Practitioners hold that a chart shows the working out of karma, that the moment of birth reflects, rather than causes, a condition already established, and that is a materially different claim from the correspondence and psychological framings common in the modern West. It makes the chart a diagnosis of a fixed situation, which is why remedy rather than insight is so central to the practice.
Readings address specific domains: marriage and its timing, progeny, career and profession, longevity, wealth, education, health and litigation. Combinations of planets called yogas are read as producing particular results, and a substantial classical literature catalogues them. Longevity calculation, once a standard part of the tradition, is now approached cautiously or declined by many practitioners on ethical grounds.
Several disputes are internal and unresolved.
The ayanamsha is the largest. Different values shift every planet's sign placement, and no agreement exists on the correct one; charts cast by different practitioners can therefore differ on basic placements.
The house system is a second: North Indian and South Indian chart formats differ in presentation, and the whole-sign house method standard in the tradition sits against practitioners who use others.
The outer planets are a third, with modernising practitioners incorporating them and traditionalists refusing.
And the relation to Hellenistic astrology is a fourth, with some Indian practitioners maintaining an entirely indigenous origin against the textual evidence of exchange, and Western traditional astrologers reading the borrowing in the other direction as well.
None of this is concealed within the tradition. Jyotisha has a large, argumentative technical literature, and a practitioner who states which ayanamsha and which house system they use is doing what the discipline's own standards require.