration responded with force, trying to prevent the gathering.

In May 1997, clashes broke out. Thirty-five people were injured. Cases were filed against 1,500 people. Twenty-six were arrested. IPC sections 302 and 307 — serious criminal charges — were invoked against participants.

Thirty-five injured. Fifteen hundred booked. Twenty-six arrested.

They did not stop.

In 2001 and 2002, tensions continued to simmer every Vasant Panchami. Finally, in 2003, the administration imposed what it called a compromise — Hindus could worship on Tuesdays, Muslims could offer namaz on Fridays.

A mandir of Mata Vagdevi. Put on a weekly timetable.

As someone who has studied governance and policy, I understand the administrative logic of such a decision. As someone who understands what Mata Saraswati represents to the Hindu civilisation — the very source of knowledge, language and learning — I also understand why no believing Hindu could ever truly accept it.

They accepted it temporarily.

They never accepted it permanently.

The Science of Truth

In 2022, a new writ petition was filed in the High Court. In 2024, the court ordered a full ASI scientific survey — 98 days, Ground Penetrating Radar, archaeologists, structural analysts, technical experts from multiple disciplines including three from the Muslim community.

The survey team was led by ASI Additional Director General Alok Tripathi. The report was submitted in 10 volumes — over 2,000 pages of evidence, analysis, photographic documentation, and scientific conclusion.

150 Sanskrit and Prakrit inscriptions. All older than the Arabic-Persian inscriptions on the same site.

106 pillars. 82 pilasters. All connected to temple architecture.

Structural evidence consistent with a large pre-existing temple complex.

The later construction — hasty. Built using earlier temple remains.

History, when examined with scientific rigour, does not lie.

The 242-Page Verdict

On May 15, 2026, Justice Vijay Kumar Shukla and Justice Alok Awasthi of the MP High Court Indore Bench delivered their verdict.

242 pages.

The key findings:

Bhojshala has been a protected monument since 1904 — continuously protected under laws of 1951 and 1958. The site is declared a temple of Mata Vagdevi — Goddess Saraswati. The 2003 ASI circular allowing Friday namaz is quashed. Hindu worship rights are fully restored. The Muslim side is offered alternative land for a mosque. The Central Government is directed to consider petitions for repatriation of the Vagdevi murti from the British Museum.

But the most important words in the entire 242-page document — the words I believe will echo through Indian legal history — were these:

"This is not merely a matter of faith. It is a matter of constitutional, archaeological and cultural heritage protection. Archaeology is a scientific discipline and courts can rely on conclusions drawn from multidisciplinary studies."

Read that again.

Not faith. Constitutional. Archaeological. Scientific.

The court did not just restore a temple. It established a legal and intellectual framework — that India's civilisational heritage claims are not religious sentiment. They are scientifically verifiable, constitutionally protectable, legally adjudicable facts.

This is the precedent that matters.

Senior Advocates Vishnu Shankar Jain and Vinay Joshi, who argued the case for petitioner Ashish Goyal, did not just win a case. They won a civilisational argument in a court of law.

What This Means — A Doctor's Diagnosis

In medicine, we distinguish between treating symptoms and treating the disease.

For decades, the Bhojshala dispute was treated symptomatically — administrative orders, timetables, temporary arrangements that managed the tension without addressing its root cause.

The May 2026 verdict is the first serious attempt at treating the disease itself — acknowledging through scientific evidence and constitutional reasoning that a civilisational wrong was done, that it is documentable, and that it is correctable through due process.

This is not majoritarianism. This is diagnostics.

A doctor who ignores evidence because it is inconvenient is not being neutral. He is being negligent. Similarly, a society that ignores archaeological evidence of historical injustice because acknowledging it is politically uncomfortable is not being secular. It is being dishonest.

Bhojshala is one verdict. But its implications reach far beyond Dhar, Madhya Pradesh.

It tells every Dharmarakshak who was injured in 1997 — your pain was not in vain.

It tells every woman who carried the Saraswati Vandana movement village by village — your devotion was not forgotten.

It tells Mata Vagdevi in the British Museum — we have not forgotten you either.

The Unfinished Prescription

As I write this, the repatriation of Mata Vagdevi remains an open question. The court has directed. The Advocate General has confirmed petitions can be filed. But the Central Government must act.

The Kohinoor remains in the Tower of London.

Mata Vagdevi remains in the British Museum.

Countless other murtis, manuscripts and artifacts remain in foreign museums and private collections.

Colonialism did not just steal land and labour. It stole identity. It stole memory. It stole the divine.

The Bhojshala verdict is the beginning of a longer civilisational conversation — one that India must have with the world, through law, through diplomacy, through science, and through the quiet, stubborn persistence of 13,000 Dharmarakshaks who never gave up.

A Final Reflection

I began this piece by talking about nadi pariksha — reading the pulse.

What does Bharat's pulse say today?

It says — a civilisation is healing. Slowly. Painfully. Through courts and surveys and 242-page verdicts rather than through rage or revenge. Through evidence and due process rather than through mob justice or political decree.

That is not weakness. That is the strength of a mature, ancient civilisation that has learned — over millennia of invasion, erasure and survival — that truth, when it is real, does not need to shout. It only needs to be heard.

From 1952 to 2026. 74 years of Vasant Panchami prayers.

Bhojshala is not just one verdict.

It is proof that a Sanatan civilisation with memory cannot be erased.

Bharat is not rising.

Bharat is returning. 🕉️🇮🇳