Mann Ki Baat 138th Episode Marks Surgical Strike Decade

The monthly radio address came back on 27 September 2026 with its 138th edition, and it opened on a night that changed the way India answers terror. Ten years ago, on the night of 28-29 September 2016, Indian Army teams went across the Line of Control and struck at terrorist camps. That action, the Prime Minister said, showed the world a new template for India's counter-terror policy, and it sits in one line with the Balakot air strike and Operation Sindoor that followed.

The decade the strike opened

The address also went back to the years of serial bombings. The Delhi blasts of 13 September 2008 took many innocent lives, and the Mumbai attack came only weeks after. The World Trade Center attacks complete 25 years in 2026; after Americans, the largest number of those killed there were Indians. India, the address argued, now works on a zero-tolerance rule rather than on waiting for anger to pass.

A census you can fill yourself

The first round of the national count is nearly finished in every state and union territory, and details of more than 32 crore families are on record. Field work is still going on in the snow belts of Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Uttarakhand. In Uttarakhand the count opened at Mana in Chamoli, called the country's first village, and the first entry was that of 83-year-old Purnima Rawat. At Bagori in Uttarkashi a homestay owner, Hardev Singh Rana, keyed in his own details.

Self-entry runs on the portal se.census.gov.in. A household logs in with a mobile number, gives its location, fills the family details and submits; no document has to be uploaded, and a special ID comes back that is shown to the enumerator when he or she calls. Over 2 crore 60 lakh people have done it already.

A centenary, a temple and a solar village

The same date is the birth centenary of Ashok Singhal, former International Working President of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, born at Agra on 27 September 1926 and a graduate of IIT BHU. The address then turned to Gujarat: Mahmud of Ghazni pulled down the Somnath temple in 1026, and in that same year the Sun Temple at Modhera, built by King Bhimdev the First only a year earlier in 1025, was attacked as well. Modhera today is the country's first Surya Gram, running wholly on solar power, and its dance festival falls in January after Makar Sankranti.

Forests, youth and local produce

Elephants have come back to the Sonai Rupai Wildlife Sanctuary in Assam three years after encroachment on the forest was cleared. In the same state a breeding effort that began with six pygmy hogs has pushed the count past 190. Widowed women of Jharkhali in the Sundarbans grow mangroves that both shield their villages and pay them. The Nasha Mukt Yuva Abhiyan, an anti-drug drive of 100 weeks with MY Bharat and NSS volunteers, was held up as youth-led work, and Pratapgarh in Uttar Pradesh was praised for its roughly 100 amla processing units under One District One Product. Nine crore beneficiaries are now on the Poshan Tracker.