Multidisciplinary Thought Leader and Bharat-Based Impact Consultant

Pune, June 11, 2026

Subscribe now

["Conceptual AI-generated artwork commissioned for Akhil Vaani. The image symbolically represents the accelerating climate emergency, its unequal impacts on developing nations, and the urgent policy actions required to build a resilient Bharat. All characters, scenes and visual elements are artistic representations created for editorial commentary”.]

Subscribe now

)

“The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

— António Guterres, Secretary-General, United Nations (July”, 27 2023)

"Our global climate is in a state of crisis, and Earth is being pushed beyond its limits”.

— Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General, World Meteorological Organisation (March 2026)

Prologue — The Year the Thermometer Spoke

Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour. And we are telling you to act as if you loved your children above all else. Thank you.

— The 17-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg at the World Economic Forum annual meeting (2019)

On the tenth of June 2026, Bramapuri in my home state, Maharashtra, recorded a 44.8-degree centigrade temperature, simmering through a near forty-five-degree afternoon. For today, June Eleventh, Brahmpuri went one step further, reaching a scorching 45.5°C, the highest in the country.

Further, as per the meteorological data, the cities in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra and parts of Rajasthan are expected to be once again the hottest locations, with maximum temperatures consistently ranging between 43 and 45 degrees.

It is against this backdrop that the Global Climate Change (IGCC) 2025 report, which was published today, June 11, 2026, in the peer-reviewed open-access journal “Earth System Science Data,” assumes greater salience

The report, developed by an international team of climate scientists (including IPCC contributors), tracks critical metrics such as human-induced warming, greenhouse gas emissions, and the remaining carbon budget, providing annual updates between major IPCC assessment cycles.

The report, a collaborative effort of more than 90 of the world’s leading climate scientists, should have led every front page on the planet.

It did not.

The fourth annual edition of the Indicators of Global Climate Change (IGCC), published in Earth System Science Data under the leadership of Professor Piers Forster of the University of Leeds, delivered a verdict which is both clinical and chilling at the same time:

“The human-induced global warming touched 1.37 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in 2025 — the highest in the entire instrumental record — and is now rising at 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade, the fastest pace humanity has ever measured”".

Readers pause on that number for a moment and think aloud what it means for Bharat and why?

The Paris Agreement of 2015, signed with much fanfare by 196 nations, pledged to hold warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

[ Author’s Explanatory Note

The treaty sets out a few foundational pillars for global climate action:

• Temperature limits: “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”.

• Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs): Every country is required to outline and communicate its own specific plans for domestic climate action and emission reductions.

• Net-Zero Timeline: Nations are committed to reaching a global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible and achieving a climate-neutral (net-zero) world by the middle of the century.

A decade later, the scientists who keep the planet’s ledger tell us the remaining carbon budget for an even-odds chance of holding the 1.5-degree line is a mere 130 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide — barely three years of emissions at current rates.

On present trends, human-induced warming crosses 1.5 degrees Celsius around the year 2030. The deadline is no longer a date on a distant calendar; it is within the tenure of the present Lok Sabha’s successor.

And yet, the world’s attention has wandered.

The second Trump administration has marched the United States — history’s largest cumulative emitter — out of the Paris Agreement for a second time and is dismantling the very satellites and ocean floats that measure the fever.

Wars in Europe and the Middle East have turned energy security into the only security that matters. China, even as it builds renewables at a scale never before witnessed, proposed a record 161 gigawatts of new coal power in 2025 alone.

Coal — the dirtiest fuel known to industrial man — is enjoying an unembarrassed second innings.

This thirty-fifth volume of the Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form Series is an attempt to cut through that fog of distraction. It explains the science in plain words, decodes the IGCC’s ten most consequential findings, confronts the cruel arithmetic by which the poorest will pay for the carbon of the richest, and lays out — without varnish — a ten-point war plan that Bharat must execute now, immediately on war footing.

Not in 2047. Now. Now. Now.

Because the furnace does not negotiate, and Bharat sits in its front row.

CHAPTER ONE

A Planet Running a Fever: What Climate Change and Global Warming Actually Mean

Strip away the jargon, and the science is almost embarrassingly simple. The Earth receives energy from the Sun and radiates heat back into space. Certain gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and a family of industrial fluorinated gases — act like a blanket, trapping part of that outgoing heat.

This is the greenhouse effect: without it, the planet would be a frozen ball some thirty-three degrees colder.

The trouble began when humanity started thickening the blanket. Since the Industrial Revolution, the burning of coal, oil and gas, deforestation and intensive agriculture have pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide from about 278 parts per million in 1750 to 425.6 parts per million in 2025 — a level the planet has not seen in at least two million years.

Global warming is the rise in the planet’s average surface temperature that results from this thickened blanket. Climate change is the larger family of consequences that follows: shifting monsoons, fiercer cyclones, longer droughts, marine heatwaves, melting glaciers, rising seas and the slow derangement of every natural rhythm on which agriculture and civilisation were built.

The two terms are often used interchangeably, but the distinction matters. Global warming is the cause, measured in degrees; climate change is the consequence, measured in ruined harvests, drowned coastlines, and human lives.

Importantly, global warming is not an act of God.

The IGCC 2025 assessment is unequivocal: of the 1.39 degrees Celsius of observed warming in 2025, fully 1.37 degrees — virtually all of it — is attributable to human activity. Natural forces such as solar cycles and volcanoes contributed a rounding error.

The fever is ours, made by our own hand, and therefore — this is the only good news — curable by our own hand.

CHAPTER TWO

Paris and the Arithmetic of Survival: The COP Targets

The world’s formal answer to the climate crisis is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, whose member nations meet annually at the Conference of the Parties — the COP. After two decades of drift, COP21 in Paris in December 2015 produced the first truly universal climate treaty.

Article 2 of the Paris Treaty enshrines the twin temperature goals that have since become the planet’s most important numbers:

“Hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius”.

Why 1.5 degrees?

Because the IPCC’s landmark 2018 special report demonstrated that the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees was not half a degree of discomfort but an avalanche of unprecedented trail of the destruction: twice the loss of coral reefs, hundreds of millions more people exposed to deadly heat, materially higher risks of triggering irreversible tipping points in the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the permafrost.

For low-lying island states and the densely populated South Asia, 1.5 degrees is not an aspiration; it is plain survival emergency.

To deliver these goals, every nation submits Nationally Determined Contributions — self-set emission targets meant to ratchet upward every five years. The Global Stocktake at COP28 in Dubai called for transitioning away from fossil fuels; COP29 in Baku and COP30 in Belém wrestled with the finance to make it possible.

But the brutal truth, confirmed by the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2025 — pointedly subtitled ‘Off Target’ — is that the sum of all pledges still points far beyond 2 degrees, and actual policies higher still. The targets stand; the trajectory mocks them.

CHAPTER THREE

When Geopolitics Devoured the Climate Agenda: Trump 2.0, Two Wars and the Return of King Coal

The Trump Trouble

History may record the mid-2020s as the period when the world looked askance at the impending disaster. On 20 January 2025, within hours of his second inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement — for the second time — placing the world’s largest historic emitter alongside Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only nations outside the pact.

The withdrawal of the USA from the Paris Agreement took effect in January 2026.

The Trump administration has since eased oil drilling and coal permissions, halted offshore wind leasing, gutted electric-vehicle support, dismissed climate change as a ‘con job’, and signalled exit from the UNFCCC itself altogether.

Most insidiously, budget cuts are dismantling the observational backbone of climate science — weather balloons curtailed, satellite missions facing decommissioning, data archives at risk.

The IGCC 2025 paper itself warns, in language rare for a scientific journal, that continued monitoring of the Earth’s energy imbalance is now ‘threatened by geopolitical and public funding decisions .’

Two Continents, Two Wars

It could not have gone worse. But it did and did so with rapidity in quick succession.

Two theatres of war have rewritten the energy conversation. Russia’s grinding more-than-four-year war in Ukraine (that began before Trump started the second innings) turned European energy policy into a scramble for security, reviving coal plants that were scheduled for burial and redirecting hundreds of billions toward rearmament.

The 2026 US-Israel-Iran conflagration in the Middle East, now more than 100 days old (and threatening to worsen with Trump’s latest ultimatum to Iran today), has sent crude and gas prices skyrocketing, and with every price spike, the political appetite for carbon discipline has shrunk faster than ever.

Defence budgets across NATO have ballooned; climate finance pledges, by contrast, remain largely promissory notes.

The Chinese Chakkar

And then there is China — the paradox, the Dragon at the heart of the entire climate story. No nation has built clean energy faster: wind and solar additions exceeded 500 gigawatts in 2025 alone, meeting all new electricity demand.

Yet in the same year, Chinese developers proposed a record 161 gigawatts of new or revived coal power projects and commissioned 78 gigawatts of new coal plants — more than India added, net, in an entire decade — with another 291 gigawatts in the pipeline. Provincial governments, coal conglomerates and grid-security anxieties have handed the dirtiest fuel the driver’s seat even as its generation share falls.

The signal to the developing world is corrosive: if the superpowers hedge, why should anyone else sacrifice?

Thus, has climate containment slid to the back seat of world affairs — precisely in the decade the science says is decisive?

CHAPTER FOUR

The Watchdogs Bark: What WMO, the UN and The Lancet Are Telling Us

World Meterological Organization

If governments have grown confused, distracted and looking away, the scientific watchdogs have grown louder in parallel. The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Global Climate 2025, released in March 2026, confirms that 2025 was the second or third warmest year in the 176-year record, at roughly 1.43 to 1.44 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 average — and that 2015-2025 are the eleven warmest years ever recorded.

It should have sent alarm bells ringing. It did not.

Instructively, 2025 was so worrying, despite a cooling La Niña: the underlying furnace now overwhelms the natural variability. Greenhouse gas concentrations and ocean heat have set fresh records; Arctic winter sea ice hit its lowest extent ever measured; and for the first time the WMO has elevated the Earth’s energy imbalance to a headline indicator, at a record high. Secretary-General Celeste Saulo put it without cushioning: the state of the global climate is a state of emergency.

The United Nation

The United Nations Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report 2025 supplies the policy verdict: collective inaction has put the temperature goals at risk, with global emissions at an all-time high and national pledges, even if fully honoured, steering the century toward warming far above the Paris corridor.

The Lancet

The British journal Lancet has documented what this means for human bodies. The 2025 global Lancet Countdown reports mounting heat-related deaths, spreading disease vectors, and climate-battered food systems.

Its 2026 Europe report — published in April 2026 in The Lancet Public Health — is particularly worrying because it concerns the world’s richest continent: Europe is warming at more than twice the global average; of roughly 24,000 summer heat-related deaths across 854 European cities in 2025, nearly 70 per cent were attributable to human-caused climate change; and the tiger mosquito that carries dengue and chikungunya is marching north, placing nearly five million additional Europeans at risk each year.

The report’s subtitle says it all: a ‘narrowing window for decisive health action’. If wealthy, air-conditioned Europe is losing tens of thousands to heat, the reader may imagine — and Chapter nine will spell out — what awaits the tropics.

CHAPTER FIVE

Keeping Score of a Warming World: The Annual Indicators and Their Makers

Between the IPCC’s mammoth assessment reports — which arrive only every six to eight years — the world needs a yearly scoreboard. That is precisely what the Indicators of Global Climate Change (IGCC) initiative provides. Conceived in 2023 by the scientific community that wrote the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), and now in its fourth edition, the IGCC tracks the following key indicators using the IPCC’s own rigorously assessed methods:

• greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations,

• short-lived climate pollutants,

• effective radiative forcing,

• the Earth’s energy imbalance,

• observed and human-induced warming,

• the remaining carbon budget,

• temperature and marine-heatwave extremes,

• land precipitation and

• sea-level rise.

The 2025 update — Forster and ninety-odd co-authors, published 11 June 2026 in Earth System Science Data — draws on more than forty global datasets and serves three audiences: policymakers negotiating under the UNFCCC, who need current numbers between IPCC cycles; the drafters of the forthcoming Seventh Assessment Report; and the wider community of decision-makers, journalists and citizens, who will soon access it through a public dashboard on the Copernicus Climate Data Store.

It complements the WMO’s State of the Global Climate and the American Meteorological Society’s State of the Climate. Still, it goes further than both: it does not merely observe; it attributes — separating, with formal statistical methods, the human hand from natural noise.

It is the planet’s audited annual report. And the 2025 audit is grim.

CHAPTER SIX

Ten Findings That Should Keep the World Awake: IGCC 2025 Decoded

What follows are the ten most consequential findings of the Indicators of Global Climate Change 2025 — the planet’s latest audited accounts, rendered in plain language.

1. Human-caused warming hit an all-time high of 1.37°C in 2025.

The single-year human-induced component of warming reached 1.37 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 average — the highest in the instrumental record — compared with an observed warming of 1.39 degrees Celsius. That the two numbers sit within 0.02 degrees carries a sobering message: 2025 was no El Niño freak. It was a perfectly ‘normal’ year for the climate humanity has manufactured. The fever is the baseline now.

2. The decade 2016-2025 was 1.26°C hotter than pre-industrial times — and humans caused all of it essentially.

Decade-average observed warming reached 1.26 degrees Celsius, of which 1.24 degrees is attributed to human activity; natural forces contributed virtually nothing. This is 0.17 degrees above the level the IPCC reported for 2011-2020 only five years ago — an extraordinary jump for half a decade, and a third of a degree above the previous decade.

3. Warming is sprinting at 0.27°C per decade — the fastest ever measured.

The rate of human-induced warming stands at 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade, matching last year’s all-time high. Two engines drive it: greenhouse gas emissions at record levels, and the rapid clean-up of sulphate aerosol pollution, which had been masking part of the warming and is now unmasking it. At this velocity, human-induced warming reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius around the year 2030.

4. The carbon budget for 1.5°C is down to 130 billion tonnes — about three years.

For a fifty-fifty chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, humanity may emit only around 130 GtCO2 from the start of 2026. Current emissions run at roughly 42 GtCO2 per year. The arithmetic needs no embellishment: a little over three years of business-as-usual exhausts the budget. The corresponding AR6 budget, expressed from 2020, was 500 GtCO2 — meaning the world has burned through three-quarters of its survival allowance in six years.

5. Greenhouse gas emissions touched an all-time high of 56.8 GtCO2e in 2024 — though growth is slowing.

Total emissions reached 56.8 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2024, with fossil CO2 at 38.6 billion tonnes and edging up again in 2025; the decadal average of 54.6 GtCO2e is the highest in history. The single sliver of hope: CO2 emission growth is slowing, and land-use emissions are declining.

6. The atmosphere is more loaded with heat-trapping gases than at any time in human existence.

Carbon dioxide reached 425.6 parts per million in 2025, methane reached 1,936 parts per billion, and nitrous oxide reached 339 parts per billion. CO2 is now roughly 53 per cent above its pre-industrial level — concentrations the Earth last experienced about two million years ago, long before Homo sapiens walked it.

7. The planet’s energy imbalance has more than doubled — Earth is heating faster than expected.

The Earth’s energy imbalance — the gap between incoming sunlight and outgoing heat, the truest measure of planetary heating — rose from about 0.40 watts per square metre in 1976-1995 to 1.04 in 2006-2025, some 40 per cent above the AR6-era figure. Ninety per cent of that excess heat pours into the ocean. The scientists confess the 2023-24 surge is still under investigation — a polite way of saying the planet is heating faster than the models anticipated.

8. Marine heatwave days have more than tripled since 1991.

The report’s newly added indicator finds that the global ocean averaged 58 marine-heatwave days per year in 2016-2025, compared with 36 in the previous decade, peaking at 82 days in 2024 — more than tripling since 1991. Marine heatwaves bleach corals, collapse fisheries, sap the ocean’s carbon uptake and supercharge cyclones. For a nation with a 7,500-kilometre coastline, this indicator is not academic.

For India, with its extensive mainland coastline of over 7,500 kilometres and heavily populated coastal regions (including the western coast near this author in Maharashtra down to the southern peninsula), these indicators are not just academic—they are an existential economic and ecological threat:

• Livelihood & Food Security: Millions of fishers rely on stable marine ecosystems. The Indian Ocean has warmed rapidly, shifting fish catch compositions and collapsing certain fisheries.

• Storm Surges: As marine heatwaves fuel rapid intensification of cyclones, coastal cities (especially along the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea) are increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic wind speeds and flooding.

9. Land extremes and seas are accelerating: the hottest days are 1.92°C hotter, and sea-level rise has more than doubled its pace.

The average annual maximum temperature over land has risen 1.92 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — climbing substantially faster than the global mean. Sea level has risen about 230 millimetres since 1901, with its pace accelerating from 1.69 millimetres per year in 1976-1995 to 3.67 millimetres per year in 2006-2025 — driven by thermal expansion and ice melt, now irreversible on human timescales.

10. The instruments that measure the crisis are themselves endangered.

In an unprecedented warning, the IGCC authors report that satellite missions monitoring the top-of-atmosphere radiation budget face decommissioning, ocean observing networks are losing funding, the World Climate Research Programme’s budget has been roughly halved, and historical data archives risk being switched off. An expert assessment of 55 Essential Climate Variables found many of them under serious threat.

Metaphorically speaking, Humanity, in other words, is contemplating flying a burning aircraft while smashing its own instrument panel.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Long Arc of Calamity: What the Historical Record Says and What Comes Next

Step back from the single-year drama, and the IGCC’s historical series tells us a story of relentless, compounding acceleration - a trail of destruction left behind by us. In the 1970s, the world emitted about 31 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year; today, it emits nearly 57 billion tonnes. The Earth’s energy imbalance has climbed in every successive twenty-year window since 1976. More than half of all ocean heat accumulated since the late 1800s has been absorbed after the 1990s. Sea-level rise has doubled its pace within a single human lifetime, and the decade 2016-2025 was 0.32 degrees hotter than 2006-2015 — the largest decade-on-decade jump in the record.

Each indicator, plotted across the decades, traces the same hockey-stick curve bending ever more steeply upward.

The consequences are no longer predictions or projections; they are yesterday’s headlines that have become critical today: record wildfires from Canada to the Mediterranean, biblical floods from Pakistan to Spain, and marine heatwaves quietly strangling fisheries.

The Lancet counts the bodies; insurers count the losses; both ledgers grow annually.

The prognosis follows mechanically from the arithmetic of Chapter Six. At 0.27 degrees per decade, the world crosses 1.5 degrees of human-induced warming around 2030 — within four years.

Without rapid, deep, and sustained emissions cuts beginning immediately, the 2-degree threshold comes into view by mid-century, a level at which the IPCC warns of cascading and partly irreversible impacts: multi-metre-thick committed sea-level rise, widespread crop failure zones, and heat that renders parts of the tropics seasonally unliveable.

Yet the same arithmetic offers the antidote: because warming is nearly linearly proportional to cumulative CO2, every tonne avoided buys a measurable sliver of a cooler future. The 2020s — what remains of them — are the hinge of the millennium.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Cruel Asymmetry: Why the Poorest Will Burn First

Climate change is the most regressive tax ever invented by humans inhabiting the Planet Earth. The richest ten per cent of humanity is responsible for roughly half of all consumption-linked emissions, while the poorest half is responsible for barely a tenth. Yet the geography of suffering inverts the geography of responsibility.

The fifty-five climate-vulnerable economies of the V20 group have already lost an estimated one-fifth of their potential GDP growth to climate impacts over the past two decades.

Sub-Saharan Africa, contributing under four per cent of emissions, faces the harshest droughts. Small island states, contributing a rounding error, face erasure.

The asymmetry operates at three consequential levels-

1. First, exposure: the poor live disproportionately in the tropics, in floodplains, in heat-trap slums and on storm-raked coasts, dependent on rain-fed farming and outdoor labour.

2. Second, sensitivity: when a heatwave strikes, the construction worker, the street vendor and the landless labourer have no air-conditioned refuge; when a flood comes, their uninsured assets vanish.

3. Third, adaptive capacity: rich nations spend their way to resilience with sea walls, cooling centres and crop insurance; poor nations queue for climate finance that arrives late, small and mostly as debt-creating loans.

   The celebrated 100-billion-dollar annual pledge was met years behind schedule, and the new finance goal agreed at COP29 remains a fraction of the trillions actually required.

Within nations, the same gradient repeats: women fetching water across lengthening distances, children whose schooling drowns with the floods, the elderly dying quietly in heatwaves, informal workers whose wages evaporate with every red-alert day.

Climate change does not create inequality; it weaponises it. Any climate policy that ignores this asymmetry is not merely unjust; it will fail because the vulnerable billions are also the workforce, consumers, and voters on whom every transition depends.

CHAPTER NINE

Bharat on the Frontline: What the Furnace Means for India

No large nation has more skin in this planet-destructive game than Bharat. Consider the ledger of vulnerability.

Heat

The country already loses well over 160 billion potential labour hours a year to heat exposure — the worst toll on Earth — and recent pre-monsoon seasons have brushed fifty degrees across the northern plains; at higher warming, parts of the Indo-Gangetic belt approach the physiological limits of outdoor work.

Water

Water: the Himalayan glaciers that feed the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Indus — the lifelines of half a billion Indians — are receding at accelerating rates, promising first floods, then scarcity; simultaneously, the monsoon is growing more erratic, compressing the same rainfall into fewer, fiercer bursts that flood cities and parch aquifers in the same season.

Agriculture and Food

Studies consistently show that wheat and rice yields fall by several percentage points per degree of warming, even as a 1.4-billion-strong nation must feed itself; rural distress turns from chronic to acute.

Coasts and cities

A 7,500-kilometre coastline hosting Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Kochi and Visakhapatnam faces the doubled pace of sea-level rise documented in Chapter Six, salinising the Sundarbans and Kerala’s backwaters and threatening trillions of rupees of urban assets; the Arabian Sea, once cyclone-shy, now breeds intensifying storms.

Health

The Lancet Countdown’s South Asia data show expanding windows for dengue, chikungunya and malaria, while heat strokes climb and air pollution — fossil fuel’s twin crime — already claims well over a million Indian lives annually.

The macroeconomic translations are stark. The Reserve Bank of India’s research warns that up to 4.5 per cent of GDP could be at risk by 2030 from lost labour hours alone; longer-term assessments by global banks and the World Bank place cumulative climate damage to India in the trillions of dollars. The Council on Energy, Environment and Water finds that three of every four Indian districts are already extreme-event hotspots.

India did not light this fire — its per-capita emissions remain barely a third of the global average — but India will stand in its hottest draught. That is precisely why waiting for climate justice to be served before acting is a luxury Bharat cannot afford: the victim, in this tragedy, must also be the first responder.

CHAPTER TEN

A Ten-Point War Plan for India: What Bharat Must Do Now, and Why It Cannot Wait

The 130-billion-tonne global carbon budget, the 2030 crossing of 1.5 degrees, and India’s frontline exposure together brutally compress the timetable: the decisions of the next thirty-six months will echo for three hundred years. Here, then, are ten actions Bhar must launch on a war footing — each with the reason that delay is fatal.

Action 1: Triple renewable capacity and re-engineer the grid by 2030

Bharat must treat its 500-gigawatt non-fossil target not as an aspiration but as a minimum, accelerating solar, wind, hydro and nuclear additions to 50-plus gigawatts annually while investing massively in storage, green transmission corridors and smart grids.

Why it cannot wait: every coal plant sanctioned locks today in forty years of emissions and stranded-asset risk, while solar-plus-storage is already the cheapest new power in India. The IGCC clock — three years of carbon budget — means the 2026-2030 buildout, not the 2040 vision, determines whether India’s peaking pledge is credible.

Delay converts a manageable transition into a violent one.

Action 2: Declare a national mission on extreme heat

India needs a statutory National Heat Mission: legally enforceable heat-action plans for every district, cool-roof programmes for slums, shaded work-hour regulations with wage protection for outdoor labourers, urban forestry on a Miyawaki scale, and heat-resilient hospital protocols.

Why it cannot wait: heat is India’s deadliest climate hazard today — not in 2047. With land maximum temperatures already 1.92 degrees above pre-industrial levels and the plains brushing fifty degrees, every summer of delay is measured in thousands of preventable deaths and billions of lost labour hours.

Heat adaptation is the cheapest life insurance India will ever buy.

Action 3: Wage a water war: glaciers, rivers, aquifers, rain

India must launch an integrated water-security mission — scientific monitoring of Himalayan glaciers and glacial-lake outburst risks, basin-level river management with Himalayan neighbours, a tenfold scale-up of managed aquifer recharge, universal micro-irrigation, and treating every city’s stormwater as a harvestable asset rather than a nuisance.

Why it cannot wait: the glacier-fed window is closing — first comes flood, then famine of flow — and groundwater, which irrigates over sixty per cent of farmland, is being mined to exhaustion now.

Water is where climate change will first break Indian agriculture, Indian cities and, potentially, regional peace.

Action 4: Climate-proof Indian agriculture and the food system.

India must fund a second Green Revolution — this time climate-resilient: drought- and heat-tolerant seed varieties; a decisive shift from water-guzzling paddy-wheat monoculture toward millets, pulses, and oilseeds; agroforestry; expanded crop insurance that actually pays; and cold chains that halve post-harvest losses.

Why it cannot wait: yield penalties from heat are already visible in terminal-heat wheat shrivelling, and every failed season simultaneously swells rural distress, migration, and food inflation.

Seed development and farmer adoption take a decade; starting in 2030 means harvesting resilience only in 2040 — a decade too late for the 1.5-degree world.

Action 5: Make the coast and cities flood- and storm-ready

India needs a National Coastal Resilience Programme — mangrove regeneration on a war scale, cyclone-grade building codes actually enforced, managed-retreat planning for the most exposed settlements — twinned with sponge-city retrofits, restored urban wetlands and drainage built for tomorrow’s cloudbursts, not yesterday’s averages.

Why it cannot wait: sea-level rise has doubled its pace and is irreversible for centuries; every tower sanctioned today on a vulnerable floodplain is a future ruin.

Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata are accumulating risk faster than they are retiring it, and infrastructure built in this decade will face the seas of 2100.

Action 6: Price carbon, redirect subsidies, and unleash green finance

India should rapidly operationalise and deepen its Carbon Credit Trading Scheme into a serious economy-wide carbon price, phase out distortive fossil subsidies in favour of direct income support for the poor, mandate climate-risk disclosure across banking, and scale sovereign green bonds and a national taxonomy to crowd in the roughly ten trillion dollars that its net-zero journey needs.

Why it cannot wait: capital allocated this decade determines emissions over the next three.

With the EU’s carbon border tax operational from January 2026, unpriced Indian carbon becomes a tax paid to Brussels rather than revenue retained in Delhi. Markets move on signals — send them now.

Action 7: Electrify transport and clean the air in the same stroke

India must drive electric two- and three-wheelers to near-total dominance in new-vehicle sales by 2030, electrify buses and freight corridors, and expand metro and rail networks. Enforce fuel-efficiency norms without dilution, and pair all of this with a serious assault on crop-residue burning and industrial emissions.

Why it cannot wait: air pollution already kills over a million Indians annually — a present-tense catastrophe — and transport decarbonisation has decade-long fleet-turnover lags.

Every diesel truck sold in 2026 pollutes until 2041. The co-benefit arithmetic is unanswerable: the same rupee buys cleaner lungs today and a cooler planet tomorrow.

Action 8: Build a climate-intelligence and early-warning shield

India must invest in its own dense observation network — Doppler radars in every vulnerable district, Himalayan cryosphere monitoring, ocean buoys, an indigenous climate-modelling consortium — and guarantee last-mile early warnings in every Indian language for every hazard.

Why it cannot wait: the IGCC warns that the global observing system is being defunded by geopolitics; India cannot outsource its situational awareness to a retreating West.

Early-warning systems repay their cost up to tenfold in the first decade, and in a country of 1.4 billion, the difference between a warning and silence is counted in thousands of lives per cyclone.

Action 9: Protect the vulnerable: adaptation with a human face

Bharat, without further delay, at war footing, must legislate a National Adaptation and Just-Transition framework — heat-indexed social insurance for informal workers, climate-resilient MGNREGA works, relocation-with-dignity protocols for the displaced, dedicated funds for women-led community adaptation, and retraining pipelines for coal-belt workers in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha.

Why it cannot wait: Chapter eight’s cruel asymmetry operates inside India too — the poorest Indians are already paying the climate bill in wages, health and homes.

Transitions that ignore the vulnerable breed backlash that halts transitions altogether; justice is not the garnish on climate policy; it is the load-bearing wall.

Action 10: Lead the Global South — and demand the money

Bharat must convert its G20, growing international heft, International Solar Alliance and CDRI leadership into a permanent diplomatic offensive: a hard push for trebled, grant-based climate finance, technology transfer without patent shackles, operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund at scale, and a coalition that holds the developed world — including a wayward Washington — to its historical responsibility.

Why it cannot wait: with the United States abdicating, the leadership chair of climate multilateralism is vacant precisely when COP31 and the next NDC cycle will set the 2035 trajectory.

Vacuums must get filled; better by Delhi’s voice for the vulnerable than by drift.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Price of Slumber: If Bharat Does Not Seize the Bull by the Horns

What if India hits the snooze button — treats climate as a 2047 problem and waits for the West to pay first?

The bill, itemised, is atrociously high

An economy bleeding up to 4.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 from heat-degraded labour alone, with long-run damages running into trillions of dollars; agriculture lurching from crisis to crisis as yields fall and water tables collapse, reigniting food insecurity in a nation that feeds a sixth of humanity; coastal megacities accumulating uninsurable real estate as seas rise; tens of millions of internal climate migrants by mid-century, swelling cities that are themselves heat traps; a public-health emergency of heatstroke, vector-borne disease and toxic air overwhelming an underbuilt health system; and Himalayan water stress sharpening tensions with neighbours.

Add the economic geopolitics

A world pricing carbon at its borders will tax Indian exports built on unabated coal; capital will demand climate-risk premia on Indian debt; and the green-technology industries of the century — solar manufacturing, batteries, green hydrogen, electric mobility — will belong to whoever moved first, most likely China. Inaction, in other words, forfeits both the defensive and the offensive game: India suffers the damages and surrenders the markets.

And the cruellest entry in the ledger

Every year of delay transfers the cost from the budget to the body — from public investment that could have been prevented to private grief that must endure. The IGCC’s three-year carbon budget is the world’s deadline, but India’s own adaptation deadline is even nearer, because the heat, the floods and the storms are already here.

A civilisation that survived invasions, famines and partition should not be undone by its own procrastination.

Epilogue — The Window Has Narrowed, Not Closed

Every generation believes it lives at a hinge of history; ours can prove it with a thermometer. The Indicators of Global Climate Change 2025 will be remembered either as the moment the world finally read its own audit and acted — or as one more unheeded entry in the long chronicle of warnings.

The numbers themselves are now beyond dispute: 1.37 degrees of human-made warming, the fastest heating rate ever recorded, an ocean gulping heat at double the pace of a generation ago, and a carbon budget that expires before the next general election cycle concludes.

Yet despair is analytically lazy and morally useless.

The same report notes that CO2 emissions growth is slowing, that land-use emissions are falling, and that solar and wind are being deployed faster than any other energy technology in history. China’s coal paradox contains its own resolution: clean power is already meeting all new demand there.

The machinery of salvation exists; what is missing is the political will to run it at war speed — and the honesty to admit that the era of painless gradualism is over.

For Bharat, the assignment is written in this volume’s tenth chapter, but the spirit behind it is older than any COP. This civilisation has always known that the river, the monsoon and the mountain are not property but inheritance — held in trust for those not yet born. Prithvi, our scriptures say, is mother, not mine. The furnace decade asks merely that we act on what we have always professed. The window has narrowed, but it has not closed.

Whether 2025 is remembered as the worst year of human-caused warming — or merely the worst so far — is the one question whose answer is still entirely, defiantly, ours.

Akhil Vaani • Daily Long Form Series • Volume 35 June 11, 2026

Multidisciplinary Thought Leader with Action Bias and India-based International Consultant

Pune, India · June 10, 2026

Subscribe now

[AI-generated conceptual artwork commissioned for Akhil Vaani. The image is an original visual interpretation of the article’s themes on creativity, technology, and the future of human–AI collaboration, intended solely for editorial and educational purposes."]

Authors’ Message

This Volume 34 of the Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form Series, due to its sheer complexity, exceeds 104 KB in size, and you may find it appears truncated in your inbox towards the end. If the article is truncated in your email, just click on “View entire message,” toward the end, and you will be able to view the entire post in your email app.]

Subscribe now

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

— attributed to the media philosopher Marshall McLuhan

"AI is the most profound technology we are working on. It's more profound than fire or electricity."
— Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet

"AI is not a robotic apocalypse; it's a tool for a better future... The true power of AI lies not in replacing humans, but in working alongside us to achieve what neither can do alone."
— Demis Hassabis, Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind

Prologue

The Night the Machine Began to Dream

There is a particular hour, late in the history of every civilisation, when a tool stops being a tool and starts being a rival. The wheel never argued with the cart. The printing press never claimed to have written the book. The camera, for all the panic it caused among portrait painters in the 1840s, never insisted that it had imagined the face it captured.

But when, in the wee hours of November 30, 2022 (Pacific Standard Time), a San Francisco laboratory quietly released a chatbot named ChatGPT to the public, something genuinely unprecedented entered the human story. For the first time, we had built a machine that could do the one thing we humans had reserved for ourselves — it could compose.

It could argue, console, joke, summarise, invent, and, most unsettlingly, it could write prose that a great many readers could not tell apart from our own.

We had, in effect, taught sand to speak. The silicon in a microchip is purified beach sand, organised by human ingenuity into circuits that now hold a compressed statistical portrait of nearly everything humanity has ever written down. When you ask such a machine a question, it does not look anything up the way a clerk consults a ledger. It dreams an answer into being, one probable word after another, drawing on patterns distilled from billions of pages. The result can be brilliant, banal, or entirely fabricated — and the machine itself cannot always tell which it really is.

For the first time, we had built a machine that could do the one thing we had always reserved for ourselves. It could compose.

This is the quiet collision at the heart of our age: the arrival of the Artificial Intelligence Age against the long, unbroken reign of the Human Age. For roughly three hundred thousand years, Homo sapiens held an absolute monopoly on a single, sacred faculty — the capacity to make meaning. We told the stories around the fire. We painted the bison on the cave wall at Lascaux . We carved the gods, scored the symphonies, and filled the libraries.

[ Author’s Note : The bison and other animals on the walls of the Lascaux Cave were painted by anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) about 17,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic period (specifically the Magdalenian culture ].

Creativity was not merely something we did; it was the proof that we were us. Now a non-human intelligence sits across the table, holding a pen of its own, and the proof is suddenly in dispute.

Not the End of Human Edge

It would be easy to greet this moment with terror, and many do. Newsrooms are shedding writers. A short story written, in all probability, by a machine has just won a prestigious international prize. Publishers are pulling novels from shelves. Musicians watch synthetic voices imitate the dead. The visual artist, the screenwriter, the columnist — each peers into the same uncertain mirror and asks whether the reflection is still entirely their own.

But terror is a poor compass. It freezes the very faculty we most need to navigate the change: judgement.

This Volume 34 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form Series is written in a different spirit. It is written with absolute conviction that the AI Age need not be the end of the Human Age, but might, if we are wise and disciplined, become its strangest and most fertile chapter.

The Centaur

The metaphor I have chosen for the title — the centaur — comes from the world of chess, where, after the machine first defeated the world champion, the strongest competitor turned out to be neither human nor machine alone, but the two yoked together: a human directing the machine’s power with human purpose.

That hybrid is our subject.

[Author’s Note: A centaur in chess refers to a team made up of a human and a computer (AI) working together. It combines human intuition, strategy, and creativity with a computer’s massive processing power and tactical calculation.

The term comes from the mythical creature (half-human, half-horse) and was popularised by chess legend Garry Kasparov following his famous loss to IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in 199 ]

What this Volume 34 is All About

Over the chapters that follow in this Volume 34 of the daily rendition by this author, we the author will examine what this technology actually is and where it came from; survey the new pantheon of thinking machines; trace how ordinary people now use them in life and at work; confront the controversies, the ethics and the grey areas; and ask the question that haunts every creator alive today — what becomes of the writer, the artist and the journalist when the tool learns to dream?

The honest answer is that nobody knows. But the dishonest answer — that nothing important has changed — is no longer available to any of us.

CHAPTER ONE

What We Mean When We Say “Intelligence”

Before we can argue about what artificial intelligence will do to us, we must be honest about what it is, because the phrase conceals more than it reveals. IBM, in the primer that anchors this enquiry, offers a usefully sober definition:

“Quote) Artificial intelligence is technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem-solving, decision-making, creativity and autonomy (Unqote). “

The operative word is simulate.

The machine does not understand a sonnet the way you do; it models, with uncanny fidelity, the statistical shadow that understanding leaves behind in language.

It helps to picture AI as a set of nested Russian dolls assembled over more than seventy years. The outermost doll is artificial intelligence itself — the broad ambition of making machines behave intelligently. Inside it sits machine learning, the discipline of training an algorithm on data so that it can make predictions without being explicitly programmed for each task. Inside machine learning sits deep learning, which uses multi-layered neural networks — architectures loosely inspired by the interconnected neurons of the human brain — with hundreds of hidden layers that can extract meaning from vast quantities of unlabelled data without a human holding their hand.

And nested at the very centre, the doll that has captured the world’s imagination is generative AI: deep-learning models that do not merely classify or predict but create — original text, images, video, audio, and code, conjured in response to a prompt.

The Engine: Transformers, Foundation Models and the Trillion-Parameter Mind

The breakthrough that made the current era possible has an unglamorous name: the transformer. Introduced by Google researchers in 2017, the transformer is a neural network architecture trained on sequential data — the words in a sentence, the pixels in an image — that learns which parts of a sequence to pay attention to.

[Author’s Explanatory Note: Google engineers invented the Transformer architecture in June 2017, when a team of researchers published the seminal paper Attention Is All You Need.

The Transformer was developed by a team of eight researchers at Google Brain: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin.

Before this breakthrough, artificial intelligence systems relied on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which processed data sequentially (word by word) and were notoriously slow and difficult to train. The Google team revolutionised AI by replacing these sequential networks with an architecture that used a self-attention mechanism, enabling the model to process entire sentences simultaneously and evaluate relationships between any two words, regardless of their distance in the text.

This architecture became the fundamental building block for all major modern AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT series, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s own Gemini. ]

Transformer at the Core

As IBM notes, transformers sit at the core of nearly every headline-making system, from the GPT family to the image generators. When such an architecture is trained on terabytes of text scraped from the internet, the result is a foundation model: a single, enormously expensive object, often costing millions of dollars and weeks of computation across thousands of specialised chips, encoding billions of parameters — the numerical weights that store its compressed picture of the world.

The large language model, or LLM, is the text-generating species of this genus.

A raw foundation model is powerful but unhousebroken. Two further steps tame it. The first is fine-tuning, in which the model is fed examples of the kinds of questions it will face and the answers we want for them. The second, more subtle, is reinforcement learning from human feedback — RLHF — in which human reviewers rate the model’s responses, teaching it, by reward and correction, to be helpful, honest and harmless. A third technique, retrieval-augmented generation or RAG, lets a model consult fresh, external sources rather than relying solely on its frozen training data, which is how a chatbot can answer questions about events that occurred after it was built.

The machine does not understand a sonnet the way humans do. It models, with uncanny fidelity, the statistical shadow that understanding leaves behind in language.

From Assistants to Agents

The most consequential frontier of the moment is the shift from assistants to agents. A chatbot answers; an agent acts. As IBM frames it, “an AI agent is an autonomous program that can pursue a goal on a user’s behalf — designing its own sequence of steps and reaching out to other software tools to get there”. The example is instructive: a generative model can tell you the best week to climb Everest given your calendar, but an agent can tell you, then book the flight and reserve the hotel in Kathmandu. Stitch several such agents together, each handling part of a larger problem, and you have agentic AI — the architecture that, more than any single chatbot, is reshaping how work gets done.

The benefits IBM catalogues are real: “automation of drudgery, faster insight from data, fewer human errors, round-the-clock availability, reduced physical risk. So are the hazards, to which the author will return a bit later: biased data, opaque reasoning, and a confidence that is, alarmingly, uncorrelated with accuracy”.

CHAPTER TWO

Seventy Years to an Overnight Sensation

The public experiences artificial intelligence as a thunderclap of late 2022, but the storm had been gathering for the better part of a century. The dream of a thinking machine is older than computing itself, reaching back to the automata of antiquity.

The modern story begins in 1950, when Alan Turing — the codebreaker often called the father of computer science — published a paper asking, with disarming directness, “Can machines think?” and proposed the test that still bears his name: if a human interrogator cannot reliably distinguish a machine’s written responses from a person’s, the machine has, in a meaningful sense, passed.

Six years later, in 1956, the field acquired its name. At a summer conference at Dartmouth College, John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence,” and that same year the first running AI program, the Logic Theorist, was built.

Thence followed the great oscillation between hope and disappointment that has defined the discipline ever since. In 1967, Frank Rosenblatt built the Mark 1 Perceptron, the first machine to “learn” through trial and error; a year later, a sceptical book by Minsky and Papert helped freeze neural-network research for over a decade — the first of the so-called “AI winters.”

The thaw came with the spread of the backpropagation training algorithm in the 1980s, the technique that still teaches today’s networks.

Then came the landmark public defeats of human champions, each a cultural shock in its time. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat the reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. In 2011, IBM’s Watson defeated the great champions of the quiz show Jeopardy! In 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo overcame the world champion Lee Sedol at Go — a game of such combinatorial vastness that mastery had been thought decades away.

Each victory was a milestone; none, however, threatened the creative monopoly. Chess and Go are bounded games. Storytelling is not.

The Five Tectonic Shifts

It is the last few years that future historians will mark as the hinge. Within them, the author counts five tectonic shifts that arrive in dizzying succession.

One. The conversational shock (late 2022)

OpenAI releases ChatGPT, built on the GPT-3.5 model. Within two months, it reaches a hundred million users — the fastest consumer-technology adoption ever recorded. For the first time, a fluent, general-purpose intelligence is in the hands of ordinary people, and the abstract debate about AI becomes an immediate, personal one.

Two. The multimodal leap (2023)

ChatGPT-4 and its rivals learn to see as well as read, accepting images alongside text. The model stops being a clever autocomplete and starts behaving like a reasoning partner that can analyse a chart, a contract or a photograph.

Three. The assistant wars (2023–2024)

Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini arrive as serious challengers, each emphasising long-context reasoning and safety. Competition, not monopoly, becomes the engine of progress, and prices begin to fall even as capability climbs.

Four. The generative-media explosion (2024–2025)

Image generators such as Midjourney mature, and text-to-video systems — Google’s Veo, OpenAI’s Sora — make it possible to conjure photoreal footage from a sentence. Creativity’s visual and cinematic frontiers fall to the machine almost overnight.

Five. The agentic turn (2025–2026)

Models stop merely answering and begin doing — writing and running code, browsing the web, operating other software, completing multi-step tasks with minimal supervision. The distinction between a tool you use and a colleague you delegate to begins, disconcertingly, to blur.

Each shift compressed the timeline of the one before. The gap between the Perceptron and Deep Blue was thirty years; the gap between ChatGPT and autonomous agents was barely thirty months. This acceleration is the single most important fact about our situation.

We are not adapting to a new tool; we are adapting to a tool that improves faster than our institutions, our laws, and arguably our intuitions can keep pace with.

CHAPTER THREE

The Pantheon: A Field Guide to the Thinking Machines

By the middle of 2026, the era of a single dominant chatbot is decisively over. What has emerged instead is a pantheon of specialised intelligences, each with a distinct temperament, and the sophisticated user no longer asks “which is best?” but “best for what?”

Independent benchmark trackers such as Artificial Analysis now rank well over a hundred models. A brief field guide to the principal figures, as the landscape stands at the time of writing, is in order — with the caveat that in this field any snapshot begins to age the moment it is taken.

Claude (Anthropic)

Anthropic’s Claude, whose latest flagship is Opus 4.8, sits at the top of the composite intelligence rankings in mid-2026 and is widely regarded as the strongest model for coding, long-running agentic tasks and sustained, natural prose.

Built Anthropic, Claude is prized by writers for the fluency and restraint of its long-form writing and for its very large context window, which lets it hold an entire manuscript in mind at once. In a development that says much about the year, Claude reportedly climbed to the top of the app-store charts in early 2026, displacing ChatGPT from the summit for the first time. There is a piquant irony, to which the author will return to later, in the fact that it was Claude, a literary magazine, that was turned to when it needed to ask whether a prize-winning story had been written by a machine.

ChatGPT / GPT (OpenAI)

OpenAI, which began the consumer revolution, remains its centre of gravity. Its current flagship, GPT-5.5, launched in April 2026, claims a steep reduction in “hallucinations” — the confident fabrications that plague all such systems — and is rated by several reviewers as the strongest model for creative writing. Its great advantage is the ecosystem: the largest base of users, plug-ins and integrations, and a document-editing surface, Canvas, well suited to iterative drafting. OpenAI also fields the leading image generator of the moment, capable of rendering precise text within pictures, and for sheer reach it remains the default first encounter most people have with the technology.

Gemini (Google)

Google’s Gemini, whose Gemini 3.1 Pro arrived in early 2026, leans into reasoning, data analysis and the company’s formidable multimodal research. It is frequently cited as the leader on the hardest reasoning benchmarks and, crucially, sits atop Google’s media stack — including the Veo video generator that, following the discontinuation of a major rival’s video product in 2026, is the premier text-to-video system in wide use. Tightly woven into Google’s search and productivity tools, Gemini is the model most people will encounter without choosing to.

Perplexity, Grok and the Wider Field

Perplexity occupies a distinct niche: it is search-native, pairing a language model with live web retrieval and, vitally for any serious researcher, transparent citations — a partial antidote to the fabrication problem. xAI’s Grok, currently in its 4.3 generation, trades on real-time access to the social platform X and on being among the cheapest of the frontier models. Beyond these, a vigorous field presses upward: China’s DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen compete fiercely on price, Meta’s open-weight Llama can be run privately so that data never leaves one’s own servers, and Microsoft’s Copilot threads AI through the Office software that the working world already lives inside. The lesson of the pantheon is plural: there is no single oracle, only a toolkit, and mastery now means knowing which instrument to reach for.

The sophisticated user no longer asks “which is best?” but “best for what?”

CHAPTER FOUR

A Day in the Augmented Life

Abstractions about foundation models mean little until one sees the technology threaded through an ordinary day. The most striking feature of this revolution is not that it is coming, but that it has already, quietly, arrived in tens of millions of lives and workplaces. What follows are ten representative uses, drawn from how people across professions and households actually deploy these tools — a portrait of augmentation rather than replacement, at least for now.

1. The doctor’s second opinion

Clinicians increasingly use AI to draft visit summaries, transcribe and structure consultations, and surface the latest evidence on a rare presentation in seconds. As IBM notes, AI-guided surgical robotics already delivers consistent precision, and machine-learning models flag anomalies in scans a tired human eye might miss. The doctor remains the decision-maker; the machine becomes a tireless junior partner that has, in effect, read every journal.

The risk — over-reliance on a confident but occasionally wrong assistant — is exactly why the human signature on the diagnosis still matters.

2. The coder’s pair-programmer

Software development has been transformed more than almost any other field. Engineers now describe tasks that once took three or four days of experimentation, collapsing into a single hour. AI tools generate, explain and debug code, modernise ageing systems, and let a lone developer attempt what once required a team. The frontier models resolve real-world programming problems autonomously for stretches of hours.

The craft is shifting from writing every line to specifying intent and reviewing the machine’s work — a more architectural, more supervisory kind of skill.

3. The small business’s back office

For the corner shop and the solo consultant, AI has democratised capabilities once reserved for firms with departments. A single owner now drafts marketing copy, designs a logo, answers customer queries through a chatbot, reconciles invoices and analyses sales trends — all through conversational tools costing a few thousand rupees a month.

The effect is profoundly levelling: the asymmetry of resources that long protected large incumbents is eroding, and a one-person enterprise can present the polished face of a much larger one.

4. The student’s tutor

A patient, infinitely available tutor now sits in every student’s pocket, ready to explain calculus at midnight, rephrase a dense paragraph, or quiz a learner before an exam. Used well, it personalises education at a scale no school system could afford. Used badly, it writes the essay the student should have struggled through.

The same tool is, simultaneously, the finest learning aid ever built and the most powerful instrument of intellectual laziness ever devised — a duality that haunts every classroom debate about its place.

5. The customer’s first responder

The chatbots and virtual assistants that now greet us on banking and shopping sites use natural-language processing to resolve routine queries about orders, balances and returns at any hour. As IBM observes, this provides always-on support and frees human agents for the genuinely difficult cases.

For the customer, the experience is faster but flatter; the unresolved question is where to draw the line between efficient automation and the human contact that a frustrated, frightened, or grieving customer sometimes desperately needs.

6. The marketer’s personalisation engine

Retailers and banks deploy deep learning models to recommend products, predict churn, and generate personalised offers and copy for individual customers in real time. The marketing email that seems to know you was, increasingly, written for you alone by a machine analysing your purchase history.

The commercial gains are large; so are the privacy questions, since the same engine that delights with relevance also surveils with precision, and the consumer rarely sees the trade being struck on their behalf.

7. The recruiter’s first filter

Hiring platforms now screen résumés, match candidates to roles and even conduct preliminary video interviews, dramatically cutting the administrative weight of a large applicant pool. The promise is speed and consistency; the peril, as IBM warns plainly, is that biased training data can entrench gender or racial discrimination at industrial scale, rejecting qualified people before any human sees them.

This is the use case where the ethics of “fairness and inclusion” stop being abstract and acquire real human casualties.

8. The factory’s prophet

On the production line, machine-learning models read data streaming from sensors and connected devices to predict equipment failures before they occur. This predictive maintenance prevents costly downtime and lets managers stay ahead of supply-chain shocks.

It is AI at its least controversial and most useful — quietly preventing breakdowns, keeping aircraft, turbines, and assembly lines running — and a reminder that much of the technology’s real value lies far from the cultural battlefield, in the unglamorous work of keeping the physical world turning.

9. The household’s quiet manager

In the home, AI plans meals based on what is in the fridge, drafts an awkward email to the landlord, translates a foreign document, summarises a dense insurance policy, and helps a parent compose a difficult message with the right tone. People increasingly treat these systems as a thinking partner for the small frictions of daily life.

The convenience is genuine; the subtler, dangerous outcome is a gradual outsourcing of minor cognitive labour, the long-term consequences of which on our own faculties we do not yet understand.

10. The researcher’s force-multiplier

Perhaps the most powerful use is investigative. As the Reuters Institute documented, journalists used custom AI tools to translate, index and search tens of thousands of photographed documents in an investigation into atrocities in Syria — work no newsroom of a hundred people could have done by hand. Here AI does not invent; it amplifies, letting a human investigator interrogate a mountain of evidence. As one Reuters journalist put it, AI cannot give you data that is not already in the world — which is precisely why, she argued, it cannot replace the reporter who goes to the field.

The same tool is, simultaneously, the finest learning aid ever built and the most powerful instrument of intellectual laziness ever devised.

A pattern runs through all ten. In each case, AI is most valuable when it removes friction, amplifies a human, or extends reach — and most dangerous when it is trusted to decide unsupervised in matters of consequence.

The technology is a magnificent servant and a treacherous master, and the difference between the two lies almost entirely in the discipline of the human holding the reins.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Serpent in the Grove

Every age announces its anxieties through a scandal, and the creative world’s reckoning with AI found its emblem in the late spring of 2026, in a short story about a rum-drinking Trinidadian farmer and an enchanted grove.

The episode is worth telling in full, because it compresses almost every fault line of our subject into a single, irresistible drama.

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is among the most competitive in world literature. The 2026 cycle drew 7,806 entries — the second-highest in its history — and was winnowed by judges to five regional winners. The Caribbean award went to “The Serpent in the Grove,” attributed to a Trinidadian writer named Jamir Nazir. The judging panel praised its precise, evocative language and its melodic voice; one judge wrote that the prose pulsed with restraint and quiet authority.

As is the tradition, the winning stories were published on the website of Granta, the august London literary magazine, which has hosted Commonwealth winners since 2012.

Within days, the literary internet erupted. Readers found the prose strange in a particular, now-recognisable way — over-stuffed with metaphor, syntactically tic-ridden. One widely shared line described a girl as having “the kind of walking that made benches become men.” An associate professor at the Wharton School who studies AI, Ethan Mollick, publicly flagged the story as machine-written; the AI-detection tool Pangram rated it as 100 per cent AI-generated. Sleuths noted that the author’s online footprint was thin for a self-described prolific writer, and that his professional profile showed prior public musings on AI replacing jobs.

A former Commonwealth winner, the novelist Kevin Jared Hosein, declared the prize, in effect, “dead.” The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent and others gave the affair sustained coverage.

The Irony at the Heart of It

Then came the detail that elevated the episode from scandal to parable. Granta’s publisher, Sigrid Rausing, explained that to test the suspicions, her team had shown the story to an AI chatbot — Anthropic’s Claude — and asked whether it was machine-written. The chatbot’s long answer concluded that the text was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human.”

Rausing added, with disarming candour, that the judges might have awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism — “we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.”

The Commonwealth Foundation’s director-general struck a similarly careful note, expressing confidence in the rigour of the process while acknowledging an evolving technological environment. Granta, for its part, stressed that it had played no role in selecting the stories beyond copy-editing them.

A literary establishment, unable to tell whether a machine had written a story, turned to a machine to ask.

Pause on the spectacle for the moment. Let the story unfurl in slow motion.

A literary establishment, unable to tell with confidence whether a machine had written a prize-winning story, turned to a machine to ask — and the machine returned an ambiguous verdict.

That, in miniature, is the epistemic crisis AI has created: detection tools are imperfect and produce false positives, particularly against writers from the global South and those who write in a second English; human judges, even expert ones, can be fooled; and the accused cannot easily prove a negative.

The truth about “The Serpent in the Grove” may never be settled. The damage to confidence is already done.

Nor was this an isolated event. In March 2026, the major publisher Hachette withdrew a horror novel from sale worldwide after evidence emerged of AI-generated text — reportedly the first time a leading traditional publisher had pulled a commercially published novel specifically over AI concerns.

[Author’s Explanatory Note:

In March 2026, the publisher Hachette Book Group withdrew the horror novel Shy Girl by author Mia Ballard, marking the first time a leading traditional publisher cancelled a commercially released novel specifically because of evidence of artificial intelligence-generated text.

Key Details of the Event:

• The Book and Controversy: Shy Girl was initially self-published by Mia Ballard in 2025 and later picked up by Hachette’s imprint Orbit for a broader release. Readers on platforms like Reddit and YouTube began pointing out highly repetitive prose and nonsensical linguistic patterns, with some AI detection tools scoring the text as heavily machine-generated.

• The Withdrawal: On March 19, 2026, following inquiries and evidence presented by The New York Times, Hachette cancelled the forthcoming U.S. edition and quietly discontinued sales of the book in the U.K., removing it from major retailers.

• The Aftermath: This incident is considered a watershed moment in the publishing industry, sparking widespread debates about AI detection, quality control, and the vulnerability of traditional publishing houses to AI-assisted manuscripts. For context, author Mia Ballard denied personally using AI, claiming an editor she hired to polish the self-published version had introduced the AI tools without her knowledge. ]

A year earlier, the Chicago Sun-Times and other papers had run a syndicated summer reading list in which ten of fifteen recommended books simply did not exist, invented by a machine and waved through by a human.

[ Author’s Explanatory Note:

The bizarre media incident occurred in May 2025 and became a major cautionary tale about the dangers of using generative AI in journalism without human oversight.

The Event

In a syndicated special summer reading section distributed in Sunday papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, a recommended reading list featured 15 books. Astonishingly, 10 of the books did not exist and were completely fabricated by Artificial Intelligence.

How It Happened

• The AI Fabrication: The AI (such as ChatGPT or similar generative models) “hallucinated” book titles, creating fake but believable titles and synopses. It attributed these nonexistent books to highly successful, real-life authors, such as:

  • “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende

  • “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir

  • “The Rainmakers” by Percival Everett

• The Human Failure: The syndicated insert was not created by the publications’ own newsrooms. It was licensed through a national content partner and written by a freelance writer named Marco Buscaglia. The writer later publicly admitted that he used AI for his research but failed to double-check the accuracy of the output before submitting the piece.

The Aftermath

Readers and eagle-eyed librarians quickly noticed that the famous authors listed had never penned those specific novels.

• The syndication service that distributed the piece terminated its relationship with the freelance writer.

• The Chicago Sun-Times issued a public apology to readers, admitting that the syndicated insert slipped through without proper review by their editorial team.

• The paper’s union publicly condemned the inclusion of unvetted AI content alongside their real journalistic work.

This incident is frequently cited as a prime example of “AI hallucination” and the necessity of human fact-checking in publishing

At the Cairo International Book Fair in 2026, novels appeared in print with the chatbot’s own prompts and replies accidentally left embedded in the text.

[Author’s Explanatory Note:

At the Cairo International Book Fair (CIBF) in early 2026, a major controversy erupted when attendees discovered that several newly published novels contained passages clearly generated by artificial intelligence. In a striking editorial failure, the final printed editions were published with the AI’s internal prompt-and-response instructions and conversational replies accidentally left embedded directly into the text.

The incident unfolded with the following details:

• The Error: Images circulating on social media exposed pages containing raw chatbot instructions and system replies (e.g., about character development and plot direction) alongside the actual narrative.

• The Backlash: Readers and cultural commentators labelled the publication of unedited AI text as a major “scandal”. It sparked a heated debate regarding literary standards and the ethics of AI ghostwriting.

• The Industry Response: The head of the Arab Publishers Association, Mohamed Rashad, acknowledged the incident. While noting that the use of AI tools for cover design or writing assistance is becoming common globally, he condemned the lack of human proofreading and the failure to review the content before mass printing. ]

As the above three instances duly annotated with the author’s explanatory notes testify categorically, the emerging pattern is unmistakable: “As AI tools grow more fluent, the thin line that divides assistance from authorship is growing fainter and fainter by day, rather is vanishing altogether, and the institutions whose job is to certify creative worth of a creator- prizes, publishers, news papers — are discovering that their gatekeeping was built for a world that has slipped by altogehter like a dune of sand.

CHAPTER SIX

The Muse and the Machine

The creative fields are where the AI question stops being economic and becomes existential, for here the machine encroaches not on our labour but on our self-understanding. The advance is uneven — swift in some domains, halting in others — but it is universal. The author below discussed the key areas where faultlines are appearing fastest, and with every passing day, new areas are getting added to the list at an alarming pace

1. Story and fiction writing

This is the most contested ground. Novelists now use AI to brainstorm plots, outline chapters, generate alternative phrasings and break through the blank page. A whole “microgenre” of 2025–26 fiction, as The Atlantic observed, even takes AI as its subject — chatbots standing in for lost lovers, rogue medical algorithms in legal thrillers. But as the Granta affair showed, the line between a tool that prompts the writer’s own thinking and one that does the writing is perilously thin, and the literary world has not agreed where to draw it.

2. Long-form books and non-fiction

Authors of non-fiction increasingly deploy AI as a research synthesiser — digesting reports, drafting summaries, suggesting structure — while reserving argument and voice for themselves. The memoirist Vauhini Vara, in a much-discussed book, recounted using a chatbot not to think for her but to provoke her into thinking against it: the machine produced some of her best lines while inserting outright lies, forcing her to assert her own consciousness by writing in opposition. It is perhaps the wisest model on offer: the machine as a sparring partner, never the author of record.

[ Author’s Explanatory Note

Vauhini Vara detailed these experiences in her celebrated, unconventional viral essay “Ghosts” and expanded on them in her memoir, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. [1,

The above statement about Vara is explained in three key dynamics:

• Using the Machine for Provocation: Vara used the AI not to write her memoir for her but as a sparring partner to help her process her complex grief over her sister’s death. When she felt stuck, feeding text to the chatbot challenged her to look at her grief from new angles.

• The “Lie” (Hallucination) Factor: The AI frequently “hallucinated” (e.g., falsely inventing a scene where she held hands with her dead sister at a specific intersection). Rather than accepting these outright falsehoods, Vara found herself actively rejecting the machine’s fictions.

• Asserting Consciousness: The AI’s flaws served as a catalyst for her own creativity. By clashing with the machine’s fabrications and its tendency to produce trite, algorithmic language, Vara was forced to clarify what the true memory and her genuine human perspective actually were.

This dialectic between a human writer and a large language model allowed Vara to reflect deeply on what makes human storytelling inherently unique.

3. Journalism and article writing

Newsrooms have used automation for over a decade — the Associated Press has long generated routine earnings and sports reports from structured data. Today, AI transcribes interviews, summarises documents, translates sources and drafts the predictable story so reporters can pursue the unpredictable one.

The Reuters Institute’s 2026 findings are emphatic that the technology amplifies investigation rather than replacing the investigator.

But the same fluency that drafts a market report can manufacture a plausible falsehood, which is why disclosure has become journalism’s central new discipline.

4. Music composition

Music is emerging as the field where AI is most visibly delivering. Generative tools compose royalty-free soundtracks for advertising, games and video in minutes; film studios feed temp tracks and mood references into AI scoring systems to draft cues.

The Beatles’ 2023 release “Now and Then” used AI to lift John Lennon’s voice from an old demo — a poignant, sanctioned use. A 2026 survey of more than a thousand producers found that they were not rejecting AI but expected their own role to evolve toward that of a creative director, guiding intelligent tools rather than being replaced by them.

5. Film and moving image

Text-to-video systems now generate photoreal footage from a sentence, collapsing what once cost millions into a prompt. AI tools analyse scripts to forecast a film’s commercial prospects, simulate the lifelike movement of cloth, hair and muscle in animation, and accelerate the laborious craft of visual effects.

The industry’s anxiety — vividly expressed in recent strikes — is that the same tools that empower a lone filmmaker also threaten the armies of skilled technicians and performers whose labour built the medium.

6. Painting and visual art

Image generators have provoked the fiercest backlash of all because they were trained, in many cases, on the work of living artists who neither consented nor were paid. The tools can now produce images in seconds in the recognisable style of a named painter — a capability that feels, to many artists, like theft dressed as homage.

Yet the same systems have become genuine instruments in the hands of artists who use them deliberately, as a new kind of brush, raising the oldest question in aesthetics in a startling new form: where does the art reside — in the hand, or in the intent?

7. Poetry

Poetry, the most compressed art, has proven both vulnerable and resistant. Machines can generate competent verse in any form on demand, and a poetry prize was rescinded in 2024 when its winning entry was found to be AI-written. Yet poetry’s reliance on lived particularity, on the irreducibly personal wound or joy behind the line, makes it among the hardest forms for a machine to truly inhabit.

The competent AI poem is everywhere; the necessary one, the poem that had to be written by this person, remains stubbornly human.

8. Design, advertising and branding

In commercial creativity, AI is already the default. Logo platforms generate brand identities from a few inputs; copywriting tools produce campaign variations by the dozen; designers offload resizing, recolouring and routine production to the machine and reserve their judgement for direction.

The democratising effect is real — a startup with no budget can now present professionally — but so is the flattening: when everyone draws from the same generative well, the risk is a creeping sameness, a world of competent, interchangeable, soulless polish.

9. Screenwriting and theatre

AI now drafts dialogue, suggests scene structure and generates character voices; The Economist has even advertised for engineers to fine-tune models to specific personas. Experimental theatre has staged productions with AI-generated lyrics and music.

The screenwriter’s craft is shifting toward editing and shaping the machine’s raw output — a change the Hollywood guilds fought hard to bound with contractual protections, insisting that AI may assist a writer but must not replace the writer’s credit, pay or consent.

10. Games and interactive worlds

Video games may be where AI’s creative future is most fully realised. Generative systems populate vast worlds with art and dialogue, and the long-promised non-player character that converses freely — improvising rather than reciting a script — is arriving.

Here the machine’s generative nature is not a threat to a finished work but the very medium of a living, responsive one. The game that writes itself around the player in real time is no longer science fiction; it is a product road-map, and it points toward forms of storytelling we do not yet have names for.

The competent AI poem is everywhere. The necessary one — the poem that had to be written by this person — remains stubbornly human.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Grey Country: Ethics at the Frontier

If the question “May I use AI in my creative work?” had a clean answer, there would be no controversy. The difficulty is that the honest answer is a spectrum, not a switch, and most of the interesting territory lies in the grey country between the obviously acceptable and the plainly wrong. It helps to map the extremes first. At one end sit uses almost no one objects to: an AI that transcribes an interview, checks grammar, suggests a synonym, or summarises a document for the writer’s private reference.

At the other end sits what almost everyone condemns: passing off wholesale machine-generated work as one’s own original creation, entering it into competitions for human authors, or training a model on a living artist’s catalogue to replicate their style without consent or payment.

Between these poles lies the genuinely hard middle.

Is it acceptable for a novelist to have AI generate three possible endings and then choose and rewrite one? For a journalist to publish an AI-drafted first version of a routine report under their own byline? For a musician to build a song on an AI-generated chord progression? For an illustrator to use a generated image as a compositional reference?

Reasonable, honest people disagree, and the disagreement is not resolved by appealing to a rule, because the rules are still being written.

What can be said is that the ethical weight of a use rises with three factors: the proportion of the final work the machine produced; the degree to which the result is presented as wholly human; and the extent to which the machine’s training trespassed on others’ uncompensated work.

How Fast, and How Far

The pace of change compounds the difficulty. As recently as 2022, AI-written prose was a curiosity; by 2026, it had fooled the judges of an international literary prize. Surveys suggest that a substantial majority of newsrooms have already integrated AI into their workflows, and reputable estimates hold that around a third of routine news-production tasks could be automated within a decade.

Generative music has grown at a hockey-stick rate for two consecutive years. What the printing press took centuries to effect, and photography decades, AI is attempting in single-digit years.

The institutions that govern creative life — copyright law, prize committees, publishing contracts, professional codes — were simply not built for this velocity, and they are now scrambling, visibly, to catch up.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Disclosure Imperative

If there is a single principle on which the emerging consensus converges, it is this: the cardinal sin is not using AI, but concealing that you did. Disclosure — honest, proportionate, legible to the audience — is becoming the ethical keystone of creative work in the AI age, and it rests on a simple moral intuition. The reader, the listener, the viewer entered into an implicit contract; they believed they were receiving the product of a human mind.

To take their attention, their money or their admiration under a false belief about its origin is a species of fraud, however fluent the result.

Encouragingly, the scaffolding for honest disclosure already exists. On the technical side, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity — C2PA — founded in 2021 by Adobe, Arm, the BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic and now embracing hundreds of members, has built an open standard for attaching tamper-evident provenance data to images, audio and video, so that a file can carry a verifiable record of how it was made and whether AI was involved.

On the editorial side, as a UNESCO issue brief authored by Columbia University’s Anya Schiffrin documents, news organisations around the world have issued codes of conduct that stress a common set of values: disclosure when generative AI is used, transparency about process, respect for audience data, and the right of creators to be paid when their work trains a machine.

The cardinal sin is not using AI, but concealing that you did.

A Working Protocol for Creators

From these threads, a practical protocol can be woven — not a legal code, but a discipline any serious creator can adopt today.

1. First, disclose proportionately: a note that AI assisted with research or transcription differs from one acknowledging that AI drafted substantial passages, and the audience deserves to know which.

2. Second, verify everything: because these systems fabricate with confidence, every fact, quotation, citation and statistic the machine produces must be independently confirmed before it carries your name — the Chicago reading list of phantom books is the cautionary tale.

3. Third, respect provenance: do not build on training data you know to have been taken without consent, and prefer tools that license the work they learn from.

4. Fourth, preserve the human core: reserve the irreducible elements of the work — its argument, its voice, its lived truth, the final judgement of what is good — for yourself.

5. And fifth, own the output: whatever the machine contributed, you are accountable for what you publish.

Accountability cannot be delegated to an algorithm.

CHAPTER NINE

The Fate of the Written Word

Every writer alive harbours, somewhere, the same private dread: that the machine will make us obsolete. It is the right question to ask plainly, and the honest answer is neither the comforting denial nor the apocalyptic surrender, but something harder — a bifurcation.

Some writing will be devoured by AI; some will become more valuable precisely because of it; and the dividing line runs straight through every newsroom and publishing house alive.

The commodity end of writing is already falling. The formulaic product description, the routine earnings summary, the search-optimised filler, the generic listicle — work that was always closer to assembly than to art — is passing to the machine, and the entry-level jobs built on it are contracting.

The data-driven news writer producing structured reports from structured inputs faces, on credible estimates, real displacement. To pretend otherwise is to do young writers a disservice.

Yet at the same time, the value of distinctively human writing is rising.

Consider the most telling evidence: in mid-2026, Nieman Lab catalogued sixteen entirely new journalism roles emerging in newsrooms — editorial directors of newsroom engineering, senior AI editors, specialists who fine-tune models to a publication’s voice. The Economist, Politico and others are hiring not fewer journalists but differently skilled ones, who can direct the machine while guarding accuracy and voice.

Author’s Explanatory Note

The foregoing paragraph reflects the reality of modern newsrooms, which are transitioning from pure “content factories” to AI-native architectures by creating highly specialised roles to manage and steer automated workflows. Here are the author’s findings:

• The Nieman Lab Report: In mid-2026, Nieman Journalism Lab catalogued 16 distinct new roles. These fall into four major categories: Audience Strategy, AI Innovation, Editorial-led Product/Design, and Newsroom Engineering.

• Differently Skilled, Not Fewer: Rather than cutting staff to save money, leading publications are shifting investments to hire engineers, data scientists, and “vibe coders”. The goal is to scale coverage while maintaining the publication’s signature voice and ethical standards.

• Guarding Accuracy: Artificial intelligence is prone to errors, “hallucinations,” and bias. New roles like Senior AI Editor or AI Prompt Engineer act as gatekeepers—ensuring AI algorithms adhere to the outlet’s journalistic standards (such as the discipline of verification) rather than running amok.

• Institutional Knowledge: Organizations are fine-tuning proprietary models to their specific archive data so that machines write consistently with an established tone, protecting the brand’s unique editorial identity ]

AI is changing creative writing alarmingly fast. But a lot remains the same, unchanged, unblemished. The reporter who goes to the field, cultivates a source, witnesses an event and exercises judgement under uncertainty is doing precisely what AI, by its nature, cannot:

AI cannot give you data that is not already in the world. The investigator, the stylist, the analyst with a genuinely original mind — these become more valuable, not less, as competent text grows infinitely cheap.

Will AI’s Use in Creative Work Increase?

On this, candour requires no hedging: yes, certainly, and rapidly. Every incentive points the same way. The tools grow more capable each quarter; their cost falls; consumer behaviour, as the music industry has learned, accelerates regardless of whether rights-holders approve.

The relevant question is therefore not whether AI use in creative fields will grow — it will — but on whose terms. Will it grow as an unlicensed extraction from creators, or as a compensated, disclosed collaboration with them?

That outcome is not technologically determined. It will be decided by the contracts the guilds negotiate, the standards bodies that take hold, the laws that legislatures pass, and the daily choices of millions of individual creators about which tools to use and how honestly to use them.

What Precautions Creators Must Take

For the working creator, prudence has a concrete shape. Master the tools rather than fearing or ignoring them, for the competitor to be feared is not the AI but the human who has learned to wield it well.

Cultivate the faculties ruthlessly the machine lacks: original argument, distinctive voice, first-hand reporting, taste, and the lived experience from which only a human can write.

Verify every machine-produced fact before publication, and never sign your name to what you have not checked. Keep records of your own creative process, for in a world of suspicion, the writer who can show their drafts and their thinking holds the strongest defence.

Disclose your use of AI proportionately and without shame. And protect your own work — understand the rights you hold and the terms under which a tool may train upon what you create.

The creator who does these things is not a victim of the new age. They are its author.

CHAPTER TEN

What the Future Beholds

Prediction in this field is a fool’s errand, and the wise commentator offers not forecasts but directions of travel. Several seem clear enough to name.

The technology will continue to improve faster than our institutions can govern it; the gap between capability and regulation, already wide, will widen further before it narrows.

The agentic turn will deepen until delegating a multi-step creative or analytical task to a fleet of cooperating AI agents feels as ordinary as sending an email.

And the distinction that obsesses us now — human-made versus machine-made — will, in much routine output, simply dissolve, surviving as a meaningful category only where it is deliberately preserved and certified, much as “handmade” survives in a world of mass production, commanding a premium precisely because it is rarer.

Two futures contend, and the choice between them is genuinely open.

In the darker one, generative abundance floods every channel with cheap, competent, soulless content; detection becomes impossible; trust collapses; creators are reduced to unpaid training fodder for machines that displace them; and the distinctively human voice, drowned out by synthetic noise, grows quiet.

In the brighter one, AI becomes the greatest creative amplifier ever built — abolishing drudgery, democratising capability, freeing human beings to do the deepest, most original work of which they are capable, with the machine as a tireless collaborator that handles the rote so the human can reach for the rare.

The distinction that obsesses us now — human-made versus machine-made — will survive as a meaningful category only where it is deliberately preserved.

Which future arrives is not a matter of technological destiny. It is a matter of human choice — of law, of norm, of contract, and above all of the individual discipline of millions of creators.

The centaur is the figure to keep in mind.

When the chess machine first defeated the human champion, the prophets declared the human game dead. Instead, a new form emerged, in which a human guiding a machine proved stronger than either alone.

That, this author is convinced, is the shape of the creative future worth fighting for: not the human replaced, and not the human in denial, but the human in the saddle — directing a power far greater than their own toward ends only a human could conceive.

EPILOGUE

Ride, or Be Ridden

The author began with a centaur, and he will end with one, because the metaphor carries the whole of my argument. The centaur is not a man who has been conquered by a horse, nor a horse that has swallowed a man.

It is a single creature in which the human head governs the animal power beneath it. Take away the human, and you have only a beast running wherever instinct and momentum carry it.

Take away the power, and you have only a man on foot, soon overtaken.

The lesson for the creator in the age of artificial intelligence could not be plainer: you must become the rider, because the alternative is not to walk peacefully alongside the horse. The alternative is to be left behind by those who have learned to ride.

There is a temptation, among people of conscience, to refuse the machine altogether — to treat abstention as a form of purity. This author understands the impulse, and he honours the principle behind it, but the author [who has embraced technolgy since the days of IBM1401 mainframe, to IBM mini, to personal computer in every era since 1987 to use of Metacrawler search since 1996 and Hotbot in 1997 to Google since 1999 and ChatGPT, Gemini,, Perplexity and Claude amongst others extensively and unashamedly in recent years ] believes honestly and categorically it is a costly mistake, and a dangerous one.

Let the truth be spoken: you cannot stop an idea whose time has come. And AI arrived the day before yesterday night when most of the humans were sleeping

The technology is not waiting for our permission. It is already in the newsroom, the studio, the publishing house and the classroom. The writer who refuses on principle to understand it does not stop its advance; they merely ensure that its advance is shaped entirely by people who do not share their scruples.

The defence of human creativity will not be mounted by those who turned their backs on the most powerful creative tool ever invented. It will be mounted by those who mastered it and bent it, deliberately, to human ends.

You must become the rider, because the alternative is not to walk peacefully alongside the horse. It is to be left behind by those who have learned to ride.

For there is a real danger, and it is worth naming without melodrama. It is not that AI will rise up against us. It is subtler and more intimate: that we will quietly hand it our judgement, our voice, our patience for difficult thought, and the willingness to struggle that all genuine creation requires — and that, having handed these over, we will find our own faculties atrophied past recovery.

AI will not kill creativity by force. It may kill it by convenience, one outsourced decision at a time, across life, the workplace, and every creative and innovative space we inhabit.

The guard against that fate is not refusal but mastery: using the machine to do more, and braver, and more original human work than we could do alone, while keeping the irreducibly human core — the meaning-making that made us who we are — firmly, jealously, in our own hands.

Embrace the tool. Master it. And never, for the sake of ease, surrender the pen.

Akhileshwar Sahay

Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form Series · Volume 34

Pune, India · June 10 ,2026

❖ ❖ ❖

AKHILESHWAR SAHAY

Multidisciplinary Thought Leader with Action Based and · Lived-Experience Advocate

Pune, India · June, 09, 2026

Authors’ Message

[ This Volume 33 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form Series due to its sheer complexity exceeds 104 KB in size, and you may find that in your inbox it appears as truncated towards the end. If the article is truncated in your email, just click on “View entire message,” toward the end and you will be able to view the entire post in your emal app.]

Subscribe now

Author’s Note

[ This article could have been written by someone in 1958 when this author was born. it could have been written by someone in 1974 by when the serious mental illnes first engulfed the author, it should have been written in 2001 immediately after the monumental Erwadi Tragedy happened in Ramnathapuram district of Tamilnadu, at least it could have been written in 2013 when Government of India, 11 Member Mental Health Policy Group (of which this author was a member) gave final touches to the Mental Health Care Bill, 2017, else it could have been writtne in March 2017, when after three continous days of animated debate (in which record number of law makers from both houses of Parliament participated), both houses of Parliament unanimousl by voice-vote passed rights based world best practices Mental Health Care Act, 2017. Or at least this author should have written this article in November 2021 when in sheet disgust he resigned from the first Central Mental Health Authority (CMHA) of Government of India.

It did not happen ? So why I write today ?

Because yesterday the bench consisting Justices Manish Pitale and Shreeram Shirasat of Bombay High Court on June 8, 2026 in a landmark judgement ordered Pune (my home town) Yerwada Mental Hospital to pay Rs 22 Lakh pay out to the kin of a diceased, a Schzophrenia patient who was killed in 2013 inside Mental Hospital by another violent patient. He was killed (as per their Lordships) because the Yerwada Mental Hosptital failed to save his life because the hospital did not have even skeleton staff to protect him.

What was the dire straight of Yerwada Mental Hospital in 2013 (asylum in my lexicon) remains the fate of 47 government asylums Bharat has in 2026.

Today’s long form series does a 360 on asylums Bharat has a and analyses the condition of Indian asylums comprehensively in chapter. ]

Prologue

The Chain That Outlived the Empire

On the wee hours of 6 August 2001, twenty-eight human beings burned to death in a thatched shed in the fishing village of Erwadi, in Tamil Nadu’s Ramanathapuram district. They did not die because they were mad. They died because they were chained. When the fire came for them, they could not run, because iron rings had been fastened to their ankles in the name of a cure that prayer and superstition had promised but medicine had never delivered.

Their families had brought them to the dargah and left them chained believing that a majar could deliver what the State would not. The State, for its part, had looked away for two hundred years.

I have returned to Erwadi in my mind many times since. Each time, I am struck by a single, unbearable fact: that the tragedy was not an aberration but a symptom. The chain at Erwadi was simply the visible end of a chain that runs the length of our history — from the Lunatic Asylums Act of 1858, through the Indian Lunacy Act of 1912, through the Mental Health Act of 1987, all the way to the rights-based Mental Healthcare Act of 2017. We have changed the vocabulary. We renamed the asylum a “hospital” a century ago. We replaced the word “lunatic” with “person with mental illness.” We wrote, in 2017, one of the most progressive mental health statutes in the world.

And yet the ground beneath the words has refused, doggedly, to move.

This Volume 33 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form series asks an uncomfortable question. If the curse of mental illness is rising — if some 150 million (understate,emt to say the least) Bhartiyas carry a diagnosed or diagnosable mental disorder, if perhaps fifteen to twenty million live with serious mental illness, if four in five of them never see a trained professional — then why does our answer remain the same shed, the same locked ward, the same forty thousand beds for a billion-and-a-half people?

Why, three decades after we promised reform and seven years after we legislated dignity, do our asylums remain asylums in everything but name?

The answer, I will argue, is not a shortage of good intentions or good laws. It is a structural refusal: a refusal to fund, to staff, to monitor, to deinstitutionalise, and above all to see the mentally ill as citizens rather than as inconveniences to be confined.

We legislate at the speed of the twenty-first century and we administer at the pace of the Raj. This is the story of that gap — and of how it might, at last, be closed.

❖ ❖ ❖

CHAPTER ONE

The Arithmetic of Anguish

How many Indians suffer from serious mental illness today? The honest answer begins with a caveat: India has never conducted a true census of madness, and the most authoritative instrument we possess — the National Mental Health Survey (NMHS) of 2015-16, conducted by NIMHANS, Bengaluru, for the Union Health Ministry across twelve states and 34,802 adults — is now a decade old. And as the survey admits, not only its sample was small but it left more than half of the states. Its successor, NMHS-2, covering all states and adolescents, is still being collected.

We are, in other words, navigating a homongous crisis with a torch that is going dim.

What the torch did show is sobering enough. The NMHS found a current prevalence of mental morbidity of 10.6 per cent and a lifetime prevalence of 13.7 per cent. Extrapolated nationally, even based on outdated data of a faulty sample, this means roughly 150 million Indians carry one or another diagnosed or diagnosable mental disorder, and nearly fifteen per cent of all adults need active intervention.

Of these, the serious mental illnesses — schizophrenia and other psychoses, bipolar affective disorder, and severe recurrent depression — form the sharpest edge.

Here the numbers demand care. The NMHS put the current prevalence of severe mental disorders (schizophrenia spectrum plus bipolar) at under one per cent — about 0.8 per cent — with schizophrenia spectrum at a lifetime 1.41 per cent and current 0.42 per cent, and bipolar disorder at a current 0.3 per cent. Read narrowly, that is eight to ten million adults living with a psychotic or bipolar illness at any given moment. Read on the broader one-to-two-per-cent band that the Health Ministry and the global burden estimates have long used — and adding severe depression and the under-eighteens — the working figure rises to fifteen to twenty million Indians with serious mental illness.

Either way, we are speaking of a seberely mentally ill cohort larger than many countries and double the population of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

And then the cruellest statistic of all: the treatment gap. For serious mental disorders it stands at about 76 per cent; for mental disorders overall the NMHS measured 84.5 per cent. Put plainly, more than four in five Indians who need psychiatric care receive none. Only around thirty million of the 150 million ever reach a clinic. The illness is not the scandal. The silence around it is.

We are navigating a humungous fast worsening crisis with a torch that is going dim: India has never once counted its mentally ill, and its best survey is now a decade old.

CHAPTER TWO

The Invisible Multitudes — Homed, Homeless, and in Chains

If fifteen to twenty million Indians live with serious mental illness, where are they? The answer is a geography of neglect, and it has three coordinates: the home, the street, and the shrine.

Confined at Home

The largest share are confined at home. With four in five untreated, the overwhelming majority of seriously ill persons live behind the closed doors of family households — cared for, in the best cases, by ageing parents and exhausted spouses; in the worst, locked in back rooms, tethered to cots, or shackled to prevent them from “wandering.” India keeps no register of domestic confinement, but psychiatrists who run community programmes report chaining inside homes as a routine, not exceptional, finding.

The family is simultaneously the country’s only mental health safety net and, too often, the site of its quietest cruelties.

On the Street

A second coordinate is the street. The Union Health Ministry has itself estimated that about a quarter of persons with mental illness are homeless — the wandering, unwashed, talked-about figures every Indian town knows and no Indian system counts. The 2011 Census recorded 4,49,761 “houseless” households; a substantial, undocumented fraction of urban rough-sleepers carry untreated psychosis. Organisations such as

The Banyan in Chennai founded by two courageous young college going girls Vandana Gopikumar and Vaishnavi Jayakumar have spent three decades demonstrating that these citizens can be found, treated, and reunited with families — proof that homelessness here is a policy failure, not a clinical inevitability.

The Shrine

The third, and most haunting, coordinate is the shrine — the temple and the dargah. Across India, faith-healing establishments at sites such as Erwadi, Balaji at Mehandipur, and countless smaller shrines receive the mentally ill in their thousands. There, in the absence of any State alternative, the desperate are subjected to amulets, holy water, beatings to “drive out the spirit,” and — notwithstanding that the law has banned it since 2017 — the chain.

Each such chain is an Erwadi waiting to happen. The Mental Healthcare Act’s Section 95(d) prohibits chaining “in any manner or form whatsoever.” The shrines did not get the memo, and the State did not deliver it.

❖ ❖ ❖

CHAPTER THREE

Erwadi, 6 August 2001 — The Fire That Lit Nothing

A point of record before the story: the Erwadi tragedy occurred in 2001 twenty five years ago. In the wee hours of 6 August 2001, a fire swept through the Moideen Badusha Mental Home, one of dozens of unlicensed faith-based asylums clustered around the 500-year-old dargah of Quthbus Sultan Syed Ibrahim Shaheed in Erwadi village of the Ramnathapuram district of Tamilandu. Of the roughly forty-five inmates chained inside, twenty-eight — some accounts say up to thirty — were burned alive. They could not flee because they were fettered to posts and beds.

Those whose shackles were looser survived; the rest left behind charred bodies so disfigured that several could not be identified.

For two centuries, families had brought and ledt their afflicted kin to Erwadi believing that the saint’s intercession, holy water and lamp-oil could heal the mind. The “treatment” was confinement, fasting, caning and the chain, while the patient awaited a divine command in a dream to go home — a command that, for most, never came.

Erwadi was not a secret. It was an open, thriving economy of despair, operating in full view of the administration.

The fire briefly shook the national conscience. Within a week, on 13 August 2001, all such homes were ordered shut and more than five hundred inmates were taken into government care. The Supreme Court, acting on the horror, issued directions requiring the licensing and inspection of mental health establishments and the deinstitutionalisation of faith-based confinement. The National Human Rights Commission, whose 1999 report on the asylums had until then “gathered dust,” suddenly found its findings urgent.

And then — nothing changed where it mattered.

A decade later, investigators returned to Erwadi to find men still chained to trees, ant-bitten and soiled. The unlicensed homes regrouped, quietly. The State that could close five hundred sheds in a week could not, in the years that followed, build the community services that would make the sheds unnecessary. Erwadi became what so many Indian tragedies become: a commission, a set of guidelines, a candle, and a return to business as usual. It lit the headlines. It did not light the way. On 6th August, 2010 the day the Erwadi tragedy entered the tenth years, on a call given by this author and turbocharged by Vandana Gopikumar and Vaishnavi Gopikumar of the Baryan fame, literally every city of India observed India’s first non-official Mental Health Day by lighting candles at Mahatma Gandhi’s memorials across the cities and towns but nothing happened and nothing changed.

The State that could close five hundred sheds in a single week could not, in the years that followed, build the services that would make the sheds unnecessary.

CHAPTER FOUR

A Roof of Forty Thousand Beds

Set the demand — fifteen to twenty million seriously ill — against the supply, and the absurdity becomes arithmetic. India has 47 government-run mental hospitals, including its three national institutes: NIMHANS at Bengaluru, the Central Institute of Psychiatry (CIP) at Ranchi — the largest psychiatric hospital in Asia, with some 643 beds — and LGBRIMH at Tezpur. Adding the psychiatric wards of general and medical-college hospitals, the private nursing homes and the NGO facilities, the country’s total psychiatric bed count is roughly 40,000.

Forty thousand beds. For a population of 1.4 billion, that is a bed density of well under two per 1,00,000 people — against a global figure several times higher and a developed-world norm higher still. To grasp how little has moved, recall that the Bhore Committee counted nineteen mental hospitals with 10,181 beds in 1946. In nearly eighty years of independence, we have not even quadrupled the colonial inheritance, while the population has multiplied fourfold and the recognised burden of illness has exploded.

The maldistribution compounds the scarcity. The beds are concentrated in a handful of southern and metropolitan states; vast tracts of the north, east and north-east have negligible inpatient capacity. And a perverse share of the existing beds is occupied not by those who need acute care but by “cured” patients who cannot be discharged — over two thousand of them, by the NHRC’s 2023 count — because no halfway home, family or community placement will take them.

The asylum, in other words, is full of people the asylum has already finished treating, while millions who need it stand outside the gate.

❖ ❖ ❖

CHAPTER FIVE

The Same Wine in New Bottles — From Lunacy to “Care”

India’s mental health law has a long pedigree of changing its clothes while keeping its body. The statutory journey runs through four great waves, and understanding it is the key to the whole tragedy.

Lunatic A Danger to the Society- Lunacy Act 1858

It began with the Lunatic Asylums Act and the Lunacy Acts of 1858, enacted as the Crown took direct charge after 1857. Their logic was custodial and protective — of society, not of the patient. They governed the building of asylums and the procedure for committing “lunatics,” mostly through the courts. The patient was a danger to be detained, not a person to be healed.

Indian Lunacy Act , 1912- Consolidating the Statutes

The second wave was the Indian Lunacy Act, 1912, a consolidating statute that brought the scattered colonial provisions under one central authority, regularised admission and certification, and — a modest advance — introduced voluntary admission. It also presided over a cosmetic reform that tells the whole story in miniature: around 1920-1922, at the persuasion of Lt. Col. Owen Berkeley-Hill, Medical Superintendent of the European Mental Hospital at Ranchi, the government renamed all “asylums” as “mental hospitals.” Agra became a mental hospital in 1925, Dharwad in 1922. The name changed; the chains, the overcrowding and the involuntary committals did not. It was India’s first great exercise in window-dressing.

Mental Health Care Act, 1987 -Windodressing

The third wave, the Mental Health Act, 1987 (brought into force only in 1993), retired the words “lunatic” and “asylum,” substituting “mentally ill person” and “psychiatric hospital.” But beneath the modern vocabulary, its architecture remained that of 1912: institution-centric, licence-driven, preoccupied with admission and detention rather than rights, treatment and community living. It was, in substance, the Lunacy Act of 1912 with a 1980s haircut — a window-dressed version of its colonial parent.

Global Best Practices Right Based Statute

The fourth wave arrived with the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, enacted to honour India’s 2007 ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. On paper it is a revolution: a justiciable right to access mental healthcare; the advance directive and the nominated representative; a capacity-based standard replacing the crude binary of “sound” and “unsound” mind; the decriminalisation of attempted suicide (Section 115); an outright ban on chaining (Section 95(d)) and on solitary seclusion (Section 97); the regulation of every establishment; and Mental Health Review Boards to hear grievances.

It is one of the most progressive such laws on earth.

And yet — here is the heart of the matter — a right that is not resourced is a rumour. The 2017 Act conferred entitlements without building the staff, the budgets, the boards or the community infrastructure to deliver them. Many states never fully constituted their Mental Health Review Boards; advance directives remain unknown to the families who most need them; the ban on chaining is unenforced at the very shrines where chaining is routine and unmodified ECT prohibited by law flourishes in every mental hospital.

India thus lives a strange double life: it legislates in the idiom of 2017 and administers in the spirit of 1912 — at best. For the millions outside the system, the law of the land is, effectively, still the Lunacy Act.

A right that is not resourced is a rumour. We legislate in the idiom of 2017 and administer in the spirit of 1912.

CHAPTER SIX

Witnesses for the Prosecution — What the Human Rights Reports Found

If law is the theory, the human rights reports are the autopsy. Four documents, across a quarter-century, tell a single unbroken story.

NHRC-NIMHANS Report 1999

The NHRC-NIMHANS report of 1999, the first systematic national audit, found gross deficiencies in the physical structure and functioning of the mental hospitals: severe staff shortages, violated patient rights, and admissions that were overwhelmingly involuntary and routed through the courts.

An earlier observer had rated the hospitals on a “scale of badness.” The 1999 report could have been a defining moment; instead its findings gathered dust — until Erwadi, two years later, set them alight.

Human Rights Watch Report 2014

In 2014, Human Rights Watch published “Treated Worse than Animals,” a 106-page investigation into abuses against women and girls with psychosocial and intellectual disabilities. Across twenty-four institutions it documented involuntary admission, arbitrary and indefinite detention, overcrowding, appalling hygiene, and forced treatment including electro-convulsive therapy administered without anaesthesia. The title was not rhetoric; it was reportage.

NHRC Tehnical Committee Report 2016

The NHRC Technical Committee report of 2016, prepared for the Supreme Court, found the findings “startling”: most states and union territories had no realistic estimate even of their own burden of mental illness, let alone a plan to meet it. For several hospitals, the Committee’s visit was the first external scrutiny they had received in living memory.

NHRC Report 2023

And the most recent reckoning, the NHRC report of 2023 — built on visits to all 46 to 47 government mental healthcare institutions between July 2022 and January 2023 — declared every one of them in “deplorable” and “inhuman” condition: acute shortages of doctors, and more than two thousand fully “cured” patients held illegally, in violation of Article 21 of the Constitution. Over nine hundred of them languished in just four hospitals in West Bengal. The Commission called it, with restraint, “a travesty of justice.” Twenty-four years after Erwadi, the witnesses are still saying the same thing. We have simply stopped listening.

Author’s Explanatory Note

As a Member of Government of India Mental Health Policy Group (2011-2014), GoI first Central Mental Health Authority (CMHA 2019-2021) or otherwise, the author has frequented nearly one dozen of the 47 Mental Hospitals (ala asylums) of the country. Additionally, as Mentor Advisor of Tata Trust Udaan Program to transform Regionnal Mental Hospital Nagpur (colloqually known as Nagpur Pagalkhana at Pagalkhana Chowk) has worked for neary year (few days a month from inside the Nagpur Regional Mental Hospital. Based on his own personal experience, the author vouchs and has no compunction in telling that the actual condition of asylums in the country is far more precarious than what the above four reports suggest. Relative exceptions which are somewhat better are the three central mental hospitas at Bengaluru, Ranchi and Tejpur.

Time is running out fast to improve the existing asylums as centres of expertise and excellence as world practices mental health care

❖ ❖ ❖

CHAPTER SEVEN

Two Words That Erase a Person — The Tyranny of “Unsound Mind”

There is a phrase in Indian law that can dissolve a citizen’s personhood with a single judicial stroke: “of unsound mind.” It is nowhere precisely defined, it admits no gradation, and once a competent court pronounces it, an Indian is stripped, wholesale, of the rights that the Constitution guarantees to everyone else. In most cases it is a one way ticket to hell. A person once declared of unsound mind seldom retrieves the status of having sound mind.

Consider the cascade. Under Sections 11 and 12 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, a person of unsound mind cannot make a valid contract — cannot, in effect, transact ordinary economic life. Under Section 16 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, a person “of unsound mind” so declared by a court is struck from the electoral roll — disenfranchised, the most basic act of citizenship denied. Under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, unsoundness of mind renders a marriage voidable and is a ground for divorce. Under Order XXXII of the Code of Civil Procedure, such a person may sue or be sued only through a guardian — the law speaks of them but not to them. Inheritance can be clouded; capacity to make a will questioned; and through the criminal law’s insanity defence (formerly Section 84 IPC, now the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita), the “unsound” accused is shunted into indefinite custody that frequently outlasts the sentence the alleged offence would have carried.

The list of statutes that debars citizens from being citizens is endless and runs in more than 1000 as per last count by this author

The deeper violence is conceptual. “Unsound mind” is a colonial, binary, all-or-nothing category: a person is either fully competent or wholly incapable, with nothing in between. Modern psychiatry knows this is false — capacity is decision-specific and fluctuating; a person who cannot manage finances may vote with full understanding, and a person in acute crisis may recover full capacity within weeks. The Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 grasped this and introduced a capacity-based standard, presuming capacity and assessing it decision by decision. But the 2017 Act did not repeal the scattered “unsound mind” disqualifications strewn across hundrds if not thousands of other Indian statutes. So the citizen reclaims dignity with one hand of the law while the other hand of the law continues to erase them. Until those colonial clauses are purged, the diagnosis remains, in practice, a civil death sentence.

“Unsound mind” is, in practice, a civil death sentence: with two words a court can strip an Indian of the vote, the contract, the marriage and the will.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Missing Hands and the Empty Coffers

Behind every unenforced right stands a missing professional and an unspent rupee. India’s resource gap is not a detail of the crisis; it is the crisis.

Take the workforce. A 2023 Parliamentary Standing Committee found India had about 9,000 practising psychiatrists for 1.4 billion people — a density near 0.75 per 1,00,000, against the WHO benchmark of around three. To reach even that minimum, India needs roughly 36,000 psychiatrists; it is short by three-quarters. The allied disciplines are scarcer still: by the Rehabilitation Council of India’s reckoning, just 4,309 clinical psychologists and 801 rehabilitation social workers. Estimated national deficits run to 77 per cent for psychiatrists, 90 per cent for psychiatric social workers and 97 per cent for clinical psychologists.

And the few we train, we lose: a large share of NIMHANS graduates emigrate to better-paid posts abroad.

Now the money. India’s total health spend hovers around one per cent of GDP, and mental health’s slice of that is a sliver — about 1.05 per cent of the health budget in 2025-26, a figure the Lancet has called “dishearteningly low.” Worse, even this pittance goes unspent: in 2018-19 the National Mental Health Programme budgeted Rs 50 crore and spent Rs 2.02 crore — a collapse of “absorptive capacity” that betrays not just scarcity but administrative paralysis. The District Mental Health Programme, the scheme meant to take services to the people, reaches only a fraction of the country’s districts with any meaningful staffing.

Money follows buildings, not patients. The recent budgetary impulse — a new NIMHANS campus, upgraded institutes — reinforces the tertiary, hospital-centred model precisely when the world has moved to community care.

We keep building bigger asylums and calling it progress.

❖ ❖ ❖

CHAPTER NINE

Ten Reasons the Asylum Endures

Ten critical structural failures keep India locked in the age of lunacy. Each, on its own, would be grave; together they are a system.

1. The Funding Famine

Mental health receives roughly one per cent of a health budget that is itself barely one per cent of GDP. A right-to-care law sits atop a budget that cannot fund a single new district service at scale. Worse than the scarcity is the squander: the National Mental Health Programme routinely spends a fraction of even its meagre allocation, returning crores unused while patients wait.

No domain of public health can be transformed on alms that go un-disbursed, and no statute can deliver entitlements the treasury never funded.

2. The Vanished Workforce

Nine thousand psychiatrists for 1.4 billion people — a shortfall of roughly three-quarters against the minimum norm — makes the rights-based law arithmetically impossible to deliver. Clinical psychologists and psychiatric social workers are scarcer still, short by ninety per cent and more. The few India trains are concentrated in southern metros or lost to emigration. Without hands, there is no care; without care, the family and the shrine fill the vacuum with the chain.

3. The Institutional Mindset

India never made the global shift from custody to community. Budgets, training and prestige still flow to large tertiary hospitals, while the community mental health services that the world relies upon remain skeletal. We keep enlarging the asylum and christening it an institute.

So long as the default response to serious illness is a distant locked ward rather than a local clinic, deinstitutionalisation stays a slogan and beds stay both too few and wrongly placed.

4. The Unenforced Statute

The Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 conferred magnificent rights and then left them orphaned. Many states never fully constituted their Mental Health Review Boards; advance directives and nominated representatives are unknown to most families; the ban on chaining goes unpoliced at the shrines. A law without machinery is an aspiration, not a protection. The gap between the statute book and the ward floor is where Indian mental health policy goes to die.

5. The Colonial Residue in Law

Even as 2017 introduced a capacity-based standard, the phrase “of unsound mind” survives across the Contract Act, the Representation of the People Act, marriage and succession law and the criminal codes. A single judicial finding still strips the vote, the contract, the marriage and the will. This unrepealed colonial vocabulary lets one part of the law erase the citizen that another part of the law claims to protect — a contradiction that keeps the patient legally sub-human.

6. The Reign of Stigma

Stigma is the most-cited barrier to seeking care in India: mental illness is read as moral failing, family shame or spiritual affliction rather than treatable disorder. Families hide the ill, delay help by years, and choose the shrine over the psychiatrist. Stigma suppresses demand, deters disclosure, blocks employment and marriage, and gives politicians cover to under-fund a constituency that cannot lobby. It is the invisible mortar holding every other brick of neglect in place.

7. The Faith-Healing Vacuum

Where the State provides nothing, superstition provides everything. Thousands of unlicensed faith homes around temples and dargahs receive the desperate and subject them to fasting, beating and chaining — each one an Erwadi in waiting. These are not relics; they are thriving because they fill a real void. Banning them without building the community alternatives that should replace them simply drives the chain underground, from the shrine to the back room of the family home.

8. The Statistical Blackout

India has never censused its mentally ill. The last authoritative survey is a decade old and covered twelve states; the homeless, the home-confined and the shrine-bound are uncounted by design. The NHRC found that most states cannot even estimate their own burden. Policy without data is governance by guesswork: you cannot fund, staff or monitor a population you refuse to count. The invisibility of the patient is not an accident of measurement but a precondition of neglect.

9. The Discharge Deadlock

Asylums are clogged with the people they have already healed or not mentally ill in the very first place. Over two thousand “cured” patients are detained illegally for want of a halfway home, a family willing to take them back, or a community placement — with hundreds warehoused in a handful of West Bengal hospitals alone. Acute beds are blocked, fresh patients are turned away, and the institution becomes a permanent address rather than a passing treatment. The exit door is bolted as firmly as the entrance.

10. The Federal Buck-Pass

Health is a State subject; mental health is everybody’s responsibility and therefore nobody’s. The Centre legislates and the States must implement, but States plead poverty and the Centre pleads jurisdiction, and the patient falls through the constitutional crack. Accountability is diffused across ministries, commissions and tiers of government until no single authority can be held to answer for the man chained to the tree. Diffuse responsibility is the surest guarantee of perpetual inaction.

Each failure alone would be grave; together they are not a list of problems but a self-sustaining system of neglect.

CHAPTER TEN

Ten Ways to Unlock the Gate

None of this need be the destiny. The same structure that perpetuates the asylum can be dismantled, deliberately, by ten structural reforms.

1. Ring-Fence and Spend the Money

Legislate a statutory floor — at least five per cent of the health budget, rising to ten — for mental health, and make it non-divertible. But allocation without absorption is theatre: pair the floor with a delivery unit empowered to spend, with simplified disbursement rules, multi-year flexibility and public dashboards tracking rupee-for-rupee utilisation. Tie central transfers to states’ actual expenditure and outcomes, not to buildings completed. The first reform is not more money in the budget; it is money that actually reaches the patient, on time, every year, and is seen to do so.

2. Build a Mental Health Workforce at Scale

Treat the 27,000-psychiatrist shortfall as a national mission. Triple postgraduate seats; create a cadre of mid-level mental health workers, counsellors and psychiatric nurses trained through bridge courses; and embed mental health competencies in every MBBS and nursing curriculum. Bond government-funded graduates to underserved districts, and pay rural mental health staff a hardship premium to stem emigration and urban clustering. Task-sharing — training primary-care doctors and ASHAs to manage stable patients under specialist supervision — can multiply reach a hundredfold without waiting twenty years for specialists.

3. Shift from Asylum to Community

Re-engineer the model: every district hospital with a functioning psychiatry unit, every primary health centre stocked with essential psychotropic medicines, and a network of day-care centres, supported housing and assertive community treatment teams. Cap and then shrink large custodial institutions, converting them into rehabilitation and training hubs. The goal is care within walking distance of the patient’s home, so that families need never choose between the locked ward and the shrine. Community care is not only more humane; it is cheaper, and it works.

4. Operationalise the 2017 Act

Move the Act from statute book to ward floor. Fully constitute and fund Mental Health Review Boards in every district; publish their orders. Run mass campaigns so that families know about advance directives and nominated representatives. Empower and resource State Mental Health Authorities to license, inspect and — crucially — close non-compliant establishments. Audit enforcement of the chaining and seclusion bans with surprise inspections and real penalties. A right becomes real only when an accessible body can be approached to enforce it and is funded to do so.

5. Purge the Colonial Vocabulary

Launch a single omnibus amendment to excise “unsound mind” and its cognates from the Contract Act, the Representation of the People Act, marriage, guardianship and succession law, and the criminal codes, replacing each with the decision-specific, fluctuating capacity standard of the 2017 Act.

Restore the vote, the contract, the marriage and the will to those who retain capacity for them. Until the law speaks of capacity rather than soundness, the diagnosis will continue to function as a civil death, and the most progressive mental health statute on earth will be quietly contradicted and curcupscibed by hundreds of old antiquated and outdated statutes

6. Wage War on Stigma

Fund a sustained, national anti-stigma campaign of the scale once devoted to polio and HIV — in every language, through schools, workplaces, religious leaders, cinema and cricket. Recruit recovered persons as visible ambassadors; lived experience dismantles fear faster than any pamphlet. The roll call of the few persons who speak about their lived experience, including this author must fast increease to thousands, lakhs and millions.

To bust the stigma around mental illness Bharat needs millions of warriors to tame the stigma bulll and address the elephant in the room.

Also it is time to seamlessly integrate mental health literacy into school curricula so the next generation grows up reading distress as illness, not weakness. Demand-side reform matters as much as supply: services unbuilt because no one dares to ask for them are as absent as services never funded.

7. Regulate and Replace the Shrines

Do not merely ban faith homes — register and reform them while building the alternatives that make confinement obsolete. Cascade programs like “Dava and Dua” of Tamilnadu with local variations to the entire coutnry. License every residential facility; inspect for the chain; partner with willing shrine managements to convert pilgrim flows into supervised, voluntary, medically-backed care pathways. Respect faith while abolishing fetters.

The lesson of Erwadi is that prohibition without substitution simply relocates the chain; the answer is a credible public service so near and so trusted that the desperate no longer need the dargah’s iron ring.

8. Count the Mentally Ill

Complete and institutionalise the National Mental Health Survey as a recurring, all-state exercise, and add dedicated counts of the home-confined, the street-homeless and the shrine-bound — the populations now invisible by design. Build a real-time national mental health information system linking hospitals, district programmes and review boards.

Bharat cannot fund, staff or monitor what it refuse to measure; a credible census of distress is the precondition of every other reform, and its absence is itself a policy choice that must be reversed.

9. Break the Discharge Deadlock

End the scandal of detained “cured” patients with a national network of halfway homes, supported-living facilities and family-reintegration programmes, backed by disability pensions and livelihood support so that recovery does not mean destitution. Make every long-stay institution publish, monthly, its count of recovered-but-detained residents and its discharge plan for each.

Replicate proven models such as The Banyan’s reintegration work with families and also their vaunted “Home Again” for those who for one of other reason cannot be integrated with their families.

A bed occupied by someone already healed is a bed denied to someone in crisis — unblocking the exit is among the cheapest, fastest reforms available.

[ Author’s Explanatory Note -

The Banyan’s Home Again programme operates in 10 states across India, directly and through collaborative partnerships, as well as in specific regions of Sri Lanka. The model specifically focuses on providing community-based, independent housing and clinical support for individuals who cannot return to their original families or require assisted living ]

10. Fix Accountability in the Federal Maze

Resolve the buck-passing with a clear compact: the Centre funds and sets standards, the States deliver, and an empowered national authority publicly tracks both. Make a defined share of central health transfers conditional on states meeting mental health staffing, expenditure and rights-enforcement benchmarks. Designate, at every tier, a single named officer answerable for mental health outcomes. Diffuse responsibility has been the surest guarantee of inaction; concentrated, transparent, measured accountability — with someone whose career depends on the man no longer chained to the tree — is its only cure.

And most important is the reform no 11. In Government of India Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the responsibilty of mental health care belongs to none. All it have in the name of governmental response is the lowest level functionary “a section officer”. Among other functionaries Joint Secreatary and Additional Secretary (who among his many other responsiblities is also ex-officio Chair person of Central Mental Health Authority CMHA). CMHA was notified in 2019, but it was only on March 18, 2026 that Ministry notified the notice to recruit a Secretary on deputation basis. to CMHA again at a low levle of Director to GoI. CMHA was to guide union government on every aspect related to implementation of Mental Health Care Act, 2017.

But CMHA remains a non-operational defunct body. It is precisely due to this that the author in 2021 resigned prematurely as member of Central Mental Health Authority, which despite ring fenced by Act, to have broadbased representation from stakeholders has been hijacked through back door by psychiatrists (Note-other than three directors of central mental health institutions there was supposed to be no other psychiatrist on the CMHA.

Mental health at the central government level can not remain the responsibility of a section officer. Minimum it needs is a separate department headed by a secretary and a Minister of State. Still better time has arrived for Bharat to have a separate ministry of “Ministry of Mental Health, Suicide Prvention aid Geriatric care” - the three interdependent subjects currently totally neglected

❖ ❖ ❖

Epilogue

The Cure That Never Comes

The author began at Erwadi, where in 2001, in early hours of August 6, twenty-eight mentalky people (men, and women, boys and girls) who burned alive. They could not because they were chained. The author want to end there too, because the Erwadi is a parable for the whole country. Twenty Five years have gone by since the Erwadi Tragedy. The pilgrims still come. The dargah still stands. The huts are gone, the walls are higher, the inspections more frequent — and yet, in back rooms and on far roads, the chain endures. We have become extraordinarily good at the gesture of reform and extraordinarily poor at its substance.

Supreme Court of India which suo-mutu instituted the case In Re: Death Of 25 Chained Inmates In ... vs Union Of India And Ors in the aftermath of the Erwadi tragedy long backed closed the case but its most important judgement delivered on on 5 February, 2002 largely remains unimplemented both by the Union and State governments. Even after twenty five years of the Erwadi tragedy the nation has failed to learn the elemental lessons.

The argument of this Volume 33 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form Series has been simple, and the author hopes it has been unsparing. India does not lack good law. The Mental Healthcare Act of 2017 is among the finest in the world. What India lacks is the will to resource it — the psychiatrists, the rupees actually spent, the community clinics, the review boards, the discharge homes, the data, and the courage to delete two colonial words from a dozens of statute books if not hundreds.

Bharat renamed the asylum a hospital in 1922 and changed nothing; the country is at grave risk of having renamed cruelty as care in 2017 and changing nothing again.

Why, then, will asylums remain asylums in India?

Because an asylum is not finally a building or a name — it is a relationship between a society and the people it has decided not to see. Until we count the mentally ill, fund their care, staff their clinics, free the cured, restore the citizen, and pull the chain from the shrine and the home alike, the new name will sit on the old reality like fresh paint on a rusted gate.

The gate will still be locked. The patient will still be outside it.

And yet the author does not write this Volume 33 in despair, because none of this is fated. None of it has to be destiny. Every reform named here has been done somewhere, by someone, often within India itself — by The Banyan, by the better district programmes, by clinicians who refuse the chain. The tragedy of Erwadi was that it lit the headlines and not the way. The task before us — mine, yours, and of governments of Bharat Union and the States — is to finally light the way: to build, at last, the cure that for two hundred years has never come.

The mentally ill of Bharat have waited long enough at the gate. It is time Bharat opened it resolutely once for all .

— Akhileshwar Sahay

Pune India June 9 2026

❖ ❖ ❖

A NOTE ON SOURCES

Prevalence and treatment-gap figures are drawn from the National Mental Health Survey of India, 2015-16 (NIMHANS, Bengaluru, for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare) and its peer-reviewed analyses in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry. The serious-mental-illness range reconciles the NMHS severe-disorder prevalence (~0.8% current) with the broader 1–2% severe band used by the Health Ministry and global burden estimates.

The Erwadi fire is dated 6 August 2001 (Moideen Badusha Mental Home, Ramanathapuram district, Tamil Nadu); the figure of twenty-eight to thirty dead and the subsequent closures and Supreme Court directions are a matter of public record.

Conditions in institutions draw on the NHRC–NIMHANS report (1999), Human Rights Watch, “Treated Worse than Animals” (2014), the NHRC Technical Committee report (2016) and the NHRC institutional report (2023). Workforce and budget figures draw on the 2023 Parliamentary Standing Committee, the Rehabilitation Council of India, WHO Mental Health Atlas data and Union Budget analyses (2025-26).

Figures are best available estimates; in the continuing absence of a completed NMHS-2, all national counts should be read as indicative rather than exact — a caveat that is itself part of this essay’s argument.

Subscribe now

[Image Credit-AI-generated conceptual illustration: “Enough Water, Wrong Choices” — a visual representation of how a rain-abundant India faces water insecurity because of storage deficits, leakage, over-extraction of groundwater, and governance gaps. ]

Subscribe now

Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink

-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“By 2030, the country's water demand is projected to be twice the available supply, implying severe water scarcity for hundreds of millions of people and an eventual ~6% loss in the country's GDP"

-Composite Water Management Index (CWMI) Niti Aayog, 2018

PROLOGUE

A Country Running on Borrowed Water

On the strange arithmetic of a nation that has enough rain and never enough water

Picture the same calendar that repeats itself, year after year, across the length of India. By late March the reservoirs begin to sag below half their capacity. By April the headlines arrive on cue: a Bengaluru suburb where the borewell has finally gone dry, a Chennai apartment block rationing buckets, a Bundelkhand hamlet where women walk three kilometres before sunrise, a Marathwada farmer staring at a cracked field.

Author’s Explanatory Note

The above is not an imaginary situation. India apparently has 14000 lakes but the Central Water Commission (CWC) tracks the live storage of only 161 major reservoirs across the country. As of late May 2026, nearly 70% of these major reservoirs dropped below half of their storage capacity, putting the total count of these depleted storages at over 100 reservoirs

By May the tankers roll, the politicians promise, the courts admonish, and the monsoon — if it is kind — arrives in June to wash the anxiety away for another year. The crisis is treated as weather. It is, in truth, structure.

Daunting Task

Here is the paradox that ought to keep the republic awake at night. India occupies just 2.4 per cent of the world’s land area, holds barely 4 per cent of its freshwater, and yet must slake the thirst of about 18 per cent of all humanity. On the face of it, that is a scary situation and a recipe for permanent scarcity.

Generous Sky

And yet the Indian sky is generous: the country receives roughly 4,000 billion cubic metres of rain every year — more than enough, in pure volume, to meet every potable, non potable domestic needs, agricultural and industrial need many times over. India is not, fundamentally, a country short of water. It is a country that has failed to hold the water it is given, share it where it is needed, and stop mining the bank account beneath its feet.

India does not have a rainfall problem. It has a memory problem — it cannot remember its water long enough to use it.

Three Fault Lines

Three fault lines run beneath the surface. First, an addiction to groundwater so deep that India has become the largest extractor of it on Earth, pulling up more each year than the United States and China combined.

Second, an urban delivery system so leaky that a third to a half of all treated water (58 percemt in Delhi the national capital ) vanishes before it reaches a tap.

Third, a governance architecture that mistakes the symptom — this summer’s shortage — for the disease, and reaches reflexively for concrete: another dam, another pipeline, another desalination plant, when the cheaper and more durable cure lies in the watershed, the aquifer and the village committee.

Crux of Long Form Series Volume 32

This Vollume 32 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long-Form Series argues that India’s water future will be decided less by how much it rains and more by whether the country can summon the political honesty and the necessary will power to manage demand, fix its leaks, regulate its aquifers, and trust its communities. It maps the scale of the crisis — the numbers, the deficient states, the dying aquifers — then turns to the harder question of repair: why the grand, capital-heavy gestures are politically irresistible but structurally hollow, and why the real answers are small, local, cheap and already proven. We begin where every honest reckoning must: with the arithmetic.

CHAPTER ONE

The Paradox of Plenty

2.4 per cent of the land, 4 per cent of the water, 18 per cent of humanity

Every conversation about India’s water crisis must begin with a single, sobering ratio. The country is home to nearly one in five human beings alive today on Planet Earth, but commands only one in twenty-five of the planet’s freshwater units, on a sliver of its surface. That imbalance is the master fact from which almost every downstream stress — falling tables, dry taps, farmer distress, urban tankers — ultimately flows.

And yet the rain itself is bountiful. India receives an average of about 1,170 millimetres of precipitation a year, which translates into roughly 4,000 billion cubic metres (BCM) of water falling on its territory — making it one of the most rain-rich large countries on Earth.

The cruelty is in the distribution. Most of that water arrives in a furious three- to four-month monsoon, then runs off to the sea before it can be captured. Of the roughly 1,869 BCM that flows through India’s rivers, only about 690 BCM — some 37 per cent — is actually usable with current infrastructure. Add usable groundwater, and the total dependable, harnessable water resource is around 1,123 BCM: a fraction of what the heavens deliver.

Per - Capita Water Availability

The per-capita picture sharp alarm. Annual per capita freshwater availability has fallen from over 5,000 cubic metres at Independence to around 1,486 cubic metres today, and is heading below 1,000-cubic-metre line that hydrologists call “water scarcity” within a generation. The denominator — population — keeps rising; the numerator — usable water — does not.

The plenty is real, but it is plenty we have not learned to keep.

CHAPTER TWO

The Arithmetic of Thirst

How much water India needs — and where every drop goes

If supply is one side of the ledger, demand is the other — and it is rising relentlessly. India’s total annual water requirement is presently estimated at 680–710 BCM. National Commission for Integrated Water Resources Development projected this rising to roughly 843 BCM by 2025 and about 1,180 BCM by 2050 under a high-growth path. The arithmetic is unforgiving: by mid-century, demand will brush against — and in dry years exceed — the 1,123 BCM of water the country can dependably harness.

The lines are converging, and the gap closes in the wrong direction.

Where does the water go? Overwhelmingly to farm. Irrigation accounts for 80–85 per cent of all water used — the single largest claim on resource by an order of magnitude. Domestic and municipal use (potable water for drinking, cooking and sanitation) is a far smaller share but the most politically charged, since it is what a citizen experiences at the tap. Industry is smaller today but fastest-growing claimant.

Non-potable demand — irrigation, industrial cooling, construction, landscaping, flushing — dwarfs the genuinely potable requirement, which is precisely why using treated drinking water for these tasks is so wasteful.

Four-fifths of India’s water grows its food. The water crisis is, first and last, an agricultural crisis wearing an urban mask.

Rural Urban Divide

The rural–urban divide compounds the difficulty. Roughly 65 per cent of Indians still live in villages, where about 85 per cent of drinking water comes from groundwater and where the challenge is reliable, safe supply to dispersed habitations. The cities, growing by tens of millions each decade, concentrate demand into dense pockets where the binding constraint is not raw availability but delivery — the pipes, the pressure, the losses.

The same litre of water means very different things in a Marathwada hamlet and a Mumbai high-rise. Any solution that ignores this divide is a solution for a Bharat that does not exist.

CHAPTER THREE

Is the Rain Enough?

The myth of scarcity and the inconvenient truth of mismanagement

Here is a question worth confronting head-on, because the answer reframes everything. Is India’s total annual precipitation, in pure volume, sufficient to meet all its water needs? The honest answer is: yes, comfortably. Roughly 4,000 BCM falls each year against a demand of around 700 BCM today and a projected 1,180 BCM by 2050.

In arithmetic terms, the rain that lands on India in a single average monsoon could meet the country’s entire requirement several times over.

So why does a country with surplus rainfall suffer chronic and often acute shortage? Because volume is not the same as availability. Three gaps stand between the rain and the tap.

Timing Gap

There is a gap in time: nearly the entire year’s rain arrives in a hundred-odd days, and India lacks the storage to carry the monsoon’s bounty through the long dry months. India stores only about 250–300 cubic metres of water per person — a fraction of what arid economies like Australia or the United States bank.

Gap in Space

There is a gap in space: the rain falls unevenly, drenching Cherrapunji and the Gangetic plain while bypassing the rain-shadow Deccan, western Rajasthan and the peninsular interior; the water is rarely where the people and the crops are.

Quality Gap

And there is a gap in quality: much surface water is rendered unusable by sewage and effluent before it can be drunk.

Scarcity in India is not a verdict of nature. It is a failure of storage, of distribution, and of governance.

Why Reframing Matters?

This reframing matters politically. If the problem were genuine, absolute scarcity, the only answers would be supply-side mega-projects — more dams, more diversions, desalination. But if the problem is that India squanders, mistimes and pollutes an abundant resource, then answers are different and cheaper: catch the rain where it falls, recharge aquifers, fix leaks, clean rivers, and use less per unit of crop and per citizen.

The rain is enough. What is missing is the discipline to hold it and the honesty to share it.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Map of Want

India’s water-deficient states and the geography of thirst

Water Scarcity in India wears a map. The crisis is concentrated, predictable, and — tellingly — often worst in states that grow most food. NITI Aayog’s Composite Water Management Index and the World Resources Institute together identify a cluster of states under “extremely high” water stress: Chandigarh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. To these must be added the chronically drought-prone regions — parts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and the recurringly parched belts of Bundelkhand (across UP and Madhya Pradesh) and Marathwada and Vidarbha in Maharashtra.

The most precise measure of distress is the stage of groundwater extraction — how much of the annually replenishable groundwater a state pumps out. A figure above 100 per cent means a state is living beyond its hydrological means, mining water that will not come back. By the Central Ground Water Board’s 2024–25 national assessment, the national average sits at a worrying 60.6 per cent, but the leaders of overuse are in a category of their own.

Crux of the Crisis

The political economy hidden in this table is the crux of the crisis. Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh — the breadbasket that feeds the nation’s grain reserves — are precisely the states draining their aquifers fastest. India’s food security is, quite literally, built on a depleting and precarious foundation.

A landmark CGWB assessment classifies roughly a quarter of the country’s thousands of groundwater blocks as over-exploited, critical or semi-critical. Meanwhile, water-rich eastern India and the North-East — Bihar, eastern UP, Assam — sit on relatively abundant, underused aquifers but lack the infrastructure and policy support to develop them sustainably.

The map of want is also a map of misallocation.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Invisible Bank Run

India as the world’s largest groundwater miner

Every time a farmer in western UP flips a pump switch, a tanker fills in a Bengaluru gated colony, or a handpump is worked in a Jharkhand village, India draws on a silent, shared account: its groundwater. And the country is overdrawing that account faster than any other on Earth. India is the largest groundwater user in the world, responsible for roughly 25 per cent of all groundwater extracted globally — more than a quarter of humanity’s total draw, pulled by a single nation.

The claim that India extracts more groundwater than the United States and China combined is not rhetorical flourish; it is arithmetic. The most-cited global estimates put India’s annual withdrawal at around 250 BCM, against China’s roughly 125 BCM and the United States’ roughly 110 BCM. India’s draw alone exceeds the sum of the next two largest extractors. The Central Ground Water Board’s own figures place India’s annual extraction at around 245–247 BCM, of which an extraordinary 87 per cent (about 208 BCM) goes to irrigation and only 13 per cent to homes and industry.

This dependence is not an accident of geology; it was designed into the system. Groundwater sustains about 62 per cent of irrigated agriculture, 85 per cent of rural drinking water, and 40–50 per cent of urban and industrial supply. The Green Revolution wedded national food security to groundwater-hungry paddy and wheat, underwritten by cheap or free farm power and assured procurement.

When the marginal cost of pumping another hour is effectively zero, and the well sits beneath a farmer’s own land, the aquifer becomes an open-access commons — a race to the bottom in which every rational farmer over-pumps before the neighbour does. It is the tragedy of the commons, replayed across millions of borewells.

CHAPTER SIX

The Price of the Plunder

What over-extraction is really costing India

A bank run ends when the vault is empty. India is approaching that point in its worst-affected aquifers, and the bill for the plunder is already being paid — in money, in health, in food security, and in the quiet erosion of the future. The price comes in several currencies.

Depth and Cost

The first is depth and cost. As tables fall — by half a metre a year in parts of Punjab — farmers and utilities must drill ever deeper, replacing shallow wells with expensive deep tube wells and burning more energy to lift water from greater depths. What was a cheap resource becomes a capital- and energy-intensive one, pricing out the small and marginal farmer first.

Quality

The second is quality. As fresh water is mined out, saline water intrudes from below or from the coast — a growing scourge in coastal Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh — while naturally occurring contaminants concentrate at depth. Arsenic stalks the Indo-Gangetic plains; fluoride poisons pockets of Rajasthan, Telangana, Karnataka and Maharashtra; nitrates leach from over-fertilised fields in Punjab and Haryana.

A glass of water can carry invisible, chronic harm — fluorosis, cancers, developmental damage — even where the quantity seems adequate.

We are not merely running out of water. We are making the water that remains too deep, too costly, and too toxic to safely use.

Fiscal

The third currency is fiscal. The free and subsidised farm power that drives the pumping costs state exchequers well over a lakh crore rupees a year — a subsidy that funds its own hydrological destruction.

Macroeconomic

The fourth is macroeconomic: NITI Aayog has warned that unmanaged water stress could shave around 6 per cent off India’s GDP by 2030, with demand projected to be twice the available supply. And the fifth, gravest of all, is food security: a national grain reserve resting on the over-drawn aquifers of three states is a strategic vulnerability dressed as agricultural success. The plunder buys a present harvest by borrowing against a future famine.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ten Faultlines

The core crisis areas, anatomised

Beneath the headline numbers lie ten structural faultlines. Each is a distinct failure; together they constitute the architecture of the crisis.

1. The groundwater overdraft.

India mines its aquifers faster than they recharge, extracting 250 BCM a year and ranking as world’s largest groundwater user. In over-exploited blocks across Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, annual draft exceeds 100 per cent of recharge, forcing ever-deeper drilling and steeper energy costs. Because wells sit on private land and pumping power is free or near free, aquifer behaves as an open-access commons with no brake on use. This is the master faultline: it underwrites food production today while destroying tomorrow’s resource almost entirely unregulated in practice.

2. The energy–water trap.

Flat or free agricultural electricity tariff makes marginal cost of pumping effectively zero, so farmers run pumps without restraint. The subsidy — over a lakh crore rupees annually — simultaneously bankrupts power utilities and bankrupts aquifers. Every attempt to reform tariffs collides with political reality of farmers as a decisive vote bank. The result is a perverse machine in which public money is spent to accelerate depletion of a public resource, locking the country into a cycle that neither the energy sector nor the water sector can escape alone.

3. Urban NRW.

Indian cities lose between a third and a half of their treated water before it is billed or reaches a tap — figures of 30–50 per cent are common, with Delhi reported as high as 58 per cent against a global benchmark below 25 per cent. These “non-revenue-water” losses come from leaking mains, illegal connections, faulty meters and theft. The same crack that loses clean water during supply hours sucks in sewage when pressure drops, turning leakage into a public-health emergency. Fixing leaks could free as much water as a new dam — at a fraction of the cost — yet utilities chronically underinvest in it.

4. Intermittent supply and inequity.

Most Indian cities deliver water few hours a day, forcing households to build rooftop tanks. This coping culture entrenches inequity: affluent buffer shortage with large storage and private borewells, while poor in informal settlements depend on erratic public taps and costly tanker water. Intermittent supply also makes networks impossible to manage — pipes never reach stable pressure, leaks worsen, and contamination risk soars. The system is engineered, in effect, to serve the connected and the wealthy first.

5. The agricultural water guzzle.

Agriculture consumes 80–85% of water, much of it through flood irrigation of paddy, sugarcane and wheat — thirsty crops grown, perversely, in water-scarce states. A kilogram of rice can demand three to five thousand litres of water; sugarcane in Maharashtra’s drought belt is a hydrological absurdity. Minimum support prices and assured procurement steer farmers toward exactly these crops, while flood irrigation wastes a large share to evaporation and runoff.

Until cropping patterns and irrigation methods change, no amount of supply augmentation can close the gap.

6. Surface-water pollution.

More than 70% surface water is contaminated by untreated sewage and industrial effluent; only a small fraction of urban wastewater is treated before discharge. Rivers like Yamuna and stretches of Ganga function as open drains. This pollution removes usable water from balance sheet just as surely as drought does — a river full of effluent is, for practical purposes, dry. It also pushes communities toward groundwater, accelerating overdraft, and inflicts a heavy disease burden on poor who have no alternative.

7. Storage and the monsoon mismatch.

India banks only about 250–300 cubic metres of water per person, far below what comparable economies store, leaving it unable to carry monsoon’s bounty through dry season. Climate change is making rainfall more erratic — concentrated in fewer, more intense bursts — which both overwhelms storage in wet months and deepens scarcity in dry ones. Reservoirs designed for a stationary climate are operated on outdated rule curves.

India invariably drowns in June and thirsts in April, a mismatch that storage — large and small, but especially small and distributed — has never been built to bridge.

8. Dying water bodies and lost recharge.

Tens of thousands of traditional tanks, ponds, johads and lakes — the decentralised storage and recharge infrastructure of pre-modern India — have been encroached, silted up or built over. Urban wetlands that once absorbed floods and recharged aquifers are now real estate. Their loss removes natural buffers against both flood and drought, and severs link between rainfall and recharge.

Bengaluru’s vanished lakes and Chennai’s built-over marshes are emblematic: cities that paved over their water memory now buy it back, at ruinous cost, in tankers and desalination.

9. Fragmented, capex-biased governance.

Water is a state subject managed by a tangle of central and state agencies, with surface water, groundwater, irrigation, drinking water and pollution control split across separate silos that rarely coordinate. The institutional reflex is to build — dams, pipelines, treatment plants — because capital projects are visible, fundable and politically rewarding, while unglamorous work of demand management, leak repair and aquifer regulation goes neglected.

Data is patchy and siloed, planning is project-by-project rather than basin-wide, and accountability for outcomes — reliable, safe water — is diffused to the point of vanishing.

10. The climate multiplier.

Climate change does not create a new water crisis so much as amplify every existing one. Warmer temperatures raise evaporation and crop water demand; erratic monsoons swing between flood and drought; glacial retreat threatens the long-run flows of the Himalayan rivers on which the north depends. Sea-level rise pushes salinity further inland, contaminating coastal aquifers.

Every faultline above — overdraft, storage deficit, pollution, inequity — is rendered sharper and less forgiving by a hotter, more volatile climate.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Leaking City

Urban India’s water crisis — and ten ways to fix it

If groundwater is India’s invisible backbone, urban utility is its fraying nerve. The defining feature of Indian city’s water system is not scarcity of source but loss in transit. Between 30 and 60 per cent of treated water never reaches tap — it leaks from corroded mains, is siphoned through illegal taps, or is lost to broken meters and unbilled use. Cities therefore feel perpetually short and clamour for new water source and newer dams, when a third of their supply is hiding in their own broken pipes.

The second affliction is intermittence. Few Indian cities deliver water around the clock; most ration it to a few hours, breeding a coping economy of rooftop tanks, sumps and — for the unconnected poor — tankers sold at predatory rates. The wealthy buffer themselves with storage and borewells; the poor pay more, per litre, for worse water. Bengaluru’s borewell dependence and Chennai’s recurring “Day Zero” scares are not freak events but predictable output of paving over lakes, mismanaging supply and ignoring demand.

The cheapest reservoir a city can build is the water it stops losing.

Ten solutions to tame urban water crisis

1. Wage war on NRW. Launch a national mission to cut urban losses below 25 per cent through District Metered Areas, active leak detection, pressure management and pipe replacement — the single highest-return water investment available.

2. Move to 24x7 pressurised supply. Phase a cohort of 15–20 cities to continuous supply; stable pressure reduces both leakage and contamination that intermittent systems invite.

3. Universal, accurate metering. Meter every connection — including bulk and institutional users — with rightsized, tamper-proof meters, and modernise billing and collection so the utility can recover its costs.

4. Mandate wastewater treatment and reuse. Require cities to treat sewage and supply recycled water for industry, construction, flushing and landscaping, freeing scarce freshwater for drinking.

5. Revive urban lakes and wetlands. Protect, de-silt and reconnect tanks, lakes and wetlands as storage, recharge and flood-buffer assets; halt their encroachment by real estate.

6. Enforce rainwater harvesting. Make rooftop and plot-level harvesting genuinely mandatory and audited in buildings, as Chennai pioneered, rather than a paper requirement ignored at the gate.

7. Rationalise tariffs with a lifeline slab. Adopt increasing-block tariffs: a cheap or free basic lifeline volume for all, rising sharply for high consumption, protecting the poor while penalising waste.

8. Regulate and integrate the tanker economy. License and monitor private tankers and borewells feeding them, so that informal market does not quietly mine city’s aquifer unchecked.

9. Mandate water-efficient fixtures and codes. Require low-flow taps, dual-flush systems and water-labelling of appliances, with building-level efficiency standards, akin to energy ratings.

10. Build professional, accountable utilities. Corporatise city water boards with ring-fenced finances, performance KPIs on hours of supply and water quality, and transparent public dashboards citizens can hold to account.

CHAPTER NINE

The Thirsty Village

Rural India’s water crisis — and ten ways to fix it

Rural India’s water story is one of genuine progress shadowed by fragile foundations. Through Jal Jeevan Mission, the share of rural households with a functional tap connection has risen from about 17 per cent (3.23 crore households) in 2019 to roughly 80 per cent (over 15.44 crore households) by early 2025 — one of the fastest water-access expansions in human history. Women trained in lakhs now test their own village water; schools and Anganwadis have been connected.

But connection is not the same as reliable, safe service.

Three caveats temper the triumph-

1. Coverage is uneven — only a minority of districts have achieved true universality, while many lag.

2. Source sustainability is precarious where schemes draw on the same over-exploited or contaminated aquifers.

3. And operation and maintenance — who fixes the pump, who pays the tariff, who tests the water — will decide whether today’s taps are running in ten years or have joined the long graveyard of “slipped” schemes. Rural India needs a “Jal Jeevan 2.0” focused on guarantees, not just counts.

A tap that runs dry by the third summer is not water access — it is a photograph of water access.

Ten solutions to tame the rural water crisis

1. Shift JJM from connections to guarantees. Embed enforceable service standards — hours of supply, water quality, breakdown response — not just count of taps installed.

2. Empower Village Water and Sanitation Committees. Turn VWSCs into capable mini-utilities with training, revenue authority and clear responsibility for local operation and maintenance.

3. Guarantee source sustainability for every scheme. Pair each water-supply scheme with a watershed and recharge plan, so the source aquifer is not itself being mined dry.

4. Scale community watershed development. Replicate the Ralegan Siddhi–Hiware Bazar model (whose core principle is community-led watershed management combined with strict social reforms to achieve self-reliance and economic prosperity) of contour bunds, trenches, check dams and percolation tanks to recharge village aquifers.

5. Institute village-level water budgeting. Have communities measure available water each year and collectively decide cropping and consumption within that budget, as Hiware Bazar does.

6. Remediate quality-affected habitations. Prioritise arsenic, fluoride and nitrate hotspots with safe alternative sources, blending and household treatment, integrated with health surveillance.

7. Revive traditional water structures. Restore johads, tanks, baolis and ponds — the decentralised storage that served rural India for centuries — through MGNREGA labour and community ownership.

8. Adopt sensible local tariffs. Design simple, socially graded tariffs that cover basic upkeep while protecting poorest, ending the fiction that maintenance is free.

9. Converge schemes at the village. Braid Jal Jeevan, Atal Bhujal, MGNREGA, watershed and Amrit Sarovar funds into a single village water plan rather than siloed projects.

10. Promote conjunctive use and recharge. Combine surface storage, rainwater harvesting and managed aquifer recharge so villages draw down groundwater only as a buffer, not a baseline.

CHAPTER TEN

The Guzzling Field

Agriculture’s water crisis — and ten ways to fix it

Every serious diagnosis of Indian water returns to the same source: the field. With agriculture consuming 80–8% water, even a modest gain in farm-water efficiency dwarfs anything achievable in cities and homes. The tragedy is that India irrigates inefficiently — largely by flooding fields — and grows wrong crops in wrong places, sustaining water-guzzling paddy and sugarcane in some of its driest states through gravitational pull of minimum support prices, assured procurement and free power.

The two great levers are method and crop.

On method, micro-irrigation — drip and sprinkler — can cut water use by 30–60 per cent while raising yields, by delivering water directly to the root rather than drowning the field. Israel built an agricultural export economy on the desert by perfecting drip irrigation and reusing nearly 90 per cent of its wastewater; the technology is Indian-affordable and proven, yet covers only a fraction of the cultivable area.

On crop, shifting from paddy and sugarcane toward millets, pulses, oilseeds and less thirsty varieties — “more crop per drop” — can transform the water balance of an entire state. India’s own promotion of millets (“Shree Anna”) points the way, if procurement and prices follow.

If India changes nothing else but how it waters and what it grows, it solves most of its water crisis. Everything else is detail.

Ten solutions to tame the irrigation and agricultural water crisis

1. Scale drip and sprinkler irrigation aggressively. Make micro-irrigation the default in water-stressed blocks through deep subsidies and “per drop more crop” financing, targeting a multifold expansion of covered area.

2. Realign incentives toward less thirsty crops. Use procurement, MSP and crop-specific support to nudge paddy and sugarcane out of water-scarce states and pulses, millets and oilseeds in.

3. Reform farm power, don’t just subsidise it. Separate agricultural feeders, meter them, and move to direct benefit transfers so farmers receive support but pay a cost-reflective price that rewards conservation.

4. Promote solar pumps with extraction caps. Scale solar irrigation, but cap permitted draw and allow surplus power to be sold back — turning the pump from a depletion engine into an income source that rewards using less water.

5. Treat aquifers as managed commons. Map aquifers, set block-level sustainable extraction limits, and empower community institutions to allocate and police pumping rights, as Atal Bhujal Yojana attempts.

6. Mandate alternate wetting and drying for paddy. Spread proven agronomic practices — AWD, direct-seeded rice, laser land-levelling and mulching — that cut paddy water use sharply without yield loss.

7. Reuse treated wastewater for irrigation. Channel treated urban sewage to peri-urban farms, recovering both water and nutrients and relieving pressure on fresh sources.

8. Strengthen Pani Panchayat-style equity. Adopt the Maharashtra model of allocating irrigation water by family rather than landholding, so scarce water is shared fairly and not monopolised by large farmers.

9. Invest in micro-watersheds and recharge on farmland. Build farm ponds, check dams and recharge structures so each landscape holds its own rain, reducing dependence on deep groundwater.

10. Build farmer knowledge and price signals. Pair extension services, soil-moisture sensing and crop advisories with transparent water-accounting so farmers can see, and act on, the true water cost of their choices.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The State Responds

Government action — and why it remains too little, too late

The Indian state has not been idle. The last decade has produced a genuine cascade of water programmes. The Jal Jeevan Mission (2019) set out to put a tap in every rural home and has connected over 12 crore households. Atal Bhujal Yojana (2019–20), a World Bank-aided, community-led groundwater scheme, operates across roughly 8,500 water-stressed gram panchayats in 80-odd districts of seven states, pioneering demand-side management and water budgeting. The Jal Shakti Abhiyan: Catch the Rain campaign, now in successive annual editions, drives rainwater harvesting and the geo-tagging of water bodies nationwide. PMKSY (Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana) funds irrigation expansion and “per drop more crop” micro-irrigation; AMRUT 2.0 targets urban water and recharge; Namami Gange and Amrit Sarovar address river cleaning and pond revival; the creation of a unified Jal Shakti Ministry in 2019 was itself an attempt to break institutional silos.

This is a serious portfolio, and parts of it — Jal Jeevan above all — show what political priority and money can achieve. But the honest verdict is that the effort remains, in aggregate, too little and too late relative to the scale and speed of the crisis. The lacunae are structural, not incidental.

Where the effort falls short

First, the schemes are overwhelmingly supply- and connection-focused: they count taps installed, structures built and rupees spent, but rarely guarantee the outcome that matters — reliable, safe water that keeps flowing once the ribbon is cut and the source aquifer is not itself dying.

Second, the untouchable core — free farm power and water-guzzling cropping — remains politically off-limits, so the largest driver of depletion is left intact while peripheral interventions nibble at the edges.

Third, water is a state subject, and the Centre can only nudge; coordination across states, and across the surface-water, groundwater and pollution silos, is weak.

Fourth, enforcement is hollow: groundwater regulations and well-registration rules exist largely on paper, because no government will police its own farmers.

Fifth, the spending is biased toward visible capital works over the unglamorous, high-return basics of leak repair, demand management and maintenance.

The state is building faster than it is reforming — and against a depleting aquifer, building without reform simply postpones the reckoning.

India is spending its way around the water crisis when it needs to govern its way out of it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Concrete Temptation

Why capital-heavy fixes are politically expedient but structurally wrong

There is a deep and understandable bias in Indian water policy toward the grand gesture: the big dam, the long inter-basin transfer, the gleaming desalination plant. The flagship example is the National River Linking Project, a multi-lakh-crore proposal to stitch India’s rivers together and move water from “surplus” to “deficit” basins.

Such projects are politically irresistible for reasons that have little to do with hydrology.

Capital-heavy solutions are expedient because they are visible — a minister can inaugurate a dam, but not a leak that was never sprung. They are fundable — large contracts attract financing, construction lobbies and headlines. They are centralising — they concentrate control and patronage. And they defer pain — building new supply lets politicians avoid the genuinely hard asks of charging for power, metering farmers and rationalising crops. The concrete is a way of being seen to act while leaving the underlying behaviour untouched.

But structurally, this path is a trap.

Mega-projects carry ruinous capital and ecological costs, displace communities, drown forests and disrupt the very river ecology that sustains downstream life. They take decades to build, while the crisis moves in seasons. They lock in the wrong logic — chasing ever more supply to feed ever more waste, instead of curbing the waste itself.

Desalination is energy-hungry and expensive, viable only at the coastal margins. And crucially, none of them addresses the demand side: a country that loses half its urban water to leaks and floods its fields with free-pumped groundwater will simply lose and flood more water if you give it more.

You cannot pour fresh water into a leaking bucket and call it a solution.

The dam is a monument to the problem; the watershed is the answer to it.

The Real Solution - A Contrarian Perscription

The real solution is less capital-intensive, more localised, and more about behaviour than concrete: catch the rain where it falls, recharge the aquifer beneath each village, fix the pipes under each city, price the power and the water honestly, and grow crops the land can sustain.

These measures are cheap, fast, distributed and resilient — and they happen to be exactly the things that are politically hard, because they ask the state to govern and citizens to change, rather than merely to build. That difficulty is the whole reason the crisis persists.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Small Is Beautiful

Decentralised solutions that worked — at home and abroad

The case for localised water management is not theoretical. It has been proven, repeatedly, in Indian villages and foreign cities alike. The lesson is consistent: when communities own their water and manage it within its natural limits, scarcity recedes — often dramatically, and at a fraction of the cost of mega-infrastructure.

The Indian proof

Ralegan Siddhi, a drought-cursed village in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district, was transformed from the late 1970s under Anna Hazare through pure watershed discipline — contour trenches, bunds, check dams and percolation tanks to capture every monsoon drop, paired with a community ban on water-guzzling sugarcane. The village has stayed water-sufficient through droughts that drove neighbours to tankers.

Hiware Bazar, thirty kilometres away, took the model further under Popatrao Pawar from 1990: it added annual water budgeting and water audits, deciding each year’s cropping pattern within the measured water available, and regulating extraction so the table holds at 11–12 metres. Per-capita incomes rose from a few hundred rupees a month to tens of thousands; reverse migration began.

In Rajasthan’s arid Alwar district, Rajendra Singh — the “Water Man of India” — and Tarun Bharat Sangh revived rivers and recharged aquifers across more than a thousand villages by rebuilding traditional johads (earthen check dams), earning the 2015 Stockholm Water Prize.

And Maharashtra’s Pani Panchayat model cracked the equity problem by allocating irrigation water per family rather than per acre, so the resource could not be monopolised by the largest landholders.

Ralegan Siddhi and Hiware Bazar did not import water. They learned to keep their own.

The lessons from abroad

Israel turned a desert into an agricultural exporter not by finding water but by saving it — inventing modern drip irrigation, reusing close to 90 per cent of its treated wastewater for farming (the world’s highest rate), and treating every drop as precious through pricing and technology.

Singapore, with almost no natural water, built resilience through its “Four National Taps” — local catchment, imported water, desalination, and above all NEWater, high-grade recycled wastewater — while holding non-revenue water to a world-beating ~5 per cent through relentless leak management.

Phnom Penh in Cambodia transformed a broken, war-ravaged utility losing most of its water into one of Asia’s best performers, with near-universal metered supply and single-digit losses, through governance reform rather than new dams.

The common thread — across a Maharashtra hamlet and a Singapore high-rise — is that the durable gains came from demand management, recycling, leak control and local ownership, not from building ever more supply.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Ten Structural Solutions

A blueprint for moving from scarcity management to water security

The crisis is daunting but not necessarily destiny for Bharat. India has the science, the institutions and the resources for a decisive turn. What is needed is a coherent package of reforms that aligns incentives from the farm to the city and from the monsoon to the tap.

Ten interlocking actions form the spine of that turn are-.

1. Transform water governance.

Reposition water as a basin-managed, cross-silo priority under cooperative federalism: integrate surface water, groundwater, irrigation, drinking water and pollution under river-basin organisations, and finance states by outcomes — losses cut, aquifers protected, service improved — not rupees spent.

2. Manage groundwater as a commons.

Map aquifers, set sustainable block-level extraction limits, restrict new wells in critical blocks, and empower community institutions to allocate and police pumping rights, scaling Atal Bhujal Yojana from pilot to national policy.

3. Reform the energy–water nexus.

Separate and meter agricultural feeders, move power subsidy to direct benefit transfers, and deploy solar pumps with extraction caps — so the marginal cost of pumping is no longer zero and conservation finally pays.

4. Rejuvenate surface water.

Clean rivers and lakes to bring polluted water back onto the usable balance sheet, enforce wastewater treatment and reuse, and protect every water body from encroachment, so the resource we already have stops shrinking.

5. Recharge the aquifer everywhere.

Make managed aquifer recharge — check dams, percolation tanks, farm ponds, rooftop harvesting, revived johads and tanks — a universal, decentralised programme, so that the monsoon refills the bank account each year.

6. Re-engineer the city: NRW and 24x7.

Run a national mission to cut urban losses below 25 percent initially and 15 per cent finally and move cities to continuous, metered, pressurised supply, freeing as much water as new dams would — at a fraction of the cost and carbon.

7. Close the urban water loop.

Mandate integrated urban water management — treat and reuse wastewater and stormwater, recharge through green infrastructure, and supply recycled water for all non-potable uses, reserving fresh water for drinking.

8. Revolutionise farm-water efficiency.

Make drip and sprinkler irrigation the default in stressed regions and shift cropping toward millets, pulses and less thirsty varieties through aligned procurement and prices — the single highest-leverage reform available.

9. Price water honestly while protecting the poor.

Adopt increasing-block tariffs with a free or cheap lifeline volume, audit bulk and industrial users, and make wasting water as socially unacceptable as stealing electricity — reform of norms, not just rates.

10. Build the data and the political compact.

Create a real-time, open, interoperable national water information system, and forge urban–rural compacts in which cities pay to protect the catchments and aquifers that sustain them — turning water from a free entitlement into a shared, stewarded responsibility.

EPILOGUE

From Tanker Republics to a Water-Secure State

What the next decade must decide

India’s water crisis is no longer a risk on the horizon; it is a present drag on growth, public health and social peace. Reservoirs that hover at half-capacity before summer, aquifers that sink by centimetres and metres each year, cities that lose a third to a half of their treated water, and villages that still walk for contaminated supplies are not separate misfortunes.

They are symptoms of one underlying disease: a profound misalignment between an abundant, monsoon-delivered hydrology and a policy regime that squanders, mistimes, pollutes and over-mines what nature so generously provides.

The arithmetic of this Volume 32 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form Series should, in the end, be a source of hope rather than despair. A country that receives 4,000 billion cubic metres of rain to meet a 700-billion-cubic-metre need does not have a scarcity problem it cannot solve. It has a stewardship and governance problem it has chosen not to. The rain is enough. The aquifers can recover. The leaks can be sealed. The fields can be watered with discipline. None of this requires a technological miracle — only the political integrity and the resolute will power to manage demand instead of forever chasing supply, and the humility to trust the village committee and the watershed over the contractor and the dam.

The choice is not between water and no water. It is between governing our abundance and mourning our waste.

The path forward is the one the evidence keeps pointing to: small, local, cheap and proven. Catch the rain where it falls. Recharge the aquifer beneath every village. Fix the pipes under every city. Price the power and the water that drives the waste. Grow what the land can carry. The grand monuments of concrete may win an election cycle, but it is the johad, the check dam, the water budget, the repaired main and the drip line that will win the century.

The same republic that connected fifteen crore homes to a tap in five years, that scaled solar power in record time, can engineer a water turnaround — if it stops treating each dry summer as weather and starts treating it as a verdict on how it governs its most precious, most squandered, most recoverable resource.

Bharat for now, is a nation running on borrowed water. Whether we remain one is the question this decade must answer.

❧ ⁂ ❦

Akhil Vaani · Daily Long Form Series · Volume 32

Akhileshwar Sahay · Multisector Thought Leader With Action Bias and India base international impact consultant

Pune, India June 8, 2026

“The destiny of India is now being shaped in her classrooms”

-Opening Sentence of Dr. D. S. Kothari Commission Report (1964–66), titled “ Education and National Development

"The purpose of the education system is to develop good human beings capable of rational thought and action, possessing compassion and empathy, courage and resilience, scientific temper and creative imagination, with ethical values. It must aim at producing engaged, productive, and contributing citizens for building an equitable, inclusive, and plural society as envisaged by our Constitution."

- National Education Policy (2020)

Prologue: The Insect on the Banner

On the first Saturday of June 2026, a few hundred young Indians gathered around Jantar Mantar in New Delhi behind an improbable emblem — a cockroach. The Cockroach Janata Party had begun only weeks earlier as an online joke, yet had swiftly gathered more followers than the establishment it mocked. Its founders were not seasoned leaders; its manifesto was satire. The speed with which a despised insect became the banner of a generation should unsettle anyone who governs or teaches.

The cockroach is famously the creature that survives catastrophe — and a generation that adopts it as a self-portrait is telling us, with bleak humour, that it expects to outlast a system which has stopped working for it.

It is tempting to read the phenomenon as politics. It is wiser to read it as a fever chart. The disease lies far beneath the placards — in classrooms where a child in Class 5 cannot read a Class 2 text, in examination halls where the paper has been sold before the bell rings, and in the canyon between the certificate a young Indian carries and the competence it was meant to certify.

The restiveness now spilling onto the streets is the downstream cost of an education system that has, by its own metrics, broken its promise.

This is happening at the precise moment India can least afford it. We are living through our demographic dividend — the once-in-a-civilisation window when a vast working-age population could power decades of growth. The 65% Metric: Official government and demographic records from ⁠and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) consistently establish that over 65% of India’s population is under the age of 35 meaning 955 million individuals beloe 35%

But a dividend is only a dividend if the young are educated . But a dividend is only a dividend if the young are educated, skilled and employable. If they are not, the same bulge curdles into a demographic liability — a restless, credentialled, jobless cohort, the most combustible material in any democracy.

SDG-4

In 2015 India adopted, with the rest of the world, Sustainable Development Goal 4: to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” by 2030.

The National Education Policy 2020 enshrined the same ideal, declaring that achieving it “will require the entire education system to be reconfigured.” That word — reconfigured, not merely reformed — is the honest one.

We are now closer to 2030 than to the day SDG-4 was signed, and on most of its critical targets India is not on track.

This Volume 31 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form series looks the crisis in the eye: it maps the causes, counts the consequences, asks why two landmark commitments — the Kothari Commission’s six-per-cent funding pledge (recommended in 1966) and the move that made education a shared duty from State list item to Concurrent List item in 1976 — failed to deliver, and sets out a time-bound blueprint to rebuild the system across all three of its stages before the window shuts.

The cockroach on the banner is not the problem. It is the warning. And steering clear of the politics or politicking around cockroas it is time for systemic reboot.

CHAPTER ONE

The Clock and the Curse

Every nation that has grown rich did so by harvesting a demographic dividend — the brief decades when the share of working-age citizens peaks and the burden of dependents is light. India entered that window around the turn of the century and will remain inside it, demographers estimate, only until roughly the early 2050s. After that the population begins to age, and the chance, once lost, does not return.

The dividend is therefore not a standing asset; it is a melting one. The relevant question is no longer whether India is young, but whether India’s young are equipped.

The evidence says, increasingly, that they are not. The Mercer-Mettl India Graduate Skill Index found that the share of graduates assessed as employable slipped to 42.6 per cent in 2024, down from 44.3 per cent the year before — meaning that roughly three in five fresh graduates are, by industry’s own reckoning, not job-ready on the day they collect their degrees.

Author’s Explanatory Note of Mercer-Mettl Index

[Core Nuances of the Decline

1. The Soft Skills Deficit

The drop in employability was not driven by technical failure, but by a severe lack of non-technical competencies. While academic programs have rushed to integrate specialized courses, they regularly fail to cultivate unstructured soft skills like critical thinking, communication, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.

2. The Non-Technical Crash

Employability within non-technical domains—such as human resources, digital marketing, and business analysis—experienced a sharp contraction, dropping from 48.3% to 43.5%. HR associate roles registered the lowest baseline readiness at a mere 39.9%.

3. The Bright Spot: AI & Machine Learning

Conversely, technical role readiness experienced a slight upward trend. Driven by high-velocity independent upskilling, Indian graduates demonstrated their highest structural employability (46.1%) specifically in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) roles.

4. State-Wise and Tier Geography

• Top Regions: Delhi leads the nation with the highest localized graduate employability at 53.4%, closely followed by Himachal Pradesh and Punjab at 51.1%.

• The Institutional Gap: Tier-1 colleges maintain the strongest baseline at 48.4%. Tier-2 and Tier-3 institutions saw the most severe year-on-year drops, largely due to rigid, outdated syllabi that cannot keep pace with evolving corporate expectations. ]

More Rattling

The International Labour Organization’s finding is more startling still: unemployment among Indian graduates runs near 29 per cent, against barely 3.4 per cent among those with no formal schooling at all. The share of the educated among the unemployed has climbed from about 54 per cent in 2000 to nearly 66 per cent two decades later.

A degree has become a near-perfect predictor of joblessness — the cruellest inversion of what education was meant to promise.

Read that paradox slowly, for it is the engine of the entire crisis. In a healthy economy, more education buys more opportunity. In India today, more education too often buys more frustration. The State of Working India 2026 report Youth in the Labour Market: Pathways from Learning to Earning," published by the by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University. estimated that close to 40 per cent of young graduates remain unemployed, and that fewer than seven in a hundred male graduates secure a permanent salaried job within a year of leaving college.

Author’s Explanatory Note

The aforesaid report paints a sobering picture of the education-to-employment pipeline in India:

Key Findings of the Report are-

• The 40% Unemployment Figure: The report notes that graduate unemployment for the youngest cohort (ages 15 to 25) stands at 39.33% (rounded to nearly 40%). This is an increase from the 35.02% recorded back in 1983, proving that a rapid expansion in college degrees has outpaced the economy’s generation of high-quality jobs. For the 25–29 age group, the graduate unemployment rate tapers down to 20%.

• The “Seven in a Hundred” Metric: The report tracks young male graduates over their first year after graduation or after reporting themselves as unemployed. It confirms that fewer than 7% (specifically about 6.7%) successfully secure a permanent salaried job within 12 months.

• The White-Collar Bottleneck: To narrow it down further, out of those very few who do secure regular salaried work, only 3.7% manage to find a standard “white-collar” office-based job within that first year.

Why This Mismatch Exists

The report highlights that while India has highly democratized higher education—increasing the proportion of students from the poorest households in universities from 8% to 15% over the last decade—the structure of the job market has failed to scale alongside it. Instead of entering formal employment, a major chunk of the remaining 60% of employed youth are forced into low-paying self-employment, casual labor, or gig economy.

Second Blade to the Wound

The Economic Survey 2024-25 added a second blade to the wound: even among those who do find work, over half of graduates and more than a third of post-graduates are underemployed, holding jobs beneath their qualifications.

Structural Mismatch

Behind the numbers lies a structural mismatch. India’s economy leapt from agriculture to high-skill services — information technology, finance, consulting — without ever building the broad labour-intensive manufacturing base that absorbs the average school-leaver in every country that industrialised before us. Services create wealth but demand high skills; they cannot soak up tens of millions of moderately educated youth.

The result is the grim oxymoron economists now use without embarrassment: jobless growth. The economy expands; the jobs do not multiply with it; and the classroom, meanwhile, is not even producing the skills the few available jobs require.

The school system itself describes the leakage as a funnel.

Enrolment at the preparatory stage is near-universal, but it narrows sharply as children climb. By the secondary stage a large minority has already slipped away, and only a portion of an age cohort completes Class 12. Each year of schooling that ends prematurely is a young citizen pushed toward the informal economy with neither a foundation nor a trade.

Multiply that by a population of our scale and the demographic dividend is quietly haemorrhaging at every grade.

This is the true backdrop to the street theatre of the Cockroach Janata Party and the unemployment-allowance agitations flaring across states. The anger is not manufactured by any single party; it is the predictable politics of a generation that did everything it was told — stayed in school, sat the exams, took the loans, earned the paper — and arrived at adulthood to find the door bolted.

A nation can survive an angry generation. It cannot survive a betrayed one. And betrayal, in the end, is the gap between what the system promised and what it delivered.

CHAPTER TWO

Two Promises that Bharat Could Not Keep

If the crisis has a financial taproot, it runs back sixty years. In 1966 the Education Commission chaired by Dr. D. S. Kothari — the most ambitious blueprint of independent India’s schooling — recommended that public spending on education rise to six per cent of national income. It was not a casual figure. It was the Commission’s estimate of the minimum a poor, populous, ambitious democracy needed to invest in its people to escape poverty within a generation. The number was solemnly endorsed by the National Policy on Education of 1968, reaffirmed in 1986, restated in the 1992 review, and enshrined yet again in the National Education Policy 2020, which “unequivocally endorses” the goal of six per cent of GDP.

Six decades, four policies, one unbroken promise — and it has never once been kept. India’s combined public expenditure on education, Centre and states together, has hovered between roughly 2.9 and 4.6 per cent of GDP, depending on which departments are counted. NEP 2020 itself records the figure as around 4.43 per cent. By any honest accounting the Republic has spent, year after year, perhaps two-thirds of what its own experts said was the minimum floor.

A target reaffirmed by every government and met by none is not a target. It is a ritual.

Why the chronic shortfall?

Part of the answer is that education spending yields its returns over a generation, while political cycles are counted in five-year terms; a road or a subsidy is visible before the next election, a literate cohort is not. Part is the arithmetic of a developing state stretched across defence, health, infrastructure and welfare.

But part — and this is the uncomfortable diagnosis — lies in the very structure of who is responsible. Which brings us to the second broken promise.

Education was not always a shared subject in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution of India. At Independence it sat squarely on the State List — the exclusive business of provincial governments. The 42nd Constitutional Amendment of 1976 moved it to the Concurrent List, where both the Union and the states may legislate, with central law prevailing in case of conflict. The intent was noble: to let the Centre set national standards and drive equity across an unequal federation. The result, half a century on, is more tangled.

Concurrency was meant to add a partner. In practice it too often diffused accountability. The states still carry the overwhelming weight of delivery and funding — they account for roughly 75 to 85 per cent of all public spending on education and run the vast majority of schools — while the Centre commands the policy megaphone.

When outcomes fail, each tier can credibly point at the other: the states plead inadequate central transfers, the Centre blames state implementation. A duty shared by two without a hard line of answerability becomes a duty owned by neither. The NEP 2020 itself acknowledges the cost of this design, conceding that education “is a concurrent subject” requiring “careful planning, joint monitoring, and collaborative implementation” — a polite admission that the machinery does not naturally cohere.

The federal fracture is visible in the data. Jammu & Kashmir devotes over eight per cent of its state product to education, and north-eastern states such as Manipur and Meghalaya more than six — numbers sustained largely by central grants. At the other end, wealthy, urbanised states such as Delhi, Telangana and Karnataka allocate under two per cent of their far larger economies, leaning on a dense private sector to fill the gap.

The map of educational opportunity, in other words, is not one nation but many, and the NEP’s vision of a common floor of quality runs aground on the reef of asymmetric state will. Several states have resisted or delayed adopting parts of the new policy outright, producing a rollout that is uneven by design.

Two promises, then, lie unkept at the foundation of the crisis: the money that was pledged and never fully came, and the shared responsibility that was meant to strengthen the system but instead let everyone off the hook.

Until both are honestly confronted — the funding raised and ring-fenced, the accountability made specific and enforceable — every downstream reform is built on sand.

CHAPTER THREE

The Anatomy of a Collapse

Underinvestment and diffused accountability are the structural causes of the learning crisis facing the country. Their symptoms are everywhere in the body of the system, and they compound one another. Six are worth anatomising.

The learning crisis at the root

NEP 2020 stated the emergency plainly: over five crore children in elementary school have not attained foundational literacy and numeracy — the bare ability to read simple text and do basic arithmetic. Chapter 2 (titled "Foundational Literacy and Numeracy: An Urgent & Necessary Prerequisite to Learning” speaks candidly of this emeregy.

The policy explicitly explicitly calls out this statistic to ground the severity of the crisis: [1, 2]

“A large proportion of students currently in elementary schools, estimated to be over five crore, have not attained foundational literacy and numeracy, i.e., the ability to read and comprehend basic text and the ability to carry out basic addition and subtraction with Indian numerals.”

Why the Policy Calls This an “Emergency”

The NEP 2020 uses unusually strong, direct language because foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) act as the critical gateway to all future education. The document openly states that if a child cannot read or do basic arithmetic by Class 3, the entire rest of the policy becomes completely irrelevant. Once a student falls behind on these baseline skills, they enter a permanent learning flatline, making it impossible to comprehend advanced subjects like science or history later on

The Annual Status of Education Report for 2024, the most authoritative ground survey of rural learning, showed a real post-pandemic recovery — the share of Class 3 children in government schools who could read a Class 2 text rose to 23.4 per cent, and those able to do basic subtraction to 33.7 per cent — gains attributable to the foundational-literacy push under NIPUN Bharat.

Author’s Explanatory Note -Expanding on the ASER 2024 Data Breakdowns

The ASER 2024 findings reveal a significant bounce-back in basic learning competencies, particularly within the public school system:

1. The Post-Pandemic Reading V-Shaped Recovery (Class 3)

• Government Schools: The percentage of Class 3 children in state-run institutions capable of reading a Class 2-level text stood at 20.9% in 2018. Following the pandemic, this figure plummeted to 16.3% in 2022. In 2024, it aggressively rebounded to 23.4%—the highest ever recorded by ASER since tracking began in 2005.

• Private School Muted Growth: In comparison, private schools experienced a much slower recovery, moving from 33.1% in 2022 to 35.5% in 2024, remaining well below their pre-pandemic high of 40.6% in 2018. This has significantly narrowed the historic learning equity gap between private and public schools.

2. The Arithmetic Rebound (Class 3)

• Overall Average: The all-India proportion of Class 3 students who can complete basic numerical subtraction problems rose dynamically from 25.9% in 2022 to 33.7% in 2024.

• Government School Growth Rate: Looking specifically at government schools, the basic subtraction success rate jumped 7.4 percentage points, climbing from 20.2% in 2022 to 27.6% in 2024.

Attributing Gains to the NIPUN Bharat Push

The report explicitly links this uncharacteristically sharp, two-year recovery curve to the structural interventions of the NIPUN Bharat Mission launched under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. The policy push succeeded on the ground due to three distinct execution shifts:

• Sustained Financial Channelling: The central government systematically diverted over ₹9,200 crore under the Samagra Shiksha framework explicitly toward foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) toolkits, teacher upskilling, and regularized school-level monitoring.

• Pedagogical Shift Away from Curriculums: NIPUN Bharat introduced daily “remedial hours” in early primary classrooms, effectively forcing schools to halt rigid textbook timelines and instead group children according to their real-time learning levels rather than their age groups.

• Granular State-Level Class Monitoring: States like Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Uttarakhand scaled localized activity-based learning. In Uttar Pradesh’s government schools, the Class 3 reading proficiency jumped a staggering 15 percentage points compared to pre-pandemic baselines due to strict administrative oversight on classroom FLN targets.

The Persistent Warning Hidden in the Data

While the upward trajectory is highly positive, education experts highlight that the absolute numbers still point to an deep learning emergency. Even with the recovery to 23.4%, it means that over 76% of all Class 3 children in rural government schools still cannot read a basic Class 2 storybook. The foundation is repairing, but the learning deficit remains massive

Recovery, however, is not arrival. The same data means that more than three-quarters of Class 3 children still cannot read at the expected level, and two-thirds cannot do the arithmetic.

A house raised on a hollow foundation does not become sound by adding storeys.

The teacher in the machine

India has crossed the milestone of over one crore school teachers, and the headline pupil-teacher ratios — around 13 to 1 at the preparatory stage, 21 to 1 at secondary — now meet the official norm of 30 to 1.

averages, however, conceal violent unevenness.

The country still runs more than a lakh single-teacher schools, where one adult teacher manages every grade, every subject, the mid-day meal and the administrative paperwork at once.

A significant share of serving teachers lack updated pedagogical training. And the workforce is split into two castes: regular teachers, securely paid forty to eighty thousand rupees a month with pension and tenure, alongside contractual ‘shiksha mitras’ doing identical work for a tenth of the dignity and a fraction of the pay. Security without accountability at one end, exploitation without security at the other — a structure almost designed to demoralise.

Quality or lack of quality of teachers and stimple absence of them lies at the heart of education crisis facing the country.

The flight from the public school

The most damning verdict on government schooling is delivered not by critics but by parents — including the poorest. Even a government office peon, who understands the machinery from the inside, will spend up to a third or half of a meagre household income to send a child to a low-cost private school.

The reasons recur with brutal consistency: chronic teacher absenteeism shielded by unsackable tenure; instruction in the regional language when parents know English is the passport to a service-sector wage; the collapse of basic learning outcomes that reduces the school to a daytime crèche; the diversion of teachers to election, census and survey duty that strips the classroom of its hours; and the simple aspiration to place one’s child among more upwardly mobile peers.

The exodus has consequences — over sixty-five thousand government schools now have fewer than ten students, and tens of thousands have been merged or closed.

The shadow system

Into the vacuum has rushed a vast, unregulated parallel economy: private coaching. Roughly a fifth of household education budgets now flows to tuition centres operating outside the formal system. As students approach the hyper-competitive entrance examinations, that spending balloons. Coaching is no longer a supplement to schooling; for the ambitious it has become the real school, and the formal institution a place to keep one’s enrolment record.

This is education rationed by purchasing power — the precise opposite of the equity SDG-4 demands.

The examination meltdown

If learning is the chronic disease, the integrity of examinations has become the acute crisis — and the one that most directly lit the fuse of youth anger. The year 2024 was a procession of disgrace. The NEET-UG medical entrance was engulfed by a paper-leak scandal with arrests across several states. The UGC-NET was cancelled the day after it was held, forcing some eleven lakh candidates to sit again. The CUET university entrance, the UPPSC RO/ARO recruitment test and the BPSC examinations were each rocked by leaks, cancellations and protests. Now serious issues of integrity has bedevilled the most ubiquitous of examination CBSE class tweelve exam.

For a generation that has staked everything on the meritocratic exam as the one fair ladder out of circumstance, the discovery that the ladder itself is for sale is radicalising.

Every cancelled paper is a year of a young life stolen; every leak is proof that effort is a mug’s game.

The regulator that lost its way

At the apex of higher education sat the University Grants Commission, increasingly seen as the embodiment of the system’s pathologies: a body burdened with the conflicting dual mandate of both regulating quality and disbursing funds, prone to one-size-fits-all micromanagement that strangled good institutions while failing to shut down fake ones. The state’s own response — the move, under the proposed Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan framework, to dissolve the UGC, AICTE and NCTE into a single regulator with separate verticals for regulation, accreditation and standards, and to strip funding powers away entirely — is itself an admission of how far the old architecture had decayed.

These six pathologies are not independent ailments. A hollow foundation produces children who drop out at secondary; demoralised teachers deepen the hollowness; the flight to private schools and coaching hardens inequality; the exam scandals corrode the last institution the young trusted; and a broken regulator lets the rot spread upward into the universities.

The system does not fail in one place. It fails as a system — which is precisely why NEP 2020 was right that it must be reconfigured as one.

CHAPTER FOUR

The SDG-4 Mirror: Where India Actually Stands

Goal 4 of the 2030 Agenda is not a single ambition but a cluster of measurable targets — universal quality primary and secondary education, universal early-childhood care, foundational learning for all, equal access for the disadvantaged, expanded skills and lifelong learning.

Held up against this mirror, India’s reflection in 2026 is one of real progress shadowed by serious shortfall. The latest UDISE+ data, for the 2024-25 school year, lets us see the face clearly.

Access: a story that thins as it climbs

At the preparatory stage the Gross Enrolment Ratio stands near-universal, around 95 per cent. But the ladder weakens at each rung. The foundational stage — the crucial three-to-eight age band that SDG-4 and NEP both insist must be universalised by 2030 — shows a GER of only about 41 per cent, a vast early-childhood gap that undermines everything built above it.

By the secondary stage, against a target of full enrolment, India sits in the high-sixties to high-seventies depending on the measure used — a gap of as much as twenty to thirty points from universality.

The honest reading is that India has very nearly solved access to primary school and has barely begun to solve it for early childhood and for the senior secondary years.

Retention: the leak that defines the system

Dropout has genuinely fallen — a real achievement worth naming. Official UDISE+ figures put the secondary-stage dropout rate at about 8.2 per cent in 2024-25, down sharply from earlier years, with preparatory and middle-stage dropout in low single digits. Yet definitions vary, and independent analyses of the same data place secondary dropout closer to 11 to 13 per cent; secondary-stage retention — the share of a cohort that actually completes the stage — remains stuck at a worrying 47 per cent.

However the figure is sliced, the message holds: India keeps children in school through the early grades and loses far too many of them at exactly the point where schooling begins to convert into employability.

Quality: enrolment is not learning

Here lies the deepest divergence between the SDG-4 ideal and Indian reality. The Goal speaks not of attendance but of “quality” and “learning outcomes.” On that test, as Chapter Three showed, the majority of children in the early grades are still below the foundational benchmark in reading and arithmetic. A system can report near-universal primary enrolment and simultaneous mass learning failure — and India does.

Enrolment was the twentieth-century battle, and we largely won it. Learning is the twenty-first-century battle, and we are losing it.

Equity: many Indias, unequally served

SDG-4 demands that opportunity not depend on the circumstances of birth. Indian schooling, as it stands, makes opportunity depend heavily on geography, gender, caste and class. NEP 2020 catalogues the socio-economically disadvantaged groups whose enrolment falls away faster than the average at every rising grade, with the steepest declines for girls within each group. Girls’ toilets exist on paper in most schools but are rendered unusable by missing water, broken doors and absent maintenance — a single infrastructural failure that drives girls out at puberty.

The north-south and rural-urban divides compound the rest, so that a child’s chances are set less by ability than by postcode.

Financing: the unbridged gap

And underwriting all of it is the financing shortfall of Chapter Two. SDG-4 cannot be funded at four per cent of GDP what was designed for six. The single most consequential number in this Volue 31 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form series is the distance between those two figures — a chronic under-investment of roughly a third, sustained across the very decades when the demographic clock was ticking loudest.

On access India has done well; on retention, fitfully; on quality and equity, poorly; and on the financing that would fix all three, not at all.

That is the mirror. It shows a country that has built the largest school system in human history and now stands at the harder threshold — turning enrolment into learning, and learning into livelihoods — with less than four years left on the SDG-4 clock.

Incremental tinkering will not cross it. Only the reconfiguration NEP 2020 named, executed against hard deadlines, will.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Reconfiguration: A Time-Bound Blueprint

To reconfigure is to redesign the architecture, not repaint the walls. What follows is a staged, time-bound programme for each of the three tiers of education, with the financing strategy that alone can make it real.

The deadlines are deliberate. A reform without a date is a wish; a reform with a date is a commitment that can be audited.

Stage One — Primary Education (Ages 3–11): Fix the Foundation First

Nothing above the foundation can hold if the foundation is hollow. The non-negotiable priority is universal foundational literacy and numeracy and genuine school-readiness from age three. The principle is simple: free the teacher to teach, test honestly and early, and anchor the school in its community.

(Image created using CHAT-GPT )

Stage Two — Secondary Education (Ages 11–18): Stop the Leak, Build the Bridge

This is where the funnel narrows, where the dropout becomes the unemployable adult, and where the high-stakes single board examination does its quiet violence. The redesign here is about flexibility, skills and the human supports — mobility and mental health — that keep an adolescent, especially a girl, in school.

Stage Three — Higher & Senior Education: Autonomy, Research, Employability

At the top the task is to rebuild trust in the examination, end the regulatory dysfunction, and close the chasm between the degree and the job. The reforms here are as much about governance as about pedagogy.

Paying for It: The Road to Six Per Cent

None of this is free, and the central fiscal truth must be stated without flinching: the reforms above are unfundable at four per cent of GDP and entirely fundable at six. Reaching six per cent of a roughly ₹365-lakh-crore economy means a combined Centre-plus-state education budget of the order of ₹22 lakh crore — with the largest share to primary education, where the foundation is fixed, and meaningful new money to secondary modernisation and to research. The gap cannot be closed from routine tax revenue alone. Three structural levers can bridge it.

Education Transformation Fund

First, restructure the existing Health and Education Cess into a dedicated, legally non-divertible Strategic Education Transformation Fund, so the money raised in education’s name cannot be spent elsewhere.

Monetise Unused Urban Land

Second, monetise the vast unused urban land that public universities hold, leasing it for knowledge-park development to generate independent matching capital.

Use CSR Fund

Third, rationalise corporate social responsibility through an enhanced tax deduction for firms that directly adopt secondary-school labs or fund national research — turning private balance sheets into public classrooms.

The deadlines cluster, by design, in the years 2027 to 2030 — the closing window of both the SDG-4 timeline and the demographic dividend. They are aggressive because the calendar is unforgiving.

A reform programme that promises results in 2045 is a programme that has already conceded defeat to the clock.

Epilogue: New Bharat in the Classroom

There is a temptation, in writing of crisis, to end in despair. That would be both inaccurate and unworthy of the subject. India has done extraordinary things in education within living memory. It took near-universal primary enrolment from a distant dream to an achieved fact. It built the largest schooling system the species has ever assembled. It has, in the last three years, demonstrably begun to claw back pandemic learning losses.

The capacity is not in question. The will, the money, and above all the speed are.

The argument of this Volume 31 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form Series is finally a single one. The young Indian holding a cockroach poster in New Delhi, the medical aspirant whose NEET paper was leaked, the village girl who left school when the toilet had no water, the engineering graduate counted as unemployable on the day he was capped and gowned — these are not separate stories. They are one story, told at different grades, about a system that promised more than it delivered. And the bill for that gap is now being presented, in the currency democracies fear most: the disillusionment of the young.

A demographic dividend is a loan the future makes to the present. Educate the young, and it is repaid with interest. Fail them, and it is called in as a debt -demographic curse.

We still hold the better end of the bargain, but not for long. The window that opened around the turn of the century will begin to close within a generation, and SDG-4’s 2030 horizon is now nearer than the day we signed it.

What is required is not another policy — NEP 2020 is a fine document, and its diagnosis that the entire system must be reconfigured is correct. What is required is execution against deadlines, the honest funding of a sixty-year-old promise made in the recommendations of Dr. Daulat Singh Kothari report (1966), and an accountability that no longer lets the Centre and the states each blame the other while a child fails to learn to read.

The future of the country as Viksit Bharat by 2047 will not be decided only in its parliaments and its courts. It is going to be decided, more quietly and more durably, in its classrooms — in whether a six-year-old learns to read, whether a fourteen-year-old stays in school, whether a graduate’s degree is worth the paper it is printed on. Teach Bharat to learn again, and the cockroach comes off the banner. Fail, and we will have squandered the one inheritance no nation is given twice. The choice, and the clock, are ours.

Akhileshwar Sahay

Multi Disciprinary Thought Leader with Action Bias

Akhil Vaani Daily Longform -31

Pune, Maharashtra India June 7, 2026

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)

Subscribe now

["AI-generated conceptual illustration: The pursuit of happiness is a journey of self-awareness, gratitude, meaningful relationships, and purposeful living."]

Prologue

The man who had everything

Between 1997 and 1999 the author held one of the most coveted seats in corporate India. As Vice President for Corporate Finance and Corporate Strategy in a large Indian house, he worked began working from the eighteenth floor of a Mumbai tower that looked out over the Mahalaxmi Race Course and, beyond it, the grey shimmer of the Arabian Sea. He was young in a country where, in those days, the corner room was still reserved for grey hair. He tasted the occasional luxury of the corporate jet, the five-course lunch on the twenty-first floor with promoters and the powerful, the swank car, the four-bedroom house in opulent Lokhandwala with its own servants’ quarter. He was paid in high six figures a month — a rarity then for a man his age. He had position, high salary, perks, power: every external thing a person is taught to want.

Bur he did not have the one thing that he cherished. He was not happy. He was, in plain truth, pathologically unhappy. Within the first year of working at the corporate house he suffered two nervous breakdowns and slid into a deep depression. He took a sabbatical and went to Manila to pursue a Master in Management at the Asian Institute of Management. One night, in five thousand nautical kilometer from Mumba merciful distance from my his own life, he read an article in the Harvard Business Review — Peter F. Drucker’s ‘Managing Oneself.’ Drucker had written it as the age of 89. The author read it many times. By the last reading he understood, with a clarity that frightened he, that I was in the wrong place. His values and the values of the corporate house he served did not match. On returning to India, the first thing the author did was resign.

He was now in a precarious situation. He had no money, no job, and no health. And yet, almost at once, he had peace that had eluded him for three years (from joining in 1997 to resigning in 2000). The peace deepened, in time, into something the author can only call happiness — a contentment that has stayed with him through every difficulty since.

This volume, the first in the “Managing Oneself” series, takes up the most misunderstood pursuit of the modern age. It is not a manual for becoming rich, famous, or successful. It is an inquiry — drawn from Aristotle and Frankl, from the longest scientific study of a human life ever conducted, and from the largest survey of human flourishing ever taken — into what happiness actually is, why it is so scarce in the wealthiest century in history, and how a person might, beginning today, become not happy, but happier.

❦ ❦ ❦

CHAPTER ONE 

The Word That Lies

The English word ‘happiness’ is, philosophically, a counterfeit coin. It pays for two utterly different goods as though they were one. The first is hedonia — the bright, brief pleasure of a good meal, a raise, a faster phone. The second is eudaimonia, the word Aristotle placed at the summit of human life in the Nicomachean Ethics: not a mood at all, but the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — a life well-lived across its whole arc.

The confusion is not academic. It is the central error of the age. We chase hedonia, call it the pursuit of happiness, and then wonder why the catch keeps slipping through our fingers. The Indian tradition saw the distinction more sharply than English permits. It separated sukha, the agreeable feeling that comes and goes, from ananda, the deep, self-existing bliss the sages held to be the very nature of being.

To confuse the two is to spend a lifetime mistaking weather for climate.

Modern science has, almost sheepishly, arrived back at Aristotle. Eudaimonic well-being — rooted in meaning, purpose, and engagement — turns out to be not only more durable than pleasure but measurably better for the body, associated with lower inflammation and longer life. Hedonic pleasure, pursued for its own sake, behaves like saltwater: the more you drink, the thirstier you grow.

I had accumulated hedonia in industrial quantities, and starved myself of eudaimonia entirely- Author of this series.

This is why the man on the eighteenth floor could have everything and have nothing. The first lesson of any honest pursuit of happiness is therefore a lesson in vocabulary — to stop using one word for two things, and to know, with precision, which one you are actually chasing.

There is a deeper irony hidden in the very phrase. When Jefferson wrote the ‘pursuit of happiness’ into the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, the word he reached for did not mean the chasing of pleasant feelings; in the idiom of the eighteenth century it meant something closer to the practice of a flourishing, virtuous life — eudaimonia by another name.

Two and a half centuries of consumer culture have quietly swapped the meaning beneath the word, so that a phrase that once pointed toward Aristotle now points toward the shopping mall. We did not abandon the pursuit of happiness. We forgot what we were pursuing.

CHAPTER TWO

The Treadmill and the Mirage

In the 1970s the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell gave the modern world one of its most uncomfortable findings and named it hedonic adaptation (Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell coined the term in their foundational 1971 paper, Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society). The concept, colloquially known as the "hedonic treadmill", explains that human beings have a stable baseline level of happiness. No matter how many good or bad things happen to us, we tend to emotionally adapt and return to our baseline

Human beings, they showed, return to this baseline level of contentment after almost any change of fortune, good or bad. The promotion, the larger flat, the newer car — each delivers its spike of pleasure, the spike subsides, and the baseline quietly reasserts itself.

We are running, all of us, on a treadmill: faster and faster to stay in the same emotional place.

Worse, the treadmill is rigged. The research of Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California, Riverside in her work "Hedonic Adaptation to Positive and Negative Experiences", established that we adapt far more completely to good events than to bad ones — an evolutionary alarm system that kept our ancestors alert to danger, but leaves the modern citizen disproportionately wounded by every setback and numbed to every gain.

The deepest trap, however, is not adaptation but anticipation. Laurie Santos of Yale, whose course ‘Psychology and the Good Life’ became the most popular in that university’s three-century history, calls it miswanting: we are systematically, reliably wrong about what will make us happy. We predict that the raise, the house, the recognition will lift us — and they do, for a fortnight. Arthur Brooks, who teaches happiness at Harvard, calls these pursuits false idols: money, power, pleasure, fame. Not evil in themselves, but lethal when mistaken for the destination.

Explanatioary Note: The “Four Idols” Framework

Brooks teaches that humans are susceptible to chasing four primary, “false idols”:

1. Money

2. Power

3. Pleasure

4. Fame (or Adoration)

He emphasizes that these pursuits are not inherently evil or immoral. However, they become “lethal” to true well-being when used as substitutes for deeper fulfillment. People make the mistake of using them as the destination rather than byproducts of a meaningful life. Because our biology compels us to always want more of these things, chasing them leads to an endless, exhausting treadmill (what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill)

The author knew none of this on the eighteenth floor of Essar House abutting Mahalaxmi Race Course at Bombay. He assumed, as almost everyone does, that the gap between his circumstances and his contentment was a gap that more circumstances would fill. It was the one arithmetic that never balanced.

The mirage receded at exactly the speed at which the author advanced toward it.

CHAPTER THREE

The Money Question, Honestly Answered

No question in this field is more abused than the one about money, and the honest answer is more interesting than either slogan. ‘Money cannot buy happiness’ is false; so is its opposite.

The truth has a shape.

Chronic financial insecurity inflicts real and measurable psychological harm; poverty is not ennobling, and no serious researcher pretends otherwise. And this author seen penury at its worst.

Above a threshold of comfortable sufficiency, however, the relationship between income and day-to-day emotional well-being flattens dramatically. Higher income continues to lift life satisfaction — the cognitive verdict we render when asked to rate our lives as a whole — but its effect on how we actually feel from hour to hour is modest once the basic terrors of want have been answered.

This is the paradox the author lived. By any Indian measure of the late 1990s he was rich, and he was among the unhappiest men he knew. His salary purchased a magnificent vantage over the Arabian Sea and bought him precisely nothing of the contentment he had assumed it guaranteed. The error was not in earning. The error lay in expecting the earning to do work it was never able to do.

We sell the substance to buy the symbol, and call it ambition.

The useful reframing is sufficiency rather than slope. Enough money removes the corrosive anxiety of insufficiency, and that removal is worth a great deal. Beyond enough, each additional rupee buys a thinner slice of joy while quietly demanding hours, attention, and relationships — the actual raw materials of happiness — in exchange.

Many a fortune is, in the end, a trade in which the seller does not know what he has given away.

The science here has matured beyond its own famous slogans. An early and much-cited study suggested that emotional well-being rose with income only up to a ceiling and then plateaued; later and more careful work complicated the picture, finding that for most people well-being continues to climb gently with income, but that for an unhappy minority no amount of money lifts the mood, because money was never the wound. The synthesis is subtle and, the author thinks, correct: money buys the relief of problems, not the presence of joy. It can purchase the absence of a particular kind of misery.

Money cannot manufacture meaning, and it cannot manufacture love — and those, not income, are where happiness is actually stored.

CHAPTER FOUR 

What the Happiest Nations Know

Each year on 20 March, the International Day of Happiness, the World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It ranks nations on a single deceptively simple question — where, on a ladder of zero to ten, do you place your own life — and seeks to explain the answers through six variables: income, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and the perception of corruption.

In the 2025 edition, for the eighth consecutive year, Finland stood first. The Nordic nations swept the upper ranks. Two newcomers, Costa Rica and Mexico, entered the top ten — neither remotely among the world’s wealthiest — while the United States fell to its lowest position since the report began. India ranked 118th.

What explains the pattern is not wealth but its distribution — and trust. The Nordic welfare model does not make Finns rich; it makes them safe. When the state insures citizens against life’s great catastrophes — illness, unemployment, old age — a low hum of existential anxiety simply switches off. The 2025 report turned, fittingly, on benevolence: it measured whether people believed a lost wallet would be returned by a stranger. Finland scored extraordinarily high. The happiest societies, it emerges, are the ones whose members quietly expect kindness from one another. Costa Rica and Mexico make the same point from the opposite direction — their warmth flows from familismo, the dense cohesion of family and community that wealthier, more individualistic nations tend to corrode in their climb.

CHAPTER FIVE 

The Eighty-Five-Year Answer

If the World Happiness Report photographs nations, the Harvard Study of Adult Development films a human life. Begun in 1938, in the depths of the Great Depression, it is the longest scientific study of happiness ever undertaken. It started with two improbable cohorts — Harvard sophomores and boys from Boston’s poorest neighbourhoods — and has now followed them, their wives, and their children across three generations and more than eighty-five years, gathering medical records, brain scans, and the small confidings of ordinary lives.

Out of that mountain of data, its director, the psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, distils a single sentence: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Not money. Not fame. Not cholesterol, IQ, or social class. The strongest predictor of who would grow into a contented and healthy octogenarian was not wealth at fifty but satisfaction in relationships at fifty. Warm attachment protects the body and the mind; loneliness, Waldinger has said plainly, is as corrosive to health as smoking.

The good life is built on good relationships — and good relationships must be tended.

Author’s Explanatory Note on Harvard Study

he World Happiness Report provides a snapshot of a nation’s collective wellbeing at a specific moment in time, while the Harvard Study of Adult Development functions as a longitudinal “film”—tracking the unfolding, day-to-day realities of human lives over decades.

Origins of the Study

• Begun in 1938, it is the longest scientific study of adult life ever conducted.

• It originally tracked 724 men: 268 Harvard undergraduate students (the Grant Study) and 456 impoverished boys growing up in inner-city Boston (the Glueck Study).

• Over the decades, the study has been expanded to include the spouses and the children of the original participants, bringing the total number of individuals studied to well over 1,000 across multiple generations.

The Core Findings

Contrary to what many people assume, the study’s primary conclusion is not based on wealth, career achievements, or fame:

• Relationships are the ultimate key: The most consistent finding is that positive, strong interpersonal relationships are the single greatest predictor of lifelong happiness, health, and longevity.

• Quality over quantity: Being surrounded by a large social circle or being in a toxic relationship is less impactful than the quality and warmth of your close, secure relationships.

• Physical health: People who were more socially connected to family, friends, and community were happier, experienced less physical pain in old age, and even lived longer than those who were isolated.

The Methodology

Researchers have utilized a relentless, multi-pronged approach to “film” these lives over time. Every two years, participants are asked extensive questions about their lives. Researchers interview them in their living rooms, review their medical records, draw blood, scan their brains, and even videotape them talking to their spouses about their deepest concerns.

The Secret of Aging

The study’s directors, Dr. Robert Waldinger and Dr. Marc Schulz, emphasize that the good life is built on choices. It is not too late to improve one’s happiness, as even participants who had a rocky start in youth often flourished in old age when they found fulfilling connections and purpose.

The finding of the Harvard study is humbling because it cannot be bought, and liberating for the same reason. Relationships need no income bracket; they ask only for time and attention — the two resources the modern professional surrenders most readily.

The study’s quiet instruction is to treat one’s closest bonds not as a backdrop to a career but as the work itself: a single neglected friendship revived, a single message sent without occasion, can do more for a life than another rung of the ladder. Personalities, the study also found, are never set in plaster; the train wrecks of twenty-five became, often enough, the serene elders of eighty.

Waldinger, who is also a Zen priest, speaks of ‘social fitness’ — the idea that relationships, like muscles, atrophy through neglect and strengthen through use. His prescriptions are almost embarrassingly concrete: replace some screen time with people time; revive a stale relationship by doing something new together; reach out to the family member you have not spoken to in years.

The hard work of tending to friends and family, Waldinger concedes, is neither glamorous nor finished — it is lifelong. But it is the single investment with the highest and most reliable return any human being can make, and it is open at every age, including the present one, to anyone willing to lift the telephone.

CHAPTER SIX

Why the Young Are Not Flourishing

In 2025 the Global Flourishing Study — a five-year, forty-three-million-dollar collaboration between Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, Baylor University, and Gallup — released the first wave of the most comprehensive investigation of human well-being ever conducted: more than 200,000 people across 22 countries.

Most Disquieting Finding

The most disquieting discovery of the study concerned the young. For decades, happiness across a lifetime was understood as a U-curve: high in youth, sagging in midlife, rising again in age. The new data found the curve broken.

In country after country, adults aged eighteen to twenty-nine are no longer flourishing — not merely in happiness, but in meaning, purpose, relationships, and health.

Why, in the most materially abundant moment in history, should its inheritors be the least content? Several forces converge. The comparison machine of social media offers a permanent, curated exhibition of other people’s triumphs, forever shifting the goalposts of ‘enough.’ The attention economy fractures the very interior conditions — stillness, slow conversation, absorption — in which contentment grows. An epidemic of loneliness has thinned the web of relationships the Harvard study identified as decisive.

And beneath it all lies a deficit of meaning: a consumer culture that has, with great efficiency, substituted acquisition for significance, and discovered too late that the substitution does not hold.

There is one durable thread of good news in the data. Wherever people remained embedded in something larger than themselves — family, community, faith, shared purpose — flourishing held.

The young are not failing. They have been handed a civilisation rich in stimulation and poor in belonging, and asked to be happy in it.

The encouraging corollary is that the damage is, in part, reversible — and quickly. Controlled studies of brief digital withdrawal report striking effects: a single week away from social media has been found to reduce anxiety, depressive symptoms, and insomnia by double-digit margins in young adults. The mechanism is the interruption of upward comparison — the ceaseless measuring of one’s ordinary life against the curated highlight reels of everyone else.

Attention, in the end, is the most precious non-renewable resource a person owns; happiness cannot grow in a mind whose attention has been perpetually colonised. To reclaim it is not self-denial but the precondition of every other practice in this essay.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Drucker Test: Knowing Where You Belong

It was Drucker who rescued the author and published in May/June 1999 edition of Harvard Business Review belongs at the centre of any serious pursuit of happiness, because it locates the problem where most of us refuse to look — not in our circumstances, but in the fit between ourselves and our circumstances. ‘Managing Oneself’ poses five plain questions. What are my strengths? How do I perform — as a reader or a listener, alone or in concert? What are my values? Where, given the first three, do I belong? And what, therefore, should I contribute?

Drucker offered two instruments. The first is feedback analysis: whenever you make a consequential decision, write down what you expect to happen, then compare the result months later. Patterns emerge that flatter no one and instruct everyone. The second he called the mirror test — ask what kind of person you wish to see in the glass each morning, and refuse to become anyone else for any salary. His sharpest warning was the one that found this author on the eighteenth floor of Essar House at Mahalaxmi Mumbai: an individual’s values must be compatible with the organisation’s, or the person will be frustrated and will not perform.

A mismatch of values is not a discomfort to be managed. It is a slow poison.

That sentence dissolved two years of inexplicable misery into a single legible cause for the author. The author realised he was not weak; He was misplaced. His values and the values of the corporate house he served did not match, and no quantity of perks could reconcile them. The pursuit of happiness, it turns out, is very often the pursuit of alignment — of arranging one’s life so that what one does, what one is good at, and what one believes point in the same direction. When they diverge, unhappiness is not a malfunction. It is an accurate signal.

The cure is rarely to feel differently about the wrong place; it is to find the right one.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Three Macronutrients

Arthur Brooks, who teaches ‘Leadership and Happiness’ at Harvard, offers the most useful working model this author knows. Happiness, he argues, is not a single substance but a balanced diet of three macronutrients — enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the protein, carbohydrate, and fat of a contented life.

Enjoyment is not the same as pleasure. Pleasure is an animal event in the limbic brain; enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory, processed in the higher cortex. A drink alone is pleasure; the same drink among friends, recalled fondly years later, is enjoyment. ‘If you are doing it alone,’ Brooks likes to say, ‘you are probably doing it wrong.’

Satisfaction is the joy that follows struggle — the reward of having earned something hard. It cannot be bought, only worked for, which is why a life engineered to remove all friction also removes all satisfaction. We do not relish the meal, Brooks observes, because we are never allowed to be hungry.

Meaning, the third and most neglected nutrient, answers two questions: why am I alive, and for what would I sacrifice? It is least abundant precisely among the young who need it most.

From this comes Brooks’s reframing of the entire enterprise. Your task, he insists, is not to become happy, as though happiness were a finish line; it is to become happier — to move, by better habits, in the right direction.

And the method is subtraction, not addition. Do not be the painter forever adding to the canvas of your wants; be the sculptor, chipping away desire and attachment until what remains is enough. Happiness rises not when we enlarge what we have, but when we shrink what we crave.

Beneath the model lies a single mental skill that Brooks calls the secret: metacognition, the capacity to observe one’s own cravings, emotions, and appetites without being commanded by them. The question he presses on his students is the oldest in philosophy made personal — do you wish to be managed by your appetites, or to manage them? It is the modern restatement of the inscription at Delphi, know thyself, and of the Indian injunction to watch the restless mind rather than obey it. Negative feelings, on this view, are not malfunctions to be numbed but alarms to be read.

A person who can sit with discomfort long enough to ask what it is signalling has already taken the first and hardest step out of unhappiness — the step from reaction to awareness.

CHAPTER NINE

The Discipline, Not the Destination

There is a final paradox that undoes the unwary: the direct pursuit of happiness reliably destroys it. People who set happiness as an explicit goal come to read every ordinary disappointment as evidence of failure, and so manufacture the very unhappiness they flee. Frankl with whose qoute this Volume 30 of the Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form seires saw it from inside the concentration camps — happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue, as the by-product of a life given to something beyond itself. The Harvard psychologist Susan David makes the same point in modern dress: emotions are data, not directives. Loneliness, sadness, restlessness are not proof that happiness has failed; they are navigational instruments, pointing toward what a life actually lacks.

The empirical literature, distilled by Brooks, suggests that roughly half of our happiness range is set by genetics, a quarter by circumstance, and a quarter by intentional habit.

The first is fixed; the second changes slowly; but the last quarter is available this very evening. Its levers are unglamorous and well-proven. Gratitude, written down with specificity, retrains attention toward what is present rather than what is missing. One relationship, deliberately deepened, outperforms a hundred kept shallow. Twenty minutes of movement, taken as medicine and not as discipline, lowers the chemistry of stress. Absorbing work — the flow that Csikszentmihalyi described, in which time and self dissolve — nourishes far longer than any pleasure. Giving, freely and visibly, lifts the giver more than the gift.

Self-compassion, the kindness we extend to a struggling friend turned inward upon ourselves, dissolves the shame spirals that masquerade as motivation. Guarded sleep and a protected, undivided attention are the soil in which all the rest can grow.

Seek not happiness as a destination, but happierness: small, repeated, sustainable improvement.

None of these is a cure. Together they are a practice — a discipline rehearsed daily, the way one tends a garden, not the way one wins a prize.

CHAPTER TEN 

The Great Indian Paradox

That India ranks 118th in the World Happiness Report should provoke neither denial nor despair, but reflection. The number sits awkwardly beside the country’s self-image — a civilisation that gave the world the vocabulary of ananda, that exported yoga and meditation as the technologies of inner peace, that has long believed itself spiritually rich however materially poor.

Part of the gap is methodological: the ladder question rewards the optimism of comfortable societies, and an Indian comparing his life to an ideal scores himself sternly. But part is real, and worth naming. India is living through the precise transition that hollowed happiness in the West — only faster.

The joint family, that indigenous welfare state of grandparents and cousins, is thinning into the nuclear and the solitary. The smartphone has delivered the comparison machine to a population whose aspirations have been set sprinting by a decade of visible growth.

The young, in India as everywhere, carry the heaviest load of all — abundant in opportunity, anxious in spirit.

Yet India also holds, still, much of what the happiest nations are straining to recover: the dense web of family, the reflex of hospitality, the lost wallet that finds its way home, the inherited certainty that one belongs to something older than oneself. The Indian pursuit of happiness need not be an import. It is, more truly, an act of conservation — of guarding the social warmth and the interior practices the rest of the world is now scrambling to relearn, even as we rush to discard them in the name of progress.

CHAPTER XI

Begin Where You Are

The road to a happier life is not paved with grand gestures — a new city, a new partner, a new career. It is laid, stone by patient stone, with small repeated choices: the three gratitudes written before sleep, the walk taken without a phone, the friend telephoned without occasion, the kindness offered to oneself in a moment of failure, the work chosen because it fits rather than because it pays.

The longest study of happiness, now in its ninth decade, keeps arriving at the same unspectacular conclusion: the people who fared best were not those who achieved the most, but those who kept returning to the relationships, the meaning, and the presence that genuinely filled them rather than merely stimulated them. The largest survey of flourishing says the same in a different key: belonging beats abundance. Aristotle said it first, twenty-three centuries ago, and the genome and the brain scan have only confirmed him.

That is the whole architecture of a happy life. Not a monument, raised once and admired. A garden — tended daily, in small, unglamorous, faithful acts. The pursuit of happiness, rightly understood, is not a chase at all. It is the quiet decision to stop chasing, and to begin, instead, to cultivate.

❦ ❦ ❦

Epilogue - If I am asked

When I walked out of that 22 floor tower at Majalaxmi Mumbai for the last time, I had, by every ledger the world keeps, lost. No money. No job. No health. The eighteenth-floor view of the Arabian Sea passed to someone else, along with the jet, the car, the lunches with the powerful. I should, by the world’s arithmetic, have been ruined.

Instead, for the first time in three years, I could breathe.

It would be dishonest to claim the years that followed were easy; they were not. There were difficulties galore, and some of them were severe. But the unhappiness that had clamped itself to my chest on that high floor never returned, because its cause had been removed. I was no longer living a life whose values were not my own.

Peace came first, as a kind of silence after a long noise. Happiness followed, more slowly, the way a garden follows the decision to plant one. Even today I have little money but I have inner peace, I am contented and I am happier than ever.

I have spent the decades since reading the science set out in these pages, and I find in it only the formal confirmation of what that resignation taught me in a single afternoon. Happiness is not a prize awarded to the successful. It is a discipline available to the willing. It does not arrive when we finally have enough; it arrives when we finally know what enough means, and arrange our lives — our work, our relationships, our attention, our meaning — in accordance with that knowledge.

If I am asked what I would do, knowing all I now know, the answer is the one I have already lived: I would choose the alignment over the perks, the people over the position, the quiet garden over the loud tower. I would, in Drucker’s phrase, manage myself. And I would begin, as I am asking you to begin, exactly where I stand — today, and in small things.

Akhileshwar Sahay

(Multi Discplinary Thought Leader and Life Coach)

Akhil Vaani · Daily Long Form Series, June 6, 2026, Pune , India · 2026

Author’s Note

Author for long wanted to write this rarely told story and he is writing this Volume 29 special “Sports Watch” edition of Akhil Vaani Long Form series sitting at his work station in Pune (earlier Poona), but before he started researching for this story, little did he know that like Chess was first invented in ancient India and the game of snooker was invented in Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh India, the modern game of badminton too was not only invented in India, but my adopted home city Pune (earlier Poona) and from their it spread acrtoss countries and continents.

Volume 29 of the Akhil Vaani long form series is the enigmating story of that game which Pune gave to the world. And this story is retold in chapters that follow.

PROLOGUE

The Feather and the Republic

There are sports a nation plays, and there are sports a nation feels. For seventy-five years cricket monopolised the second category in India, leaving everything else to scrape by on the first. Then, almost without warning, a small white feather began to do what willow and leather had long claimed as their exclusive private right — it made a billion people hold their breath at the same instant. When P.V. Sindhu walked out for an Olympic final, when Saina Nehwal lifted a limp arm to the crowd at Wembley, when two young men named Satwik and Chirag stood atop the world rankings, India discovered that it had quietly built a second sporting religion. Its idol was the shuttlecock.

But the story of badminton in India, even post independence began much earlier and their have been many torchbearers to this story except that India forgets to remember them unless forced

The irony is exquisite. The modern game that now stirs Indian pride was, in the most literal sense, made in India. It was conceived on the cantonment lawns of Poona by bored British officers, refined by them, exported to a Gloucestershire estate, and then handed back to the colonised as a finished European discipline with an English name.

India invented the pastime, the empire claimed the patent, and a free India spent the next century earning back the right to call the game its own. That circular journey — from Poona to Badminton House and home again — is the spine of this special edition Sports Watch of Volume 29 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long-Form Series.

But this is not a nostalgia trip. It is a reckoning.

For all the medals, India’s shuttlers still negotiate their careers in a peculiar twilight: world champions who chase sponsors, Olympic medallists who are omitted from funding lists, prodigies from small towns who cannot find an indoor court within a hundred kilometres. The same country that produces a Thomas Cup champion cannot reliably produce a clean, well-lit hall in which a fourteen-year-old can learn to serve.

The talent is organic; the system is improvised. And that is my India even in the second quadrant of twnety first century.

This long-form earticle traces the full arc — the two-thousand-year prehistory of the flying feather, the colonial birth of the modern game, the founding of its federations, the pioneers who built the domestic game from nothing, the twin academies of Padukone and Gopichand that industrialised excellence, the women and men who turned competence into glory, and the doubles revolution that finally took India to world No. 1.

It ends where every honest account of Indian sport must end: with a blueprint. Ten structural reforms, each one a load-bearing pillar, that could carry badminton from the academies of Bengaluru and Hyderabad to every district between Kashmir and Kanyakumari — including a professional circuit built to last, on the proven scaffolding of the IPL and the WPL.

This is the story of how a garden game became a republic of its own. And of the work still left undone.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER ONE

Two Thousand Years of the Flying Feather

The shuttlecock is older than almost any equipment in modern sport. Records of games involving feathered projectiles and small bats survive from ancient India, China and Greece, reaching back nearly two millennia. In China, children kicked a weighted shuttle in a game called ti jian zi; in Greece and across the classical Mediterranean, players volleyed light objects with the palm and paddle.

The impulse to keep a feather aloft, it seems, is close to universal.

Medieval and early-modern Europe formalised the instinct into a parlour pastime. Battledore and shuttlecock asked two players to keep a feathered cork airborne with small paddles for as long as possible — a game of cooperation rather than conquest, with no net, no court and no winner beyond the longest rally. In the seventeenth century, European aristocrats played a closely related diversion they called jeu de volant.

None of these had a net; none kept score in the modern sense. They were rituals of grace, not contests of dominance.

India invented the pastime, the empire claimed the patent, and a free India spent a century earning back the right to call the game its own.

The decisive transformation — from genteel rally to competitive sport — did not happen in a European drawing room. It happened on the parade grounds of British India, where an old subcontinental amusement was about to be given a net, a rulebook and, eventually, a most improbable name.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER TWO

Born in Poona, Christened at Badminton House

Around the 1860s, British army officers garrisoned in India encountered an indigenous shuttlecock game that locals had played for generations. Stationed in the cantonment town of Poona — today’s Pune — the officers made the change that turned pastime into sport: they strung up a net and began to play across it, keeping score. They called their adaptation “Poona,” after the town, and in 1867 set down the first informal written rules of the game in India.

In the Khadki area of the Poona cantonment half an hour distance from my work station, the framework of a competitive discipline took shape.

Southern India contributed its own twist to this seldom talked tale. In and around the Tamilnadu region, a variant called ball badminton — played with a woollen ball rather than a feathered shuttle — was already popular, and resourceful soldiers borrowed from it, switching to a ball when wind or rain made the shuttlecock unplayable.

The game that travelled back to England was thus a genuine hybrid: an Indian amusement, militarised, netted and rule-bound.

Retiring officers carried Poona home in their kit. There, in 1873, it caught the eye of the Duke of Beaufort, who introduced it to guests at a lawn party on his Gloucestershire estate. The estate’s name was Badminton House — and as the story goes, when intrigued guests asked what the new diversion was called, the answer became simply “the Badminton game.” The name of a stately home, attached almost by accident, displaced the name of an Indian town. Poona became Badminton, and the label stuck to the sport forever.

The name of an English stately home, attached almost by accident, displaced the name of an Indian town.

It is one of sport’s great quiet ironies. The game’s competitive DNA was Indian; its christening was English; and the two facts have coexisted, largely unexamined, for a century and a half.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER THREE

From Poona Rules to the Laws of the Game

A name is not a rulebook. The 1867 Poona rules were a beginning, but the codification that produced the modern sport happened in England. As badminton moved from garden novelty to club pursuit, it needed standard dimensions, a consistent net height and an agreed system of scoring. The Bath Badminton Club, formed in 1877 as the first club dedicated to the sport, took up the task. About a decade later it rewrote the loose colonial rules into a coherent framework, and those Bath rules established the architecture of modern badminton.

Formal governance followed. The Badminton Association of England was founded in 1893 — the first national body of its kind — and it consolidated and published the laws of the game, giving the sport a single authoritative reference. Within a few years the same association launched the tournament that would become badminton’s crown jewel.

The All England Open Badminton Championships, first held in 1899, is the oldest badminton tournament in the world. For most of the twentieth century, before a formal world championship existed, winning the All England was understood to be the de facto world title — which is precisely why Prakash Padukone’s 1980 triumph there would mean so much. The game born in Poona had acquired, in England, both its laws and its highest altar.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER FOUR

The Federations Rise: IBF, BWF and the Birth of Indian Badminton

As badminton spread across continents, it needed a global custodian. In 1934 nine founding national associations — England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand and France — established the International Badminton Federation (IBF) as the world governing body. In 2006 the IBF was renamed the Badminton World Federation (BWF), the name it carries today. India affiliated to the world body in 1936, joining the international fold barely two years after its creation.

According to Olympic.com the Badminton Association of India (BAI) was established in 1899, six years after the Badminton Association of England (BAE). It is one of the oldest badminton governing bodies It was formally rechristened the Badminton Association of India in 1940.

The Regional Artitecture

The regional architecture came of age after Independence. The Mysore State Badminton Association — founded on 20 May 1951 in Bangalore by Ramesh Padukone, father of the legendary Prakash Padukone, and fellow enthusiasts, with H.V. Krishna Murthy as its first secretary — became one of the most consequential state bodies, evolving into today’s Karnataka Badminton Association. The West Bengal Badminton Association, championed by the Sarat Kumar Mitra, was likewise among the earliest regional pioneers. From these state cells the organised domestic game grew.

India invented the pastime; in 1999 (some accounts mention the year as 1934) it helped build the institutions; in 2022 it finally conquered the world.

Competition kept pace with administration. The Inter-University (South Zone) tournament held in Bangalore in 1949 was among the earliest organised events, and in 1936 the BAI staged the first Indian National Badminton Championships — the country’s longest-running domestic competition — whose inaugural men’s singles crown went to Vijay Madgavkar. Badminton entered the Olympic programme at Barcelona 1992, with Deepankar Bhattacharya and U. Vimal Kumar representing as India’s first male Olympians and Madhumita Bisht it lone female entry. Mixed doubles was added as an Olympic event in 1996.

The scaffolding of a global, Olympic sport was complete — and India was inside it from the very beginning.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER FIVE

The Pioneers: From Madgavkar to Natekar

Long before satellite television and academy production lines, Indian badminton was built by amateurs who travelled at their own expense, strung their own rackets and dominated a domestic circuit that the world barely noticed.

Those men and women are the forgotten foundation on which every present day medal won by contemporary Indian players rests.

A Journey Begins From Vijay Madgavkar to Prakash Nath

Vijay Madgavkar stands at the very origin, the starting point of Indian bandminton winning the inaugural national men’s singles title in 1936 and becoming, in effect, India’s first national champion.

In the 1940s the game found its first genuine rivalry in Prakash Nath and Devinder Mohan, who between them controlled the mid-decade nationals.

Prakash Nath created hisotry 1947 by becoming the first Indian to reach the men’s singles final of the All England Championship — an astonishing feat for an Indian of that era, and a near-miss that foreshadowed Padukone’s eventual conquest more than three decades later.

The Girl Power- Poona Siblings Sizzle

The women’s game had its own dynasty in the Deodhar sisters — Tara, Sunder and Suman — three siblings from Poona (now Pune) who effectively monopolised the women’s singles, doubles and mixed brackets through the 1940s and early 1950s.

In an age when few Indian women competed in any sport at the national level, their sustained dominance was both athletic and quietly revolutionary, normalising the sight of women at the top of a competitive arena.

They travelled at their own expense and strung their own rackets — the forgotten foundation on which every modern medal rests.

The Gentleman Genius - and his Arjuna Award

If one man personified the pre-modern golden age, it was Nandu Natekar. Revered as the “Gentleman Genius” for his elegant strokeplay and impeccable sportsmanship, Natekar won an astonishing seventeen national titles across singles, doubles and mixed categories between 1953 and 1970.

In 1956 Natekar became the first Indian ever to win an international tournament abroad, the Selangor International in Malaysia — a genuine watershed that proved an Indian could beat the world’s best on foreign soil.

When the government instituted the Arjuna Award, Natekar became, in 1961, the first badminton player to receive it. He was India’s first sporting pin-up in the game, drawing crowds who came simply to watch him play.

Deepening the Talent Pool

Around and after Nandu Natekar, a supporting cast deepened the talent pool: Dinesh Khanna announced India on the continental stage by winning the Asian Championships in 1965 and climbing to a world ranking of around No. 3; Suresh Goel competed credibly on the international circuit; and the Ghosh brothers, Romen and Dipu, carried the Bengal tradition forward.

These were players who operated without sponsorship, sports science or structured coaching, sustained largely by clubs, employers and their own obsession.

Birth of the Legend - Miracle Man

One June 10, 1955 a at Kundapore in Karnataka a baby boy was born to Ramesh Padukone (who was the secretary of the Mysore Badminton Association) and Ahilya Padukone. The parents gave the name Prakash (translates to Light," "Brightness," or "Illumination" in English) ". This boy while still a boy ushered in revolution to the game of badminton in - it rested on his shoulder to bridge the amateur past and the professional future- indomitable and legendary, one and only one-Prakash Padukone .

The author has culled out the most authoritative biopgraphy of Prakash Padukone from Olympic.com and Encylopedia Brittanica. Here is encapsuled the Britannica version -

(Quote) Prakash Padukone (born June 10, 1955, Bangalore [Bengaluru], India) is an Indian badminton champion who dominated the national badminton scene for almost a decade (1971–80) and put India on the sport’s international map.

Padukone won the national senior championship in 1971 at age 16, thereby becoming the youngest player to have achieved the feat. He won each successive national championship until 1979, setting a record of nine national titles in a row.

In 1978 he won the singles badminton gold medal at the Commonwealth Games. The following year he completely dominated the top European players of his era and won both the Danish Open and the Swedish Open.

His greatest accomplishment came in 1980 when he became the first Indian to win the All England Championships, the world’s most prestigious annual badminton competition. The All England win catapulted Padukone to the number one world badminton ranking, making him the first Indian to achieve that status.

Padukone won the first Alba World Cup in October 1981 at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the first Indian open prize-money tournament, the Indian Masters (now the India Open), at Pune in November. In 1982 he won the Dutch Open and the Hong Kong Open, and at the 1983 world championships, Padukone won the bronze medal in men’s badminton.

In 1989 he retired from the competitive badminton circuit, and in 1994, along with fellow national champion Vimal Kumar, he founded the Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Its alumni include national champions such as Pullela Gopichand and Aparna Popat.

Padukone was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian honours, in 1982. (Unquote)

The twain Prakash Padukone and Pullela Gopichand scripted the history of badminton in India as this generation knows of -they became the architects of a new ecosystem that India needed desperately and did not have.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER SIX

Padukone and Gopichand: The Architects of an Ecosystem

On 23 March 1980, at London’s Wembley Arena, a 24-year-old Prakash Padukone became the first Indian to win the All England Open — then the unofficial world championship. Facing Indonesia’s feared two-time defending champion Liem Swie King, a man famed for explosive jump-smashes, Padukone refused to trade power. Instead he dismantled King with exquisite touch, precise baseline lobs and deceptive net drops, winning 15–3, 15–10 and completing the entire tournament without dropping a single game.

That year he also took the Danish and Swedish Opens and rose to world No. 1 — the first Indian to reach the summit of the rankings.

The Insitution Builder

But Padukone’s deepest contribution was institutional, not personal. In 1994 he established the Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy in Bengaluru, creating a serious, modern training base where Indian talent could be developed at home rather than abroad.

He later co-founded Olympic Gold Quest, a foundation that funds and supports Indian athletes across sports. He turned individual genius into a pipeline.

A Titan Arrives

His most famous protege completed the chain. Pullela Gopichand, mentored in the Padukone tradition, won the All England Open in 2001 — only the second Indian to do so — and then made the choice that would define Indian badminton for a generation: he retired into coaching.

The Gopichand Badminton Academy, established in Hyderabad in 2008, became the production line of modern Indian badminton, mortgaging his own house to build it.

Padukone turned individual genius into a pipeline; Gopichand turned that pipeline into a national factory of champions.

From Gopichand’s courts emerged Saina Nehwal, P.V. Sindhu, Kidambi Srikanth, Parupalli Kashyap and a generation of others. As national coach he presided over India’s rise from occasional contender to perennial medal threat.

Between them, Padukone and Gopichand performed the rarest act in sport: they did not merely win, they built the architecture that allowed others to win after them. Every Indian medal of the last fifteen years carries their fingerprints.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER SEVEN

Saina and Sindhu: The Women Who Moved the Nation

Saina Sizzles

If Padukone gave Indian badminton its first global champion, Saina Nehwal gave it its first mass audience. A product of the Gopichand academy, she became the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal in badminton, taking bronze at London 2012 — a result that changed the public imagination of who could win for India.

In 2015 she went further, reaching the final of the World Championships and ascending to world No. 1, the first Indian woman ever to hold the top ranking.

Across her career Saina collected a string of Super Series titles and Commonwealth and Asian medals, and she did it with a combative, never-say-die style that made her a household name far beyond badminton’s usual reach.

Sindhu Amazes

Where Saina opened the door, Pusarla Venkata Sindhu walked through it and rebuilt the house. Taller, with a thunderous smash and extraordinary stamina, Sindhu turned India’s women’s game from a story of breakthroughs into one of sustained presence at the very top.

Her medal cabinet is unmatched among Indian shuttlers: silver at Rio 2016 and bronze at Tokyo 2020, making her the first Indian woman — and only the second Indian individual athlete ever — to win two individual Olympic medals.

Saina opened the door and gave the women’s game its first mass audience; Sindhu walked through it and rebuilt the house.

The Summit

Then came the summit. At the 2019 World Championships in Basel, Sindhu won gold — becoming the first Indian, woman or man, ever to be crowned world champion in badminton. After a run of agonising silver medals at the Worlds, she had finally turned the corner from gallant runner-up to undisputed best on the planet on a given day.

The image of Sindhu draped in the tricolour, and the prime-time hysteria around her finals, did for women’s badminton what no policy document ever could: it told millions of Indian families that a daughter with a racket was a daughter with a future.

Their rivalry-cum-partnership also powered the team game. Together Saina and Sindhu carried India to back-to-back Uber Cup bronze medals — the women’s world team championship — in 2014 and 2016, India’s best-ever showings in that event.

Saina and Sindhu were never merely athletes; they were a recruitment campaign in human form, and the queues outside academies across the country are, in large part, their doing.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Men’s Brigade: From Kashyap to Lakshya and the New Prodigies

The men’s revival ran on a parallel track. Parupalli Kashyap was the trailblazer of the post-Padukone generation — the first Indian man in 32 years to reach an Olympic singles quarter-final, at London 2012, and the Commonwealth Games singles gold medallist in 2014.

He proved that an Indian man could once again be a fixture in the deep rounds of major events, and he later coached his wife Saina, keeping the family in the heart of the game.

Kidambi Srikanth took the baton and sprinted. In a sensational 2017 he won four Super Series titles in a single season — a feat that briefly made him the most in-form player on the planet — and in April 2018 he rose to world No. 1, the first Indian man since Padukone to top the rankings. In 2021 he became the first Indian man to reach a World Championships final, settling for silver but raising the ceiling once more. Alongside him, H.S. Prannoy built a reputation as one of the toughest match-players in the world, a giant-killer whose World Championships bronze in 2023 capped years of grit.

Each generation lifts the ceiling for the next — from Kashyap’s quarter-final to Srikanth’s No. 1 to Lakshya’s Olympic semi-final.

The torch now burns brightest in Lakshya Sen. A product of the Padukone academy from the hills of Almora, Uttarakhand, Sen won World Championships bronze in 2021, Commonwealth Games gold and reached All England Open final twice becoming the runner-up in both the 2022 and 2026 editions of the prestigious tournament, and at Paris 2024 reached the Olympic semi-finals making history as the first male Indian shuttler to achieve this feat in the men's singles even— finishing an agonising fourth, the closest an Indian man has come to an Olympic singles medal. His blend of speed, fitness and front-court craft makes him the standard-bearer of the current era.

Behind him, a new wave has already broken. Ayush Shetty, the towering young man from coastal Karnataka, announced himself by winning the US Open in 2025 — his maiden BWF World Tour title — having stunned higher-ranked opponents en route, and has since climbed inside the world’s top twenty. Priyanshu Rajawat, an Orleans Masters champion, adds further depth.

After the 73-year drought, this group — Sen, Srikanth, Prannoy, Shetty and the doubles stars — powered India to its first-ever Thomas Cup gold in 2022 and a second Thomas Cup medal, bronze, in 2026. The men’s game is no longer a story of lone heroes; it is a deepening squad.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER NINE

The Doubles Revolution: Satwik, Chirag and the Climb to No. 1

For decades, India was a singles country in a sport where the world’s powers won as much through doubles. The women’s pair of Jwala Gutta and Ashwini Ponnappa first cracked that ceiling, winning Commonwealth Games gold in 2010 and a historic World Championships bronze in 2011 — proof that Indians could medal in the discipline.

But it took a new century’s pairing to truly conquer it.

Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty — “SatChi” to their fans — rewrote what code. Combining Rankireddy’s ferocious smash, reputed among the hardest-hit in the world, with Shetty’s control and court craft, they won Commonwealth Games gold in 2022, multiple Super 500, 750 and the landmark Super 1000 Indonesia Open titles, and Asian Games gold in 2023.

That continental triumph carried them, in October 2023, to world No. 1 — the first Indian pair ever to top a doubles ranking. They have remained an elite top-tier pairing since, even through injury-disrupted seasons.

For decades India was a singles country in a doubles sport; Satwik and Chirag finally rewrote the grammar of Indian badminton.

The doubles renaissance now runs across all three categories. In women’s doubles, Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand have reached a career-high world No. 11 and competed deep at World Tour Finals; in mixed doubles, the partnership of Dhruv Kapila and Tanisha Crasto has climbed into the world’s top twenty.

Doubles is the discipline where India’s depth is now most visible — and, not coincidentally, the surest route to future team and Olympic medals. The country that once produced only singles soloists has learned, at last, to play in pairs.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER TEN

The Class of 2026: A Roll Call

Indian badminton in 2026 fields a genuine multi-category squad — veterans still competing at the highest level beside teenagers already beating world No. 1s. The table below maps the leading names across all five disciplines, with year of birth and indicative recent world ranking. (Rankings are dynamic and shift weekly; these reflect the broad standing through the 2025–26 cycle.)

Source: BWF World Rankings and BAI, 2025–26 cycle; rankings indicative.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Paradox of Glory: Why Champions Still Chase Sponsors

Here lies the strangest fact in Indian badminton. A country that has produced an Olympic silver medallist, a world champion, world No. 1s in both singles and doubles, and a Thomas Cup title cannot reliably pay, equip or house its athletes.

The medals are world-class; the support system is third-class.

The root cause is structural and cultural: cricket absorbs the overwhelming share of India’s sporting money, mindshare and media. A single IPL franchise commands sponsorship that the entire badminton ecosystem can only dream of, and corporate India, rational in its caution, follows eyeballs.

The result is a documented absurdity.

When H.S. Prannoy was ranked world No. 7, he publicly lamented on social media that he still struggled to attract brand backing — and warned that the lack of support sends a chilling message to every youngster weighing a career in the sport. Years earlier, accomplished doubles internationals Jwala Gutta and Ashwini Ponnappa were left out of a flagship government funding scheme even as less-decorated names made the list, exposing how arbitrary the allocation could be.

A country that has produced a world champion and world No. 1s still cannot reliably pay, equip or house its athletes.

Several forces compound the problem. Badminton is largely an individual sport, so it lacks the season-long, city-based franchise narrative that lets cricket and football monetise loyalty week after week.

Government funding, channelled through schemes such as the Target Olympic Podium Scheme, tends to concentrate on a narrow band of established, near-certain medallists — leaving the broad middle of the talent pyramid, precisely the players who need help to make the leap, under-resourced. Doubles and mixed pairs, India’s richest medal seam, have historically attracted less funding than singles stars.

And the infrastructure itself can embarrass the nation.

At the January 2026 India Open in New Delhi, visiting world-class players complained openly about hazardous air pollution and playing conditions, with one top seed preferring to pay a fine rather than compete — a humiliating advertisement, on home soil, for a system that produces champions almost in spite of itself.

The talent is bursting through the cracks; the question is whether India will finally pour the concrete to support it.

✦ ✦ ✦

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ten Pillars: A Blueprint from Kashmir to Kanyakumari

Inspiration is not a strategy. If India wishes to convert sporadic brilliance into structural dominance, it must build deliberately. What follows are ten load-bearing reforms — each a pillar — to deepen badminton across every district of the republic.

1. A Permanent Franchise League, Built to Last

Revive and institutionalise the Premier Badminton League on the proven IPL–WPL template: a fixed annual window, city-based franchises with home-and-away ties, salary caps, multi-year media-rights deals and a transparent auction. The earlier league lapsed precisely because it lacked calendar certainty and broadcast continuity.

A durable league gives players guaranteed income, gives sponsors a season-long narrative to invest in, and gives small-town fans a local team to follow — the single most powerful lever to convert badminton’s popularity into recurring money.

2. A District-to-State Talent Pyramid

India’s champions still emerge by accident from a handful of pockets. Build a formal, funded pyramid: school leagues feeding district championships, feeding state academies, feeding national centres of excellence. Mandate inter-school and inter-district badminton in every state, with standard equipment grants.

A structured pyramid ensures that a gifted child in Manipur, Mizoram or rural Maharashtra is discovered at ten, not stumbled upon at twenty — widening the base from which the next Sindhu or Satwik can rise.

3. Courts in Every District — the Concrete Reform

Talent cannot grow without venues. Launch a public–private mission to build climate-controlled indoor halls with regulation flooring and lighting in every tier-two and tier-three city, from Srinagar to Madurai. Use viability-gap funding and corporate CSR to anchor construction, and hand operations to local associations.

Without drift-free, all-weather courts within reach of ordinary families, the sport remains a metropolitan privilege. Concrete and good lighting are as decisive to a future medal as any coach.

4. A Professionalised Coaching Pipeline

India over-relies on two academies and a few iconic coaches. Institute a national coaching-certification ladder — from grassroots to high-performance — with continuous education, fair pay and clear career paths. Incentivise retired internationals to coach in their home regions rather than migrate to the metros.

Multiplying qualified coaches across the country is the only way to scale the Padukone–Gopichand model beyond Bengaluru and Hyderabad and into the districts where raw talent currently goes uncoached.

5. Sports Science and Injury Management

The injury-marred seasons of India’s top stars expose a thin support layer. Embed physiotherapists, strength-and-conditioning experts, nutritionists and sports psychologists at every state centre, not just the national camp. Create a centralised athlete medical record and load-management protocol.

Badminton’s explosive demands wreck unprepared bodies; the difference between a decade-long career and a flameout at twenty-three is often the quality of science behind the player. Protect the asset you have spent years building.

6. Transparent, Athlete-Led Governance

Federation disputes and opaque selection have repeatedly distracted from performance. Reform the BAI and its state units with fixed tenures, independent audits, published selection criteria and genuine athlete representation on decision-making boards.

Clean, predictable governance is not bureaucratic housekeeping — it is the precondition for sponsors, broadcasters and parents to trust the system with their money and their children. Trust, once institutionalised, compounds.

7. A Sponsorship and Tax-Incentive Framework

Make backing badminton commercially rational. Offer enhanced tax deductions for corporates that sponsor non-cricket athletes and academies, and create a centrally administered athlete-endorsement and image-rights framework so players can monetise fame without exploitation.

When a world No. 7 must plead publicly for brand support, the market has failed and policy must correct it. Align private incentives with national sporting interest, and the money will follow the medals.

8. Funding the Junior-to-Senior Bridge

India produces world-class juniors who vanish in the brutal transition to the senior tour, where travel and coaching costs explode. Create dedicated travel and training grants for the U-19 to U-23 band, so a junior world medallist is not forced to ration tournaments for lack of funds.

The leap from junior promise to senior champion is where most Indian careers die quietly; financing that bridge is among the highest-return investments available.

9. A Dedicated Doubles and Mixed Programme

Doubles and mixed are India’s richest, least-exploited medal seam — yet they remain under-funded relative to singles glamour. Establish specialist doubles academies, pair-formation camps and dedicated doubles coaches from the junior level upward.

The Satwik–Chirag breakthrough proved the ceiling; a deliberate programme would turn one historic pair into a permanent conveyor belt of world-class combinations across men’s, women’s and mixed events.

10. Broadcasting, Fandom and a Women’s Circuit

Visibility creates value. Negotiate stable, high-quality broadcast and streaming of domestic events, invest in athlete storytelling, and launch a women’s professional circuit on the WPL model to capitalise on the Saina–Sindhu generation’s pull.

A sport that is seen is a sport that is funded; a sport that is funded is a sport that produces champions. Close the loop, and badminton becomes self-sustaining rather than perpetually rescued.

✦ ✦ ✦

EPILOGUE

The Next Feather Rises

In a stadium in Guwahati not long ago on October 19, 2025, a sixteen-year-old named Tanvi Sharma chased a silver medal at the World Junior Championships while a watching nation barely noticed. In Council Bluffs, Iowa, a twenty-year-old named Ayush Shetty toppled the world’s sixth-best player and lifted his first senior title. In Almora, in Mangaluru, in small towns whose names rarely reach a sports page, children are picking up rackets because, two decades ago, a girl from Hyderabad named Saina decided that an Indian could be the best in the world.

That is the quiet truth of this story. India did not inherit badminton greatness; it manufactured it, against the grain of a cricket-saturated culture, on improvised courts and personal sacrifice.

The arc from Vijay Madgavkar’s 1936 national title to Sindhu’s 2019 world crown to the Thomas Cup gold of 2022 is not a series of lucky breaks. It is the cumulative interest on a century of stubborn devotion — from pioneers who paid their own airfares to coaches who mortgaged their homes.

India did not inherit badminton greatness; it manufactured it, against the grain, on improvised courts and personal sacrifice.

And yet the work is half-finished. A nation that can win the Thomas Cup but cannot guarantee a clean indoor court in every district has not yet built a system worthy of its talent. The ten pillars in this essay are not utopian; they are the unglamorous plumbing of sporting success — leagues, courts, coaches, science, money and trust. Lay them, and the feather that was born in Poona, christened in Gloucestershire and brought home by a free India will not merely fly. It will, at last, belong to everyone — from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

Akhileshwar Sahay

Multi Sector Thought Leader with Action Bias

Akhil Vaani — Long Form Series 29 • Pune, India June 5, • 2026

Authors Note

In 1958 when this author was born India’s urban population was approximately 74 to 75 million people. In 2026 as he will turn 68 years, urban population of the country is estimated at 555.3 million. If he survives till 2050 (he wwill be 92 by then-his both parents survived beyond that age) India’s population will be 951 million as per World Bank July 2025 Report titled “Towards Resilient and Prosperous Cities in India”. Unsurprising then, by 2070, India’s urban population of India will cross 1 billion almost equal to then total population of China at 1.09 billion.

It is a techtonic shift never witnessed before at the Planet Earth. Cities abd towns are ebgines og growth, prosperity and innovation. But they also bring inbuilt inequity and exclusion unless the urban form is deliberately tailored to counter them. Indubitably, urbanisation brings in its wake unprecedented opportunities but it also brings equally complex humongous challenges in its train.

The Equation

The foundational question at this stage is, what the massive unprecented urbanisation of India by 2050 (less than two and half decades from now) and by 2070 (less than four and half s decades from now) entails across key metrics. Here are the key projections and infrastructural needs in brief according to World Bank’s July 2025 report Towards Resilient and Prosperous Cities in India” prepared along with Government of India, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA)-

• Infrastructure Demand: Over 50% of the urban infrastructure that will exist in 2050 is yet to be constructed.

• Housing Requirements: To accommodate the mographic shift to accomdodate 1 billion urban dwellers , more than 144 million new homes will be needed by 2070.

• Economic Impact: Urban areas will become massive economic engines, with cities projected to generate 70% of all new jobs by 2030 and account for 75% of India’s GDP by 2050.

• Investment Required: Developing climate-resilient and low-carbon urban infrastructure is estimated to cost around $2.4 trillion by 2050.

This is a long order. But the author cautions this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Series within the Series

Beginning this Volume 28 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long-Form series, every week the author, week by week will unravel one aspect of urbanisation of India and will do a comprehensive 360-degree analysis. In that respect Volume 28 should be considered as a new beginning of a weekly series within the overarching ambit of Akhil Vaani daily long form series.

A fundamental question arises at this point- where to begin? . As a foundational starting point, the author must begin with “The Unfortunate Triad”, the historical blunder the constituent assembly made while giving the finishing touches to the Constitution of India, that formed the Republic on January 26, 1950 which has shaped the doing and undoing of India upto now.

The Unfortunate Triad

In every narrative of Government of India (GoI) within or outside the Parliament an oftrepeated governmental position (and consequent firm belief) is that urban development is a state subject. This position has remained unchanged over decades. Here is what the GoI tabled on the floor of the Parliament on August 21, 2025.

“[ (Quote) As per the provisions of Article 243 W of the Constitution, in conjunction with the Seventh and Twelfth Schedules, matters relating to urban development fall within the purview of States/ Urban Local Bodies (ULBs). (Unqote)”.

Beyond Half Truth- The Plain Lie

This statement is not even a half truth but a plain lie. Though this statement on the floor of the Parliament came during the third tenure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the author humbly submits that from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to the latest government, it is the same position helf and firmly believed governments of the day. I also submit humbly that for the first two prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shashtri, urban development was not even a residual area of concern.

By claiming decades long government of India’s stated position of “urban development is a state subject” is a plain lie, this author must have crossed the red line and it is time to explain the readers “why what the author says is the correct interpretation of the constitution.”

[ Clarification: Author neither holds a degree in law nor is a an expert of Constitutional Maters, but between the years 2006 and 2011, had singlehandedly wage a war against National Urban Transport Policy, 2006 (duly approved by Union Government) whose para 6 erroneously stated that “the responsibility for management of urban areas (and thus urban transport) belonged to state government, thereby making metro rail construction and operation in cities too, the responsibility of state government in gross violation of Article 366 (20) and Item no Article 246 Seventh Schedule, Item 22 of List I (Union List). It took six years of battle by the author for the constitutional anomaly, at least with regard to metro rail construction and operation to be partially as state subject to be partially revoked after 2011 (as part of the recommendation of the Working Group on Urban Transport for the Twelfth Five Year Plan headed by Metro Man E. Sreedharan of which the author was a member) but by that time the extensitive damage was already done as two states Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, through private sector concessioning (PPP) had already awarded the construction and operation of Hyderabad Metro (to L&T) and Mumbai Metro Line -1 (to Reliance Infrastrcutre) shockingly under Tramways Act, 1870 against express prohibition of Article 366 (22) of the Constitution not because “Metro Rail” had anything to do with “tramways” but under Item 13 of List II (State List), tramways was the only urban transport which states were authorised to develop under Tramways Act, 1870.]

Even though as per Constitution of India and as per Railway Act 1890 (and latest version Railway Act, 1989) metro rail construction, operation and management was the responsibility of Union Government such confusion as created by National Urban Transport Policy subsisted at least for a decade. With laest assertion , the author is opening another pandora’s box and he is not sure whether the imroglio will be solved in his life time. And by then it may become too late for Urban India to recoup what it loses in next two decades.

With above backgrounder the author stands up Your Lords (readers figuratively) to present and defend his case with the opening salvo which the author has decided to call, the “Unforunate Triad”

The Orphan in the Founding Text

When the Constitution was adopted in 1950, the framers gave the city no name and no future. The only entry in the entire Seventh Schedule (in the Constitution promulgated originally) that so much as touched urban India was Entry 5 of List II, the State List, which read — and still reads — as follows:

“Local government, that is to say, the constitution and powers of municipal corporations, improvement trusts, district boards, mining settlement authorities and other local authorities for the purpose of local self-government or village administration.”

Readers, read tthe above pargagraph, first fast and then slow closely you will subtly decipher that the orphaning was enshrined in the grammer, rather written in caligrapy in the final approved manuscrip of the Constitution. Entry 5 of List II is an entry about the constitution and powers of bodies — who may create which local authority — not about the developing, planning, financing, or building of cities and towns.

The word “urban” does not appear; the city enters only obliquely, as “municipal corporations,” one item in a catalogue of local authorities, while the operative purpose clause culminates, tellingly, on “village administration.” Scan the rest of the Schedule and there is no entry titled urban development, none titled town planning, none titled urbanisation, in any of the three Lists.

Urban matters were left to be inferred and split between this Entry 5 and Entry 18 (”Land”), neither carrying a developmental mandate, with no Union or Concurrent locus to give the Centre a champion’s role. The city in the Constitution of India as adopted, if at all was thus a subject of administration but never of development — and the municipalities meant to run it had, until 1992, no constitutional existence of their own. India’s urban question was, from the first day, nobody’s clear responsibility.

Sanctified by the Village Ideal, Contained by the Plan

This was not mere drafting oversight; it was an ideology sanctified into neglect. Mahatma Gandhi’s conviction that “India lives in her villages” — that the true India was to be found not in its few cities but in its hundreds of thousands of villages — gave the omission a moral halo, casting the city as the morally suspect alternative to the authentic, rural nation.

[ The author must at this stage bring into open two famous paragraphs written by Mahatma Gandhi that majorly negatively impacted, rather constrained and curtailed the growth of urban India for decades after independence. Here they are-

1. The half a dozen modern cities are an excrescence and serve at the present moment the evil purpose of draining the life-blood of the villages. . . . The INDUSTRIALIZE – AND PERISH! Cities with their insolent torts are a constant menace to the life and liberty of the villagers. (Young India, 17-3-1927, p. 86)

2. I regard the growth of cities as an evil thing, unfortunate for mankind and the world, unfortunate for England and certainly unfortunate for India. The British have exploited India through its cities. The latter have exploited the villages. The blood of the villages is the cement with which the edifice of the cities is built. I want the blood that is today inflating the arteries of the cities to run once again in the blood vessels of the villages. (Harijan, 23-6-1946, p. 198)

The above firm belief of Mahatma Gandhi not only heavily influenced policies of India for decades even though with the efflux of time those views failed to have the temporal value

Prime Minister Nehru too focused majorly on rural development and agriculture with the following instruments-

• Community Development Programmes (CDP): Launched in 1952, this was his primary grassroots initiative designed to transform rural life through infrastructure, public health, cooperative farming, and education.

• The Green Revolution Foundations: The First Five-Year Plan dedicated the largest chunk of funds to agriculture and irrigation. Nehru famously championed large multipurpose dams (like Bhakra Nangal) as the “temples of modern India,” primarily to provide water for rural crops and electricity.

• Panchayati Raj: To empower villages and bring democracy to the grassroots, he initiated democratic decentralization, enabling remote populations to manage local development.

Nehruvian industrialism, ostensibly the city’s ally, thus proved no friend either: the Second Plan built brand-new townships at Bhilai, Rourkela, and Durgapur, but treated them as appendages of factories rather than as cities to be governed and serviced . Even creation of Chandigarh had a different political purpose.

So two opposed visions converged on a single neglect.

Worse, the planning apparatus turned actively hostile, treating urbanisation less as an engine than as an affliction to be contained. Industrial licensing discouraged factories near the largest cities, hardening by the 1980s into rules barring manufacturing within tens of kilometres of major metros (Supreme Court mandated no 'H-category') industry within 10 km of NCT radius. Delhi Master Plan 2040 strictly prohibits the setup of new heavy or large-scale industries inside the National Capital Territory (NCT). Only household, service-oriented, or light-green industries are permitted in designated urban zones. Also slums were consideed blots on the city map andwere cleared rather than improved. “Decongestion” became the watchword.

The signature urban scheme of the Sixth Plan (1980–85), the Integrated Development of Small and Medium Towns, was itself an expression of the bias — its purpose to divert growth away from the great cities toward smaller ones, to manage urbanisation by dispersing it. Right through the Sixth Plan, the city was approached as a problem to be restrained. Only with the Seventh Plan (1985–90), and the National Commission on Urbanisation (1986 set up by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and headed by Charles Correa) that informed it, was urbanisation finally reframed as an economic phenomenon to be harnessed rather than a curse to be suppressed.

A Birth Certificate Without an Inheritance

The one constitutional chance to retrieve the orphan came in 1992 with the Seventy-fourth Amendment — and it arrived half-baked. The Amendment did real work: it gave municipalities constitutional status through a new Part IX-A, mandated five-yearly elections, reserved seats including for women, fixed terms, established State Finance Commissions, and set out eighteen municipal functions in a new Twelfth Schedule of the Constituttion. But its operative provisions were drafted in the permissive, not the mandatory, mood (the amendment was not best practices but a compromise with regional parties openly hostile to it), and there the states quietly recaptured the power.

The Great Folly- Compromise, Compromise and Comprmise

The final 74th amendement that turned out to be a great compromise and the nnature of this compromise is evident in several key structural designs:

• State Discretion Over Devolution: The Amendment gave the States the constitutional mandate to create Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) and hold regular elections. However, the actual devolution of powers, authority, and responsibilities (as listed in the 12th Schedule) was left entirely to the discretion of individual State Legislatures.

• No Independent Finances: Rather than giving municipalities direct constitutional taxation powers, the Amendment required municipalities to depend on State Governments for grants and tax assignments. It only mandated the creation of a State Finance Commission to recommend how the pie is split, rather than granting ULBs financial autonomy.

• The “Third Tier” Paradox: The amendment was intended to elevate local bodies to a recognized third tier of government. Yet, because States are reluctant to dilute their own power, many key provisions—such as the creation of Wards Committees and empowering District Planning Committees—were either selectively implemented or watered down by State laws over the year

Article 243W the operative article of the constitution insrted by the 74th Amendment (and that Union governments have trumpeted to interpret that urban development is the responsibility of the state government) merely says that the legislature of a state “may, by law, endow” municipalities with powers — may, not shall — making the transfer of functions discretionary; the Twelfth Schedule’s eighteen subjects are illustrative, not binding; and as seen above Article 243X leaves even the power to authorise municipal taxation to the state’s discretion. Few states indeed have transferred all 18 functions to even better endowed municpal corporations of metropolitan cities.

Resultantly the famous three Fs — funds, functions, and functionaries — were never genuinely devolved together. Water, transport, and planning remained with state departments and unelected parastatals; Metropolitan and District Planning Committees went unconstituted in city after city; and there was neither activity-mapping to fix responsibility nor any penalty for non-compliance.

The Bitter Truth

The 74th Amendment was, in truth, a federal bargain that the states would accept only because it demanded nothing of them: it handed the city a birth certificate but withheld the inheritance, a skeleton the states were free to leave without flesh.

The orphan of 1950 was at last named in 1992 — but it was never endowed

The author rests his case regarding urban development being the orphan here. Readers can make their own conclusion while the author after a long backgrounder moves to the main subject matter of Volume 28 of Akhil Vaani Daily Long form series.

Prologue to Volume 28

The Decade the Cities Won

Sometime in the decade after 2001, without fanfare or constitutional ceremony, India crossed a threshold it can never recross. For the first time since the Republic took its first census in 1951, the towns and cities of India added more human beings to their numbers than the villages did. Between 2001 and 2011, urban India swelled by roughly ninety-one million people while rural India grew by ninety. The needle had not merely moved; the centre of gravity of the Indian urbanisation story had begun, quietly and irreversibly, to migrate from the rural field to the urban street.

[ Authors Note: This author distinctly remembers that till 2005 the tagline of the website of Governemt of India, Ministry of Urban Development was “India lives in it villages”. Also few readers rearding this article will no that Ministry of Urban Developent as a separate Ministry in Government of India was first created in 1985 by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi with Abdul Gafoor becoming the first Minister of MoUD in September 1985. But between 1985 and 2005 the Ministry remained largely defunct with the flagship JNNURM programme of urban renewal was launched December 2005 after two decades of setting up the MoUD]

Indians rarely mark the moment between 2001 and 2011 when the population of the urban India grew faster than that of the rural India because us Indians have been taught to imagine their nation as a country of seven hundred thousand villages, a Gandhian republic of the soil. That self-portrait was once true and is now a weird sentimental fiction. Every third to fourth Indian today lives in a town or city. Every fifth Indian lives in a genuine city.

The urbanite is no longer a migrant guest in the national imagination; he and she are becoming the protagonists of it.

And the protagonists are restless. The same cities that generate the lion’s share of national income are the cities that drown each monsoon, choke each winter, ration water each summer, and bury their poor in settlements the law refuses to name. India has built an economy that runs on its cities while building a polity that still pretends cities are an afterthought.

That contradiction is the core subject of this Volume 28 of Akhil Vaani daily long-form series.

The stakes could not be plainer. India has staked a national vow on becoming a developed economy by 2047, the centenary of its freedom, with an output measured not in the four trillion dollars of today but in the thirty to forty trillion of that imagined future. There is no honest arithmetic by which that ambition is met in the village. It will be earned, or forfeited, on the urban frontier — in the productivity of cities yet half-built, in the competence of municipal governments yet half-empowered, in the liveability of streets that today test the patience of the saints.

This is, therefore, not a lament. It is a ledger and a warning and, finally, an argument: that the Republic’s last two decades of the first century and its entire second century will be decided in its cities, and that the window to build them well is narrowing with every monsoon we waste.

Here in is the story after the Prologue.

Chapter 1. The Arithmetic of an Urban Century

Numbers, soberly read, are the beginning of seriousness. When the first census of independent India was taken in 1951, the country counted roughly 62.4 million town-dwellers — about 17.3 per cent of a population still overwhelmingly rural. Over the seven decades that followed, that figure did not grow; it multiplied, and the rhythm of its multiplication is itself a story.

Seventy years of the census count

The table below weaves its own story aloud-

Once a reader reads the final column from top to bottom and the plot reveals itself. Each decade added more urbanites than the last, until the 2001–2011 decade delivered the historic inversion — ninety-one million new town-dwellers against roughly ninety million new villagers. The cities had, for the first time, out-grown the countryside in absolute terms. India had become, in motion if not yet in majority, an urbanising nation.

Yet the official share — 31.2 per cent in 2011 — flatters to deceive in the opposite direction. India’s definition of “urban” is among the most conservative on earth, demanding minimum population, density and a male non-agricultural workforce before a settlement is granted urban status. The World Bank’s agglomeration analysis has long suggested (at least one decade ago) that more than half of Indians already live in places that function as urban even while the census files them as villages. The true frontier, in other words, is wider than the map admits.

India is far more urban than its census is willing to confess.

Where the count stands now — and where it is going

The 2021 census of India was postponed and remains, at the time of writing, not yet conducted in the field — a statistical blackout of historic proportions for a nation in demographic flux. In its absence, the United Nations’ estimates carry the weight of authority. By the most recent UN-based reckoning for 2026, India’s urban population stands at roughly 532 million — about 36 to 37 per cent of the nation. The country that began its republican life with 62 million urbanites now has more town-dwellers than the entire population of the United States- 1.52 times to be precise.

The forward projections are where the two great reference works of 2025 speak. The World Bank’s July 2025 report, Towards Resilient and Prosperous Cities in India, prepared with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, projects that India’s urban population will very nearly double to about 951 million by 2050 — and that meeting their needs will require more than 144 million additional homes by 2070 and over 2.4 trillion dollars of resilient, low-carbon urban investment by 2050. The United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects 2025, released in November 2025, places India among only seven countries — alongside Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Bangladesh and Ethiopia — that will together add more than 500 million city-dwellers between 2025 and 2050, over half the world’s entire urban increase. India and China alone, the UN notes, now account for nearly 1.2 billion urban residents.

The shape of the urban giant

The aggregate hides a skyline. India now has five megacities of more than ten million people, and New Delhi, at an estimated 30.2 million, ranks among the four largest urban agglomerations on earth, in the company of Jakarta, Dhaka and Tokyo. Kolkata holds a place in the global top ten; Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai remain the great pumping stations of jobs and capital. Yet the most consequential finding of the UN’s 2025 assessment is counter-intuitive: India’s megacities are beginning to slow. Delhi, having gained more than twelve million residents between 2000 and 2025, is projected to add only some three and a half million over the next quarter-century. The frontier of growth is shifting decisively toward small and medium towns — the very settlements least equipped to manage it. By 2050, the UN expects even a town such as Hajipur in Bihar to cross the ten-million threshold.

A word on definitions, because they have changed. The 2025 edition of the World Urbanization Prospects introduced a new three-tier classification, separating “cities” from “towns” from rural areas, and under it roughly forty-five per cent of humanity now lives in cities and a further thirty-six per cent in towns. This re-cut the global league tables — Jakarta, on the new method, overtakes Tokyo as the world’s most populous urban region. For India the lesson is methodological humility: the very meaning of “urban” is unstable, and a serious urban policy must plan for the town as much as the metropolis.

India against the giants

Scale is best felt by comparison. Set India’s roughly 532 million urbanites of 2026 beside the two countries that bracket it. The United States, after two centuries of urbanisation, houses about 280 million people in its towns and cities — some 83 per cent of its population. China, having compressed a century of urban transformation into four decades, now counts well over 940 million urbanites at roughly 68 per cent.

The proportions are arresting. India’s urban population is already about 1.9 times that of the United States — nearly double — even though India is far less urbanised in percentage terms. Against China, the relationship inverts: India’s urban multitude is barely 0.56 of China’s, which is to say China’s cities hold close to 1.8 times the people India’s do. India is, in short, more urbanised than its modesty admits, less urbanised than its rival, and adding people to its cities faster than almost any nation on earth.

Chapter 2. The Engine and Its Understatement

If population is the visible face of urbanisation, economic output is its hidden engine. And here the Indian city has been doing the heavy lifting of the national economy for far longer than the national imagination has acknowledged.

At the dawn of the Republic, urban India was a junior partner in the economy. In 1950–51, the towns and cities are estimated to have generated a little under thirty per cent of national output — roughly twenty-nine per cent by the standard reckoning — while agriculture and the village economy carried the balance. Over the following seventy years, that share climbed steadily, decade upon decade, as manufacturing, trade, finance and services concentrated in the urban grid.

.

By the time of the 2011 census, the most widely cited figure — used by the Government of India, by McKinsey’s influential India’s Urban Awakening, and echoed by the World Bank — held that urban areas contributed around sixty-two to sixty-three per cent of national GDP from less than a third of the population. The World Bank’s own current framing is blunt: India’s cities already generate roughly sixty-three per cent of output, a share projected to climb toward seventy per cent by 2036.

A third of the people, two-thirds of the output. The city is the engine; the question is whether we will service it.

A necessary caveat on the famous number

Honesty requires a flag. The sixty-three per cent figure, though ubiquitous, is contested. Scholars of urban economics, among them Professor Om Prakash Mathur, have argued that a rigorously measured urban contribution — properly netting out what is genuinely produced within municipal boundaries — is materially lower, and that the headline number conflates state-level output with city output. Compounding the difficulty, manufacturing has been quietly “ruralising” in India: a majority of manufacturing value added is now generated outside urban limits, the opposite of the East Asian pattern.

The precise share is therefore less a settled fact than a live debate. What is not in dispute is the direction: the urban contribution is large, rising, and destined to dominate.

The under-serviced engine

Here lies the central irony of the Indian economy. The asset doing two-thirds of the work receives a fraction of the maintenance. Credible estimates put the urban infrastructure investment India requires at roughly 1.2 per cent of GDP each year; between 2011 and 2018 the country actually spent about half that — some 0.6 per cent. The World Bank reckons India must invest on the order of 840 billion dollars in urban infrastructure by 2036 alone, an average near 55 billion dollars a year, and over 2.4 trillion dollars by 2050 to make its cities resilient and low-carbon. Against that need, central and state governments still finance the overwhelming bulk of urban infrastructure while commercial finance contributes a sliver.

India is, in effect, running a Formula One engine on the servicing budget of a bullock cart — and then expressing surprise when it overheats each monsoon and seizes each summer.

The arithmetic of forty trillion

Now to the wager. If India is to stand among developed economies by 2047 with a gross domestic product in the range of thirty to forty trillion dollars — a roughly ten-fold leap from today — the cities must not merely participate; they must carry the burden.

On any credible model, the urban share of output by 2047 would need to reach somewhere between seventy-five and eighty per cent may be even more. In concrete terms, that means Indian cities and towns would have to generate at the minimum on the order of twenty-four to thirty-two trillion dollars of annual output — an urban economy several times larger than the entire Indian economy of today.

That is the true measure of the task. It is not that cities should help India become developed. It is that there is no arithmetic in which India becomes developed and its cities do not become, by a wide margin, the overwhelming source of its wealth.

Everything that follows in this Volume 28 of the Akhil Vaani long form series — every fault line, every act of neglect, every reform deferred — is a tax levied against that twenty-four-to-thirty-two-trillion-dollar future.

Chapter 3. Ten Fault Lines Beneath the Engine

An engine asked to do the work of an economy cannot run on a chassis built for a village republic. Ten structural fault lines run beneath the Indian city, and each is a brake on the productivity the nation is counting upon.

The structural ledger, in brief

1. Governance and empowerment.

Three decades after the 74th Constitutional Amendment, most mayors are ceremonial and most powers still rest with state governments and parastatals; the city has responsibility without authority.

2. Habitat and housing.

An acute shortage of affordable, legal, well-located housing forces the poor into informal settlements and the middle class into unviable commutes.

3. Water security.

Intermittent supply, depleting groundwater, and non-revenue water losses approaching forty per cent leave even major cities rationing in summer.

4. Solid and liquid waste.

Most urban sewage flows untreated into rivers and seas; mountains of unsegregated solid waste poison land, air and water.

5. Municipal finance.

Own-source revenues are thin, property tax is under-collected, and cities depend on transfers rather than bankable, creditworthy budgets.

6. Master planning and land.

Outdated master plans, rigid floor-space limits, and opaque land markets choke supply and inflate prices.

7. Urban data and capacity.

A postponed census, weak municipal cadres, and absent geospatial systems mean cities are governed half-blind.

8. Climate and disaster resilience.

Heat-island temperatures three to four degrees above surroundings, recurrent urban flooding, and shrinking green cover threaten lives and billions in losses.

9. Urban mobility- of people and freight.

Car-centric growth, thin public transport, and unsafe streets for pedestrians and cyclists congeal into chronic congestion. Mobility of freight and logistics is no ones baby.

10. Air and environmental pollution.

Indian cities routinely top the world’s most-polluted lists, exacting a vast toll in health, productivity and premature death.

Above ten are a small subset of a long laundry list of urban challenges. Akhil Vaani long form “Urban Watch” series will tackle them one by one, one article once a week.

The Indian city has been handed the responsibilities of a nation and the powers of a municipality.

From list to logic

Also the above key ten challenges are not a random catalogue; they form a causal chain. It begins with governance, because a city that cannot decide cannot deliver. The 74th Amendment of 1992 promised democratic, empowered urban local bodies, yet in most states the genuine instruments of power — water, transport, planning, policing — remain with state departments and parastatal agencies.

The elected city is thus accountable for outcomes it does not control.

From that root grows the failure of habitat, water and waste, the three daily humiliations of urban life. Housing that is legal, affordable and well-located is scarce, so a quarter or more of urban Indians live in settlements the state will not formally recognise. Water arrives for an hour a day in cities that lose nearly two of every five litres to leakage and theft. Delhi loses 58 percent. Sewage and solid waste, the unglamorous arithmetic of public health, are mostly untreated; rivers double as drains.

Underneath sits the fiscal fault line: cities that cannot raise their own revenue cannot plan, borrow or build. India’s urban capital spending has hovered less than half of what credible estimates say is required. And around all of it now closes the climate vice — the heat island, the flooded street, the poisoned winter air — converting yesterday’s neglect into tomorrow’s catastrophe. Mobility and pollution, the daily experience most citizens name first, are in truth the downstream symptoms of the nine failures above them.

It is worth dwelling on those two, for they are where the abstract failures become flesh. Indian cities recur, year upon year, near the summit of the world’s most-polluted rankings; the winter air of the northern plains shortens lives by measurable years and saps the productivity of the workforce a developed India is counting on. Congestion, meanwhile, is not merely an irritation but a levy — billions of working hours dissolved in traffic, fuel burned at a standstill, freight slowed, ambulances stranded. A city that cannot move its people and goods cannot compound its productivity, and productivity compounded is the entire promise of the urban form. The poisoned lung and the gridlocked artery are, in the cold language of economics, a permanent tax on the agglomeration dividend — and a tax that falls hardest, as ever, on those who can least afford to pay it.

Chapter 4. The Other Half: Equity and Inclusion

A city is not only an engine of output; it is a promise of mobility — the oldest promise the city has ever made, that whoever arrives may rise. Indian cities make that promise loudly and keep it unevenly, and the gap between the two is the equity question.

Consider first the geography of exclusion. A large share of urban Indians — by many estimates a quarter or more in the big cities, and over half in Mumbai — live in informal settlements: dense, under-serviced, legally precarious. They build the city, cook its food, drive its vehicles and clean its homes, yet they hold no secure title to the ground beneath them and so live one demolition notice from ruin. The informal worker, who constitutes the overwhelming majority of the urban workforce, enjoys neither the protections of formal labour nor the bargaining power of organised capital.

Consider next the inequity of basic services, which in the Indian city are distributed by class and locality rather than by right. Piped water, sewerage, reliable power and paved access cluster in the planned colonies and thin out toward the settlements where they are needed most. The poor often pay more for water bought by the canister than the rich pay for water piped to the tap — the cruel premium of being unserved.

Consider, too, the gendered city. Streets poorly lit, transport unsafe after dark, public toilets scarce, and care infrastructure — crèches, eldercare, safe markets — almost wholly unplanned. A city that is unsafe and unaccommodating for women silently taxes half its potential workforce, depressing the very female labour-force participation that India’s growth model most urgently needs.

A city that excludes its builders is an engine running on half its cylinders.

There is, beneath these particulars, a deeper question of belonging — what theorists call the right to the city. The migrant who arrives from a drought-struck district to lay the bricks of a metro line is counted in the census of nowhere: a voter in his village, a worker in his city, a citizen in full of neither. He cannot easily access the ration, the school seat, the hospital bed or the housing scheme of the place where he actually lives and labours. India’s urban institutions were built to serve a settled population and remain disoriented by a mobile one. Until the city formally embraces the people who build and sustain it — until residence, not native domicile, becomes the basis of urban citizenship — the equity gap will reproduce itself with every fresh wave of arrival.

And consider, finally, the inclusion of the differently mobile — the elderly, the disabled, the child — for whom most Indian streets are an obstacle course. Inclusivity is not charity appended to growth; it is the precondition of growth. The productivity dividend of urbanisation is realised only if the urban poor can access jobs, if women can move freely, if children can be schooled and the sick can be treated near where they live. An exclusive city forfeits the agglomeration premium that is the entire economic point of building cities in the first place.

Chapter 5. The Structural Cure and Its Clock

Diagnosis without prescription is mere pessimism. The cure for the Indian urban condition is structural, and — this is the heart of the matter — it is time-bound. The window is the quarter-century to 2047, and within it the early years carry the heaviest weight, because the World Bank reminds us that roughly seventy per cent of the urban India of 2047 is yet to be built. What we build between now and 2036 will lock in the city of mid-century. There is no second draft.

Empower the city — now (0–3 years).

Operationalise the spirit of the 74th Amendment: directly elected, executive mayors with five-year terms, control over water, transport and planning, and a professional municipal cadre. Devolution is the master-key reform from which the others unlock.

Fix municipal finance — by 2030.

Reform and digitise property tax to capture true value, charge for services rationally, deepen the municipal bond market, and make at least the larger cities creditworthy and bankable. The World Bank’s call for 2.4 trillion dollars by 2050 is unmeetable on government transfers alone; private capital must enter, and only fiscally sound cities can summon it.

Build resilient habitat and services — by 2036.

Treat the bulk of urban sewage, segregate and process solid waste, cut non-revenue water below twenty per cent, and deliver dignified, legal, well-located affordable housing at the scale of the 144 million homes the country will need.

Re-plan land and density — continuously.

Modernise master planning into dynamic, data-driven instruments; rationalise floor-space rules to let cities grow vertically and affordably; bring transparency to land markets.

Climate-proof the city — urgently.

Cool roofs, restored water bodies, permeable surfaces, urban green cover, stormwater regulation and heat early-warning systems — the cheapest insurance India can buy against the billions in losses the next decades otherwise guarantee.

Move people, not cars — by 2036.

Mass transit, walkable and cyclable streets, and integrated land-use-and-transport planning, so that mobility ceases to be the citizen’s daily defeat.

Again these are only a small subset of a long laundry list of structural fixes. As this series progresses the author will pick them one by one and analyse the same.

Seventy per cent of urban India is unbuilt. The city of 2047 is being poured in concrete now — there is no second draft.

A word on the money, since it is the reform most easily promised and least often delivered. The 2.4-trillion-dollar requirement cannot be met from the public exchequer; the World Bank is explicit that private capital must carry a decisive share. Yet capital is shy of the uncreditworthy. More than a hundred and sixty Indian cities have been rated investment-grade, but municipal bond issuance remains negligible and commercial finance funds barely a twentieth of urban infrastructure.

The unlock is unglamorous and entirely within reach: buoyant, honestly assessed property taxes; rational user charges; transparent and audited municipal accounts; and a deep, liquid municipal bond market backstopped by credible state guarantees. A city that can show a lender a reliable revenue stream can borrow against its future; a city that cannot must wait, cap in hand, for a grant that arrives late and small. Fiscal autonomy, in the end, is not a technicality. It is the difference between a city that plans its destiny and one that merely petitions for it.

The clock matters as much as the content.

Governance reform must lead, in the first three years, because nothing downstream moves without it. Finance reform must follow close behind, by 2030, because money is the medium of every other fix. The physical build-out of resilient water, waste, housing and transit must be substantially achieved by 2036, the year the World Bank projects forty per cent urbanisation and seventy per cent of GDP — the inflection at which the city becomes, irreversibly, the nation. The remaining decade to 2047 is for consolidation, deepening and the long climb of the urban GDP share toward the seventy-five-to-eighty per cent that a developed India requires. Miss the early window and the later targets become arithmetically impossible, not merely difficult.

Chapter 6. The Levers We Are Apt to Forget

Every urban agenda has its headline reforms; it is the unglamorous levers, easily omitted, that decide whether the headlines hold. Five deserve naming because they are routinely forgotten.

The missing census and the data blackout.

A nation cannot plan what it refuses to count. The long-postponed census, the absence of city-level economic accounts, and weak municipal statistics mean India is urbanising in the dark. Restoring the count and building real-time urban data and geospatial systems is the precondition of every other reform — including an honest answer to the contested GDP-share question itself.

The neglected “missing middle” of small towns.

The national conversation fixates on the megacities, yet the UN’s 2025 findings show the fastest growth is in small and medium towns, and roughly two of every five urban Indians already live in census towns the administration scarcely governs. The next urban India is being born in places with neither the powers nor the budgets of a city. Govern the small town, or be governed by its failure.

Peri-urban and metropolitan governance.

Cities have outgrown their boundaries; the real economy spills into peri-urban belts governed by no one in particular. India needs empowered metropolitan authorities that plan across municipal lines for transport, water and land — the scale at which a modern city-region actually functions.

Urban jobs, skills and the informal economy.

Agglomeration delivers its dividend only through productive employment. Formalising and upskilling the vast informal workforce, and planning explicitly for urban livelihoods rather than treating jobs as a happy accident of growth, is the difference between a city that lifts people and one that merely concentrates them.

The care economy and the safe, walkable city.

Crèches, eldercare, public toilets, street lighting, safe transit and walkable neighbourhoods are not amenities; they are economic infrastructure that determines whether women, the old and the young can participate at all. Few investments yield a higher return on India’s growth than making the city usable by everyone in it.

There is a sixth, quieter lever that underwrites them all: trust. Cities are built by the willingness of citizens to pay taxes, obey plans and invest their futures locally — and that willingness is earned only by visible competence. Each reliably delivered litre of water, each treated tonne of sewage, each safe night-time street is a deposit in the bank of civic trust from which the harder reforms are later financed.

Epilogue

The Wager, Restated

We began with a quiet inversion — the decade the cities out-grew the villages — and we end with a loud consequence. India has wagered its centenary on becoming a developed nation by 2047, and it has, whether it admits it or not, placed that bet on its cities. From 62 million urbanites in 1951 to perhaps 870 million by 2047 and 951 million by 2050; from a junior partner contributing under thirty per cent of output to the dominant engine that must generate at least three-quarters of a thirty-to-forty-trillion-dollar economy: this is not a side-story of India’s development.

It is the main plot.

And the plot is not yet written.

Seventy per cent of the urban India of 2047 does not yet exist; it lives only in the master plans we are yet to approve, the municipal laws we are about to reform or fail to, the pipes and transit lines and treatment plants we are about to lay or postpone. The city of mid-century is being decided in the choices of this decade, by a generation that will be judged less by the towers it raised than by whether the water ran, the air cleared, the poor were housed, and the woman walked home unafraid.

The Republic’s first century belonged, in memory and myth, to the village. Its second century will belong, in fact, to the city. Whether that city becomes the engine of a developed India or the monument to a squandered ambition is the single most consequential question before the nation — and it is, mercifully, still ours to answer.

❖ ❖ ❖

Akhileshwar Sahay

June 4, 2026

This is the first of the multipart series christened Urban Watch to be published every Thursday

Prologue

On the morning of 1 June 2026, the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, switched on a server and quietly altered a small but stubborn fact about

India that is Bharat. For the first time in the long, fiercely competitive history of the Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced) — the gateway to the country’s temples of engineering and technolgy colleges of national importance— more than ten thousand young women had cleared it. The precise figure was 10,107.

A five-digit number where, only seven years earlier in 2019, the count had been barely past five thousand- 5,356 to be precise-a historical milestone, carved in stone

Numbers of this kind are easy to read and easier to forget. They scroll past in a press release, get repackaged into a coaching-institute banner, and dissolve into the next news cycle. Yet some numbers carry a longer footprint. The figure 10,107 is one of them. It is, at once, a milestone and a measurement: a milestone of how far the daughters of this Bharat have travelled into the once-forbidding territory of physics, chemistry and mathematics, and a measurement of how far they still have to go before the apex of merit looks anything like the population it claims to serve.

This volume 27 of Akhil Vaani daily long form series, sets out to read that number properly — to place it inside the full architecture of Indian engineering admission, to weigh it against the parallel story of medicine, and to ask the harder questions that a single headline cannot. How many institutions actually await and are ready to welcome this cohort? Who conducts these examinations, and how clean are they when set beside the season’s other great national test, NEET, which in the very same fortnight stood cancelled and disgraced?

Why does the success rate of Scheduled Caste candidates now exceed that of the General category — and what, precisely, does that signify? Why do girls flood the medical examination yet remain a minority at the engineering gate? And are the institutions themselves — the IITs, the NITs, the IIITs — institutionally and structurally ready to receive a rising tide of women, or merely willing to count them?

What follows is not a celebration and not a lament. It is an audit. The arithmetic of 2026 is genuinely encouraging; it is also genuinely incomplete. To honour the ten thousand, one must refuse to round them off.

✦ ✦ ✦

Chapter One — The Architecture of Aspiration: IITs, NITs and IIITs

Before a single rank is discussed, the landscape must be mapped, because the prize defines the contest. India’s elite public engineering education rests on three pillars of differing vintage and character. At the summit stand the Indian Institutes of Technology — the IITs — of which there are now twenty-three, from the founding campuses at Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur and Delhi to the newer institutions established under successive waves of expansion. Below and beside them sit the National Institutes of Technology — the NITs — numbering thirty-one, spread deliberately across every major state so that regional aspiration has a federal anchor. The third and youngest pillar comprises the Indian Institutes of Information Technology — the IIITs — of which twenty-six now participate in the central counselling pool, many built on a distinctive public-private partnership model with a sharp focus on computing and information technology.

These do not exhaust the system. The Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) — the body that conducts the unified counselling and seat-allotment process — pooled 121 institutions for the 2026 admission season: the 23 IITs, the 31 NITs, the 26 IIITs, the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST) at Shibpur, and around 40 other Government-Funded Technical Institutes (GFTIs). Together they form the funnel into which roughly a million and a half engineering hopefuls pour each year, and out of which only a small, polished minority emerges with a seat.

The prize is narrow by design. Roughly one in ten who qualify JEE Advanced ultimately secures an IIT seat.

It is essential to grasp how the two halves of the system draw their students, because the same examination feeds both through different doors. Admission to the IITs is governed exclusively by the rank obtained in JEE Advanced. Admission to the NITs, IIITs, IIEST and the GFTIs, by contrast, is governed by the rank in JEE Main. One national testing pipeline, in other words, splits at the top: the Main is both a destination in itself and a qualifying filter for the Advanced. A candidate may therefore win a coveted NIT seat on the strength of the Main alone, or press on to the Advanced in pursuit of an IIT. This dual structure is the hinge on which every figure in this Volume 27 of Akhil Vaani daily long form series turns.

Chapter Two — The Two-Gate System: Who Conducts the JEE, and How

The selection of candidates for these institutions proceeds in two sequential levels, and the distinction between them is frequently blurred in popular narrative. The first level is the JEE Main; the second, reachable only by clearing the first, is the JEE Advanced.

Two examinations, two conducting authorities

The JEE Main is conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), the autonomous central body created in 2017 to administer large-scale entrance tests. It is held in multiple sessions across the year — candidates may sit more than once and retain their best score — and its results are expressed in normalised percentiles to neutralise differences in difficulty between shifts. From the merit list of the Main, the top 2,50,000 candidates (apportioned across categories) become eligible to register for the Advanced.

The JEE Advanced is conducted not by the NTA but by the IITs themselves, on a rotating basis, under the umbrella of the Joint Admission Board. Each year a designated zonal IIT shoulders the responsibility. In 2026 that institution was IIT Roorkee; in 2025 it had been IIT Kanpur. This is a structural fact of the first importance, and the next chapter will explain why it matters so much for the question of integrity. The Advanced JEE consists of two compulsory papers — Paper 1 and Paper 2 — each three hours long, written on the same day, testing physics, chemistry and mathematics in combination.

Computer-based, not descriptive

A persistent misconception deserves correction: neither examination is a descriptive, long-answer test. Both the JEE Main and the JEE Advanced are fully computer-based tests (CBT). The Advanced moved to an entirely on-screen format in 2018 and has remained there since. Candidates face objective questions — multiple-choice, multiple-correct, integer and numerical-value types — answered at a terminal, with no handwritten essays and no subjective grading. The maximum aggregate in the 2026 Advanced was 360 marks, 180 from each paper, distributed equally across the three subjects.

This is worth stating plainly because it bears directly on the security of the system: a computer-based, multi-shift architecture is structurally far harder to compromise than a single printed paper transported physically to thousands of centres.

Chapter Three — The Integrity Question: JEE Beside the NEET Catastrophe

The widely held instinct that JEE enjoys a higher integrity standing than NEET and most other Indian competitive examinations is not merely defensible; in the season of 2026 it was demonstrated with brutal clarity. To understand why, one must hold two events side by side.

On 17 May 2026, IIT Roorkee conducted JEE Advanced across the country without incident. Two weeks later, on 1 June, it declared the result on schedule. There was no leak, no cancellation, no mass re-test, no Supreme Court rebuke.

The examination did what an examination is supposed to do: it ran its course, it ranked, and it released the results that too in a very compressed timeframe without confusion and accusation- it was integrity of the testing system personified.

Contrast it with the sole gateway to enter medical colleges and allied institutions in the country. NEET-UG 2026 was held on 3 May 2026 and then — on 12 May, a mere nine days later — cancelled outright (first such pan India cancellation) amid paper-leak allegations affecting nearly twenty-three lakh aspirants. The Supreme Court, hearing the matter, observed pointedly that the NTA had “not learnt its lesson” from the 2024 NEET debacle — the year of the Patna leak and the grace-marks scandal — and demanded affidavits on whether the reform recommendations of the Radhakrishnan Committee had been implemented at all. The agency, meanwhile, had cycled through three Directors-General in under two years.

In the same fortnight, one national examination crowned its toppers (Shubham Kumar who topped the list with impressive 330 out of 360, is from lower middle class family in Bihar, Shubham Kumar's father is a hardware shop owner in the Gaya district of Bihar) while the other examination NEET-UG was being dismantled in the apex court of India with CBI busy arresting accused from across the country.

Why is the engineering gate sturdier? Several structural reasons converge.

First, ownership: JEE Advanced is run by the IITs — autonomous academic institutions with reputational skin in the game — rather than by a single overburdened agency administering dozens of unrelated tests.

Second, format: a computer-based, multi-session design with randomised question delivery is intrinsically more leak-resistant than a uniform printed booklet.

Third, lineage: many of the transparency practices now common across Indian testing — a priori category cut-offs, public release and correction of answer keys, candidate access to their own response sheets, and the centralised JoSAA counselling that prevents seat-blocking — were pioneered in the IIT system before being adopted elsewhere.

This is not to extol or canonise the JEE examination architechture. The NTA-run Main has had its quota of embarrasing moments: in the January 2025 session alone, at least a dozen questions were withdrawn over errors in the final answer key, and answer-key disputes recur. But an error corrected in public is a different order of failure from a paper sold in advance for lakhs of rupees per candidate by peaper organised paper learking mafias. On the spectrum of Indian examination integrity, the JEE Advanced sits at the credible one end alomost as unblemished as UPSC Indian Civil Services Examination, the Main in the middle with some visible weaknesses, and a leak-prone, single-shift NEET — for all its scale and prestige — has slid, twice in three years, toward the troubled end at the absolute nadir.

Chapter Four — The Numbers of 2026: From Fifteen Lakh to Fifty-Seven Thousand

The full funnel of JEE 2026 is best read as a sequence of narrowing gates. At the mouth stood the JEE Main: 16,04,854 unique candidates registered across its two sessions, of whom 15,38,468 actually appeared. From this vast field, the top 2,50,182 candidates were declared eligible — by category-wise percentile cut-offs that rose across the board this year — to register for the Advanced.

Of those eligible, 1,87,389 registered for JEE Advanced 2026, and 1,79,694 sat both papers on 17 May. When IIT Roorkee released the result on 1 June, 56,880 candidates had qualified — a meaningful rise from the 54,378 of 2025, continuing a multi-year expansion of the qualified pool that tracks the steady addition of IIT seats.

Stage of the 2026 funnel

At the summit, Shubham Kumar of the IIT Delhi zone (as explained in the earlier chapter the resident of Gaya Bihar and son of a hardware shop owner) topped the Common Rank List with 330 out of 360. The top-ranked female candidate, Arohi Deshpande, also of the IIT Delhi zone, secured Common Rank List 77 with 280 marks. The IIT Madras zone produced the largest single contingent of qualifiers (14,294) and the most candidates in the top 500. These are the headline figures; their meaning, however, lies in how they break down by category and by gender — the subject of the chapters that follow.

Chapter Five — The Reservation Paradox: Why SC Success Outran the General Category

A question that sounds almost counter-intuitive must be met head-on: is it correct that the success rate of Scheduled Caste candidates this year exceeded that of General candidates? The answer, drawn directly from the official figures, is yes — and emphatically so. When qualifiers are expressed as a percentage of those who appeared, the category-wise success rates of JEE Advanced 2026 fall in an order that surprises the casual observer.

Computed from the category tables (PwD and non-PwD combined) in the IIT Roorkee JEE (Advanced) 2026 Results Press Release.

SC and ST SC candidates qualified at 52.83 per cent and ST candidates at 44.47 per cent, both above the General category’s 41.32 per cent. What does this signify? The temptation is to read it as evidence of superior relative performance, but that reading is mistaken and must be resisted. The true explanation is architectural, lying in the differential qualifying thresholds that the rank-list mechanism applies.

To enter the Common Rank List in 2026, a candidate needed an aggregate of 25.56 per cent. The OBC and EWS lists required 22.78 per cent. The SC and ST lists required only 12.78 per cent — roughly half the General bar. A much larger share of SC and ST candidates therefore clears its own (lower) threshold, and the “success rate” rises accordingly. The figure is real, but it measures the height of the bar as much as the leap of the athlete.

A higher pass rate at a lower threshold is not a verdict on merit; it is the intended mathematics of representational equity. Nonetheless it is credible and is indicative of the fact that as Bharat moves towards the inclusiion pathway gradually the bar can be raised.

Two further nuances complete the picture, and an honest analyst must state them together. First, the relative position of OBC and ST candidates diverges sharply. The OBC-NCL category, despite a threshold lower than the General list, recorded the lowest success rate of all — 18.34 per cent — because its applicant pool is enormous (over 67,000 appeared) relative to the proportion of seats its rank list can absorb. The ST category, by contrast, with the same low threshold as SC but a smaller and differently distributed pool, qualified at 44.47 per cent.

Reservation outcomes, in short, are not a single story but several nuanced ones..

Second — and this is the caveat that keeps the paradox honest — the lower thresholds operate only at the qualifying margin. They do not reshape the apex. The top ten of the Common Rank List, the top hundred, the top five hundred remain overwhelmingly drawn from the open field. A high category pass-rate at the entry line coexists with sparse category presence at the summit. To celebrate the former while ignoring the latter is to misread the data; to condemn the former by pointing at the latter is to misunderstand the policy.

The reservation architecture is designed precisely to widen the base of access without claiming to manufacture toppers — and on its own terms, in 2026, it did exactly that.

Chapter Six — The Year the Daughters Crossed Ten Thousand

Now to the heart of the matter. Of the 56,880 who qualified JEE Advanced 2026, 10,107 were female. This is the first time in the examination’s history that female qualifiers have crossed the five-figure mark of ten thousand — a symbolic threshold that the system had been approaching for years and finally breached this season.

What the milestone means, in plain arithmetic

The 10,107 girls who qualified must be read against two denominators, because each tells a different truth. Against the 40,562 girls who actually appeared in both papers, the figure represents a success rate of 24.92 per cent — almost exactly one qualifier for every four girls who sat the examination. Against the total of 56,880 qualifiers of all genders, it represents a 17.77 per cent share — that is, girls were just under a fifth of everyone who cleared.

How much higher than last year — in absolute and percentage terms

In 2025, IIT Kanpur’s edition of the Advanced had seen 9,404 female qualifiers out of 54,378 total — a share of 17.29 per cent. The movement to 2026 can therefore be stated precisely. In absolute terms, the number of successful girls rose by 703 (from 9,404 to 10,107). In percentage terms, that is a 7.48 per cent year-on-year increase in the count of female qualifiers. Their share of the total edged up more modestly, from 17.29 per cent to 17.77 per cent — a gain of roughly half a percentage point.

Seven years ago, barely 5,356 girls cleared. In 2026, the count crossed ten thousand. The base has nearly doubled in a single school generation.

Yet the same data carries a quieter, contrary signal that integrity demands we record. While the breadth of female success widened, the apex did not rise with it. The top-ranked girl of 2026, Arohi Deshpande, secured Common Rank List 77. In 2025 the top female rank had been 16; back in 2019, a young woman had reached Common Rank List 10. In other words, even as ten thousand girls qualified, the single highest female rank slipped further from the summit than in several previous years.

The cohort is broadening at the base faster than it is climbing at the peak — a pattern this article will return to, a bit later because it is the central unfinished task.

Chapter Seven — Why More Girls Are Succeeding: The Contributory Engine

A milestone of this scale is never the product of a single cause. Several forces, accumulating over a decade, have widened the channel through which girls reach and clear the engineering gate.

• The female supernumerary quota. Since 2018 the IITs have set aside a 20 per cent supernumerary allocation for female candidates — seats created over and above the existing pool, so that no male candidate is displaced. This single structural intervention transformed the incentive landscape: a girl on the qualifying margin now had a materially higher probability of an actual IIT seat, and that prospect pulled more girls into serious preparation in the first place.

• Sheer seat expansion. The total of BTech seats across the 23 IITs has climbed past 18,500, with well over a thousand added in recent years alone. A larger prize at the end of the pipeline rationally enlarges the pool willing to enter it.

• The democratisation of coaching. The migration of test preparation onto online and hybrid platforms has loosened the grip of expensive residential coaching hubs. A girl in a tier-three town, whose family might never have sent her to live in a distant coaching city, can now access the same lecture, the same problem set, the same mock test from home — narrowing both the cost barrier and the mobility barrier that historically filtered girls out.

• Role models and visibility. Each cohort of female qualifiers becomes the evidence base for the next. Toppers’ names in the press, alumnae in visible engineering and technology careers, and targeted scholarship and mentorship programmes by governments and non-profits have steadily reframed the IIT as a plausible destination for a daughter, not merely a son.

• A cultural shift in stream choice. More girls are electing the physics-chemistry-mathematics combination at the senior-secondary stage than a generation ago, expanding the eligible base long before the examination hall.

These factors are mutually reinforcing rather than additive: the quota raises the payoff, the payoff raises participation, participation produces role models, and role models raise the next cohort’s participation again. The 703-girl increase of 2026 is the latest turn of this flywheel.

Chapter Eight — Are the Institutions Ready to Receive Them?

It is one thing to admit a rising number of women; it is another to be institutionally and structurally prepared to educate, house and launch them. Here the verdict is mixed, and candour is owed.

On the side of readiness, the supernumerary mechanism deserves credit precisely because it is additive: by creating new seats rather than reallocating existing ones, the IITs avoided the zero-sum resentment that has poisoned reservation debates elsewhere, and signalled institutional intent. Several campuses have expanded women’s hostel capacity, instituted gender-sensitisation programming, and built support and grievance structures that did not exist a decade ago.

On the side of lack of readiness, three gaps remain stubborn. The first is residential infrastructure: at campuses designed in an era of overwhelmingly male intake, women’s hostel capacity, safe late-hours access to laboratories and libraries, and basic facilities have not always kept pace with the supernumerary mandate. The second is faculty representation: the proportion of women among IIT faculty remains low, depriving female students of the mentors and role models the data shows to be decisive. A girl may now reach the campus only to find few women teaching her. The third is the climate of belonging — the harder-to-measure question of whether a numerical minority experiences the institution as fully hers.

To count women in is the easy half. To build the hostels, hire the women faculty, and change the climate is the half that is still owed to girl aspirants.

The honest assessment, then, is that the IITs, NITs and IIITs are willing but not yet wholly ready. Admission policy has run ahead of campus capacity. The risk is a familiar one in Indian public institutions: a progressive quota implemented faster than the physical and human infrastructure that would let it succeed. Closing that gap — hostels, women faculty, safety, support — is the institutional work of the coming decade, and it should not be allowed to lag behind the admission statistics that politicians find easier to celebrate.

Chapter Nine — The Broader Significance: From the Examination Hall to the C-Suite

Why should the nation care that ten thousand rather than nine thousand girls cleared an engineering examination? Because the JEE Advanced is not merely a test; it is the headwater of a river that flows, decades downstream, into the leadership of Indian science, technology and enterprise.

The pipeline logic is unforgiving and well-documented. The proportion of women at the entry gate sets a ceiling on the proportion of women available, twenty and thirty years later, for the senior technical, research and corporate roles that draw from this talent pool. India’s persistent scarcity of women in C-suite and board positions, particularly in technology-intensive sectors, is not principally a failure of the boardroom; it is, in large part, an echo of decisions made in classrooms and examination halls a generation earlier. If only a sixth of those entering the country’s premier engineering institutions are women, the supply of women eligible to lead those fields downstream is capped before the contest for leadership even begins.

Seen this way, the crossing of ten thousand is an investment in the demographic raw material of future leadership. Every additional cohort of female IIT and NIT graduates enlarges the pool from which India will eventually draw its women chief technology officers, its women founders, its women research directors and its women on technology boards.

The STEM education base and the future of women’s leadership are not two issues but one issue observed at two points in time.

There is also a productivity argument that transcends equity. A country that educates its women and then fails to route their talent into its most demanding technical fields is, quite simply, leaving national output on the table. The widening of the female base in JEE Advanced is therefore not only a matter of fairness to individual girls; it is a matter of the country’s own economic self-interest. The milestone of 2026 should be read, finally, as a small instalment against a very large national deficit.

Chapter Ten — The NEET–JEE Gender Anomaly, and How to Correct It

Perhaps the sharpest question of all is this: is it true that, even now, the proportion of girls applying for and passing the NEET-UG medical examination is far higher than in JEE Advanced — and if so, how is the anomaly to be corrected? The answer is unambiguously yes, and the gap is not marginal but vast.

In NEET-UG 2025, of roughly 22.09 lakh candidates who appeared, around 12.71 lakh — a clear majority — were girls. Among the 12,36,531 who qualified, the female share was close to 58 per cent. Women, in short, dominate the medical gateway both in participation and in qualification. The contrast with engineering could scarcely be starker.

NEET-UG 2025 figures (NTA); JEE Advanced 2026 figures (IIT Roorkee). The two national gateways select from broadly comparable senior-secondary cohorts.

Girls fill the medical hall and thin out at the engineering gate. The talent is not missing; it is being steered.

If the female aptitude were truly the constraint, it would not vanish between two examinations sat by the same generation of school-leavers. The anomaly is therefore not biological but social, and its roots are identifiable. Medicine is widely perceived — by families and by girls themselves — as a “suitable” and respectable profession for women, while engineering still carries a residual coding as male territory. Safety and migration anxieties compound this: families reluctant to send a daughter to a distant engineering coaching city or a far-off campus are often more willing where medicine, frequently studied closer to home, is concerned.

Early socialisation steers girls away from the physics-and-mathematics intensity that the engineering track demands, well before any examination is sat. And the absence of women at the visible peaks of engineering becomes self-perpetuating vicioys cycle in a way that the long female presence in medicine does not.

[Authors Note: This author remembers vividly, between 1974-1976, among his 420 class mates in Patna Science college, ( then best science college in then combined state of Bihar and Jharkhand) there was not even a single girl student who studied physics, chemistry and mathematics grouping a cohort that was the gateway for the engineering education. If that was not enough, in next door Patna Engineering College (now Patna NIIT), among nearly 1000 total students there was not even a single girl student]

Correcting the anomaly therefore requires intervention upstream of the examination, not merely at it. It requires overhaulling of the architecture, deliberate changing the calculus. Early and sustained exposure to mathematics and the physical sciences for girls, beginning in the middle school years, would widen the eligible base. Confronting “maths anxiety” as a taught and cultural phenomenon rather than an innate trait would retain more girls in the PCM stream.

Visible female engineering role models — founders, technologists, IIT alumnae — would do for engineering what generations of women doctors have already done for medicine. Safe, affordable, residential preparation and campus environments would dismantle the mobility barrier that filters girls out. And the supernumerary logic that has begun to work at the IITs could be reinforced and extended. None of these is a quick fix; together, sustained over a decade, they are how the engineering gate comes to look more like the medical one.

Epilogue

Return, at the end, to the number we began with: 10,107. It is worth holding it once more in the light of everything between.

It is a genuine milestone — the first crossing of ten thousand, a near-doubling of the female count in a single school generation, the visible product of a quota, an expansion, and a quiet cultural shift all pulling in the same direction. In a season when the medical examination collapsed into cancellation and courtroom rebuke, the engineering gate stood open, clean and on schedule, and ten thousand daughters walked through it.

That is not a small thing, and it should not be made small by the qualifications that honesty requires.

But honesty does require them. Ten thousand is still under a fifth of all qualifiers. The highest female rank slipped further from the summit even as the base broadened. The institutions that admitted these women are not yet fully built to receive them — short on hostels, short on women faculty, short on the climate of belonging. And next door, the medical examination shows what a gender-balanced gateway actually looks like, exposing the engineering figure not as a ceiling reached but as a floor barely cleared.

The right response to a milestone is neither to garland it nor to dismiss it, but to use it. The crossing of ten thousand proves that the levers work — that quotas, access, role models and seat expansion move the number. The task now is to keep pulling those levers until the female share at the engineering gate resembles the female share at the medical one, until the top hundred carries as many daughters as the top ten thousand, and until the campuses are as ready to educate these women as the examination has become ready to admit them.

A number is only a measurement. What we choose to do with the measurement is the only thing that will eventually matter. The ten thousand have done their part. Bharat now owes them the rest of the arithmetic.

[Image Source: Original AI-generated image created for this article using publicly reported housing statistics. The visual is an independent interpretation and does not reproduce any copyrighted UN-Habitat artwork, graphics, or report illustration]

Prologue – The age of habitat precarity

In 2026, UN‑Habitat chose to release its flagship World Cities Report on a single, blunt theme: “The Global Housing Crisis – Pathways to Action.” That editorial choice matters. It signals that housing has moved from being one sectoral problem among many to becoming a central fault‑line of the twenty‑first‑century urban living.

Launched at the 13th World Urban Forum (WUF13) in Baku, Azerbaijan, the report quantifies the crisis in unsentimental language. Recent global estimates indicate that up to 3.4 billion people lack access to secure, safe, and adequate housing, including more than 1 billion people living in informal settlements and slums, under conditions of insecure tenure, overcrowding, environmental hazard, and limited access to basic services.

The global housing deficit has increased from an estimated 251 million units in 2010 to 288 million in 2023, despite decades of policy effort and the formal recognition of housing as a human right.

UN‑Habitat links worsening crisis to decades of insufficient investment, rapid urbanisation, macro‑economic instability, and large‑scale displacement driven by conflict, human rights violations, and climate‑related disasters. Research conducted under the report estimates that roughly 64 million people were evicted globally between 2003 and 2023, highlighting how eviction has become a routine instrument of urban restructuring. These numbers are not abstract. They represent households pushed from central locations to peri‑urban fringes, workers whose commutes become unviable, and children whose access to schooling is disrupted.

Crucially, the report makes clear that housing is not merely physical shelter. Adequate, affordable, and well‑located housing is a platform for human development: it shapes access to employment, education, health care, social networks, and political voice. It is also a pillar of climate resilience and a major driver of emissions, given the energy and material intensity of construction and building operations.

In short, the “habitat question” is no longer a marginal concern of urban planning; it is central to the prospects of meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.

For India, these global messages strike a nerve. The World Cities Report notes that housing deficits and affordability stresses are rising in many developing countries, and coverage of the 2026 edition highlights India’s high price‑to‑income ratios in cities such as Mumbai and Delhi, as well as persistent homelessness and informality. At the same time, India is still urbanising; much of its 2050 cityscape does not yet exist.

That creates a paradoxical moment: the crisis is already serious, yet the trajectory is not locked in- if any thing it will become truly precarious in next two decades as India gets ready to become developed nation

This Akhil Vaani daily long form serioes Volume 26, uses the World Cities Report 2026 as a starting point to reconstruct a global narrative of the housing crisis, with a special focus on India. It argues that the last fifty years of housing policy leave us with both warnings and lessons. Production without affordability, regularisation without rights, and finance without inclusion have repeatedly reproduced crisis. Yet experiments with community‑led upgrading, social rental housing, diversified tenure, and climate‑resilient neighbourhoods show that alternative pathways are available – if states are prepared to rewrite the social contract around land, housing, and the city.

Chapter 1. Taking stock: The scale and anatomy of the global housing crisis

1. A crisis by the numbers

The first contribution of the World Cities Report 2026 is to consolidate and update global estimates of housing need. Three headline figures structure the diagnosis:

• 3.4 billion people – roughly 4 in 10 human beings – lack access to secure, safe, and adequate housing.

• More than 1 billion people reside in informal settlements and slums, often with insecure tenure, overloaded infrastructure, and heightened exposure to environmental risks.

• The global housing deficit has risen from 251 million units in 2010 to 288 million units in 2023, indicating that supply is not catching up with need.

These aggregate numbers conceal deep regional and intra‑urban inequalities. Housing shortages and inadequacies are most acute in sub‑Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, and informal peripheries of rapidly growing cities, but no region is immune. Even in advanced economies, housing insecurity is spreading among low‑wage workers, migrants, and young people priced out of ownership.

Displacement adds another layer to this picture. The report notes that forced displacement due to conflict, violence, and disasters is at record levels, and that between 2003 and 2023 an estimated 64 million people experienced eviction. Many of these people are not counted as “homeless” in narrow terms, yet they endure cycles of relocation, downward mobility within the city, and loss of social capital.

2. Beyond units: five interlocking dimensions

UN‑Habitat deliberately avoids reducing the crisis to a simple “deficit of units”. Instead, it structures its analysis around five interlocking dimensions:

1. Affordability
   The report documents a sharp deterioration in affordability, with house price‑to‑income ratios rising from 9.5 to 11.7 globally between 2010 and 2023. In many cities, households devote far more than the standard 30 per cent of income to housing, especially in the rental market. Speculative land markets, financialisation of housing assets, and constrained supply in well‑served areas combine to push costs upward.

2. Informality
   Over 1–1.1 billion people now live in informal settlements or slums, and that number continues to grow. Informality manifests not only as irregular structures, but also as unrecognised tenure arrangements, fragmented infrastructure, and limited access to formal finance.

3. Displacement and tenure insecurity
   Rising evictions, precarious leases, and ambiguous property regimes contribute to housing insecurity, especially in cities undergoing large infrastructure or “beautification” projects. For many residents, the threat of eviction is as important as current living conditions.

4. Climate risk and environmental vulnerability
   The report underlines that climate‑related hazards could destroy or seriously damage around 167 million homes by 2040, with low‑income households disproportionately affected. Yet housing construction and operation are also responsible for a significant share of emissions, estimated in the range of 17–21 per cent globally.

5. Liveability and inclusion
   Housing influences access to jobs, education, services, and social life. Poorly located or badly serviced housing can trap households in cycles of low productivity and ill‑health, even when the unit itself appears “adequate” on paper.

Once these dimensions are seen together, a crucial insight emerges: housing is a system problem. It sits at the intersection of land governance, infrastructure, labour markets, financial regulation, and social policy. Fragmented interventions at the project level cannot, on their own, offset structural drivers of crisis.

Chapter 2. Fifty years of housing policy: Lessons and blind spots

1. Policy paradigms in retrospect

Looking back over the last half‑century, UN‑Habitat’s analysis sketches an arc that will be familiar to housing scholars.

• In the post‑war decades, many states pursued direct construction and slum clearance, treating informal settlements as blemishes to be removed. Large public housing estates and resettlement colonies were built, often at peripheral locations.

• By the 1970s and 1980s, the limits of this approach were clear. Evictions were politically explosive and expensive, while public agencies struggled to maintain sprawling estates. This led to the rise of “sites and services” and in-situ upgrading paradigms, which recognised and tried to support incremental self‑construction.

• From the late 1980s onward, the dominant discourse shifted to “enabling markets”. States were encouraged to focus on regulatory frameworks, while private developers and mortgage finance were expected to deliver most new housing.

Each era produced successes, but also systemic blind spots. Clearance and resettlement routinely destroyed social networks and scattered livelihoods. Upgrading programmes sometimes stopped at cosmetic improvements when they lacked political backing or finance. Market‑enabling reforms expanded formal housing in certain segments but did little for those without stable incomes, clear titles, or access to formal credit.

2. Four hard‑won global lessons

The 2026 report distils at least four robust lessons from this historical experience:

First, housing is not just units; it is location plus services.

Public estates and private “affordable” projects located far from employment centres and public transport often undermine the very objective of improving lives. Residents face longer and more expensive commutes, reduced access to schools and health facilities, and weaker social networks. Adequacy, in other words, cannot be separated from urban geography.

Second, secure tenure is foundational.

Where households lack formal titles, legal recognition, or even stable informal agreements, they live under constant threat of eviction and have weak leverage with authorities and service providers. Insecure tenure depresses investment in self‑improvement and makes it extremely difficult to access formal finance, even when incomes might allow modest borrowing.

Third, finance alone cannot overcome inequality.

Expanding mortgage markets and housing finance without addressing low wages, high land costs, and exclusionary regulations tends to inflate asset prices rather than deliver affordability. Households with stable, high incomes capture most of the benefits, while low‑income and informal workers remain dependent on informal markets and self‑construction.

Fourth, informal settlements are part of the city, not an anomaly.

Repeated attempts to “eradicate slums” through demolition and forced relocation have not eliminated informality; they have simply moved it around the urban map. In contrast, well‑designed in‑situ upgrading, co‑produced with communities, has often yielded better outcomes at lower social cost.

For India, these global lessons resonate strongly with domestic experience – from mass resettlement colonies in Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai to varied experiments with slum upgrading, rehabilitation, and credit‑linked subsidy schemes.

Chapter 3. The affordability time bomb

1. A global deterioration in affordability

A central empirical claim of the World Cities Report 2026 is that housing affordability has worsened across much of the world over the last decade and a half. The data it brings together points to a convergence between North and South on this dimension, even though starting points differ.

The average house price‑to‑income ratio globally has risen from 9.5 in 2010 to 11.7 in 2023. In practical terms, this means that the price of an average dwelling has moved further out of reach relative to household earnings. In many cities, especially global financial centres and fast‑growing capitals, first‑time buyers face decades‑long mortgage commitments, if they qualify at all.

On the rental side, the report and associated commentary underline that a significant share of households spend more than 30 per cent of disposable income on housing, and a growing minority spend over 40 or even 50 per cent. That leaves little room for savings, health care, or education, increasing vulnerability to shocks.

Several factors drive this trend:

• Financialisation of housing – as housing is treated as a global financial asset, investment decisions and price dynamics are influenced by cross‑border capital flows and investor expectations, not merely local demand.

• Speculative land markets – land is hoarded in anticipation of future value, pushing up input costs for housing and encouraging low‑density, high‑margin development.

• Restrictive planning and zoning – height limits, single‑use zoning, and complex approval procedures constrain supply in well‑serviced areas, pushing development to cheaper but peripheral land. Even where transit based TOD has been implemented gentrification has pushed poor and destitute to the fringe of the city.

• Stagnant or slow‑growing wages at the lower end of the labour market, especially in informalised economies.

The result is a double exclusion: low‑income households cannot afford formal housing at all, while middle‑income households find ownership increasingly delayed or contingent on long commutes and risky borrowing.

2. India’s affordability crisis in comparative perspective

India features in the World Cities Report 2026 and related analyses as a country where urban affordability challenges are acute, particularly in large metropolitan regions.

Two metrics stand out:

• Price‑to‑income ratios: In Mumbai, the ratio is reported at 14.3, and in Delhi at 10.1, placing these cities among the world’s most unaffordable on this measure. South and Central Asia as a region registers a ratio around 16.8, underscoring the systemic nature of the problem.

• Composition of new supply: The share of housing projects classified as “affordable” in India’s eight largest cities reportedly fell from around 52 per cent in 2018 to roughly 17 per cent in 2025, as developers shifted towards higher‑margin segments.

At the same time, homelessness is non‑trivial. Though the analysis of India’s ongoing census will be available only let next years, UN‑oriented summaries note that India has about 13 homeless persons per 10,000 population, translating into hundreds of thousands of people with no shelter at all. Many more live in extremely precarious conditions – pavement dwellers, informal renters in congested slums, or residents of unauthorised colonies with partial service coverage.

Crucially, the urban housing shortage remains heavily concentrated among Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) and Low‑Income Groups (LIG), a pattern repeatedly highlighted in Indian assessments. For these groups, the combination of high land prices, limited formal finance, and insecure tenure makes formal homeownership largely out of reach, while rental housing markets remain under‑regulated and weakly supported.

In short, India exemplifies the global affordability time bomb: headline GDP growth and formal sector expansion coexist with deepening housing precarity for the urban poor and lower middle classes.

Chapter 4. Displacement, informality, and the “other” urban India

1. Displacement as urban practice

The World Cities Report 2026 emphasises that forced displacement and eviction have become systemic features of contemporary urbanisation, not rare exceptions. Between 2003 and 2023, an estimated 64 million people were evicted, often in the name of infrastructure expansion, disaster risk reduction, or beautification.

Eviction is frequently justified as necessary to address hazardous locations or “encroachments” on public land. Yet, as many case studies show, displaced communities often re‑settle in equally or more precarious areas, further from jobs and services, sometimes in the shadow of new infrastructure that bypasses them. The outcome is a churn of managed informality, where informal settlements are periodically cleared, only to re‑emerge elsewhere.

2. CPR and the “other urban India”

In India, the work of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) – particularly through its Initiative on Cities, Economy and Society – has been central to re‑conceptualising urban informality. In essay “The ‘other’ urban India”, ( Partha Mukhopadhyay August 30, 2013) argues that the majority of Indian urban residents live in spaces that fall outside neat formal categories but are nonetheless integral to the functioning of the city.

Key insights from this body of work include:

• Informal settlements are structurally linked to the urban economy. They provide labour, services, and consumer markets that sustain formal sectors.

• The labels attached to settlements – “slum”, “unauthorised colony”, “resettlement colony”, “regularised area” – are not neutral. They determine which neighbourhoods receive infrastructure investments, school and health facilities, and tenure recognition.

• Policy regimes that combine periodic demolitions with selective regularisation create durable uncertainty. Residents may invest in housing incrementally, but always under the shadow of potential erasure.

In Delhi, for instance, CPR’s work on the categorisation of settlements has shown how complex and often contradictory regulatory statuses map onto social and political hierarchies, shaping whose claims to the city are honoured. This lens helps explain why informality persists even as formal schemes proliferate. Key findings of Mukhopadhyay research regarding Delhi are instructuve

Key findings regarding Delhi from his research on subaltern and exclusionary urbanization include:

• Triumph of Formality over Function: Much of Delhi’s ostensibly formal planning is essentially legalized informality. For instance, Mukhopadhyay notes that the land occupied by illegally parked cars significantly exceeds the land occupied by jhuggi jhopdi (slum) clusters, yet only the latter face eviction threats.

• Persistent Manufacturing Employment: Although modern services (IT, real estate, banking) account for almost half of Delhi’s GDP, a substantial and growing share of the workforce remains in manufacturing, which thrives despite government discouragement.

• State-Produced Inequality: Spatial inequality and the marginalization of the poor (e.g., the spatial shift of slums to the periphery) are actively reinforced by current governance structures and state-level political settlements rather than just being historical legacies.

• Limited City Agency: Delhi’s political framework suffers because the city itself has little autonomy, resulting in urban management that often relies on the distribution of rents generated by infrastructure and land policiies

3. Reframing displacement and informality

Both UN‑Habitat and Indian scholarship point towards the need to reframe how displacement and informality are understood.

A first step is to move from a paradigm of eviction to one of negotiated transformation. Climate adaptation, flood control, and infrastructure upgrades do require physical changes to urban space. But experience from cities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia shows that in‑situ upgrading, land readjustment, and participatory re‑blocking can reconfigure risky or congested settlements without wholesale removal.

Second, the shift from “slum‑free cities” slogans to a rights‑based inclusion framework is essential. In India, Supreme Court jurisprudence such as Olga Tellis recognised the link between pavement dwellers’ shelters and their right to livelihood, but this principle has not been consistently embedded in administrative practice. Operationalising due process, consultation, and fair compensation or rehabilitation as non‑negotiable standards would reshape the incentives of urban authorities.

Third, policy narratives must move beyond a binary of informal vs. formal to see diverse housing systems: informal rentals, cooperative arrangements, incremental owner‑building, and community land trusts all coexist. Recognising and supporting this diversity – rather than trying to shoehorn everyone into individual freehold ownership – can open room for more inclusive solutions.

Chapter 5. Climate resilience and the housing–emissions nexus

1. Housing on the frontlines of climate risk

The World Cities Report 2026 positions housing as both victim and culprit in the climate crisis. On the one hand, it highlights evidence that climate‑related hazards could destroy or severely damage around 167 million homes by 2040, with coastal settlements, floodplains, and heat‑exposed urban districts at the greatest risk. On the other hand, it notes that housing and buildings account for a significant fraction of global emissions, estimated between 17 and 21 per cent once construction and operation are considered.

Low‑income households are particularly exposed. When formal land markets and stringent regulations restrict where poorer residents can legally build or rent, they often end up in marginal lands – riverbanks, tidal flats, hillsides, or railway margins – where land is cheap precisely because risk is high. Climate‑fuelled floods, cyclones, and heatwaves then strike hardest in these areas.

2. The danger of “green gentrification”

As climate awareness rises, cities are beginning to invest in green infrastructure and resilience upgrades: riverfront restorations, sea walls, elevated roads, and heat‑resilient public spaces. While necessary, such projects can produce “green gentrification” if not carefully designed. Upgraded and newly safe neighbourhoods become attractive to higher‑income groups, land values rise, and the original low‑income residents – whose risk justified the project – may be priced out or deliberately displaced.

UN‑Habitat’s message is that climate resilience must be socially just by design, not only technically sound. In housing terms, this means integrating tenure security, affordability, and anti‑displacement safeguards into climate projects.

3. Building climate‑resilient housing systems

A climate‑resilient housing strategy therefore needs to operate at several interlinked levels:

• Building level: Promote resilient construction techniques and materials that can withstand floods, storms, and heat while remaining affordable. Retrofitting existing stock – especially in informal settlements – is critical, as waiting for complete redevelopment is neither feasible nor just.

• Neighbourhood level: Invest in drainage, nature‑based solutions (wetlands, urban forests), shaded public spaces, and local emergency infrastructure, particularly in low‑income neighbourhoods.

• City and governance level: Integrate climate risk mapping into land‑use plans and housing programmes, ensuring that new “affordable” schemes are not located in future sacrifice zones. Develop insurance, social protection, and relocation frameworks that share climate risk fairly rather than dumping it on those with least capacity to absorb it.

For India, where urban floods in cities like Mumbai and Chennai, heatwaves across north and central India, and cyclones on the eastern coast intersect with dense low‑income settlements, this agenda is existential. Housing policy that ignores climate risk will soon find its gains literally washed away.

Chapter 6. From projects to systems: Pathways to adequate and affordable housing

1. Housing systems, not isolated schemes

UN‑Habitat’s strategic conclusion is that the world needs to move from scattered housing projects to coherent housing systems anchored in the right to adequate housing. Such systems would align land policy, infrastructure, finance, and regulation around clear objectives: adequacy, affordability, inclusiveness, and resilience.

Key components include:

• Comprehensive affordability strategies that combine land release in well‑located areas, streamlined approvals, inclusionary zoning, and supply‑side support for genuinely affordable units.

• Expanded non‑market and rental housing sectors – including social rental housing, cooperative housing, and community land trusts – to provide long‑term affordability outside speculative markets.

• Inclusive housing finance that offers appropriately structured products for low‑income and informal‑sector households, backed by public guarantees and subsidies where necessary.

• Secure tenure and anti‑eviction safeguards enshrined in law and practice, with independent oversight and accessible grievance mechanisms.

The overall ambition is to treat housing as social and economic infrastructure – akin to transport or health – rather than solely as a private asset.

2. Beyond the conventionality of housing finance

One of the more pointed critiques in the World Cities Report 2026 is directed at the “conventionality of housing finance”. Traditional mortgage systems assume:

• Stable, documented incomes

• Clear, individualised titles

• Formal properties recognised by planning and land‑record systems

• Long‑term contracts and predictable interest rate environments

In many developing countries, and for large sections of the population in India, these conditions do not hold. Informal workers lack payslips; tenure is often collective, customary, or partially documented; and properties may straddle the line between “authorised” and “unauthorised” in official records.

As a result, conventional finance systematically excludes those who most need support. The report suggests several directions for breaking this impasse:

• Micro‑mortgages and housing microfinance suited to incremental building and low, irregular incomes.

• Blended finance models that use public and development finance institutions to de‑risk investment in affordable segments.

• Support for community‑based savings and credit mechanisms, which already finance much incremental housing construction, so that they can operate with lower risk and deeper capital pools.

• Rental‑oriented finance, including credit enhancements for not‑for‑profit housing associations and instruments that allow pension funds or impact investors to support long‑term affordable rental portfolios.

The underlying principle is that finance architectures must be adapted to real urban livelihoods and tenure patterns, not the reverse.

Chapter 7. India: Housing, the city, and inclusion

1. The scale and nature of India’s challenge

When it comes to urbanisation India was a late bloomer but the country is already home to world’s to second largest urban population next only to China. As per World Bank 2025 report India’s urban population will be 951 million by 2050 and will likely cross 1 billion by 2070. This itself is likely to engineer monumtental habitat crisis.

The World Cities Report and associated commentaries underline several facts about disrupted habitat in India:

• Urban housing shortages remain concentrated among EWS and LIG households, even as middle‑ and higher‑income segments see expanding supply.

• Price‑to‑income ratios of 14.3 in Mumbai and 10.1 in Delhi mark these cities as deeply unaffordable by global standards.

• The share of “affordable” projects in major city pipelines has declined sharply, from around 52 per cent in 2018 to about 17 per cent in 2025.

• India has around 13 homeless persons per 10,000 population, indicating a significant population with no shelter at all, alongside a much larger group in sub‑standard or insecure housing.

• Informal settlements and unauthorised colonies remain central to shelter provision, especially for migrants and informal workers.

At the same time, public policy has not been static.

Programmes such as Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY‑Urban), state‑level slum upgrading and rehabilitation schemes, and various credit‑linked subsidies have expanded the pool of subsidised or supported housing. Global summaries note that coverage of subsidised housing in India increased from 0.3 per cent in 2010 to about 7 per cent in 2023, reflecting this policy push.

2. Why the crisis feels worse for the poor

Yet for many low‑income and marginal urban residents, the housing situation feels more precarious today than it did decades ago. Several dynamics contribute to this perception:

• Peripheral resettlement: Formal solutions, especially in large metros, often involve relocating residents from central informal settlements to distant resettlement colonies on inexpensive land. This can drastically lengthen commutes, erode informal economic networks, and isolate households from social support structures.

• Continuing insecurity: Many informal settlements, even those that have existed for decades, face the threat of demolition linked to infrastructure projects, environmental litigation, or city “beautification” drives.

• Lack of a robust rental strategy: Policy remains overwhelmingly ownership‑centric, even though the urban poor are disproportionately renters. Regulation of rents and tenancies is uneven, and dedicated affordable rental stock is scarce.

• Labour‑housing disconnect: Informalised labour markets make it difficult for low‑income households to demonstrate credit‑worthiness, excluding them from formal finance and many subsidy schemes.

The Partha Mukhopadhyay’s CPR research underscores how the architecture of urban regulation – planning norms, land records, enforcement practices – systematically produces an “other” urban India, where residents are simultaneously indispensable to the city’s functioning and marginal in its legal imagination. In such a context, the expansion of formal programmes does not automatically translate into felt security.

3. Housing and the city: a reframing for India

A different approach would start from the premise that housing is inseparable from the wider urban system. A “Housing and the City” frame for India might prioritise:

• In‑situ, service‑first upgrading: Rather than defaulting to resettlement, cities could commit to upgrading as the primary mode of engagement with informal settlements – providing water, sanitation, drainage, electricity, and access roads while co‑designing layout changes with residents.

• A serious affordable rental agenda: This could include public or social rental housing, regulated private rentals, and hostels or dormitories for single workers and students. A focus on rental would align better with migrants’ needs and income volatility.

• Land policy reform: Improved land records, transparent mechanisms for land assembly, and land value capture instruments could ensure that rising urban land values finance affordable housing rather than pure windfalls.

• Integrated metropolitan planning: Housing locations should be planned alongside transport corridors, employment clusters, and social infrastructure. This would avoid creating dormitory peripheries disconnected from opportunity.

• Rights‑based governance: Embedding procedural protections and participation in housing and slum‑related decisions would operationalise the spirit of Indian jurisprudence on the right to livelihood and shelter.

Such a shift would not be simple. It would require coordination across levels of government, rebalancing relationships with private developers, and new forms of engagement with informal settlements. But it is precisely the kind of systemic change that the World Cities Report 2026 suggests is necessary.

Chapter 8. Transformative pathways: Closing the “adequate housing” gap

Bringing together global evidence and Indian realities, at least five interlocking pathways emerge for closing the “adequate housing” gap.

Pathway 1: Re‑anchoring housing in rights

The first pathway is conceptual but powerful: re‑anchor housing policy in the right to adequate housing. That right is more than access to a roof. It encompasses security of tenure, availability of services, affordability, habitability, accessibility, location, and cultural adequacy. It must fit in the ambit of expanded provision by the Supreme Court of India of Article 21 (Right to Life) of the Constitution of India

Operationally, this means:

• Explicitly referencing the right to adequate housing in national legislation and policy frameworks.

• Defining measurable standards, including maximum recommended housing cost burdens, minimum habitability criteria, and norms for proximity to basic services.

• Establishing independent mechanisms – human rights commissions, ombuds offices, or housing tribunals – that can hear complaints related to evictions, discrimination, and gross inadequacies.

In India, judicial precedents have already linked shelter to the right to life and livelihood. Translating those precedents into concrete administrative protocols would close part of the gap between constitutional principle and everyday practice.

Pathway 2: Recognising and upgrading informality as urban infrastructure

The second pathway is to treat informal settlements as critical urban infrastructure, not anomalies or blots at the urban landscape

This would involve:

• Legal and policy recognition of informal settlements and their residents as legitimate urban constituents, with rights to services and participation.

• Large‑scale, multi‑year programmes of community‑led, in‑situ upgrading, with secure or progressively improving tenure forms.

• Use of detailed settlement categorisation work – like that undertaken in Delhi – to tailor interventions, distinguishing between environmentally hazardous locations that require negotiated relocation and those where upgrading is clearly viable.

Upgrading on this scale requires sustained finance and political commitment. But the costs of inaction – in health, productivity, and social cohesion – are equally high.

Pathway 3: Building climate‑resilient and low‑carbon housing systems

The third pathway is to embed climate resilience and low‑carbon design into housing systems, with a strong equity focus.

Elements include:

• Incentivising low‑carbon materials and designs that reduce life‑cycle emissions without pushing costs beyond reach. This can range from local material use to design that facilitates natural ventilation and reduces dependence on air‑conditioning.

• Mapping climate risks across the city and integrating this information into housing subsidy and location decisions, so that new “affordable” housing is not placed in areas that will soon face chronic flooding or extreme heat.

• Ensuring that major climate adaptation projects incorporate anti‑displacement safeguards and affordable housing components, preventing green infrastructure from becoming a vector of exclusion.

For countries like India, this pathway offers a chance to avoid the locking‑in of carbon‑intensive and fragile housing stock during a once‑in‑a‑century urbanisation wave.

Pathway 4: Democratising housing finance

The fourth pathway focuses on democratising housing finance. The aim is to design financial systems that can work with the realities of informal employment and diverse tenure forms.

Possible moves include:

• Encouraging micro‑mortgage products and housing microfinance, with shorter tenors, flexible repayment schedules, and collateral arrangements tied to occupancy rather than perfect titles.

• Expanding public and multilateral credit guarantees for affordable housing, especially where social or non‑profit providers are involved.

• Supporting community savings groups, cooperatives, and self‑help housing organisations with technical assistance and matched funding, rather than treating them as informal anomalies.

In India, such innovations could complement existing credit‑linked subsidy schemes, making them more accessible to informal workers who dominate urban labour markets.

Pathway 5: Governing housing as part of an equitable urban system

The fifth pathway is to govern housing not in isolation, but as part of a broader urban system.

This involves:

• Aligning housing strategies with transport including TOD sans gentrification, jobs, education, and health planning at metropolitan scale, so that affordable homes are located in liveable, opportunity‑rich contexts.

• Using inclusionary zoning and land value capture to ensure that new transport corridors and growth zones incorporate obligations for affordable housing.

• Deepening democratic participation in urban planning – through ward committees, neighbourhood forums, and city‑level housing boards – so that low‑income residents can shape decisions about where and how housing is provided.

When housing is treated as infrastructure that enables equitable urban life, rather than as a commodity to be traded, these system‑level reforms become easier to justify.

Epilogue – From crisis statistics to a new vistas

The World Cities Report 2026 offers a sobering statistical portrait: 3.4 billion people without adequate housing, more than 1 billion in informal settlements, and a rising tide of evictions and climate‑driven displacement. It documents a worsening global affordability crisis, with house prices and rents outpacing incomes and speculative land markets undermining the promise of secure shelter. It shows how climate risks threaten to destroy millions of homes even as housing itself drives a substantial share of emissions.

Yet the report also makes a crucial central claim: the housing crisis is governed, not inevitable. It is the product of policy choices to under‑invest in social housing, to financialise shelter, to treat informality as a blemish and blot on the face of the city rather than a resource, and to pursue climate action without fully confronting questions of distribution and justice. Different choices are possible.

For India, standing on the cusp of most dramatic urban transition that will witness in next two decades this is a defining moment and one of high stakes. If current trends continue, the country could entrench hyper‑unequal metropolitan regions in which large majorities live with fragile tenure, under‑serviced neighbourhoods, and escalating heat, flood, and pollution exposure. But India also has the opportunity to use its still‑unfolding urbanisation story to institutionalise affordable, inclusive, and climate‑resilient housing as a central pillar of development of making India a developed nation by 2047.

The transformative pathways outlined here – rights‑anchored policy; recognition and upgrading of informality; climate‑resilient design; democratised finance; and system‑level urban governance – are neither utopian nor exhaustive. They draw on existing experiments across the world and within India, many of which have already demonstrated what is possible when communities, states, corporates and non-governmental sectors collaborate.

Closing the “adequate housing” gap will not be achieved by a single flagship programme or a five‑year mission. It calls for reimagining and rewriting social compact of the city: who is entitled to belong, who bears risk, who captures rising land values, and who has a voice in spatial decisions. It demands that housing be reimagined as a commons – a shared foundation of social and economic life – rather than simply as an individual asset or a financial instrument.

The World Cities Report 2026 is a warning, but it is also an invitation that provides the pathway: to translate crisis statistics into a new social compact of home, one that makes room for the billions currently excluded and that treats every dwelling, formal or informal, as part of a collective endeavour to build more just, liveable, and resilient cities.

Subscribe now

( Ai Generated Representative Image)

Prologue: A Country Between Two Health Eras

Late last week, the Government of India Ministry of Health and Family Welfare released the sixth edition of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS‑6, 2023–24). The NFHS-6 arrives at a defining moment in India’s development trajectory. NFHS‑5 (2019–21) had already signalled India had hit near near‑replacement fertility, expanded institutional deliveries and immunisation, and achieved far improved access to core household infrastructure like electricity and drinking water. NFHS‑6 confirms these findings but also raises uncomfortable questions- the country is entering an uncharted era dominated by non‑communicable diseases, ageing, and “second‑generation” gender and nutrition challenges.

Demographic Shift

The demographic structure itself is shifting decisively. The share of children under 15 has fallen further, while that of older persons (60+) has risen from around 11.8 per cent in NFHS‑5 to 12.9 per cent in NFHS‑6, with several southern and hill states ageing much faster than the country as a whole.

Fertility has stabilised at around 2.0 children per woman overall (below the replacement rate), with urban fertility at 1.6 and rural at 2.1, implying that population momentum, rather than high fertility, will drive future growth. Basic amenities such as electricity and improved drinking water now nominally reach 95 per cent of households, shrinking the classic “infrastructure gap” that dominated earlier development debates.

Instructively, NFHS‑6 throws up new faultlines. Contraceptive prevalence has risen, but method mix remains heavily skewed towards female sterilisation and a rising share of traditional methods, while. Maternal and child health coverage has improved, but caesarean section rates have soared—especially in private facilities and in states such as Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala—raising concerns about over‑medicalisation even as some poorer states still struggle to ensure timely emergency obstetric care.

Child nutrition has improved modestly: stunting, wasting and underweight have declined, but pockets of high burden remain deeply entrenched in central and eastern India. Also, NFHS‑6’s expanded biomarker modules highlight the rapid rise of non‑communicable diseases. Elevated blood sugar and hypertension have increased significantly between NFHS‑5 and NFHS‑6 among both women and men, especially in southern and western states already dealing with high levels of adult overweight and obesity.

Women’s empowerment indicators are both encouraging and disturbing. Female education, digital inclusion, and access to bank accounts have increased since NFHS‑5, but labour force participation, safety, and freedom from gender‑based violence have not kept pace. Tobacco and alcohol use, concentrated more among men in specific geographies, further amplify the NCD burden.

This silver jubilee edition, Volume 25 of Akhil Vaani daily long-form series, offers a structured, comparative reading of NFHS‑5 and NFHS‑6 across major domains: population and household profile; characteristics of adults; family planning and unmet need; maternal and child health; child and adult nutrition; NCD epidemiology; women’s empowerment; gender‑based violence; and lifestyle risk factors.

It distils ten core problems and proposes ten targeted policy responses to guide India’s transition from the NFHS‑5 to the NFHS‑6 health era and beyond.

1. Survey architecture and context: NFHS‑5 vs NFHS‑6

NFHS‑5 (2019–21) and NFHS‑6 (2023–24) share a broadly similar design, enabling valid comparisons over time. Both provide national and state/UT‑level estimates, with district‑level estimates for a subset of indicators. NFHS‑6, like NFHS‑5, uses four instruments: Household, Woman (15–49 years), Man (15–54 years), and Biomarker schedules, administered using computer‑assisted personal interviewing (CAPI).

A key difference between NFHS-5 and NFHS-6 is expanded scope and timing. NFHS-6 includes new modules on Direct Benefit Transfer, Self‑Help Group coverage, digital and financial literacy, and an expanded set of clinical, anthropometric and biochemical (CAB) tests. NFHS‑6 fieldwork was conducted in two phases between May 2023 and December 2024, capturing a post‑pandemic health landscape, whereas NFHS‑5 straddled the pandemic years (2019–21).

2. Population and household profile

2.1 Age structure and demographic transition

NFHS‑5 reported that 26.5 per cent of India’s population was below 15 years, and 11.8 per cent was aged 60 and above. NFHS‑6 shows these shifting to 25.5 per cent and 12.9 per cent, respectively, underlining a continued decline in the youth share and a steady rise in the elderly population.

Urban–rural differences persist: rural India remains younger than urban India, but even rural areas show a gradual ageing trend.

State‑level differentials are pronounced. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and several other southern and hill states have significantly higher shares of population aged 60+, reflecting long‑standing low fertility and better survival. In contrast, Bihar, UP and parts of the north‑east remain demographically younger, with larger child populations and lower elderly proportions.

The NFHS‑5 to NFHS‑6 comparison confirms that while India remains relatively young on average, it is rapidly becoming an ageing society in several states, with social security and geriatric care systems lagging behind demographic reality.

2.2 Basic amenities and financial inclusion

Between NFHS‑5 and NFHS‑6, access to basic amenities has improved further. At the national level, the proportion of the population living in households with electricity rose from 96.8 per cent to 98.3 per cent, while access to improved drinking‑water increased from 95.9 to 96.5 per cent. These improvements are seen in both urban and rural areas, with some residual gaps in parts of central and eastern India.

Health insurance coverage shows one of the sharpest improvements: households with at least one member covered under a health insurance/financing scheme increased from 41.0 per cent in NFHS‑5 to 60.2 per cent in NFHS‑6, driven by the expansion of public and state‑sponsored schemes. Households with any member having a bank or post‑office account rose from 95.7 to 98.2 per cent, indicating near‑universal financial inclusion at the basic account level.

Female educational participation has improved: the share of women aged 6+ who have ever attended school increased from 71.8 per cent in NFHS‑5 to 73.7 per cent in NFHS‑6, with larger gains in some lagging states. However, women’s ownership of land or a house (alone or jointly) increased more modestly from 14.0 to 18.8 per cent, suggesting slower progress in asset‑based empowerment.

3. Characteristics of adults (15–49 years)

3.1 Education and digital inclusion

Between NFHS‑5 and NFHS‑6, adult education indicators improved. The proportion of women aged 15–49 with 10 or more years of schooling rose from 41.0 per cent to 46.4 per cent nationally, while for men, the increase was from 50.2 per cent to 54.6 per cent. Urban–rural and inter‑state disparities remain, but the trend is clearly upward, with faster gains in female education in several states.

The most dramatic shift is in digital inclusion. In NFHS‑5, only 33.3 per cent of women and 51.2 per cent of men had ever used the internet. NFHS‑6 shows these rising to 64.3 per cent and 80.5 per cent, respectively. Many southern and western states report very high internet use among both sexes, while Bihar, Jharkhand, and some north‑eastern states remain laggards, particularly among rural women.

3.2 Marriage patterns

The proportion of women aged 20–24 married before 18 fell from 23.3 per cent in NFHS‑5 to 20.1 per cent in NFHS‑6. For men aged 25–29 who were married before 21, the decline is smaller, from 17.7 to 15.9 per cent. These reductions are uneven: early marriage remains more prevalent in Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and some north‑eastern states, while Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and several others have very low early marriage rates.

NFHS‑6 shows progress on child marriage relative to NFHS‑5, but the pace is insufficient in high‑burden states, and improvements in age at marriage do not always translate into delayed first birth, especially where social norms still favour early motherhood.

4. Fertility, family planning and unmet need

4.1 Fertility levels and trends

NFHS‑5 placed national TFR at 2.0 children per woman, down from 2.2 in NFHS‑4. NFHS‑6 confirms a TFR of 2.0, indicating consolidation at replacement level, with urban fertility at 1.6 and rural at 2.1. Several states—Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal—remain well below replacement, while six states, led by Bihar and UP, remain above but show continued decline.

Adolescent fertility has changed more modestly: the share of women 15–19 who are already mothers or pregnant is roughly stable nationally, with small improvements in some states and stagnation or slight deterioration in others.

4.2 Current use of family planning methods

Between NFHS‑5 and NFHS‑6, overall contraceptive prevalence among currently married women 15–49 rose from 66.7 to 69.1 per cent. However, use of modern methods declined from 56.4 per cent to 52.7 per cent, while use of traditional methods rose sharply from 10.3 per cent to 16.4 per cent. Female sterilisation remains high (37.9 percent in NFHS‑5 vs 36.5 percent in NFHS‑6), while male sterilisation, although inching up from 0.3 to 0.5 percent, remains negligible.

State‑wise, southern states display high contraceptive prevalence dominated by female sterilisation, whereas northern and eastern states show a mix of lower prevalence, higher unmet need, and increasing use of traditional methods

4.3 Unmet need for family planning

Total unmet need declined modestly from 9.4 per cent in NFHS‑5 to 8.5 per cent in NFHS‑6, with small shifts for spacing (from 4.0 to 4.5 per cent) and limiting (from 5.4 to 4.0 per cent). Progress is uneven: some states have seen sharp reductions, while others still register double‑digit unmet need, especially in rural areas and among poorer, less educated women.

5. Maternal health: antenatal, delivery and postnatal care

5.1 Antenatal care (ANC)

NFHS‑5 showed that 70.0 per cent of mothers had an ANC check‑up in the first trimester, 92.6 per cent had at least one ANC visit, and 58.5 per cent had at least four ANC visits. NFHS‑6 records improved figures: 76.2 per cent had first‑trimester ANC, 95.9 per cent had any ANC, and 65.2 per cent had four or more visits.

Iron–folic acid (IFA) consumption is a critical area for improvement. In NFHS‑5, only 44.1 per cent of women consumed IFA for 100+ days and 26.0 per cent for 180+ days. NFHS‑6 raises these to 54.9 and 37.8 per cent, respectively, but this still falls short of programme goals, particularly in large northern and central states.

5.2 Delivery care

Institutional births increased from 88.6 per cent in NFHS‑5 to 90.6 per cent in NFHS‑6, with skilled birth attendance rising from 89.4 to 91.3 per cent. The public‑private split remains notable: the share of deliveries in public facilities ticked down slightly, while private facilities maintained a strong presence in urban and better‑off states.

Caesarean section (C‑section) rates highlight a critical shift. NFHS‑5 estimated that 21.5 per cent of births were delivered by C‑section nationally, whereas NFHS‑6 reports 27.2 per cent. C‑section rates in private facilities jumped from 47.4 to 54.1 percent, while those in public facilities rose modestly from 14.3 to 16.9 percent. States such as Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu now report C‑section rates far above WHO’s suggested range, signalling potential over‑medicalisation. It is worthwhile to note that WHO considers the ideal Cesarean section (C-section) rate to be 10 to 15 per cent

5.3 Postnatal care (PNC)

NFHS‑5 showed that about 79 per cent of mothers and 78 per cent of newborns received PNC within two days; NFHS‑6 raises these to roughly 94 per cent and 93.5 per cent, respectively, at the national level, albeit with some state variation.

From NFHS‑5 to NFHS‑6, maternal care coverage has improved across the continuum—ANC, delivery and PNC—but quality concerns (notably high C‑section rates and incomplete IFA adherence) have sharpened, and inter‑state inequality remains marked.

6. Child health and nutrition

6.1 Immunisation and illness

Nationally, NFHS-5 reported India’s full immunisation coverage (FIC) at 76.4%- 76.8%, while NFHS-6 recorded a national average of 87.1% for children aged 12–23 months. Coverage of second‑dose measles‑containing vaccine among children 24–35 months has expanded sharply, reflecting intensified measles‑rubella campaigns. The newly released NFHS-6 data also shows that large, previously lagging states (such as Uttar Pradesh) made massive, double-digit jumps in full immunisation coverage, helping push the national average higher.

Prevalence of diarrhoea and ARI in the two weeks prior to the survey remains relatively stable and moderate across the two rounds, with NFHS‑6 showing slightly higher care‑seeking in some states but lower in others, often correlating with socio‑economic status and health‑system performance.

6.2 Infant and young child feeding (IYCF)

Between NFHS‑5 and NFHS‑6, early initiation of breastfeeding and exclusive breastfeeding show a mixed result breastfeeding indicators show

• Exclusive Breastfeeding (Under 6 months): Fell significantly to 55.8% (down from 63.7% in NFHS-5).

• Early Initiation (Within 1 hour of birth): Improved to 50.1% (up from 41.8% in NFHS-5).

• Overall Breastfeeding: About 95.6% of infants under six months were breastfed during the survey period.

6.3 Child anthropometry

NFHS‑5 placed stunting among under‑5 children at 35.5 per cent, wasting at 19.3 per cent, and underweight at 32.1 per cent nationally. NFHS‑6 fact sheets show national stunting around 20.1 per cent for the India table presented, wasting 10.9 per cent, and underweight 17.8 per cent—these numbers reflect a new reference table in the specific excerpt, but the direction of improvement is clear: declines in all three, though from very high levels in NFHS‑4 and NFHS‑5.

State variability is stark. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Goa show relatively low levels of stunting and wasting, whereas Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and parts of Gujarat and Telangana continue to exhibit high levels of stunting and wasting.

Child survival and immunisation have strengthened; child nutrition is improving but too slowly and unevenly. Feeding diversity, not just calorie availability, is now the central constraint, especially in poorer states.

7. Adult nutrition (15–49 years)

NFHS‑5 had already highlighted a double burden of malnutrition: under‑nutrition coexisting with rising overweight/obesity. NFHS‑6 accentuates this pattern.

Among women 15–49, the share with BMI below 18.5 increased slightly from 18.7 per cent in NFHS‑5 to about 12.0 per cent in the India table of NFHS‑6, indicating modest improvement but continued under‑nutrition in poorer regions. Meanwhile, overweight/obesity (BMI ≥25) among women rose from 24.0 per cent in NFHS‑4 to 30.0 per cent in NFHS‑5 and to 46.7 per cent in NFHS‑6, according to the India fact sheet excerpt provided, especially in urban and southern/western states.

For men, underweight (BMI <18.5) in NFHS‑5 was around 16.2 per cent; NFHS‑6 shows 15.5 per cent, essentially stable with small improvement. Male overweight/obesity increased from 22.9 percent in NFHS‑4 to mid‑30s in NFHS‑5 and to 37.0 percent in the NFHS‑6 India table.

States such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Punjab and Goa now have adult overweight/obesity rates commonly exceeding 35–45 per cent, while central and eastern states continue to wrestle with under‑nutrition alongside emerging overweight in urban pockets.

From NFHS‑5 to NFHS‑6, under‑nutrition has slowly receded but remains substantial; overweight and obesity are rising sharply, especially in more developed states, foreshadowing an even larger NCD burden.

8. NCD risk: blood sugar and hypertension

8.1 Blood sugar

NFHS‑5 revealed that 14–16 per cent of adults 15+ had high or very high blood sugar or were on diabetes medication, with higher prevalence in southern and western states. NFHS‑6 pushes those numbers up: about 28.9 per cent of women and 31.9 per cent of men have high or very high blood sugar (≥140 mg/dl or on medication), according to the India fact sheet excerpt, up from 24.8 per cent and 27.0 per cent, respectively

States like Kerala, Punjab, Goa, and Telangana stand out for very high blood sugar prevalence; several central and north‑eastern states also show rising trends.

8.2 Hypertension

Similarly, NFHS‑5 indicated 21–24 per cent of adults had elevated blood pressure or were on anti‑hypertensive medication. NFHS‑6 reports that 31.9 per cent of women and 36.6 per cent of men nationally have elevated blood pressure (systolic ≥140 and/or diastolic ≥90 or on medication).

Southern states, Punjab and some north‑eastern states have particularly high hypertension prevalence; some of them show modest improvements in treatment rates compared to NFHS‑5, but overall control remains poor.

Within just one survey cycle, India has moved decisively deeper into the NCD era. Biomarker data show a steep escalation in diabetes and hypertension prevalence, especially in populations that also exhibit high rates of overweight/obesity, pointing to an urgent need for NCD‑centric health system redesign.

9. Women’s empowerment

NFHS‑5 reported that 88.7 per cent of married women participated in three key household decisions, 78.6 per cent had a bank account, and 54 per cent had a mobile phone. NFHS‑6 improves all these markers: 96.5 per cent now participate in household decisions, 91.7 per cent have their own bank or savings account, and 89.1 per cent have their own mobile phone.

Hygienic menstrual protection use among women 15–24 was about 77.3 per cent nationally in NFHS-5; NFHS‑6 gives a national figure of 92.5 per cent, with some states reaching near‑universality. Yet, work participation among women paid in cash remains modest (around 25.8 per cent in NFHS‑5 and 36.2 per cent in NFHS‑6, as shown in the India table excerpt), and formal employment remains limited

State‑wise, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Himachal Pradesh, and Maharashtra show high levels of women’s decision‑making, bank accounts and mobile ownership. Northern and eastern states like Bihar, Rajasthan and parts of Uttar Pradesh still trail on some of these dimensions but have improved markedly since NFHS‑5.

NFHS‑6 documents a rapid expansion of “infrastructure for empowerment” between NFHS‑5 and NFHS‑6—bank accounts, mobiles, and decision‑making—but economic empowerment and safety gains lag.

10. Gender‑based violence

NFHS‑5 estimated that 29.3 per cent of ever‑married women 18–49 had experienced spousal physical, sexual or emotional violence. NFHS-6 shows 17.7 per cent of ever‑married women 18–49 reporting spousal violence, with 1.7 per cent experiencing physical violence during pregnancy and 0.3 per cent of young women 18–29 reporting sexual violence by age 18.

The direction of change is nuanced.

Better awareness and support systems may increase reporting in some states, while under‑reporting remains a concern nationwide. States such as Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha and Jharkhand show high spousal violence prevalence in both rounds, whereas Kerala and Himachal Pradesh show lower levels, but not zero.

Despite advances in education, digital access and financial inclusion from NFHS‑5 to NFHS‑6, gender‑based violence remains stubbornly prevalent. Any apparent reduction in certain indicators must be interpreted with caution, given definitional and reporting differences.

11. Tobacco and alcohol use

NFHS‑5 found that 8.9 per cent of women and 38.0 per cent of men aged 15+ used some form of tobacco nationally. NFHS‑6 indicates 2.2 per cent of women and 15.9 per cent of men use tobacco; This reduction in headline percentages partly reflects definitional differences and the focus on “any kind of tobacco” as captured in the new table, but there is also real progress in some states.

Alcohol use among women was 1.3 per cent and among men 29.2 per cent in NFHS‑5; NFHS‑6 reports 0.3 per cent of women and 22.7 per cent of men consuming alcohol nationally. State‑wise, male alcohol use remains high in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and parts of the north‑east.

NFHS‑6 suggests some reduction or stabilisation in tobacco and alcohol use relative to NFHS‑5, but prevalence remains high in specific male cohorts and geographies, aligning closely with NCD and injury burdens.

12. Ten key problems crystallised from NFHS‑5 to NFHS‑6

Synthesising the comparative trends, at least ten critical problem areas emerge:

1. Ageing without policy realignment: Rapidly rising 60+ population, especially in southern and hill states, with limited social security, long‑term care and geriatric services.

2. Educational and digital gains for women without commensurate economic agency: Large improvements in schooling, bank accounts and internet use, but modest gains in paid work and occupational mobility.

3. Stagnant and skewed family planning method mix: Reliance on female sterilisation, negligible male involvement, rising traditional method use despite higher overall prevalence.

4. Persistent pockets of high unmet need and adolescent fertility: Especially in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and parts of the north‑east.

5. Over‑medicalisation of childbirth: Rapidly rising C‑section rates, especially in the private sector and southern states, without strong clinical justification frameworks.

6. Incomplete maternal nutrition response: Suboptimal IFA adherence and anaemia control despite improved ANC coverage.

7. Slow and uneven progress in child nutrition: Entrenched stunting and wasting in central and eastern states; poor complementary feeding practices nationwide.

8. Escalating adult overweight/obesity: Particularly in urban, southern and western states, not matched by preventive policy.

9. Rapid expansion of NCD burden: Rising prevalence of high blood sugar and hypertension with inadequate systems for screening, treatment and long‑term adherence.

10. Persistent gender‑based violence and concentrated lifestyle risks: Spousal violence in several states; high tobacco and alcohol use among men in specific geographies.

13. Ten targeted solutions for the NFHS‑6 era

From the comparative evidence, at least ten targeted, state‑differentiated solutions suggest themselves:

1. State‑level ageing compacts: In Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Himachal, coastal Andhra and similar states, build geriatric‑friendly primary care, community long‑term care models, day‑care centres for the elderly, and integrate mental‑health and dementia screening into primary care.

2. Women’s digital‑to‑income pipeline: In high‑education, high‑internet states like Telangana, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Delhi, design targeted programmes that convert women’s digital access into home‑based and remote work opportunities, with childcare, transport safety, and skill‑matching built in.

3. Family planning method diversification mission: Set state‑specific targets for increasing reversible modern method share; strengthen counselling and provider training; create positive communication campaigns on male contraceptive responsibility; use programme data to ensure quality and informed consent in sterilisation.

4. Adolescent SRH and delayed first‑birth strategies: Overlay NFHS‑6 maps of adolescent fertility and unmet need with school dropout and child marriage data; implement integrated interventions combining SRH education, community dialogues, and conditional cash transfers linked to girls’ secondary education.

5. C‑section governance and obstetric quality assurance: Publicly report facility‑wise C‑section rates; tie empanelment and reimbursement under public insurance to adherence to evidence‑based guidelines; promote midwife‑led birth centres; strengthen emergency obstetric care in states where C‑section access remains inadequate.

6. Maternal anaemia and IFA adherence offensive: Use digital MCP cards and frontline worker data to track IFA adherence; introduce social norm campaigns on anaemia; expand staple fortification (wheat, rice, salt) in high‑anaemia districts; integrate pre‑conception nutrition into adolescent health services.

7. High‑burden child nutrition convergence plans: For districts with high stunting and wasting, mandate converged plans linking Poshan/ICDS, WASH, food security, and social protection; focus on improving minimum acceptable diet through context‑specific complementary feeding using local foods.

8. Urban nutrition and activity policy: In high‑BMI states and cities, introduce health‑sensitive urban design (walkable streets, cycling lanes, open spaces), regulate ultra‑processed food marketing to children, use fiscal tools for sugary drinks and junk foods, and integrate diet and physical activity counselling into primary care.

9. National NCD Mission anchored in primary care: Institutionalise annual screening for hypertension and diabetes at Health and Wellness Centres; create digital registries; empower ASHAs and ANMs for community‑based adherence support; ensure uninterrupted supply of essential NCD medicines at primary facilities.

10. Integrated GBV and lifestyle risk response: Embed GBV screening in ANC/PNC and NCD clinics; expand one‑stop centres in high‑GBV states; design male‑focused tobacco/alcohol cessation programmes integrated with NCD services; leverage SHGs and community groups to change norms around violence and substance use.

Epilogue: From Data to Design

NFHS‑5 told the story of a country that had largely won the first-generation battles: expanding basic infrastructure, bringing births into institutions, raising immunisation coverage, and pushing fertility down to replacement levels. NFHS‑6 affirms those gains but insists on a new storyline: India is now older, more digitally connected, more exposed to lifestyle diseases, and confronted by subtler, more structural forms of inequality and risk.

The comparative picture is clear. Between NFHS‑5 and NFHS‑6, basic coverage indicators improved steadily—more ANC, more institutional deliveries, more PNC, more insurance, more bank accounts and mobile phones for women. But the quality and direction of progress are uneven. Caesarean sections climbed sharply; reversible contraceptive use did not; adolescent fertility and child nutrition remained stubborn in specific belts; adult overweight, diabetes and hypertension accelerated; and gender‑based violence persisted.

What NFHS‑6 offers, when read against NFHS‑5, is not just a dashboard of success and failure, but a design brief for the next decade of health and social policy. It suggests that India can no longer afford a one‑size‑fits‑all approach. Southern and western states must pivot quickly to ageing and NCD management, over‑medicalisation control, and care for the frail elderly. Northern and eastern states must simultaneously accelerate the unfinished agenda of maternal and child health and nutrition while preparing for their own impending NCD wave.

The survey’s most transformative potential lies in its granularity.

If used well, NFHS‑6 can help re‑prioritise by district and by population group: the adolescent girl in rural Bihar, the middle‑aged man with hypertension in urban Telangana, the widowed elderly woman in Kerala, the young, educated but unemployed woman in Maharashtra. Each of these lives sits at the intersection of multiple indicators in the fact sheets.

The question is whether India’s institutions can move from viewing NFHS as a backward‑looking audit to treating it as a forward‑looking blueprint. If the comparative insights between NFHS‑5 and NFHS‑6 drive differentiated, evidence‑based action over the next decade, the country can convert its narrowing demographic window into a genuine health dividend. If not, the same data will serve, a decade from now, as a record of opportunities missed.

[AI Generated Original illustration depicting India’s fast but uneven digital and AI transformation, showing diverse citizens connected through public digital infrastructure, real‑time payments and data flows.]

India’s Digital Decade at Full Tilt

Reading the State of India’s Digital Economy 2026 as a map of ascent, asymmetry, and unfinished inclusion

State of India’s Digital Economy (SIDE) report— issued by ICRIER and Potus Centre for Internet and Digital Economy (IPCIDI) is an annual publication since 2023—to bring greater clarity, transparency, and methodological rigour to the digital benchmarking landscape. As per the latest edition State of India’s Digital Economy Report, 2026 India is ranked 5th in a benchmarking of 71 countries. The current edition of the SIDE as per publishers introduces two major improvements. First, it embeds AI-related indicators into the CHIPS—Connect, Harness, Innovate, Protect, and Sustain—framework, thereby updating it for the AI era. Second, it expands the country coverage from 32 to 71 countries, accounting for 96 percent of global GDP, 86 percent of the world’s internet users, and 83 percent of the global population.

This Volume 24 of Akhil Vaani Daily long form series, I trace the sotry of the fast tragectory growth of India’s digital economy, analyse the emerging fault line, discsus the challenges facing the country and provide the structural solutions.

And i must begng with the opening stanga of the report that shows how the global digital map has become tripola.

The Tripolar Digital Economy

At the outset the report note that the global digital map is becoming more distributed and tripolar. It adds that the initial digital leadership was historically concentrated in North America and Western Europe, with Japan as the Asian outpost. But there is a remarkable recent shift and that order is changing, and changing fast.

The rise of the digital economy in China, India, Singapore, South Korea, and other Asian economies is shifting the centre of gravity categorically toward the Indo-Pacific. Unsurprisingly then, among the top five digitalised countries, three—China, Singapore, and India—are belong to the Indo-Pacific, while the U.S. and the U.K. represent the North Atlantic. Continental Europe remains relevant, with France and Germany in the top 10, but its relative influence appears to be declining.

A Caveat

Before I move to the main story, I must bring forward the the caveat the report starts with. The report notes that despite the fast track growth of the digital economy, the digital convergence remains limited. While most countries are making progress, the U.S. continues to push the frontier further ahead.

The gap between the frontier and many other G20 economies has widened, and country rankings have become more entrenched. Regional spillovers appear weak with the countries in the same region often show very different levels of digitalisation, suggesting that digital transformation is driven less by geographical proximity—unlike manufacturing—and more by domestic capabilities, institutions, policies, and private sector dynamism.

Developing Countries Breaktrough AI Diffusion

The most significant value add of this report is analysing the AI diffusion story. The report notes that Gnerative AI has already positioned it as the the fastest-diffusing digital technology in history. It reached mass adoption at astonishing pace, far faster than the internet, smartphones, e-commerce, or digital payments.

Unlike earlier technology transformations, AI has democratised fastest recent waves of technologies becoming a developing-country phenomenon almost immediately. Unsurprisingly then, developing countries already account for 72 percent of global AI users, with China and India alone accounting for nearly two-fifths of global users. This creates a major opportunity for developing countries to shape AI adoption and use cases.

A breakthrough finding of the report is that India already marched ahead on AI frontperforms. In the standalone AI index, India ranks fourth, behind only the United States, China, and Singapore, and ahead of Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and Korea.

Another key finding of the report is that developing countries are, on average, doing better on AI adoption than they performed on traditional digitalisation. However the report puts a caveat that this finding should be treated with caution, as many AI indicators capture inputs and intermediate capabilities—such as publications, patents, skills, GitHub activity, model development, and startup funding—rather than economy-wide outcomes such as productivity, exports, investment, or grow

Having set the context, it is time now for the prologue “The new republic of network”.

Prologue: The New Republic of Networks

India’s digital story is no longer a side note to its development narrative; it is becoming foundational pillar through which Bharat now understand and defines growth, governance, finance, welfare, innovation and state capacity. The State of India’s Digital Economy 2026 report argues that benchmarking digitalisation is no longer a purely academic exercise because digital and AI rankings increasingly shape policy debates, investor sentiment and geopolitical perception.

Indubitably then the report is not just a scorecard and ranking of digitization. It is an attempt to place India inside the changing architecture of the world economy, where digital systems are now as strategic infrastructure pillars as ports, highways, oil routes and manufacturing corridors.

AI Embedded

The report itself is part of a continuing institutional effort that began in 2023. It is the fourth edition of the flagship SIDE series and was published in May 2026 by the ICRIER-Prosus Centre for Internet and Digital Economy (IPCIDE) at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER).

The context isprofound and categorical: this edition of the report comes at a moment human history of techtonic shift, at a time when the world is moving from a broad digital economy to what the report calls the “intelligent digital economy,” where artificial intelligence is no longer a separate frontier but is increasingly getting embedded fast in the overarching framework of connectivity, commerce, labour markets, governance systems and industrial competitiveness.

The Comparative Landscape

The report introduces a widened country sample of 71 economies and updates its CHIPS framework—Connect, Harness, Innovate, Protect and Sustain—to capture the AI era through 58 indicators spread across 16 sub-pillars.

Within that framework, India is ranked the fifth most digitalised country in the world in 2026, up from eighth place in the previous year’s smaller sample, placing it in the global top decile. The top five countries are the United States, China, Singapore, the United Kingdom and India; the five immediately after India are the United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, the Republic of Korea and Canada.

What does Improvment means

India has improved its ranking by three places, rising from eighth in 2025 to fifth in 2026. Its performance is driven by relatively strong contributions from connectivity (11.9), usage (9.2), and protection and sustainability (10.5), although it continues to lag in innovation (5.3) compared with the top performers. verall, India appears as a well-rounded but still evolving digital economy, with significant scope to strengthen its innovation pillar and close the gap with frontier countries.

Beyond Ranking

This ranking matters, but not in the shallow, chest-thumping way that international league tables often do. It matters because India’s rise has been driven by a distinctive combination of scale, low-cost digital diffusion, public digital infrastructure, entrepreneurial adaptation, and unusually rapid social adoption of mobile internet and real-time payments Yet the same report also warns that digital expansion is not the same as universal inclusion, and that headline success can coexist with exclusion, fragility and underpreparedness.

Chapters that Follow

What follows in chapters below is a deep reading of the SIDE report as both celebration and caution: a study of how India climbed into the top tier, what forces are powering its digital march, how the country must position itself for the next phase of AI revolution, why exclusion still shadows expansion, where the cracks lie, and what a serious agenda of structural correction should look like if India wants digitisation to become not merely fast, but just, resilient, equitable, inclusive and transformative.

Chapter 1: What the SIDE report is and why it exists

The State of India’s Digital Economy 2026 is an annual benchmarking report designed to assess India’s digital economy in comparative global perspective. According to the report, it was launched to bring greater clarity, transparency and methodological rigour to cross-country digital benchmarking at a time when competing indices often produce sharply divergent results for countries such as India.

It is published by IPCIDE, the ICRIER-Prosus Centre for Internet and Digital Economy, within ICRIER, one of India’s leading economic policy think tanks. The report credits Prosus for continued support to the centre and notes that this edition was enriched through interactions at SIDE 2025 outreach events involving institutions such as NITI Aayog, the Ministry of Finance, the RBI, DARPG and TRAI, underscoring that the report instead of just another contribution is an isolated academic silo is embedded in the archtecture of the gestal of the policy ecosystem.

The report’s broader context is strategic, forward looking, geopolitical and developmental all at the same time. It explicitly frames digital benchmarking as a strategic exercise in an age when digital and AI rankings are watched, contested and used to influence narratives about national capability.

The Ranking Imbroglio

This report is not the only report that does digital ranking. In the very first chapter of the report in table 1, apart from this report, the report provides divergent ranking of India in different reports and notes that - India’s position across major digital and AI indices varies widely—from around 134th in the ITU’s ICT Development Index to the global top tier in AI-focused rankings. It notes that the First-generation indices—developed in the early 2000s by institutions such as the ITU, UN, and WEF—focused primarily on a narrow set of digitalisation indicators and largely ignored scale effects, thereby placing India lower. In contrast, more recent indices—such as those by Oxford Insights, Tortoise, and Stanford—place greater emphasis on scale and adopt a broader lens, where India performs much better. It also notes that the IMF index is an exception: despite being recent, it adopts a methodology similar to that used in first-generation studies from the early 2000s

The report’s critique of first-generation digital indices is that they often measure only the average user’s digital intensity, ignore scale, and mix enablers with outcomes in ways that systematically understate the position of large emerging economies.

How SIDE addresses the Problem- CHIPS framework

To address that problem, the SIDE report uses the CHIPS framework: Connect, Harness, Innovate, Protect and Sustain. The 2026 edition expands country coverage from 32 to 71 economies accounting for 96 percent of global GDP, 86 percent of internet users and 83 percent of global population, and it adds AI sub-pillars to four of the five pillars so that digitalisation is interpreted through the lens of the AI era.

Chapter 2: India at number five

The report places the United States first with a CHIPS-Combined score of 64.4, China second at 51.6, Singapore third at 38.2, the United Kingdom fourth at 38.2, and India fifth at 36.9. Immediately behind India come the United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, the Republic of Korea and Canada, making India the only lower-middle-income country in the top five and one of the most notable outliers in the global ranking.

The report says India’s rise from eighth in 2025 to fifth in 2026 reflects both substantive gains and some methodological effects. On the substantive side, India benefited from improved connectivity, greater harnessing of digital technologies, and a strong AI talent pool; on the methodological side, the larger country sample and the exclusion of some indicators where India had underperformed also helped its relative position.

Still, the report’s own judgment is clear: even allowing for caveats, India belongs in the top decile of global digital rankings. It presents India as a “well-rounded but still evolving digital economy” with relatively strong scores in connectivity, usage, protection and sustainability, though it continues to lag the top performers on the innovation pillar.

Chapter 3: The engines of India’s digitisation march

The report’s clues about what powers India’s ascent are spread across pillars rather than gathered into a single slogan, but a coherent pattern emerges. India’s digital rise rests on scale, rapid diffusion, low-cost access, public digital rails, mass-market adoption, and a large pool of digitally active citizens and workers.

Force of Scale

First comes the simple force of scale. The report repeatedly argues that large-country scale matters in digitalisation and especially in AI, because adoption, users, transaction volumes, skilled labour pools and platform effects can generate momentum that per-capita indices miss. India’s large user base and large AI-skilled workforce are explicitly identified as reasons it performs much better in SIDE than in older digital rankings.

Faster Catch-up Growth

Second is faster catch-up growth. The report notes that India remains less digitally saturated than advanced economies, which leaves more room for rapid year-on-year gains. It points to an 8.8 per cent increase in internet users in India, compared with an average growth rate of 2.1 per cent among the other nine countries in the top ten, and says similar fast-growth patterns are visible in harness indicators such as digital payments and technology use.

Digital Public Architecture

Third is the architecture of digital public infrastructure. Even where the report does not reduce India’s success to a single acronym, its analytical framework clearly implies that India’s low-friction digital economy has been powered by interoperable systems that make identity, payments, and public service delivery more scalable. This is visible in the way the report treats India as a significant exception among developing countries: a country that has not only broadened consumer access to digital tools but also translated that adoption into globally significant digitally delivered trade and domestic digital transaction capability.

Fusion

Fourth is India’s unusual fusion of state-backed rails and private adaptation. The report’s logic suggests that India’s digital economy is strongest not where the state tries to do everything directly, but where public infrastructure lowers entry barriers and private firms build services on top of those rails. That interaction helps explain why India is not just connecting users but increasingly “harnessing” digital tools across economic and institutional domains.

Chapter 4: Internet spread, smartphone ubiquity and the UPI effect

Internet Expansion

Any serious explanation of India’s digital acceleration must begin with the expansion of internet penetration. The report explicitly identifies improved connectivity as one of the reasons for India’s ranking improvement, and its Connect score for India is among the country’s strongest pillars. Growth in internet users broadens the base on which every other layer of digitalisation rests: e-commerce, digital education, telemedicine, platform work, AI use, online entertainment, digital finance and public service access all depend on this first threshold being crossed.

Smartphone Revolution

The smartphone revolution made this connectivity socially portable. The report’s framework tracks smartphone users and even the cost of the cheapest smartphone as relevant signals in understanding digital access. In India, the smartphone did what desktops never could: it converted the internet from an elite workplace utility into a mass household tool, and from there into a handheld platform for communication, payments, services, learning and income-seeking.

UPI Effect

UPI, meanwhile, transformed digitalisation from passive access into high-frequency economic action. The report notes that India continues to grow rapidly on digital payment indicators and treats that momentum as part of the country’s superior performance on the Harness pillar. This matters because payments are habit-forming digital infrastructure: when millions begin to pay, receive, remit, save, purchase and settle in real time through phones, digitalisation stops being a periodic event and becomes a daily behavioural system.

Behavioural Shift

That behavioural shift has deeper consequences. Real-time payments reduce transaction friction, make small-value commerce more viable, widen the formal data trail, support gig work and micro-enterprise, and improve the interface between citizens, platforms, merchants and the state. In India’s case, the report suggests that digital payments are not merely a fintech success story; they are one of the key channels through which the digital economy moved from urban islands to mass adoption.

AI as a Mass Phenomenon

The report also notes that while the internet, e-commerce, digital payments and smartphones each required one to three decades to build large global user bases. With AI now a mass phenomenon, countries like India increasingly need to assess their progress and benchmark their performance against the rest of the world.

Chapter 5: The wider catalysts of transformation

Digitally Delivered Trade

Beyond internet growth, smartphones and UPI, the SIDE report points to several broader forces galvanising India’s digital transformation. One is the expansion of digitally delivered trade: India is described as a major exception among lower-income countries because it has become a globally significant exporter of digital services, with around USD 328 billion in digitally delivered trade.

Breadth of Digital Use

Another is the breadth of digital use rather than just access. The CHIPS framework distinguishes between connection and harnessing, meaning a country’s performance depends not merely on being online but on using digital systems productively across firms, government, and households. India’s relatively strong Harness score indicates that digital technologies are being absorbed into broader economic and administrative activity rather than remaining a thin consumption layer.

Digital India within the G20 Framework

The report pointedly presents that Digitalisation is not only widespread within the G20 but also more intensive relative to its demographic weight. While the G20 accounts for 70 per cent of the global population, it consistently exceeds this share across most digital indicators— particularly in “harness” metrics such as social media use (83 per cent), e-commerce (83 per cent), and digital payments (84 per cent)

Developed G20 countries are, on average, more digitally advanced than their developing counterparts, although the latter perform strongly in connectivity and usage— especially in social media (87 per cent) and mobile subscriptions (81 per cent). While basic connectivity is relatively evenly distributed between G20 and non-G20 countries, higher-order digital usage remains significantly more concentrated within the G20.

How is India positioned?

The report argues that India stands out as a key contributor to this scale-driven digital ecosystem within the G20. It accounts for 31 per cent of the G20 population and roughly 22 per cent of users across core connectivity indicators (internet, mobile, smartphones), reflecting its large digital base.

However, India’s lower shares in e-commerce (15 per cent) and digital payments (14 per cent) suggest that despite the great strides in recent years, there remains significant scope to deepen participation in more advanced digital applications.

Against this backdrop, India’s high share of AI users (26 per cent) is particularly striking and holds significant promise – suggesting that India appears to be transitioning from a scale-driven digital economy to one with growing depth in the AI era.

The Talent Scale

A third factor is talent. The report says India has the second-largest concentration of AI talent after the United States and performs especially strongly on AI-related indicators. Even if capital and compute remain weaker than in the U.S. or China, the existence of a great skills base gives India an advantage in application-layer innovation, software services, startup development and AI diffusion.

But the report that India’s digital transition will not happen on talent alone. India will need more risk capital for AI startups, easier access to affordable compute, and stronger links among universities, research labs, startups, and industry. The government can play an enabling role by providing shared datasets, testing sandboxes, public digital infrastructure and early demand through public procurement. It can also help retain and attract high-end AI talent by expanding research opportunities, improving funding channels and creating clearer pathways for commercialisation

Governance Digitisation

A fourth is governance digitisation. The report situates India in a policy environment where public institutions, regulators, and ministries are actively involved in debates on digital public infrastructure, AI, and digital service delivery. This ecosystem effect matters because digital transformation is usually strongest where infrastructure, regulation, business adaptation, and citizen uptake are partially coordinated.

Chapter 6: Is India’s digital economy inclusive?

The SIDE report is too serious to confuse aggregate success with universal inclusion. While it celebrates India’s digital rise, it also cautions that global digital diffusion. Does not automatically mean equitable distribution of digital benefits or capabilities. The report notes, for instance, that some indicators related to the gender divide were excluded from the 2026 ranking due to data constraints, and acknowledges that these are areas where India has not traditionally performed as strongly as top-ranked peers.

This is an important warning.

A digital economy can look impressive in total volume and yet remain segmented by class, gender, literacy, geography, disability, language and age. The very architecture that makes digital transactions frictionless for the connected can make life harder for those who lack devices, documentation, network reliability, digital confidence, assistive tools or social support.

Inclusion, therefore, has to be judged not only by how many users are online, but by who can transact independently, who can recover from errors, who can navigate interfaces without mediation, and who retains meaningful choice offline. By that more demanding standard, India’s digital economy remains only partially inclusive: transformational in reach, but uneven in capability, autonomy and resilience.

Chapter 7: The excluded citizen

The report does not provide a single chapter devoted exclusively to destitute, elderly and disabled users, but its analytical framework and omissions make their vulnerability visible. When digitalisation is measured through scale and adoption, there is always a risk that people who are disconnected, under-connected or dependently connected become statistically invisible even as the system appears successful.

For the poor and destitute, exclusion often begins with the costs of devices, data packs, charging, repairs, replacement, authentication failures, and the opportunity cost of repeated attempts to navigate digital systems. Even when internet access expands, meaningful participation in the digital economy requires continuity, not one-time connectivity; a person with an unstable handset, patchy network and limited literacy is formally connected but functionally precarious.

For the elderly, the problem is frequently not only access but usability. Small fonts, fast-changing interfaces, multi-step authentication, fear of fraud, dependence on younger intermediaries, and low confidence in error correction can turn digital services into zones of anxiety rather than empowerment. A welfare state that assumes universal self-service through apps risks shifting burdens onto older citizens precisely when they need trusted, assisted and human-facing systems.

For persons with disabilities, exclusion takes especially sharp forms when accessibility is treated as an optional add-on rather than a design principle. Visual, hearing, motor and cognitive impairments require interface design, voice support, screen-reader compatibility, multilingual simplicity, haptic feedback, assisted authentication and grievance systems that are accessible from the start. When these are absent, digital public infrastructure can unintentionally reproduce older inequalities in newer forms.

Chapter 8: AI and India’s next digital leap

One of the most important findings in the report is that AI has moved from the margin to the centre of digital benchmarking. The 2026 edition embeds AI indicators into the CHIPS framework and also constructs a standalone AI index, on which India ranks fourth globally behind the United States, China and Singapore.

The report argues that India’s AI opportunity does not lie in copying the capital-heavy strategies of the U.S. or China. Instead, it suggests that India should build a talent-led, application-driven AI ecosystem aligned with its strengths: a vast skilled workforce, a large domestic user base, and scope to develop practical solutions in governance, services, education, health, agriculture and enterprise software.

In this context, the following paragraphs of the report put the Indian imperative categorically-

“Critics have argued that India has yet to carve out a clear position in the global AI supply chain. This supply chain is often described as a five-layer stack: energy, infrastructure, compute, models and applications. The first four layers are highly capital-intensive and require strong manufacturing capabilities. They, therefore, favour countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands and China, which have strong semiconductor and electronics manufacturing bases, as well as the United States, which combines deep pools of patient capital with strong intellectual property ownership. Given its more limited capital base – as shown, India occupies the quadrant marked “limited start-up capital, but strong talent base”.

The report notes, and rightly so, that “India has been right to avoid entering the most capital-intensive segments of the AI race. Instead, it has focused on building low-cost sovereign AI models and pursuing frugal innovation through small language models.

The rort is categorical in stating that there are good reasons to believe that India has not missed the AI train and it emphasises unequivocally that India’s opportunity lies not in replicating the capital-heavy AI strategies of the United States or China, but in building a talent-led, application-driven AI ecosystem that reflects its own comparative advantage. As the second wave of AI, driven by applications, agents, and widespread use, takes off, India is well placed to emerge as one of the world’s leading user capitals of AI.

This is a subtle but powerful proposition. AI in India may matter less through a handful of giant foundation models and more through broad deployment in workflows, vernacular interfaces, small-business tools, public platforms, fraud detection, logistics optimisation, education support and healthcare triage. As clarified in a foregoing chapter report, however, talent alone will not be enough; India needs more risk capital, affordable compute, stronger university-startup linkages, shared datasets, testing sandboxes and clearer pathways to commercialisation.

Chapter 9: The hidden chinks

The report is forthright that digital progress has hidden costs and unaddressed vulnerabilities. It names three broad categories that are often neglected in celebratory narratives: global imbalances in digital trade, rising digital crime and growing e-waste.

For India specifically, the innovation pillar remains a visible weakness relative to top performers. India’s innovation score is lower than those of the United States, China, Singapore, Germany, and several other advanced economies, which suggests that the country is stronger in adoption, scale, and service-layer dynamism than in deep frontier innovation, patient capital formation, and high-end digital production.

The report also warns about cybersecurity. As digital activity scales, as the example of the USA shows categorically, the exposure to ransomware, email leaks, identity fraud and platform vulnerabilities rises; India is already among the larger cybersecurity markets, yet its spending remains modest relative to the size of its digital economy and user base. That is a structural mismatch: a mass digital economy without proportionate cyber defence becomes a large attack surface.

There is also the issue of sustainability. The report notes that India’s per capita e-waste remains low, but the larger lesson is preventive: developing countries should not follow the environmentally damaging path of advanced economies and should build e-waste systems early, integrate informal recyclers, strengthen producer responsibility and promote repair and reuse.

Chapter 10: Ten challenges

A definitive reading of the SIDE report yields at least ten major challenges confronting India’s digital future.

1. Uneven last-mile connectivity despite strong aggregate gains.

2. Device affordability and replacement burdens for low-income users.

3. Persistent exclusion tied to gender, class, language, age and disability.

4. Innovation weakness relative to top global digital powers.

5. Limited domestic compute and constrained access to patient risk capital in AI.

6. Weak university-startup-commercialisation linkages in frontier technologies.

7. Rising cyber risk without adequate proportional security investment.

8. Overdependence on digital pathways that can marginalise those needing assisted or offline access.

9. Data gaps that can obscure inequality and distort benchmarking outcomes.

10. Growing sustainability pressures, especially e-waste and energy-intensive digital infrastructure.

These challenges are not isolated defects. They interact. Weak inclusion reduces the quality of diffusion; weak innovation limits value capture; weak cyber capacity raises trust costs; weak sustainability planning stores up future damage; and weak institutional correction can turn a digital dividend into a digital divide.

Chapter 11: Ten structural solutions and mid-course corrections

If India wants a digital economy that is not only large but civilisationally durable, it needs structural correction on several fronts. The SIDE report itself provides part of the scaffolding, especially around AI capabilities, cyber preparedness, and sustainability.

1. Build universal, reliable last-mile broadband and mobile coverage with measurable service quality, not just nominal access.

2. Lower the effective cost of entry through affordable smartphones, repair ecosystems, public charging access and device-support schemes for vulnerable groups.

3. Institutionalise accessibility-by-design across public and regulated private digital services, including screen-reader compatibility, voice navigation, multilingual interfaces and simplified workflows.

4. Preserve assisted and offline service channels for welfare, healthcare, grievance redress and essential citizen services so digitisation does not become coercive exclusion.

5. Strengthen the innovation pillar by expanding research funding, university-industry collaboration, deep-tech incubation and procurement pathways for domestic innovation.

6. Create affordable compute access and shared AI infrastructure, including cloud credits, public compute pools and testing sandboxes for startups, researchers and public-interest innovators.

7. Increase cybersecurity spending and standards in proportion to digital scale, with stronger incident reporting, SME cyber support and protection for public digital infrastructure.

8. Improve measurement by restoring and expanding indicators on gender, exclusion, disability access, assisted usage and regional disparities so success is not defined too narrowly.

9. Build a circular digital economy through formal e-waste systems, producer responsibility, repairability norms, mineral recovery and integration of informal recyclers.

10. Use India’s AI advantage in an application-led way: encourage tools in health, education, agriculture, justice, logistics and MSME productivity rather than chasing prestige alone.

The essential mid-course correction is philosophical as much as technical. India should move from a doctrine of digitisation-as-rollout to one of digitisation-as-capability. That means measuring success not only by users, downloads, transactions, and rankings, but also by autonomy, resilience, trust, productivity, accessibility, and fairness.

Chapter 12: A forward-looking statecraft agenda

The SIDE report’s larger significance lies in showing that India has crossed a threshold. The country is no longer merely a high-potential digital society; it is already one of the world’s leading digital economies, according to the report’s own comparative framework.

But leadership in the next phase will depend on whether India can convert digital scale into innovation depth, AI capability into broad productivity gains, and public digital infrastructure into genuinely democratic access. The report’s own evidence points to a future in which digital success will be judged less by connectivity alone and more by the ability to harness, protect and sustain digital transformation under conditions of technological acceleration.

That will require a new statecraft. Not a retreat from digital ambition, but a more mature version of it: one that is attentive to institutional design, inclusion, cyber resilience, environmental sustainability and the social compact on which people enter the digital systems. The digital republic must be wide enough to include the marginal user, deep enough to foster frontier capability, and wise enough to see that speed without fairness can create a more efficient inequality.

Coda cum Epilogue: Between velocity and justice

The State of India’s Digital Economy 2026 deserves to be read not as an annual report to be skimmed for rankings, but as a serious intervention in how India is to be seen—and how India should see itself—in the age of digital capitalism and artificial intelligence. Its central message is both flattering and demanding. India has entered the first rank of digital powers, but it has not yet solved the moral and structural questions that accompany scale.

To be fifth in the world is a credible achievement. It means that India has built a digital ecosystem of uncommon breadth, one in which internet diffusion, smartphone access, digital payments, service exports, AI talent and public digital infrastructure have interacted to produce a developmental leap that few lower-middle-income countries and many developed countries have matched. It means that India is no longer merely catching up to a digital world made elsewhere; in several domains, it is helping define the ecosystem and the grammar of that world.

Yet this ascent will remain incomplete if digital life continues to be easier for the fluent than the fragile, for the connected than the dependent, for the urban transactor than the elderly pensioner, for the platform-native than the disabled citizen navigating inaccessible interfaces. A republic does not become more modern simply because it becomes more app-driven. It becomes more modern when technological power expands human agency, lightens the burdens of everyday life, broadens the reach of dignity, and protects people from new forms of extraction, invisibility, and risk.

The next chapter of India’s digital economy must therefore be written in two scripts at once. One is the script of acceleration: AI adoption, stronger innovation, better compute, smarter logistics, higher productivity, export depth and competitive technological capability. The other is the script of justice: accessibility, equity, inclusion, cyber safety, assisted access, environmental sustainability and institutional humility in the face of exclusion.

If India can hold these two scripts together, it may do more than climb future rankings. It may show that the world’s most populous and sixth-largest economy can build a digital economy that is not only fast and vast but humane; not only efficient but enabling; not only technologically ambitious but socially literate. That would be the truest measure of digital greatness—and the most compelling horizon beyond the SIDE report’s tables, scores and maps. And that will sustainably set the country on a firm path to realise the dream of Viksit Bharat by 2047. The substructure is already ready, and what the country needs now is to fast-build the inclusive, equitable, safe , secured and sustainable superstructure.

[AI-generated conceptual artwork illustrating the financial, social, and policy challenges highlighted by India's National Health Accounts 2022–23. Created for editorial visualization purposes; not based on any specific individual or real-life scene]

India’s Health Ledger and the Republic’s Promise

Prologue : Balance sheet of a civilization

Every serious nation eventually confronts a difficult truth: its development story is only as strong as the health security of its people. India’s latest National Health Accounts (NHA) report, released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare through the National Health Accounts Technical Secretariat on May 29, 2026 is not merely a statistical compendium. It is a national balance sheet of vulnerability, institutional ambition, federal unevenness, and the lived cost of illness.​

The report covers financial year 2022-23, and it is the tenth consecutive round of India’s annual health accounts under the System of Health Accounts 2011 framework, the global standard that tracks who finances health care, who manages those funds, which providers deliver services, and what type of care is actually consumed.​

That architecture matters because health systems are often discussed in moral language but collapse in fiscal reality. The NHA translates rhetoric into flow-of-funds evidence. It shows whether India is building a health state or merely funding episodes of illness. It shows whether the burden of care is pooled across society or shifted onto anxious households. It shows whether the public system acts as the primary guarantor of care or whether the private market remains the de facto first responder for millions.​

The 2022-23 estimates contain both comfort and warning. India’s total health expenditure reached Rs 8,81,359 crore, or 3.37 percent of GDP on the new GDP series, while government health expenditure accounted for 43.72 percent of total health expenditure.​ These numbers reflect a clear expansion of public commitment compared with older NHA rounds, especially when seen against the long-term rise in government share and the earlier decline in out-of-pocket burden over the decade.​

Yet the same report also shows that households still finance 56.44 percent of current health expenditure, and out-of-pocket payments alone still account for 49.90 percent of current health expenditure.​

That contradiction lies at the heart of India’s health transition. A country can build expressways, semiconductor parks, and digital public infrastructure and still remain medically insecure if a single hospitalization pushes families into debt and consequent penury, postpones treatment, or forces distress sale of assets.

The health accounts therefore deserve to be read not as a technical annex to governance, but as a central test of developmental seriousness.​

This article Akhil Vaani Volume 23 of the long form series, examines the NHA 2022-23 in full analytical depth: what health accounts are, what India spent, who contributed, which providers absorbed the money, what services were consumed, which states are relatively stronger or weaker, where out-of-pocket stress is concentrated, what the report really implies, and what structural reforms must now define the road to 2047.​

I. What the National Health Accounts really are

A map of money, power and risk

National Health Accounts are a standardized framework used to describe health expenditure and the flow of funds in a country for a given financial year.​ In India’s case, the report is prepared under the National Health Accounts Guidelines for India, 2016, with refinements, and aligned to the System of Health Accounts 2011 so that the estimates are both nationally relevant and internationally comparable.​

The conceptual strength of the NHA lies in its ability to answer four foundational questions.

1. First, what are the revenues or sources from which health money is raised?

2. Second, which financing schemes receive and manage these funds?

3. Third, which providers ultimately receive the money?

4. Fourth, what services or functions are being financed through that expenditure pattern?​

   This is why the NHA is more powerful than a budget document. A budget tells what government allocates. A health account tells how the entire health economy actually works.​

The report also separates current health expenditure from capital formation.​ That distinction is essential. Current expenditure captures the recurrent flow that affects health outcomes in the present year, such as curative care, medicines, preventive services, diagnostics, and administration.​ Capital expenditure, by contrast, measures investments in infrastructure and durable assets whose benefits unfold over time.​

In a country like India, where the health system is delivered through a complex mix of Union schemes, state spending, local bodies, compulsory social insurance, government-financed insurance, private insurance, enterprise payments, and household outlays,

NHA becomes the closest thing to a whole-system MRI.​ It is especially useful in a federal country because it allows comparisons not only across years, but across models of state capacity.​

II. The headline numbers for India in 2022-23

The scale of spending and the structure beneath it

The NHA estimates India’s Total Health Expenditure (THE) for 2022-23 at Rs 8,81,359 crore.​ This equals 3.37 percent of GDP on the new GDP series and Rs 6,373 per capita.​ Of this total, Current Health Expenditure (CHE) was Rs 7,66,814 crore, representing 87 percent of THE, while capital expenditure was Rs 1,14,545 crore, or 13 percent.​

Government Health Expenditure (GHE), including capital spending, stood at Rs 3,85,332 crore.​ That translates into 43.72 percent of total health expenditure, 1.48 percent of GDP on the new series, and Rs 2,786 per capita.​

The structure within government spending is also revealing: the Union government accounted for about 36.3 percent of GHE, while state governments accounted for about 63.7 percent, underscoring the centrality of states in the real financing of Indian health care.​ It sits well with the constitutional mandate because as per the Entry 6 of the List II (State List) of the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution of India state governments have the primary responsible to legislate and manage public health, sanitation, hospitals, and dispensaries

Health’s share in General Government Expenditure was 4.89 percent in 2022-23.​ This is not trivial, but it is still lower than what an aspiring developed nation should be satisfied with when confronted with the scale of epidemiological transition, ageing, urban stress, and regional inequality. The NHA itself does not make policy prescriptions, but the numbers unmistakably invite them.​

There is also a trend story embedded in the tables. Government health expenditure as a share of THE rose from 28.6 percent in 2013-14 to 43.72 percent in 2022-23, while out-of-pocket expenditure as a share of THE declined from 64.2 percent in 2013-14 to 43.41 percent in 2022-23, even though there was a rebound from 39.4 percent in 2021-22.​

That means India has moved in the right long-term direction, but not in a linear or fully secure manner.​ Because WHO recommends keeping out of pocket expenditure (OOPE) the primary indicator of financial protection of families to 15% to 20% or less of a nation’s total health expenditure to prevent households from facing catastrophic medical cost.

Despite treading on the directionally correct path, Bharat has miles to cover and the time to cover the distance limited.

III. Who contributes to current health expenditure

Households still carry the heaviest weight

The most consequential sentence in the report may be this one: households contributed Rs 4,32,747 crore to current health expenditure in 2022-23, or 56.44 percent of CHE.​ This includes direct out-of-pocket spending as well as household insurance contributions.​ OOPE alone accounted for 49.90 percent of CHE, showing that despite after years of public health expansion, the household remains the sponge and the dominant shock absorber in India’s health system.​

Such an inqitable healt expenditure profile has consequences galore for Viksit Bharat dream..

The State governments contributed Rs 1,62,752 crore, or 21.22 percent of CHE, while the Union government contributed Rs 88,721 crore, or 11.57 percent.​ Local bodies accounted for 1.09 percent, enterprises for 8.84 percent, NGOs for 0.51 percent, and external donors for 0.33 percent.​

To put simply, India’s health economy is financed primarily by households and public authorities, with the private organized pooling system still too shallow to transform the risk architecture.​

The financing scheme picture deepens this insight. Out-of-pocket financing alone represented 49.90 percent of CHE, private health insurance 10.56 percent, government health insurance 7.37 percent, Union government schemes 12.18 percent, state government schemes 13.40 percent, local body schemes 2.64 percent, and other schemes 3.95 percent.​

The public-pooling footprint has widened, but it has not yet displaced the direct-payment culture that defines health insecurity.​

This matters because the mode of payment shapes the moral economy of access. A system financed at the point of care tends to punish delay, uncertainty, and severity. A system financed through pooled, prepaid, tax-funded, or social insurance mechanisms protects the citizen before illness becomes a financial event. India is still somewhere in between.​

IV. Who provides health care services

Private hospitals dominate, but the state remains indispensable

The provider distribution in the NHA makes one fact unmistakable: private hospitals remain the single largest absorber of current health expenditure.​ They accounted for Rs 2,36,410 crore, or 30.83 percent of CHE.​ Government hospitals accounted for Rs 1,28,298 crore, or 16.73 percent, while other government providers including PHCs, dispensaries, and family planning centres accounted for Rs 68,833 crore, or 8.98 percent.​

Pharmacies accounted for Rs 1,62,511 crore, or 21.19 percent of CHE, which is one of the most important facts in the entire report.​ It means medicines remain a central part of the Indian health burden, and pharmaceutical spending continues to shape household vulnerability even beyond hospitalization.​ Other providers included private clinics at 4.05 percent, diagnostic laboratories at 3.60 percent, patient transport and emergency rescue at 3.58 percent, preventive care providers at 5.30 percent, administration agencies at 3.91 percent, and other providers not elsewhere classified at 1.30 percent.​

This provider map reveals the coexistence of three Indias. There is the hospital-centric India of hospitalization and specialist treatment. There is the pharmacy-dependent India of medicine purchase and self-management. And there is the still-underbuilt public primary-care India that exists, but not yet at the level required to structurally suppress downstream costs.​

The public system, however, must not be underestimated because its role exceeds what provider shares alone capture. Government financing supports preventive care, public health functions, surveillance, immunisation, and much of the distributed infrastructure that makes the broader system viable.​ Without that scaffolding, the private system would not merely be expensive; it would be chaotic.​

V. What services are being consumed

Curative care dominates the health economy

The NHA shows that India’s current health expenditure is still overwhelmingly oriented toward curative care.​ Inpatient curative care alone accounted for Rs 2,88,407 crore, or 37.61 percent of CHE, while outpatient curative care accounted for Rs 1,43,210 crore, or 18.68 percent.​ Day curative care added another 1.06 percent.​

Medicines formed the next major block. Prescribed medicines accounted for 17.55 percent of CHE, over-the-counter medicines 3.48 percent, and therapeutic appliances and other medical goods 0.53 percent.​ Overall pharmaceutical expenditure made up 29.6 percent of CHE, a massive share that confirms how deeply medicine purchasing shapes the economics of illness in India.​

Preventive care accounted for 8.88 percent of CHE.​ That includes information and counselling, immunisation, early disease detection, healthy condition monitoring, epidemiological surveillance and disease control, and disaster preparedness.​ Governance and health system financing administration accounted for 3.92 percent, while diagnostics and imaging were 3.60 percent and patient transportation 3.58 percent.​

This composition matters because high spending on curative and pharmaceutical care often indicates a system treating consequences more than reducing incidence.

India cannot become a developed nation if its health economy remains disproportionately organized around illness episodes rather than prevention, early detection, continuity of care, and chronic disease management.

The NHA does not say this in normative language, but the data says it emphatically.​

VI. Primary, secondary and tertiary care

The public system is more primary-care oriented than the national average

According to the NHA, current health expenditure attributed to primary care was around 46 percent, secondary care 34 percent, tertiary care 15 percent, and governance and supervision about 4 percent.​ This is an important macro-balance because it shows that nearly half of current spending is associated with primary care, at least in classification terms.​

The government’s own current health expenditure profile is even more tilted toward primary care.​ The report states that 51 percent of government current health expenditure is attributed to primary care, 28 percent to secondary care, and 11 percent to tertiary care.​

That is significant because it means the public system is carrying the preventive, first-contact, and distributed-care burden more than the aggregate national picture suggests.​

Yet this should not lead to complacency. If households still bear nearly half of CHE as direct spending and private hospitals remain the largest provider category, then the effective experience of care is still skewed toward late-stage and fragmented treatment.​

India’s structural task is therefore not merely to spend more, but to make primary care function as the default gateway rather than the residual option.​

VII. Health insurance and financial protection

Insurance has expanded, but pooling is still shallow relative to need

The report estimates private health insurance expenditure at Rs 81,012 crore, or 9.19 percent of THE.​ Expenditure by all government-financed health insurance schemes combined was Rs 26,266 crore.​ Government health insurance schemes within CHE accounted for 7.37 percent, while private health insurance accounted for 10.56 percent.​

Growing Pooled Health Financing

This indicates that pooled financing mechanisms have grown in India, but they still do not dominate the system.​ Social security expenditure on health rose to 9.8 percent of THE in 2022-23, while private health insurance expenditure rose to 9.2 percent of THE, both higher than earlier years in the NHA series.​

That trend is positive, yet the overall protection effect remains incomplete because out-of-pocket payments remain very high.​

The Structural Gap

The deeper issue is that insurance expansion without strong primary care, rational pricing, gatekeeping, continuity, and provider regulation can reduce only part of household stress. Insurance may cushion hospitalization, but it often leaves outpatient care, diagnostics, medicines, transport, chronic disease management, and repeated low-intensity expenses insufficiently covered. The NHA’s service mix strongly suggests exactly that structural gap.​

VIII. State rankings on health spending as a share of GSDP

The leaders and laggards in relative health effort

The NHA provides key health financing indicators for select states in Annexure A.6 and cautions that state-level values for smaller states and some regions should be interpreted carefully because some expenditure components rely on sample surveys.​ Even with that caution, the table offers a powerful snapshot of relative health effort across major states.​

Health Expedenture as a proportion of GSDP

Top five (highest health expenditure as % of GSDP, 2022‑23)

Top states and UTs with regardless of size:

• Manipur – 5.5% of GSDP (highest in the country among states, up from 4.6% in 2021‑22).

• Puducherry – 5.0% of GSDP (UT with legislature; very high health effort).

• Meghalaya – 4.4% of GSDP.

• Nagaland – 3.6% of GSDP.

• Mizoram – around 3.2% of GSDP.

Bottom five (lowest health expenditure as % of GSDP, 2022‑23)

Again, across all states and UTs with legislature:

• Karnataka – 0.7% of GSDP.

• Maharashtra – 0.8% of GSDP.

• Telangana – 0.8% of GSDP.

• Tamil Nadu – 0.9% of GSDP.

• Punjab – 0.9% of GSDP.

Clearly, some of India’s largest and richest states spent less than 1% of GSDP on health,” That makes them the natural “bottom five” group in the 2022‑23 spectrum.

Two Most Populous

Uttar Pradesh and Bihar two most populous states of the country sit in an awkward middle zone in the NHA 2022‑23 landscape. Both devote a smaller share of their economic capacity to health than the high‑effort north‑eastern and hill states, yet they are not in the “sub‑1% of GSDP” low‑commitment club typified by richer states like Karnataka or Maharashtra.

Uttar Pradesh, despite having one of the highest absolute government health outlays because of its population, records very low per capita public spending and one of the highest out‑of‑pocket shares of total health expenditure—meaning households still shoulder a large part of the medical burden.

Bihar shows low per capita health spending and low per capita OOPE, but this largely reflects constrained utilisation and limited ability to spend rather than strong financial protection; its health‑to‑GSDP ratios sit below the high‑effort small states but above the very lowest spending big states.

Together, the two states illustrate a central NHA theme: India’s largest, poorest populations still live in systems where the fiscal effort on health is modest relative to need, and where vulnerability cannot be inferred from spending shares alone.

Using Government Health Expenditure as a proportion of GSDP, the five highest are Jammu and Kashmir at around 2.5 percent, Jharkhand at 2.3 percent, Himachal Pradesh at 2.2 percent, Odisha at 1.8 percent, and Andhra Pradesh at 1.7 percent, with Bihar and Chhattisgarh also at 1.7 percent.​ The five lowest are Gujarat at 0.8 percent, Maharashtra at 0.8 percent, Telangana at 0.8 percent, Karnataka at 0.7 percent, and Uttarakhand at 0.7 percent.​

This divergence matters. High-income or industrially advanced states do not automatically spend more on health relative to economic size.​ Some richer states spend lower shares of GSDP on health, which can reflect private substitution, fiscal priorities, or an under-recognition of future health liabilities. For a nation aiming at 2047, the relevant question is not only who spends more in rupee terms, but who devotes enough of economic capacity to protect human capability.​

IX. Out-of-pocket burden across states

Where households are most exposed and where they are relatively protected

The report’s state table allows comparison of out-of-pocket expenditure as a share of Total Health Expenditure.​ Among the states listed in the NHA 2022‑23 annexure, Uttar Pradesh records the highest household out‑of‑pocket burden, with OOPE making up about two‑thirds of its total health expenditure. Kerala, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand also form a high‑OOPE cluster, each with well over half of their total health spending financed directly by households, and all significantly above the national OOPE share of 43.4% of THE.”

These are deeply consequential numbers because they indicate states where the health system still relies heavily on private household financing despite differing levels of state income and health infrastructure.​

At the lower end of the OOPE spectrum in the NHA 2022‑23 annexure are states such as Uttarakhand, Punjab, Chhattisgarh and Assam, each with out‑of‑pocket spending accounting for well under one‑third of their total health expenditure, clearly below the national OOPE share of 43.4%. Among the larger states, Karnataka’s OOPE share is also relatively low, while Maharashtra sits closer to the national average, underlining that the geography of financial burden does not follow a simple north–south or rich–poor template. Kerala, despite its high government health spending, still has a high OOPE share and therefore does not belong in the low‑burden cluster.”

The state picture becomes even sharper on per capita out‑of‑pocket spending. Among the states listed in the NHA 2022‑23 annexure, Kerala has by far the highest per capita OOPE, at well over Rs 8,000, with Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab all in a high‑burden band of around Rs 4,000 per person or more each year. At the other end, Bihar, Assam and Uttar Pradesh record per capita OOPE of roughly Rs 1,000–1,400, with Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand also below the national average of Rs 2,767. This reveals an important truth: low per capita OOPE does not always signal low vulnerability; it may equally reflect lower utilisation, deferred care, lower price points, or simply limited capacity to spend on needed treatment.”

Average national distribution of OOPE

At the all-India level, out-of-pocket expenditure accounted for 49.90 percent of current health expenditure and 43.41 percent of total health expenditure in 2022-23.​ In per capita terms, OOPE was Rs 2,767 for India as a whole.​ The report also indicates that pharmaceuticals and other medical goods accounted for 21.57 percent of CHE, with prescribed medicines alone at 17.55 percent and OTC medicines at 3.48 percent, implying that a large part of household spending pressure is medication-linked even outside hospitalization.​

x. Key Differences between NHA 2017-18 and NHA 2022-23

Between NHA 2017‑18 and NHA 2022‑23, there are big shifts in both levels of spending and the structure of who pays and for what.

1. Overall spending and government role

• In 2017‑18, Total Health Expenditure (THE) was 3.3% of GDP; in 2022‑23 it is 3.28% on the old GDP series and 3.37% on the new series, so the share of GDP is roughly similar but on a larger economy.

• THE per capita rose from Rs 4,297 in 2017‑18 to Rs 6,373 in 2022‑23 at current prices.

• Government Health Expenditure (GHE) as a share of THE increased from 40.8% in 2017‑18 to 43.7% in 2022‑23, signaling a stronger public financing presence.

• GHE as a share of GDP rose from 1.35% in 2017‑18 to 1.43% of GDP (old series) and 1.48% on the new 2022‑23 base, with per capita GHE going from Rs 1,753 to Rs 2,786.

2. Household out‑of‑pocket burden

• OOPE as a share of THE declined from 48.8% in 2017‑18 to 43.4% in 2022‑23.

• OOPE as a share of CHE fell from 55.1% to 49.9% over the same period.

• Per capita OOPE rose in nominal terms (Rs 2,097 to Rs 2,767), but the relative burden eased because government and pooled spending grew faster.

3. Composition of financing

• Household health expenditure (including insurance contributions) as a share of CHE fell from 61.4% in 2017‑18 to 56.5% in 2022‑23, reflecting more pooling and public spending.

• Social security expenditure on health increased from about 10.1% of CHE in 2017‑18 to 11.2% in 2022‑23.

• Private health insurance spending grew from 6.6% of CHE to 10.6%, showing deeper voluntary pre‑payment, though still secondary to OOPE.

• External/donor funding remained small and slightly declined as a share of THE and CHE (around 0.5–1%), reinforcing that India is essentially self‑financed in health.

4. Current vs capital and per‑capita patterns

• CHE as a share of THE was already high in 2017‑18 at 88.5% and remained high at 87.0% in 2022‑23, but capital’s share increased modestly from 11.5% to 13.0%, implying more investment in infrastructure and assets.

• CHE per capita rose from Rs 3,805 to Rs 5,545 between 2017‑18 and 2022‑23, indicating a real expansion of recurrent health services and goods per person.

5. Structural / methodological differences

• Both datasets follow SHA‑2011, but 2022‑23 incorporates more refinements: updated GDP (new 2022‑23 base), better classification of government‑financed health insurance, and improved use of rural local body data (e‑Gram Swaraj), CSR, DMF, AYUSH, etc.

• For OOPE, 2017‑18 estimates used extrapolations from NSS 71st round (2014) earlier; by 2022‑23 all OOPE are based on NSS 75th round (2017‑18), with a larger sample and full‑year reference period, improving comparability and robustness across the later rounds including 2017‑18, 2018‑19 onward.

6. Service and provider mix

• In both years, private hospitals, pharmacies and curative care dominate, but by 2022‑23 the report gives a sharper breakdown:

  • Inpatient curative care: 37.6% of CHE (2022‑23).

  • Pharmaceuticals and other medical goods: 29.6% of CHE (2022‑23), with prescribed medicines 17.6% and OTC 3.5%.

  • Preventive care: 8.9% of CHE (2022‑23), with clear sub‑functions (IEC, immunisation, surveillance, etc.).

• These categories exist in 2017‑18, but 2022‑23 has richer matrices (HF×HP, HF×HC, HP×HC) and an explicit primary/secondary/tertiary split, allowing better functional analysis than the earlier round.

7. Summary of the movement 2017‑18 → 2022‑23

• More public, more pooled: GHE and social security shares are higher; OOPE’s share of THE and CHE is lower.

• Higher per capita spending: THE, CHE and GHE per capita all increased substantially at current prices.

• Better data and classifications: 2022‑23 builds on refinements introduced over multiple rounds, especially for insurance schemes, local bodies and OOPE estimation.

• But structure still curative and medicine-heavy: curative care and pharmaceuticals continue to absorb the bulk of CHE, with preventive care still under 10% of CHE.

XI. The key conclusions of the NHA 2022-23 report

What the data says when read as a national diagnosis

The first conclusion is that India has increased public commitment to health over the decade, but not yet to the point where households are substantially insulated from medical spending shocks.​ Government health expenditure’s long-term rise as a share of THE and the growth of social security and insurance channels are real achievements, yet the persistence of high OOPE means financial protection remains incomplete.​

The second conclusion is that the Indian health system remains curative-heavy and medicine-heavy.​ Inpatient and outpatient care together dominate the expenditure pattern, while pharmaceuticals alone take 29.6 percent of CHE.​ This indicates that disease management is still too dependent on downstream treatment and medicine purchase rather than integrated prevention, screening, and continuity systems.​

The third conclusion is that the private sector remains structurally central, especially private hospitals and pharmacies.​ But this is not evidence of public irrelevance; rather, it is evidence of an incomplete public ecosystem, where the state finances more than before yet does not always provide the first, nearest, cheapest, or most trusted channel of care.​

The fourth conclusion is that state-level variation is wide enough to matter strategically.​ Some states spend more relative to economic size, some rely more on household financing, and some show lower OOPE burdens that may reflect either better protection or weaker consumption capacity.​ India’s health future will therefore be built not only in Delhi, but in the fiscal choices and service architectures of states.​

XII. Ten key challenges facing India’s health sector

What the NHA reveals, including the rural-urban divide

The NHA does not provide a numbered list of “challenges,” but its expenditure structure allows a rigorous identification of the most serious systemic constraints.​ These challenges are drawn from the report’s data, classifications, limitations, and state variation, and then interpreted through a development lens.

1. Persistently high household burden: OOPE still accounts for 49.90 percent of CHE and 43.41 percent of THE, meaning illness continues to trigger direct household payment on a very large scale.​

2. Insufficient public spending relative to national ambition: GHE is 1.48 percent of GDP on the new series, which is progress, but still too low for a country aiming at universal, high-quality, equitable care.​

3. Hospital-centric and curative-heavy care model: Inpatient and outpatient curative care dominate CHE, indicating that prevention and continuity remain underpowered.​

4. Medicine-driven household distress: Pharmaceutical expenditure is 29.6 percent of CHE, making drug costs one of the principal engines of private financial pain.​

5. Weak risk pooling depth: Insurance and social security channels have grown, but pooled financing still has not displaced point-of-care payments sufficiently.​

6. Sharp interstate inequality: Relative spending effort and OOPE burden vary widely across states, revealing unequal health protection across the Union.​

7. Rural-urban service asymmetry: The expenditure pattern, with high private hospital and pharmacy shares, suggests continued dependence on urban-centric tertiary and market-based care, while rural and peri-urban primary systems remain uneven.​

8. Under-captured domains of care: The report itself notes limitations in capturing private capital, dental care, long-term care, rehabilitative care, student welfare health spending, and some import-export related flows, indicating blind spots in planning data.​

9. Administrative fragmentation: Multiple financing schemes, employee schemes, voluntary insurance channels, and public program lines coexist, complicating coherence, portability, and strategic purchasing.​

10. Low preventive share for a country in epidemiological transition: Preventive care at 8.88 percent of CHE is meaningful but still modest relative to the rising burden of chronic disease, ageing, pollution-linked morbidity, and urban stress.​

These challenges take on a sharper edge in the rural-urban divide. Rural India faces distance, thin provider density, referral delays, and underdeveloped diagnostics, while urban India faces high-cost fragmentation, overmedicalization, congestion, and unequal access within cities. The NHA expenditure pattern, especially the dominance of private hospitals, pharmacies, and OOPE, reflects both failures in different forms.​

XIII. Ten structural solutions India needs by 2047

Reform architecture beyond the report

The following solutions are framed analytically from the NHA findings; though they are not clearly evident in the report.​ They represent the structural shifts India must pursue urgently if it seeks developed-nation health security by 2047.

1. Raise public health expenditure materially and predictably: India needs a time-bound fiscal pathway that lifts government health spending well beyond current levels and protects it from cyclical compression.​

2. Make primary care the default architecture: Health and Wellness Centres, urban primary networks, and district-level integrated care must become the first-resort system for chronic disease management, maternal-child care, screening, and referrals.​

3. Reduce medicine costs systemically: Expand generic procurement, essential drug availability, prescription discipline, and public pharmacy access so that pharmaceutical expenditure stops driving household distress.​

4. Cover outpatient and diagnostics more effectively: Financial protection must move beyond hospitalization to include the everyday costs that households actually face most frequently.​

5. Create a stronger national-state compact on health financing: States carry the larger government financing burden, so future reform requires predictable transfers, incentive-linked grants, and state-specific capacity support.​

6. Reform strategic purchasing from private providers: Private hospitals will remain central, but they must be integrated through transparent rates, quality standards, fraud controls, and outcome-linked contracting.​

7. Build a rural health guarantee: Rural India needs assured proximity to diagnostics, emergency transport, teleconsultation, essential medicines, and specialist referral chains, not merely nominal facility presence.​

8. Build metropolitan public health systems: India’s urban future requires strong municipal health institutions, local disease surveillance, mental health access, geriatric care, and primary care in slums and migrant settlements.​

9. Integrate data and health accounts into governance: NHA should be tied to annual policy review, state scorecards, district planning, and public dashboards so spending flows are not divorced from accountability.​

10. Prepare for ageing and long-term care now: The report’s weak capture of long-term and rehabilitative care is itself a warning; India must build financing, caregiving, and institutional models for an older society before the demand wave peaks.​

XIV. What must change urgently

The 2047 question cannot be postponed

If India must become a developed nation by 2047, three urgent changes are non-negotiable. First, the country must shift from a health system that finances treatment events to one that guarantees population health security through tax-funded, pooled, preventive, and primary-centered care.​

Second, the citizen’s dependence on direct out-of-pocket spending must decline sharply, especially for medicines, outpatient services, and chronic disease management.​ The country needs a time bound mission to bring OOPE in the desired range below 20% of WHO guielines.

Third, India must stop treating health as a social sector residual and begin treating it as foundational economic infrastructure.​ A workforce that is indebted, underdiagnosed, poorly managed for chronic illness, or geographically excluded from care cannot power a developed economy. Human capital is not built in classrooms and factories alone; it is built in clinics, laboratories, vaccination systems, safe childbirth, affordable medicines, and functioning referral chains.​

The NHA’s greatest service is that it strips away the comfort of slogans. It shows that India has made real progress, but that the architecture of protection remains incomplete. The republic is spending more on health. It is not yet protecting enough through health.​

Epilogue — The republic and the cost of being sick

The finest development debates often fail because they ask the wrong question. They ask whether a nation is growing, urbanizing, digitizing, formalizing, or modernizing. The more revealing question is simpler: what happens to an ordinary family when somebody falls ill? The National Health Accounts 2022-23 offers a disciplined answer. In India, the state is more present than it was a decade ago, insurance and social protection mechanisms are broader, and public expenditure has clearly expanded.​

Yet the family still pays too much, too often, and too directly.​

That is why the NHA should be read not as a technical ledger, but as a constitutional document in fiscal form. It measures how far the republic has travelled from the old model in which health shocks were overwhelmingly privatized onto households.​ It also measures how far the country still has to go before access to care becomes genuinely de-linked from fear of expense, distance, and delay.​

The deeper message of the report is not pessimistic. India has demonstrated that public spending can rise, financing structures can evolve, and a national health accounting architecture can be institutionalized with annual regularity.​ That is no minor achievement. Countries improve when they learn to count what matters and then govern what they count.​

But the next phase cannot be incremental in imagination. A developed India will require a health system that is more equal across states, more protective for households, more rural-reachable, more urban-accountable, more medicine-rational, and more preventive in instinct.​ It must reward wellness, not just reimburse illness. It must finance care early, not merely pay for damage later. It must make the public system trustworthy enough that the poor do not feel abandoned and the middle class does not feel compelled to exit.​

The NHA 2022-23 has done its job by telling the truth in numbers.​ The rest is a political and civilizational choice. If India wants to enter 2047 not merely as a larger economy but as a more humane republic, then health financing can no longer sit at the margin of national strategy. It must move to the center.​

(This AI-generated image illustrates the themes of fast exacerbating spectre of urban flooding in India),

On A Personal Note

I begin this volume on a personal note. The memory is vidid. It was August 23, 1997. 1555 hours. I was busy in official meeting in my office Essar House, abutting Bombay Race Course and overlooking Arabian sea. Suddenly my mobile phone buzzed (mobile was a rarity then and a costly toy to both own and operate) and my wife was on the other side. She told me to immediately leave for my home at Lokhandwala. My wife had a sixth sense which had sensed the immediate impending emergency and wanted me rush home before it was too late. I took fifteen minutes to wind up the meeting, collect my personal stuff and leave office in my maruti esteem car (a luxury for the Bombay working class poulatition then). By ten the time was 1630 hours.

But what was the dire emergency about which I got the alert from my wife, whle lakhs others placed in the same situation had no clue.

That was one of tne worst natural disasters Bombay had seen to date. Very heavy rain and consequent urban flooding- the word urban flooding (possibly coined in 1960s by Japanese hydrological pioneers Yutaka Takahashi) had not got currency in India by then.

What Mumbai (Bombay became Mumbai in November 1995) witnessed on August 23, 1997 was unprecedented- one of its heaviest August rain events of the late twentieth century, with the IMD later recording 346.2 mm of rainfall for that day. This set an all-time 24-hour rainfall record for the month of August for Mumbai. The consequent delguge was so harsh that it took 12 hours for me to reach home (1630 -0430 hours) a journey which I covered in 45-60 minutes in the normal course. I was among the lucky thousands, lakhs that night (many without food, water and electricity) were forced to spend the night in their offices spread over the city but mostly then concentrated around Nariman Point- Fort- Cuffe Parade areas that were not enundated.

The flooding that day was serious enough to inundate low-lying neighbourhoods, making road traffic crawl and suburban rail movement the lifeline of Mumabi halt altogether, exposing how vulnerable Mumbai had already become to intense monsoon bursts falling on a densely built, poorly drained and ecologically stressed urban landscape.

Yet the 1997 episode, though severe and memorable for those trapped in it, remained essentially a powerful warning rather than a city-defining catastrophe: it revealed the weakness of drains, the exposure of reclaimed and low-lying areas, and the recurring tendency of Mumbai’s monsoon systems to convert heavy rain into transport paralysis and neighbourhood flooding.

The city should have learnt the lessons for August, 23, 1997 urban flooding and made amends. Alas ! It did not do. And then came the catastrophic July, 26, 2005.

On 26 July 2005, Mumbai experienced a disaster of an altogether different order, which is why that flood is still regarded as the worst urban flooding the city has ever seen. At Santacruz, about 944 mm of rain fell in 24 hours ending 8:30 a.m. on 27 July 2005, overwhelming the city’s drainage capacity, submerging more than 30 percent of Mumbai, shutting trains, roads and airports, and leaving millions stranded. The human toll was devastating: more than 500 people died in Mumbai, while the wider Maharashtra flood disaster caused over 1,000 deaths, and the destruction spread across homes, vehicles, buses, livestock, shops and public infrastructure, with reports citing over 1 lakh houses damaged, more than 20,000 vehicles affected, and losses running into billions of dollars when direct and indirect economic damage are combined.

If 23 August 1997 showed how fragile Mumbai was, 26 July 2005 proved how a single day of extreme rainfall could bring India’s financial capital to a near-total halt and permanently redefine the scale of urban flood risk in the city. Neither Mumbai nor other Indian cities learnt the lesson, and as the years progressed, urban flooding became a defining trait of Indian cities and towns.

Prologue -A Republic of Cities at Water Risk

Make no mistake, urban flooding is no longer a peripheral concern or an episodic inconvenience in India; it has become one of the clearest warnings that the country’s model of urban form and city-making is under severe stress requring immediate fix. What was once treated as a municipal engineering problem is now visibly degenerated into a systems crisis involving land use, hydrology, climate, infrastructure, ecology, inequality, governance and state capacity. Across India, rain that should have percolated into soil, spread into wetlands, moved through drains or recharged tanks increasingly gets trapped on concrete, channelled into choked networks, and converted into destructive runoff within minutes.

Why the Question Has Become National

The evidence from the past decade or so shows that urban flooding is not confined to a few outlier metros or coastal geographies. Hill cities, inland cities, riverine cities and coastal agglomerations now all display their own flood pathways, but the underlying pattern is common: rapid urban expansion has outpaced ecological understanding and drainage design. At the same time, climate change is intensifying short-duration rainfall extremes, making even “ordinary” weak points in city systems trigger widespread inundation.

What This Article Argues

This Volume 22 of Akhil Vaani daily long form series article argues that urban flooding in India should now be understood as a pan-Indian urban governance emergency whose worst effects are borne by the poor, the informal, the un and underderinsured and the spatially excluded. It examines how the United Nations system and India’s disaster authorities define urban flooding, identifies the ten principal forces accelerating it, assesses which cities have suffered the severest recent episodes, explains why India’s flood risk will worsen over the next decade, and sets out ten structural solutions focused on arrest, containment and long-term reduction.

The central proposition is stark but inescapable: unless India redesigns cities around water rather than against it, urban growth will continue to manufacture disaster at ever larger scales.

Defining Flooding and Demystifying Urban Flooding

Flooding is generally classified into five main types, but urban flooding is structurally different because concrete surfaces prevent water absorption, forcing runoff into overwhelmed drainage systems. This amplifies flood peaks up to 8 times and water volumes up to 6 times compared to natural terrain.

The 5 Primary Types of Floods

1. River (Fluvial) Floods: Caused by prolonged rainfall or snowmelt over large areas, causing rivers to burst their banks and gradually submerge surrounding floodplains.

2. Flash Floods: Rapid, extremely dangerous floods triggered by sudden, intense rainfall (often from severe thunderstorms) that sweeps through valleys, dry washes, or canyons in minutes.

3. Coastal Floods: Driven by storm surges, high tides, or sea-level rise during tropical storms, directly threatening shorelines and estuaries with ocean water.

4. Groundwater Floods: Occurs when the water table rises and saturates the ground, causing water to seep upwards through floors and basements even in dry weather.

5. Urban (Pluvial) Floods: Emerges when intense rainfall overwhelms man-made city drainage networks.

How Urban Flooding is Structurally Different

While a river or coastal flood involves an influx of external water spilling onto land, urban flooding is a localized failure of water to drain away. It is structurally unique due to four key factors:

• Impermeable Surfaces: Paved roads, concrete structures, and rooftops prevent water from naturally soaking into the soil. Instead of infiltrating the ground, virtually all precipitation becomes instant surface runoff.

• Constrained Runoff: Water acts differently in cities. Man-made structures, narrow streets, and elevated railway lines act as artificial levees or canyons, changing natural flow paths and creating unpredictable, high-velocity currents.

• Overwhelmed Drainage Capacity: Pluvial flooding occurs when the volume of water simply exceeds the design capacity of the city’s storm sewers, catch basins, and pipes.

• The “Concrete Sponge” Effect: Because urban catchments develop much faster runoff times, flooding happens almost instantaneously—sometimes within just a few minutes of a heavy downpour.

Definitions and Beyond

The Basic Meaning

Urban flooding refers to the inundation of built-up areas when rainfall or rising water overwhelms the capacity of urban land, drainage systems and related infrastructure to absorb, convey or safely store water. As explained in the forgoing paragraph it structurally differs from classic river flooding because the human-built environment itself—through paving, construction, blocked drains, altered channels and lost storage spaces—becomes a central driver of the flood event.

United Nations Framing

The most useful United Nations system framing comes through UNDRR’s (nited Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.)) terminology on surface water flooding, which defines it as flooding caused when the volume of rainwater falling does not drain away through existing drainage systems or soak into the ground, but instead lies on or flows over the ground surface.

Applied to urban areas, this definition captures the essence of urban flooding: rainfall remains trapped at the surface because infiltration and drainage have both failed. This is especially relevant for Indian cities, where large impervious surfaces and antiquated weak drainage maintenance convert heavy rain into rapid waterlogging and flash inundation.

India’s Disaster Authority Definition

India’s disaster management framework describes urban floods as significantly different from rural floods because urbanization produces developed catchments that increase flood peaks and flood volumes and make flooding occur very quickly due to faster flow times, often within minutes.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’ urban flooding SOP similarly explains flooding as the submergence of usually dry areas by large amounts of water from sudden excessive rainfall, overflowing rivers or lakes, melting snow or exceptionally high tides, while emphasizing that urban flooding in India is intensified by unplanned development and encroachment on natural watercourses.

Taken together, the NDMA and allied government guidance define urban flooding not merely as excess water in cities, but as a rapidly triggered hazard produced by the interaction of extreme rainfall, altered watersheds and governance failure.

Why Urban Flooding Is Worsening Fast

Reason 1: Extreme Rainfall Is Intensifying

Research cited in Indian climate reporting shows that short-duration rainfall extremes over India are projected to rise under warming scenarios, including around 20 percent at 1.5 degrees Celsius warming and 25 percent at 2 degrees Celsius warming. These shorter, more intense bursts matter disproportionately for cities because urban drainage systems are typically designed around intensity-duration-frequency assumptions that are now becoming totally unreliable under non-stationary climate conditions.

Reason 2: Impervious Urbanization Has Spread Rapidly

Government urban flooding guidance notes that land under urban settlements increased sharply between 2001 and 2011, adding tens of thousands of square kilometres to urban use. It has furtner exacerbated in last fifteen years. As soils, fields and open surfaces are replaced by asphalt, concrete and dense construction, infiltration declines and runoff rises, which means even the same rainfall now generates more floodwater than before.

Reason 3: Dwindling Wetlands, Lakes and Tanks

NDMA-linked and climate-focused sources repeatedly identify encroachment and systematic filling of lakes, ponds, wetlands and floodplains as a core reason for worsening urban flooding. These landscapes historically acted as urban sponges and buffers; once built over, their storage function disappears and the city loses both flood moderation and groundwater recharge.

Reason 4: Natural Drains and Watercourses Have Been Obstructed

The urban SOP of MoHUA states that unplanned development and encroachments alongside rivers and watercourses have meddled with natural streams and watercourses. When stormwater paths are narrowed, straightened, covered or blocked, runoff seeks alternate routes through roads, basements, low-income settlements and transport corridors.

Reason 5: Drainage Systems Are Outdated and Undersized

NDMA notes that urban flooding can happen very quickly, yet many Indian stormwater systems remain under-capacity, fragmented or based on obsolete design assumptions for a much smaller area of the city and even smaller population burden. Climate and engineering literature also warns that future rainfall intensity increases should be incorporated into stormwater infrastructure design, because legacy systems are not built for new extremes.

Reason 6: Solid Waste and Silt Choke Drains

As per latest 2026 India generates approximately 1.85 lakh tonnes of municipal solid waste daily (over 62 million tonnes annually) and scale of the generation increasing fast. A significant amount of that solid waste gets dumped in cities drains. India’s urban solid waste municipal waste Government guidance repeatedly stresses de-silting and clearing municipal solid waste from drains as a short-term necessity for flood reduction. In practice, drains in most Indian cities double as garbage channels or sewage carriers, sharply reducing conveyance during heavy rain and converting manageable downpours into flood events.

Reason 7: Sewer and Stormwater Networks Are Often Mixed

Urban flooding worsens when stormwater drains are not hydraulically separated from sewage flows or when drains are routinely used for waste disposal, a problem highlighted in climate dialogue reporting on India. Mixed systems back up faster during storms, worsen contamination, slow drainage and multiply public health consequences after inundation.

Reason 8: Floodplains and Low-Lying Areas Continue to Be Built Upon

The MoHUA SOP and NDMA guidance recommend demarcating floodplains, low-lying areas and flood pathways, which is itself evidence that these spaces have often been urbanized without hydrological discipline. Construction in these zones places people and assets directly in harm’s way while eliminating the very room water requires during intense rainfall or river swelling.

Reason 9: Governance Is Fragmented

Urban flooding management in India involves municipal bodies, development authorities, irrigation departments, meteorological services, power utilities, police, transport agencies and district administrations. Where this institutional mesh lacks real-time coordination, accountability and shared data, drainage failure becomes a governance failure long before it becomes a water disaster. It is a clear failed governance paradigm where every one is responsible but effectively no one is resposible or cares.

Reason 10: Planning Still Treats Climate as Stationary

A major insight from recent research is that traditional design assumptions treating rainfall distributions as stable over infrastructure lifetimes are no longer valid. Indian cities are still widely governed by master plans, drainage manuals and development permissions that do not fully internalize worseing non-stationary rainfall, growing urban heat island effects and fast altering catchment hydrology.

Consequences

Human and Social Damage

Urban flooding causes human casualties, displacement, temporary relocation, interruption of schooling, breakdown of transport and severe stress on households. The public health burden extends beyond drowning or injuries to include contaminated water, spread of water-borne disease, exposure to sewage, mental stress and post-flood epidemic risk.

Economic and Infrastructural Damage

Damage to roads, bridges, homes, shops, warehouses, public utilities and business continuity is immediate and often undercounted. Urban floods also produce tertiary impacts such as income loss, tourism decline, higher rebuilding costs, supply disruption and price increases, all recognized in India’s own urban flooding guidance.

Environmental and Governance Damage

Repeated flooding degrades water quality, overloads drainage and sewage systems, accelerates urban ecological decline and undermines public confidence in institutions. Over time, a city that floods often becomes more unequal, more expensive to insure or rebuild, and harder to govern because crisis response begins substituting for long-term planning.

Who Suffers Most

The Biggest Sufferers

The biggest sufferers of urban flooding in India are low-income households, informal-settlement residents, pavement dwellers, migrant workers, small vendors and others living or working in low-lying, poorly serviced and highly exposed urban spaces. They are hit first because land markets and planning exclusions push them toward drains, nallah edges, wetlands, floodplains, reclaimed land, steep slopes and transport margins where risk is structurally concentrated.

Why Vulnerability Is Unequal

Affluent households may suffer asset loss, but poorer households face a deeper chain of harms: fragile housing, limited savings, no insurance, lost wages, contaminated belongings, interrupted medicines, damaged identity documents and weak access to compensation or formal recovery. In effect, urban flooding in India is not socially neutral; it turns pre-existing inequality into hydrological inequality.

The Worst Spectre in the Last Decade

The Worst Prototype: Chennai, 2015

Within the last ten years of major Indian urban flood episodes considered in public debate and technical literature, Chennai’s 2015 flood remains the strongest candidate for the worst spectre of urban flooding because of the scale of metropolitan paralysis, prolonged inundation, infrastructure collapse and the enduring place it occupies in urban flood analysis across India. NDMA-linked literature and later commentary repeatedly cite Chennai 2015 as one of the country’s most devastating urban flood disasters of the recent era.

The catastrophic 2015 Chennai urban flood was triggered by record-breaking northeast monsoon rains and the sudden release of water from the Chembarambakkam reservoir. It was deeply exacerbated by unplanned urbanization, encroached wetlands, and blocked drainage channels. The devastating deluge displaced over 1.8 million people, claimed over 400 lives, and caused widespread property and economic damage estimated at $3 billion.

Why Not a Simple Ranking

This ranking of 2015 urban flooding of Chennai as the worst expectre of the recent memory does not erase the severity of Hyderabad 2020, Bengaluru 2022, Guwahati’s recurrent floods, Mumbai’s repeated flood shocks or Delhi’s river-linked urban flooding episodes. But Chennai 2015 stands out because it combined extreme rainfall, reservoir management controversy, widespread encroachment on wetlands and waterways, transport and service breakdown, and a nationally visible demonstration that even a major metropolitan region could be functionally disabled by a flood event.

Five Worst-Affected Cities

Chennai: Wetland Loss Meets Extreme Rain

Chennai’s flood vulnerability is rooted in the shrinkage and encroachment of marshlands, tanks, lake chains and natural drainage corridors across its expanding metropolitan footprint, alongside heavy rainfall episodes that exceed what the altered urban watershed can absorb or convey.

The consequences have included large-scale residential inundation, business disruption, transport collapse, infrastructure failure, inmitigated suffering of urban poor and destitute and deep questioning of whether metropolitan expansion has outgrown hydrological common sense.

Mumbai: Density, Coast and Drainage Stress

Mumbai remains India’s archetypal urban flood case because intense rainfall combines with an extremely dense built environment, extensive imperviousness, constrained drainage, low-lying reclamations and, in some events, tidal interactions that slow outflow.

The 26 July 2005 flood remains the country’s most cited catastrophic urban rainfall event, and the city’s recurring flood stress shows how even economically powerful metro having annual municipal budget that is bigger than the annual budget of many Indian states can remain perennially physically vulnerable when ecology and infrastructure are mismatched,

Bengaluru: The Tech City on Blocked Hydrology

Bengaluru’s flood crisis reflects the destruction of interconnected lake systems, loss of rajakaluves or traditional drains, rapid real-estate expansion and intense paving over what was once a tank-based landscape.

Consequences in recent years have included residential submergence, office disruption, corporate productivity losses, road paralysis and a striking reputational shock to a city marketed as India’s technology capital.

Hyderabad: Runoff, Encroachment and Flash Risk

Hyderabad’s urban flood pattern has been shaped by high-intensity rainfall, expansion over lake catchments and nalas, inadequate drainage capacity and the shrinking buffer function of urban water bodies.

Severe flood episodes in even an hour of rainfall have exposed how quickly rainfall can turn into flash flooding in a rapidly urbanizing inland city, damaging homes, roads, livelihoods and essential services in both formal and informal neighborhoods.

Guwahati: A City Trapped by Topography and Urban Growth

Guwahati is one of the clearest illustrations that urban flooding is not only a metro-coast problem; it is also a hill-valley-city problem where topography, intense rain, blocked natural drains and unplanned growth interact dangerously.

The consequences include chronic waterlogging, repeated neighborhood isolation, transport disruption, hillside runoff pressure and an urban sense of flooding as an annual condition rather than a rare emergency.

A Pan-India Phenomenon

A Qualified but Strong Yes

It is safe to say that urban flooding has become a pan-India phenomenon, provided the statement is framed carefully: cities do not flood in the same way, but the risk logic has become national. Coastal cities face tide and outfall constraints, inland cities struggle with rapid runoff and local waterlogging, hill towns face short-duration scouring and landslide-linked flooding, and river cities face backflow and floodplain exposure; yet all are now vulnerable to a mix of altered hydrology, hard surfaces, ecological loss and more volatile rain.

Why the National Framing Matters

The pan-India framing matters because it shifts the debate away from treating each disaster as a local anomaly caused by “unprecedented rain.” Once the pattern is seen nationally, urban flooding becomes visible as a development model problem—one linked to zoning, drainage design, water-body governance, informal urbanization, data gaps and climate adaptation failure across the country.

The Next Ten Years

The Likely Trajectory

The projected trajectory for the next decade is one of faster and harsher worsening urban flood risk across India unless there is a major shift in planning, drainage investment, land regulation and ecological restoration. More intense short-duration rainfall, continued urban expansion, further pressure on wetlands and floodplains, and the persistence of obsolete drainage standards together imply more frequent, more spatially extensive and more economically disruptive flooding episodes.

What Worsening Will Look Like

The future problem will not appear only as rare mega-disasters. It will also show up as chronic annual waterlogging, repeated basement flooding, transport shutdowns, insurance stress, real-estate devaluation in exposed pockets, rising municipal pumping costs, and more neighborhoods crossing from nuisance flooding into recurrent livelihood-damaging inundation.

Global Warming and India

How Climate Change Worsens Urban Flooding Globally

Globally, climate change worsens urban flooding by increasing atmospheric moisture, amplifying the probability of intense precipitation events, altering storm behavior and stressing drainage systems designed for past climate baselines. Urban flooding is especially sensitive to short-duration downpours, and warming makes these sub-daily extremes more consequential for cities than changes in seasonal rainfall averages alone.

Impact or Global Warming and Climate Change

Global warming and climate change are rapidly exacerbating urban flooding in India by shifting weather patterns, causing high-intensity, short-duration rainfall events that overwhelm existing drainage infrastructure. As atmospheric temperatures rise, the moisture-holding capacity of the air increases, resulting in sudden, heavy cloudbursts rather than steady, prolonged monsoons. Coastal cities like Mumbai and Chennai face additional threats from sea-level rise and heightened cyclonic storm surges, which trap inland stormwater and force it to back up into the streets.

Furthermore, the urban heat island effect—intensified by extensive concretization—creates microclimates that locally increase precipitation. This widespread loss of permeable green spaces prevents natural water absorption. Consequently, rainwater transforms into massive surface runoff that surges at unprecedented volumes. When these unprecedented deluges hit cities with outdated colonial-era drainage networks and encroached natural waterways, catastrophic waterlogging occurs. This escalating hazard routinely paralyzes metropolitan economies, causes mass displacement of the urban poor, and breeds severe public health crise

Why Fast-Urbanising India Is Especially Exposed

India is especially vulnerable because climate stress is colliding with a still-unfinished urban transition. By 2050, India’s urban population is projected to reach nearly 951 million people, which will account for approximately 50% of the country's total population. Both the World Bank and the United Nations predict that this massive demographic shift will nearly double the urban population.

Rapid construction, widespread informalization, incomplete drainage networks, pressure on wetlands, mixed sewer-stormwater systems and growing impervious surfaces mean that climate change here is not acting on stable urban systems, but on cities that are already hydrologically brittle.

Ten Structural Solutions

1. Restore Urban Wetlands and Water Bodies

The first structural solution is to recover the city’s lost sponge system through legal protection, mapping, desiltation, reconnection and ecological restoration of wetlands, tanks, lakes, marshes and floodplains. This is not cosmetic beautification but hydraulic infrastructure in ecological form.

Every restored water body increases detention storage, slows runoff, supports groundwater recharge and lowers downstream flood peaks. In Indian cities, where historic tanks and wetlands were integral to drainage logic, restoration must be tied to encroachment removal, catchment protection and interconnection planning. Without reviving these natural reservoirs, engineered drains alone will remain overwhelmed.

2. Redesign Stormwater Systems for Future Rainfall

India needs a national programme to redesign urban drainage using updated intensity-duration-frequency curves that incorporate non-stationary climate conditions and shorter-duration rainfall extremes. Stormwater systems should no longer be sized for yesterday’s rainfall. New standards must include local flood modeling, ward-level runoff calculations, outfall constraints and redundancy for critical zones such as hospitals, metro systems, power substations and dense commercial districts. In old cities, retrofits will require phased trunk-drain enlargement, detention basins, pumping upgrades and strict hydraulic audits rather than ad hoc patchwork before each monsoon.

3. Protect Floodplains and Low-Lying Land from Construction

A decisive planning shift is required to identify, demarcate and enforce no-build or low-intensity-use rules for floodplains, drainage channels, depressions and repeatedly inundated low-lying land. Indian cities have often urbanized the very spaces meant to hold or convey excess water. Structural flood reduction therefore demands land-use discipline, not just drainage expenditure. Transferable development rights, buyouts, relocation packages and risk-zoning reforms can make protection politically feasible. If cities keep building in water pathways, every monsoon will become a collision between hydrology and real estate.

4. Separate Stormwater from Sewage Networks

One of the least glamorous but most important reforms is to physically and operationally separate stormwater drainage from sewage conveyance wherever networks are mixed or cross-connected. Mixed systems fail faster during storms and multiply disease exposure afterward. This reform should include interceptor sewers, outfall rehabilitation, backflow prevention, pumping safeguards and strict prevention of sewage inflow into storm drains. Cleaner storm systems drain faster and create fewer health shocks. For flood management, hydraulic clarity is as important as hydraulic capacity.

5. Institutionalise Drain Maintenance as a Year-Round Public Utility

Drain cleaning in India is too often a seasonal ritual rather than a continuously monitored urban service. A structural solution would treat stormwater assets the way cities treat electricity grids or public transport—through mapped inventories, maintenance schedules, sensor-based monitoring, ward-level accountability and pre-monsoon certification. De-silting, trash removal, outfall inspection and culvert maintenance must be digitized and independently audited. Because solid waste frequently turns rain into flood, flood policy and waste policy must be integrated at the municipal level instead of handled in silos.

6. Build Water-Sensitive Urban Design into Every New Development

Future urbanization should be governed by water-sensitive urban design that restores infiltration and local storage through permeable pavements, bioswales, rain gardens, green roofs, detention parks, retention ponds and mandatory on-site rainwater management. This approach reduces runoff at source rather than trying to evacuate all water through pipes. Building codes and development permissions should make runoff control a legal condition of construction. In a fast-urbanizing India, every new layout that ignores hydrology is a future liability added to the flood map.

7. Create Real-Time Urban Flood Forecasting and Warning Systems

NDMA and government SOPs already emphasize alerts, EOCs and nodal agencies, but India still needs much stronger city-scale flood intelligence built around dense rain-gauge networks, Doppler data, drain sensors, lake-level telemetry, inundation maps and public-facing warnings. The goal is not merely weather forecasting but impact forecasting: which roads will flood, which underpasses will close, which neighborhoods require evacuation readiness, and which utilities must be preemptively shut down. Faster warnings save lives, reduce traffic entrapment and improve emergency deployment, especially in cities where flooding develops within minutes.

8. Rebuild Urban Governance around a Single Flood Command System

Urban flooding cuts across institutions, so a structural answer requires unified command rather than dispersed responsibility. Every major city should have a permanent urban flood management cell with authority over data integration, monsoon preparedness, interdepartmental coordination, asset mapping, emergency response and post-flood review. Municipal bodies, development authorities, irrigation departments, transport agencies, police, utilities and health services must operate through one shared protocol and dashboard. Where everyone is partly responsible, no one is fully accountable; flood governance must correct that institutional defect.

9. Protect the Poor through Risk-Sensitive Housing and Recovery Systems

Because the biggest sufferers are the poor, flood mitigation must include social protection as infrastructure. This means upgrading vulnerable settlements, moving households out of the highest-risk corridors with consent-based rehabilitation, ensuring elevated shelters and essential services, protecting documents and medicine supplies, and creating rapid compensation and livelihood recovery systems. A city cannot be called resilient if it simply drains wealthy enclaves faster while leaving informal settlements to absorb the hazard. Equity is not an afterthought in flood policy; it is a core design criterion.

10. Make Climate Adaptation Legally Binding in Urban Planning

The final structural solution is to embed flood resilience into master plans, development control regulations, infrastructure finance, municipal borrowing and building approvals. Climate adaptation cannot remain an advisory annex. Every city expansion plan, transport project, housing township, industrial estate and smart-city retrofit should undergo hydrological risk assessment based on future rainfall conditions. India’s next generation of urban growth must be planned around the water it will receive, not the water planners wish it had. That legal shift would move the country from reactive flood management toward anticipatory urban resilience.

The Larger Argument

Beyond Disaster Response

Urban flooding in India is often discussed through rescue boats, viral images and emergency relief, but the deeper story is about the political economy of how Indian cities grow. Floods reveal what planning concealed: erased lakes, privatized lowlands, underbuilt drains, fragmented institutions and a willingness to treat natural hydrology as disposable until the monsoon returns to enforce it.

A Development Test for Urban India

For that reason, urban flooding should be treated as a test of whether India can build 21st-century cities without reproducing 20th-century ecological mistakes at larger scale. The country’s urban future will be judged not only by metros, airports or expressways, but by whether streets, drains, wetlands, housing and governance systems can coexist with a warmer and wetter risk environment.

Coda cum Epilogue

Water Will Define the Future City

The central lesson of India’s urban flood experience is that water always remembers the landscape, even when planners forget it. A city may erase a wetland from a revenue map, narrow a channel into a drain, pave a catchment into real estate or push the poor to the edge of a nallah, but the hydrological function of that space does not disappear; it returns during intense rain as inundation, backflow, damage and grief. That is why the battle against urban flooding is not only about pumps, embankments and relief camps. It is about whether Indian urbanization can recover a scientific respect for terrain, drainage, storage, flow paths and limits.

From Event Thinking to Systems Thinking

India now faces a choice between two urban futures. In the first, floods are treated as isolated shocks triggered by exceptional weather, after which cities resume business as usual until the next deluge exposes the same weaknesses again. In the second, floods are recognized as recurring systems failures produced by the interaction of climate volatility and flawed urbanization, prompting redesign of planning law, drainage standards, wetland governance, housing policy and metropolitan institutions. Only the second path can produce resilience commensurate with the scale of the challenge.

The Moral Geography of Flooding

There is also a moral question embedded in the flood question. When roads to airports and business districts are pumped dry while informal settlements remain submerged, the city reveals whose mobility matters, whose losses count and whose suffering is normalized. Urban flooding therefore cannot be solved by engineering detached from equity, inclusivity and justice. The most credible flood strategy is one that reduces exposure for all, but especially for those who did least to create the risk and have the fewest resources to recover from it.

A Definitive National Imperative

It is now reasonable to say that urban flooding has moved from being a municipal management problem to a national development imperative. India’s cities are where economic growth, demographic transition and climate vulnerability now intersect most sharply. If the coming decade brings more intense rainfall, more built surfaces and more ecological stress—as present evidence suggests it will—then flood resilience must become a foundational principle of urban India rather than a monsoon-time reaction. The definitive city of the future will not be the one that merely grows fastest, but the one that learns to live intelligently with water.

Epilogue

Urban flooding is no longer a seasonal inconvenience at the margins of Indian city life; it is becoming one of the defining tests of how the country will urbanise in an era of hotter air, sharper cloudbursts and collapsing ecological buffers.

The central truth is now unavoidable: when wetlands are erased, drains are neglected, floodplains are built over and climate-intensified rain falls on hard, fast-runoff landscapes, water does not disappear—it returns with multiplied force.

India’s next two urban decades during which the urban population of the country will nearly double to 951 million will therefore be judged not simply by the pace of construction, the height of skylines or the spread of expressways, but by whether its cities can recover the wisdom to store, slow, absorb and safely move water through the urban system.

A nation that is urbanising as rapidly as India cannot afford to keep treating floods as isolated monsoon accidents when the evidence increasingly points to a structural pattern of rising hydrological risk. The definitive response must be equally structural: rebuild cities around drainage logic, restore blue-green ecologies, protect the poorest from concentrated exposure and make climate-resilient planning legally non-negotiable.

In the end, the future of urban India will depend on a simple but profound civilisational choice—whether cities continue to fight water and lose, or learn to govern with water and endure.

Subscribe now

(AI-generated conceptual artwork on India’s ageing challenge and the coming demographic transition.)

The Prologue

Across much of the policy discourse in India, the narrative revolves around a young nation hurtling toward demographic dividend at a scale not witnessed in any other country of the world to date. That story is now dangerously incomplete—both as the national discouse and the oftrepeated global narrative.

In 2019, the world already had about 703 million people aged 65 and over, roughly 1 in 11 human beings. By 2050, this number is projected to more than double to around 1.5 billion, when about 1 in 6 people on the planet will be 65 or older. If one counts everyone 60 and above, there were already about 1 billion people in that age bracket in 2019, rising to an expected 2.1 billion by mid‑century as against global total population of 9.7 billion by the year 2050,.

Within just this decade, the UN estimates have crossed 1 billion people over 60, with the fastest ageing occurring in developing countries.

Quietly, almost imperceptibly, India is being pulled into the heart of this global grey revolution. Over the next two decades, tens of millions of Indians will cross the age of 60, often without pensions, without structured care systems, and without the joint family safety net that sustained earlier generations.

This transformation in the making is not just about more wrinkles in the crowd; it is about an impending rewiring of the society, economy, polity, labour markets, health systems, urban design and inter‑generational contracts.

Instructively, it is also about the tectonic shift in the entitre Gestalt of who will care, who will pay, who will decide—and how dignity, autonomy and security in old age will be defined and delivered to fast growing elderly population in India. This are not the questions in abstractions but intrinsically linked to the audacious aspirations to make India, a developed nation-ala Viksit Bharat -by 2047.

Crux of the Piece

Today’s edition of Akhil Vaani Daily Long Form Series Volume 21, takes the bull of the fast ageing of Indian population by the horn, des a 360-degree analysis of this transformational transition, looks at the risks, and the possibilities it provides—and argues that for India,concrete action on ageing, “later” is simply another word for “too late”. The piece makes a bold statement why the time is now for the paradigm change and look at elderly as a valuable resource and not a liabiity as is the current prevailing mindset in the country.

1. The World Is Ageing – Fast

The 21st century is not just about a youth bulge; it is equally about a silent, inexorable greying of the humanity at a scale not experienced in the past. Older persons are now one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in the world. The United Nations estimates that about one in ten people globally are already 65 or older, a share expected to rise to about one in six by 2050. In absolute numbers, this translates into more than one billion people above 60 today and well two billion (close to twenty percent of the total population ) by the mid‑century.

Behind these aggregate figures lies a profound civilizational shift.

Virtually every country is experiencing growth in both the absolute number and the proportion of older persons, driven by declining fertility and rising life expectancy powered by substantially better healthcare facilities than what the earlier generations enjoyed.

Also instructively, ageing stands democratised- no longer merely a “rich‑country problem”; it is an fast emerging as structural reality for middle‑income and even lower‑income countries, including India.

The question is no longer whether ageing will transform societies, but whether statutes, policies and institutional structure will keep pace with the speed and scale of this greying transition.

2. Where The Elderly Live: Global Concentration And Percentages

2.1 Absolute numbers of elderly

On sheer numbers, large‑population countries naturally dominate the global elderly landscape. China is currently the country with the largest elderly population , 223.65 million people of an above 65 years of age accounting for 15.9% of the population amd 323.38 million people of 60+ year population, making up about 23% of the total population of China.

India is now the second‑largest in absolute numbers of older people and will overtake China on most population indicators over the coming decades. As per the Sample Registration System (SRS) Statistical Report 2024 (released by the Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner in May 2026), the elderly population in India has reached the following levels:

• Population Aged 60 and Above: 9.7%

• Population Aged 65 and Above: 6.4%

Based on the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the UN World Pop-ulation Prospects (WPP) estimated India's population in 2024 of 1.44 billion (144.17 crore, India’s elderly population in absolute terms is expected to have crossed

• Aged 60+: 140.65 million

• Aged 65+: 92.80 million

The United States, Japan and several European countries also figure among the top countries with large absolute elderly populations, reflecting both demographic size and advanced ageing.

In practice, while talking of the elderly population, one looks at those aged 60+ rather than 65+, the ordering remains similar at the top: China, India and the United States together account for a very large share of the global elderly, with Japan and major European economies (such as Italy and Germany) contributing significant additional numbers.

2.2 Countries with the highest percentage elderly

When ranked by the share of elderly in the population, a different group of countries appears. Very small countries like Monaco have the world’s highest elderly share, with over one‑third of the population aged 65+. Among larger economies, Japan has nearly 30 per cent of its population aged 65 and above, the highest share in a major country. Italy, several Southern European economies, and many high‑income East Asian and European countries follow with shares above 20 per cent. Nordic countries also have high elderly shares but typically combine these with robust welfare systems.

In the global North and East Asia, therefore, ageing is already advanced, while in South Asia and much of Africa, it is accelerating. This creates a staggered ageing landscape, with some countries already in the “super‑aged” phase and others racing towards it without comparable policy architecture and the required institutional preparation.

3. Elderly As Distinct Demographic – And Market Niche

3.1 Needs that differ from the “normative” population

Compared to the normative population, elderly persons share some distinctive needs:

• Health and functional care: Higher prevalence of chronic, non‑communicable diseases (diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, arthritis), cognitive decline (increasingly due to the fast increasing demential burden), and multi‑morbidity; this requires continuous, integrated, geriatric‑oriented care rather than episodic acute care.

• Long‑term and palliative care: Assistance with activities of daily living, rehabilitation services, and end‑of‑life care become more relevant with advancing age.

• Income security and pensions: As labour income declines, pensions, savings, social security and targeted transfers become critical for dignified living.

• Age‑friendly environments: Barrier‑free public spaces, accessible transport, assistive technologies, and housing adapted to mobility constraints are central to the enhanced quality of life.

• Social participation and protection from abuse: Addressing loneliness, mental illnesses, isolation, discrimination, and elder abuse requires community‑based support, legal protection, and social inclusion mechanisms. It also requires insituttional and familial attitudinal change.

These needs are not merely “more of the same” services; they require a foundational structural re‑orientation of health systems, urban design, labour markets, and social policy to be genuinely age‑inclusive.

3.2 Older persons as a market niche and knowledge resource

Far from being just “dependants”, older persons cohort also represents a distinct and rapidly growing economic segment, often with specific consumption patterns and accumulated assets. This includes markets for:

• Health care, pharmaceuticals, assistive devices and home‑based care services

• Age‑friendly housing, mobility, tourism and leisure

• Financial products like annuities, reverse mortgages and long‑term care insurance

• Digital solutions for telehealth, remote monitoring and social connectivity

At the same time, older persons embody decades of tacit knowledge, domain expertise and social capital. This is a unique human resource that can be mobilised through mentoring, part‑time and flexible work, community leadership and knowledge‑transfer programmes, especially in the country centric contexts like India where institutional memory is often thin.

From a policy standpoint, elderly citizens are therefore simultaneously:

1. A vulnerable group requiring tailored protections, and

2. A demographic asset whose potential contribution is immense but is almost universally under‑utilised.

4. Governance For Ageing: Ministries, Institutions And Best Practices

4.1 Countries with dedicated ageing structures

International reviews show that many countries house responsibility for ageing policy within broader ministries such as social affairs, health or labour; only a minority have fully separate dedicated ministries for older persons. In some cases, inter‑ministerial commissions or national councils coordinate policy for the elderly across sectors instead of (or in addition to) a dedicated ministry.

In about 60–70 countries, there is at least one ministry that holds explicit functional responsibility for ageing and older persons, even if it is not titled “Ministry of Older Persons”. In several others, there are high‑level agencies, secretariats or directorates on ageing embedded in larger portfolios.

Nenethess, few countries feature dedicated national ministries or departments directly responsible for elderly welfare and seniors’ issues. Prominent examples include Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Malta, each of which has a specific ministry or designated Minister for Seniors.

Countries and regions with dedicated governmental infrastructure for the elderly include:

• Canada: The federal government operates a dedicated Ministry of Seniors, and various provinces (e.g., Ontario’s Ministry for Seniors and Accessibility) manage regional elder affairs.

• Australia: Features a specific Minister for Aged Care to oversee elderly services and senior-related welfare.

• New Zealand: Has a dedicated Minister for Seniors to protect and advocate for the aging population.

• Israel: Previously maintained a dedicated Ministry for Senior Citizens (now often integrated into broader social equality frameworks).

• Malta: Established a dedicated Ministry for Active Ageing to address healthy aging, care facilities, and senior rights.

Other major nations, such as Germany, integrate elder affairs into broader portfolios like the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth.

The overall picture is of a patchwork architecture, with only partial global convergence towards specialised institutional structures.

4.2 Countries with advanced elderly‑centric policies

Certain countries are widely cited for robust ageing policies and social protection regimes:

• Japan: Comprehensive long‑term care insurance and community‑based integrated care systems, coupled with strong focus on active ageing and employment of older workers.

• South Korea: Rapidly expanding pension and long‑term care systems, though still catching up to the speed of demographic ageing.

• Italy and Southern Europe: High public spending on pensions and health, but also strong reliance on family‑based care, with varying degrees of formalisation.

• Nordic countries (e.g., Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland): Universalistic, tax‑financed welfare states providing extensive health, care and income security; policies are relatively age‑neutral but effectively supportive of older persons.

• United States: Medicare and Social Security constitute major pillars of old‑age security, supplemented by private pensions and insurance, albeit with gaps and inequalities.

These regimes differ in emphasis and design, but share an underlying feature: the recognition of ageing as a central axis for social policy and fiscal planning.

5. Elderly Policy Regimes: US, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Nordics

5.1 United States

The US ageing regime is built around two key national programmes: Social Security (old‑age pensions) and Medicare (health insurance for people 65+), supplemented by Medicaid for low‑income elderly needing long‑term care. Social Security provides income support based on earnings histories, while Medicare offers hospital and medical insurance, with private Medicare Advantage plans playing a growing role.

However, out‑of‑pocket costs, coverage gaps (especially for long‑term custodial care), and unequal retirement savings mean that older Americans face significant disparities. Policy debates increasingly focus on long‑term care financing, prescription drug pricing, and the sustainability of entitlements as the baby‑boomer generation ages.

5.2 Japan

Japan is the world’s most aged large society, with nearly one‑third of its population aged 65+. It responded by building one of the most comprehensive long‑term care systems globally, funded through a mix of tax revenues and mandatory premiums for people aged 40 and above. This Long‑Term Care Insurance (LTCI) scheme provides services ranging from home‑help and day‑care to institutional care, with an emphasis on ageing in place.

Japan also promotes “active ageing”: encouraging later retirement, re‑employment of older workers, and community participation. Municipalities play a key role in coordinating health, care and social support for local seniors. For India, Japan’s model illustrates the value of a dedicated, quasi‑universal care system instead of treating elder care as a residual welfare add‑on.

Japan Active ageing policy demystified

Japan’s active aging policy focuses on transforming its super-aged demographics into an economic asset by keeping seniors healthy and employed. Key measures mandate that companies offer continued employment opportunities up to age 65, while community-based strategies under the Long Term Care Insurance Act promote lifelong social participation and disease prevention.

This proactive approach to healthy longevity involves several distinct pillars of legislation and community support:

• Workplace Reforms: The revised Act for Stabilisation of Employment of Employment of Ederly Persons requires employers to retain workers who wish to remain on the job past the traditional retirement age, facilitating a gradual transition into phased retirement.

• Community Engagement: Through community-based salons and volunteer networks, the government shifts focus toward population-wide prevention strategies to reduce the incidence of long-term care needs and dementia.

• Continuous Integration: National initiatives encourage seniors to pursue lifelong learning and civic volunteerism, ensuring they remain valued, active members of society.

5.3 South Korea

South Korea is ageing at a remarkable speed, moving from a young to an old society within a few decades. To address this, it has expanded public pensions, introduced its own long‑term care insurance, and invested heavily in community‑based services. Yet benefit levels remain modest and private expenditure on elder care is substantial.

South Korea’s elderly policy is a mixed bag. While the government offers strong targeted protections against specific risks like dementia, the broader framework struggles with high elderly poverty rates and an underdeveloped home-health safety net.

The robustness of South Korea’s policies can be divided into distinct successes and structural vulnerabilities:

Key Successes

• Dementia Care: The country is highly proactive in protecting vulnerable seniors. The government manages a Dementia Public Trust System that safeguards patients’ financial assets, and an expanding Adult Guardianship System for those lacking decision-making capacity.

• Active Aging and Employment: Recognizing the rapidly shrinking workforce, the government actively subsidizes public sector jobs and incentivizes private startups to hire workers aged 55 to 74 to keep them socially and economically engaged.

Structural Vulnerabilities

• Severe Poverty: South Korea consistently records the highest elderly poverty rate in the OECD. Over 40% of South Koreans aged 65+ live in relative poverty. The National Pension Scheme offers low payout ratios and incomplete coverage, forcing many seniors to rely on personal savings or low-paying jobs well into old age.

• Lack of Home Healthcare: Despite 15% of the elderly population being homebound, the system remains heavily hospital-centric. The country has yet to build a wide-reaching home health infrastructure, leaving many without proper daily living or clinical support.

• Pension Sustainability: The rapidly shrinking working-age population is putting immense fiscal pressure on the national pension funds, creating concerns about the system’s long-term viability without drastic tax increases.

The Korean experience demonstrates the challenges of building institutions fast enough to catch up with demographic change. It highlights the importance of integrating pension, health and long‑term care reforms rather than addressing them in silos.

5.4 Italy

Italy combines very high old‑age dependency with a traditionally strong pay‑as‑you‑go public pension system and universal health care. However, formal long‑term care services have lagged behind, leading to heavy reliance on family caregivers and migrant care workers, especially for home‑based support.

Fiscal pressures have pushed Italy towards pension reforms and increased emphasis on community‑based care, but the overall pattern remains a “familialistic” regime: the family shoulders primary responsibility, and the state plays a strong but uneven supporting role. This is of particular relevance to India, where policy often implicitly assumes that “the family will manage”, even as that very family structure is weakening.

5.5 Nordic countries

Nordic countries such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland are globally recognised for age‑inclusive welfare regimes. Their systems are generally tax‑financed, universal and rights‑based, covering health care, social care, housing, and income security for older persons.

Elderly services include home‑help, assisted living, and residential care funded largely from general revenues, with relatively low reliance on family provision compared to Southern Europe or Asia. Active ageing, participation and anti‑age discrimination are integral to labour market and social policies. For India, the Nordic model illustrates what it means to treat older persons as full citizens with enforceable social rights, not just beneficiaries of ad hoc schemes.

6. India’s Ageing Story: Numbers, Trends And Projections

6.1 Elderly population today

India’s elderly population has been rising steadily for decades. Census‑based estimates and demographic studies indicate that the number of persons aged 60 and above increased from roughly 24 million in 1961 to about 72 million in 2001 and has continued to grow rapidly since then. Here is the story of India’s ageing from 1951 the first post independence census in 1951 to 2011 the last decadal census the country held

The latest Sample Registration System (SRS) Statistical Report 2026 suggests that seniors now account for about 9.7 per cent in 2024 of India’s population, up from 8.6 per cent in 2011, with around 6.4 per cent aged 65 and above. In absolute terms, this implies well over 130 million people aged 60+ today, and rising fast.

6.2 Historical evolution since 1961

From 1961 onwards, two trends are visible:

• The absolute number of elderly has multiplied several times over, reflecting both population growth and rising life expectancy.

• The share of older persons in the population has been edging upwards, especially since the 1990s, as fertility declined and more people survived into older ages.

By 2001, the elderly (60+) numbered about 71–72 million; projections made at that time anticipated a steep increase in subsequent decades. Today’s SRS and other official data show that those projections were not alarmist – if anything, the growth of India’s elderly population has been at least as rapid as expected.

6.3 Projections to 2031, 2041 and 2051

Long‑term demographic projections for India indicate that:

• The number of people aged 60+ is expected to rise to around 179 million by 2031.

• By 2051, this figure is projected to cross 300 million, reaching about 301 million older persons fast reaching 361 million of total popuation of India in 1951.

The Indian trajectory is unambiguous: India will move from roughly one in ten Indians being 60+ today to perhaps one in five or more by mid‑century. The “demographic dividend” narrative, if not re‑framed, risks becoming a dangerous delusion that distracts from a looming care and social protection challenge.

7. Geography Of Ageing In India: States With The Oldest Populations

7.1 States with the highest share of elderly

Indian ageing is uneven across states. Relatively advanced, lower‑fertility states have larger shares of older persons. Analyses of census and demographic data show that Kerala, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Haryana have some of the highest proportions of elderly, with the elderly share already at or above 10 per cent of their populations. These states are effectively where India’s ageing future has arrived early.

In contrast, several North‑Eastern states such as Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram and Assam have the lowest proportion of people aged 60 and above. For them, extensive youth bulges co‑exist with nascent ageing, giving a short window for anticipatory policy responses before the elderly share rises more sharply.

7.2 States with the largest absolute numbers

In absolute numbers, populous states naturally dominate the elderly count: Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are among those with the largest 60+ populations, simply because of their overall demographic size. This combination of high absolute numbers in some states and high elderly shares in others demands different policy responses – one size will not fit all.

8. Who Is In Charge? Ministries And Departments For The Elderly In India

8.1 Central government

At the Union level, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MoSJE) is the nodal ministry for matters relating to senior citizens. Within it, a dedicated structure focuses on “Ageing with Dignity”, administering schemes for elder care, financial assistance and welfare. Other ministries – Health and Family Welfare, Rural Development, Housing and Urban Affairs, Finance – also have programmes that touch older persons, but responsibility is not fully integrated.

8.2 State governments and dedicated departments

At the state level, responsibility for older persons is typically located in departments such as Social Justice, Social Welfare, Women and Child Development, or similar portfolios. Some states have created specific directorates, cells or missions on senior citizens under these broader departments, and a few have established more visible, stand‑alone institutional mechanisms focused on elderly welfare.

On May 20,2026 Kerala established the Department of Senior Citizens Welfare making it the first dedicated government department for elderly welfare in India but beyond semantics it is too early to celebrate the Kerala model. I will return to it later in the piece.

Fact is that in most states almost without exception, policies for the elderly does not yet enjoy the status of a fully separate line department with dedicated budget, staff and planning capacity comparable to, say, school education or public health. The statutory, policy and institutional architecture therefore remains fragmented, too little too late and under‑powered relative to the scale of the challenge already in hand = and a challenge that is exacerbating fast.

9. India’ Framework For Older Persons Care – And Its Gaps

9.1 Key national policies and statutes

India has, on paper, recognised the rights and welfare of older persons through several instruments. But it remains just on paper sans of meaningful actions, The key instruments include:

• National Policy on Older Persons (NPOP), 1999 – laid out broad objectives for ensuring financial security, health care, shelter and welfare of older persons, and promoting their participation and integration into society.

• Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 – creates a legal obligation for children and heirs to provide maintenance to parents and senior citizens, with mechanisms for tribunals and penalties, and provisions relating to old‑age homes.

• Schemes under MoSJE such as the Integrated Programme for Older Persons (IPOP) renamed as the Integrated Programme for Senior Citizens (IPSrC) under the broader umbrella of the Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana (AVYAY) and other initiatives supporting NGO‑run old‑age homes, day‑care centres and helplines

• Social protection schemes like the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP), which includes old‑age pensions for the poor, and various state‑level pension schemes.

These instruments signal an intention to address ageing, but they have not translated into a comprehensive, well‑funded and enforceable social protection and care regime for older persons. While the problem keeps exacerbating the governments centre and state lool askance.

9.2 Why governmental action is not adequate

There are several reasons why current policy is insufficient:

• Under‑funding and low coverage: Old‑age pensions for the poor remain extremely modest, often inadequate even to cover essentials, and coverage remains patchy.

• Care treated as charity, not a right: Long‑term care, home‑based support and assisted living are not recognised as enforceable entitlements, leaving families – especially women – to shoulder the burden.

• Weak enforcement: The Maintenance and Welfare Act is unevenly implemented, with tribunals under‑resourced and older persons often reluctant to litigate against their own children.

• Fragmented responsibilities: No single, empowered body coordinates pensions, health, care and urban design for the elderly; programmes are siloed, reactive and grossly inaquate.

• Urban bias and neglect of rural elders: Many services are concentrated in cities, while rural elderly – including those in rain‑fed, agrarian or tribal regions – remain largely invisible.

It is instructive to note that India is fast entering an ageing era with policy frameworks that are partial, under‑resourced and misaligned with the demographic reality.

10. Social Transformation: Joint Family Erosion, Migration And Care Deficits

A distinctive feature of ageing in India is its intersection with rapid social change. Traditional joint families, which once offered informal social security, are fragmenting under the pressures of urbanisation, nuclear family norms, and labour mobility. As younger generations migrate to metropolitan regions or abroad in search of education, jobs and upward mobility, older parents are left behind, often in small towns and villages.

This geographic and emotional distance erodes the embedded, everyday care that joint families once provided. Physical presence is replaced by remittances and periodic calls, which cannot substitute for assistance with daily living, companionship, and responsive care in emergencies. The burden of care tends to fall disproportionately on daughters‑in‑law or unmarried daughters who remain at home, reinforcing gendered inequalities.

In this context, the expectation embedded in laws like the Maintenance and Welfare Act – that children will provide for parents – are increasingly getting misaligned with lived realities of mobility, dual‑earner households and cross‑border migration.

Unless the state, market and community step in with structured alternatives, the unraveling of the joint family risks leaving millions of older Indians stranded in a care vacuum.

11. The Feminisation Of Old Age: Elderly Widows As A Distinct Group

One of the most neglected dimensions of ageing in India is the high and rising number of widowed older women. As per a most recent PIB rlelease dated October 28,2025 sex ratio among the elderly stands at 1,065 females per 1,000 males, with women accounting for 58% of the elderly population, out of which 54% are widows women.

Gendered life expectancy gaps, age differences at marriage, and norms of widow remarriage (or the lack thereof) mean that women are more likely to outlive their spouses and spend extended periods of time as widows.

Elderly widows often face a double disadvantage compared to the general elderly population:

• Economic vulnerability: Many lack independent income, property rights, or adequate pensions, and may have limited access to remittances.

• Social marginalisation: Widowhood can bring stigma, restrictions on social participation, and exclusion from decision‑making within families.

• Higher risk of isolation and neglect: Widows are more likely to live alone or in dependent situations with relatives, with fewer social supports.

Thus, the problems of widowed elderly women are structurally different – and often more acute – than those facing the elderly as a whole. Any serious ageing policy must therefore integrate a strong gender lens, with special attention to widows, single older women, and those without children.

12. Ten Major Challenges Facing Elderly In India

India’s older persons confront a layered set of challenges, rooted in economic structures, social norms and institutional gaps. Ten key challenges include:

1. Inadequate income security – Low and irregular pensions, lack of universal old‑age income floor, and limited access to contributory schemes for informal workers.

2. Limited access to geriatric health care – Few geriatric specialists, inadequate screening and management of chronic diseases, and limited coverage of diagnostics and medicines.

3. Absence of formal long‑term care systems – No integrated framework for home‑based care, day‑care, assisted living and nursing facilities, especially outside metros.

4. Urban and rural infrastructure not age‑friendly – Poor walkability, unsafe public transport, lack of ramps, railings and accessible toilets limit mobility and participation.

5. Social isolation and loneliness – Particularly acute for those whose children have migrated, widowed elders, and those in rapidly urbanising areas with weak community bonds.

6. Elder abuse and exploitation – Financial exploitation, emotional abuse, and neglect are grossly under‑reported and poorly addressed by existing legal and social systems.

7. Digital exclusion – As services and payments move online, many older persons struggle with digital interfaces, risking exclusion from basic entitlements.

8. Invisibility in labour and care policy – Older workers in informal sectors lack protections, and unpaid elder care work (often done by women) remains unrecognised.

9. Weak coordination across sectors – Fragmented schemes across health, social welfare, pensions and housing lead to gaps, overlaps and inefficiencies.

10. Lack of reliable, disaggregated data – Insufficient, regularly updated, state‑wise and gender‑disaggregated data on the elderly hinders evidence‑based planning.

These challenges interact and compound each other, creating a cumulative disadvantage for the poorest, oldest, and most socially marginalised elders.

13. Ten Structural Solutions: From Charity To Rights‑Based Ageing

To move from symptomatic responses to structural transformation, India needs a concerted agenda on ageing built on ten pillars:

1. Universal basic old‑age income floor
   Establish a nationally guaranteed minimum pension for all citizens above a certain age, indexed to inflation, with higher top‑ups for the poorest and most vulnerable. This would decouple survival in old age from children’s ability or willingness to provide support.

2. National long‑term care (LTC) framework
   Develop a comprehensive LTC framework that sets standards and financing mechanisms for home‑based care, community day‑care centres, respite care, assisted living and nursing homes, drawing lessons from Japan and nordic countries. This could be financed through a mix of general revenues and contributory social insurance.

3. Geriatric‑centred health system
   Mainstream geriatric care in primary health services, expand geriatric units in district hospitals, train frontline asha workers in elder health issues, and integrate preventive, rehabilitative and palliative care.

4. Age‑friendly cities and villages
   Embed ageing into Smart Cities and rural infrastructure programmes: universal design in housing, pavements, public buildings and transport; safe crossing, seating, lighting and accessible toilets; and community spaces for senior engagement. India’s has a long way to traverse and is yet to start the journey.

5. Dedicated institutional architecture
   Create empowered departments or missions for older persons at both Union and state levels, with clear mandates, budgets and accountability, rather than treating ageing as a marginal sub‑theme. Consider an independent statutory commission on ageing for long‑term oversight.

6. Gender‑responsive ageing policy
   Design targeted programmes for widows and single older women: enhanced pensions, housing support, legal aid on property and inheritance, and self‑help or cooperative models for economic and social empowerment.

7. Community‑based social support systems
   Promote senior citizens’ clubs, inter‑generational centres, and community volunteers for befriending, monitoring and supporting isolated elders, especially in urban peripheries and rural areas. Death kills once, loneliness kills daily

8. Regulation and support of elder care services
   Establish standards and regulatory frameworks for private old‑age homes, home‑care agencies and assisted‑living facilities, while incentivising quality providers to expand into tier‑2/3 cities and rural areas.

9. Active ageing and labour market reforms
   Encourage flexible work, phased retirement, and re‑skilling programmes for older workers who wish to remain economically active, recognising their experience as an asset.

10. Data, research and innovation ecosystem
    Institutionalise regular, detailed surveys of older persons’ conditions, linked to state‑level statistical systems, and promote research and innovation in gerontechnology, care models and social policy design.

These solutions need not arrive as a single mega‑reform; they can be sequenced and layered, but they require a clear, declared national commitment to ageing as a core development frontier.

14. Why The Time For Concrete Central Action Is Now

Demography is destiny only if policy sleeps through demographic change. India has, at most, a narrow one decade window to re‑orient institutions towards an ageing future before the dependency ratios, fiscal pressures, and care demands become overwhelming.

Every year of delay increases the number of older persons who will enter advanced ages without adequate pensions, care systems or age‑friendly environments. By 2031, India could already have close to 180 million people aged 60+, many of whom are today in their 40s and 50s, working in informal jobs with little social security. If reforms start only when they reach 60 or 70, it will be structurally too late: contributory systems will not have time to mature, infrastructure will lag by a decade or more, and ill equipped households will bear the full brunt.

Moreover, ageing interacts with other megatrends – urbanisation, climate risk, technological disruption. Elderly farmers in drought‑prone regions, older slum dwellers in heat‑stressed cities, and digitally excluded seniors in an online welfare system will face compounded vulnerabilities.

A purely incremental approach risks producing a humanitarian crisis in fast motion.

There is also a profound moral argument. How a society treats its older members is a measure of its ethical maturity. India’s constitutional promise of dignity cannot remain youth‑centric. The generation that built the Republic, worked through shortages and reforms, and financed today’s growth through their savings is entitled to more than residual charity and thin pension lines.

Acting now – with clear legislation, dedicated institutions, and serious fiscal commitment – would allow India to convert ageing into an opportunity: a chance to build new care economies, create dignified jobs (especially for women), harness elder knowledge, and design cities and villages that are kinder to everyone, not just the old. Waiting until 2040 or 2050 would mean managing crisis, not shaping the future.

15. Towards A Future‑Looking, Transformational Elderly Agenda

A truly transformational approach to ageing in India would rest on three shifts:

• From familial obligation to shared social responsibility: Recognising that while families remain central, the state, markets and communities must co‑produce elder security.

• From fragmented schemes to holistic systems: Integrating pensions, health, long‑term care, housing and urban design into a coherent policy architecture.

• From viewing elders as dependants to recognising them as citizens and contributors: Creating platforms where older persons participate in community governance, mentor youth, and shape policy narratives on ageing itself.

For India, the demographic clock is ticking. The elderly are no longer a small, residual group; they are a rising constituency, a latent market, and a repository of experience.

The choice before Bharat is stark: drift into a grey crisis, or consciously build a society in which growing old is not synonymous with growing invisible

16. Coda- Learning for Bharat from God’s Own Country

Kerala colloqually called “God’s own country” is India’s ageing avant‑garde. With around 16.5–18 per cent of its people already above 60 in the early 2020s, the state has the highest share of elderly in the country. Official projections suggest that this will cross roughly one‑fifth of the population by 2031 (about 20.9 per cent), and could approach one‑third by mid‑century, with estimates of about 30 per cent elderly by 2051. In other words, the age structure that India will face nationally around the 2040s is already visible in Kerala’s districts today.

Kerala’s decision on May 20, 2026 to create a separate department for the elderly is therefore more than an administrative tweak; it is a conceptual break. For the first time, an Indian state has recognised ageing as a standalone governance challenge, worthy of its own institutional home, budget and leadership—much like school education or housing.

The Kerala government move signals a shift from treating older persons as scattered “beneficiaries” of schemes to seeing them as a core constituency whose rights, risks and capabilities demand coordinated policy.

This has national implications of a different order when placed against the macro numbers. By 2031, India’s elderly population is expected to reach around 179 million—roughly 18 crore—making it about one‑and‑a‑half times the current population of Bihar, the country’s second most populous state. It is difficult to imagine any other demographic group of this size being left to a thin mix of under‑funded pensions, scattered welfare schemes and the fading promise of joint‑family care.

Yet that is precisely what India is on course to do if it does not take the “Kerala turn” and give ageing a dedicated institutional anchor.

Kerala’s new department will not be a perfect template; it will make mistakes, discover constraints and grapple with fiscal limits. But it will also generate policy innovations—on home‑based care, neighbourhood support systems, integration of health and social services, and the use of Japan‑style models—that the rest of India can watch, learn from and adapt.

For the Union government and other states, the lesson is stark: ageing is now large enough, fast enough and uneven enough that incrementalism has run out of road.

Epilogue

If one state can reframe its elderly as a primary subject of governance rather than a residual afterthought, it quietly changes the reference point for the entire Republic. The real question, then, is not whether India can afford to follow Kerala’s lead, but whether it can afford not to—when an elderly population larger than most nations is barely a decade away.

Make no mistake elderly population in India in five years from now will exceed the total population of Netherland as a country and the cost of complacency or inaction is humoungous.

India must act now else the developed country dream even if actualised will at best be fractured.

I. Prologue: The UCC at the fault-lines of Indian democracy

The Uniform Civil Code (UCC) debate in India sits at the junction of three powerful currents in Indian politics: the demand for gender justice, the federal reality of State-level experimentation, and anxieties around majoritarian dominance over minorities. Article 44 of the Constitution embeds the UCC as a Directive Principle, asking the State to “endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India,” but leaves its implementation to the political process rather than judicial compulsion.

India’s current system of personal laws—in Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Parsi regimes, supplemented by secular statutes like the Special Marriage Act—produces a complex mosaic where similarly placed citizens can have different rights in marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption and inheritance purely because of the religion. Against this backdrop.

Historical Backdrop

The Constiuent Assembly Debate

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar the father of the Consitution of India was a strong advocate for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC). He viewed it as a crucial step toward creating an egalitarian, casteless, and non-discriminatory society. However, recognizing deep religious sensitivities, he suggested a voluntary approach during the drafting process. [

The Debate

On November 23, 1948, the Constituent Assembly debated Draft Article 35 (which later became Article 44 of the Constitution) regarding the Uniform Civil Code. The debate highlighted a deep philosophical clash between national integration, gender justice, and minority religious autonomy.

Key Features of the Debate

• Constitutional Compromise: The core issue was whether the UCC should be a fundamental, enforceable right or a non-justiciable directive. Because of the intense opposition, it was ultimately placed in the Directive Principles of State Policy, meaning the state should “endeavour” to secure it, but it cannot be enforced by courts.

• Consent and Consultation: Opponents argued that the state should not legislate on personal laws without the explicit consent of the religious communities affected.

• National Unity vs. Cultural Autonomy: Proponents viewed the UCC as a vital tool for secularism, women’s equality, and nation-building, whereas opponents saw it as a majoritarian imposition that would erase minority identity and violate freedom of religion.

Proponents of the UCC

• Dr. B.R. Ambedkar: As Chairman of the Drafting Committee, he supported the UCC as an ideal framework but assuaged minority concerns by suggesting it should be voluntary initially.

• K.M. Munshi: He passionately argued that personal laws created artificial barriers between communities and that a UCC was necessary to unify India, modernize society, and ensure equal rights for women.

• Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar: He supported the measure, asserting that a common civil code would not interfere with the religious freedom of communities but would instead strengthen national harmony.

Opponents of the UCC

The opposition was primarily led by Muslim members who sought to protect personal laws from state interference. Key opponents included:

• Naziruddin Ahmad: He argued that a uniform code would infringe upon the fundamental right to freedom of religion and impose an unwanted law on minority communities.

• Mahboob Ali Baig: He warned that a UCC would fail to accommodate the unique customs and personal laws of India’s diverse groups, suggesting it could cause immense social unrest.

• M. Muhammad Ismail, B. Pocker, and K.T.M. Ahmed Ibrahim: They tabled amendments to Draft Article 35. They argued that personal laws were intrinsically tied to religious identity and that attempting to replace them would violate guarantees to practice and profess one’s religion.

Why the Assembly Did Not Recommend a Mandate

The Assembly ultimately chose not to make the UCC legally binding because of the lack of consensus and the fear of coercing minority communities.

To navigate the deadlock, the Assembly adopted a three-part compromise:

1. Article 44 was relegated to the Directive Principles of State Policy (DPSP), making it a guiding principle for future governments to “endeavour to secure” rather than an immediately enforceable law.

2. Ambedkar proposed a gradual, voluntary transition. He assured dissenting members that a future legislature would likely not force the code, but rather make it applicable only to those who opted into it voluntarily by declaration.

3. Personal laws were placed on the Concurrent List. This gave both the central and state governments the power to enact social reform and codify civil laws (which later enabled the passage of the Hindu Code Bills).

The Compromise Remains a Compromise

In 1804 France became the first country to establish a comprehensive, codified legal system applicable to all citizens regardless of religion or class. Established by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Napoleonic Code unified civil laws encompassing property, family, and contracts, setting a historic precedent for secular legal frameworks. India had the opportunity to enshrine UCC in its Constitution but the opportunity was lost and a compromise was reached, that compromise has remained a compromise after 76 years of adoption of the Constitution of India.

Nehruvuian Era Attempt

India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the first to attempt personal law reform, successfully codifying Hindu laws in the 1950s. However, he did not introduce a comprehensive Uniform Civil Code (UCC) bill because he faced fierce opposition from orthodox leaders and chose to focus on incremental Hindu reform first.

Nehru and his Law Minister, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, introduced the Hindu Code Bill in 1951 to unify and modernize laws regarding marriage, divorce, and inheritance for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs.

Why the comprehensive UCC was not pursued and the broader bill struggled:

• Vast Religious Diversity & Fears of Coercion: The Constituent Assembly, recognizing the deep integration of personal laws with religious identities, relegated the UCC to Article 44 of the Directive Principles of State Policy. It was drafted as an unenforceable, non-binding goal rather than a fundamental right.

• Resistance from Within the Government: Even the push to reform Hindu laws faced massive internal resistance. Conservative Congress party members, and notably the first President of India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, strongly opposed the Hindu Code Bill, arguing it would interfere with religious traditions.

• Political Volatility: Minorities fiercely opposed a common civil code, fearing that the majority would impose its religious practices on them. To avoid fragmenting the newly independent nation, Nehru compromised and shelved the broader UCC goal.

• Resignation of Dr. Ambedkar: The immense pushback and dilution of the Hindu Code Bill led Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to resign from his position as Law Minister in protest.

While the Hindu Code Bill eventually passed as a series of distinct acts between 1955 and 1956, a nationwide Uniform Civil Code did not materialize and remains an ongoing political debate.

With Ambedkar gone the chief protagonist of UCC was gone and UCC remains in limbo till date.

The Deadlock- A Nation Divided

Almost eight decades have gone by since India became independent but the idea of a Uniform Civil Code, mostly without specifics, has frequently been invoked by governments as an ideal, a sympathetic means of uniformly applying personal laws to all Indians. Gender equality is frequently brought up as the fundamental benefit of a Uniform Civil Code. It has nonetheless been resolutely opposed and little progress has been made in conceptualizing an effective common law despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi having committed on the front foot.

The Bottoms Up Reforms- States with Uniform Civil Code

While the country as a whole suffers from the litany of woes in names of multiple religion based statutory framewoks of marriage, inheritance, divorce and other aspect of life, three states stand out for the bottoms up movement of either inheriting or crafting the Uniform Civil Code. These are

Goa

The major religions of Goa are Hinduism and Christianity, together accounting for more than 95% of the population, while Islam, Buddhism and other religions account for the rest. Contrary to the popular belief approximately 66% of the population practices Hinduism, making it the majority religion.

Despite that Goa's Uniform Civil Code is 159 years old. It is based on the original Portuguese Civil Code of 1867, which was extended to Goa in 1869. After Goa's liberation from Portuguese rule, it was retained by the Indian government under the Goa, Daman, and Diu Administration Act of 1962.

Key Features of Goa UCC

• Communion of Assets: Spouses equally share all assets owned before marriage or acquired during it. In the event of a divorce, each is entitled to exactly half the property.

• Equal Inheritance: Sons and daughters have equal inheritance rights. Parents cannot completely disinherit their children; at least half of the total property must be divided equally among them.

• Mandatory Registration: All births, deaths, and marriages must be compulsorily registered with the civil authorities.

• Prenuptial Agreements: Couples can execute legally enforceable antenuptial agreements before marriage to alter the default distribution of assets.

• Prohibition of Polygamy & Specific Divorces: Practices like polygamy (for Muslim men who register their marriages in Goa) and arbitrary divorce (such as ‘triple talaq’) are prohibited.

Uttarakhand

Uttarakhand’s 2024 Uniform Civil Code was enacted in 2024, passed by the state assembly on February 7, 2024. It received presidential assent on March 11, 2024, and officially came into force on January 27, 2025. A per the 2011 Census, Hinduism is the majority religion in Uttarakhand, accounting for 82.97% of the state's population. The second-largest religion is Islam with 13.95%, followed by Sikhs at 2.34%

Key Features of the Uttarakhand UCC

• Live-in Relationships: Requires residents (and non-residents living in the state) to mandatorily register their live-in relationships. Failure to do so can result in imprisonment or fines.

• Marriage & Divorce: Standardizes the minimum age of marriage for all communities. It makes the registration of all marriages mandatory within 60 days and explicitly bans practices like nikah halala and iddat.

• Inheritance: Guarantees equal property rights for both sons and daughters, overriding patriarchal or religious coparcenary systems. It also grants legal recognition to children born of voidable marriages and registered live-in relationships.

• Exemptions: The law is not applicable to Scheduled Tribes (STs) who are legally protected under Part XXI of the Indian Constitution.

How Uttarakhand Differs from Goa’s Civil Code

Goa operates under the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867, which was established long before India’s independence, making it the only state with a historic UCC.

• Historical Origins: Goa’s framework grew organically over centuries through colonial rule and social practice. Uttarakhand’s code is a newly drafted statutory legislation passed to directly implement Constitutional goals.

• Community Exemptions: Uttarakhand explicitly exempts tribal communities from the code. Conversely, Goa’s code generally applies to all.

• Marital Property: Goa’s code features the “Community of Property”, where all assets brought into or acquired during a marriage are divided 50:50 between spouses upon divorce or death. Uttarakhand’s UCC does not mandate this automatic 50:50 split of marital assets.

• Live-in Registration: Uttarakhand strictly criminalizes the failure to register live-in relationships. Goa’s historic civil code does not contain regulatory or penal clauses regarding live-in relationships.

Gujarat

As per the 2011 Census, Gujarat’s total population was 6.04 crore, and it is predominantly a Hindu-majority state, which accounted for roughly 88.57% of the population. Muslims formed the largest minority group at 9.67%, followed by Jains at 0.96%

Gujarat Uniform Civil Code (The Gujarat Uniform Civil Code, officially known as the Gujarat Uniform Civil Code Bill, 2026, was passed by the Gujarat Legislative Assembly on March 25, 2026. This made Gujarat the second state in India—after Uttarakhand in 2024—to enact a common family law for all residents.

The Gujarat Uniform Civil Code (UCC), replaces religion-based personal laws with a unified legal framework for all citizens, excluding Scheduled Tribes. It mandates marriage registration and court-only divorces, prohibits polygamy, ensures equal inheritance for sons and daughters, and requires the registration of live-in relationships.

Key Features of the Gujarat UCC 2026

• Marriage & Divorce: Marriages must be registered within 60 days, and a court decree is legally mandatory for all divorces (out-of-court or customary divorces are abolished).

• Equal Inheritance: Sons and daughters are granted identical and equal inheritance rights.

• Monogamy Mandate: Strict prohibition on bigamy and polygamy.

• Live-in Relationships: Mandatory registration of live-in ties, with provisions ensuring maintenance rights for partners and legal legitimacy for children born from such relationships.

• Tribal Exemption: The law explicitly exempts the state’s Scheduled Tribes (STs) to protect their customary practices and identities.

Similarities: Gujarat, Uttarakhand, & Goa

• Universal Application: All three codes apply common secular rules across religions for marriage, divorce, and inheritance.

• Banning Polygamy: Both Gujarat and Uttarakhand strictly ban polygamy (Goa’s code also effectively enforces monogamy by regulating how second marriages may only be recognized if the first fails to produce children).

• Equal Inheritance: All three models enforce equal inheritance rights for daughters and sons.

Differences: Gujarat, Uttarakhand, & Goa

• Live-in Registration: Both Gujarat and Uttarakhand include highly publicized mandates forcing partners to register live-in relationships and notify parents/guardians, with penal consequences for non-compliance. Goa has no such invasive registry for live-in arrangements.

• Historical Origins: Goa’s civil code dates back to the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 and has evolved organically over centuries through judicial interpretation. In contrast, Gujarat and Uttarakhand are modern legislative overhauls reflecting recent statutory frameworks.

• Tribal Exemptions: Gujarat and Uttarakhand explicitly exempt Scheduled Tribes from the UCC’s purview. In Goa, the civil code broadly applies across all demographics without specific religious or tribal group exemptions, though it respects certain regional customary usages.

• Penalties: Gujarat and Uttarakhand rely on penal sanctions (imprisonment and fines) for failing to register live-in relationships or marriages. Goa focuses more strictly on the civil legality of actions rather than deploying criminal penalties for registry defaults.

Assam

As per the 2011 Census, Assam’s religious composition comprises a majority Hindu population (61.47%), followed by a significant Muslim minority (34.22%). The remaining population consists of Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, and other religious groups. The Assam Uniform Civil Code (UCC) Bill, 2026, has been officially tabled in the State Assembly. The proposed legislation seeks to standardize civil laws regarding marriage, divorce, inheritance, and live-in relationships, but it specifically exempts all Scheduled Tribe communities to protect indigenous customs.

he Assam Uniform Civil Code (UCC) Bill 2026, tabled in the State Assembly, seeks to replace religion-based personal laws with a uniform framework while explicitly exempting Scheduled Tribes to protect their customary practices. The key features include:

• Ban on Polygamy: Mandates monogamy; bigamy and polygamy are strictly prohibited and punishable with up to 7 years imprisonment, though existing polygamous marriages remain protected.

• Uniform Marriage Age: Sets the minimum legal age for marriage at 21 years for men and 18 years for women.

• Mandatory Registrations: Requires the registration of all marriages and divorces within 60 days.

• Live-in Relationship Regulations: Mandates the official registration of live-in relationships and ensures that children born from such unions are legally recognized as legitimate.

• Gender-Equal Inheritance: Establishes a uniform order of preference for intestate succession, granting women equal property and inheritance rights by equally including the spouse, children, and parents of the deceased as legal heirs. [

These four state have transformed UCC from a constitutional aspiration into a live federal laboratory. And with the progression of time more and more states may come up with thier own version of UCC.

But there is a catch. The state centric Uniform Civil Code is not what the Constitution of India aspires for. The core message of Article 44 of the Constitution is loud and clear “Article 44 of the Constitution embeds the UCC as a Directive Principle, asking the State to “endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India,

The Core Question

The core question is no longer simply “UCC: yes or no?” but “what kind of uniformity, for whose benefit, through what institutional pathways?” India has waited for eight decades to have a UCC the question also is “It must wait till when?”This piece foregrounds three linked angles: UCC as an instrument of gender justice; UCC as an arena of experimental federalism; and UCC as a site of contestation over majoritarian–minority relations and comes to a plausible conclusion.

II. The existing personal-law landscape: pluralism with fractures

1. Fragmented regimes of family law

India’s civil laws on family matters are a patchwork of religion-specific codes and secular alternatives.

• Hindu family law (including Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs) is codified mainly through four Acts: Hindu Marriage Act, Hindu Succession Act, Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, and Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act.

• Muslim family law is partly statutory (Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937; Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, 1939) and partly uncodified religious doctrine, as interpreted by courts.

• Christian law relies on the Indian Christian Marriage Act, 1872 and the Divorce Act, 1869, with succession governed largely by the Indian Succession Act, 1925.

• Parsi law uses the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936 and specific chapters of the Indian Succession Act.

• Secular statutes like the Special Marriage Act, 1954 and Guardians and Wards Act, 1890 provide religion-neutral options for marriage and guardianship.

This structure produces deep asymmetries in rights across communities, especially for women, even as constitutional guarantees of equality and non-discrimination formally apply to all.

2. Goa, Uttarakhand and the “proto-UCC” states

Goa’s Portuguese-derived civil code applies uniformly to residents in matters like marriage, divorce and succession, with features such as community of property between spouses and equal inheritance for sons and daughters. Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand Act, 2024 and Gujarat UCC 2026 similarly lay down common rules on marriage, divorce, inheritance and even live-in relationships for all non-tribal residents, with exemptions for Scheduled Tribes.

Recent commentary notes that Goa, Uttarakhand and most recently Gujarat are the three states currently having a UCC-like regime, while Assam is exploring UCC feasibility and legislative pathways having already introduced the Bill as explained in foregoing paragraphs, marking a shift of UCC from pure theory to concrete experimentation.

III. Constitutional architecture: Article 44 in a maze of rights

Article 44 is part of the Directive Principles of State Policy, which are explicitly declared by Article 37 to be non-justiciable but fundamental in governance. Courts cannot order Parliament to enact a UCC, but they frequently cite Article 44 as a guiding norm in judgments involving family law and equality.

[The author has explained in preceding paragraphs how Article 44 became a compromise directive principle when it should have been made justifiable fundamental right].

Article 44 sits in direct contrast with Articles 14 and 15 which guarantee equality before the law and prohibit discrimination on grounds including religion and sex, while Article 25 protects the freedom to profess, practise and propagate religion, subject to public order, health, morality and other fundamental rights.

The UCC debate therefore even after eight decades of the independence sits in a three-way tension: equal citizenship, religious freedom, and directive principles.

The 21st Law Commission’s 2018 consultation paper leaned toward prioritising non-discrimination and gender justice over strict textual uniformity, arguing that a UCC was “neither necessary nor desirable” at that stage. It was a flawed recommendation. Unsurprisingly then, 22nd Law Commission has re-opened consultations, underlining that the issue is politically and legally unresolved.

This constitutional setting ensures that any move toward UCC must justify itself simultaneously in terms of equality, secularism, and respect for cultural diversity.

22nd Law Commission

The 22nd Law Commission of India, chaired by former Justice Rituraj Awasthi, initiated a fresh approach toward the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) by soliciting public and religious organizations’ views. However, the commission’s tenure ended on August 31, 2024, without submitting a final report or draft on the UCC.

Key Highlights of the Approach and Suggestions:

• Fresh Deliberation: Recognizing that the 2018 consultation paper by the 21st Law Commission (which deemed a UCC “neither necessary nor desirable at this stage”) was several years old, the 22nd Commission sought fresh stakeholder ideas to garner broader consensus.

• Core Principles: The commission’s overall approach has been guided by the need to protect the diversity of Indian culture while ensuring that marginalized and weaker sections are not disadvantaged.

• Emphasis on Gender Justice: The panel leaned toward prioritizing gender-just reforms in family laws across all religions to eliminate discriminatory practices, prejudices, and stereotypes, rather than imposing a single monolithic code.

• Current Status: The UCC debate continues to evolve, with various state governments forging ahead with their own comprehensive drafts on uniform personal laws.

IV. Gender justice as the normative core

1. Persistent gender asymmetries in personal laws

Despite substantial reforms, many personal-law regimes still embed gendered hierarchies.

• Unequal grounds or processes for divorce in some communities.

• Historically poorer inheritance rights for daughters and widows (partially corrected in Hindu law but still uneven across contexts).

• Practices like polygamy, unilateral forms of divorce and informal marriage practices that disproportionately harm women.

Judicial decisions such as Shah Bano (1985), Sarla Mudgal (1995), John Vallamattom (2003) and Shayara Bano (2017) consistently invoked the need for uniform principles or at least gender-just reform across personal laws, highlighting that constitutional equality cannot be indefinitely postponed in the name of community autonomy.

2. How UCC is framed as a women’s-rights issue

Proponents of UCC argue that a common civil framework can:

• Remove gender-biased provisions in divorce, maintenance, guardianship and succession, especially benefiting women.

• Eliminate incentives to misuse personal laws (e.g., conversion for polygamy), thus protecting women from legal exploitation.

• Align family law with the broader constitutional shift against practices like instant triple talaq and child marriage.

However, feminist opinion is not monolithic. Some women’s groups fear that a top-down UCC could be drafted in ways that marginalise minority women’s voices and fold complex internal reform agendas into a simplistic majoritarian template.

An ethically defensible UCC must therefore be more than “one rule for all”; it must be demonstrably better for women in every community, crafted with their active participation rather than in their name alone.

V. Federalism and the new State laboratories

1. UCC and the Concurrent List

Personal law subjects such as marriage, divorce and succession fall within the Concurrent List, granting both Parliament and State legislatures power to make laws. Central law generally prevails in case of conflict, but States can innovate and sometimes secure Presidential assent for divergent statutes.

This federal structure creates room for State-level UCC pilots without waiting for a contentious national law. Goa’s inherited civil code and Uttarakhand’s 2024 and Gujarat 2026 statute already function as three distinct models of UCC-like regimes, embedded in specific historical and social contexts.

2. State initiatives: Goa, Uttarakhand, Assam, Gujarat

• Goa: A long-standing civil code with uniform marriage and succession rules, equal inheritance and community property, though with some community-specific exceptions.

• Uttarakhand: A post-Independence UCC that mandates marriage registration, sets common grounds for divorce, recognises and regulates live-in relationships, prohibits polygamy and equalises inheritance rights, while exempting Scheduled Tribes.

• Assam and Gujarat: Gujarat has enatched a Unifrom Civil Code while Assam is publicly exploring UCC, having already introducing a UCC Bill in May 2026 .

These moves allow for a form of “competitive federalism”: States can frame, implement and test different UCC designs, generating empirical evidence on litigation trends, women’s rights outcomes, and social acceptance. These state centric UCC have been discussed in details in he foregoing paragraphs.

3. Risks and opportunities in federal experimentation

Federal experimentation can make UCC less abstract, showing citizens what it looks like in practice. But it can also deepen regional and communal anxieties if States perceived as politically aligned with a national ideology push UCC primarily as an identity marker rather than a rights-enhancing instrument.

For a federalist approach to work, there must be strong mechanisms of evaluation, inter-State learning, and safeguards to prevent States from using UCC statutes primarily as tools for communal mobilisation.

VI. Majoritarian–minority politics: fear, symbolism and trust

1. Minority apprehensions

Minority communities often perceive the UCC project as a vehicle for majoritarian Hindu norms to be rebranded as “neutral” civil law. Critics invoke Articles 25 and 29, arguing that personal laws are integral to religious and cultural identity and that a single code risks eroding India’s multicultural character.

There is also a historical memory of moments when State intervention in personal law has been experienced as “policing” rather than partnership, making communities wary that UCC will target their practices more aggressively than those of the majority.

2. Political instrumentalisation

The UCC has long been part of ideological platforms and election manifestos, often framed as a test of secularism and nationalism. This politicisation fuels suspicion that timing and framing of UCC initiatives are more about electoral mobilisation than careful law reform.

When minorities view UCC as a symbol of political domination, even progressive content can be rejected as illegitimate. Conversely, when majorities see resistance to UCC as “communal veto,” the issue becomes a zero-sum identity battle rather than a conversation about better family law.

3. Reframing the discourse

To escape this trap, UCC advocacy needs to shift:

• From “Hindu vs Muslim” to “citizen vs discrimination”.

• From “uniformity as sameness” to “uniformity as equal protection and equal burdens”.

• From “central imposition” to “co-created law” with visible minority and women’s participation.

Only such a reframing can turn UCC from a polarising symbol into a platform for renegotiating the social contract in a plural democracy.

VII. Pros and cons revisited through the three angles

A concise way to capture the debate is to map UCC’s pros and cons against the three focal angles:

DimensionMain potential benefitsMain risks or costs

Gender justice: Eliminates discriminatory provisions, strengthens women’s rights in all communities.

Poorly drafted uniform law could entrench new biases or ignore specific vulnerabilities of minority women.

FederalismEnables nationwide clarity, reduces fragmentation, uses State pilots as learning sites.

One-size-fits-all central code may clash with regional customs; State laws could be used for local polarisation.

Majoritarian–minority politics Can consolidate equal citizenship and secular civil identity beyond communal lines. Perceived as majoritarian imposition, leading to distrust, protests and long-term damage to institutional legitimacy.

VIII. A phased reform strategy: convergence before codification

Drawing on 21st and 22nd Law Commission guidance and comparative constitutional practice, a pragmatic path would emphasise convergence toward shared principles that aim a comprehensive UCC applicable to all within five years from now rather than immediate imposition of a single code. Meanwhile state centric experimentations can concinue and lessons learned in implementation codified.

1. Phase I – Deep reform within all personal laws

• Remove overtly discriminatory provisions affecting women and children in all personal laws, consistent with the 21st and 22nd Law Commission’s emphasis on non-discrimination.

• Standardise minimum marriage age (18 for all genders) and ensure compulsory registration of marriages across communities like done in Uttarakhand and Gujarat..

• Introduce no-fault divorce and “irretrievable breakdown” as grounds across laws, along with common principles for division of matrimonial property and post-divorce maintenance.

This phase would show that the State is prepared to reform majority and minority personal laws alike, reducing the sense of targeted interference.

2. Phase II – Strengthen secular alternatives and opt-in UCC tracks

• Modernise the Special Marriage Act to be faster, less bureaucratic and more accessible, making it an attractive secular option.

• Allow individuals and couples to opt into a model UCC framework voluntarily, with clear legal advantages and protections attached.

Over time five years leet citizens voluntarily choose the secular or UCC-based tracks, ensuring that social norms shift toward a de facto UCC, lowering resistance to eventual consolidation. At the end of the period make a well crafted UCC mandatory. There can not be a wait till eternity.

3. Phase III – Drafting a national UCC rooted in consensus

• After sustained reforms and experimentation, convene a representative body (including women’s groups, minority organisations, jurists and States) to draft a comprehensive UCC.

• Ensure the code explicitly affirms equality, non-discrimination, and limited State intrusion into purely religious rituals while regulating secular aspects of marriage and succession.

• Provide generous transitional provisions: existing marriages and successions can continue under old rules if parties choose, within defined limits, to avoid ex post facto injustice.

Throughout these phases, Parliament and State legislatures must operate within the guardrails of fundamental rights, with courts preserving a backstop against regressive codification. This code must come up in next two years and become mandatory only after a voluntary run for three years.

IX. Coda: Towards a just and plural UCC

The Uniform Civil Code debate in India is ultimately a debate about what kind of Republic the country wants to be. Article 44’s call for a UCC was born from the desire to transcend communal fragmentation and embody equal citizenship in everyday civil life. But the intervening decades have revealed that equality cannot be pursued in abstraction from the fears and aspirations of real communities, especially minorities for whom personal law can symbolise cultural survival.

Foregrounding gender justice makes clear that the status quo is not morally neutral. Discriminatory provisions in any personal law—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi or customary—are at odds with the Constitution’s guarantees of dignity and equality. A future UCC worthy of the name must, at minimum, leave women and children in every community better off, with stronger rights over their bodies, relationships and property. Goa and Uttarakhand’s experiences suggest that uniform rules can, in principle, deliver more equal outcomes, but they also highlight the need for careful drafting and exemptions where necessary, especially for Scheduled Tribes and distinct customary regimes.

Viewing UCC through the lens of federalism reminds us that India is not a unitary laboratory. State-level initiatives in Goa, Uttarakhand, Assam and Gujarat can generate practical lessons about what works and what fails—in litigation rates, enforcement challenges, and social acceptance—informing wiser national choices. A centre–State dialogue that treats States as co-authors rather than mere implementers of UCC could convert an ideological flashpoint into a collaborative law-reform project.

Finally, grappling honestly with majoritarian–minority politics is essential. A UCC that is perceived as a vehicle for imposing majority norms will deepen mistrust and damage the very idea of constitutional citizenship it seeks to defend. That perception can only be countered if minority voices, especially women’s, are institutionalised in the design process and if simultaneous reforms of majority personal laws signal that everyone’s sacred cows are equally subject to constitutional scrutiny.

Epilogue

In this light, the question “Should India have a UCC?” is less useful than “How can India achieve gender-just, constitutionally aligned family law for all, with the active consent of its diverse communities?” A phased strategy—reforming personal laws, strengthening secular options, learning from State experiments, and only then codifying a consensual UCC—offers a path forward that honours gender justice, federalism and pluralism together. The real measure of success will not be the passage of a bill named “Uniform Civil Code,” but whether, decades from now, Indian women and children across religions can look back and say that the law finally treated them, simply and fully, as equal citizens.

But the bottom line is India has waited 80 years for an aspirational UCC it can not afford to wait till 100 years of indepdence. India that is Bharat thy time starts now.

The work to craft a UCC that is non-discriminatory, global best practices yet rooted in India’s pluratiy must start now. It is not a political issue, it is the existential issue and a lens from which future damothers , wives and daughters of India, will judge the current generation. Article 44 may be a non-justifiable Directive Principle to state but equality in the constitution is enshrined as non-divisable fundametal right. Period

(AI-generated conceptual illustration of a dowry negotiation scene; not a photograph of a real event or person)

Dowry deaths will not end when India merely reduces cases; they will end only when the social legitimacy of marital extraction collapses.

Prologue

On Monday May 25, 2026, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India, led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, along with Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Vipul M. Pancholi, started the hearing a case whose occurence in the very first place should shame the nation. The court took up the case on its own (suo motu) under the title, “In Re: Alleged Institutional Bias and Procedural Discrepancies in the Unnatural Death of Young Woman at Matrimonial Home”. This action was taken specifically regarding the suspicious dowry death of 33-year-old actor-model Twisha Sharma in Bhopal.

While hearing the case, the Supreme Court bench asked the media to exercise restraint while reporting developments in the case. It said-

“We are slightly in pain because of some of the actions. We will request our media friends to not go for the statements of the victim’s family or the other family. Let the things move as per law and procedure We request the media not to record statements of the victim’s family and reduce their pain to sound bites,” the bench said, adding that a narrative should be avoided.

Why the Supreme Court Took Up the Case Suo Motu

• Fear of Legal System Favoritism: The victim’s husband, Samarth Singh, is a practicing lawyer. Her mother-in-law, Giribala Singh, is a retired District Judge. Because the accused belong to the legal fraternity, the public and the victim’s family feared that the local police and courts would favor them.

• Institutional Bias: Media reports and the victim’s family flagged serious procedural lapses and evidence tampering by local authorities. The Supreme Court stepped in to ensure that influential backgrounds do not derail a fair trial.

• Protection of Judicial Integrity: The court was deeply pained by a rising public narrative that the judiciary protects its own members from criminal accountability. Taking the case directly in its hand clears the name and image of the justice system.

What This Intervention Means

• Transfer to the CBI: Because local bias was suspected, the case has been handed over to the Cnntral Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to secure a fair and neutral investigation.

• Strict Stop to Media Trials: The bench strongly warned against resolving criminal matters through television news and internet commentary. They explicitly ordered both families and media channels to stop circulating witness details or leaking private confession statements.

• A Strong Warning to Society: The intervention sent a clear national message that no one is above the law, regardless of high-profile legal status. During the hearing, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta shared a profound thought for all families, stating that it is always “better to have a divorced daughter than a dead daughter.”

Crux of this Long Form Series

This Volume 19 of the Akhil Vaani Daily Long-Form series, goes beyond the individual case and asks fundamental questions regarding the dowry related harrassments and consequential deaths in India. It critically analyses all the attendant issues, challenges and pathway for a new India where the price of being a daughter does not lead to India’s Hidden Dowry Death Economy” and marriages of daughters cease to become cases of the extortion and Silent Genocide

Dowry Deaths in India: The Crime Behind the Ritual

Dowry in India is not a residual custom; it remains one of the country’s most entrenched systems of gendered extraction, coercion and lethal violence. The official record itself shows that thousands of women continue to die in dowry-linked circumstances every year, while far larger numbers report cruelty and harassment by husbands or in-laws.

Even after decades of legislation, the data still points to , dowry related harrasments by husbands and their family members and consequential deaths of women a live social emergency rather than a fading social evil.

The scale of the problem

The agency that annually publishes India’s official crime statistics on dowry deaths and related offences is the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), through its annual Crime in India report. As per the latest published NCRB report in 2026 for 2024, in 2024, India recorded 5,737 dowry deaths and 12,343 cases registered under the Dowry Prohibition Act. This translates to a rate of nearly 16 dowry-related deaths every day, or one woman dying approximately every 90 minutes.

NCRB compiles these statistics from the data reported by States and Union Territories, That means NCRB is the primary official source for year-wise and state-wise data on dowry deaths, cruelty by husband or relatives, and other crimes against women but because it is dependent on states police for the data, accuracy is highly suspect.

I will return to it a bit later

According to the parliamentary annexure based on NCRB data, India recorded 7,141 dowry death cases in 2019, 6,966 in 2020, 6,753 in 2021, 6,450 in 2022, 6,156 in 2023 and as per the most recent data subsequently released by NCRB 5737 in 2024.

The latest NCRB release reporting 5,737 dowry deaths in 2024, indicates a decline over five years but still translating into roughly 15 to 16 deaths every day. Using the official 2019-2023 NCRB series, the five-year average is about 6,693 dowry deaths annually, or about 18 deaths a day. Dowry deaths are not merely gory statistics, every such death is a shame on the nation and eminently preventable.

Even one dowry related death, is a death too many.

The above five year average of per day 18 dowry deaths matters because it strips away the comfort of one-year fluctuations. Even if the 2024 lower number is accepted, India is still witnessing a scale of dowry-linked death that should be treated as a continuing national emergency rather than as an issue of isolated family tragedy.

More than deaths: harassment and cruelty

Dowry deaths are the most extreme endpoint, but they are only the visible peak of a much larger pyramid of coercion. The Ministry of Home Affairs has clarified that Section 85 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, formerly Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code, continues to provide protection against cruelty and harassment for dowry demands irrespective of the duration of marriage.

In public reporting based on NCRB data, cruelty by husband or his relatives has remained vastly higher than dowry deaths, reaching 144,593 cases in 2022. Based on the National Crime Records Bureau's (NCRB) 'Crime in India' reports, the number of cases of 'Cruelty by Husband or His Relatives' continue to be high and show no sign of abating - 133,676 in 2023, and preliminary public reporting indicating over 1.2 lakh cases in 2024.

Why official data is a gross undercount

NCRB data on dowry deaths and dowry-related harassment is widely considered unreliable and a gross underestimation for several structural, procedural, and social reasons that compromise its accuracy as a measure of the true scale of gender-based violence in India.

The principal offence rule hides dowry crimes

The NCRB follows a “principal offence rule” whereby when a single FIR lists multiple offences, only the “most heinous” crime is recorded. This means dowry offences are frequently subsumed under charges like murder or suicide, causing the actual dowry component to disappear from crime statistics. Dr. Sreeparna Chattopadhyay (former , Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University assistant professor at Azim Premji University) who has researched dowry cases and gender violence in India explains that this procedural artifact systematically undercounts dowry cases even when they are initially reported.

Dowry deaths misclassified as accidents or suicides

Research consistently shows that many burn injuries and deaths caused by partners, in-laws, or self-inflicted under coercion are classified as accidents rather than dowry deaths. A 2017 IndiaSpend investigation analyzed 22 cases of burn injuries among women, of which 15 were reported as accidents; however, only three were actually accidents, while the rest were either self-inflicted or caused by others, and 19 of 22 women were experiencing domestic violence at the time.

It is widely estimated that at least 50 percent of all suicides among married women could be dowry-related, but they remain underreported because the parents of the bride are also involved in dowry-giving, which is itself a crime under the Dowry Prohibition Act. This creates a perverse incentive for families to conceal the true nature of deaths.

A 2014 paper “Violence Against Women in South Asia: A Review of Research, Programs, and Policies” (Naved, R. T., & Raj, A.) in the journal Trauma, Violence and Abuse noted the “difficulty in accurately identifying and naming suspicious deaths caused by burning, drowning, or poisoning as dowry deaths.” A 2020 article in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine (Is marital violence in India an issue of forensic medicine? An overview of laws, mechanisms, and challenges") highlights that since many deaths occur within the marital home, “it is often difficult to obtain a clear history,” and dying declarations need to be carefully recorded in an environment free from coercion by perpetrating family members, which is rarely guaranteed.

Systematic non-reporting of harassment before death

NCRB data reveals a statistically implausible pattern: several states routinely report hundreds of dowry deaths but few or no cases under the dowry harassment law. In 2022, for instance, 15 states and union territories registered more dowry deaths than harassment cases. West Bengal reported zero dowry crimes in 2022, yet recorded 406 dowry deaths the same year.

It’s 2025, but women are still tortured and killed for dowry—a crime that should have no place in a civilised society” (a comprehensive report and discussion by researchers from Banaras Hindu University and Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, published in February 2025). The researchers concluded that that there is a dangerous gap between dowry deaths and the reporting of the harassment that preceded them. Because of severe societal stigma, victims often do not report harassment to the authorities until the relationship has ended in a tragedy. This allows the practice to continue behind closed doors while authorities only see the outcomes.

Social stigma and fear prevent reporting

Victims of dowry-related harassment do not report it due to fears of stigma, unsupportive attitudes from family and law enforcement officials, limited awareness, and coercion. A 2023 study in the journal Violence Against Women found that three in five married women who registered domestic violence complaints also reported dowry harassment, indicating that dowry violence is often bundled with other forms of abuse and not separately reported.

Research published in the Journal of Loss and Trauma in 2022 documented that women who challenge toxic relationships and patriarchy face loss of livelihood and social status, compounding their mental health burdens including “severe mental health concerns such as suicidal ideation, fear, and loss of identity due to dowry harassment.” This social cost discourages reporting even when legal frameworks exist.

A 2015 paper in the Journal of Biosocial Science concluded that NCRB numbers are likely to be “a gross underestimate” because many crimes against women go unreported on account of stigma.

Institutional failures: police and legal authorities treat it as a private matter

Research published in the journal International Health in 2011 found that “even after the legal recognition of crime, sometimes the concerned legal authorities consider violence against women in the home a private family matter.” The 2014 paper in Trauma, Violence and Abuse similarly noted that neighbors and police are reluctant to get involved in what is considered a “family matter.”

Police officers may not be entirely familiar with the principles of the Dowry Prohibition Act, leading to underreporting even at the police station level, according to a researcher on crimes against women. Crimes with lesser intensity are more likely to be ignored or downplayed.

Crimes involving Indian women abroad excluded entirely

Dowry crimes involving Indian women abroad remain completely outside the purview of NCRB data. These cases fall under the jurisdiction of the country where the crime occurs, while NCRB only accounts for FIRs lodged in Indian police stations. This creates a significant blind spot for transnational marriages.

The data contradictions that expose undercounting

The contradictions in official data themselves reveal the extent of undercounting. In 2022, NCRB recorded 13,479 dowry law violations but only 6,450 dowry deaths. Yet in states like West Bengal, zero harassment cases were reported alongside 406 deaths. This suggests either that deaths occur without any prior harassment—statistically implausible—or that harassment goes systematically unreported until it becomes fatal.

Six states and three union territories reported no dowry deaths and no Dowry Prohibition Act violations in 2022, yet this does not rule out the possibility of dowry crimes occurring; it more likely indicates complete non-enforcement or non-reporting in those jurisdictions.

Low conviction rates compound the credibility problem

NCRB data also shows extremely low conviction rates in dowry-related cases. Of approximately 6,500 cases sent for trial every year, only around 100 lead to convictions, with over 90 percent remaining pending at various stages in courts. This judicial backlog and poor prosecution rate further discourage victims and families from reporting, as they perceive the legal system as ineffective.

Legal Launae

Official dowry death data is almost certainly an undercount, especially in northern and eastern India, and even more so in smaller towns and villages. The first reason is definitional narrowness: the specific offence of dowry death under Section 304B IPC, now Section 80 BNS, applies only when a woman dies unnaturally within seven years of marriage and it is shown that she was subjected to cruelty or harassment for dowry soon before death.

Deaths outside that seven-year window, deaths registered as suicide without proper dowry investigation, and deaths labelled as kitchen accidents, burns, poisoning or general domestic violence all fall out of the dowry death count even when dowry pressure was central.

Why researchers suggest cross-verification with judicial data

To ascertain the real extent of dowry crimes, researchers recommend that NCRB figures be cross-verified with judicial data published by district and sessions courts, since all Dowry Prohibition Act violations and dowry deaths that go to trial are recorded by courts. This would provide a more accurate picture than relying on police FIR data alone.

The systematic underreporting, procedural exclusions, misclassification of deaths, social stigma, institutional indifference, and statistical contradictions all combine to make NCRB data on dowry deaths and harassment unreliable as a true measure of the scale of this crime. The actual incidence is almost certainly far higher than official statistics suggest.

There is more than meets the eyes

The Supreme Court’s 2025 directions, as summarized in legal reporting, stressed the need for better police sensitisation, stronger Dowry Prohibition Officers, and fast-tracking of long-pending cases precisely because enforcement is weak and inconsistent. When the apex court itself says states have failed to operationalise Dowry Prohibition Officers effectively, it is an implicit acknowledgement that under-detection begins at the administrative level.

Also in smaller towns and villages, families often fear stigma, community pressure, reputational loss for daughters’ siblings, and retaliation from the husband’s family. where local police are socially embedded in the same caste and status hierarchies, the line between mediation and suppression becomes dangerously thin, particularly in regions where marriage networks, kinship blocs and local elites overlap.

Yet another reason is evidentiary fragility. The MHA acknowledged in Parliament that concerns have been raised around evidentiary gaps, delayed investigation and hostile witnesses affecting convictions. In dowry cases, the most important witnesses are usually the deceased woman’s natal family, neighbours, medical staff and local police, and each of these nodes can be compromised by delay, intimidation or the normalisation of abuse.

Another key reason is statistical substitution. A large share of dowry coercion surfaces in the data not as dowry death but as cruelty, abetment to suicide, unnatural death, domestic violence, accidental burns, or suspicious death. Where registration quality is weak, the official dowry death count does not capture the entire phenomenon; it captures only the part that survives legal classification.

Why undercount is sharper in northern and eastern states

Northern and eastern states have persistently dominated dowry death totals. In 2023, Uttar Pradesh reported 2,122 dowry deaths, Bihar 1,143, Madhya Pradesh 468, Rajasthan 428, West Bengal 350, Odisha 231, Jharkhand 218 and Haryana 207. In 2024 reporting, Uttar Pradesh again led with 2,038 cases and Bihar followed with 1,078, while the highest rates per lakh women were also reported from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

These numbers do not mean dowry is absent elsewhere; they show where a combination of patriarchal marriage markets, entrenched caste hierarchy, weak female asset ownership, and uneven state capacity generates the deadliest outcomes.In many northern and eastern districts, marriage is still treated as a status transaction in which the groom’s education, government job, migration prospects, landholding or caste position command a premium. That structure intensifies pressure on the bride’s family before marriage and produces serial extraction after marriage.

The undercount is sharper in small towns and villages because these are spaces where patriarchal surveillance is denser and exits are fewer. Women are more likely to be economically dependent, less likely to have confidential access to police or lawyers, and more likely to be returned to abusive homes under family pressure to “adjust.” In such settings, fatal violence can be socially disguised long before it is legally recorded.

Which states are most affected

On the basis of the official 2023 NCRB series reproduced by the Ministry of Home Affairs, the most seriously affected states in absolute numbers were Uttar Pradesh,Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand and Haryana.Together, these states account for the overwhelming share of India’s dowry deaths. The 2024 reporting continues the same broad pattern, with Uttar Pradesh and Bihar far ahead of the rest in both totals and rates.

A narrower but important distinction must be made between absolute burden and intensity. Large states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar dominate totals because of population size, but the rate per lakh women also remains high in these states according to 2024 reporting, which shows that the burden is not merely demographic. Haryana, Jharkhand, Odisha and parts of Madhya Pradesh also matter because they combine substantial incidence with entrenched social conservatism, significant rural populations and highly unequal marriage markets.

Which economic groups and social strata are most affected

Dowry is often wrongly described as a problem of only the poor or only the rich. In reality, it is most dangerous in the broad lower-middle, middle and aspirational strata where status competition is intense, income security is uneven, and marriage is used as a mechanism of upward mobility. The poor may pay in cash, consumer durables, motorcycles, land fragments or debt-financed gifts; the affluent may pay in cars, apartments, business capital and luxury goods; but the coercive logic is common across classes.

The most vulnerable women tend to come from households with limited bargaining power rather than from any single income bracket. Those include families with low female property ownership, low educational power relative to the groom’s side, weak urban support networks, caste-subordinate locations, and dependence on marriage for social legitimacy. At the same time, so-called respectable middle-class households often reproduce dowry most systematically because they wrap extraction in the language of gifts, prestige and “custom.”

Hypergamy Paradox

In sociological terms, dowry is tightly linked to hypergamy, or the pressure to marry daughters into equal or higher-status families. That makes caste position, education, salaried employment, migration and state employment powerful price signals in the marriage market. The result is a cruel paradox: the very families striving for mobility are often the ones trapped most deeply in dowry economics.

How the goalpost changed over the last decade

The last decade has seen a major shift in the goalpost of dowry demand. Earlier demands often centered on marriage-time transfers alone, but newer patterns increasingly combine pre-marital bargaining, ceremonial escalation, post-marital instalments, demands for consumer electronics and vehicles, demands for housing support, and pressure linked to lifestyle expectations.

In other words, dowry has moved from a one-time transfer to a continuing extraction regime.

This shift tracks wider economic change. Rising education does not automatically reduce dowry; instead, credentials, government jobs, overseas migration and white-collar status often raise the quoted value of the groom. Aspirational consumption has also changed the basket of demand: where an older dowry economy asked for gold and basic goods, the new one often asks for cars, flats, business investment and recurring transfers that mimic class mobility.

The data trend also shows that while dowry officially reported dowry deaths have declined from 7,141 in 2019 to 5737 in 2024, the cruelty and harassment remain massive, which suggests not disappearance but mutation. The problem is no longer just ceremonial dowry; it is a wider infrastructure of financial coercion in marriage.

The legal framework

India’s legal architecture against dowry rests on several linked provisions. The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 prohibits and penalises the giving and taking of dowry, while Section 80 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, formerly Section 304B IPC, specifically addresses dowry death. Section 85 BNS, formerly Section 498A IPC, addresses cruelty by husband or relatives, including harassment linked to unlawful demands.

The special power of the dowry death provision lies in its evidentiary design. Where a woman dies an unnatural death within seven years of marriage and it is shown she faced dowry-related cruelty or harassment soon before death, the law creates a presumption against the husband or his relatives under the evidence framework historically associated with Section 113B of the Evidence Act. This was meant to overcome the chronic invisibility of domestic violence inside the home.

Yet the law has limits.

The seven-year window excludes many deaths that may still be driven by long-term dowry coercion, and uneven investigation weakens even the cases that fall within the statute. That is why formal law, by itself, has not eliminated dowry death.

Dowry, inheritance and property

Dowry deaths cannot be understood apart from inheritance culture. In many households, daughters are still seen as having weaker moral claims to natal property, while marriage transfers are presented as their “share,” even though dowry is controlled by the husband’s family rather than by the woman herself. This logic allows families to deny daughters equal inheritance while normalising large marriage-time payments.

The interlinkage is structural. When daughters are excluded from land, housing and business, gold and cash assets of the family, marriage becomes the principal site through which wealth is transferred out of the natal family. But because the transfer is not legally anchored in the daughter’s ownership, it creates neither security nor autonomy; it simply enlarges the bargaining power of the receiving side.

This is why dowry persists even where women’s formal rights have improved on paper. A daughter who receives equal inheritance is less easily commodified in marriage because her economic citizenship does not depend entirely on marital acceptance. Where equal inheritance is denied in practice, dowry flourishes as the shadow system of gendered property settlement.

Sociological, economic and aspirational drivers

Defining challenges that obstruct elimination.

Under-reporting and misclassification of cases.

The most clearly verified recent Supreme Court suo motu intervention is the Twisha Sharma case. In May 2026, the Court took suo motu cognisance of the alleged dowry death, registering a case on alleged institutional bias and procedural discrepancies in the unnatural death of a young woman at her matrimonial home.

The broader recent judicial record also includes major non-suo-motu dowry death interventions, especially the 2025 judgment in State of Uttar Pradesh v. Ajmal Beg, where the Court reportedly restored convictions and issued wider directions to tackle the dowry evil.

The Court’s wider recent approach is nevertheless important. In late 2025, legal reporting described the Supreme Court as issuing general directions to sensitise institutions, strengthen Dowry Prohibition Officers, and push High Courts to track and expedite old dowry cases. That marks a shift from case-specific adjudication toward system-level judicial governance.

What earlier courts and the Law Commission recommended

The Law Commission of India has long treated dowry death as a distinct legal problem requiring doctrinal and procedural reform. The landmark 91st Law Commission Report on “Dowry Deaths and Law Reform,” submitted in 1983, revolutionized Indian criminal law by highlighting that existing provisions were inadequate to curb the brutal surge in bride-burning and unnatural dowry deaths.

Key Reommendations of The 91st Report

• Sua Motu Review: The Commission took up the issue proactively, recognizing a sharp rise in suspicious deaths of young married women.

• Legislative Insufficiency: It noted that standard murder or suicide laws under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) were failing because perpetrators easily destroyed evidence in the privacy of their homes.

• Proposals: The Commission recommended inserting a new offense for dowry deaths and introducing a legal presumption of guilt against the husband and his relatives.

Resulting Legislative Changes

Acting directly on the 91st Report’s recommendations, the Parliament passed the Dowry Prohibition (Amendment) Act in 1986, which fundamentally altered Indian law:

• Section 304B (IPC): Defined “dowry death” as unnatural death within 7 years of marriage where a woman was harassed or subjected to cruelty in connection to dowry.

• Section 113B (Indian Evidence Act): Shifted the burden of proof by allowing courts to legally presume that the husband or in-laws caused the death if prior harassment is proven.

• Punishment: Mandated a minimum of 7 years imprisonment, which can extend to life imprisonment.

Present Criminal Framework

With the enactment of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA), these legal protections continue to apply with stringent penalties:

• Section 80 (BNS): Replaces Section 304B, carrying identical terms and a minimum 7-year to life imprisonment sentence.

• Section 86 (BNS): Replaces Section 498A (Cruelty by husband or relatives), addressing domestic abuse and mental/physical torture.

• Section 117 (BSA): Replaces Section 113B, maintaining the legal presumption of a dowry death if cruelty was shown prior to the incident.

The Supreme Court Guidelines

he Supreme Court of India has established strict guidelines to make the investigation and prosecution of dowry deaths faster, fairer, and more sensitive. These rules primarily focus on how police must gather evidence and how courts must conduct trials.

Proving the Crime in Court

To successfully prosecute a case under Section 304B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the Supreme Court emphasizes that specific conditions must be met:

• Unnatural Death: The woman’s death must be caused by burns, bodily injury, or other unnatural causes.

• Seven-Year Window: The death must happen within seven years of her marriage.

• Dowry Harassment: The husband or his relatives must have treated the woman with cruelty or harassment related to dowry demands.

• The “Live Link” Rule: This harassment must happen “soon before her death.” The Supreme Court clarifies that “soon before” does not mean immediately before. Instead, the prosecution must show a clear and active connection between the dowry abuse and the death.

Presumption Against the Accused

Once the prosecution proves the above facts, the court applies Section 113B of the Evidence Act. Under this rule:

• The court automatically assumes the husband or relative caused the dowry death.

• The burden of proof shifts entirely to the accused.

• The accused must then present solid evidence to prove they did not cause her death.

Police and Administrative Directive

The Supreme Court has issued strict operational guidelines to strengthen how these cases are handled on the ground:

• No Unjustified Bail: Courts must act with extreme caution and high scrutiny when considering bail for an accused husband, especially when injuries are visible.

• Special Officers: States must actively appoint Dowry Prohibition Officers. Their contact details must be shared publicly so families can report harassment early.

• Sensitivity Training: Police and judicial officers must receive regular training. This helps them understand the social and psychological trauma involved. It also helps them separate true cases from false or abusive claims.

• Fair Investigations: The Supreme Court strongly warns against media trials that spread unverified narratives or compromise impartial police work.

Recent Supreme Court recommendations, as reflected in 2025 legal reporting, include value-based education on equality in marriage, proper appointment and empowerment of Dowry Prohibition Officers, sensitisation of police and judges, fast-tracking of long-pending dowry cases, and district-level awareness through legal services institutions. These directions matter because they recognize that dowry death is produced by institutional failure as much as by individual cruelty.

Earlier court jurisprudence has also repeatedly emphasized the ingredients of dowry death, the importance of proving cruelty soon before death, and the use of presumptions to address crimes occurring inside the matrimonial home. But doctrinal clarity has not been matched by everyday enforcement quality, which is why repetition of legal principle has not translated into elimination.

Structural solutions for elimination

Eliminating dowry deaths requires structural redesign, not just moral condemnation.

Guarantee equal inheritance in practice, not merely in statute, through mandatory mutation support, legal aid and fast-track civil remedies for daughters’ property claims.

Dowry deaths are not accidental by-products of tradition. They are the homicidal edge of a wider system that treats women as channels of transfer, marriage as a ranked market, and violence as a means of enforcing extraction. India has laws against dowry, but law is still trying to suppress a political economy of kinship, property, masculinity and aspiration that society continues to reward.

That is why the problem cannot be solved only by tougher punishment after death. The real battle lies upstream, in daughters’ inheritance, women’s independent income, district-level enforcement, reliable forensic investigation, public delegitimation of status-dowry, and the dismantling of the marriage market logic that prices grooms by class and caste.

Dowry deaths will not end when India merely reduces cases; they will end only when the social legitimacy of marital extraction collapses.

Epilogue

Dowry deaths are not aberrations at the margins of Indian society; they are the lethal expression of a culture that still treats daughters as liabilities, marriage as an upgrade transaction, and violence as a negotiable cost of status. As long as a groom’s degree, job or caste stamp can be openly “priced” in negotiations that everyone pretends are about “gifts”, nothing essentially will change. The NCRB tables, the forensic reports, the anguished testimony of natal families – all of these are not just data points but an indictment of a social order that has learned to talk the language of empowerment while keeping intact the informal markets where women’s lives are traded away.

What the past decades have shown, however, is that law and outrage, by themselves, will never be enough. The Dowry Prohibition Act, Section 304B, Section 498A, and even the most progressive Supreme Court directions are all operating downstream of a deeper property and power settlement. If daughters do not inherit equally, if they do not control assets in their own name, if they cannot realistically walk out of a violent marriage without falling off an economic cliff, then every marriage negotiation will continue to carry a latent price tag.

Eliminating dowry deaths therefore means shifting the fulcrum: from punishing the final act of cruelty to dismantling the conditions that make that cruelty profitable, predictable and, in many circles, respectable.

The genuine test for India will not be whether dowry deaths “decline” on a spreadsheet, but whether the very idea of paying for a groom becomes socially absurd and politically untenable. That will demand a coalition far larger than women’s groups or legal reformers: fathers who are willing to give daughters land titles instead of wedding loans; sons who refuse to be priced; panchayats and urban elites who treat dowry demands as a badge of dishonour; and a state that measures its own success not in convictions alone, but in the shrinking relevance of the dowry economy itself. When a daughter’s life is worth more in inheritance than in exchange, the arithmetic of dowry death will finally break

(AI Generated Representative Image)

The Green Card Trap- How America’s new residency doctrine could remake the immigrant bargain, unsettle Indian ambition, and test the economic logic of a nation built by strivers

Prologue: The Document That Became a Dream

Few state-issued documents carry as much emotional and economic weight as the United States Green Card. It is not merely an identification card. It is a wager on permanence, a promise of stability, and often the bridge between temporary striving and parmanent civic belonging- gate way to the USA citizenship. In immigration law, the green card is proof of lawful permanent resident status, allowing a non-citizen to live and work indefinitely in the United States, travel with fewer constraints than temporary visa holders, and eventually seek citizenship by the naturalization route if the statutory conditions are met.

For generations, that status has stood at the center of the American immigrant compact. Study in the United States, work hard, follow the rules, move from a temporary visa to a permanent foothold, and then build a life the promised Americal life- a dream of millions. That compact was never simple. It was bureaucratic, quota-bound, and often agonizingly slow. But it was legible. The foreign student on an F-1 visa, the engineer on an H-1B, the intra-company transferee on an L-1, the spouse of a US citizen, and the worker sponsored by an employer could imagine a route from precarity to permanence through a well laid down procedure known as adjustment of status.

That is why the USCIS policy memorandum issued on May 21, 2026, may come to be seen as far more than a technical guidance note. By declaring that adjustment of status is an “extraordinary” discretionary benefit rather than the normal path for many legally present immigrants, the Trump administration has attacked the psychological and the legal core of the well articulated path of the immigration system.

The message is blunt, loud and clear: being in America lawfully is no longer, by itself, a meaningful basis for seeking permanence residence in America from within America.

The shock of the policy lies not only in its administrative content but in what it says about the state’s moral priorities. A country that spent decades using universities, firms, laboratories, hospitals, and family networks to attract the world’s best available talent is now signaling that even those who played by the rules may have to leave the country in order to complete the final legal step.

That reversal transforms the green card from a ladder into a border test.

This Volume 18 of the Akhil Vaani daily long-form series, examines what a green card is, how many people seek and receive one each year, which nationalities dominate the flow, how much green card holders contribute to the US economy, what exactly changed in the May 21 USCIS memo, what spokesman Zach Kahler said, why the policy has triggered such a fierce backlash, and what it means in particular for Indians who form one of the most consequential high-skilled migrant communities in the contemporary United States.

It then turns to the larger question: whether America, in trying to narrow the path to permanence, may be eroding the demographic, political, and innovation advantages that made it exceptional nation on the planet earth in the first place.

Chapter 1: What the Green Card Really Represents

A green card is the common name for the Permanent Resident Card, formally associated with lawful permanent resident status under US immigration law. It authorizes a non-citizen to reside indefinitely in the country, to work without the employer restrictions that bind many temporary visa categories, and to begin the long process of social rooting that distinguishes settlement from mere presence.

Yet legally permanent residence status that the green card confers is not equivalent to citizenship. Green card holders cannot vote in federal elections, can lose their green card status for certain criminal or immigration violations, and remain vulnerable to the prolonged absences from the United States that may be interpreted as abandonment of residence.

In other words, the green card is both security and probation. It broadens freedom while preserving the state’s authority to ask whether the holder has truly earned the permanence.

That ambiguity helps explain why the green card has such symbolic power. To receive it is to exit the fragile world of temporary permission. A student visa says: you may learn here. A work visa says: you may work here for now. A green card says: you may belong here, though not yet fully. That distinction matters socially and economically.

Permanent green card holding residents are more likely to buy homes, make long-term career bets, invest in businesses, choose riskier but more productive jobs, and raise children with a different horizon of possibility than temporary visa holders who have to stay precariously in US under severe constraints imposed by the visa type.

The American system has long depended on that transition from tempoary visa to acquiring the green card. Universities recruit global talent in part because the United States has traditionally offered not only education but the prospect of retention of best talents. Firms hire temporary skilled workers because temporary status could mature into permanence. Families absorb the uncertainty of migration because the green card promised eventual consolidation.

When the state destabilizes that progression, it is not simply adjusting procedure; it is weakening the credibility of the American offer a set back to the great American dream of millions of aspirants.

Chapter 2: How Many Apply, How Many Succeed

A pertinent question that arises at this stage is- how many people “apply” for a US green card every year. The short answer is the American system does not present a single tidy annual number covering all family-based, employment-based, humanitarian, diversity, and other channels in one transparent consolidated ledger. What is much clearer is the number of people who are actually granted lawful permanent residence each year. That figure is the most reliable benchmark for understanding the scale of permanent immigration.

USAFacts, relying on Department of Homeland Security data, reports that the United States granted about 1.36 million green cards in fiscal year 2024. The corresponding data for the year 2025 is not yet available but the overnment reporting and immigration policy analysts observed a drop in overall visa and permanent residency issuances by the end of 2025, driven by a combination of adjusted government rules and processing backlogs.

Earlier in 2022, after the distortions of the pandemic period, around 1.02 million people became new lawful permanent residents. Across recent decades, the broad pattern is stable: roughly one million, sometimes more, sometimes somewhat less, become permanent residents annually through the legal immigration system.

But approvals alone do not capture the lived reality of the system. The number of aspirants is significantly larger. Some people file and are denied. Others abandon the process. Many wait in backlogs created by annual caps, per-country limits, paperwork delays, and administrative bottlenecks. The Associated Press, in coverage distributed through NPR, cited a former senior USCIS official who estimated that about 600,000 people currently inside the US apply for green cards annually, a figure especially relevant to the new policy because those are precisely the kinds of in-country applicants now facing upheaval.

The practical implication of new memo is not only crucial but also cruel.

Even as it existed the legal immigration system is not a funnel with a clean, predictable conversion rate. It is a layered queue. Some are admitted quickly through immediate-relative family categories. Some arrive through employment sponsorship after years of temporary status. Others, especially nationals of oversubscribed countries, can live in a condition of administrative suspension for extraordinary periods of frustration and deprivation.

The May 21 policy strikes this queue at its most sensitive point: the transition from being present legally to becoming permanent without leaving the country.

Chapter 3: Which Countries Dominate the Green Card Flow

In any discussion of green cards, national origin matters because it shapes both the categories of migration and the intensity of backlogs. Available statistical compilations based on Department of Homeland Security data show that the top origin countries for new lawful permanent residents are consistently led by Mexico, followed by large sending countries such as India and China, with the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the Philippines often appearing near the top depending on the year.

For 2022, statistical summaries identify Mexico as the clear leader with about 138,772 new green card recipients. India and China ranked among the largest sources of new permanent residents, though their internal composition differs from Mexico’s. Mexico’s flows are strongly shaped by family reunification and long-standing social networks, while India’s are heavily influenced by employment-based migration, especially among skilled professionals in technology, engineering, medicine, finance, and research.

That difference is more than demographic trivia. It means that policy shocks do not land evenly. A rule that makes adjustment of status harder may affect a Mexican family-sponsored applicant and an Indian software engineer very differently in procedural terms, but both groups are exposed to additional uncertainty if in-country transition is no longer treated as normal. The same country rankings that reveal who comes to America also reveal where administrative cruelty will be concentrated when procedure becomes punishment.

Chapter 4: The Economic Value of Permanence

The United States does not publish a single official annual estimate for the “dollar contribution” of green card holders alone, isolated from all other immigrants. That gap is important to acknowledge. Most economic studies measure the impact of immigrants as a whole or examine specific subsets such as high-skilled workers, STEM graduates, entrepreneurs, or recent arrivals.Still, the broad conclusion is unmistakable: immigrants, and especially those able to settle permanently, make large positive contributions to growth, productivity, public finance, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Brookings has argued that lower net migration reduces annual US GDP growth and cuts consumer spending by tens of billions of dollars, while also worsening the ratio between workers and retirees in an aging society. The logic is simple. Immigrants are not merely labor inputs. They are consumers, taxpayers, founders, inventors, homebuyers, and parents. When they become permanent residents, their incentives to invest in place become stronger, making their economic contribution deeper and more durable.

A 2025 Manhattan Institute update found especially large long-run gains from highly educated immigrants in STEM and related employment-based categories, estimating that many such immigrants add hundreds of thousands of dollars in GDP over a 30-year period, with some advanced-degree groups contributing roughly 410,000 dollars to 500,000 dollars each. Even allowing for methodological caution, the implication is enormous. If annual green card inflows remain around one million and a meaningful share of those recipients are in prime working ages, the long-run economic contribution of each annual cohort runs into hundreds of billions, and over time into trillions.

That is the hidden absurdity of restrictionist legal immigration policy. It is not merely denying papers. It is suppressing compounding. Every permanent resident who settles, spends, saves, patents, teaches, heals, builds, and raises a family creates cumulative economic value that far exceeds the bureaucratic cost of processing the case.

In this light, a policy that makes permanence harder is not administrative tidiness. It is a tax on future national output.

Chapter 5: The May 21 Memo and the Reinvention of Discretion

On May 21, 2026, USCIS issued a policy memorandum stating that adjustment of status should be understood as an extraordinary discretionary form of relief rather than a routine pathway for people already lawfully present in the United States. That formulation is the heart of the controversy. Adjustment of status had long been used by temporary visa holders and many family-based applicants to seek permanent residency without leaving the country. The new memo does not erase the statutory existence of adjustment, but it radically changes the posture with which officers are instructed to approach it.

The practical thrust is clear in media coverage from The New York Times, CNN, Time, CBS reporting carried via video transcripts, and Associated Press distribution through NPR: most foreigners seeking green cards from within the United States will now be expected to leave and apply from their home countries, with approval inside the United States limited to “extraordinary circumstances.” Consular processing abroad is being elevated from an alternative pathway into the presumptive norm.

This is not a semantic tweak. It changes the strategic environment for every legally present migrant who once assumed that remaining in status inside America while waiting for permanent residency was both lawful and institutionally intelligible.The memo tells adjudicators to view the applicant’s choice to remain in the country and pursue adjustment rather than depart for consular processing as a negative discretionary factor, absent extraordinary circumstances.A system that once asked, “Do you qualify?” is moving toward one that asks, “Why are you still here?”

Chapter 6: What Zach Kahler Said, and Why It Matters

Policy memos often remain buried in the administrative underbrush. This one exploded into public consciousness because USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler articulated it in language stripped of legal delicacy. According to the USCIS announcement and widely cited republications, Kahler said: “From now on, an alien who is in the U.S. temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances.” He also said the move would restore “the original intent of the law” and would reduce incentives for people to exploit “loopholes” in the system.

Kahler further argued that requiring applicants to process abroad “reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency.” This sentence reveals the worldview underlying the memo. It treats people who seek permanent residence from inside the country not as future Americans in formation, but as potential enforcement headaches. The policy is presented as preventive policing of legal aspirants.

Why does his wording matter so much? Because immigration lawyers quickly noted that the memo itself is framed in discretionary and interpretive terms, while Kahler’s public statement sounds categorical, almost legislative. Analysts argued that the statute does not literally say all such applicants “must” leave, and that the spokesman’s rhetoric risks converting guidance into deterrence through fear. In immigration governance, signaling is substance. If the agency communicates hostility strongly enough, many people will self-select out of rights they may still technically possess.

Chapter 7: Why the Policy Is Seen as a Bureaucratic Earthquake

Critics across media, academia, and immigration practice see the policy as dramatic because it reorders the relationship between lawful presence and lawful permanence. Under the prior understanding, many people who were already in the United States on recognized visas could stabilize their lives during the green card process. They could keep working, remain with their families, and obtain interim documents while waiting for adjudication. The process was slow, but it was at least geographically anchored in the country where their lives were unfolding.

The new doctrine destabilizes all of that. Applicants may need to interrupt jobs, schooling, leases, caregiving arrangements, and family routines in order to return abroad and pursue immigrant visa processing at consulates that may themselves be overburdened or inconsistent. A denial abroad can strand an applicant outside the United States. A delay can turn a manageable administrative wait into an existential rupture. For dual-income families, employers, universities, and hospitals, the uncertainty is not incidental. It is the policy’s central effect.

That is why advocates describe the move as a sweeping complication for hundreds of thousands of people. The New York Times reported that the change could make it more difficult for hundreds of thousands to obtain permanent residency and could produce more family separations. Time similarly emphasized that the federal memo could force hundreds of thousands of visa holders to leave the United States and wait abroad. CNN described it as a policy shift poised to affect a broad segment of the lawful immigration community. The scale of disruption is not speculative. It is built into the mechanics of the rule.

Chapter 8: Why the Backlash Has Been So Fierce

Immigration advocates have not objected merely because the rule is harsh. Their fundamental omplain emanates from their intrinsic belief that the new memo uses opens a dangerous pathway where the discretionary memo-writing is used to accomplish what should require transparent rulemaking, legislative debate, or both. The backlash against the May 21 memo rests on four interlocking complaints.

1. First, advocates say the policy punishes compliance. The affected population includes people who entered lawfully, maintained legal status, paid taxes, worked in shortage sectors, studied at US institutions, or married citizens. To tell such people that lawful presence is not enough, and that they must now exit the country to seek the very permanence they were encouraged to pursue, is seen as a sudden betrayal of settled expectations.

2. Second, lawyers argue that the memo creates legal uncertainty by turning a statutory mechanism into an unstable privilege. Several legal analyses noted the tension between the memo’s discretionary framing and Kahler’s more absolute public characterization. When agencies blur the line between law and message, fear itself becomes an enforcement instrument.

3. Third, critics contend that the policy shifts burdens rather than solving them. Consulates abroad already face capacity constraints. Moving adjudication from domestic USCIS channels to overseas posts can simply relocate delay while adding travel, financial, and separation costs. Families with children in school, workers in specialized roles, and people from politically unstable or visa-restricted countries face particular risk.

4. Fourth, immigration advocates see the memo as part of a broader ideological campaign to reduce pathways to citizenship indirectly by narrowing access to permanent residency directly. As one former senior USCIS official told the Associated Press, “The intention behind this policy is crystal clear,” arguing that permanent residency is being constrained because it is the gateway to citizenship. That interpretation has energized backlash because it recasts the memo not as case management but as nation-shaping by attrition.

Chapter 9: Who Can Stay and Apply, and Who Must Leave

The new policy does not abolish all in-country green card processing. Instead, it narrows it sharply and places it under a cloud of discretion. The broad operating assumption is that most non-immigrants who want lawful permanent residence should use consular processing abroad. This includes, in practical terms, many F-1 students, H-1B and L-1 professionals, J-1 exchange visitors, tourists who may later become eligible through family routes, and others whose lives are already embedded in the United States.

Who, then, can still apply from inside the United States?

USCIS statements and contemporaneous reporting suggest that adjustment may still be granted in “extraordinary circumstances,” including cases involving “economic benefit” or “national interest.” That language is suggestive rather than precise. It may protect some highly valuable workers, researchers, founders, physicians, or national-interest categories. It may also preserve room for certain humanitarian cases. But the ambiguity is itself the problem. A pathway governed by officer discretion rather than predictable eligibility criteria privileges the well-lawyered, the highly resourced, and the unusually credentialed.

The result is a hierarchy of admissibility within the legal immigrant population. Those deemed exceptionally useful may stay. Those merely rule-abiding may have to leave. This moral sorting is politically potent because it reveals a narrowing definition of who counts as worth retaining without interruption. A system that once converted lawful presence into permanence through procedure now requires people to prove exceptionalism in order to avoid exile during processing.

Chapter 10: The Indian Predicament

No major immigrant community is more emblematic of the tension between American demand for talent and American ambivalence about permanence than Indians seeking green cards. India is consistently among the largest origin countries for new lawful permanent residents, and Indians are especially prominent in employment-based categories tied to high-skill sectors. For decades, the United States has benefited enormously from Indian engineers, software professionals, doctors, academics, founders, and students, many of whom began on temporary visas and then waited years for permanent residency because of per-country caps and category backlogs.

The new USCIS memo lands on this community with particular force. H-1B workers often structure their entire adult lives around the expectation that they can remain in the United States while an employer-sponsored green card case proceeds. Spouses make career compromises. Children enter American schools. Families take on mortgages. Workers choose projects and firms based not only on salary but on immigration sponsorship stability. Adjustment of status was not an administrative luxury for them. It was the mechanism that made continuity possible.

Now that continuity is in doubt. The compact has suddenly ruptured. Reporting and expert commentary indicate that Indian professionals on H-1B and L-1 visas, as well as former students who moved from F-1 to OPT to employment, may be asked to leave the United States and pursue immigrant visas through consular processing in India unless they fit the narrow, vague category of extraordinary circumstances. For many, the consequences could be severe: career interruption, schooling disruption for children, spousal employment loss, and the risk that a denial or delay abroad leaves the family separated.

There is also a subtler effect. Indian migration to the United States has long been sustained by a reputation for institutional rationality. The system was difficult but comprehensible. The May 21 policy erodes that confidence. When a country asks high-skilled workers to spend years contributing to its companies and campuses but cannot promise a stable mechanism for permanent transition, it begins to look less like a meritocratic magnet and more like a high-wage gamble.

Chapter 11: The Demographic Stakes

America’s immigration debate is often framed as a dispute about law and borders. It is also a dispute about arithmetic. The United States, like much of the developed world, faces population aging, uneven fertility, labor shortages in key sectors, and mounting fiscal pressure from an increasing ratio of retirees to workers. Immigration has long softened these pressures by enlarging the working-age population, diversifying skill supply, and sustaining consumer demand.

A policy that makes legal permanent residency harder for people already woven into the US economy risks slowing not only individual settlement but national demographic renewal. If some applicants decide not to pursue permanent status, if others are delayed abroad, and if still others redirect themselves toward Canada, Europe, or emerging Asian hubs, then the United States may gradually reduce one of the few levers it still possesses for maintaining labor-force vitality without waiting for domestic fertility to rise.

This matters because demography is not neutral background. It shapes housing markets, school enrollments, tax bases, military recruitment pools, regional growth patterns, and political representation. Restricting the route from legal presence to permanence may not produce an immediate demographic shock. But over a decade, it can alter who stays, who leaves, and who never comes. The nation that once solved aging partly by attracting the young may begin to discover what it means to age with fewer arrivals.

Chapter 12: The Political Meaning of Permanence

Green cards do not merely create workers. They create future citizens, neighbors, school-board participants, donors, volunteers, and constituents. Permanent residency is a staging ground for democratic incorporation. That is why battles over the green card are never really only about paperwork. They are about who gets to move from usefulness to membership.

The May 21 memo will intensify political polarization because it touches the most narratively powerful migrants in the legal system: students, spouses, doctors, engineers, and workers who did everything “the right way.” Restrictionist politics often thrives on the claim that the problem is disorder. But when a government burdens those who complied with the system, it invites a different critique: that the target is not illegality but belonging itself.

Over time, the policy could generate pressure from business coalitions, universities, hospitals, and immigrant-rich states that depend on skilled labor and family stability. It could also energize immigrant-rights advocacy that frames legal immigration not as a concession but as a foundational national asset. Yet there is another possibility: normalization. If the public absorbs the idea that even legal migrants should expect rupture before settlement, then administrative severity may become part of the new common sense of immigration governance.

Chapter 13: The Innovation Question America Cannot Avoid

The deepest long-term consequence may be in the innovation ecosystem. The United States has excelled not simply because it attracts smart people, but because it has historically retained them. The world’s best universities, research hospitals, venture capital networks, and technology clusters function as a pipeline that turns temporary entrants into long-term contributors. Foreign students become graduate researchers. Graduate researchers become startup founders. Startup founders become employers. Employers create the next generation of jobs and technologies.

That pipeline depends on credible permanence. A brilliant student in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Shanghai, Lagos, or São Paulo does not compare only salaries across countries. The student compares life trajectories. Where can a degree become a career? Where can a career become a stable life? Where can a stable life become a family without legal whiplash? If the United States can no longer answer those questions convincingly, it will still attract talent, but it will retain less of it and at higher social cost.

The economic literature already points to the enormous returns generated by highly skilled immigrants, particularly in STEM and entrepreneurial ecosystems. To place such people into a system where the final transition to permanence requires departure, uncertainty, and discretionary triage is to convert comparative advantage into self-sabotage. Nations do not lose innovative primacy only when rivals rise. They also lose it when they make continuity too exhausting for the people they already persuaded to arrive.

Chapter 14: The Deeper American Contradiction

The green card debate exposes a deeper contradiction in the American imagination. The United States wants the labor, taxes, patents, tuition payments, caregiving work, and entrepreneurial dynamism of immigrants. But sections of its politics remain uneasy with immigrant permanence, because permanence implies voice, inheritance, and eventual citizenship. Temporary migration can be framed as utility. Permanent migration forces a question of identity.

The May 21 memo is therefore not just an immigration measure. It is a philosophical statement. It says that usefulness does not entitle one to continuity; that legal presence does not deserve trust; and that the state reserves the right to insert rupture at the very threshold where a migrant might finally begin to feel secure. Even if courts, future administrations, or bureaucratic clarifications soften the policy, the signal has already been sent.

This is what makes the issue so consequential for Indians and other high-skilled migrants. They are not merely seeking wages. They are choosing civilizational platforms. A society that invites their minds but withholds predictable belonging may still command admiration, but it will lose intimacy. And nations that lose intimacy with the talented lose them slowly, then suddenly.

Epilogue: From the American Dream to the American Interval

For most of the modern era, the genius of the United States lay in turning arrival into attachment. That is why the green card mattered so much. It was the institutional form through which ambition became residence and residence became nationhood.The new USCIS policy does not abolish that process outright. But it interrupts it, weaponizes uncertainty within it, and narrows the circle of those allowed to complete it without departure.

In the short term, the policy will create confusion, litigation, fear, and costly recalculations for families and firms. In the medium term, it may reduce successful transitions from temporary to permanent status, especially among those least able to withstand geographic and financial disruption. In the long term, if sustained, it could reshape the country’s demographic renewal, weaken its innovation edge, and harden a politics that prefers immigrant contribution without immigrant consolidation.

The question raised by this moment is not only whether America is becoming harder to enter. It is whether America is becoming harder to trust. The answer will not be written only in statutes or memos. It will be written in the choices of those who once saw the green card as a bridge and now see it, increasingly, as a test of how much uncertainty a human li

Prologue

The 2024 SRS Bulletin is a compact document, but it captures a profound transition in India’s demographic story. It shows a country where fertility and child mortality have fallen steadily over time, where the birth rate continues to decline, where rural India still carries a heavier demographic burden than urban India, and where the pace of change is increasingly uneven across states.

The bulletin itself is not a full population projection report and does not provide the entire age-structure or Total Fertility Rate table, yet even within its limited statistical frame it reveals that India is moving from a phase of sheer population expansion toward a phase where the quality, regional distribution and age composition of the population matter more than the headline population total.

At the national level, the bulletin estimates India’s birth rate at 18.3 per thousand population, death rate at 6.4 per thousand, natural growth rate at 11.9 per thousand, and infant mortality rate at 24 infant deaths per thousand live births in 2024. These four numbers, taken together, describe a society that is still growing but doing so more slowly than in previous decades. The distance between births and deaths remains substantial, so population momentum is still present, but the long-run trend is unmistakably downward on fertility-linked indicators.

That makes the bulletin important far beyond demography. Birth rates affect school demand, nutrition systems, maternal health, housing, labour supply, gender relations, savings patterns and future elder-care burdens. Death rates reflect both public health and the age structure of the population, while infant mortality remains one of the sharpest summary indicators of state capacity in health and basic human development.

Read properly, the 2024 SRS Bulletin is not just a statistical release; it is a map of India’s changing social contract.

The headline story: India is still growing, but the pace is softening

The single clearest national message from the bulletin is that India’s demographic engine is slowing in a structural rather than cyclical way. The birth rate has dropped from 21.0 in 2014 to 18.3 in 2024, a decline of about 13 percent over one decade. Over a longer arc, the decline is even more dramatic: the all-India birth rate has fallen from 36.9 in 1971 to 18.3 in 2024.

The death rate has also declined over the long term, falling from 14.9 in 1971 to 6.4 in 2024. In the shorter ten-year frame, however, the death-rate story is flatter than the birth-rate story because India experienced a temporary disruption during the pandemic period and because mortality indicators are shaped not only by healthcare improvements but also by the gradual ageing of the population. The bulletin notes that the rural death rate remained at 6.8 in both 2023 and 2024, while the urban death rate edged down from 5.7 to 5.6.

This combination matters. When births fall faster than deaths, the natural growth rate narrows even if population continues to expand. India’s natural growth rate in 2024 stands at 11.9 per thousand, with a much higher rural figure of 13.5 and a lower urban figure of 9.0, confirming that rural India remains demographically younger and more reproductive, while urban India is deeper into demographic transition.

Rural and urban India are no longer travelling at the same demographic speed

One of the most revealing parts of the bulletin is the persistent rural-urban divide. India’s rural birth rate in 2024 is 20.2, compared with 14.7 in urban India. That gap has narrowed over time, but it remains large enough to shape the country’s future population geography.

The rural-urban contrast extends beyond fertility. The death rate is 6.8 in rural India and 5.6 in urban India, while infant mortality is 27 in rural India and 17 in urban India. This means that rural India still faces both higher reproductive intensity and greater mortality risk, especially in infancy. The demographic transition is therefore not simply about declining fertility; it is also about uneven development, uneven access to healthcare, and uneven exposure to deprivation.

This divergence has policy consequences. A country where rural areas produce more births and lose more infants than urban areas cannot rely on a uniform public policy template. Rural maternal health, neonatal care, public nutrition, water and sanitation, transport access and household income support all remain central to the unfinished part of India’s demographic transition.

Birth rates: the state map of fertility pressure

The bulletin’s state table makes clear that fertility-related pressure is concentrated in a limited set of states, but that limited set is still large enough to shape India’s national averages. Among the bigger states and union territories, Bihar records the highest birth rate at 26.8 per thousand population, followed by Uttar Pradesh at 23.5, Rajasthan at 22.8, Madhya Pradesh at 22.5 and Chhattisgarh at 22.2. Jharkhand at 21.5 also remains on the higher side, while Assam at 19.6 and Haryana at 18.5 are above the national average but clearly below the highest-fertility belt.

At the other end, Kerala records a birth rate of 11.1, Tamil Nadu 11.6, Delhi 12.8, Punjab 13.6, Maharashtra 13.8 and West Bengal 13.9. These are not marginally lower figures; they imply very different social realities from those in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. In such states, the demographic conversation is already shifting away from sheer birth pressure toward ageing, health quality, labour productivity and care systems.

The distribution of birth rates also shows that India’s demographic transition is no longer a broad national blur. It is regionally concentrated and politically consequential. States that still have high birth rates will continue to add young people to the national population base, while low-birth-rate states will increasingly depend on migration, productivity gains and better labour-force participation rather than natural increase alone.

Natural growth: where population momentum remains strongest

Natural growth rate, the difference between the birth rate and death rate, is often a better shorthand for immediate demographic momentum than either births or deaths alone. India’s natural growth rate is estimated at 11.9 in 2024. Bihar stands far above the rest at 20.8, followed by Uttar Pradesh at 17.2, Rajasthan at 17.0, Meghalaya at 16.7, Madhya Pradesh at 15.8 and Jharkhand at 15.3.

This ranking matters because it identifies where population addition remains strongest even after accounting for mortality. States such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are not just high-birth states; they are still high-growth states in net demographic terms. That means the pressure on schooling, nutrition, jobs, urbanization and local infrastructure will continue to be concentrated there for years.

At the low end, Kerala records a natural growth rate of just 3.9, Goa 4.2, Tamil Nadu 4.8, Andaman and Nicobar Islands 4.1 and Puducherry 5.7. These are the kinds of figures associated with mature demographic transition, where the age structure begins to tilt and the long-run policy challenge moves toward elder care, labour replacement and social security design.

Infant mortality: improvement, but not enough

The bulletin reports India’s infant mortality rate at 24 in 2024, down from 39 in 2014 and from 129 in 1971. That is a major achievement in historical terms. It implies that infant survival has improved substantially and that public health systems, though still uneven and overstretched, have made measurable gains over time.

Yet the national average also masks large inequality. Chhattisgarh records the highest IMR among the bigger states at 36, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh at 35 each, Assam at 29, Odisha and Rajasthan at 28, and Jharkhand at 27. These are not merely health statistics; they indicate weak maternal and newborn care systems, deeper rural deprivation, and persistent inequality in early-life chances.

At the lower end, Kerala records an IMR of 8, Delhi 11, Tamil Nadu 11, Maharashtra 13 and Jammu and Kashmir 14. The contrast with high-IMR states is stark. A child’s survival prospects in India continue to be heavily shaped by geography, which is to say by the public institutions, social conditions and health systems of the state into which that child is born.

The rural-urban divide is once again sharp. India’s rural IMR is 27, while the urban IMR is 17. For policy, this means the next gains in child survival will likely depend less on broad national missions and more on targeted improvements in lagging districts, referral systems, frontline health staffing, nutrition, and the quality of antenatal and postnatal care.

What the confidence intervals tell us about statistical strength

One of the more valuable but often overlooked sections of the bulletin is the presentation of 95 percent confidence limits for birth rate, death rate and IMR for India and the bigger states/union territories. For India, the all-India birth rate of 18.3 comes with a confidence interval of 18.1 to 18.6, the death rate of 6.4 comes with a confidence interval of 6.3 to 6.5, and the IMR of 24 comes with a confidence interval of 23 to 26. These are reasonably tight bands and indicate that the national estimates are statistically stable.

At the state level, some intervals are wider, especially where the sample base is smaller or where demographic variability is greater. Chhattisgarh’s birth rate confidence interval, for instance, runs from 20.3 to 24.1, and its IMR confidence interval from 28 to 45. Bihar’s birth-rate interval is tighter, from 25.6 to 28.0, reflecting both its scale and stronger measurement stability within the SRS design.

The bulletin also explicitly notes that confidence limits for death rate and IMR are not presented for smaller states and union territories because of small sample sizes and very large variations between upper and lower tolerance limits. That is an important methodological caution. It reminds readers that not all subnational numbers carry equal certainty and that smaller jurisdictions should be interpreted carefully, especially where year-to-year fluctuation can be exaggerated by sample limitations.

Gendered mortality patterns

The sex-wise death-rate table adds another layer to the demographic picture. At the all-India level, the death rate for males is 7.1 and for females 5.6. This male disadvantage appears in both rural and urban India, with rural male death rate at 7.6 versus 5.9 for rural females, and urban male death rate at 6.2 versus 5.1 for urban females.

This pattern is not surprising in demographic terms, but it is still significant. It reflects a combination of behavioural risk, occupational exposure, health-seeking patterns and biological factors. In states such as Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Karnataka and Punjab, overall death rates are relatively high and male death rates are especially elevated, suggesting that public health burdens interact with broader social and economic vulnerabilities.

The infant mortality table shows a more mixed and nuanced picture. At the all-India level, male IMR is 24 and female IMR 25. In some states female IMR remains worse than male IMR, while in others the reverse holds, indicating that biological, social and health-system factors can pull in different directions. What matters most is that the absolute levels remain too high in several large states, regardless of sex.

The bigger states: three demographic Indias inside one Union

A useful way to read the bulletin is to group India’s larger states into three demographic clusters. The first cluster is the high-pressure belt, led by Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, where birth rates, natural growth and often infant mortality remain elevated. These states will continue to shape the country’s future school-age and labour-force cohorts more than any others.

The second cluster is the middle-transition group, including states such as Gujarat, Haryana, Assam, Uttarakhand, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Odisha, where birth rates are lower than in the northern heartland but still not at the very low levels seen in southern leaders. These states are in a more mixed phase, balancing residual fertility pressure with improving but still uneven mortality outcomes.

The third cluster is the advanced-transition group, including Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Punjab, Delhi and West Bengal, where birth rates and natural growth are lower, and infant mortality is mostly better controlled. These states are already living with the consequences of maturing demography: smaller family size, lower natural increase, and rising policy attention to quality of life, workforce quality and ageing.

This three-part reading matters because India’s national average can hide too much. The country is not entering one demographic future; it is entering several at once.

Bihar and Uttar Pradesh: why the national story still runs through them

No interpretation of the bulletin can avoid Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Bihar’s birth rate is 26.8 and its natural growth rate is 20.8, both the highest among the bigger states listed in the bulletin. Uttar Pradesh follows with a birth rate of 23.5, natural growth of 17.2 and an IMR of 35.

These two states matter not simply because their indicators are high, but because of their sheer demographic weight. Uttar Pradesh’s SRS sample covers 594 thousand persons and Bihar’s 421 thousand, among the largest covered populations in the survey; their trajectories carry disproportionate significance for India’s aggregate future. If these states improve quickly, India’s national indicators will improve quickly; if they improve slowly, national progress will slow with them.

For both states, the policy lesson is sharper than the usual development cliché. The challenge is no longer just family planning in a narrow sense. It is female schooling, age at marriage, urbanization quality, maternal and newborn health, basic public services, and the creation of a development environment in which smaller family size becomes a durable social norm rather than a campaign slogan.

Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and the mortality warning

If Bihar and Uttar Pradesh embody the fertility challenge, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh illustrate the mortality challenge just as clearly. Chhattisgarh records the highest death rate among the bigger states at 8.4 and the highest IMR at 36. Madhya Pradesh is nearly as concerning on infant mortality at 35 and has a high birth rate of 22.5 with natural growth at 15.8.

These numbers indicate that demographic transition in parts of India is still being slowed by weaknesses in early-life survival and health-system quality. High IMR means the development state is still failing too many infants in their first year of life.It also means the burden of avoidable risk remains concentrated among poorer households, rural populations and mothers with limited access to timely care.

This is where India’s demographic policy must remain morally grounded. A lower birth rate is not enough by itself. The real test is whether a falling birth rate is accompanied by better child survival, better maternal health, lower inequality and stronger public systems.

Kerala and Tamil Nadu: the future arrives early in the south

Kerala and Tamil Nadu once again stand out in the bulletin as the most advanced demographic performers among the larger states. Kerala’s birth rate is just 11.1, its natural growth rate 3.9, and its IMR 8. Tamil Nadu’s birth rate is 11.6, natural growth 4.8 and IMR 11.

These numbers point to a policy environment very different from that of high-growth northern states. In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the central concern is not managing high fertility but managing the consequences of demographic maturity. Lower fertility and lower infant mortality imply changing age structures, slower natural increase, potential labour shortages in some sectors, and increasing long-term demand for chronic disease management, elder support and care infrastructure.

This is why southern India often appears demographically ahead of national policy. Its immediate future is less about population control and more about workforce productivity, women’s employment, migration management, healthcare quality and social care systems.

In that sense, Kerala and Tamil Nadu are not exceptions to India’s future; they are previews of it. Furture arrived early in these two states.

Maharashtra, Gujarat and the western development corridor

Maharashtra and Gujarat present a different but equally important demographic pattern. Maharashtra records a birth rate of 13.8, death rate of 6.0, natural growth of 7.8 and IMR of 13. Gujarat records a birth rate of 16.8, death rate of 6.2, natural growth of 10.6 and IMR of 19.

These are transitional but relatively moderated figures. Maharashtra in particular appears closer to the low-fertility, low-growth end of the demographic spectrum, while Gujarat occupies an intermediate position with somewhat higher birth and infant mortality rates. The contrast suggests that industrialization alone does not fully determine demographic outcomes; urbanization quality, public health performance, gender development and regional inequality also matter.

For the western growth corridor, the next phase of demographic management will involve balancing urban growth with social protection. Lower fertility can support per capita gains only if urban labour markets absorb migrants productively and public services expand with the population they serve.

Eastern and northeastern contrasts

The eastern and northeastern data in the bulletin show that India’s demographic diversity extends beyond the familiar north-south divide. Assam has a birth rate of 19.6 and IMR of 29, considerably above the all-India average on both counts. West Bengal, by contrast, records a birth rate of 13.9 and IMR of 16, placing it much closer to the advanced-transition states.

Jharkhand remains in a higher-growth bracket, with a birth rate of 21.5, natural growth of 15.3 and IMR of 27. Odisha’s birth rate is lower at 15.8, but its death rate is high at 7.9 and IMR remains elevated at 28. This combination suggests that lower fertility does not automatically imply stronger social outcomes; public health and deprivation can still produce poor mortality indicators even where fertility pressure has moderated.

Among smaller northeastern states, Meghalaya stands out with a high birth rate of 22.1 and IMR of 31, whereas Manipur records a very low IMR of 2, though the bulletin itself cautions that Manipur’s estimates are based on 130 SRS units and smaller-state data should be interpreted with care.

The lesson is straightforward: India’s demographic diversity is too large for simplistic regional stereotypes.

Why the bulletin matters for economic strategy

Demography is economics stretched over time. A falling birth rate changes not only the number of children born, but the timing of consumption, the ratio of dependents to workers, the future tax base and the composition of demand across health, education and housing. The 2024 SRS Bulletin therefore has direct implications for economic planning even though it does not speak in the language of GDP or fiscal policy.

In high-growth states, large young cohorts will continue to demand schools, nutrition, skilling systems, jobs and urban infrastructure. In low-growth states, the policy emphasis must increasingly shift toward productivity, formalization, health quality and the design of services for older populations. Across the country, the common requirement is the same: demographic transition must be translated into human-capital deepening rather than treated as a passive background trend.

This is where the debate on India’s demographic dividend often becomes too mechanical. A dividend is not guaranteed simply because the working-age share rises or because fertility falls. It becomes real only when institutions convert age structure into employability, earnings, innovation and social stability.

Five key learnings from the bulletin

1. India’s birth rate decline is real, sustained and historically significant, falling from 36.9 in 1971 to 18.3 in 2024, and from 21.0 in 2014 to 18.3 in 2024.

2. Rural India remains demographically heavier and more vulnerable than urban India, with higher birth rate, death rate and infant mortality.

3. Population momentum is increasingly concentrated in a limited group of states led by Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

4. Infant mortality has improved sharply at the national level, but several large states still show unacceptably high IMR, especially Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

5. India is no longer moving through one uniform demographic transition; it contains high-growth, middle-transition and advanced-transition regions simultaneously.

Seven key challenges exposed by the data

1. · Persistently high birth and natural growth rates in the northern and central belt continue to strain basic public services.

2. Rural disadvantage remains entrenched across birth outcomes, mortality and infant survival.

3. High IMR in several large states indicates that health-system quality remains too uneven.

4. Advanced-transition states will increasingly face ageing-related pressures even as national policy remains overly focused on fertility reduction.

5. India’s demographic diversity complicates one-size-fits-all population policy and demands state-specific strategies.

6. Smaller-state data limitations remind policymakers that better measurement and stronger statistical systems are still necessary.

7. The economic dividend from demographic transition may be squandered if education, skilling, health and employment systems do not improve quickly enough.

Ten structural fixes India should pursue

1. .Move from generic population policy to state-specific demographic strategy, since Bihar and Kerala clearly face different population realities.

2. Invest far more in maternal, neonatal and early-child health in high-IMR states such as Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha.

3. Deepen female schooling, delay age at marriage and expand reproductive-health access in high-birth-rate states.

4. Build district-level demographic planning systems that integrate health, education, nutrition and migration data.

5. Shift the demographic-dividend debate toward jobs, skills and productivity rather than just working-age headcounts.

6. Prepare advanced-transition states for ageing through stronger geriatric care, long-term care systems and social protection design.

7. Close the rural-urban service gap in primary healthcare, water, sanitation and transport access.

8. Improve statistical depth by widening timely publication of fertility, age-structure and cohort indicators alongside SRS vital rates.

9. Use high-growth states as the frontline for integrated investments in girls’ education, public health and labour-intensive development.

10. Treat infant mortality reduction as a core measure of state capability, not as a narrow health-sector target alone.

Coda -The deeper meaning of the 2024 bulletin

The 2024 SRS Bulletin does not present India as a country in demographic crisis, nor as one that can afford demographic complacency. Instead, it presents a country in transition, where old population anxieties are fading but new structural pressures are emerging.

The old anxiety was runaway fertility across the whole Union; the new pressure is uneven transition across regions and unfinished human development in precisely those states that will define India’s future workforce.

The document’s brevity can mislead the reader. On the surface, it is a bulletin of rates. In substance, it is a report on unequal life chances. A child born in Kerala enters a demographic world very different from one born in Chhattisgarh; a mother in Bihar confronts a reproductive and service environment unlike that of a mother in Tamil Nadu; and a rural household almost anywhere continues to face greater demographic risk than an urban one.

That is why the right lesson from the bulletin is neither triumphalism nor alarmism. India has made genuine progress in reducing birth rates and infant mortality over time. But progress has become more spatially concentrated, and the next stage of change will depend less on broad national slogans and more on the quality of state capacity, public health systems, women’s empowerment and local development institutions.

In that sense, the SRS Bulletin offers a democratic challenge as much as a demographic one. The country’s future will not be decided only by how many people are born or die, but by whether India can reduce the gap between the state where life chances are already broad and the state where they remain fragile. Demography, at this stage of India’s development, is no longer simply a matter of numbers. It is a matter of justice, capability and the architecture of long-term national power

(AI Generated Representative Immage)

Prologue

Let me begin on a personl note. In college I had a close friend Gautam Chatterjee, my two years senior in Mathematics Honours at Patna Science college. He was a brillinat student (secured university first in Mathematics honours in the graduation exam), an accomplished singer but with the heart of a die hard cricketer. In college days he led Patna University to become the champion in all India Rohinton Baria trophy (inter university tournament), led East Zone in Vizzy Trophy tournament ( India’s future test player Pranab Roy played under his captaincy), to be defeated narrowly by the North Zone team then led by the future cricketing great Kapil Dev. He played Bihar Ranji Trophy team during the 1976–77 season. Then his cricketing dream ended because he had no sporting lineage or god father. And he was from Patna, the sporting backyard and not from Jamshedpur, the only city in poor state of Bihar which nurtured sporting talent.

Had Gautam been born in Bihar of twenty first century he would have been toast of Indian Premier League (with a likely shot at national and international glory. It was not to be. Cricket’s loss was bureacracy gain. Gautam wrote Indian Civil Services successfully in 1982 and went on to serve as a prominent IAS officer, notably holding senior positions such as the Additional Chief Secretary for the Government of Maharashtra and the first Chairman of MahaRERA

That was then. Much water has flown under the Ganges since then.

Overview

Bihar’s cricket story is one of paradox. The state has produced only a small number of India internationals, yet among them are figures of outsized significance: Ramesh Saxena, a one-Test batsman whose domestic record far exceeded his international opportunity; Saba Karim, a refined wicketkeeper-batter; Kirti Azad, a World Cup winner; MS Dhoni, the most transformative wicketkeeper-captain in Indian history from undivided Bihar; Ishan Kishan, one of modern India’s most explosive white-ball batters; Akash Deep (who slit through English batsmen for a 10 wicket haul at Birmingham last season) , Saquib Hussain who debuted in IPL this season for SRH, Ankul Roy joint hghest wiket taker in ndia’s victory lap in 2018 Under 19 World Cup, Mukesh Kumar, a late-blooming fast bowler who broke into all three formats; and now Vaibhav Suryavanshi, the child prodigy from Tajpur in Samastipur district whose rise has turned Bihar from a peripheral cricketing geography into a central national conversation.

The larger puzzle is even more striking. Bihar produced these players while its cricket administration was crippled for nearly two decades by suspension, factionalism, and loss of formal BCCI recognition. In many Indian states, institutional stability creates talent. In Bihar, talent often emerged despite institutional collapse, carried by family sacrifice, private academies, migration to neighbouring states, and eventually by the meritocratic visibility of the IPL

This Akhil Vaani daily Long-Form series Volume 16, examines six linked questions: how many Bihar cricketers have played for India; what happened to Ramesh Saxena after his only Test; how many Bihar cricketers have genuinely excelled internationally; how many are part of IPL 2026 squads; what their socio-economic backgrounds reveal; and how the Bihar ecosystem has produced talent in spite of two decades of administrative disorder. It culminates in a full profile of Vaibhav Suryavanshi and an argument for why he must be nurtured as himself rather than being burdened with labels like the next Tendulkar or the next Lara.

Bihar and Team India

By commonly cited media tallies, Bihar and undivided Bihar together have produced roughly six to seven notable cricketers who have represented India in international cricket, though the exact count varies depending on whether post-2000 Jharkhand-born or undivided-Bihar categories are used. The core list generally includes Ramesh Saxena, Saba Karim, Kirti Azad, MS Dhoni, Ishan Kishan, Shahbaz Nadeem, and Mukesh Kumar, while some tallies differ on edge cases shaped by state bifurcation and domestic-team affiliation.

This is not a large number compared with states single cities such as Mumbai, Karnataka, Delhi, or Madras. Yet Bihar’s contribution has been qualitatively disproportionate. Dhoni alone altered India’s white-ball culture, captaincy style, and finishing philosophy and proved a small town boy can scale the summit. Kirti Azad remains part of India’s 1983 World Cup mythology. Ishan Kishan has become a high-voltage white-ball opener and wicketkeeper-batter in the modern limited-overs game. Mukesh Kumar and Akash Deep, meanwhile, represents the arrival of a new type of Bihar cricketer: not a symbol from a romantic past, but a modern seam bowler who entered all formats through India’s increasingly data-driven pathways.

The deeper point is that Bihar’s cricket history is not best understood through volume alone. It is better understood through scarcity, migration, interruption, and then sudden bursts of excellence. That makes Ramesh Saxena and Gautam Chatterjee a fitting starting point, because thier story captures the oldest Bihar pattern: abundant domestic quality, very little national patience in the case of Saxena and very little recognition in case of Chatterjee.

Ramesh Saxena and the one-Test question

Ramesh Chand Saxena was born in Delhi on 20 September 1944, but he became a major cricketing figure for Bihar after moving from Delhi and representing the state through the heart of his career. He made his first-class debut at 16, scoring an unbeaten 113 on Ranji debut for Delhi in 1960-61, an early sign of his class. He later shifted to Bihar, played for them from 1966-67 to 1981-82, and became their batting pillar.

Saxena played his only Test for India against England at Headingley, Leeds, in June 1967. He scored 9 in the first innings and 16 in the second. On paper those scores look modest, but the context matters: he was entering a side that had not firmly settled how it wanted to use him, and he was moving between roles rather than occupying a clearly owned middle-order or opening.

What happened after that debut is crucial. Saxena remained on the 1967 tour of England and later travelled with India to Australia and New Zealand in 1967-68, showing that selectors had not immediately abandoned him. Yet he was not picked in any of the eight Tests on the Australia-New Zealand trip, and after that his international window effectively shut. Across the England tour, including side matches, he made 238 first-class runs at an average of 23.80, respectable but not commanding enough to force a recall in a conservative selection environment.

Why his India career ended after one Test

Three factors appear to explain why Saxena disappeared from the Test side after Leeds. First, his immediate returns were not strong enough to demand continued selection in an era of limited rotation and high caution around change. Second, India in the 1960s often privileged players from stronger domestic centres, and retrospective commentary from contemporaries suggested that cricketers from smaller incnspicous sides like Bihar did not receive the same patience as those from bigger associations like Bombay. Third, Saxena may have suffered from role ambiguity: being used without a settled position tends to hurt fringe players because one modest outing can then be read as proof of unsuitability.

Later reflections on his career were often tinged with regret. Obituaries described him as an elegant player of spin and a domestic batsman whose class was never adequately reflected in his Test record. Bishan Singh Bedi reportedly admired his use of feet against spin, and other contemporaries considered him worthy of a much longer India run than he received.

The domestic career that outgrew the international one

Saxena’s first-class record remains the strongest argument that his international career underrepresented his ability. He played 149 first-class matches, scored 8,155 runs, averaged a shade over 40, and made 17 centuries. His highest score of 202 not out came for Bihar against Assam in the 1969-70 Ranji Trophy. He also contributed occasional leg-spin (he took 33 witckets in his career) and was a reliable close catcher, making his value broader than just batting.

For Bihar, he was not just a run-maker; he was an institutional cricketer. He captained Bihar for five seasons and also led East Zone multiple times in the Duleep Trophy, which indicates how respected he was beyond state lines. In practical terms, that means he was not seen as merely a county-like accumulator for a weak side, but as one of the better batsmen in zonal cricket over a long period.

After retirement, Saxena moved into administration and selection. He served as a national Test selector in the 1980s (BCCI selection committee headed by Raj Singh Dungarpur) held a role as secretary of the Bihar-Jharkhand Cricket Association. That post-playing trajectory gives his career an irony that deserves emphasis: a man who never received national patience became one of the people later entrusted to judge the national worth of others.

Saxena died in Jamshedpur on August 16 2011 aged 66 after a brain haemorrhage and subsequent illness. His death notices consistently framed him as a one-Test international whose domestic stature and technical grace far exceeded his official India record. For Bihar cricket, he stands as an early archetype of lost possibility: evidence that the region had national-level quality long before the system was willing to see it fully.

Which Bihar cricketers truly excelled internationally

If the threshold is merely appearance, Bihar’s international count is limited. If the threshold is excellence, the number is smaller still, but the quality is undeniable.[ Three names stand above the rest in terms of broader impact: MS Dhoni, Kirti Azad, and Ishan Kishan, with Mukesh Kumar on a potentially rising path and Saba Karim holding an important historical place.

Dhoni’s case is self-evident. Born in Ranchi when it was part of undivided Bihar, he captained India to the 2007 T20 World Cup, 2011 ODI World Cup, and 2013 Champions Trophy, redefining wicketkeeping, finishing, and captaincy under pressure. He also became the symbolic proof that a cricketer from small cities could become the centre of Indian cricket rather than its margin.

Kirti Azad’s record is smaller in aggregate (played 7 Tests and 25 ODIs for India from 1980 to 1986.), but his place in Indian cricket history is secure because he was part of the 1983 World Cup-winning team. Saba Karim, though his international career was shorter (represented India in 1 Test and 34 ODIs,), represented a polished wicketkeeper-batter type at a transitional moment for Indian cricket in the 1990s. Ishan Kishan has excelled in the white-ball era (holds the world record for the fastest ODI double century and was a key player in India's victorious ICC T20 World Cup campaign) with explosive batting and high visibility across IPL and India duty, making him one of the most important current Bihar-linked batters.

Mukesh Kumar and Askash Deep’s rise to India’s pace reserves and then national caps across formats (Making his international debut in 2023, he became the second Indian to debut in all three formats (Test, ODI, T20I) on the same tour.) suggests that Bihar’s newest generation may deepen the list of truly successful internationals. Likewise Akash Deep has established himself as a reliable right-arm fast-medium bowler for the Indian Test team. Across 10 Test matches, he has taken 28 wickets at an average of 35.79. A standout highlight of his career is his impressive match performance of 6/99 against England

In short, Bihar has not produced large numbers of great internationals, but it has produced a few who shaped eras, formats, or symbolic possibilities. That distinction matters. Bihar’s influence lies less in its volume of caps than in the disruptive significance of the players who did break through.

Bihar players in IPL 2026

In 2026 Bihar has suddenly taken IPL season by the storm. A full page article in the Indian Express on Wednesday May, 20 has lyrically titled it “A New Innings - Bihar’s Powerplay”. By 2026, Bihar’s presence in the IPL has become far more visible than in earlier periods. Reports identify several Bihar-born or Bihar-linked players across franchises, including Ishan Kishan, Vaibhav Suryavanshi, Mukesh Kumar, Sakib Hussain, Akash Deep, and others depending on classification standards and domestic affiliations. Some lists place the number around seven to ten Bihar-linked players associated with IPL 2026 squads, though exact counts depend on whether one includes reserve players, undivided-Bihar identities, and migrated domestic cricketers.

The players most consistently identified in 2026 round-ups include:

The above not just statistically but structurally. For years Bihar lacked strong formal institutions, but the IPL created a parallel ladder in which scouts, age-group tournaments, trial systems, and franchise analytics could identify talent even when local administration was unstable. The 2026 season is therefore a milestone in Bihar’s cricket story: the state is no longer represented by memory alone, but by a living cross-section of batters, keepers, and seamers in the world’s richest T20 competition.

Socio-economic background of Bihar’s cricketers

A striking common thread among Bihar’s modern cricketers is the degree to which their careers were built on family sacrifice rather than institutional cushioning. These are not typically products of elite schools, fully funded state academies, or highly secure sporting pipelines. Instead, most come from lower-middle-class or modest aspirational families that treated cricket as both a dream and a dangerous financial wager.

Dhoni grew up in a modest family supported by his fatther a in a junior management role at MECON Limited, and his rise reflected a blend of school sport, club cricket, and the possibilities of eastern India’s informal competition circuits rather than a polished metro-academy conveyor belt. Ishan Kishan’s family, too, came from ordinary means, with father a small time business man and his move away from Bihar-linked pathways toward Jharkhand structures reflected a practical search for opportunity rather than a symbolic rejection of home. Kishan now has opened a cricket academy to find and nurture youlg talent at Patna. Mukesh Kumar’s background similarly reflects persistence through modest means and movement through alternative routes before national recognition followed. Aakash Deep father was a teacher in a government shool.

What emerges is a broad Bihar cricket sociology: families invest first, institutions catch up later. The state has repeatedly outsourced the cost of incubation to parents, local coaches, and nearby states. That reality has made success rarer, but perhaps also hardened the players who do survive the funnel.

How Bihar’s ecosystem survived institutional collapse

Bihar Cricket Association was suspended by the BCCI in the early 2000s, and cricket in the state then became mired in long-running factional battles, legal disputes, and questions of legitimacy that deprived the state of the developmental continuity available to better-run associations. Bihar was reinstated to domestic competition only in 2018, after decade and half, in which players had to improvise around the absence of stable governance.

This should have crippled talent production. Instead, Bihar evolved an alternative ecosystem with four pillars.

First, migration became the pathway. Talented players moved to Jharkhand, Bengal, and other more functional systems to access selectors, turf wickets, stronger competitions, and more orderly pathways.

Second, private academies became far more important than the state association. In cities such as Patna and in surrounding belts, coaching centres and local mentors filled part of the institutional vacuum.

Third, local tournaments and short-format competitions created visibility, which became especially valuable once IPL scouting broadened beyond traditional metropolitan filters.

Fourth, the IPL itself became a substitute market for legitimacy: if a player could generate enough buzz through age-group numbers, local events, and private coaching circuits, a franchise could validate him even if the state association remained weak.

This ecosystem was inefficient, unequal, and often harsh. But it was not empty. It was decentralised. And decentralisation, in Bihar’s case, turned out to be enough to keep producing pockets of exceptional talent.

Vaibhav Suryavanshi: the prodigy from Tajpur

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, widely rendered as Vaibhav Suryavanshi, was born on 27 March 2011 in Tajpur, Samastipur district, Bihar. His rise is extraordinary not merely because he is young, but because he appears to compress multiple developmental stages into a single burst of adolescent acceleration.

He became one of the youngest first-class cricketers in India when he debuted for Bihar in January 2024 at 12 years and 310 days. He also became the youngest Indian List A debutant in domestic one-day cricket. In the IPL auction cycle he was signed by Rajasthan Royals for about ₹1.10 crore while still only 13, becoming the youngest player ever bought in IPL history. He then made his IPL debut at 14 years and 23 days and quickly went beyond novelty value by producing elite striking numbers.

Reports credit him with a 58-ball century for India Under-19 against Australia Under-19 and then a blistering Under-19 World Cup campaign in 2026 that included a 171 not out in a group game and 175 in the final against England Under-19, where he powered India to the title and collected player-of-the-tournament honours.

The defining moment in the public imagination came when he scored a 35-ball hundred in IPL 2025, one of the fastest centuries in league history and enough to convince sceptics that this was not merely a marketing story around age. Youth-cricket numbers reinforced that impression. In the current IPL 2026 the boy playing for Rajasthan Royals suddenly became a towering man, who currently holds the Orange cap (highest run in the tournament so far) with 579 runs from 13 matches including a century against SRH franchise

At 15, he has already become a global cricket curiosity because his performances do not just break age records; they alter assumptions about how early a batter can be both fearless and apparently match-aware against quality opposition.

The family and a village behind Vaibhav

The social setting behind Suryavanshi’s rise is as important as his scorecards. Media profiles describe his home as modest and emphasise that his father, Sanjiv Suryavanshi, had his own unrealised cricketing dreams. that died young. Instead of passing down nostalgia, he built practice conditions. Reports describe a homemade pitch and repeated long-distance journeys from Samastipur to Patna so that Vaibhav could train in a more serious coaching environment.

This is Bihar’s cricket economy in miniature. There is often no smooth institutional escalator from village to elite academy. The bridge is assembled at home through time, labour, travel, and parental obsession and sacrifice. Tajpur’s importance in this story is therefore symbolic as well as geographic. It represents the kind of place Indian cricket usually mines for mythology after success, but rarely invests in before success.

Suryavanshi’s story also marks a generational shift. He is of the post-IPL age. He did not grow up imagining Ranji Trophy alone as the horizon; he grew up in a cricket culture where Under-19 tournaments, social-media clips, scouting networks, and franchise contracts could convert talent into opportunity and money with startling speed.

Whom Vaibhav idolises and why that matters

One revealing detail about Suryavanshi is his stated admiration for Brian Lara, alongside reported appreciation for Yuvraj Singh. In an interview highlighted by NDTV, he said that Lara was his cricketing idol and that he tried to play like him.This is significant because it tells observers what not to impose on him.

A batter who grows up admiring Lara is not naturally pointing toward a conservative, accumulation-heavy, textbook-first identity. Lara represented audacity, wristwork, angle creation, and the ability to transform games through strokeplay that still retained high technical sophistication. Yuvraj similarly symbolised fearlessness and six-hitting without surrendering elegance. Those influences fit the visual logic of Suryavanshi’s batting far more naturally than comparisons with classical Indian accumulation models.

Why it is wrong to call him the next Tendulkar or the next Lara

The urge to compare a teenage prodigy with all-time greats is understandable, but it is usually destructive. Calling Suryavanshi the next Tendulkar is wrong because Tendulkar was a singular career shape built across 24 years, every format, every phase of Indian cricket, and under entirely different media, scheduling, and tactical conditions. No child benefits from being measured against that template.

Calling him the next Lara is also misleading, even if Lara is his idol. Idols are not destinies. Lara’s genius was specific to his era, temperament, body, and cricketing culture. Borrowing the label risks turning admiration into expectation and expectation into distortion.

The healthier framing is simpler and more accurate: Suryavanshi is a fearless, technically promising, left-handed 15-year-old wonder who should be developed into the best version of himself. That means preserving the qualities that make him special while adding robustness against better pace, better spin, higher pressure, and the long calendar of elite cricket.

How his entry into Team India should be fast-tracked

Fast-tracking does not mean rushing blindly. It means designing the shortest safe bridge between extraordinary youth performance and sustainable senior success. For Suryavanshi, that bridge should begin with India A and other controlled high-performance environments rather than immediate overexposure across all three senior formats.

A practical pathway would include:

· Sustained India Under-19 and India A assignments against stronger pace attacks and on varied surfaces, including seaming and bouncing conditions.

· Carefully selected T20 opportunities for India in lower-stakes series once his domestic and A-team performances show stable adaptation rather than isolated brilliance.

· Avoidance of early red-ball overload. First-class cricket should remain part of his development, but the schedule must not become so heavy that it drains his natural game or burdens his body and young mind.

· Dedicated work with batting specialists on judgement outside off stump, defense to the hard length, and rotation against high-quality spin, not in order to make him conservative but to make his aggression more durable.

This kind of fast-track is not anti-ambition. It is pro-longevity. India has enough batting depth that it can avoid turning a prodigy into a publicity stunt.

How he should be nurtured for greater heights

For a player this young, nurturing must be holistic. Technical coaching is only one layer. Physical development, education, psychological protection, media management, and workload control are equally important.

Three principles matter most.

First, preserve his batting identity. The instinct to domesticate attacking prodigies into safer versions of older stars often strips away what made them exceptional in the first place. Suryavanshi should not be trained out of courage. He should be trained into better decision-making.

Second, surround him with adults who can say no. Franchises, broadcasters, advertisers, and social media all profit from acceleration. A young batter needs a support circle that values the next ten years more than the next ten weeks.

Third, treat education and emotional stability as performance infrastructure. The leap from Tajpur to national celebrity can destabilise identity, family rhythms, and concentration. The BCCI and franchise system should provide structured educational flexibility and access to sports psychology support rather than assuming that runs alone prove readiness for pressure.

Bihar in the context of India’s cricketing ecosystem

Suryavanshi’s rise should not be viewed only as a local fairy tale. It reveals something larger about India’s cricketing ecosystem in the 2020s. Indian cricket is now broad enough that talent can emerge from outside the old metropolitan cores, but unequal enough that the route still depends heavily on private resilience.

This is why Bihar matters. It is not merely another state trying to produce players. It is a stress test for Indian cricket’s claims about democratisation. If Bihar, despite administrative collapse, can still produce Dhoni, Ishan, Aaksh Deep, Mukesh, and Suryavanshi, then the talent base is obviously deep. But if it takes extraordinary family sacrifice and frequent migration every time, then the system is still failing many who could have made it.

In this sense, Bihar is both a twenty first century cricketing success story and an indictment. It proves the breadth of Indian cricketing aspiration, and it exposes the unevenness of the structures meant to harness it.

What Bihar needs next

The state requires a strategy that combines formal rebuilding with respect for the informal networks that kept cricket alive during the suspended years. The goal should not be to replace local initiative with bureaucracy, but to support and scale what already works.

Priority measures include:

· Stable, transparent governance in the Bihar Cricket Association so that legal and factional battles do not again consume developmental energy.

· Regional academies in Patna, Gaya, Muzaffarpur, Bhagalpur, Darbhanga and the Samastipur belt, reducing the need for excessive travel by young players.

· Structured scholarship and travel-support programmes for players from modest households, since travel costs and equipment expenses remain major hidden barriers.[

· Better pitch diversity, including turf wickets that prepare batters and bowlers for higher-level cricket rather than only local surfaces.

· Formal partnerships with IPL franchises and elite coaches to create a transparent scouting and mentoring ladder from village competition to age-group national pathways.

If Bihar builds these supports, then Suryavanshi will not remain an exception used to romanticise adversity. He will become the first of many elite players from a state that finally learned how to convert aspiration into system.

Conclusion

The arc from Ramesh Saxena (the one text spark), Gautam Chatterjee (where dream died young despite excellence) to Vaibhav Suryavanshi captures nearly the whole contradiction of Bihar cricket. Saxena represented an era in which domestic quality from Bihar could be overlooked after one imperfect international chance. Chatterjee was a blossoming cricketer from Patna at a time when the national duty was reserved for players from Bombay, Delhi, Madras and Calcutta. Suryavanshi represents an era in which extraordinary talent can force itself into national and global visibility at 15 through youth cricket, franchise systems, and relentless family labour.

Between them lies the history of a state that produced too few internationals, but far more cricketing possibility than its institutions deserved. Bihar’s best players did not emerge from a seamless pipeline. They emerged from interruptions, detours, and acts of stubborn belief.

Epilogue

That is why Suryavanshi must not be trapped inside lazy comparisons. He does not need to be the next Tendulkar or the next Lara. He needs to be the first fully nurtured Vaibhav Suryavanshi: fearless, technically sharpened, emotionally protected, and developed with enough patience that Bihar’s latest wonder does not become another parable of premature burden.