If you walk down a street in urban India, you’ll likely see plastic. A blue tarpaulin sheet fluttering off a rooftop. A drain choked with plastic sachets. Somewhere, a cow nibbles on a carry bag, mistaking it for fodder. Plastic has become so central to our lives that we have normalised it, even as we drown in it.

We cannot ignore that fossil fuel deposits, coal and oil, are compressed remains of ancient plant and animal life, buried over millions of years. If current consumption patterns remain unabated, plastic may well become the defining fossil of the Anthropocene. According to a 2024 study published in Nature, India generates 9.3 million tonnes of plastic waste annually.1 This figure includes both formally managed plastic waste and waste managed by the informal sector. India’s per capita plastic consumption of 15 kilograms a year remains lower than the global average.2 However, rising disposable incomes are quickly narrowing that gap as production and consumption increase.

The health crisis is no longer speculation. Microplastics have been detected in human blood, lungs, heart and brain and pose concerns for cardiovascular, neurological and endocrine health. Adding to these concerns, persistent organic pollutants such as mercury bioaccumulate up the marine food chain and ultimately end up on our plates. As per a study published in Environmental International, polymer dust has now been identified as an air pollutant, thereby widening the pathways of exposure.3 Wildlife across terrestrial, avian or aquatic ecosystems bears the same burden through bioaccumulation and biomagnification. Further, our traditional disposal methods like open-air incineration not only fail to address the problem but also generate secondary air pollutants, converting solid waste into airborne toxins.

Here is an unpleasant economic truth underpinning all of this: plastic pollution is a textbook negative externality. A manufacturer that sells a packet of chips or a shampoo sachet captures the maximum value of that sale, while the public bears the end-of-life cost through plastic-choked drains, polluted soil, contaminated water, and air. Producers individualise the profit and socialise the cost. When prices ignore externalities, markets misallocate resources, and the economy ends up overproducing cheap, disposable plastic at levels well beyond what a market that accounts for actual costs would ever choose.

India’s response, for decades now, has been to legislate its way out of the crisis. The Plastic Waste Rules of 2011 built the first holistic legal framework.4 It prohibited the manufacture, sale, and use of plastic bags less than 40 microns thick and, notably, integrated waste pickers, the kabadiwalas and ragpickers, into formal waste management chains. The 2016 Rules went a step further by introducing the collect-back system, or the lifecycle responsibility, now called the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) system.5 It aimed to operationalise the polluter pay principle by holding producers responsible for the plastic they introduce into the market. Subsequent amendments in 2018, 2021, 2022, 2024, and 2025 have increased plastic bag thickness, prohibited low-utility single-use plastics, categorised plastic waste by type, introduced tradable EPR certificates, and mandated a QR-code traceability system.

The latest amendment, introduced in 2026, now requires a minimum level of recycled content in plastic packaging.6 The rules mandate at least 30% recycled content in rigid plastic packaging for FY 2025-26, increasing to 40% by April 2026 and 60% by FY 2028-29. However, the amendment also permits producers who fail to achieve these targets to carry forward their deficit for up to three years, provided they make up at least one-third of the shortfall each year. Introduced after industry representations, this provision underscores a recurring feature of India’s plastic governance: ambitious targets are often paired with compliance relaxations.

On paper, this seems like a gradual regulatory progression. But in reality, plastic use and waste have continued to rise. This reflects limitations in its regulatory design. India has built a command-and-control regime that concentrates authority at the top while neglecting incentives for the actors actually involved in collection and recycling.

India’s EPR system is the most market-oriented element of its plastic waste regulatory mechanism. It was designed to work like carbon credits, where producers who exceed their obligations sell certificates to those who fail to meet them, ensuring compliance at minimal cost. Though the idea is economically sound, it has been poorly executed. A report published by the Centre for Science and Environment revealed roughly 70,000 fake EPR certificates in circulation, with several polluters simply escaping the regulatory ambit.7 Without third-party checks and balances, the EPR certificate framework has become vulnerable to manipulation. A market allocates resources efficiently only when the underlying claims are credible. Fictitious compliance certificates do not represent market failure; instead, they constitute the absence of a genuine market. Though the state enacted the regulatory framework, it failed to develop the audit infrastructure required to sustain it.

Then there is India’s taxation structure, which runs counter to circular-economy policy. Scrap materials, plastic, and metal waste are taxed at the same 18% GST as virgin raw material.8 Beyond bureaucratic inertia, there is little justification for imposing the same tax burden on recycled and newly manufactured plastic. The effect is highly predictable. Formal recyclers that comply with tax obligations are priced out by the informal sector, shifting recycling into the informal economy and increasing the ecological burden. This is not a market failure, but government failure that aggravates a solvable problem.

None of this implies that the law is irrelevant, or that the plastic waste crisis should be left entirely to the market. Instead, the state’s role should be confined to developing an enabling regulatory framework by codifying explicit rules, enforcing standards, ensuring credible verification and allowing markets to work efficiently. India’s informal waste sector already processes a significant share of the country’s plastic waste cost-effectively, yet it remains almost entirely excluded from formal policy. A liberal approach to this crisis does not mean fewer regulations, but rather better-designed ones. This includes recognising informal recyclers as legitimate economic participants in the waste ecosystem, strengthening third-party verification in the EPR framework, providing tax incentives to encourage the use of recycled materials, and removing unnecessary regulatory barriers to encourage innovation in sustainable and alternative packaging materials.

Like Delhi’s winter smog, the plastic crisis ultimately asks who bears the cost of pollution they did not create. The answer lies not in adding new layers of centralised regulation to an already complex and weakly enforced legal framework. Instead, it calls for creating a system that aligns economic incentives, establishes clear accountability and empowers the informal stakeholders who sustain India’s circular economy. India’s real test is not whether it can enact yet another amendment, but whether it can build a system honest enough that the next one isn’t needed.

In 1920, Ludwig Von Mises, in his book “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” predicted what would happen when a state uses bureaucratic administration instead of the price mechanism. In much of the second half of the twentieth century, India attempted to use bureaucratic planning instead of prices. In this article, we will connect theory with practice and show how Mises’ warning haunts Delhi.

Mises argued that without private ownership of capital goods, no market exists for them, and without a market, no genuine prices exist. Without real prices, individuals cannot compare the relative scarcity of steel, cement, or foreign exchange across competing uses. People have no common unit to compare whether a ton of steel should go to a bridge or to a bicycle factory. When people plan production without prices, they are, in Mises’s phrase, “calculating blind”.

Hayek formalised and developed this idea into what he called the knowledge problem. The relevant facts about where a resource is most urgently needed are scattered across millions of minds and change hour to hour, in a form no ministry could collect and process.

Prices are, thus, an economy-wide communication and coordination mechanism. From 1951 onward, India’s Planning Commission set investment targets, output quotas, and industrial licenses through the Mahalanobis model rather than through market bidding. Under the License Raj, a firm needed government permission to expand capacity, change its product mix, or import inputs, permission granted not by price signals but by administrative discretion. C. Rajagopalachari, who coined the term in the 1950s, predicted that this system would breed corruption and inefficiency rather than the rational allocation its architects promised (1).

The macroeconomic record bears this out. From the 1950s through the 1980s, India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at an average of 3.5% a year, with per-capita income growth of barely 1%. Economist Raj Krishna dubbed it the “Hindu rate of growth” in 1978, insisting that no matter what policymakers did, the trend would stay near 3.5%(2).

In 1947, India’s average income was roughly comparable to South Korea’s and Taiwan’s; by 1999, after decades of planning, India’s per capita income of $1,818 trailed South Korea’s $13,317 and Taiwan’s $15,720 by an order of magnitude (3). Both South Korea and Taiwan, whatever their own state involvement, retained functioning capital markets and price-guided investment far more than India did.

When the License Raj was dismantled in 1991, prices and calculation were restored to industry, and growth accelerated markedly in the years that followed, just as the theory predicts.

The limited growth under planning is not because of malice or incompetence among Indian planners and officials. Mises’s point was that no planner, however capable or well-intentioned, can plan without market prices for the means of production. India’s partial liberalisation since 1991 offers a natural test of the thesis within a single country and culture: growth accelerated precisely where prices, and hence calculation, was restored.

Citations

1. India in the Age of Ideas: Select Writings, 2006–2018 (on C. Rajagopalachari’s coining of “License Raj”).

2. Business Standard, “Hindu rate of growth: Where does the term come from and what it means” (Mar. 2023)

3. Meghnad Desai, “India and China: An Essay in Comparative Political Economy,” paper presented at the IMF/NCAER Conference, New Delhi (Nov. 2003), available via IMF.org.

4. Business Standard, “Is India’s economy really ‘dangerously close’ to Hindu rate of growth?” (Mar. 2023); ISAS Brief, “The Indian Budget: A Failure to Confront the Challenges” (Jul. 2009).

About the author:

Mann Sharma is interested in Objectivism, libertarian legal theory, Austrian economics, engineering, physics, and the philosophy of science, driven by a curiosity about how the world works at a fundamental level.

This week, Delhi’s prisons finally ended an archaic policy: segregating incarcerated sex workers from other female inmates. The change follows a Supreme Court directive to remove discriminatory rules from prison manuals. This ruling builds on its 2022 ruling that sex workers are entitled to full constitutional dignity under Article 21.

It is a meaningful reform, but it only changes how the state treats sex workers after they are locked up. It does not change the statute that put them there in the first place. The Immoral Traffic (Prevention)Act, 1956 (ITPA) criminalises solicitation, brothels, and shared earnings. The state has decided to humanise custody rather than question why consenting adults were taken into custody in the first place.

What the Collectives Demand

In Kolkata, the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) has run self-regulatory boards since the 1990s. Their panels include sex workers themselves, tasked with screening new entrants for coercion and identifying minors, without routing every case through the police. In Maharashtra, Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP), supported by SANGRAM, runs a comparable self-regulatory system. The All-India Network of Sex Workers has for years demanded to decriminalise the trade itself and keep trafficking a serious and separately prosecuted crime. They also demand to let sex workers organise the way any other informal-sector workforce does.

This framework is not an abstract theory imported from outside. It is an operational model developed over decades by the communities living under the daily violence of current law. The framework also mirrors legislative reforms that have succeeded elsewhere. Gillian Abel conducted a comprehensive evaluation of New Zealand’s decade under the Prostitution Reform Act 2003. She found that the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective (NZPC) was the decisive catalyst behind the law. Reform did not emerge from moral hand-wringing by external commentators. Instead, it succeeded because organised workers framed safety, access to health care, and bodily autonomy as fundamental rights.

How Criminalising Endangers the Worker

The ITPA does not explicitly criminalise the individual act of selling sex, but it outlaws solicitation, brothel-keeping, and living off the earnings of prostitution. So while the trade is legal on paper, in reality every mechanism required to practice it safely is a crime.

This affects a worker’s daily physical safety. A fixed, known premise lets workers screen clients, check in with peers, and maintain emergency response systems. Criminalising brothels and shared spaces forces the trade underground. It strips workers of visibility, isolates them in unregulated environments, and prevents colleagues or managers from intervening during violent encounters.

This dynamic is not unique to India. The Lancet established in its landmark series on HIV and sex work that human rights violations occur across all policy models, but they are “most egregious in climates of criminalisation.”Outlawing the perimeter around sex work treats occupational safety as a criminal conspiracy.

New Zealand provides another empirical counterweight. Its Prostitution Reform Act 2003 decriminalised the trade entirely while maintaining strict criminal penalties for coercion and the involvement of minors. The review led by Gillian Abel demonstrated immediate, measurable gains in occupational safety:

● Power to Refuse Clients: The proportion of brothel-based workers who successfully refused a client rose from 47% before reform to 68% after decriminalisation.

● Rights Literacy: Within a decade of reform, over 90% of sex workers reported an explicit awareness of their legal and employment rights.

● Police as Safety Allies: On the street, police patrols shifted from being perceived as a threat of entrapment to an encouraging presence that protects workers’ safety and monitors client vehicle registrations.

● Occupational Health and Safer Sex Negotiation: The law banned brothels from advertising workers as medically “clean,” combating to foster a broader culture of safe sex.

Why Conflating Sex Work with Trafficking Backfires

No welfare argument works if it ignores trafficking. Carole Pateman argues that poverty compromises consent, making commercial sex inherently non-voluntary. But acknowledging economic coercion demands better safety nets, living wages, and viable exit options, not criminalising the infrastructure sex workers rely on for physical safety.

Markets around sex work have historically been used to coerce women, and any serious reform must confront that reality directly. Yet this history is precisely why the law must separate trafficking from voluntary adult sex work.

When police focus on raiding visible brothels, state resources are spent disrupting an established trade rather than tracing the hidden networks that actually traffic people.

India’s Supreme Court acknowledged this distinction in Budhadev Karmaskar (2022), ruling that consenting adult sex workers are entitled to dignity and equal protection under Article 21. Delhi’s recent decision to abolish segregated prison cells for sex workers is a direct, welcome outcome of that ruling. A Supreme Court direction, however, is not a statutory amendment. ITPA’s soliciting and brothel-keeping provisions remain on the books, untouched by the ruling. Court orders cannot substitute for repealing the provisions that put them there.

What a welfare-centred law would look like

New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA) is worth treating as a template. Its purpose clause

(Section 3) draws a boundary that Indian policy debates struggle to articulate: decriminalisation is not moral endorsement. The Act exists explicitly to “decriminalize prostitution (while not endorsing or morally sanctioning prostitution or its use” and to construct an enforceable framework around safety, health, and human dignity.

The Act backs that purpose with enforceable mechanisms:

● Contracts are valid: Agreements for commercial sexual services are not void on public-policy grounds. This brings sex workers into ordinary contract law rather than leaving every dispute unenforceable.

● Occupational health and safety law applies: Sex workers are treated as “at work” under New Zealand’s Health and Safety at Work Act while providing services. This puts them under the same protections as any other worker, rather than a separate, lesser category.

● Coercion is punished more harshly: Inducing or compelling someone into sex work, or into handing over their earnings, through threats, blackmail, or withholding drugs carries up to fourteen years’ imprisonment. Gillian Abel documents New Zealand courts using the Act’s protections to convict a police officer who abused his authority to coerce sex from a worker, and to jail a client for nine years for a violent rape.

● Minors are protected absolutely, and separately: Anyone assisting, contracting with, or profiting from a person under eighteen in the trade faces up to seven years’ imprisonment, enforced independently of the adult framework.

A law built around sex workers’ welfare, rather than around suppressing the trade, would translate this template into the Indian context. It would:

● Decriminalise the Operating Perimeter: Repeal ITPA provisions on solicitation and brothel-keeping, establishing lawful status for operational premises and civil contracts.

● Institutionalise Collectives: Grant formal legal standing to community-run mechanisms like DMSC’s boards, mirroring the PRA’s small owner-operated model.

● Guarantee Labour & Social Protections: Extend basic occupational health norms, institutional banking access, and the right to refuse clients, while legally protecting social security benefits for individuals exiting the trade.

● Target Coercion, Not Consensual Work: Maintain severe, standalone criminal penalties for trafficking and child exploitation, shifting investigative assets from local brothels to cross-border coercive networks.

New Zealand proved this is buildable, not utopian. Dignity delayed at the level of statute is dignity denied at the level of the street.

About the Author:

Aashna Goel is a social work student and public policy enthusiast currently pursuing her Master’s in Social Work at the Department of Social Work, University of Delhi. Her academic and professional interests are rooted in a commitment to understanding and addressing complex social issues through research, policy, and practice.

As you walk through the bustling garment and apparel manufacturing hubs of Tirupur and Noida, you see an industry vibrating with dynamism. Thousands of workers cut, stitch, and pack garments destined for export to different corners of the globe. The Indian textile industry is a centrepiece of the Indian economy, employing roughly 45 million people. Despite the sector’s potential, its performance since 2011 has stagnated, and India’s global share in textiles and apparel hovers stubbornly between 3.9% and 4.1%. This has coincided with Bangladesh and Vietnam capturing a greater share of textiles and apparel exports. One part of the explanation lies in India’s protection of key inputs used by textile manufacturers.

The decline in India’s clothing sector largely stems from its inability to compete in the man-made fibre sector. A key input for producing synthetic fibres such as polyester is a chemical called purified terephthalic acid (PTA). The problems began in 2010, when domestic PTA production declined while demand for PTA increased by 140%.

Imports fell around the same time that domestic production declined. But why? One important reason was the decision to impose anti-dumping duties on PTA imports from major exporters, ranging from $24 to $117 a tonne in 2014, to protect two domestic producers (Reliance Industries Ltd. and Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation India Ltd.). An anti-dumping duty is a tariff a government imposes to protect local industries from imported goods sold below the price they charge in the home market. The stated goal of imposing the anti-dumping duty is to level the playing field for Indian firms and prevent foreign producers from undercutting Indian firms.

The problem was that the benefits of the protection granted by the Indian state were concentrated amongst two producers who already accounted for a large market share for PTA. At the same time, rising PTA costs had a cascading effect on downstream fibre-making and apparel industries, making their products costlier and less competitive in the international market. This is the second-order effect of protectionism that Friedman and Bastiat frequently brought into economic debates. The higher cost of PTA reduced polyester capacity utilisation, which in turn lowered gross value added per worker (constant PPP).

This was further worsened by the Indian government’s decision to hike the import tariff on PTA from 7.5% to 10%. Raising the tariff on key inputs increased production costs for domestic firms, further reducing their export competitiveness and the ability to penetrate global markets. Furthermore, the protectionism offered by the government under the push for “Make in India” had a knock-on effect, creating a perverse political asymmetry where firms from other sectors would then lobby for protection. Public choice gives us the valuable insight that policies such as tariffs may create deadweight loss, but they offer benefits concentrated among a relatively small group of producers. Those producers then have a strong incentive to organise, hire lawyers, file complaints, and lobby for protection. The costs are spread across thousands of firms and millions of consumers. Each paying a little more.

The PTA case isn’t an isolated episode; it’s one case study among hundreds of misdirected trade policy interventions that end up hurting Indian firms. Another case of protectionist measures backfiring is viscose staple fibre (VSF), another important input for India’s textile industry. When the ASEAN-India Free Trade Agreement was signed in January 2010, India committed to eliminating tariffs on a wide variety of intermediate inputs, including VSF. The promised liberalisation did not last, as anti-dumping duties (ADD), Most Favoured Nation tariff adjustments, administrative extensions, and, ultimately, quality control orders (QCOs) undermined tariff elimination on VSF. This effectively taxed downstream competitive, labour-intensive yarn and garment industries. Abhisekh Anand and Naveen Thomas argue that deploying protectionist measures to protect a single dominant VSF generated roughly US$2.5-3.1 billion in rents for that producer. In other words, protection created a substantial gain for the protected producer, while firms further down the value chain bore the higher VSF price. India’s share of global viscose-based yarn exports fell from 13.2% in 2011 to 8.7% in 2024. Its share of viscose-based garment exports also declined, from 5.0% in 2017 to 3.9% in 2024.

The cost of protection goes deeper than lost employment or higher production costs. At its core, protectionism is a barrier to knowledge spillover—the sharing of best ideas and practices that enable productivity gains. Hayek’s broader insight that no policymaker or central planner can know in advance which production methods, technologies, or business models will allow firms to compete against other entities in the market is relevant here. Firms can discover knowledge only when they face competition and must respond. Protected firms have weaker incentives to reduce costs or improve product quality, especially when state capacity is weak and many interest groups are involved. A foreign competitor that can produce the same input more cheaply while ensuring better quality is not merely a threat to an Indian producer; it is also a source of information about what is technically and commercially possible. For Indian firms to achieve higher productivity, internationalisation through the dismantling of tariff and non-tariff barriers is critical to tap into global state-of-the-art knowledge.

Some lessons have been learned, as the anti-dumping duty on PTA was removed in 2020. More recently, in April 2026, customs duties on textile inputs, including PTA, were removed to ensure availability at competitive prices for downstream industries. Yet protectionism hasn’t completely disappeared, with the Indian government in November 2025 deciding to extend its anti-dumping duty on flax fabric from China and Hong Kong for another 5 years.

In conclusion, India’s textile industry does not need shielding from competition; it needs a chance to integrate into global markets. The experience of PTA and VSF shows how protectionism benefits few producers at the cost of increasing production costs for firms further down the supply chain, weakening the very industry it seeks to strengthen. As Hazlitt and Bastiat remind us, th policy often shows up in what remains unseen. Removing barriers may be painful for certain interest groups or firms in the short run; in the long run, it creates an incentive to be as competitive as possible.

About the author:

Amol Asthana is a Political Science and History student at Delhi University with an interest in economics, political economy, comparative development experiences, and international affairs. His interests include free markets, institutions, incentives, and the role of economic policy in shaping development outcomes. He writes on economic and policy issues, with a particular interest in free trade and political economy.

By: Dinesh Rai

Every year across India, about 22–23 lakh medical students sit for the NEET-UG, and only around one lakh secure seats in government medical colleges. This year, the exam took place on 3 May. Within a few days, investigators found that the paper had been compromised (Tognolini, 2026). A digital “guess paper” had circulated on Telegram and WhatsApp before the test and matched many real questions. The government cancelled the test nationwide. Protests broke out at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. Officials passed a new law with stricter penalties and ordered faster probes. The prime minister promised tougher action.

Laws against paper leaks are necessary, yet they leave the deeper problem untouched. India’s medical education system is a clear contemporary case of the Olson–Tullock–Stigler framework. The intense competition for medical seats is driven less by the country’s actual need for doctors and more by the large rents this sector offers. We see these rents in hidden admission fees and the huge costs of medical training. These rents are extra money that people extract without creating matching value for others (Henderson, 2018). They create strong incentives to enter and stay in the system. Organised groups–existing practitioners, medical associations or college owners–have a vested interest in keeping the system in their favour through regulatory barriers. These restrictions create large rents for a few, while the costs spread across the whole population.

Why Simply Adding More Seats Won’t Work

Many people say the government should simply add more medical seats because India needs more doctors. This sounds like a good idea. However, the real issue is not a lack of seats. The issue is: why do so many students take the exam in the first place? The massive rent attracts students. If we change the system to focus on actual healthcare needs, this rent will shrink. Students’ motives will then change. We saw this in the Indian Revenue Service. When the government introduced faceless tax assessments, the chance to take bribes fell. Many officers resigned (Kumar, 2025). People are not simply good or bad. The system shapes how they act. Just adding more medical seats will only attract more people chasing the same rent (Sanjay Maurya & Shukla, 2026).

A Need-Based Healthcare System

Strong financial and insurance markets help a country prosper (Panda et al., 2020). India’s stock market is now worth several hundred lakh crore. Why do people trust the market with so much money? The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is the answer. SEBI has built solid rules for the market. These rules protect everyday investors. Health insurance, however, still covers far fewer people. A NITI Aayog report on ‘Health Insurance for India’s Missing Middle’ shows the scale of the gap: roughly 40 crore people still have no health insurance at all. The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) is now working hard to build trust between companies and insurers (Mathew, 2026).

A competitive health-insurance market is one of the best ways to reduce rent-seeking. Look at motor insurance today. It is highly competitive. Companies make money by covering millions of people and still settle claims fairly. The same logic can work in health. Managed-care arrangements that link insurers, hospitals, laboratories and pharmacies can spread risk and control costs. Teams of doctors, nurses and physician assistants can handle most routine primary care (Hu et al., 2024). This frees doctors to specialise where the country truly needs them. At present, many doctors gather where the rent is highest, not where patients need them most. Cardiology attracts more doctors than neurology even though neurologists are scarce in many districts (Gupta, 2026). An insurance market creates clear signals. Those signals pull doctors toward the places and specialities that patients actually need.

Where we are standing right now matters a lot.

We cannot ignore the current friction between doctors, patients, and insurers. Delayed approvals, rejected claims, and heavy paperwork are real challenges. Yet when more people join an insurance pool, the system grows stronger and more stable (Smith & Kane, 1994). Motor insurance already shows this is possible (Staff Reporter, 2025). Public acceptance will grow as the benefits spread, just as they did with the stock market.

True reform must protect the public from rent. It must also stay watchful of people who claim to speak for patients or the profession while defending arrangements that mainly serve themselves.

About the Author:

Dinesh Rai is a PhD Student of economics at the Indian Institute of Technology Patna. He works on agricultural price policy, specifically its distributional impact on various sections of farmers in India, as well as the barriers and policy solutions for linking farmers to markets.

Bibliography

Gupta, D. P. (2026, July). Why India needs a neurologist in every district. Express Healthcare. https://www.expresshealthcare.in/news/why-india-needs-a-neurologist-in-every-district/454164/

Henderson, R. David. (2018, February 5). Rent Seeking. Econlib. https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentSeeking.html

Hu, X., Coplan, B., Barnes, H., Smith, N., Essary, A., & Dill, M. (2024). Physicians working with physician assistants and nurse practitioners: perceived effects on clinical practice. Health Affairs Scholar, 2(6), qxae070. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11196955/

Kumar, A., & Sarwal, R. (2021). Health insurance for India’s missing middle. NITI Aayog.

Kumar, P. Sesh. (2025, December 22). 853 IRS Officers Quit in a Decade: Tax Service Losing Its Soul?. The Raisina Hills. https://theraisinahills.com/853-irs-officers-quit-in-a-decade-tax-service-losing-its-soul/

Mathew, G. (2026, July 30). How IRDAI’s latest reforms could reshape India’s insurance sector. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-economics/irdai-insurance-reforms-explained-10810249/

Scheffler, R. M. (2008). Is there a doctor in the house?: market signals and tomorrow’s supply of doctors. Stanford University Press.

Smith, M. L., & Kane, S. A. (1994). The Law of Large Numbers and the Strength of Insurance. Huebner International Series on Risk, Insurance and Economic Security, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1378-6_1

Staff Reporter. (2025, May 20). India’s motor insurance market to hit $21.5b by 2030. Insurance Asia; Charlton Media Group. https://insuranceasia.com/insurance/news/indias-motor-insurance-market-hit-215b-2030

Tognolini, P. N. J. (2026, August 7). NEET doesn’t need more security. It needs a better design. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/education/neet-doesnt-need-more-security-it-needs-a-better-design/article71312788.ece

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By: Siya Agrawal

The popular caricature of the micromanager is someone who insists on being copied on every email, rewrites work that others are perfectly capable of completing, and turns every decision into a request for permission. The image is familiar because nearly everyone has encountered some version of it. Yet the research literature treats these behaviours less as quirks of temperament than as symptoms of deeper institutional incentives.

Organisational psychologists have long argued that excessive control undermines initiative. Research by Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham, and later Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, consistently finds that autonomy is central to motivation, creativity, and effective decision-making.

The implications extend beyond morale. Organisations learn by allowing decisions to be made where knowledge actually exists. The people closest to a problem typically understand its particularities better than those further removed from it. Empowering them is therefore not an act of generosity. It is often the most effective way of producing better decisions. This is why contemporary organisational psychology increasingly treats excessive control as self-defeating.

Suppose we encountered an organisation that consistently displayed every behavioural characteristic associated with micromanagement. Would we conclude that generations of its leaders happened to possess unusually controlling personalities? Or would we suspect that the organisation itself had been designed for purposes that made these behaviours rational?

History offers a compelling example.

The British Indian Civil Service is frequently described as one of the most capable bureaucracies ever constructed. The Indian Civil Service was widely regarded as an unusually disciplined and cohesive administrative organisation. Its recruitment, training and hierarchical structure produced a professionalised cadre capable of exercising authority across an enormous territory. A few thousand civil servants governed hundreds of millions of people across immense linguistic, cultural, and geographical diversity.

The puzzle is how.

The Indian Civil Service is best understood by starting with its purpose rather than its reputation. It was not designed to maximise local initiative — it was designed to govern an empire, and that distinction shapes everything that follows.

Empires face a structural problem that has nothing to do with the character of the people running them. Authority has to be exercised across territories that are geographically distant, politically varied, and only partially legible from the centre. The officials on the ground almost always know more about local conditions than their superiors do, yet it’s the superiors who remain accountable for the outcomes. This creates a recurring dilemma for any imperial system: how does the colonial state ensure distant officials faithfully implement its priorities?

The British answer was not to eliminate discretion altogether. A district collector exercised enormous discretionary authority over taxation, policing, justice, famine relief, and public order. But crucially, that discretion was embedded within a structure whose primary loyalty pointed upward rather than outward. The bureaucracy therefore evolved around a principle that organisational psychologists would immediately recognise. When trust cannot be assumed, control must be designed.

Once this principle became embedded in organisational routines, it began producing a predictable pattern of behaviour: authority migrated upward, information flowed upward, responsibility flowed downward, and discretion became something to be monitored rather than cultivated.

When India became independent, it inherited not only the personnel of the old administrative state but much of its operating philosophy. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel famously defended the continuation of the civil service as the “steel frame” that would hold together a fragile new republic. Given the upheaval of Partition, the integration of princely states, and the immense task of nation-building, the decision was understandable. Yet while the objectives of the state changed dramatically, the architecture of administration changed far less.

The colonial bureaucracy had been designed to govern subjects. The democratic state now sought to serve citizens, foster development, and implement ambitious social and economic programmes. But organisations do not automatically acquire new habits when they receive new missions. They tend to pursue new goals through familiar methods.

This is where organisational psychology becomes more than a metaphor.

A micromanaging organisation does not merely slow decisions at the top. Over time, it changes the behaviour of everyone below. When every choice requires approval, initiative becomes less valuable than anticipation. Success depends not on solving problems creatively but on accurately predicting what one’s superiors will accept.

This helps explain a paradox that frequently appears in discussions of Indian governance. Individual civil servants are often highly capable, deeply committed, and exceptionally competitive to recruit. Yet the system within which they operate is frequently criticised for procedural delay, excessive caution, and limited experimentation. Those observations are not necessarily contradictory. Highly capable individuals can still become procedurally cautious if the institution rewards procedural defensibility more reliably than discretionary success.

The colonial inheritance also helps illuminate another enduring feature of the bureaucracy: its preoccupation with visibility.

One of the defining habits of the micromanager is the belief that seeing work is equivalent to controlling it. The British governed immense territories with astonishingly few officials. They compensated by creating systems that rendered society legible through paperwork. Bernard Cohn described colonial rule as an exercise in producing knowledge, through censuses, surveys, classifications, and records, that made administration possible.

The difficulty arises when technologies developed to maintain control become ends in themselves. Organisations can gradually begin optimising what they can measure rather than what they hope to achieve. Producing documentation becomes easier to evaluate than exercising good judgement. Completing procedures becomes more professionally defensible than adapting creatively to local circumstances.

Here the argument intersects with economics. Friedrich Hayek’s famous insight about dispersed knowledge is often invoked in debates over markets, but its deeper relevance concerns organisations. Knowledge is fragmented. Much of what matters is local, contextual, and impossible to communicate fully through reports. The “man on the spot” frequently possesses information that cannot be transmitted upward in its entirety. A bureaucracy optimised for central oversight inevitably confronts this limitation

The claim I make here is not that the Indian state behaves like an overbearing office manager. Nor is it that bureaucrats are, by temperament, micromanagers. The claim is institutional. Organisations built to maximise political control, standardisation, and upward accountability tend to generate behavioural patterns that organisational psychologists recognise as the consequences of micromanagement. The colonial state adopted those patterns because they solved the problems of imperial governance. Independent India inherited many of the same institutional routines because replacing them was vastly more difficult than repurposing them.

Institutions rarely begin each generation with a blank slate. Administrative reform is therefore about more than reducing red tape or digitising government services. It requires reconsidering the assumptions built into the architecture itself. If the objective of a democratic state is not merely to maintain order but to enable citizens, then discretion cannot always be treated as a threat. Local knowledge cannot remain subordinate to distant visibility. Initiative cannot flourish where compliance is the safest career strategy.

Organisational psychologists have spent decades showing that resilient institutions do not emerge by eliminating discretion but by designing for responsible autonomy. They distribute authority because they recognise that knowledge is dispersed. They cultivate trust because constant supervision is an expensive substitute for it. They encourage experimentation because adaptation depends on learning rather than perfect foresight.

The irony is that these are precisely the qualities an empire could least afford.

The colonial bureaucracy was not dysfunctional. It was remarkably well adapted to the task for which it had been created. Its emphasis on control, surveillance, standardisation, and upward accountability reflected a coherent institutional logic.

The question confronting India today is whether an administrative system designed to govern an empire can fully realise the ambitions of a constitutional democracy.

About the author:

Siya Aggarwal is an undergraduate student at IIM Kozhikode interested in public finance, political economy, and financial regulation. She is particularly interested in how economic policies and institutions shape incentives for firms and individuals in developing economies.

An everyday conversation with my girlfriends revealed how all of us employ various strategies to “hold it in” (avoiding urination) in the absence of safe sanitation. This “girl math” includes deliberately not hydrating enough and using the washroom several times before leaving home or the office. It also means carrying the extra weight of toilet-seat sanitiser spray, tissues, wet wipes and paper soap, just in case an emergency public-washroom visit becomes unavoidable. This is just an ordinary day for millions of Indian women. And that is before we even consider the ordeal of a menstruating woman trying to find running water to change her menstrual cup. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has repeatedly released data on ‘locked toilets’ in schools across the nation, indicating that women train for this ‘toilet avoidance’ behaviour pattern since childhood, compromising on their health and dignity.

These everyday compromises are not just individual inconveniences. They are evidence of how easily women’s realities can disappear when they are not adequately captured in the data that informs policy. Data is often described as the backbone of all decision-making. The government uses it to decide its spending priorities - where to build roads, hospitals, schools and transport networks. Business owners use it to analyse market trends. Researchers use it to understand the gaps. But data will only work when it reflects the realities of everyone it is expected to represent. More often than not, Indian women disappear in the averages.

In her book, “Invisible Women”, Caroline Criado Perez argues that societies repeatedly treat men’s experiences as the “default” while women’s experiences become invisible because either they are not collected or not analysed distinctively. This gender data gap shapes and affects everything from car mortality tests to the importance of footpaths in urban planning. India is no exception.

Take urban mobility. Every day, millions of women travel across cities, but they travel differently from men. An Indian man may commute between home and work. An Indian woman, however, may drop a child at school, visit the boutique, buy medicines at the pharmacy for an elderly parent, travel to work, and stop at a sabzi-mandi before returning home, truly displaying the phenomenon of “trip chaining.” If transport surveys measure only the conventional home-to-work commute, they fail to capture these women’s actual travel patterns. When these patterns are not captured, transport planning can overlook the everyday barriers women face. Vendors and parked vehicles often make footpaths inaccessible, while poorly lit bus stops and inadequate last-mile connectivity force women to make multiple trips, adding to the burden both physically and financially. Additionally, public transport becomes inaccessible after dark because safety concerns again force women to shorten or alter their journeys. These are not merely infrastructure problems. They are evidence problems.

And this is why counting girls is not enough, but understanding their experiences is equally important. The idea is not just to separately collate statistics for men and women, but to recognise that formulating better policies requires different and nuanced data collection. Without this distinction, policies and schemes risk serving an imagined average citizen rather than real people with different needs.

What counting women would actually look like

None of this needs new technology; it just needs better questions to be asked consistently. A city budgeting for public toilets should report usable toilets per thousand women, not per thousand people, because the average hides the real gap. Education departments should track whether school toilets have doors, water, and safe disposal, not just whether a toilet block technically exists. Labour surveys should count unpaid domestic work as economic activity, recognising the millions of women whose labour remains invisible simply because it is not captured by conventional definitions of work.

India does not lack the institutions to collect gender data. It lacks the sustained priority and funding to make that data comprehensive, regular and useful for policy. As of December 2020, only 44.3% of the gender-specific SDG indicators needed to monitor progress were available for India, leaving major blind spots regarding unpaid care work, labour market outcomes, pay gaps, and women’s access to assets.

Why this is not a side issue

A toilet is where privacy, dignity, safety, and health all meet in one small physical space. This is exactly why it is one of the clearest places where missing gender data becomes a literal locked door. If a system cannot get something this basic right, it is worth asking what else is being planned using half a picture of the population.

The fix does not start with a grand policy document. It starts with a question that should have been asked decades ago: who is this space actually built for, and did anyone ask women what they need to use it safely and with dignity? The next time you stand in a long queue outside a women’s washroom, or hear that a school toilet is locked again, remember this is not bad maintenance. It is what happens when half of India goes missing from the data that shapes its cities, schools, and budgets. Counting women properly is not a favour to them. It is the minimum requirement for a country that works for everyone in it.

About the Author:

Shalini was a scholar at the Indian School of Public Policy with expertise in stakeholder management, international affairs, and policy research. She is passionate about education policy and policy advocacy, with strong analytical and communication skills. She is currently a Project Consultant at APCO Worldwide.

A newly laid road near my neighbourhood in Ayodhya was satisfying to look at. Days later, workers ripped it open again to lay a water pipeline, because no one had thought to loop in the water department before the tar went down. Bilaspur tells the same story with a different face. A stretch of road there carries brand-new smart traffic signals and CCTV cameras, standing a few feet from a drain that has overflowed, ignored, for months.

We are residents of Bilaspur and Ayodhya, and this piece began as a casual conversation between us about our own cities. What started as small talk turned into a pattern neither of us could shake. Freshly lit roads get dug up within weeks. Cameras watch over drains that nobody drains. Both cities sit under the same Smart Cities Mission, the same funding formula, the same guidelines, yet a handful of other SCM cities show none of this neglect. That gap is the puzzle driving this piece: why does one policy produce such different outcomes on the ground?

The Smart Cities Mission was launched in 2015 with an ambitious promise: to transform Indian cities through institutional, physical, social and economic infrastructure, complemented by digital technologies and data-driven governance (MoHUA, 2015). A decade later, judging its success is far from straightforward. Some cities have woven technology into everyday service delivery. Others continue to struggle with basic urban services despite visible investment in smart infrastructure. The policy is the same everywhere. The experience of living with it is not.

State capacity: The missing piece

As residents of Bilaspur and Ayodhya, we experience the SCM not through policy documents but through everyday life. A smart traffic signal, a command centre, a newly laid road, and a CCTV system are all visible. The institutional systems that make them work are not.

Urban transformation does not happen through infrastructure alone. It depends on the less visible capabilities of the institutions responsible for planning, financing, implementing, monitoring and maintaining that infrastructure over time. Pritchett, Andrews and Woolcock call this gap isomorphic mimicry: governments sustain legitimacy by copying the outward form of functional, “modern” institutions without building the functional capability that would make those forms actually work. In Bilaspur and Ayodhya, that mimicry looks like beautification drives and digital infrastructure standing in for the administrative capacity needed to run urban systems well. Reforms fail here not because local governments resist reform, but because the policy elites who design them import “best practice” models shaped by their own experience rather than the realities of the cities meant to adopt them.

Over time, that gap between form and function produces what Pritchett, Andrews and Woolcock call a capability trap: governments keep adopting new reforms and institutional structures without building the capacity to make any of them work. Coordination between departments cannot fix this. Before departments can coordinate with each other, each one needs the capacity to do its own job.

Overlooked basics

This kind of capability is exactly what a Smart City proposal fails to reward. Beautifying existing infrastructure and installing “SMART” systems is comparatively easy, and both are visible and marketable. The harder work happens behind the scenes, and none of it makes for a ribbon-cutting.

Under the SCM, a Special Purpose Vehicle handles implementation, while water, electricity, roads, telecom, sewerage and transport often remain under separate departments. Policy guidelines and CAG audits have both identified this coordination gap (CAG, 2025), yet it persists, at least in Ayodhya and Bilaspur.

A structural flaw runs through the policy: SCM projects are layered onto weak foundations in water supply, sanitation, waste management, electricity, and mobility, rather than fixing those foundations first. Tier 3 urban local bodies like Bilaspur and Ayodhya compound the problem. Their technical teams are small, their monitoring mechanisms limited, and their reliance on external consultants high. Departments need the capacity to do their own jobs before they can meaningfully coordinate with each other. Yet, the policy treats coordination as achievable independent of the capacity gaps that undermine it.

That gap between promise and practice raises a simple question: what actually constitutes a “smart” city? When technological interventions coexist with unreliable basic services and growing procedural burdens, the promise of “smart” risks becoming a performance rather than a lived urban reality.

A City that did differently

Visiting both large and small cities across India as residents of Tier 3 cities ourselves, we came to a simple conclusion: technology and infrastructure alone cannot build a genuinely “smart” city. Efficient delivery depends on the invisible infrastructure beneath it, the administration that makes it run. To test that claim, we turned to Udaipur as a contrast. Like Bilaspur, it is the headquarters of an administrative division. Like Ayodhya, it is a major cultural tourism destination.

What sets Udaipur apart is the distinction it draws between infrastructure and institutional capability. Municipal audits in Bilaspur and Ayodhya reveal deficiencies in financial management, project monitoring, contractor oversight and administrative capacity. Udaipur’s implementation record tells a different story, one that consistently foregrounds the less visible work of project delivery (USCL, 2023). Its Smart City documentation repeatedly treats coordination among the municipal corporation, district administration, engineers, planners, financial officers and project consultants as integral to implementation, not as an afterthought. Set against Bilaspur and Ayodhya, Udaipur shows that smart technologies cannot substitute for weak institutional systems. They depend on those systems to function at all.

Udaipur has not cracked the code. Independent audits of the city reveal persistent weaknesses in the municipal systems meant to sustain urban transformation. Mandatory five-year execution plans and annual municipal plans went unprepared. Annual accounts were delayed for years. Asset registers remained incomplete. Monitoring mechanisms for public infrastructure, public toilets among them, proved ineffective, leaving poor maintenance in place despite contractual provisions for inspection and penalties.

Even so, Udaipur’s emphasis on administrative coordination, multidisciplinary implementation teams and sustained stakeholder engagement supports the same proposition this piece has been building towards: urban transformation depends on organisational capability as much as on technological investment. The contrast with Bilaspur, then, is not simply about the quality of finished infrastructure. It lies in how central institutional coordination is to planning, sustaining and delivering that infrastructure over time.

Looking beyond

Taken together, these cities unfold the nuanced story of SCM that operates across municipalities with differing levels of administrative capability, but the real divide is not between “successful” and “unsuccessful” cities but between different degrees of administrative readiness. Technology and infrastructure may be visible symbols of progress, but institutional capacity is what ultimately defines the value of delivery years after a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Every city under SCM got the same blueprint, but not every city possessed the common starting point to implement the vision. This argument doesn’t make the Smart City Mission a failure; rather, it shifts attention from policy work to analysing what truly makes a city “smart”.

The next time you walk through your neighbourhood, look beyond brand-new Smart Traffic signals and freshly laid roads and ask yourself: What story do my city’s institutions tell?

About the Authors:

Nimmi Verma is a Master’s student in Public Administration with an interest in public policy, particularly education and gender. She previously worked as a Team Co-Lead, Policy and Advocacy Intern at an education-focused think tank, contributing to policy research and advocacy initiatives.

Titiksha Raushan is a Master’s student in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. Her interests include public policy, governance, inequality, and gender. She has research experience in areas such as vaccine hesitancy, menstrual health, education policy, and qualitative fieldwork.

The moment I step outside my PG to go to the library or Centre for Civil Society (CCS) office, my movement is often interrupted by cattle occupying the narrow lanes of Vijay Nagar near Delhi University’s North Campus. Sometimes there are one or two; at other times, an entire herd. These scenes are not unique to one neighbourhood -they are a familiar sight across much of Delhi.

Freely roaming cattle are more than an inconvenience. They contribute to traffic congestion, cause road accidents, and in some cases, even fatalities. A Hindustan Times report from 2024 noted that three people died in cattle-related road accidents within a single month. Separately, a New Indian Express report, drawing on Delhi Police data, highlighted stray animals on roads as a contributing factor to road crashes, alongside poor lighting and other road safety concerns.

At first glance, this appears to be a problem of weak municipal enforcement. My fieldwork, however, suggests something more fundamental. Many of the animals occupying the city’s roads are not abandoned but privately owned. The real challenge is not merely the presence of cattle in public spaces, but the absence of effective systems to trace ownership and enforce accountability, allowing the costs of private ownership to be borne by the public.

While speaking to a worker at one of the gaushalas in Gurmandi, North West Delhi, I discovered that not all cattle on the roads are abandoned. Many of them have owners. When asked why they let their cattle roam freely, some owners responded, “These cattle are like our family members. Does anyone cage their family?” Others argued that “Delhi once had more open spaces where cattle could roam. Urbanisation and population growth have taken away those spaces, but that does not mean we should keep them tied up forever.”

The owners of these cattle acknowledged that cattle create problems on the roads. However, they also pointed to their own constraints. With limited space to house their animals, many believe they have no option but to let them roam. Most owners agreed in principle that relocation would be acceptable. However, they argued that the absence of affordable alternatives within or around the city leaves them with little practical choice but to continue operating where they currently are.

Pedestrians, however, tell a different story. One resident complained that vehicles often cannot leave their lane because herds block the entrance. Apart from littering the roads and creating an unpleasant odour, cattle pose a genuine safety risk, especially for two-wheelers that skid on slippery roads. A university student even told me that she had to shift her PG because e-rickshaw drivers refused to enter lanes regularly clogged with cattle. These conversations reveal that the issue is not simply one of abandoned cattle, but of privately owned animals whose ownership is rarely visible to authorities.

This raises an important question: who should bear responsibility for cattle occupying public roads? Is the problem rooted in inadequate municipal capacity, insufficient animal shelters, the informal nature of the dairy sector, or a broader failure of urban governance or the cattle owners themselves?

Recent government interventions illustrate how policy has focused primarily on managing cattle after they occupy public roads rather than addressing why they continue to do so. Public attention intensified only after stray cattle reportedly delayed the Chief Minister’s convoy. The incident prompted the Delhi Government to allocate ₹40 crore to develop modern cow shelters in Ghumanhera to improve the sheltering and management of stray cattle. Yet existing gaushalas are already overcrowded, making it difficult for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to relocate cattle from public roads. While these measures address the immediate presence of cattle, they do little to improve traceability of ownership.

The problem is compounded by the largely informal nature of the dairy industry. Many cattle are bought and sold without proper documentation, making it easy for owners to abandon economically unproductive animals. Although several owners claimed they possessed documentation, none were able to produce it during my conversations. As such, establishing ownership often remains difficult. This raises a larger question: why do privately owned cattle continue to occupy public spaces in the national capital, often without any identifiable ownership?

Madhya Pradesh faced a similar challenge and attempted to address it by introducing colour-coded identification tags to distinguish privately owned cattle from stray animals. Such measures make tracing ownership considerably easier.

The legal framework in Delhi also reflects a gap. Article 48 of the Constitution, under the Directive Principles of State Policy, directs the State to preserve and improve cattle breeds and prohibit the slaughter of cows, calves, and other milch and draught cattle. In line with this, the Delhi Government enacted the Delhi Agricultural Cattle Preservation Act, 1994, which prohibits the slaughter of agricultural cattle. However, the Act remains silent on what happens when cattle become economically unproductive. The law protects cattle but provides little guidance on assigning responsibility once privately owned animals enter public spaces.

This transforms the issue of stray cattle into a broader problem.

The economics of Delhi’s stray cattle crisis can be understood through Garrett Hardin’s insights on the Tragedy of the Commons. Although public roads are not commons in the traditional sense, they function as an open-access resource for the movement and grazing of privately owned cattle. Individual owners reduce their maintenance costs by allowing cattle to use this shared space rather than bearing the full costs of housing and feeding them. For each owner, this decision appears rational. Collectively, however, when many owners make the same choice, the result is congestion, road accidents, deteriorating sanitation and shrinking public space. The case therefore resembles Hardin’s broader insight that individually rational decisions can generate socially undesirable outcomes when access to shared resources remains weakly governed.

This dynamic also represents a classic case of a negative externality. Owners earn private benefits through the sale of milk and dairy products, while commuters bear the costs of delays, pedestrians face safety risks, and municipalities struggle with enforcement. Because many cattle cannot be traced back to their owners, authorities are often unable to fix responsibility or take timely action.

Beyond ownership, the crisis also exposes shortcomings in urban planning and governance. City planning cannot focus exclusively on residential and commercial expansion while ignoring the realities of existing economic activities. Rapid urbanisation has steadily reduced grazing spaces without creating viable alternatives for livestock owners. This reveals a disconnect between urban planning and livestock governance—one that is particularly significant in a city like Delhi.

Improving traceability, rather than merely expanding shelter capacity, should therefore become the focus of policy. Although the Delhi Government has proposed spending ₹40 crore on new shelters, the objective should not simply be to remove cattle from the roads. The larger goal should be to ensure that those who benefit from cattle ownership are also held accountable for their upkeep. Madhya Pradesh’s proposal to assign unique 12-digit identification tags, along with colour-coded markers distinguishing stray and domesticated cattle, offers one possible way to improve traceability and accountability.

Delhi’s stray cattle problem is often framed as a question of animal welfare or municipal inefficiency. My fieldwork suggests that it is, more fundamentally, an institutional problem of ownership and accountability. When privately owned cattle occupy public roads without effective systems to assign responsibility, the costs of ownership are borne by society. Better shelters may alleviate congestion temporarily, but they cannot resolve the underlying incentive problem.

Ultimately, the issue comes down to traceability and accountability. In rural areas, informal social norms and close-knit communities make it relatively easy to identify cattle owners, creating social pressure to manage the commons responsibly. Delhi, by contrast, is a large and anonymous city where such informal mechanisms rarely exist. In this context, effective identification systems and enforceable ownership records become essential. Without them, responsibility remains invisible, enforcement remains weak, and public spaces continue to absorb the costs of private decisions.

About the author:

Nisshat is a postgraduate in Sociology with a strong interest in education policy, gender, and social inequality. Her research spans qualitative fieldwork with tribal women in Assam and Pakistani refugee communities in Delhi, as well as quantitative analysis on the link between female education and labour force participation in India.

If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably mastered making your way through the lines of e-rickshaws outside Delhi Metro stations. They are such an everyday part of our commute that we rarely notice them unless it is to complain about the traffic they create. But a few weeks ago, we happened to pay closer attention. With dozens of drivers offering the same service, you’d expect fierce competition for every passenger. But that’s not always what we found.

In Mayur Vihar Phase 1, drivers have developed an informal system for themselves. Each driver sticks to a particular route, and they rarely compete with each other for passengers. In fact, during our visits, we often saw other drivers directing passengers to a particular e-rickshaw driver rather than keeping the fare for themselves. On the other hand, at Vishwavidyalaya Metro Station, several drivers compete for the same passengers, and no such system is in place.

At first glance, classical market theory offers a straightforward answer for what we see at Vishwavidyalaya. The theory states that rational, self-interested actors, left to compete freely with no external referee, will default to rivalry. But the simplest version of this theory does not hold in Mayur Vihar. The drivers there sell the same service, work in the same city, and share the same goal of maximising profit, yet they behave differently from their counterparts a few stations away. Game theory offers a better account. Drawing on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Nash equilibrium, and Robert Axelrod’s work on the evolution of cooperation, this shows that self-interest does not produce a single fixed behaviour. It produces different stable outcomes depending on the structure of the game: who is involved, what choices they face, and whether they expect to meet again.

At Mayur Vihar, the driver community is small, and the same faces return daily. That repetition changes the incentives drivers face. In a one-off encounter, a driver gains by poaching a rival’s passenger, because there is no tomorrow to answer for. When the same drivers meet every day, poaching invites retaliation, and breaking the arrangement leaves a driver worse off than if they keep it. Given what every other driver is doing, no single driver benefits from breaking ranks alone. Game theorists call this a Nash equilibrium: a state in which every player has settled on the best response to everyone else’s behaviour, so no one has reason to move first.

Axelrod tested this logic directly. He ran a computer tournament in which different strategies played a repeated “cooperate or betray” game against each other, rather than only once. The winning strategy was strikingly simple and was nicknamed tit-for-tat. It cooperates on the first move, then copies whatever the opponent did last. Cooperation is met with cooperation, betrayal with a single retaliation rather than a permanent grudge. Over many rounds, this simple approach beat every strategy built on aggression or exploitation. Applied to Mayur Vihar, the lesson holds. When the same drivers expect to face each other again and again, cooperation becomes the smarter bet rather than a nicety.

Rigid tit-for-tat, however, has a weakness: it cannot distinguish an honest mistake from a real betrayal. It simply copies whatever happened last. Real interactions are noisy. A driver might cross into another’s route by accident, or a passenger might approach the wrong rickshaw. Strict tit-for-tat treats that misread exactly like deliberate betrayal, so the wronged driver retaliates. The other driver, who did nothing wrong, reads the retaliation as an unprovoked attack and hits back. A single misunderstanding can spiral into open conflict even though neither driver intended to break the truce. What holds Mayur Vihar together appears to be a more forgiving variant of the same strategy. Drivers appear to tolerate occasional, ambiguous lapses rather than answering them immediately, and that margin of forgiveness may be what keeps the arrangement stable when mistakes inevitably occur.

Vishwavidyalaya runs on the opposite conditions. Its driver pool is larger and more transient, and the rush-hour crowd draws in passengers few drivers will see again. Under these conditions, the one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma takes hold. A driver who competes hard for every fare pays no future cost for it, because there is no relationship left to damage. Competing becomes the rational move each time, even though the result, mutual defection, leaves every driver worse off than cooperation would.

Different kinds of drivers do not populate Mayur Vihar and Vishwavidyalaya. The same self-interest operates at both stations. What differs is the strategic environment each station creates. Repeated interaction and tolerance for occasional error make cooperation the stable outcome at Mayur Vihar. Neither condition holds as strongly at Vishwavidyalaya, and competition fills the gap instead.

None of this overturns the classical view of competition. Self-interest explains the drivers’ behaviour at both stations. The error lies in a common shorthand drawn from that theory, the assumption that self-interested actors default to rivalry as though no other rational response existed. Self-interest instead produces different equilibria depending on whether a game repeats or ends after one round, and on whether the system can tolerate noise and error. Cooperation is not the opposite of self-interest, a moment where drivers set aside their own gain for the collective good. It is exactly as rational as competition, reached by the same logic under different conditions.

Axelrod captured the mechanism at work: in the short run, the environment determines how players behave, but over the long run, players determine the environment. Neither Mayur Vihar’s drivers nor Vishwavidyalaya’s created the conditions they operate under. Repeated interaction was already there to be exploited at one station and largely absent at the other. But once those conditions existed, drivers built the norms that fit them, cooperative at one stop, competitive at the other.

Delhi’s gig economy runs on hundreds of similar informal arrangements, and none of them needs a manager to produce order. Where drivers form small, stable groups, see each other daily, and tolerate the occasional honest mistake, they can build cooperative norms on their own. Policymakers looking to improve conditions for gig and informal transport workers should ask not how to police competition among them, but how to engineer the repeated contact and tolerance for error that make cooperation the rational choice drivers reach for themselves.

About the Authors:

Aman is a postgraduate Economics student at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi, with experience in public policy, social development, and sustainability. She has worked with the Ministry of Culture, Teach For India, and the DEFT Foundation, and is interested in education, social welfare, and evidence-based policymaking.

Kritika is an Economics student at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Her interests include public finance, development policy, and political economy, with research on gender, fiscal policy, and welfare. She has worked with the Centre for Policy Research and Governance and Citizens for Reform India, and serves as General Secretary of her college's Economics Society.

Walk into most Indian classrooms, and you’ll find the same scene that has played out for decades: a teacher at the front, notes on the board, and children copying them down. This has long been the dominant way of teaching, leaving little room for more interactive learning approaches. Ask a child what they did in class, and you rarely hear, “We played a game to learn fractions.” Game-based learning uses physical or digital games to teach concepts, develop problem-solving skills, and hold student attention. It covers online and video-game-style formats as much as board games, and all of them rest on one idea: that children learn by doing rather than by listening. Teachers who use it are not adding an activity to a lesson. They are changing how the lesson works.

The importance of play is gaining global recognition. In 2024, the United Nations (UN) marked the first International Day of Play on 11 June, recognising play as a child’s right and highlighting its role in supporting cognitive, physical, social, emotional, and creative development. The UN also notes that learning via games makes learning more engaging for children.

Far less attention has gone to a prior question: what determines whether a school can adopt such a method at all? Effectiveness alone does not make an innovation spread. Schools must be willing to adopt it, and they must be able to. A principal may see the value in a new teaching method and still fail to introduce it. For low-cost private schools, the constraint is rarely the willingness. It is the capacity.

The Incentive Is There

Private schools rely largely on fees paid by families, which makes attracting and retaining students a matter of survival. Low-cost private schools feel this most sharply, because enrolment determines whether they stay open. Parents choose these schools for English-medium instruction, exam results, and discipline, so no school can count on game-based learning to fill its classrooms by itself. But a school that improves the learning experience becomes easier to choose and harder to leave. Owners of low-cost private schools therefore have good reason to experiment.

Incentive alone, though, predicts very little. A school with both the desire and the means will experiment readily. A school with the desire but no means will delay, not because it undervalues the method, but because it cannot pay for it. Incentive and capacity together mark out four conditions under which schools decide whether to adopt game-based learning, and the matrix below sets them out.

Low Capacity

High Capacity

Low Incentive

Status quo

Able but unwilling

High Incentive

Willing but unable

Most likely to innovate

Low-cost private schools sit in the bottom-left cell. They want to innovate but cannot afford to.

The Case for Capacity

Wanting to act does not create the ability to act. Introducing game-based learning takes more than buying a classroom activity or subscribing to a digital platform. Teachers need training before they can build games into a lesson. Schools need materials, devices, and internet access, depending on the method, and teachers need time to plan activities and align them with the curriculum and its assessments. All of it demands money before it returns anything. In budget private schools, staff salaries already absorb nearly 60% of expenditure (Central Square Foundation, 2021). A new investment competes directly with the payroll. Cost, not conviction, is what keeps game-based learning out of these classrooms.

But where one school might not find it affordable, a cluster of schools can together share these costs. This can reduce the burden on each school. James Tooley argues that low-cost private schools can improve quality by coming together through school chains or associations. Through this, they can jointly invest in management, teacher training and curriculum development. The same logic applies to procuring game-based learning tools. An association of multiple schools can procure a learning tool once, making the investment more affordable per school. For example, if purchasing a digital learning platform costs ₹1 lakh, ten schools in a network could share the cost, reducing the expense to ₹10,000 per school instead of each school paying the full amount.

Schools can also draw on capacity built elsewhere. Public institutions and non-profits lower the cost of adoption by developing resources and training teachers directly. CIET-NCERT, in collaboration with NITI Aayog, has run free online training on game-based learning for teachers. The Opentree Foundation’s Play2Learn set up play-based learning centres at no cost in low-income schools in Maharashtra and trains teachers to use play-based methods in the classroom. Each of these initiatives removes an expense a school would otherwise meet on its own, and each sends teachers back to the classroom more confident about using the method.

Way Forward

Individual schools cannot expand game-based learning on their own. They depend on an ecosystem that makes good learning resources cheaper to develop and easier to reach. Affordable credit, shared teaching resources, and teacher training all build capacity directly. The Government of India’s push to strengthen the Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics (AVGC) sector may also support education indirectly. By expanding India’s pool of game developers, such initiatives could increase the availability of educational games and create more opportunities for collaboration between schools and developers over time.

Educational games will keep getting made. The harder question is which schools can put them to use. Low-cost private schools already understand what game-based learning offers them. What they lack is the money to buy it, the training to teach with it, and the organisation to keep it running. Affordable finance, teacher training, and school networks that spread costs would help address the problems schools face.

About the author:

Shubhangi Yadav is a third-year Economics student at Hindu College, University of Delhi, with interests in public policy and development studies. She was a Research Scholar under the Centre for Civil Society's Researching Reality 2025 Residency Program, where she worked on governance and decriminalization reforms, and led an Invest India-endorsed research project on India's trade partnerships.

By: Raina Roy

Last week, I received an email with one line in bold: “Usage of AI is strictly discouraged as our focus is to understand your thinking and approach.” That line captures a much broader sentiment surrounding artificial intelligence today. Sceptics worry that AI is sexist, biased, and capable of reinforcing existing inequalities (UN News, 2026). Others argue that AI is a shortcut that erodes critical thinking, stifles creativity, diminishes skill development, and threatens intellectual autonomy, an effect researchers have termed “cognitive offloading” (MDPI, 2026). Major companies have acted on these worries. JPMorgan Chase, Apple, and Spotify have all restricted employees’ use of AI outright (CNN Business, 2023).

But why do we limit a tool designed to enhance human productivity? From an economic perspective, AI is an innovation that lets people achieve more with the same time and effort. Economists would say it shifts the indifference curve outward, raising efficiency without raising resource use. In India, where gender gaps run across corporate structures, a tool that is genderless by architecture could improve equity. A large language model does not decide anything based on who is prompting it. A calculator returns 25 for 5 times 5 no matter who presses the keys, and an LLM answers the same way, which makes it one of the more gender-neutral tools available to the workforce.

The equity problem does not arise from AI itself. It arises from who gets to use it. When more men than women engage with AI, the data and language that models train on tilt toward male usage patterns and professional needs (Ho et al., 2025). Over time, the model’s baseline context shifts. This is not an inherent property of the technology. It is a consequence of who gets to use it. Restricting AI does not neutralise this risk but amplifies it because restrictions rarely fall equally.

In the modern economy, AI is a reality. Employers and workers would do better to adapt than to resist, treating AI as leverage rather than as a threat.

India’s Comparative Advantage in AI

India leads the world in AI skill penetration, and the gender data makes the equity opportunity compelling. The government has launched the IndiaAI Mission and established Centres of Excellence for AI, strengthening the country’s research and innovation base. Policymakers have tied these programmes to the vision of Viksit Bharat by 2047, under which India aspires to become a global AI powerhouse.

• India ranks 1st globally in AI skill penetration with a score of 2.8, ahead of the US (2.2) and Germany (1.9). India’s AI talent concentration has grown by 263% since 2016. (Stanford AI Index, 2024)

• India also leads in AI skill penetration for women, scoring 1.7 against the US at 1.2 and Israel at 0.9. This means that when Indian women access AI, they adopt it at a rate that outpaces that of women in the world’s most advanced economies. (Stanford AI Index, 2024)

Yet a strange contradiction sits alongside these wins. We celebrate AI adoption nationally and discourage it organisationally. Companies announce AI strategies, then email employees telling them not to use ChatGPT. In universities, professors worry about AI-assisted assignments even as their departments launch AI courses. Recruiters say they want tech-savvy employees, yet run AI-averse hiring processes. Investing in highways while banning cars would look much the same. A century ago, literacy meant reading and writing. Today it increasingly means the ability to collaborate with intelligent systems. Institutional resistance to AI is not neutral. It exacts its highest cost on those already structurally disadvantaged.

The Cost of Pessimism

Women face a real and well-documented risk in the global labour market. A 2025 ILO analysis with Poland’s National Research Institute found that in high-income countries, jobs at the highest risk of generative-AI automation account for 9.6% of women’s employment against 3.5% of men’s, nearly three times the exposure. Clerical and administrative roles drive that gap, because women disproportionately hold them and because they rank as the most exposed occupational category. Unless employers respond deliberately, through retraining, redeployment, and policies that route women into AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced roles, AI could meaningfully erode female labour-force participation. The risk raises a design question: how should we build institutions and workplaces so that AI becomes a net gain for women rather than a source of displacement?

A GLO study (2024) shows what happens when institutions leave that question unanswered. Where AI tools are available but not officially sanctioned, women use them significantly less than men, at 45.1% against 57.7%, and associate the usage with misconduct or cheating. A CNBC survey (2026) finds the same instinct at work: 41% of women feel that using AI at work is cheating, compared with 34% of men. Women also tend to seek higher competence before embracing a new technology, while men explore AI at lower proficiency levels. Heavy institutional investment in AI has not dislodged this pessimism at the point of adoption, and the divide deepens along lines of risk tolerance, conformity, and confidence. Women, in particular, disengage rather than experiment: Stanford Social Innovation Review’s meta-analysis covered 143,008 people across 25 countries and found that women had 22% lower odds of using generative AI than men. Scepticism about AI’s value did not drive that gap. Lower confidence did, alongside a perceived need for more training before the tool could pay off.

From “Cheating” to “Fluency”

The GLO research also identifies a turning point. When the employer formally provides the AI tool, usage rates equalise. Official endorsement of AI use reclassifies it for women, transforming it from a suspected form of cheating into a skill-enhancing tool worth capitalising on. Companies that make space for AI in hiring standards and workflows would stop penalising caution, which often rests on the assumption that AI use is unethical, and start rewarding the people who use AI to sharpen their skills. AI governance could then advance gender equality rather than merely avoid harm.

The same study found that women who used an employer-sanctioned AI tool reported measurably higher confidence. The authors link that confidence to a greater willingness to enter competitive, merit-assessed settings. Hiring and promotion decisions turn on exactly that kind of high-stakes evaluation. Niederle and Vesterlund established the baseline problem years ago: equally skilled women opt into competition less often than men do.

AI also appears to lift women’s performance more than men’s. The law of diminishing marginal productivity explains why. AI adds far more marginal value to a non-technical worker than to a seasoned technical veteran. A male software engineer might gain an incremental bump in coding speed. A woman historically shut out of legacy technical syntax can use an LLM to bypass years of structural barriers, automating processes, building tools, and commanding digital infrastructure in natural language. The skill premium on AI use, in other words, runs structurally higher for women. Equal access here produces unequal gains, and the gains favour those previously excluded.

Leading by Example

Some companies have already integrated AI rather than fenced it off. Unilever cut 70,000 person-hours of manual interviewing and assessment, made its job descriptions more inclusive, and attracted a balanced talent pool by combining AI with a blind application evaluation process. Women now hold 51% of its management roles globally (NITI Aayog, 2025). Young et al. (2023) argue that generative AI offers a rare chance to disrupt traditionally male-dominated fields and to build diversity into them early.

Way Forward

Firms that never officially encourage AI widen the gender gap, which makes institutional endorsement a structural imperative rather than a soft preference. When the firm provides AI as a baseline tool, women engage competitively at the same rate as men. Endorsement dismantles barriers that have long gatekept important roles.

The private sector, and the technology industry in particular, carries an outsized role in making AI adoption equitable (UNCTAD, 2025; UN Women, 2025). UN Women (2025) and UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI set the regulatory floor, calling on private organisations to adopt responsible practices: to strip gender bias from models, to increase women’s representation in AI leadership, and to build safeguards against AI-amplified violence.

Which brings me back to that email. “Usage of AI is strictly discouraged” was meant to protect something: original thinking, presumably. But it will not. The people who ignore it will be those already confident enough to experiment, and the GLO and Stanford numbers show who that is. A ban does not measure how well anyone thinks. It measures who was willing to risk being caught, and it sorts a workforce accordingly.

About the author: An economics and policy enthusiast with an MSc in Development Economics and Policy, exploring the intersections of gender and labour economics. Passionate about research with experience in NGO work and student-led policy initiatives. Beyond economics, she has spent over 20 years practicing classical dance.

Near the end of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden finally tells his sister, Phoebe, what he actually wants to do with his life. Holden imagines a field of rye on the edge of a cliff. Thousands of children play in the field, and nobody watches them but him. His job, the only one he can picture wanting, is to stand at the edge and catch any child who strays too close to the drop. He does not want to teach the children, play with them, or ask where they are running. He wants to stand at the boundary and stop the fall.

Strip away the poetry, and Holden has designed a policy. Some people, in his account, cannot see the risks they run. One other person, wiser or more cynical, must stand at the edge and intervene on their behalf. This is paternalism in its most literal form. A milder policy leaves the choice of action to citizens themselves. Holden’s fantasy removes the choice entirely. The protector decides what counts as danger, and the children never learn he is there. Even if they did, nobody asked him to catch them.

This fantasy is well-intentioned, which is what makes it a strong policy case. Nobody builds a restriction on other people’s freedom out of contempt. They build it out of love, fear, or grief, and Holden is writing from grief. He has lost his brother Allie, watched a classmate die, and concluded that the world is a place children fall out of. His catcher fantasy turns that grief into a vocation. Real paternalist policy works the same way. It is rarely the product of malice, and that is precisely what makes it hard to argue against.

The case for the catcher collapses under three questions.

First, who decides what counts as falling? Holden assumes a clean line between the safe field and the fatal cliff edge. But the children running through the rye are not all running toward the same danger. Some are running toward growing up, which Holden experiences as a kind of death, but it is also how anyone becomes their own person. A catcher who cannot tell a child about to be hurt from a child about to change will end up stopping both. He is not qualified to judge what falling means.

Second, what does the child lose when the choice disappears? The child who is caught never learns what waited on the other side of the risk. Holden spares her the fall, but he also spares her the agency, the accountability, and the experience of judging a risk and living with the result. That experience is what turns a child into an adult who can judge the next one. And because the child never jumps, Holden never has to face the possibility that the fall was survivable, or worth it, or none of his business to prevent.

Third, did anyone ask? The children play, Holden watches, and the catching happens to them, not with them. There is no consent, because the whole premise denies them the standing to give it. Every paternalist scheme rests on this same move. To justify acting on someone’s behalf, you must first prove they cannot act for themselves, and the more thoroughly you prove it, the less they look like people whose interests you can claim to know.

Salinger frames this argument from an unusual angle. Holden narrates the whole novel from inside a psychiatric facility, where his family sent him after his breakdown. The boy who dreams of catching children has himself been caught, removed, diagnosed, contained. The adult world aims the same protective impulse at Holden that Holden aims at his imaginary children. Salinger shows both sides of paternalism at once, the good intentions behind it and the cost it rarely lets you see, a loss of self. The catcher’s reward is to be caught and catalogued by other catchers.

The strongest evidence that Salinger argues against the catcher, rather than for him, comes in the final scene. Holden takes Phoebe to the carousel. She reaches for the gold ring the way children on old carousels did, leaning off her horse far enough that she could fall. Holden watches, and he lets her. This moment reverses the whole field of rye. The loving act is not to stand between the child and the risk. It is to step back far enough that the risk becomes hers to take. Holden does not stop fearing for Phoebe. He simply accepts that his fear gives him no right to govern her choices. That distinction between caring about someone’s well-being and claiming the right to override their choices is the argument against paternalism in full.

Salinger did not set out to write a treatise on autonomy, and I doubt he’d recognise this reading. But the policy lesson holds regardless. Before we build the cliff-edge institutions, the bans and mandates and schemes that catch people for their own good, his three questions are worth asking first.

Aanya Monga is a Grade 11 student at DPS International Saket, New Delhi, with a deep passion for politics, philosophy, economics and IR. An avid reader, researcher and public speaker, she likes engaging with ideas that connect abstract thinking to real-world governance.

In the digital age, attention has become one of the world’s most valuable resources. Social media platforms compete not only for users but also for the time users spend on their applications. Their algorithms, which determine the content people see online, are designed to maximise engagement by keeping users scrolling and interacting. Although these platforms have transformed how people communicate and access information, they have also raised concerns about misinformation, mental health, and market power.

This raises an important question: should governments regulate social media?

From an economic perspective, attention is a scarce resource. Individuals have limited time and cognitive capacity, so every minute spent on one activity comes at the expense of another. Social media companies monetise attention by selling advertising space. The longer users remain on a platform, the more advertisements they see, generating greater revenue. Firms therefore have strong incentives to design algorithms that maximise engagement, often by promoting emotionally charged content because high-arousal emotions encourage users to continue scrolling.

However, the market for attention can produce several forms of market failure. One is negative externalities. Algorithms may amplify misleading or inflammatory content because it generates engagement, while the resulting social costs are borne by the public rather than the platform. In India, platforms also benefit from safe harbour protections under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, which generally shields them from liability for content posted by third parties.

The consequences of misinformation extend well beyond individual users. It can undermine public trust in the media and public institutions, distort political outcomes through voter manipulation and coordinated disinformation campaigns, and increase social polarisation. False narratives and hate speech can encourage people to view political opponents not simply as individuals with different opinions but as existential threats.

Another economic concern is information asymmetry. Most users do not understand how algorithms select and rank content. Platforms possess extensive data about user behaviour and detailed knowledge of how their recommendation systems operate, while users know very little about how their attention is being influenced. This imbalance limits consumers’ ability to make informed choices and weakens market discipline. Unlike traditional markets, where consumers can compare products and prices, the mechanisms behind algorithmic recommendations are largely opaque. Modern AI systems rely on complex statistical models trained on vast datasets rather than simple human-written rules, making it difficult for users, researchers, and even regulators to understand why particular content is promoted.

Governments have responded to these concerns in several ways. Measures such as stronger content moderation requirements, transparency obligations, age-appropriate design codes, and regulations like the European Union’s Digital Services Act aim to increase platform accountability and reduce the spread of harmful content. Many companies have also invested in AI-powered moderation systems to detect misinformation, hate speech, and other harmful material more effectively.

Despite these efforts, significant challenges remain. Regulators still lack a universally accepted definition of misinformation, making enforcement difficult without risking restrictions on freedom of expression. Automated moderation systems often struggle to identify misleading content that mixes factual information with false narratives, particularly in regional and low-resource languages. Safe harbour protections may also shield platforms even when their algorithms actively amplify harmful content. At the same time, recommendation systems evolve rapidly, causing legislation to become outdated before it can be effectively implemented. Increased moderation requirements can also lead to overblocking, in which legitimate journalism, political criticism, and artistic expression are mistakenly removed. Similarly, age verification measures designed to protect minors often require the collection of sensitive personal information, raising important privacy concerns. These limitations suggest that existing regulatory frameworks remain insufficient to address the complexities of the modern social media ecosystem.

Policymakers must also consider the unintended consequences of excessive regulation. Strict rules may discourage innovation and make it harder for smaller firms to compete with established platforms that possess greater legal and financial resources. There are also concerns about freedom of expression. Deciding which content to promote or restrict is inherently difficult, and greater government involvement in algorithmic decision-making may pose risks of censorship or political interference.

A balanced regulatory approach is therefore likely to be the most effective solution. Rather than regulating individual speech, governments should focus on platform behaviour by promoting transparency and accountability. Platforms could be required to disclose how their recommendation systems operate, the factors influencing content visibility, and the processes used to moderate content. Greater transparency would reduce information asymmetry by allowing users, researchers, and regulators to better understand how information is prioritised online.

Governments should also distinguish between hosting content and actively amplifying it. Platforms should not be held responsible for every post made by users, but they should be accountable when their algorithms systematically promote harmful or misleading content to maximise engagement. Independent audits and regular risk assessments could improve accountability without giving governments direct control over online discourse.

Digital literacy programmes should also complement regulation. Educating users about misinformation, algorithmic bias, and online manipulation would reduce their vulnerability to harmful content while preserving freedom of choice.

Ultimately, social media algorithms provide significant benefits by expanding access to information and enabling global communication, but they also generate social and economic costs. Government intervention is therefore justified, provided it focuses on transparency, accountability, and user empowerment rather than extensive control over online content. Such an approach is more likely to protect both public welfare and freedom of expression.

In conclusion, government regulation of social media is justified because the market for attention generates important market failures, particularly negative externalities and information asymmetry. Left entirely unregulated, platforms have strong incentives to prioritise engagement and profit over social welfare. At the same time, excessive regulation risks reducing innovation and restricting freedom of expression. A balanced approach is therefore essential. By improving algorithmic transparency, holding platforms accountable for harmful amplification, and investing in digital literacy, governments can correct market failures while preserving the fundamental freedoms that make open societies possible.

Kavya Rao is a Grade 11 student at The Shri Ram School,Moulsari, with a strong interest in business and economics. She enjoys tackling challenging projects that require research, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

I was in Chandni Chowk last month shopping for my sister’s wedding. If you’ve been there before a wedding, you know the drill. We were mid-conversation about products with the shopkeeper when he glanced toward the lane and said, almost as an aside, “Inspector sahab aa gaye” (the inspector has arrived). A jeep slowed near the entrance. Nobody said anything. The shopkeeper handed some money over to the inspector, and the vehicle moved on to the next shop. The shopkeeper turned back to us and continued his sales pitch as if nothing had happened.

What struck me wasn’t that the shopkeeper paid the inspector. What surprised me was the shopkeeper’s nonchalance. He made the payment while customers were in the shop, with no attempt to hide it, and no interruption to business. He told us that this inspector covered the entire lane daily and made more in a month than most salaried people make in a year, without once actually inspecting anything.

I kept thinking about that word: Inspector. It suggests that someone is checking standards and enforcing rules. But that was not what I saw. A jeep drove through, the inspector received the payment, and work continued as usual. There was no inspection, at least none that I could see. A few weeks later, I saw something similar much closer to home. Near my hostel is a small samosa shop run by a man everyone knows as Ramesh bhai. He has been frying samosas at the same corner for over a decade. Once a month, a municipal health inspector arrives; Ramesh Bhai hands over some money, and the inspector leaves within minutes. No checklist. No visible inspection. Afterwards, Ramesh bhai simply goes back to work. When I once asked him about it, he shrugged and said, “Yahi hota hai“ (This is just how it is).

Same problem, more or less.

The easy response is to call this corruption and move on. Most people, including me, instinctively see these interactions as wrong. Why should this inspector take money from the poor businessman? But that’s not all that is happening. In return for the payment, the inspector ignores all the various rules that these businesses may have violated. For instance, maybe the store in Chandi Chowk doesn’t have all the licences it should. Street Vendors are not supposed to employ anyone, but Ramesh bhai does since his thela is slightly large. For these businesses, corruption is much less costly than complying with the law. In fact, if they did comply, either the prices would go through the roof, or they would shut down.

There could certainly be cases where a business is fully compliant, but still, the inspector tries to extract some money. These officials should be held accountable. But often, the time, energy, and effort required to seek formal redress are far greater than the inspector asks for.

We, as consumers, in fact, benefit from much of this corruption. Goods are cheaper and more plentiful. But the regulations and payments don’t affect every business the same way. In Chandni Chowk, such costs may be absorbed as part of doing business. For someone like Ramesh bhai, even a small additional burden can matter. The rule may be the same, but the ability to absorb its costs is not. When complying with regulations becomes costly and uncertain, the burden falls disproportionately on smaller businesses. Some absorb it. Others cannot. Over time, that affects who enters a market, who survives, and who grows.

These experiences reminded me of something C. Rajagopalachari wrote in 1963 while criticising the permit-licence-quota raj. He argued that a system created to prevent exploitation had, in practice, begun to encourage it. He wrote, “What appears as progress has been achieved in spite of the incubus, and not on account of the regimentation.” Although Rajaji was speaking about industrial licensing, the concern feels familiar even today.

A 2025 TeamLease RegTech report found that a typical manufacturing MSME faces more than 1,450 compliance obligations annually and spends an estimated Rs. 13–17 lakh a year on compliance. For a large firm, that figure is a manageable line item, spread across a much bigger operation and handled by people hired specifically for the purpose. For smaller enterprises, however, regulatory obligations are the difference between staying open and closing.

There are practical alternatives. Inspections can be targeted towards businesses that pose greater risks or have a history of violations, rather than being applied as routine monthly visits regardless of track record. The general public can access Inspection reports, allowing consumers to make informed decisions and regulators to be held accountable from outside the system, not just from within it. India has already experimented with similar approaches: several states have introduced risk-based inspection systems, and certain categories of businesses and startups can adopt self-certification.

None of these ideas is new. In 2016, RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan observed that India had largely dismantled the licence raj but had done much less to reform the inspector raj. He advocated self-certification backed by random inspections and meaningful penalties for violations. Various states have adopted versions of these reforms in some sectors, but the broader challenge remains a decade on.

The lesson from Chandni Chowk and Ramesh bhai’s samosa shop is not simply that corruption exists. Most Indians already know that. The more interesting question is why these arrangements persist even when everyone involved knows the rules are being bent and the deal is happening outside the formal system. If complying with regulations is often more difficult than finding ways around them, then reform requires more than stricter enforcement. It requires asking whether the system is making compliance easier or merely making non-compliance negotiable.

About the author:

Aayushi Tripathi is a graduate in Economics and History from the University of Delhi and is currently a Junior Associate at CCS Academy. With a strong interest in public policy, leadership, and social impact, she enjoys debating and engaging with ideas that drive meaningful change.

By: Abhinav Bhatia

Walk through any Indian city, and you will notice something immediately: different kinds of street poles on the same road. Direction signs buried under political banners. A footpath that begins somewhere, then disappears into a construction pit, then reappears three hundred meters later. A heritage monument in what can be described as disco lighting. This is especially evident in Delhi, where monuments like Qutb Minar and India Gate are lit with random RGB lighting. This looks like chaos, because it is.

I have been following a debate that has been circulating online, which captures this frustration well. One side argues that India needs a Ministry of Aesthetics, a central body with a unified vision for how our cities look and feel. The argument makes sense. India has an extraordinary architectural heritage, a rich visual culture, and cities full of potential. And yet, monuments that would be lit with warm lighting anywhere else in the world end up looking like the backdrop of a college festival. So the frustration is real. But here is the thing: Is this actually an aesthetic problem?

I don’t think so, because the second voice in this debate makes a more stronger argument: The problem is not that India lacks taste, the problem is that no one is in charge. Jurisdictional fragmentation means that most cross-cutting problems have no single agency with authority and accountability for the whole. Take one road. The Public Works Department (PWD) manages it. The Municipal Corporation manages the street lights. The traffic police manage the signals. DISCOM handles the electricity poles. The tourism department has opinions about the heritage sites. Five departments, one road, zero coordination, and most importantly, zero shared responsibility for how the whole thing looks. In cities across India, repeated instances of newly paved roads being re-excavated due to poor coordination between PWD and other departments exemplify the systemic inefficiencies of uncoordinated governance.

There is a concept in political economy that captures this precisely. We all have heard about the tragedy of the commons, but Michael Heller, in his theory of the tragedy of the anti-commons, argued that when too many people own pieces of one thing, nobody can use it, and if too many owners control a single resource, cooperation breaks down, and everybody loses (Heller, 2013). Although Heller originally developed this idea to explain fragmented property rights, but the logic applies perfectly here. India’s public streets are not owned by anybody; they are owned by everybody in pieces. Nobody owns the road as a whole. And so nobody is responsible for what it becomes.

Thus, when nobody owns the whole picture, nobody is responsible for how it looks. The RGB lights on our monuments are not a failure of imagination. They are a failure of coordination. And this is not a small administrative problem. According to NITI Aayog’s 2021 report, Reforms in urban planning capacity, 65% of India’s 7,933 urban settlements lack statutory master plans, and governance remains fragmented across multiple agencies, creating jurisdictional issues that hinder accountability. This is the structural reality behind every broken footpath, every mismatched pole, every signboard.

So what is the solution?

Here is the thing, though, this problem does not exist everywhere. Walk into any private gated colony or a shopping mall, and you will notice that the lights match, the signage is consistent, the footpaths are maintained, and nobody has dug up the floor for a water pipe without telling anyone. The difference is not resources. It is ownership. In a mall, a single entity owns the entire property and is responsible for how it looks, feels, and functions. On a public road, nobody does. And it shows.

Let’s build on this through the example of Singapore. Cities in Singapore did not get beautiful public spaces by accident. Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) is the city’s sole land-use planning and conservation agency, responsible for everything from long-term strategic plans to urban design, the conservation of heritage sites, and the promotion of architectural excellence (National Library Board Singapore, n.d.). URA is a statutory board under the Ministry of National Development of the Singapore Government. Thus, Singapore didn’t get well-maintained streets because they have better taste or aesthetics. They got them because someone was in charge of the whole picture.

Thus, what I think is the solution is not a Ministry of Aesthetics sitting at the top and issuing colour codes for lampposts. That would be a top-down aesthetic vision layered over a broken coordination structure, and it would produce exactly the kind of results you would expect: a few showcase monuments with approved lighting and everything else exactly as it was. What India might actually need is what Delhi is trying to do with DUMTA (Delhi Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority): bringing transport agencies such as the Delhi Transport Corporation, the Public Works Department, the Transport Department, and the Delhi Traffic Police under a single umbrella (Swarajya, 2025).

This approach may be replicated for the issue at hand, where a ministry that decides what things should look like is absent, but a collective body ensures the right people are in the same room when decisions are made. Urban planning and architecture are not decorative professions. They are proper professions which should be included in these conversations. Thoughtfully designed public spaces have the power to reawaken history, celebrate culture, and create meaningful connections between people and place, but that requires moving beyond the aesthetics argument and understanding the deeper problem. India’s cities do not look chaotic because we have bad taste. They look chaotic because we have built a system in which everyone is responsible for a piece, and nobody is responsible for the whole. Fix that, and the aesthetics will follow. Until then, no ministry, however well-intentioned, is going to change what you see when you walk down the street.

About the Author:

Abhinav holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in Development Studies, and brings experience in research, policy communication, and stakeholder engagement. His interests span sustainability, social entrepreneurship, and social sciences. He currently works at CCS as an Associate in the Academy.

Every evening across India, thousands of street vendors light their stoves, and the hiss of blue flame marks the start of the working night. For these micro-entrepreneurs, liquefied petroleum gas is not a convenience but the fuel that powers their livelihoods. It is the difference between earning that day and not earning it.

That fuel has become a source of constant worry. A field survey of more than 90 street vendors in Delhi and Jaipur, conducted in April 2026, points not to a passing inconvenience but to a system failing the people who depend on it most. Regulatory barriers have shut the poor out of the legal market, over-regulated their work, and left them exposed to every price shock that comes.

The Scale of the Disruption

The disruption is widespread. Of the 78 LPG-dependent vendors surveyed, over 90% reported severe daily operational disruptions in the past 30 days. This situation is not a minor financial setback but a structural failure. Vendors face chronic refilling delays, forced shutdowns of up to 12 days, and a 250% premium charged by the black market.

Take Rajesh, a tea seller at Old Delhi Railway Station. When the shortage first hit, he spent his small savings stocking up on cylinders, expecting it to pass. It did not. Prices climbed week after week and ate through his capital.

At the same spot, Shivpal, who sells cooked meals to daily-wage labourers, was paying Rs 3,500 for a single domestic cylinder, nearly four times the regulated price of Rs 950. That gap is days of hard physical labour swallowed at once, just to buy the fuel to cook for one more day.

A Tripled Price on a Thin Margin

The same pattern shows up across both cities. In Lalarpura, Jaipur, a fast-food vendor named Tejpal watched his fuel costs rise over 30 days leading into March 2026, from the regulated rate of Rs 950 to between Rs 2,800 and Rs 3,200 per cylinder on the black market. That is roughly a threefold increase in a matter of weeks, leaving micro-entrepreneurs little time to adjust and turning a stable input into a threat to the business. For a stall that gets through three or four cylinders a month, that adds Rs 5,000 to Rs 9,000 to its costs.

And vendors cannot pass on the extra cost. Their customers watch every rupee and will simply go elsewhere, so the vendor absorbs the rise himself. Manoj, who sells aloo chaat in Chawri Bazar, put it plainly: “Crisis is temporary, but customers are permanent.” He takes the loss and watches his daily profit shrink to almost nothing.

Unlike air-conditioned corporate restaurants, street vendors have no fiscal cushion. As Shivpal puts it, they operate at the margins of survival, where losing a customer can mean losing the means to feed their own families that night.

Slowing the Pace of the Streets

In Chawri Bazar, a tea seller named Hasan normally works a nine-hour shift, opening his stall at 2:00 PM and serving customers until 11:00 PM. Because of the fuel shortage leading into April 2026, he has been closing two hours early, at 9:00 PM, simply because he cannot secure a reliable supply of LPG. That loss of his late-night hours strips away more than 20% of his daily operating window and cuts directly into his main source of income.

In Mukherjee Nagar, the price swings made it hard for vendors to know what their fuel was really worth. One vendor, Upendra, was out of work for several days. The pause was deliberate: with black-market prices moving hour by hour, he chose to wait and see whether the 250% spike would hold or fade before committing. A vendor with no financial cushion cannot afford to misjudge, since paying an inflated rate for fuel or setting his menu around it could exhaust the working capital he has left.

The financial strain is not the whole story. Locked out of legal commercial LPG, some vendors have gone back to firewood. Between 15% and 18% of those surveyed said they had given up gas stoves in favour of solid biomass, and in Lalarpura, Jaipur, seven vendors, including Raju Gurjar, switched to firewood as a stopgap.

The switch costs more than it first appears. Firewood runs Rs 13 to Rs 20 a kilogram, and on top of that, vendors lose hours scouting local markets to find it, time they would otherwise spend serving customers. It also cooks more slowly. As Deepak, a vendor in the same area, puts it: “An LPG stove is faster and easier to operate. A wooden stove takes far longer to heat up. I cannot make tea on demand, and serving fewer customers means lower daily income.”

Rules that keep affordable LPG out of vendors’ hands push them toward a slower, costlier fuel, which means fewer cups of tea sold and less money at the end of the day.

Caught in the Trap

The core policy problem is a design flaw in the market’s structure: the state over-regulates the vendor’s physical space while denying him any formal commercial identity. To buy a legal 19kg commercial cylinder from the state oil companies, a business must produce a municipal trade licence, proof of permanent address, or formal commercial registration. But municipal corporations have frozen zoning laws and stalled on issuing Certificates of Vending under the Street Vendors Act, so the great majority of vendors hold none of these documents.

The result is a system in which a roadside tea stall sits in the same commercial tier as a five-star hotel, yet is denied the paperwork it needs to legally buy that fuel.

With no legal route, vendors break the rules to survive. Shamim, a tea seller in Hasanpura, says he uses domestic cylinders simply to stay in business, working each day in fear of a fine.

That fear is well-founded. Also in Hasanpura, Usman and Kishan Singh had their cylinders seized during police raids, losing the one tool their livelihood depends on.

The trap closes from three sides. The system bars vendors from the legal supply chain, pushes them into a black market where the likes of Mangi Lal and Sonu Srivastav make call after call to find a cylinder at Rs 2,800, and then sends the police to punish them for buying it. The system is an institutional failure of a basic kind. The system does not protect the vulnerable. It punishes them for surviving.

A Blueprint for Reform

The accounts of Rajesh, Shivpal, Tejpal, and Teena Chawala, who stopped vending for 12 days and lost all income in that time, show that the market design itself is failing. These vendors are not asking for charity or welfare. They want a fair and functioning market in which they can work.

To break this cycle, the state should pursue three structural reforms.

A micro-commercial fuel tier. The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas should scrap the rigid household-versus-corporate binary. Using the country’s existing Digital Public Infrastructure, it could introduce a micro-commercial tier, such as 5kg or 12kg cylinders, tied directly to a vendor’s PM SVANidhi or e-Shram ID. That would let vendors buy clean fuel at stable official rates without having to produce commercial property deeds they cannot obtain.

Spatial deregulation. Municipal corporations should halt punitive raids and actually implement the Street Vendors Act of 2014. Replacing complex licensing with simple, open digital registration based on a market’s natural capacity would give vendors legal standing and protect them from arbitrary seizures and police extortion.

Open access to cleaner technology. To reduce the informal economy’s exposure to fuel-price shocks, the state should remove the barriers that keep vendors off cleaner options, giving them the same access to electricity connections, financing, and induction or solar-assisted equipment that any registered business enjoys. The aim is to widen the choices open to vendors, not to dictate which fuel they use.

When a system makes it easier to operate illegally than legally, the failure lies with the system, not the people trying to earn a living within it. The fix is not more direction from above, but a redesigned market in which the smallest entrepreneurs can register, buy fuel, and trade on fair terms.

Authored by Dharmraj Joshi Associate, Jeevika App at Centre for Civil Society.

Co- Authored by Anamika Joshi, Manager, Growth and Innovation at Centre for Civil Society.

By: Abhinav Bhatia

So my phone got stolen. It’s a bummer, right? But, fortunately, I knew exactly where it was. Apple’s family sharing feature in Maps meant I could track my phone in real time, a blue dot moving through streets I could name, updating every few minutes, broadcasting its location with quiet precision. What I did not have was anyone willing to act on that information. What followed was not simply a frustrating experience with bureaucracy. It was a reminder of a lesson in political philosophy from my undergrad days.

Social contract theory, developed by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, holds that individuals voluntarily surrender certain freedoms to the state in exchange for protection, security, and justice. Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) described this as laying down one’s “right to all things” so that the state may act “for their peace and common defence” (Hobbes, 1651, Ch. XIV & XVII). John Locke, whose version of the social contract was more reciprocal than Hobbes’s, highlighted that the state’s authority is not unconditional. In the Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke argued that “the reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property”, which encompasses life, liberty, and estate, and that government exists solely as a “guard and fence” for those rights (Locke, 1689, sec. 222.). When the state fails this obligation, it does not merely disappoint; in Locke’s own terms, it commits a “breach of trust” by which it forfeits the very power the people had placed in its hands (Locke, 1689, sec. 222.).

Thus, the logic of the contract is straightforward: you give up the right to retrieve (here by force) what is yours, and in return, the state assumes the obligation of doing it for you, lawfully, proportionately, and reliably. This restraint is not incapability or weakness. To be honest, the thought of hiring someone to retrieve the phone or of showing up at the thief’s location myself did cross my mind. What stopped me was not incapacity, but the contract, the unwritten agreement that binds every law-abiding citizen to formal channels even when those channels are failing them.

So, I did what I could do: I filed the FIR. I returned to the station. I shared the live location. I waited. What I did not know at the time was that the theft had occurred on the border between two states, a geographic accident that became a huge problem. Each state’s police force pointed at the other. Responsibility was passed back and forth until the device, which had been moving and traceable, came to a permanent stop, and the phone was gone. A phone that technology had made easy to recover had been lost entirely to an institutional drama.

Moving away from political philosophy, let’s view this from an economic lens. I am a taxpaying citizen. The state institutions are funded by taxes that people like me pay. This is a very important detail that people seem to forget. In a democracy, public institutions are not doing citizens a favour when they respond to a crime; they are fulfilling a function that citizens have already paid for. Even if we remove the tax lens, when these institutions fail, it is not just a service failure. It is a breach of the same social contract that runs in both directions.

This is one example of what’s called the principal-agent problem. The principal-agent problem is a conflict of interest that occurs when one person or entity (the “agent”) makes decisions or takes actions on behalf of another person or entity (the “principal”). In the public sector, the problem arises when there is a disconnect between the goals and interests of politicians or public servants and the citizens they are supposed to serve. In theory, the police are agents acting on behalf of the citizen, the principal. In practice, when jurisdictional ambiguity makes accountability impossible to assign, agents on both sides of a state border can evade their responsibilities entirely, leaving the principal with no recourse. The information was there. The location was live. What was missing was any agent willing to be accountable for acting on it.

The arguments discussed above reveal the deeper problem. The issue is not that the authorities were unkind or that the system is entirely broken. It is that the structure of institutional accountability has not kept pace with the technology available to ordinary citizens. A normal mobile can now broadcast its precise GPS coordinates continuously. The limiting factor in recovering a stolen mobile is no longer a lack of information; rather, it is institutional and jurisdictional clarity. When those fail, the person who loses most is the one who followed every rule, trusted every channel, and exercised exactly the restraint the social contract asks of them; they are the ones who bear the cost (both literally and figuratively) of the state’s failure.

A democratic society asks its citizens to be law-abiding not merely as a civic duty but as part of a reciprocal arrangement. The state’s end of that arrangement is not optional. In my case, when jurisdictional ambiguity became a reason for inaction rather than a problem to be resolved, and when a law-abiding citizen’s only reward for restraint is an irretrievable loss, the contract is not being upheld; it is literally being broken. The blue dot went still on a Tuesday afternoon, and I received an update from the police station that the phone is no longer traceable. The question it left behind is harder to switch off: what do citizens make of institutions that are absent when they are needed most?

Citations:

Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3207/pg3207-images.html

Locke, J. (1689). Second treatise of government. Hanover Historical Texts Collection. https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165locke.html

About the Author:

Abhinav holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in Development Studies, and brings experience in research, policy communication, and stakeholder engagement. His interests span sustainability, social entrepreneurship, and social sciences. He currently works at CCS as an Associate in the Academy.

The latest discussion on patents can easily lead us into a conversation about Judy Hopps, Nick Wilde, and Gary De’Snake adventuring through Zootopia in search of a long-lost patent. If you are unfamiliar with these characters, they are the heroes of the 2025 sequel, Zootopia 2. The film’s premise is something of a libertarian nightmare. It is the story of a crony capitalist, Milton Lynxley, partnering with local government in the form of Mayor Brian Winddancer to extract favours for his business. Milton merely follows in the footsteps of his grandfather, Ebenezer Lynxley, who built his empire on lies and government corruption. The Lynxley family enjoys the respect, fame, and wealth that come with being the descendants of the inventor of Zootopia’s weather walls, an innovation that allows the city to be home to animals from every kind of environment: hot deserts, cold tundra, rainforests, and open meadows.

As we progress through the seemingly happy utopia that is Zootopia, we encounter the first signs of exclusion of a particular community: the reptiles. After a breathless chase through a water pipe and some heartbreaking disagreements between our cops, the lies Ebenezer Lynxley fabricated to advance his interests are finally laid bare. The weather walls, the single greatest innovation making Zootopia a utopia, are revealed to have been the original idea of Agnes De’Snake, a reptile. Agnes, an extraordinary innovator, had patented her idea and approached Lynxley seeking investment. Seeing the potential in her work, Ebenezer steals it and registers the patent in his own name. Later, he fabricates a murder to frame reptiles as dangerous and exiles them from the city using the force of the state. Eventually, Agnes’s lost patent is revived, and her name and innovation are restored to their rightful place in history.

What should catch the viewer’s attention here is a clear case of individuals seeking benefits and expanding their wealth by lobbying political actors, also known as “rent-seeking”. The Lynxleys used government power to suppress genuine innovators who arrived at their ideas through independent thought.

But how did Ebenezer manage to patent an idea that was already registered? The answer lies not in the failure of government enforcement, but rather in the very fact of government enforcement itself. Government involvement in the administration of patents has a well-documented tendency to create monopolies for connected businesses while shutting out those who threaten established lobbying interests. This erects entry barriers for smaller innovators and exposes them to litigation risks from larger firms operating under state protection.

This discussion would be incomplete without the case of Galgotias University, which filed and received an Indian patent for an “IoT-Based Writing Pen for Monitoring the Health Parameters” in 2024. In a manner that echoes Zootopia 2, an almost identical patent was filed by Samsung five years prior, in 2018 (see here). No legal action was taken or even considered necessary because patent filings by universities do not serve the purpose of eventual commercialisation. They serve a very different, and far more conflicting, set of incentives.

The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), which ranks universities across several categories, including “Research and Professional Practice” (see here). This parameter carries a 30% weight in the overall score, with the volume of patents filed as a sub-metric. This induces a mindless race to file patents purely to accumulate points and improve rankings, regardless of the quality of those filings or their resemblance to prior work. The formula rewards patents published, not granted, and certainly not commercialised. They do not need a working invention. They just need paperwork.

Since 2011, Galgotias University has filed 2,297 patent applications, surpassing the combined totals of IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, and IIT Kanpur. Only 24 of those applications were accepted, a success rate of roughly one per cent, as opposite to a success rate of sixty-three per cent in IITs. Once the ranking points are collected, none of the patents reaches the market. Data from the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks (CGPDTM) for 2026 shows that commercially worked patents fell to just 1.6% of all patents in force. A patent is considered commercially worked when the invention is actually manufactured, sold, or licensed in India, i.e., it has progressed from being a registered idea to being utilised in the market. A policy designed to advance innovation, therefore, not only fails to encourage it but actively distorts it. Educational institutions succumb to treating patents as a quota to fulfil rather than a natural product of genuine inquiry.

Some argue that even low-quality engagement with patents builds awareness and culture, and that imperfect participation is better than none. But consider the practical consequences. Patent examiners already work under government-imposed monthly targets of 15 new examination reports and 25 disposals. A flood of applications filed purely for ranking purposes lands on those same desks, deepening backlogs and squeezing the time available to scrutinise each case properly (see here). Quality control degrades under a volume that the government’s own incentive structure created. Teaching institutions that file without any commercial intention do not build an innovation culture. They teach that the appearance of innovation is what matters.

The most striking illustration of this is the moment Galgotias University announced on national television that the robot dog showcased at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi had been developed in-house. Within hours, internet users identified it as the Unitree Go2, a commercially available Chinese product retailing for approximately $2,200. The patent, it turns out, was not the only thing that had been borrowed.

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, carries the language of protection but, in practice, restricts rights by imposing stricter conditions on recognising transgender identity. By expanding bureaucratic and medical oversight into the domain of gender identity, the bill makes the State’s gaze more intrusive, more medicalised, in the very sphere where individual liberty should be most sacred: the self. Instead of safeguarding dignity, it places individuals under scrutiny, requiring them to justify who they are, reframing identity as something to be verified rather than lived.

The amendment marks a departure from the constitutional vision established in NALSA v. Union of India, where the Supreme Court affirmed that gender identity is intrinsic to personal autonomy and upheld the right to self-identify. The original 2019 Act, despite its shortcomings, recognised transgender persons, prohibited discrimination in education, employment, healthcare, and public spaces, and enabled identity certification through an administrative process.

The 2026 Amendment, however, ties recognition to medical and sociocultural criteria, undermining the idea that identity is self-determined and making dignity conditional on compliance with state-defined categories. This narrowing of recognition raises a deeper concern about who is excluded and what exclusion means in practice. Those who self‑identify as transgender but do not fit these boxes are left outside the law’s protection.

Recognition in law is not merely symbolic, it determines access to rights, protections, and resources. When individuals fall outside state-recognised categories, they risk being denied welfare benefits, legal safeguards against discrimination, and even basic documentation. The absence of recognition can render people effectively invisible in the eyes of the law, leaving them without recourse when their rights are violated. In this sense, lack of recognition is not neutral, it actively produces marginalisation by excluding individuals from the legal and administrative frameworks.

Earlier, individuals could apply to the District Magistrate for a Transgender Identity Certificate through a largely self-declaratory administrative process, without mandatory medical scrutiny. The bill now requires the District Magistrate to seek approval from a Medical Board before issuing the certificate.

This shift subjects individuals to institutional validation, where doctors and officials determine whether someone’s identity is “legitimate.” It medicalises gender, reducing a deeply personal and lived experience to a clinical assessment. What changes now is the nature of that proof, shifting from a largely self-declaratory process to one requiring medical validation. Such a process not only intrudes on privacy but also reinforces the idea that identity must be proven to authority, allowing the State to insert itself into the most intimate sphere of human life

As individuals, we are already something of an open book to the State through documentation of religion, caste, address, and family composition. These practices have normalised the sharing of personal information, but what is happening now feels different because it cuts into something far more intrinsic, not just what the State knows about us, but what it is allowed to decide about us. Gender identity is not merely another data point, it is an intrinsic aspect of identity.

When identity requires approval, the State ceases to be a neutral guardian of rights and instead becomes a gatekeeper of personhood. By empowering officials and medical boards to invalidate personal identity, the amendment makes access to rights contingent on institutional acceptance.

Rights, however, are meant to be inherent, not something one earns by satisfying administrative criteria. Once recognition becomes conditional, individuals must prove their legitimacy to access what should already be guaranteed, and the boundary between protection and control begins to collapse. In a country where so many aspects of life are already documented and classified, this shift signals a deeper transformation, one where the State not only records who we are but increasingly decides who we are allowed to be.

“Our Constitution inheres liberal and substantive democracy with rule of law as an important and fundamental pillar… These TGs, even though insignificant in numbers, are still human beings and therefore they have every right to enjoy their human rights.” (NALSA v. Union of India, 2014)