Highways are about human lives, not cement & steel

A highway built only for speed, without regard for the land and the people it passes through, honors only half that duty. True development binds kilometers to the wellbeing of those who live alongside them.

Last week, a section of the Dehradun-Mussoorie Road caved in after overnight rain weakened the embankment beneath it. The road was shut, and hundreds of vehicles were stranded on both sides. This is the same hill road that now absorbs every additional vehicle the new Delhi-Dehradun Expressway sends toward Mussoorie, since the expressway itself terminates at Dehradun and goes no further.

This was not an isolated event, either. Just weeks earlier, a stretch built barely six months ago at Mussoorie’s Paani Wala Bend developed a large crack and began sinking, prompting a former legislator to allege negligence and demand an inquiry. Landslides and road damage in the Garhwal Himalayas are not new, but their frequency and severity have risen noticeably over the past decade.

Rapid deforestation for road widening, a sharp rise in vehicular traffic on wider roads, growing tourist and pilgrim inflows, and hurried construction of hospitality infrastructure to house them are all straining the fragile ecology of the region. This raises a pertinent question: is the impact-assessment process followed by governments and public authorities before approving and building infrastructure projects, especially highways and expressways, actually adequate?

The newly built Delhi-Dehradun Expressway is a useful case study. Inaugurated in April 2026 at a cost of roughly ₹12,000 crore, the six-lane, access-controlled corridor has cut travel time between Delhi and Dehradun from about six-seven hours to roughly two-and-a-half hours, and to Mussoorie from around seven hours to under four.

The government has projected that this faster connectivity will boost tourism and support industrial corridors around Dehradun. What I find missing from that projection is any visible reckoning with the fact that the expressway does not reach Mussoorie itself. Every vehicle it delivers to Dehradun in a fraction of the earlier time still has to funnel onto the very same unwidened hill stretch that collapsed last week. That is not a coincidental juxtaposition of two unrelated news items; it is a supply chain, with the expressway as the intake and the old Dehradun-Mussoorie Road as the choke point.

I say this carefully: last week’s collapse was triggered by rainfall saturating the embankment, not by traffic volume directly, and I do not want to overstate a mechanical link that isn’t there. But higher volume raises the stakes of every such failure, in how many people are stranded, how much pressure builds to keep a weakened road open, and how much rushed widening work gets done on unstable slopes to cope with the load. The two roads appear to have been evaluated, if at all, as though they belonged to two entirely separate projects under two separate agencies, rather than as one continuous journey for the traveler.

Part of the reason such downstream questions may never have been asked is structural. Under India’s (Economic Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification of 2006, many highways and road-widening stretches below defined length thresholds are exempt from a full environmental impact assessment. If that exemption applied here, then the absence of a study covering hotel capacity, sanitation load or the old road’s carrying capacity is not a gap in my research; it may be a gap the law itself permits. This would not be the first time Himalayan carrying capacity has been flagged as inadequately assessed before construction. The 2023 land subsidence in Joshimath, and the Supreme Court-mandated High-Powered Committee set up to review the Char Dham road-widening project, both arrived at the same underlying finding: that road-building in this terrain proceeded well ahead of any serious study of what the land and the towns at either end could actually absorb.

It is worth asking whether the following questions were part of the impact analysis for the expressway, and what measures were put in place to manage the consequent burden on regional ecology and local civic life:

·         How much will passenger and commercial vehicle inflow into Dehradun and Mussoorie increase, and is there adequate parking capacity to absorb it?

·         Was the additional load the expressway places on the existing, unwidened Dehradun-Mussoorie stretch modelled as part of the expressway’s own clearance, or was it treated as a separate agency’s problem because the two roads fall under different jurisdictions?

·         What is the likely impact of higher vehicle inflow and construction-linked deforestation on local air quality, and what mitigation measures, if any, are built into the road contract?

·         How many additional hotel rooms will be needed to house the increased tourist inflow, and do local regulations even permit new tourist accommodation at that scale?

·         What additional water supply, sanitation, sewerage treatment, garbage disposal and healthcare capacity will the higher tourist inflow require, and is augmentation of these civic amenities planned alongside the road itself?

·         How will the expressway affect local residents through higher land and home prices, increased transit traffic, and food and hospitality inflation, and who is accountable for measures to protect local affordability and traffic-handling capacity?

·         Is the road designed for safe traffic flow at every exit and interchange, particularly at points where a 100-120 kmph expressway meets local roads?

·         How will a high-speed, access-controlled expressway affect villages along its route whose residents are used to a slower pace of life, and what safety awareness and training do they need for themselves, their livestock and their property?

·         What systems exist for periodic safety audits and disaster management, including medical response and rapid evacuation in the event of a major accident, and has responsibility for these systems been fixed before the road opened to the public?

Despite genuine effort, I have not been able to establish whether the impact study for the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway addressed any of these points. I raise them not to oppose the project, but to draw the attention of policymakers, regulatory authorities and civil society to what I consider a critical gap in how highway development is planned and executed in ecologically sensitive regions.

At minimum, a corridor of this kind should require a mandatory downstream carrying-capacity study covering every connecting road it feeds traffic into, an independent post-construction audit rather than a one-time pre-approval clearance, and a single accountable authority spanning both the new expressway and the older roads it terminates into, rather than the current split between agencies.

Investor takeaways

Faster connectivity is a genuine tailwind for Uttarakhand-linked hospitality, real estate and consumption stories, but the pace of civic infrastructure build-out (water, sewerage, healthcare) is the real gating factor for how much of that tailwind converts into sustainable earnings.

Where a new expressway feeds traffic into an older, unwidened connecting road under a different agency, that jurisdictional seam is itself a risk; closures on the connecting stretch can strand demand the expressway was built to capture.

Recurring landslide-driven closures are a direct operating risk for logistics, tourism and construction companies with revenue tied to these corridors, and are worth factoring into weather-linked earnings volatility.

If regulators tighten carrying-capacity and post-construction audit requirements in response to episodes like Joshimath, future Himalayan infrastructure timelines and costs could extend; this is worth watching as a sector-wide execution risk, not just a single-project one.

 

Think about simpler solutions

We have a habit of ignoring simpler solutions for our problems and love to over complicate things. Energy security and air pollution are two specific issues where the policymakers have often ignored simpler and sustainable solutions and favored adhoc solutions, often with uncertain outcomes.

When petrol prices rise, we cut fuel taxes, burdening fiscal balance with economy wide ramifications. When crude oil prices rise, we worry about the import bill. When Delhi’s air turns unbreathable, we restrict traffic and close schools. When accidents climb, we call for stricter enforcement. Each problem gets its own emergency response.

One question, however, rarely gets asked: why do we engineer ordinary family cars to run at 200–240 kmph when the highest permissible speed on any Indian road is 120 kmph, on access-controlled expressways, with 100 kmph the norm on national highways?

This is not a question of engineering capability. Indian manufacturers can build fast cars. The question is whether a country that imports the bulk of its crude oil, battles severe air pollution, and records one of the world’s highest road-accident tolls should keep paying, in fuel, cost and emissions, for a top-speed capability its drivers are legally barred from using.

The case in numbers

Consider two hypothetical family cars of similar size and utility, one engineered for a 240 kmph top speed, the other purpose-built for 150 kmph. Directionally, the trade-off may look like this:​

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The distinction matters: this is not about bolting an electronic speed limiter onto an existing 240 kmph car. It is about designing the vehicle, from engine and transmission to tyres and aerodynamics, around a lower top speed from the outset.

Caveat

India’s fuel-efficiency and emissions norms (BS-VI, CAFE) are measured over standardized drive cycles, not top speed, so a car’s advertised maximum speed does not feed directly into its certified mileage; efficiency gains would have to come through the weight and drivetrain changes described, not from the speed cap itself. Second, high-performance engines are frequently shared across model variants and export markets, so the cost and engineering savings from a lower top-speed design would vary widely by manufacturer and platform, and are unlikely to be uniform across the industry. The reader should treat the table as a plausible order of magnitude for the direction of the argument, not as a verified engineering estimate.

Why pay for speed we cannot use?

An ordinary Indian family car can often exceed 180–240 kmph, well beyond the 120 kmph ceiling on our fastest roads, and beyond what most global markets permit. Even in the United States, the highest posted speed limit is 85 mph, about 137 kmph, on a single 41-mile stretch of State Highway 130 in Texas; most US interstates cap out at 70–80 mph.

A car engineered for 240 kmph is not simply a car with a bigger engine. Reaching that speed safely requires a stronger transmission, larger brakes, higher-speed-rated tyres, more sophisticated suspension and cooling, and greater structural strength. Each addition adds weight, and weight compounds fuel consumption. It is an expensive chain: more speed capability leads to more power, a heavier drivetrain, bigger brakes and tyres, and ultimately more fuel burned, on every single journey, regardless of whether that top speed is ever used.

The oil, pollution and safety angles

India imports roughly 85% of the crude oil it consumes, so every additional liter burned adds to the import bill, pressures the rupee and widens the current account deficit. Fuel-price policy gets debated in detail. The amount of fuel a given vehicle needs to burn in the first place gets far less scrutiny.

The same logic applies to pollution. Reactive, winter-only restrictions on traffic and construction treat a structural problem as a seasonal one. A lighter, more efficient vehicle fleet reduces emissions at source, every day of the year, not only when air quality crosses a threshold.

On safety, the physics is straightforward: kinetic energy rises with the square of speed, so high-speed crashes are disproportionately more destructive. A lower speed ceiling will not by itself curb reckless driving, but resources currently spent engineering unusable top-end performance could instead fund better brakes, more airbags, stronger crash structures and wider adoption of electronic stability control.

Performance need not suffer

A 150 kmph ceiling does not mean a sluggish car. Top speed and usable performance are different things. What matters on Indian roads is strong 0–100 kmph acceleration and confident overtaking in the 80–120 kmph band, not a theoretical capability twice the legal limit.

Policy levers, not a ban

A blunt speed cap is not the only option. Fiscal policy could nudge the market toward efficiency without dictating design: lower registration fees or GST for lightweight, fuel-efficient vehicles, insurance incentives for safer and lower-risk cars, and taxation more closely linked to vehicle weight and engine capacity. The aim is to let the market reward efficiency rather than horsepower.

Investor takeaways

·         The oil-import and current-account channel is the more durable investment link: any structural reduction in average vehicle fuel consumption reduces India’s crude import intensity over time, a theme relevant to INR trajectory and to companies exposed to the import bill.

·         Passenger-vehicle OEMs face a genuine strategic question on where to allocate engineering spend, high-performance variants versus efficiency and lightweighting, as regulatory and fiscal incentives evolve; this is a multi-year theme, not a near-term catalyst.

·         Ancillary segments tied to lightweighting, efficient braking systems and advanced driver-assistance technology stand to benefit disproportionately if policy shifts incentives in this direction; treat any related exposure as a slow-moving structural theme.

Cockroaches, rats and termites

Three unlikely teachers

Cockroaches, rats and termites are not creatures anyone invites into their home. Biologically, though, they have a lot in common. All three live close to us, mostly unseen, active at night, and multiply quickly once conditions favor them. Cockroaches and termites even share a common ancestry, both belonging to the insect order Blattodea.

But it isn’t their biology that has made them part of everyday language. It’s the role each has come to symbolize. The cockroach stands for resilience — something that survives almost anything thrown at it. The rat stands for opportunism — quick to sense danger and quicker to leave. The termite stands for quiet, structural damage — weakening something from the inside, often before anyone notices.

I want to borrow these three ideas — resilience, opportunism and internal decay — not to describe people, but to describe what I observed at the protest site in Delhi last weekend, and what it might mean for how India’s political landscape shifts over the next few years.

Resilience: a movement that keeps showing up

I visited the student protest site at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi over the weekend. The immediate trigger was the NEET paper leak controversy, but what struck me was how the grievance has broadened. It no longer reads as anger about one exam. It reads as a wider demand for accountability — a demand that keeps resurfacing, gathering more voices each time it does.

That resilience is the interesting part. Protest movements in India have a habit of losing steam once the original trigger fades from headlines. This one hasn’t, at least not yet. What it currently lacks is a clear ideology or political vehicle — it is closer to a demand for competent governance than a platform with a defined manifesto. Whether it can convert that energy into something more durable, the way the anti-corruption movement of 2011 briefly did before losing momentum, remains an open question. The Tamil Nadu assembly election result is one template worth watching, since it showed how anti-incumbency sentiment can be organized into an electoral outcome rather than staying confined to a protest site.

Opportunism: how firm is the base, really?

At the protest site, I met several people who described themselves as long-standing supporters of the ruling government, and of the prime minister in particular. A few admitted, candidly, that their support isn’t unconditional — that a credible alternative could make them reconsider. That kind of honesty is more common in private conversation than in public commentary, but it points to something real: political loyalty, even where it looks solid from the outside, often has more give in it than the visible numbers suggest.

The journalists at the site were speculating on a related question — which coalition partners within the ruling NDA alliance might reposition themselves if public sentiment shifts further. This is ordinary political calculation, not disloyalty; coalition partners across the spectrum, in every country, recalibrate when the wind changes. It’s worth remembering that the government has its own counter-narrative here — pointing to welfare delivery, infrastructure execution and macro stability as reasons this loyalty should hold. Which reading proves correct will only be visible in hindsight.

Internal decay: the part that worries me most

The third theme is harder to pin to a single event. It’s the slower, less visible erosion of institutional trust caused by (i) the unholy nexus of corrupt public servant, unscrupulous businessmen and opportunist politician, and (ii) the perception, fair or not, that enforcement agencies and the judiciary are not always able to move quickly or independently against wrongdoing, whichever side of the political spectrum it comes from. I want to be careful here: I’m not asserting guilt against any individual or institution, only noting a pattern of public perception that shows up repeatedly in survey data and in conversations like the ones I had this weekend. Perception gaps like this matter for investors too — they show up eventually in governance risk premiums and in how foreign capital prices India relative to peers.

What this means going forward

·         A protest movement that refuses to fade (resilience).

·         A political base that looks firmer than it may actually be (opportunism).

·         A slow erosion of institutional trust that no single election result fixes (internal decay).

None of these three, on their own, changes an investment thesis overnight. But together, they are worth tracking as a governance risk indicator — the kind that eventually shows up in currency stability, policy continuity and how comfortable foreign capital feels holding Indian assets through an election cycle. 

Some random thoughts

 West Asia crisis

In June 2026, the US and Iran signed an agreement to extend their ceasefire by 60 days. This gave both sides time to negotiate a lasting solution to a long conflict. Most West Asian countries seemed to support this process. But Israel, the most important player in the region, kept its distance and did not fully sign on to the terms.

This week, Iran held the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, its Supreme Leader, who was killed in joint US-Israel air strikes in February 2026. Leaders from several countries attended the long-delayed funeral, and millions of Iranians came out on the streets of Tehran to mourn him. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has since taken over as Iran's new Supreme Leader.

Even as the funeral was underway, the fragile ceasefire came apart. In the past two days, Iran attacked commercial ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The US responded on 7 July with what it called “powerful strikes,” hitting more than 80 targets inside Iran, and reimposed the oil sanctions it had lifted as part of the ceasefire deal. Iran, in turn, said it would deliver a “crushing response” and struck US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain on 8 July. On the same day, speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, President Trump said he now considers the ceasefire “over” and a “waste of time.” Oil prices jumped sharply on the news.

Looking at the mood of the Iranian people, the stance of Iran's leadership on its right to enrich uranium and control the Strait of Hormuz, and Israel's position on Iran's rights, it seems to me that this conflict is far from over. This week's exchange of fire, coming barely three weeks after the ceasefire was signed, confirms that hoping for a lasting solution within the 60-day window was always more wishful thinking than realistic expectation.

A more likely path over the next couple of years could involve four things. First, Iran may push ahead with building a nuclear deterrent against Israel and prepare to avenge the killing of its former Supreme Leader. Second, GCC countries may continue to keep an equal distance from Iran, Israel and the US, even as some of them, like Kuwait and Bahrain, get drawn into the crossfire. Third, Israel may keep trying to weaken Iran's ability to strike it. And fourth, the US may keep swinging between war and peace, as it has done again this week.

Ethanol blending

The government's policy of blending ethanol with petrol has drawn sharp criticism from citizens. There have been complaints of vehicle damage and lower mileage due to blended fuel. Several environmental groups have also opposed the E20 policy, saying it uses too much water to produce ethanol.

The government has strongly defended the E20 policy, pointing to its environmental, agricultural and economic benefits. Automobile companies have also said that E20 fuel does not damage modern, compatible vehicles. A review of thousands of service records suggests there is no widespread evidence of engine damage, wear and tear, or corrosion caused by E20 fuel.

Even so, opposition parties and civil society groups have turned E20 into a popular campaign against the government. They allege that the blending policy mainly benefits the family of a minister who is in the ethanol production business.

This could well become a major election issue. It is not clear how the government will restore public trust in blended fuel and put this controversy to rest. If I were asked for a suggestion, I would say the government should make blended fuel optional rather than mandatory, and offer incentives such as a lower price for blended fuel or a subsidy on insurance premiums.

Infra construction quality

Poor quality of infrastructure, especially roads, along with allegations of large-scale corruption in awarding and executing key infrastructure projects, has become a common topic on social media.

While corruption cannot be ruled out, a more likely reason for the poor condition of newly built roads is rushed construction to meet deadlines, which are often set for political reasons. Poor design and inadequate safety audits are also major concerns for road quality in India.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that India spends much more than the global average to build its highways, yet the quality of these highways remains poor in terms of design, durability and comfort.

It would help to open up infrastructure construction to global competition and make it mandatory for all projects above Rs 50 million to be awarded through global tenders.

It would also be worthwhile to set up a dedicated highway police force to ensure the safety and security of highway travelers and to quickly address complaints of damage and accidents.

 

Who will teach the next generation?

Every week, a new wave of articles warns us that AI is killing jobs. The argument is always the same: automation replaces human work, and workers lose. It is a tidy story. It may also be the wrong one.

The real problem may be quieter, slower, and more damaging. AI is not destroying jobs. It is destroying the willingness of organizations to grow people. And that distinction matters enormously — for firms, for the economy, and especially for anyone entering the workforce today.

The Jevons Paradox is not the point

Most commentators reach for the Jevons Paradox when discussing AI and jobs. Jevons observed in the nineteenth century that more efficient steam engines led to more coal use, not less — because efficiency unlocked demand. Applied to AI: if AI makes workers more productive, we will want more output, not fewer workers.

That is a reasonable argument in some contexts. But it sidesteps the real question. This is not a story about wanting more output. This is a story about who would pay to grow people — and right now, the answer is: nobody.

The training problem nobody wants to own

Here is the economic reality that most commentators might be missing. Training a junior employee is expensive. It takes senior time, patience, and a long horizon. The company that invests in training a twenty-two-year-old today may collect the benefit in seven years — long after the person who did the training has moved on, and long after the manager who approved the budget has left for another firm.

AI changes this calculus sharply. With AI tools, a small team of experienced people can produce what used to require ten. The temptation to stop hiring and training juniors is not irrational — it is the logical response to short-term incentives. Every individual manager, evaluated on this quarter’s output, makes the same rational choice. Stop building the bench. Use the tools. Ship faster.

The result is a collective action problem. Every firm does what makes sense for them individually, and the system as a whole would stop producing the experienced mid-level talent it will need in a decade.

A few firms will win big — Later

There is an investment angle here worth watching. A small number of firms with genuinely long-time horizons will continue to train juniors, precisely because everyone else has stopped.

In five to seven years, when the hollowing out becomes visible, experienced mid-career professionals will be scarce. You can poach a few senior people. You cannot manufacture an entire generation of capable thirty-year-olds who simply were never trained. The firms that built bench strength quietly during the AI adoption frenzy will collect a meaningful scarcity premium. The firms that cut training entirely will find themselves unable to grow — not because they lack capital or technology, but because they lack people who know how to do things.

This is not speculative. It is a predictable consequence of the incentive structure described above. The only uncertainty is timing.

 So, what should a young person do?

If the market has stopped training you, the question becomes: how do you train yourself? And here, of all places, the Bhagavad Gita offers the clearest answer available.

Chapter 4, verse 34:

तद्विद्धि प्रणिपातेन परिप्रश्नेन सेवया |

उपदेक्ष्यन्ति ते ज्ञानं ज्ञानिनस्तत्वदर्शिन: ||

 

Seek this knowledge through humble surrender, sincere inquiry,

and devoted service — the wise who have seen the truth will teach you.

Shankaracharya, in his commentary on this verse, is precise about what each word means. He is not offering a general sentiment about being a good student. He is describing a method.

The three-part method

Pranipata — prostration. Not the performance of humility, but the actual thing. Approaching someone who knows more than you without the armor of your credentials, your opinions, or your need to appear capable. This is harder than it sounds, especially for people who are technically skilled and used to being the smartest person in the room.

Pariprasna — inquiry. Not asking surface questions to seem curious. Asking the real ones: Why did you make that call? What were you wrong about? What does this look like when it goes badly? These are the questions that extract genuine knowledge rather than polished answers.

Seva — service. Making yourself genuinely useful to the person you are learning from. Not networking. Not managing up. Actually doing work that helps them, so that the relationship is built on something real.

Those three words describe the entire apprenticeship model. And it is precisely this model that is being dismantled by the current AI adoption cycle.

Jnani versus Tattva-Darshi

The sharpest line in Shankara’s commentary is a distinction he draws between two kinds of knowers.

The jnani is the person who is learned, credentialled, fluent, and well-read. In today’s terms: someone who can produce polished output on any topic, speak confidently in meetings, and appear competent across every domain.

The tattva-darshi is different. Shankara says the word means one who has seen the truth. Not read about it. Not synthesized it from other sources. Seen it — through direct experience, through having done the work long enough to understand where it actually breaks.

His point is direct: knowledge imparted by those who have seen the truth takes effect. Knowledge from the merely learned does not, or not in the same way.

This is the whole game now. AI will make everyone look like a jnani. Fluent, articulate, able to produce output on anything within seconds. What AI cannot manufacture is the tattva-darshi: the person who has done the work long enough to know when the confident answer is wrong, to make a sound call on incomplete information, to see the thing beneath the surface that the tool cannot access.

The practical implication

For young people entering the workforce, the advice follows directly from the analysis.

Do not optimize your first job for title or brand name. Optimize it for how fast you get good — which means: how close you are to people who have actually seen the truth in your field.

A well-known firm where you spend three years producing AI-assisted output with minimal senior exposure will leave you fluent and shallow. A less prestigious role where you sit next to someone who has been doing this for twenty years, who makes real decisions and lets you watch — that will make you rare.

Approach those people through pranipata, pariprasna, and seva. Stay low. Ask the real questions. Earn your place by being useful. This is not advice about networking or impression management. It is a description of how knowledge actually transfers between people.

The market is quietly eliminating the apprenticeship. Your job is to find one anyway.

(This piece is mostly based on a post written by a dear friend, who is a great exponent of Shrimad Bhagwat Gita, and regularly delivers talks on Gita.)

 

Modi @ 12: The unfinished agenda of India’s development

What gets measured gets managed. What gets obscured gets inherited.

The completion of twelve years of the Narendra Modi-led NDA government has triggered a familiar debate. Supporters point to faster infrastructure creation, digitization of governance, improved tax compliance, stronger foreign policy visibility, record UPI adoption, rising formalization, and India’s emergence as one of the fastest-growing major economies.

Critics argue that beneath these achievements lie deeper structural weaknesses that have either persisted or worsened.

Both narratives contain elements of truth.

India today is larger, more digitally connected, and more visible on the global stage than it was in 2014. Yet the ultimate test of governance is not merely GDP growth or international ranking of GDP number. It is whether the country’s long-term developmental foundations have strengthened.

(I would like to make it clear that this is not an exercise in political partisanship. The purpose here is narrower and, in some ways, more demanding: to assess the domains where the record is objectively weak and the agenda remains unfinished.)

Human capital: The unfinished foundation

India’s most consequential competitive advantage is demographic: a large, young workforce that ought to be highly productive. Whether it will be, depends almost entirely on the quality of education and health systems built now. On this, the twelve-year record is mixed at the primary level and disappointing at the structural level.

Education

As per the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024 — approximately 50% of Class 5 students cannot read a Class 2-level text — a basic literacy failure at scale, after a decade of policy attention. Secondary education outcomes remain poor. Dropout rates among 15-16 year-olds average 8%, rising to 13% in Uttar Pradesh and 8.6% in Bihar. Teacher training, while expanded, remains syllabus-driven rather than competency-driven. The National Education Policy 2020, whatever its aspirations, has yet to produce measurable system-wide improvement at secondary and tertiary levels.

Public investment in education has consistently fallen short of the 6% of GDP target that NEP 2020 itself mandates. The structural deficit in higher education quality — as measured by India’s dismal showing in global university rankings — has not been meaningfully addressed.

Health

The trajectory on health outcomes shows improvement on legacy indicators: infant mortality has declined from approximately 40 per 1,000 live births in 2014 to 25 by 2023; the maternal mortality rate has improved to 80 per 100,000 live births (compared to 130 in 2014). These improvements reflect the continuation of long-run secular trends, aided by schemes like Janani Suraksha Yojana.

What has not improved is the structural commitment to public health financing. India’s public health spending continues to hover around 1.9% of GDP — well below the National Health Policy 2017 target of 2.5% by 2025. Critically, Union transfers to states for the National Health Mission dropped from 75.9% of the health budget in 2014-15 to just 43% in 2024-25 in real terms. The burden of healthcare costs on households remains severe: out-of-pocket expenditure accounts for approximately 48% of total health spending, pushing an estimated 63 million Indians into poverty annually due to catastrophic medical costs.

Ayushman Bharat is a genuine policy innovation, extending coverage to previously uninsured populations. Its operational effectiveness, however, remains contested — particularly the quality of care delivered and the adequacy of insurance payouts for complex conditions. Access to basic primary care, especially in rural areas, remains structurally underfunded.

The verdict on human capital is that incremental improvements have occurred, but the structural investment required to realize the demographic dividend has not been made. The 2030s will reveal the cost of this underinvestment.

Employment: The disputed ledger

No topic in Indian economic policy discourse is more contested — or more politically charged — than employment. Both the government’s triumphalist claims and the opposition’s ‘jobless growth’ narrative oversimplify a complex picture.

The data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) does show genuine improvement on several headline metrics. The Worker Population Ratio increased by approximately 9 percentage points between 2017 and 2023, implying a 26% rise in employment over the period. Youth unemployment fell from 17.8% in 2017-18 to 10% in 2022-23. Female labour force participation has increased, particularly in rural areas. The employment elasticity of GDP between 2017 and 2023 was approximately 1.11 — suggesting that every 1% increase in GDP was accompanied by a 1.11% rise in employment.

These are not fabricated numbers, and dismissing them entirely would be dishonest. However, the quality of employment created remains the central and largely unresolved concern.

The increase in employment is predominantly in self-employment, unpaid family labour, and informal agriculture — not in the organized manufacturing or formal services jobs that generate the quality of employment needed to absorb India’s approximately 12 million annual entrants to the labour force. The share of manufacturing in total employment has not meaningfully increased. India has not replicated the manufacturing-led employment transformation that propelled East Asian economies. EPFO payroll additions (a proxy for formal employment) remain modest relative to the scale of the workforce.

The absence of a population census since 2011 also introduces genuine uncertainty into employment data — a point that is more than a political talking point. The PLFS itself notes methodological limitations in capturing the full complexity of informal employment.

Assessment: The ‘jobless growth’ narrative is an overstatement. But the quality of employment — formal, productive, adequately compensated — has not kept pace with economic growth. This is not a failure unique to the Modi years, but twelve years of high growth should have delivered a more decisive structural transformation.

Energy security: The widening import gap

India’s energy vulnerability is the most under-discussed structural risk in the country’s economic story. Twelve years of a government that has consistently invoked energy security as a national priority have paradoxically left India more import-dependent than it was in 2014.

The data is unambiguous. Domestic crude oil production has fallen from 36.94 million tonnes in 2015-16 to 28.7 million tonnes in 2024-25 — a 22.3% decline. Simultaneously, crude oil imports rose from 202.85 million tonnes in 2015-16 to 243.22 million tonnes in 2024-25. India’s crude oil import dependence has increased from 84% in 2014-15 to approximately 88-90% in 2024-25. The annual crude import bill reached approximately USD 137 billion in FY2024-25.

The situation is made structurally worse by a depletion of domestic reserves. India’s proved crude oil reserves fell from 762.73 million tonnes in 2014 to 672.07 million tonnes — a 12% decline. Natural gas reserves fell more sharply, from 1,427 BCM in 2014 to 1,073 BCM in 2025, a 25% reduction. Despite opening the oil and gas sector to 100% FDI, India attracted only about USD 8.19 billion in upstream FDI between April 2000 and September 2024 — a rounding error by global exploration standards.

The renewable exception — A genuine achievement

The solar power story is, without qualification, a significant achievement of the Modi years. India’s installed solar capacity increased from just 3 GW in 2014 to approximately 130 GW by 2025 — a more than 40-fold increase. Overall renewable capacity grew from 76 GW in 2014 to over 233 GW in 2025. India now ranks third globally in solar capacity. This is real, meaningful, and strategically important.

The limitation, and it is a significant one, is that renewables’ share of actual electricity generation (~16%) remains well below their share of installed capacity (~50%), due to the intermittency problem and inadequate storage infrastructure. Coal-fired generation still accounts for over 80% of actual power produced. The structural energy vulnerability — particularly to Middle East geopolitics — therefore persists. The West Asia disruptions of early 2026 demonstrated this with painful clarity.

Crude import dependence (2014-15): 84%

Crude import dependence (2024-25): ~89%

Domestic production decline: -22.3% (2015-16 to 2024-25)

Solar capacity (2014): 3 GW

Solar capacity (2025): ~130 GW

Income and wealth inequality: The inconvenient numbers

India’s growth story has generated enormous aggregate wealth. The distribution of that wealth is a separate, and far less comfortable, conversation.

The top 10% of Indians hold approximately 57% of national income; the top 1% hold approximately 22%. The bottom 50% account for roughly 13% of national income. Wealth concentration is even more extreme: the top 1% own approximately 40% of total national wealth, while the bottom 50% hold just 3%. The wealth Gini coefficient rose from 81.2% in 2008 to 85.4% in 2018 and has remained elevated since.

The government has pointed, with some justification, to the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey of 2022-23 showing a Gini Index of 25.5 — a relatively low figure. This requires context: this is a consumption-based measure, not an income or wealth-based measure, and is not comparable to the income-Gini figures cited by most international institutions. The World Bank itself noted this distinction in its April 2025 Poverty & Equity Brief. Consumption surveys structurally understate the true inequality in income and wealth.

There is a legitimate discussion to be had about methodology. But the direction of travel is not seriously in dispute: labor’s share of national income declined from approximately 32% in the 1990s to roughly 22% by 2024, per ILO data. CEO pay rose 50% between 2019 and 2024, while worker wages grew by less than 1%. The billionaire class has expanded dramatically; Asia’s two wealthiest individuals are Indian. This has occurred during a period of strong aggregate GDP growth — which is precisely the point. Growth has not been distributionally neutral.

The government’s narrative on inequality leans heavily on poverty reduction data, which is real and significant. But poverty reduction and widening inequality can coexist — and in India’s case, they have.

Ecological vulnerabilities: Progress and denial

India’s ecological stress represents the compound interest on decades of growth-at-all-costs development — and the Modi government has managed this inheritance with mixed results.

Forests and Biodiversity

The global annual rate of net forest loss has declined from 10.7 million hectares (1990-2000) to 4.12 million hectares (2015-2025), reflecting global improvements in forest governance. India’s official forest cover figures show a modest increase in recorded forest area. However, independent analyses consistently note that the definitional inclusion of monoculture plantations and agroforestry distorts the picture. Net natural forest loss continues, biodiversity pressures remain acute, and forest clearances for infrastructure projects have been expedited rather than constrained under the current regime, including significant amendments to the Forest Conservation Act.

Water

India’s water stress is accelerating. The country accounts for approximately 17% of the world’s population but has access to only 4% of its fresh water. Groundwater depletion continues at alarming rates across the Indo-Gangetic plains and peninsular India. The Jal Jeevan Mission, which aims to provide tap water connections to all rural households, has achieved impressive connection numbers (over 80% coverage reported). Independent assessments, however, note significant gaps between connections and functional, quality water supply. The deeper structural challenge of aquifer depletion has not been addressed.

Air Quality

India contains 42 of the world’s 50 most polluted cities by PM2.5 concentration. Delhi’s air quality routinely reaches hazardous levels for months each year. The National Clean Air Program has set targets; measurable progress at the population level remains elusive. This is an area where 12 years of policy attention has yielded insufficient results.

Against these challenges, the renewable energy transition is a genuine bright spot. India’s commitments under the Paris Agreement have been largely honored, and the clean energy deployment trajectory is one of the world’s more credible energy transitions.

Institutional credibility: The slow erosion

Democratic health depends not only on elections — which India continues to hold — but on the credibility of the institutions that make those elections meaningful and that arbitrate between citizens and the state. This is where the twelve-year record raises the most serious concerns.

Judiciary

The formal independence of India’s judiciary is constitutionally guaranteed, and the Supreme Court has delivered important rulings that constrain executive power. But the perception of increasing politicization is not limited to partisan critics. Freedom House’s 2024 report notes that while the judiciary is formally independent, ‘courts have shown signs of increasing politicization’ and government judicial appointments have been considered political in nature by observers. Several high-profile Supreme Court rulings have been favorable to the ruling party on politically sensitive matters. The pace of judicial appointments and the government’s posture toward the collegium system have been sources of institutional friction.

Election commission and democratic institutions

The Election Commission of India has faced unusually sharp credibility questions during this period. Opposition parties, civil society organizations, and a growing body of expert opinion have raised concerns about the Commission’s assertiveness in enforcing the Model Code of Conduct evenhandedly. The 2024 Lok Sabha elections were considered broadly free and fair — the outcome itself was proof of that, with the BJP performing worse than projected. But the process, including VVPAT verification controversies and the appointment process for Election Commissioners, has drawn sustained scrutiny.

Press Freedom

The Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index ranked India 159th in 2024 and 157th in 2026 — among the lowest-ranked democracies in the world. The methodology of this index is contestable, and the government has credibly argued that India’s 900+ television channels and thousands of print outlets constitute genuine media plurality. The concern, however, is structural: media ownership has consolidated dramatically. The acquisition of NDTV by the Adani Group in 2022 and the creation of JioStar through a Reliance-Disney merger have raised well-documented concerns about editorial independence in the concentrated ownership environment.

India has moved from ‘Free’ to ‘Partly Free’ in the Freedom House classification, a designation maintained since 2021. The V-Dem Institute classifies India as an ‘Electoral Autocracy.’ These designations are contested and carry Western institutional biases. But the direction of the trend — even adjusting for methodological limitations — is difficult to dismiss.

Law enforcement and the corruption paradox

Perhaps the most difficult section to write — and the most important for institutional credibility — concerns the use of investigative agencies and the government’s relationship with political corruption.

India’s Corruption Perceptions Index score was 36 in 2013 (when the Modi government inherited the UPA’s record). It stood at 38 in 2024 — a marginal deterioration that prompted the government itself to distance itself from the methodology. The government’s rhetoric has been consistently and emphatically anti-corruption. The substantive record is more complicated.

The Indian Express conducted an investigation in 2024 that documented 25 opposition politicians facing central agency investigations who crossed over to the BJP since 2014. Of these, 23 received reprieve — with three cases closed entirely and 20 stalled or placed in cold storage. In contrast, the same investigation noted that between 2014 and September 2022, 121 prominent political leaders came under the ED’s radar, of whom 115 were from opposition parties.

The pattern is not entirely new in Indian politics — the weaponization of investigation agencies predates Modi. But the scale and systematicity of the ‘washing machine’ phenomenon (as it has come to be called across party lines, including by a former BJP state president who first used the metaphor) is unprecedented. This is not partisan allegation; it is documented by the country’s most respected investigative journalism.

The corrosive effect on institutional credibility is twofold: it undermines the legitimacy of genuine anti-corruption action when it occurs, and it normalizes a transactional relationship between political loyalty and legal jeopardy. This is not a foundation on which rule of law can be built.

A government that came to power on an explicit anti-corruption mandate and has expanded the remit and resources of the ED must be held to a higher standard on this dimension. The ‘washing machine’ pattern represents a material failure against that standard.

Conclusion: The 12-year balance sheet

The Modi government’s achievements are real and should not be elided in an honest assessment. The physical infrastructure build-out, digital public infrastructure, formalization of the economy through GST and DBT, and the renewable energy transition are all genuine program successes.

But twelve years is long enough for structural failures to be owned. The human capital foundation — in education quality and public health investment — remains inadequate for the ambitions of a country claiming to be a future economic superpower. Energy import dependence has worsened despite ambitious rhetoric. Income and wealth inequality have increased materially, even as poverty has been reduced. Ecological stress is unaddressed at systemic scale. And the credibility of democratic institutions — judiciary, election commission, investigative agencies, and a free press — has declined by most independent measures.

The investment implications of this assessment are not trivial. An economy with deteriorating human capital quality, rising inequality, deepening energy import dependence, and weakening institutional credibility faces compounding structural headwinds that will eventually show up in growth sustainability, FDI attractiveness, and market valuations.

The next election cycle will offer a fresh mandate — to this government or to an alternative. The structural challenges catalogued here, however, are not election-cycle problems. They are generational ones, and they will require a generational commitment of political will and public resources that Indian politics, across all parties, has thus far found difficult to sustain.

Hope could drive you insane

In a striking illustration of India's deepening climate emergency, on multiple days in April and May 2026, all fifty of the world's hottest cities were located within Indian borders — a record corroborated by real-time temperature tracking platform AQI.in. Uttar Pradesh accounted for more than half of those cities, with temperatures hovering between 43°C and 44°C across scores of districts, while parts of Maharashtra's Vidarbha region breached 46°C.

Yet searing temperatures are only one dimension of a multi-front crisis. Large swaths of the country are simultaneously contending with devastating heatwaves, violent sandstorms, acute water shortages, and frequent power outages. A severe wildfire has raged through Uttarakhand. Crops are withering under abnormally high temperatures. Livestock are succumbing to heat and drought. Ordinary citizens are suffering heat-related illnesses alongside water and electricity shortfalls. And the broader economy is straining under high inflation, widening fiscal and trade deficits, a depreciating currency, and rising bond yields.

Compounding the material hardship is a crisis of reputation and governance. Avoidable foreign policy missteps, unpredictable economic decisions, a chronic accountability deficit, and systemic mismanagement have eroded India's standing both at home and abroad.

Warnings Ignored

None of this should have come as a surprise. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) issued advance warnings of above-normal summer temperatures months before the season began. Global climate agencies had been signaling the likelihood of a strong El Niño event — and potentially a super El Niño — since at least February of this year. Heatwaves, water scarcity, wildfires, and grid overload are precisely the contingencies that governments and disaster-management authorities should have anticipated and prepared for in advance.

War clouds had been gathering over West Asia for several years. Energy-price shocks, inflationary pressures, and supply-chain disruptions were the very minimum that any forward-looking administration should have modelled and mitigated against.

None of this preparatory work appears to have been done. Rather than acknowledging the gathering risks, the government remained in denial — and, according to multiple reports, actively disseminated reassuring but misleading information to the public until state elections had concluded.

An existential threat demanding existential urgency

The stakes extend far beyond any single political cycle. Some credible research published recently projects that heat-related mortality in India could escalate several-fold under high-emissions scenarios in the coming decades. One study estimates that annual heat deaths across South Asia could exceed 400,000 by 2045, with India bearing the heaviest burden. Since 1990, one quarter of all heat-related excess deaths globally have occurred in India.

Meanwhile, India's Himalayan glaciers are retreating at an alarming rate. Studies by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) indicate that approximately 75% of Himalayan glaciers are in retreat, and research from the University of Leeds found that Himalayan ice loss over recent decades has occurred at a rate ten times higher than the long-run historical average. Major river systems — the Ganga, Yamuna, Indus, and Brahmaputra — face long-term threats to their base flows, imperiling agriculture, drinking water, and hydroelectric power for hundreds of millions of people.

A government genuinely alive to these existential stakes would be mobilizing resources, reforming institutions, and communicating urgently with citizens. Instead, the policy agenda has featured landmark statue construction and road-building projects of questionable strategic priority.

The youth crisis: Anxiety, aspiration, and despair

The mismanagement of competitive and school examinations has added yet another dimension to the crisis. The cumulative effect on young people is measurable. According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), over 40 per cent of all suicides in India are committed by those below the age of 30 — a share that represents roughly double the global average for that age cohort, according to experts at AIIMS. In 2022, 1.71 lakh suicides were recorded in India; among the young, this figure marked a 27 per cent rise compared to 2018.

The broader social picture is equally sobering. Affluent Indians are increasingly seeking to emigrate or to secure foreign residency for their children. Those without such options face a system that offers diminishing returns on effort and aspiration.

Investor confidence is wavering. Entrepreneurs are deferring capital allocation. The economic dynamism that India's demographic dividend was supposed to generate remains frustratingly latent.

The danger of hope deferred

An overwhelming majority of Indians appear to be sustaining themselves on hope — the expectation that conditions will improve, that governance will strengthen, that the arc of the country's trajectory bends, eventually, toward better days.

That hope is neither irrational nor unwarranted. India possesses extraordinary reserves of talent, entrepreneurship, and resilience. But hope, unaccompanied by accountability and action, is a fragile vessel.

As the character Red — played by Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption — observed with characteristic economy: “Hope is a dangerous thing. It can drive you insane.” The line resonates differently when the hope in question is that of a nation waiting for its institutions to deliver on their most basic obligations.

India's crises — climatic, institutional, and social — are not destiny. They are the cumulative product of choices: choices about what to prioritize, what to acknowledge, and whom to hold accountable. Different choices remain possible. But they require, first, an honest reckoning with the scale of what is already unfolding.