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)

A few weeks ago, a car mounted the footpath and ran over my foot, leaving me injured. I’m still limping a month later, but I will certainly recover. What’s harder to heal from is the realisation that the Indian pedestrian lives a precarious life. I wasn't jaywalking. I was exactly where I was supposed to be on the footpath. Yet, a car climbed onto the pavement and struck me anyway. The photograph below shows the tree-lined road full of government offices, where a car ran over my foot. A pedestrian isn’t safe even in the capital city of India, in an expensive neighbourhood, on a footpath. It points to a deeper failure of urban management, in which design, enforcement, and accountability consistently underperform.

India’s urban management neglects the primary user of the streets, pedestrians. A 2019 survey found that pedestrians accounted for 63% of trips in urban India. However, the infrastructure of most cities doesn’t reflect this reality. A study found that 44% of roads in Delhi have no footpaths.

Anyone who has walked on Indian streets knows what it’s like to deal with broken footpaths and careless driving. Drivers often ignore zebra crossings. Footpaths are broken or obstructed, sometimes by parked vehicles. Crossing the road can require navigating fast-moving traffic with little protection, especially for children or the elderly. Even without data, it’s clear that walking in many Indian cities involves a degree of risk which often leads to serious injury or even death.

In Delhi, nearly half of all road crash deaths are pedestrians. In Chennai, the share of pedestrian deaths has shot up from just 11% of total fatalities in 2019 to 43% in 2023. This data shows that cities need to focus more on safe footpaths, crossings, and traffic management to cut these numbers.

A Bosch report based on 2021 data finds that 99% of Indian pedestrians are at risk of injury. That year, there were 60,000 pedestrian crashes, resulting in 29,200 fatalities; 91% were due to human error, 63% due to poor infrastructure, and 44% due to vehicle issues. The vast majority of Indians, including you, could be the victim of a system that fails to protect its most basic road users.

A report in Nagpur found 6 out of 7 evaluated roads failed basic design and safety standards. These roads had discontinuous footpaths, encroachments, unsafe junctions, and missing cycle lanes, indicating a broader pattern of gaps in basic street design and safety standards across cities. This failure becomes even more concerning when placed alongside the scale and priorities of public investment in urban roads.

Public investment in roads and highways has surged to over Rs. 2.8 lakh crore annually, reflecting a strong policy focus on vehicle infrastructure. Yet, this investment has not translated into safe spaces for pedestrians. 44% of roads in Delhi lack footpaths, and in cities like Ahmedabad, nearly 72% of roads have none. Despite pedestrians accounting for a majority of road deaths, a poorly designed crossing is not seen as a failure of the system, but as your fault for choosing to cross.

Not all cities in India are equally unsafe for pedestrians. In parts of Pune, especially in Pimpri-Chinchwad, street redesign projects have introduced features like continuous and elevated footpaths, barriers to prevent two-wheelers from entering sidewalks, and safer, more inclusive street layouts under programmes such as the Urban Streetscapes initiative. Pune’s approach aligns with the National Urban Transport Policy (2006). The policy explicitly called for cities to ‘move people, not vehicles,’ and emphasised public transport, walkability, and safe infrastructure for pedestrians.

In most cities, however, pedestrians are neglected. Urban local bodies face little accountability for missing or encroached footpaths, and there are no serious consequences for failing to provide safe pedestrian infrastructure. Even flagship initiatives like Smart Cities need to place greater focus on street-level infrastructure for pedestrians. Currently, most infrastructure projects focus on building flyovers and highways that serve pedestrians poorly.

Even when footpaths exist, vehicles often use them to get through during heavy traffic or simply as free parking spots. Stronger enforcement of rules would make these spaces safer and more reliable for pedestrians. Investment in improving existing footpaths and developing new ones could significantly reduce injuries and fatalities. Streets reflect the priorities we build into them. With better design, consistent enforcement, and thoughtful management, they can work for everyone and not just vehicles.

The recent controversy about the bike-taxi platforms in Bengaluru, particularly the case of Rapido, reveals a deeper conflict between technological innovation, giving autonomy to individuals seeking flexible work, v/s the interests of a few individuals who are unwilling to share the market. This issue reached the Karnataka High Court after Rapido challenged earlier restrictions placed on its operations, prompting the Court to examine whether bike-taxis were permissible under existing transport law. During the hearings, the Karnataka government informed the Court that it had not notified any rules under Section 93 of the Motor Vehicles Act that would allow bike-taxis to operate as a contract-carriage service. In the absence of such a policy, the Court held that aggregators could not legally run motorcycle-based taxi services and ordered all operators to halt bike-taxi operations within six weeks. What began as a petition seeking regulatory clarity, ultimately highlighted the deeper tensions between livelihood freedom and regulatory measures.

The political-economic context behind this issue is crucial to understand the situation. Karnataka’s auto-rickshaw and taxi unions had consistently pressured the government to prevent bike taxis from entering the market, arguing that they represented unfair competition and would erode the earnings of traditional transport workers. This dynamic reflects a pattern that Adam Smith had identified centuries earlier: established commercial interests routinely use political influence to restrict competition and protect their own privileges at the public’s expense. Smith warned that proposals from such groups should be treated with “great precaution,” arguing that merchants and manufacturers possess an interest that is “never exactly the same with that of the public” and that they habitually seek monopoly protections to the detriment of consumers and new market entrants (Smith, 1776/2005, Book I, Ch. XI, pp. 213–214). 

The pressure exerted by Karnataka’s transport unions on the state government to keep bike taxis out of the market is a direct example of this. This dynamic appears in Bengaluru, where political demand to regulate bike taxis was shaped less by evidence and more by fear of organised unions capable of exerting voting pressure. The outcome is an uneven regulatory landscape where new, low-cost forms of mobility/movement remain trapped in legal ambiguity while older transport lobbies maintain their monopolistic stability.

The core issue, however, is not merely administrative delay or sectoral politics, it is the question of individual freedom. Bike-taxi riders are not large corporations; they are overwhelmingly lower-income workers who own a motorcycle and seek to monetise it in a flexible manner. Preventing a person from using their own legally purchased asset to earn a livelihood reflects what Hernando de Soto (2000) identified as a foundational barrier faced by the poor in developing economies: they possess real assets but are excluded from the formal legal frameworks that would allow those assets to function as productive capital, leaving their wealth effectively “dead” and inaccessible to the wider market (de Soto, 2000, pp. 29–35). 

In Bengaluru, the human cost of the ban was immediate and severe. Over 1.2 lakh gig workers who had built their livelihoods around bike-taxi platforms lost their primary source of income, with riders reporting daily earnings of ₹800–1,000 that were suddenly reduced to nothing (BangaloreBeat, 2025). Many were forced into parcel delivery work, where they earned roughly half their previous wages amid intensified competition and fewer opportunities (NewsBytesApp, 2025). When livelihood choices are restricted through policy non-decisions, the state limits not just income but economic agency.

Framing the bike-taxi debate as one about freedom rather than transport policy highlights how regulations shape human capability. Amartya Sen (1999) conceptualised development as the expansion of freedoms, including the freedom to participate in economic activity. When the state, intentionally or through action, eliminates an accessible pathway for work, it reduces individuals’ capabilities to pursue lives they value. For many riders, bike taxis are not a side hustle but a mechanism for financial independence. Likewise, consumers, particularly students, low-income commuters, and women seeking affordable point-to-point transport, lose meaningful choices when the state restricts innovation in mobility services. The concern, therefore, extends beyond gig workers to the broader public, whose everyday freedom to choose efficient and affordable mobility options becomes constrained.

The Bengaluru case demonstrates how modern regulatory debates are often struggles over the distribution of freedom. Innovation introduces new possibilities, incumbents resist those possibilities, and the state’s role becomes arbitrating whose freedom takes precedence. When policy delays function as de facto bans, the freedom that is compromised is that of the least powerful actors: small entrepreneurs, gig workers, and ordinary consumers. A democratic society should aspire to regulations that enable participation, competition, and safety without foreclosing livelihood opportunities. The bike-taxi controversy offers a timely reminder that economic freedom is not an abstract principle but a lived experience shaped by everyday access to work, mobility, and choice.

About Abhinav Bhatia

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.

Draconian gun controls make guns whisper, not recoil. They turn firearm possession into a privilege rather than a liberty. Scholars have debated the empirical effects of civilian firearm access, not least in the United States. But statistics aside, we must look at a deeper question: does the state have the moral authority to disarm competent law-abiding citizens?

Beginning from first principles will help. A free society rests on the idea that individuals own themselves. The maxim of self-ownership endows individuals with the rights to possessions acquired voluntarily. Property rights flow from this premise. A gun is a type of property. It is dangerous, yes, but tools do not lose moral protection because they are dangerous. What holds for knives and hockey sticks must hold for guns.

Property rights, of course, are not unlimited. No one claims that individuals should be allowed to own nuclear weapons. But that concession is not a case against firearms. The distinction between such extraordinary weapons and guns lies in proportionality and discriminability. Nuclear bombs cannot be used without indiscriminate destruction. Their deployment violates innocent lives. Guns by contrast can be used for defense in ways that are consistent with the rights of others. Robert Nozick did not view gun ownership as infringing the boundaries of others’ rights.

The moral foundation of this position becomes clearer when we turn to the right of self-preservation. Imagine walking home to find a burly attacker lunging at you. John Locke held that an aggressor, by initiating violence, forfeits all claims to not be resisted. You may strike back in self-defense. The right of self-defense is not granted by the state. It precedes political authority and licensing.

Yet a right without a means to exercise it is hollow. A state that makes it difficult for citizens to own guns leaves them unable to defend against lethal violence. Guns are thus an effective means of self-defense.

But why just guns? One could in theory defend using swords and knives. Suppose you’re weak and are faced off against that burly man in close combat. In practice, bodily strength would determine the outcome. A firearm remedies that imbalance. Guns are great equalizers allowing the elderly, women, and physically vulnerable to defend themselves.

Restrictionists respond by redefining the right to self-defense. For them, self-defense is a mere means to enhanced safety— a reduced probability of being harmed. If banning guns lowers aggregate violence, they contend rights are best safeguarded. Accepting this premise would indicate that a few unlucky individuals who might have otherwise defended themselves die, but society gains overall security. But as philosopher Lester Hunt argues, this view drains self-defence of its intuitive meaning. Such an understanding leaves no room for people to defend themselves when faced against an aggressor.

The restrictionist camp offers a secondary argument for limiting gun ownership. Philosopher David DeGrazia suggests that a needs-based policy should restrict guns to people who are vulnerable. This argument too fails since people cannot predict when they will be victimized. Putting a burden of clairvoyance on potential victims is unsound.

Security based accounts of gun controls overlook another moral dimension. Philosopher Deane-Peter Baker argues that firearms help assert dignity. How often do we admire those who resist aggression? Resistance affirms people’s status as ‘persons,’ not as tools at the hands of their aggressors.

This is the moral core of the matter. Should citizens be self-authors of their own preservation, or passive wards who must await the protection of centralized authority? In a free society, self-ownership, and dignity are paramount. When anchored on such a moral order, prohibitions on firearm ownership become difficult to defend. The burden of justification then lies not with those who wish to protect themselves, but with those who would disarm them.

About Anshu Chowdhury

Anshu Chowdhury is Junior Associate at CCS Academy. He studies political science at Hindu College, University of Delhi.

Indian libertarians have been losing the war of ideas. Is this because libertarianism is a weak philosophy? I think not. In fact, libertarianism is very coherent as a philosophy, unlike its three cousins: the closest one liberalism, the farthest communism and conservatism. Unlike its distant relatives it enjoys the support of few around the globe— perhaps one of the reasons why it’s not as diluted. Its consistency is reflected in its three core philosophical commitments: moral primacy of the individual, a focus on non-coercion and the right to maintain private property.

No, this is not an essay about why libertarian philosophy works. It is not my burden to prove, for serious academics have tussled with such problems long. My intention is to point fingers at a glaring aperture in how libertarian ideas are advocated in India.

The way contemporary libertarianism is articulated in India is consequentialist. Consequentialism is a moral philosophy that justifies its actions by its end outcomes. Adopt X policy, and this will lead to Y outcomes. Such arguments, often economic in nature, are maintained by economists, policy wonks, and businesspeople. A libertarian consequentialist argument would be this: markets reduce poverty faster than state planning, and therefore adoption of libertarian rules by a society will lead to increased welfare. There’s nothing bad about such consequentialist arguments. They make the case for libertarian ideas stronger. But are they enough?

I contend not. Over-reliance on consequentialist frameworks has led Indian libertarianism to its own demise. It overlooks the importance of maintaining a coherent doctrine. What’s worse is it lacks rhetorical quality.

Consider the case for Marxism. Its appeal lies not in its economic models. Few Indian Marxists could claim mastery over its heterodox economics and yet this hardly matters. Marxism’s communicative power lies elsewhere. It matters more that Marxism offers a theory of history, a theory of power, and a theory of exploitation. You are unemployed? Your life feels constrained? Is there too much inequality? You’re concerned with your caste position? Marxism offers appealing answers to you. It makes the world legible for you, almost in a cookie cutter format. BJP’s civilizational conservatism has a strong appeal factor as well. It offers a story of civilizational decay, and belonging. Religious humiliation bears more action than data.

Contrast this with libertarian arguments that often appear as a set of technical preferences. Cutting taxes, freer trade and fewer regulations are good rational ideas in themselves. But they do not offer easy answers to existential questions such as the ones posed above. Their explanatory power falters.

Now why do people not see through the rational arguments that libertarian consequentialists promote? Are people stupid?

Looking at social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s work ‘The Righteous Mind’ (2012) will help. Haidt contends that people make moral judgements intuitively. They adopt ideologies to which they already feel aligned to without much reasoning.  

He uses a metaphor of a ‘rider’ and an ‘elephant’ to describe this. The rider represents our reasoning, and the elephant represents our intuitions. We like to think the rider is in control, but in reality, it is the elephant that decides where to go. The rider just follows and then justifies the direction afterward. This means that reasoning is often not about discovering the truth, but about defending what we already feel.  So, if you try to change someone’s moral commitments by appealing only to reason i.e. by speaking only to the rider, you will fail because their intuitions or the elephant will resist you.

What this means for Indian libertarianism is this: our arguments thus far are rider styled. They are rational, and good reasoning proves them. They are sound economic principles after all. But these don’t always translate to good political communication. We have yet to address the elephant— the intuition. We have been bad at this. The appeal of Marxism and Conservatism is because they target the elephant. Libertarian consequentialist thought relies more on overriding intuitions. Hence the unpopularity.

Indian libertarianism however need not remain anemic in its intuitive richness. Libertarian philosophy has more to offer than its Indian articulation suggests. Consequentialism is but one road to an open society. The answer I believe lies elsewhere. Indian libertarians must pay attention to other foundations of libertarian political thought that are more accessible. 

One promising alternative deserves attention: natural rights. Natural rights can best be understood as a baseline moral right that comes with being a person. All persons possess the same natural rights. For e.g. all people have a natural right to not be enslaved. Such natural rights could be grounded in both theological and secular foundations.

A libertarian natural rights framework argues that liberty is owed to all individuals. Coercion here is not framed as ‘inefficient,’ but as a wrong in itself. Domination is framed as a moral injury. Such arguments could be made to speak to matters of dignity and violation, and extended to the logic of caste and inequality. For instance, when a Dalit entrepreneur must seek permission at every step to start a small enterprise, the injustice could be framed not just as economic inefficiency but the moral injury of being treated as someone whose freedom requires authorization. What matters is that such arguments have a far more intuitive language than the consequentialist vocabulary that dominates libertarian discourse in India. They are more resonant.

To develop this sensibility, we need Indian libertarian scholarship in areas of philosophy, and political thought. It is only through such work that libertarianism will resonate with the Indian intuition. We must learn to speak to the elephant and not just the rider. Libertarian thought must be made intelligible not only to economists but to the everyday moral experience of the Indian. Until then, libertarianism will remain confined to the fringes. Respectable but irrelevant to India’s political culture. 

About Anshu Chowdhury

Anshu Chowdhury is Junior Associate at CCS Academy. He studies political science at Hindu College, University of Delhi.

The Truman Show, a 1998 classic starring Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, follows the life of Truman Burbank, an ordinary man living in Seahaven, who slowly discovers that his entire existence is an elaborately constructed television show broadcast to millions. Every aspect of Truman’s life, from his intimate relationships to his job and even the physical surroundings, such as his town, is a set and system in place to monitor and track his movements. He, without realising it, is under constant surveillance. The film shows how events in his life are staged, and his actions are manipulated without him realising it. 

While The Truman Show is a satirical film, we may not have realised how closely Truman’s life mirrors our everyday reality. Our daily activities, as small as taking the Delhi metro from Green Park station to Dilli Haat INA, buying everyday essentials such as groceries (using UPI o bank transactions), and even the doom-scrolling that we do on Instagram, are all under some form of surveillance, both physically and digitally. Unlike Truman, we have no single Christof who monitors or tracks our movements. We live in a world where multiple institutions and systems are in place that keep a constant eye on our movements. Every time we tap “Allow”, we trade privacy for convenience; we continue the same bargain Truman never consented to, except we do it willingly. This surveillance has become so internalised that, like Truman, we have also started behaving in a certain way, where our actions and behaviours are manipulated because of this surveillance.

Long before smartphones, Michel Foucault warned that the most effective form of power is one that makes people police themselves. He introduced panopticism, a theory that talks about how individuals start self-regulating their behaviour because they sense that they are always being watched. He came up with this idea based on the Panopticon, a prison system designed by Jeremy Bentham that essentially has one watchtower, and the prison cells are arranged around it such that every prisoner can be monitored from the watchtower. However, the prisoners cannot see when someone is watching over them from the tower. This leads to them thinking they are under constant surveillance, and therefore they self-regulate their behaviour. 

Now, in our everyday life, the world in itself has become a panopticon. Individuals shape their behaviour in a certain way because they feel they are always visible to someone. This idea of always being in someone’s sight has led to internalising self-regulation. 

What makes contemporary surveillance different from the panopticon Foucault described is that it no longer feels like confinement. It presents itself as a choice. The watchtowers now are the apps, platforms, and policies that promise efficiency, safety, and connection. We are not forced to remain visible; we are “encouraged” to be. Visibility is rewarded with convenience, validation, and access, while opting out often comes at a social or economic cost. In this world, surveillance does not operate through overt coercion but through subtle incentives, making self-regulation not an act of fear but a habit of everyday life.

Unlike Truman, whose moment of realisation led to an exit, our surveillance has no clear walls and no single door that will save us, because an overwhelming number of us will always prioritise convenience over privacy. The systems that watch us are normalised and embedded into everyday convenience. There is no dramatic escape, only quiet compliance. In this sense, the tragedy of our reality is not that we are watched, but that we have accepted watching as the cost of convenience.

About Samyuktha Rajesh

Samyuktha Rajesh is a Junior Associate in the Learning and Development (L&D) team at the Centre for Civil Society. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations and has a strong interest in public policy, with a focus on understanding how ideas translate into effective institutions and governance outcomes.

Our education system is one of the most centrally planned sectors of society. From the textbook curriculum to evaluation systems, the learning environment is heavily institutionalised and follows a one-size-fits-all approach. From the very beginning, children are taught ‘what to think,’ moulding them all to follow a certain narrative instead of carving out individual identities. An education system like this kills independent thinking and curiosity, stifles creativity, and leaves students stuck in a cycle of passive learning. Despite such strong central control over the education system, the learning outcomes of students have shown little to no improvement. 

What if the education system were reimagined? What if the education system were allowed to flourish without centralised top-down planning? What if there were more freedom and choice for students and parents? 

First of all, it is imperative that no central authority can ever design a foolproof system that can understand the preferences, needs, and contexts of millions of individuals. It is important to understand that each young mind is unique, each teacher has a different teaching style, and in a diverse country like India, the local contexts are very different. Therefore, to implement a centralised system in such diversity means to force a sense of uniformity when there is none to begin with. Now, if we rethink the learning environment as an ecosystem where students, teachers, and schools have the liberty to function, adapt, and flourish according to their own local needs and contexts, all stakeholders in the learning process gain the freedom to decide what and how to be taught. 

A spontaneous learning order means that a system is allowed to emerge bottom-up instead of designing a new system top-down.

A system that has a centralised textbook curriculum will end up holding examinations that focus on the retention of textbook content. In a spontaneous learning environment, there will be diverse pedagogical approaches that can co-exist, such as online learning, project-based sessions, etc. Successful practices would spread organically, not because they were mandated, but because learners and parents would freely choose what works best. A system of trust-based learning will take over.

This, however, does not mean that there is complete abandonment of the state. Here, the role of the state will shift from being a provider of education to acting as a facilitator, by ensuring access to quality education to all and enabling diverse models of learning to exist. In India, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is a step towards flexibility in the education system. However, there is still a lot of regulatory power that remains with the state that can be further scaled back. In order to build a trust-based learning environment,  there needs to be freedom for schools, teachers, and students to innovate learning strategies without much bureaucratic control. 

In conclusion, a reimagined spontaneous learning environment can benefit all stakeholders, meet the requirements and needs of each student. It will not be a one-size-fits-all policy, allowing each student the care and attention they deserve. This will nurture curious minds by allowing them to learn in a manner that best suits their ability. 

About Samyuktha Rajesh

Samyuktha Rajesh is a Junior Associate in the Learning and Development (L&D) team at the Centre for Civil Society. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations and has a strong interest in public policy, with a focus on understanding how ideas translate into effective institutions and governance outcomes.