The young are restless! Now clubbed into a group called Gen Z, they are taking to the streets, fighting governments - from Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Morocco, Peru and Kenya, with significant movements also in Indonesia, the Philippines, Serbia, Togo and Mexico. The first breakout of Gen Z was the LGBTQ+ movement in the US.

The issues are different from corruption, unemployment, lack of affordability, identity politics, LGBTQ+ questions, climate anxiety, breakdown of government services, education, and a general sense that the world is broken.

We, of the greying generations before them, judge them, their work culture, their lax timelines, mental-health days, entitlement, etc. We also marvel at their me-first, me-always lens, probably a little of that would be good for us. We are offended that Gen Z is out of break what we are desperately trying to hold together - our entire world.

I considered the dharmic appreciation of Gen Z in an earlier post (also linked below). Here I want to suggest that the Gen Z protests are a symptom - an effect. They are not the problem. Their anger is real but their direction is manipulated using an ingenious technique during their coming of age.

How to manipulate a generation?

The process is simple - find their grievance, isolate them, group them under an identity and direct them at some target.

The science of manipulation is well understood. It has been studied for a very long time. From Dale Carnegie to study of Germany in World War II, Korean war, to Milgram, Tajfel and Turner, etc.

The tools are different, adapted for today’s world.

First, we need grievance!

At the centre of manipulation is a grievance. Expert manipulators know that they cannot choose a grievance well in advance. An imposed grievance does not connect and thus does not have the power to seed a movement. The best course of action is to highlight all the grievances, amplify them and poke them to check if you hit a nerve. This process goes on all the time. Leaders connected with grassroots are able to put their finger on the pulse of the masses very effectively. Those disconnected, cannot amplify a genuine grievance even if it is served to them on a platter.

Isolation is critical

The basic template of isolation is simple - convince the person that no one understands them. Not parents, not teachers, no one from college, not seniors, not bosses - no one! Technology makes it easier. It captures her attention, makes the real-world a boring distraction, and keeps connections shallow. So many connections but none meaningful make the isolation real.

Isolation alone is not enough. For a movement to rise you need action. A blissful isolation leads to peace. A sad isolation leads to inaction - pathos. You need to create an uncomfortable isolation, an angry isolation.

For anger, you need dissonance. A stark contrast between their hopeless situation and possible bliss that others are enjoying creates a dissonance that feeds the anger. Starker the contrast, more the anger. So, make it starker - make the pain real and the pleasure fake. Hammer upon their grievances. Convince them that ALL paths lead to pain and suffering. Redirect the natural instinct of pursuit of happiness to fake highs and call it experimentation. For older generations it was cigarettes, then weed, then harder drugs, even pain-killers, each generation had some fake-happiness path sold to them.

Thus isolated, disillusioned and angry youth ask the expected question. Why can’t their world-view become true? Their innocent world view that says accept all, embrace all, universal love, world peace, pro-animal, pro-environment, pro-inclusivity, no hunger, prosperity for all, etc. Why can’t we have it?

The ideals are not inherently wrong. But when they become the only lens, they produce two responses.

Some turn inward and change themselves: Rastafarian movements, hippie culture, veganism, or radical shifts in sexual identity and preferences.

Others turn outward and try to change the world: the classic rebel youth, “save the planet,” clean the rivers, volunteer for the poor, save the stray dogs, etc.

For political disruption we need them in groups

An isolated person aches to belong. So YOU hand them a group. YOU define it for them, through media, through the socials, through a thousand small messages, until they accept your label as their own. You give them a special language. Gen-Z lingo is not an accident; a private dialect that outsiders cannot follow - it is an innovative fence. It keeps the herd inside and everyone else out. This way, YOU get to define them. They rely on the algorithm and the influencer decide it for them. And you decide WHO is that influencer!

To make the group closer, you make others resent this tribe. “Gen-Z has no work ethic.” “They are too sensitive, they are triggered by everything.” The resentment is not a side effect. It is manufactured by amplifying the slacker from the Gen-Z group. Mutual contempt brings the group close ranks. And once the group is sealed, you control the leader — or, in a leaderless movement, you control the mood, which is even better, because a mood cannot be arrested.

Now you have a weapon in search of a target!

Your weapon is an isolated, wounded, morally certain, tightly-bonded group that speaks its own language and distrusts everyone outside it. All that remains is to aim it and fire to get a massive confrontation.

But you have to be careful before confrontation erupts. In a confrontation, the group dynamics get exposed, the shortcomings come to the front - most groups fizzle out. Hence it is important to choose the right target at the right time for the group. Aim it at the government and you get regime change. Aim it at society and you get a culture war.

Do it right and you see organised movements like Occupy Wall Street, pride parades, and now the Gen Z uprisings we are witnessing from Kathmandu to Lima.

This is not unique

One may say it is essential to the society. The youth aspiring for an ideal world with energy, vigour, a low tolerance for hypocrisy, a sense that injustice can actually be fixed are all part of growing up. So is the hunger to bond with one’s own kind. These are not unique to Gen-Z. They were true of us, and of our parents, and of theirs. The young will always find their tribe. In every single generation, they do.

So the interesting question is not how to stop them. You cannot, and you should not want to. The interesting question is this: how do we make sure that this tribe betters humanity — challenges our institutions, questions our lazy assumptions, forces us to be better —without tearing the social fabric apart in the process?

A better way? Yes, it is possible

The mistake is to ask what is wrong with Gen-Z. The right question is what Gen-X, the millennials and the rest of us must do differently. Because the manipulation only works on a generation that feels unheard. Close that gap and the machine loses its fuel.

• First, listen

  • Not the performative listening where we wait for our turn to lecture. Actual listening. Their grievances are real be it corruption, a rigged economy, no jobs, no housing, a planet on fire.

• Then, connect

  • If isolation is the foundation of the whole scheme. Connection is the antidote. A young person who has one older person who genuinely gets them is far harder to radicalise, in any direction.

• Acknowledge our own shortcomings

  • We have to be honest about the world we are working in. This generation comes of age at a moment when truth itself is ideologically-coded and fake news makes it impossible to know true facts. We let this happen. The least we can do is be truthful in how we report the world to them.

  • And we should ask ourselves hard questions. Are we actually focused on making things better — or just on being right? We too were dealt a bad hand by history. But let us not take it out on the young.

• Highlight the good

  • The algorithm hates good news. It will happily feed me sunny days and cats having fun — rainbows and puppy dogs — and it will happily feed me outrage. What it will not feed me is progress. So we have to supply it ourselves.

  • Give me the news of improvement, of things that are quietly getting better. Give me realism — the world is not perfect, it never will be — but the truth is that it is improving. And, most important of all, cheer them when Gen-Z improve somethings. Let them know they are part of the improvement, not merely victims of a decline.

  • Dividing the world into two tribes — old versus young, left versus right, us versus them — forces everyone to pick a side. But there are never only two sides. There are many sides, many tribes, and the real ones do not run along generational lines at all. They run across generations. The decent people of every age group have far more in common with each other than with the loudest voices of their own cohort. That is the alliance worth building.

• From outrage-maxing to sense-maxing

  • Modern media — social and traditional alike — is in the business of outrage-maxing.

  • Outrage is profitable; sense is not.

  • We do not have to play that game. We can talk sense. We can tone it down. We can, deliberately and stubbornly, notice and reward good behaviour instead of amplifying the worst. In an economy built on outrage, calm is a defiant act.

In sum

Gen-Z is not the problem. Gen-Z is the alarm. The discontent is real, the template used to channel it is ancient, and the responsibility for what happens next sits — where it has always sat — with the older generations who are working this world and hold its levers.

So the onus is on us. Patience is the key; a generation cannot be argued out of its anger overnight, and it should not be. And in the end we must do the oldest thing of all — simply follow our dharma. Do our duty by the young, honestly and without agenda, and trust that a generation that is truly heard has no need to be manipulated by anyone.

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Over the last few weeks, we have seen two very different groups of young Indians walking with a sankalpa.

Thousands walked from Jantar Mantar towards Parliament. Around the same time, lakhs of Kanwariyas were walking towards Shiva, and some were even running the Dak Kanwar, carrying Gangā jal for Jalabhishek. Around this season, we also see the Wari, where lakhs of Warkaris walk towards Pandharpur chanting the name of Vitthal.

All these journeys inconvenience the body. They affect traffic and disrupt normal life around them. More importantly, all of them show us the enormous power of young people coming together around a shared purpose.

The real difference is not that one group walked in protest while another walked in devotion. The real difference is what their collective energy was ultimately being used to create.

The march towards Parliament began with a genuine issue. Students wanted justice over examination irregularities, and they had every right to demand answers and accountability. Protest is not wrong. In fact, standing up for someone else’s right to a fair examination can itself come from responsibility towards the people around you.

The problem was what the movement eventually became.

Somewhere along the way, the students for whom this supposedly began seemed to get lost. Other political and ideological forces joined the mobilisation. We saw abusive language, attacks on Hindu Gods, attacks on Bharat, anger and aggression becoming increasingly central to the movement. What began as a demand for justice increasingly looked like an attempt to create unrest and force a democratically elected government into surrender.

This becomes even more difficult to understand because the Education Minister had already acknowledged the problems and several corrective measures had been initiated much before the march to Parliament. Yet the demand for his resignation became non-negotiable.

If the sankalpa was really justice for students, then students suffering because of examination and recruitment failures elsewhere, including Jharkhand, should have generated the same sustained mobilisation. Justice cannot become important only when a particular government can be targeted through it.

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This is where the comparison with the Kanwariya becomes interesting.

He too has a sankalpa. He too leaves home and puts his body through discomfort. He walks for kilometres, sometimes barefoot, and in the Dak Kanwar he may even run while his group carries the Gangā jal continuously towards its destination.

But he is not walking to make someone else surrender. He is walking to learn to surrender himself.

You do not merely say that something is sacred to you. You undertake something with your body for it.

The Gangā jal that finally reaches the Shiva linga has cost the pilgrim time, comfort, effort and discipline. That cost is precisely what turns the water into his or her offering.

This is the deeper purpose of pilgrimage. A pilgrimage is not meant to be a conquest. You do not undertake it to prove that you are greater than someone else. You deliberately accept difficulty so that something within you can become smaller. Your comfort becomes less important. Your compulsions become less important. For a little while, something that you consider sacred becomes more important than you.

That is why the contrast between the two sankalpas is worth thinking about.

One kind of collective energy can become increasingly focused on making somebody else surrender. The other is consciously directed towards surrendering something within oneself.

One can fill public discourse with anger, abuse and Vāk-viṣa. The other attempts to bring some sweetness of devotion into one’s life.

The consequences of both extend far beyond the walk itself because what we repeatedly think, speak and do eventually shapes the kind of human beings we become.

The Wari gives us another beautiful example of the same possibility. Lakhs of people walk towards Pandharpur together. They eat together, sleep together, sing together and serve one another while chanting Vitthal Vitthal. People who may never otherwise have met become part of one community because they share something they consider sacred.

This is where both these very different movements teach us something important about the power of community.

CJP understood community extremely well. An emotion that began online became a physical community on the ground. Young people found others who shared their concerns. They developed a common language, common symbols and a sense of belonging. An individual sitting alone with his anger suddenly discovered thousands of others saying, “I feel this too.”

We should learn from that.

Sanatana Dharma has been creating communities at an extraordinary scale for centuries. The Kanwar Yatra brings together enormous numbers of people, many of them young. The Wari brings lakhs together year after year. These are not communities created around a political leader or a common enemy. At their best, they are communities created around devotion, discipline, seva and something larger than the individual.

Yet we are remarkably poor at amplifying them.

A protest involving thousands can dominate social media for weeks. An abusive slogan becomes a reel. A confrontation becomes breaking news. Anger travels extraordinarily fast online.

Meanwhile, lakhs and sometimes crores of people can voluntarily undertake a pilgrimage, and we rarely stop to ask what makes a young person put his body through this.

Why is the young person shouting angrily at a barricade more visible than the young person running with Gangā jal?

Both are young. Both have energy. Both are willing to endure discomfort. Both understand the power of community. The question is what we encourage that energy to become.

This is why protecting Sanatana Dharma cannot only mean responding when someone abuses our Gods or attacks our traditions on social media. We also have to become much better at building, strengthening and amplifying communities around Dharma itself.

What if the community created during the Kanwar Yatra did not simply disappear after Jalabhishek? What if the relationships created during the Wari did not end at Pandharpur? What if young people who discover this sweetness of devotion remained connected through seva, learning, responsibility and spiritual seeking throughout the year?

That would not mean creating another angry counter-mob. The objective should be exactly the opposite. It should be to create a mass movement for inner transformation.

That inner transformation does not mean withdrawing from the world or becoming indifferent to injustice. Devotion towards knowledge can make you fight for a student’s right to a fair examination. Devotion towards your country can make you take responsibility for its institutions. Devotion towards people around you can make their suffering your concern. A community rooted in Dharma can absolutely organise for justice.

The difference is in what drives the action.

Justice need not require hatred. Responsibility need not require abuse. Courage need not require Vāk-viṣa. A person can stand firmly against injustice without allowing someone else’s political or ideological agenda to use his genuine grievance to create anarchy.

That is perhaps the most important lesson from these two walks.

Young India clearly has no shortage of energy, commitment or sankalpa. It is capable of building enormous communities both online and on the ground.

The question is what we organise that energy around.

We should learn from CJP’s ability to turn online emotion into an active physical community, while refusing to imitate the anger, abuse and ideological piggybacking that eventually overshadowed the original students’ cause.

At the same time, we should stop treating the Kanwar Yatra and the Wari merely as annual religious events. These are already enormous living communities. They need to become more visible, more connected and more active. Their devotion can express itself through seva, responsibility, protection of Dharma, concern for society and, when necessary, standing together for justice.

Young India should not allow genuine issues to become vehicles through which someone else’s vile agenda creates anger and unrest.

We can organise around something far more powerful.

We can organise around the possibility that Sanatana Dharma has always placed before us: transform the human being, build strong communities around that transformation, and allow those transformed human beings to transform the world around them.

Perhaps that is the sankalpa worth amplifying.

In Part 2, I was trying to work out why standing up gets you noticed but doesn’t automatically earn you trust. The answer I kept landing on was commitment. But sitting with that a little longer, I realized many times, commitment and charisma get treated like they’re the same thing, and they’re really not.

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I guess, we live in a moment where leadership gets confused with visibility constantly. The loudest voice in the room is assumed to be the strongest. The person who speaks most confidently is assumed to know the most. Whoever gathers the most attention is assumed to be leading. But attention is not leadership. Sometimes real leadership is happening quietly, most of the time invisibly, while everyone’s looking elsewhere.

I read about this story somewhere. In December 1964, a cyclone tore through the Pamban Bridge, the railway link connecting Rameswaram to the mainland. For that town it was their lifeline gone and not just a small infrastructure damage. Movement stopped completely. A whole community was cut off. The Railways estimated months to repair it.

A young engineer named E. Sreedharan was handed the job. Now, he didn’t become a leader by giving a speech about resilience. He became one by solving the problem, studying the damage, mobilizing the team, staying disciplined on every detail, because in a bridge, you cannot make small mistakes. He restored it far ahead of schedule.

That’s what commitment actually looks like.

Years later, building the Delhi Metro, the scale was completely different but the principle was same. A city choking on traffic, public transport failing it, and an entire culture of delay and cost overruns that everyone had just accepted as normal. Sreedharan’s leadership there wasn’t flamboyant either. It came from one simple refusal to accept inefficiency. Delay and disorder cannot be treated as the natural condition of public work. He worked with discipline. Meetings started on time. Decisions got followed through. The whole culture communicated one thing, this was never about anyone’s personal importance, it was about delivering what people actually needed.

That’s the power I keep coming back to when I try to understand what leadership really is. It’s not something that dominates a room. It is the one that changes the room.

I think today we’ve started mistaking constant expression for commitment. Posting an opinion every day can look committed. Speaking aggressively can look like courage. Attracting followers can look like influence. This is what I personally feel is happening with the leadership of the CJP movement. But then what is the real test of leadership? I think, the real test is -

Can someone stay with one problem long enough to actually solve it? Can they keep working when nobody’s praising them? Can they stay disciplined after the excitement of the announcement wears off? Can they build something that keeps serving people even when their own name has stopped being part of the conversation?

Charisma gathers people around a personality. Commitment gathers people around a possibility. Charisma creates excitement. Commitment creates trust, but only over time. Charisma makes people admire you. Commitment makes people believe in the work itself.

Someone who depends only on charisma has to keep performing, keep proving their importance, keep occupying attention. Someone rooted in commitment stops needing to be seen and starts being consumed instead with what actually needs to get done.

None of this means communication doesn’t matter, it clearly does. But communication without commitment is just theatre. Visibility without responsibility is just noise. And influence without discipline is genuinely dangerous.

Here’s the part I find myself sitting with the longest, though. Commitment eventually brings its own test. At some point, every leader gets offered a shortcut, a profitable compromise, a convenient silence, a deal that looks good from the outside but asks you to give up something of yourself to take it.

And that’s the moment leadership actually gets tested, not by how much someone can achieve, but by what they’re willing to refuse.

Which is the question I want to sit with in Part 4: what’s the value of success, if the price of it is losing yourself?

In Part 1, I was sitting with a question that felt urgent given everything happening around us right now: is standing up against something wrong actually enough, or is there more to it? I keep coming back to Kurien, Shivaji, Patel, people who didn’t just refuse to look away, they built something lasting out of that refusal.

But the moment someone stands up, a harder question follows them. Why should anyone trust them?

Because let’s be honest, a lot of people are disturbed by injustice. A lot of people can speak with conviction when something is wrong. A lot of people can gather a crowd around a grievance for an afternoon. None of that, on its own, makes someone a leader. I think leadership only starts to mature when people can sense that the person isn’t doing this for attention, or to feel something, or to protect their own image. They have to sense something underneath all of that. Total commitment.

I think about Dr. Kalam a lot in this context. He never led through aggression or authority, he wasn’t trying to dominate anyone’s imagination. People trusted him because they could feel his commitment was real, to learning, to the country, to science, to young people who could suddenly picture themselves doing something extraordinary. His influence never came from command. It came from inspiration, which is a completely different currency.

And that’s really the point, isn’t it. Trust can’t be bought with a good speech. It can’t be manufactured through visibility, through slogans, through being clever on social media. People can be impressed by a personality for a while, sure. But they only trust what they experience as consistent, over time, when no one is applauding.

When someone gives everything of themselves to a cause, they stop being a person asserting their own ego, and start becoming something people can actually place their aspirations onto. People don’t follow because they’re forced to. They follow because they can feel that this person’s every action is genuinely for them, not for themselves.

That’s the weight of it, honestly. Once people place their trust in you, your thoughts stop being just your thoughts. Your emotions stop being just yours. Your actions stop being just individual choices. Many other lives start moving in response to how clear, or how confused, you are inside.

Sadhguru puts it simply: as a leader, your every thought, emotion, and action impacts many lives, so working on yourself internally becomes non-negotiable, not optional.

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This is why I don’t think leadership can ever be reduced to performance. You can speak well, strategize well, mobilize a room well, but if you haven’t done the work on yourself, your own unresolved stuff eventually leaks into whatever you’re trying to build.

When someone actually does that inner work, three things tend to show up naturally. Integrity, insight, inclusiveness.

Integrity, he says, and how I understand it, is simply no gap between what you know, what you intend, and how you act. What you say outwardly has to have roots inside you, otherwise it’s just theatre. Lal Bahadur Shastri is the example that comes to mind. His simplicity wasn’t a strategy for optics. It was just who he was, aligned all the way through. That’s why, in a time of real scarcity, people were willing to sacrifice alongside him, because they could feel he wasn’t asking them to do something he wasn’t already doing himself.

Insight is the ability to see what’s actually shaping a situation, not just the surface of it. Most people see events. Very few people see the pattern underneath the events. Which is what we really need to see with these protests that are happening in the country right now.

Inclusiveness is realizing leadership was never about making yourself bigger. There’s really only one business any of us are in, human wellbeing. And a leader who doesn’t include people in how they think, eventually starts using people, even while claiming to speak for them.

The moment people sense that someone’s commitment is selective or self-serving or performative, something breaks. People might keep going along with it for sometime, but they stop giving themselves fully. And I think that’s the difference between being followed and being trusted.

We live in a moment where commitment gets confused with visibility constantly. The loudest voice gets assumed to be the strongest. The most visible person gets assumed to be the leader. The most followed account gets assumed to be the most capable. But none of that has ever actually been true. Leadership has never belonged to the loudest person in the room. It belongs to whoever’s commitment is still there after the applause has stopped.

Which brings me to the question I want to sit with in Part 3: is leadership the ability to be seen, or the willingness to stay committed even when nobody’s watching?

There’s a particular kind of tired I’ve felt more than once - watching something unfair play out, again, while everyone around me just shrugs and calls it normal. Sometimes in anger, the way we are seeing protests unfolding around us. A gap between what is and what should be that sits in your chest until it becomes unbearable.

For most of us, that feeling is where a complaint starts and ends. We vent, we scroll past it, we go back to our day.

I first understood why that feeling can be something else entirely when I came across something Sadhguru said - that leadership isn’t ambition dressed up in a title. It’s a consequence. It’s what happens when someone with the capability to act simply cannot walk past a failure everyone else has learned to live with. He put it in a way I haven’t been able to shake since: leadership is often the destiny of others, placed - uninvited - on the shoulders of whoever is capable of carrying it.

That reframed the whole idea for me.

Leadership isn’t something you chase. It’s something that finds you, at the exact moment you refuse to look away.

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Years before millions of litres of milk began moving through rural Bharat every single day, there was one man watching dairy farmers accept a system everybody else had accepted to call it normal. Dr. Verghese Kurien could have looked at that supply chain, understood its inefficiencies, and built a very profitable company off the back of it. Instead, he saw something else - an injustice baked into the market itself, where the people doing the actual work had no bargaining power and no choice but to depend on middlemen who took without giving back. So he didn’t just build a business. He built a cooperative that put the farmer at the center, with dignity, ownership, and real economic strength. He refused to accept exploitation as simply “how business works.”

Some people want leadership for the visibility. Some want it for the authority, or to be a step ahead of everyone else. But the leadership that actually changes anything rarely starts with wanting power. It starts with not being able to look away - when a situation is being handled badly, when unfairness has become routine, when everyone around you has quietly adjusted themselves to something wrong, and you simply can’t do the same.

Think of this as situational responsibility. It’s not the pettiness of wanting a piece of the world for yourself, or the need to look important in front of others. It’s a shift in the question you’re asking - from what can I get out of this to what does this actually need from me. Ambition tries to occupy space. Responsibility tries to answer a need. Those are two very different engines, even when they look similar from the outside.

Bharat’s own history is full of this. Shivaji didn’t emerge because he wanted power for its own sake - he emerged because the structures around him had failed to protect people’s dignity and freedom, and where everyone else had made peace with that failure, he refused to accept helplessness as the final word.

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel is another one I keep coming back to. At the moment of independence, while the country was still catching its breath, it was also staring down the very real danger of coming apart into hundreds of pieces. Integrating the princely states wasn’t a ceremonial job - it took clarity, firmness, patience, timing, and a level of national responsibility most people never can just summon. Sardar Patel did not just administer a process. He stood, quite literally, in the gap between what the country was and what it needed to become.

That’s the first movement of leadership, as far as I can tell. Not dominance. Not noise. Not the need to be seen. Just an inability to look away from something that is fundamentally wrong.

But this is also where it gets dangerous. The same exhaustion that pushes someone to stand up can just as easily curdle into anger, reaction, ego. This is exactly what is happening with the student’s protests at Jantar Mantar and Parliament. We’ve seen it happen before also. Someone starts out standing against something unjust, and slowly, without noticing, they become consumed by the very ugliness they set out to fix. We see it around us all the time, in workplaces, in academic spheres, in politics.

So the question worth asking, every time that fire comes up, is: am I actually responding to what’s needed here? Or am I just reinforcing who I want to believe I am? It’s a subtle difference. But it decides everything that comes after.

Standing up may be the first movement of leadership, but it isn’t enough on its own. Plenty of people raise their voice for a moment and then disappear. Very few are ever trusted with something as serious as other people’s futures. That trust only comes when people sense you’re not doing this for attention, or emotional release, or the satisfaction of being right, but because you’ve given yourself, fully, to what actually needs doing.

Which leaves me with a harder question, the one I am trying to find an answer to: why should anyone trust a person just because they stood up once?

That’s what I want to sit with next.

Special shoutout to whose ideas have also been part of RightVIEWS discourse since past two years.

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Back in 2014, when Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was dominating discussions on income polarization, I wrote a piece examining the structural forces acting on the modern firm. At the time, the mainstream debate was fixated on the fear of robots taking our jobs. But the real economic friction was always about two conflicting forces: a firm’s constant drive to compress employee costs, and its simultaneous, desperate need for highly skilled talent.

When you extrapolate the confluence of those two forces, you end up with either a dystopian collapse of wages or a utopian era of free agents. Twelve years ago, that era had not yet arrived. Today, driven by the normalization of remote work and the massive productivity leverage of AI, we are finally watching it unfold.

The Unbundling of the Firm

To understand why this is happening, we have to look at the firm structurally. Over the past 250 years, we have transitioned from simple, independent value chains to highly interconnected, complex networks. (In my book Understanding Firms, I refer to these as Resource Transformation Chains).

Because these chains are so complex, specialized expertise developed in one area now has immense, diverse applicability across multiple chains. However, from the perspective of a single firm, the value of that talent is artificially capped. Employees with these capabilities consistently feel underpaid and switch jobs to force market corrections. Yet, even with substantial pay bumps, their compensation remains miniscule compared to the actual economic value they could potentially create.

The logical market solution, which I argued in 2014, was to organize these individual clusters of competencies into tradable units—micro-suppliers or free agents plugging into various value chains. Today, we simply call this the fractional workforce.

The Talent Stock Exchange

For this free-agent agglomeration to function, it requires a highly efficient market. Buyers (the firms) and sellers (the micro-agglomerations) need a place to discover, evaluate, and contract with one another.

In 2014, I saw LinkedIn as a potential talent stock exchange—a market where every professional operates like a listed entity. I assumed the platform itself would have to deploy algorithmic bots to validate the skills of these “listed entities” to make the market viable.

I was right about the market, but I was hoping from the wrong crowd. LinkedIn wanted to be the Facebook of professional-life. They did not attempt anything worthwhile in this space.

The performance visibility problem wasn’t solved by platform algorithms; it was solved by public signalling. Today, free agents advertise their own “value-set” through proof of work. Your Substack, your public portfolio, and your content output serve as evidence of your competencies and reputation. The validation problem still remains and so does the gap from this value-set to a “ticker”.

AI-Robotics as the Capital Multipliers

The automation anxiety of 2014 has morphed into the AI-robotics reality of today. But rather than simply displacing labor, AI is acting as a massive capital multiplier for top knowledge-work while robotics will amplify the productivity of effort-work.

Generative AI allows a single fractional worker to output the productivity of an entire traditional department. It is driving a localized productivity boom for those who know how to wield it.

Robotics, augmented with AI, will be able to attack productivity and effort-based tasks at an unprecedented scale. Returns to skill will be amplified dramatically.

In such an environment, every individual will soon realise that their specific skills are a market unto themselves. However, there is a distinct gap in validating the skill-sets and making talent tradable as easy as trading stocks on the stock market.

The era of the free agent is here, and it will lead us not just to a more efficient allocation of human capital, but to a fundamentally enriched and autonomous way to work. We need the enabler!

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Notes and References

Leadership programs often teach decision-making, adaptability, execution, communication, and teamwork.

Classical arts train all of these too.

The difference is that they are not learned as concepts. They are lived, practiced, repeated, corrected, embodied, and internalized. What emerges is not simply knowledge about leadership, but a certain way of being.

I attended a recent conversation at Sadhguru Academy’s ‘Human is Not a Resource’ program, Radhe Jaggi shared how her decades of training in classical dance shaped capabilities that are directly relevant to leadership. What was interesting to me, was that none of these lessons came from a classroom. They emerged from rigorous artistic practice.

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1. The Ability to Drop What Isn’t Working

One of the most valuable leadership qualities is the ability to let go of an idea, a concept or a process that is failing and quickly move toward a better possibility.

Radhe described how artistic training develops this naturally.

“The minute you realize that something is not working, it’s very easy to implement whatever corrections you want to implement because that’s what you have been doing your whole life.”

Artists live in an environment where constant refinement is normal.

“There’s always somebody who’s a better dancer than you, there’s always somebody who’s more creative, somebody who’s got better stage presence.”

Because improvement is built into the culture, criticism becomes information rather than a personal attack.

She recalled a performance review from her father that came just days before a major tour:

“He just looked at me and he said, ‘Can I be honest with you? This simply won’t fly.’”

Her response was not defensiveness.

“I know it was very bad, but tell me what’s not working.”

Many leaders struggle because they become attached to plans, opinions, or strategies. Artistic training repeatedly teaches you to separate yourself from the work and focus on improving the outcome.

2. Rasa and the Duty to the Audience

Perhaps the most powerful leadership lesson came through her explanation of Rasa.

Rasa is often translated as emotion, but Radhe described it as something much deeper.

The performer’s responsibility is not merely to feel something.

The responsibility is to take the audience through the same journey.

“You are trying to create an emotion and the audience is trying to experience that same emotion.”

She explained that if the audience is merely admiring the performer, Rasa has not happened.

“You also have to be with me step on step and your emotions have to rise and fall along with me.”

This is equally true in leadership.

Every meaningful enterprise begins with a certain bhava. A founder sees a possibility. A teacher wants to awaken learning. A healthcare provider wants to reduce suffering. A business wants to solve a problem.

The role of leadership is to ensure that this original intent is experienced by everyone involved.

Employees understand it.

Partners align with it.

Customers feel it.

Stakeholders experience it.

Radhe shared a story. During a rehearsal, a performer became so emotionally overwhelmed while portraying Sita that she began crying on stage. Many thought it was beautiful. But another artists said,

“You are failing your audience by being overwhelmed with your own story in your head.”

That sentence could sit comfortably inside any leadership handbook.

A leader cannot become absorbed in personal emotions, personal victories, or personal struggles.

The duty remains.

“Your business is to take these hundred people, three hundred people, ten thousand people along with you on that journey.”

There is another gift hidden here.

Dance repeatedly allows a person to inhabit different emotions, different characters, different perspectives.

Over time this creates tremendous flexibility.

As Radhe put it:

“When you know that you can change absolutely everything about yourself if you want to, because you have done it many, many times, it’s extremely freeing.”

Leadership requires exactly this freedom.

3. Know Your Subject Inside, Outside, Upside Down

Execution looks effortless only after deep preparation.

Radhe’s description of preparation was uncompromising.

“You have to know your subject inside, outside, upside down, backwards, forwards.”

In dance that means knowing the choreography, the music, the calculations, the lyrics, the rhythm, and rehearsing until it becomes intrinsic knowledge.

Why?

Because when something unexpected happens, recovery becomes possible.

If a sequence is forgotten, the dancer can still find the way back because the underlying structure is fully understood.

The same applies to leadership.

When you know a subject deeply, mistakes become easier to identify.

Corrections become easier to implement.

Adaptation becomes easier.

Communication becomes easier.

Radhe made another observation that every leader should pay attention to:

“You have to know it so well that you can make it relevant to anybody who comes and sits in front of you.”

Different people absorb information differently.

Different teams need different explanations.

Different stakeholders need different entry points.

Depth of understanding creates flexibility of communication.

4. Learn What You Are Terrible At

One of the most interesting ideas emerged while she was describing the music session participants would experience the next day.

She encouraged people to pay attention to what happens when they attempt something they are genuinely bad at.

“Everybody must learn something that you’re terrible at, absolutely terrible at.”

Why?

Because when you start from zero, learning becomes visible.

You can observe yourself.

You can observe resistance.

You can observe adaptation.

You can observe improvement.

“If you start absolutely at zero, it’s very easy to observe how quickly you’re capable of learning something if you put your mind to it.”

Many professionals spend years operating within their strengths.

Growth often happens when we enter spaces where competence has not yet arrived.

The beginner’s state is not a disadvantage.

It is one of the most powerful learning environments available.

Leadership That Becomes a Living Experience

What was fascinating about this conversation was that none of these lessons were presented as leadership theories.

They emerged from learning dance.

From rehearsals.

From mistakes.

From performance.

From discipline.

From artistic rigor.

This is precisely what makes the Sadhguru Academy leadership experience unique.

Participants do not merely discuss leadership.

They encounter it through music, movement, martial arts, yoga, culture, observation, teamwork, discipline, and learning itself.

The result is that ideas move beyond intellectual understanding and become lived experience.

As Radhe said while describing the essence of learning:

“You have to learn how to listen not just with your ears, but with your whole body.”

Perhaps that is also how leadership is learned.

Note: All images in this post are courtesy of the internet. No copyright is claimed. Copyright belongs to respective owners.

Ferrari launched its new electric vehicle - the Ferrari Luce. It is designed in collaboration with Jony Ive’s new independent design studio LoveFrom.

Jony gained fame for being on the team that designed the clamshell macbook that kickstarted the revival of Apple from almost bankrupt company to the first Trillion Dollar mega-corp. Jony was part of the design for most of this period earning him accolades. Apple was also rumoured to be working on a car of its own, but abandoned that initiative. After leaving Apple, Jony Ive started his own independent design studio called LoveFrom. This Ferrari is the first iconic product from that studio.

The exterior design shocked the internet. Though people complemented Jony Ive and Ferrari for not using touch screen and providing proper workable buttons to operate the interiors. But the exterior was total scandal.

Here are some of the image artworks from trolls signalling their disappointment with the new Ferrari Luce. If you are interested in video creativity do search them up for those too are fantastically creative!

Why am I writing about this?

First, the creativity of the people has no bounds and I want to keep this as a record of what the society saw in the Ferrari Luce launch.

Second, there is inherent power of social media to power products or to detract from them. Tesla was essentially marketed through power of memes. Whereas the memes helped Tesla establish a new car company, it seems memes may hurt Ferrari. Performance-wise there does not seem to be anything wrong with Ferrari Luce. Over time we will know how it actually performed. There is not much hope since they intend to sell it at $600,000 a piece.

Finally, the Luce does not seems to lack originality in design. We will see how it goes over time.

Till then, here are the pictures of the memes:

Finally

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Mumbai has begun clearing the slums, and rightly so. However, it is important to understand why slums form so that we can prevent them from emerging in the future. To that end, we have to answer five questions:

1. Why slums form?

2. How do they contribute to the economy?

3. Why should they be demolished?

4. What should replace them?

5. How to ensure they do not come up again?

Let’s dive in.

Why slums form?

There are many reasons for slum formation, but they reduce to four:

1. Rural-to-urban migration running faster than supply of affordable housing.

• Urban migrants make a choice between urban incomes coupled with high-cost urban life OR rural incomes with relatively lower-cost rural life. They pick urban because the income gap is wide enough to absorb the cost gap.

• As migration increases, the cost of urban life rises and rent dominates the household budget. The gap between what the migrant can pay and what legal housing costs is closed through encroachment — aided by predatory politics, mafia, and pliant law enforcement.

• If the income gap between rural and urban areas AND the gap in number of job opportunities were to shrink, slum formation would decline.

• Two distinct problems hide inside this one. One, lack of opportunities outside the city. Two, lack of legal affordable housing inside the city. Most policy responses tackle only one.

2. Inappropriate policy incentives.

• The Slum Redevelopment Act allows developers additional Floor Space Index (FSI) when they undertake slum rehabilitation. While sound in principle, in practice it is often misused to encourage encroachments.

• To understand why, ask the WIIFM question for every stakeholder. [WIIFM = What’s in it for me?]

• For the squatter: a hutment can eventually be upgraded into a built unit that can be sold for a serious profit.

• For the developer: rehab participation comes with fungible FSI that can be loaded into a high-end tower in the same project. The gap between construction cost per square foot and the high-end sale price is so wide that creating a slum and then redeveloping it is a profitable business plan.

• Individual developers cannot manufacture slums on their own. Politicians, illegal manufacturing cartels, hawker mafias, and pliant officers all chip in. That is why the equilibrium holds. The Slum Rehabilitation Authority’s own track record — a completion rate below 13% over 27 years, with most rehab units undersized and poorly maintained — is the visible cost of this design.

3. Low-cost housing versus slum redevelopment.

• Compare the costs and incentives of a developer building low-cost housing versus one doing slum redevelopment.

• Land cost is decisive in a megacity like Mumbai — SRA projects have near-zero land cost (the land was encroached) while legitimate low-cost housing needs high-cost land.

• Governments are tweaking FSI rules for low-cost housing to align incentives. But in real estate, location decides price. Projects get redesigned so that multiple units are bought by middle and higher-income households, and the low-income buyer ends up without affordable housing anyway. PMAY-U has built millions of units but the in-situ slum redevelopment vertical has consistently under-delivered for exactly this reason.

4. Demographic jihad.

• One factor driving illegal slums and encroachments is deliberate demographic engineering. Poor Muslim families, including foreigners (Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltration cases have been documented by NIA and state police across Mumbai, Delhi, and the North-East), are settled in strategically chosen pockets — near critical infrastructure, vote-decisive constituencies, or border areas. The objective is not economic, it is to scuttle the law-and-order machinery in the chosen locality and reshape the electorate. National security agencies need to take this seriously. I fear it is already past the point at which it could be quietly contained.

How do they contribute to the economy?

Slums’ contribution to the city economy is rarely recognised, partly because so much of it is informal. But it is real. India’s informal sector is roughly 50% of GDP and over 90% of total employment (NCEUS; ILO 2019). Dharavi alone — 2.4 sq km, 1+ million people — hosts 20,000+ enterprises and generates an estimated USD 1–1.5 billion in annual output. We are not talking about a marginal economy.

1. Slums are the source of cheap labour.

• The labour that does the inconvenient and undesirable work — garbage pick-up, sewage maintenance, recycling — comes from these slums. Most of these workers are exploited by middlemen and contractors.

• They also supply the services every middle-class household has now built its lifestyle around — delivery riders, drivers and cabs, household help, janitorial and cleaning staff, security guards. The middle-class cost of living in Mumbai is sustained by this invisible subsidy.

2. Slums hide illegal factories that require substantial manual labour.

• Many of these are low-cost manufacturing units driven purely by private profit motives.

• Many of these factories are involved in illegal manufacture, drugs, or polluting activities (leather, dyeing, plastics) and therefore need to be regulated, not romanticised. Bringing them into the legal net is part of fixing the wider ease-of-doing-business problem I have written about in the context of illegal hawkers.

3. Slums also contain semi-formal supply-chain depots.

• Bulk-breaking, sorting, and transhipment activities happen inside slums at very low cost. This reduces the cost of getting goods to the rest of the city. It is genuine social value — even if the underlying setup is illegal.

So the honest framing is this. Slums subsidise the cost structure of the city in the short run. In the long run they sit on the city’s productivity ceiling — because the same residents whose cheap labour you depend on are stuck in a poverty trap of insecure tenure, poor schooling, and worse health outcomes. This is what Marx, Stoker and Suri (MIT, 2013) called the policy trap.

Why should they be demolished?

Many people sense intuitively that slums have to go but the reasons are not always articulated. Let me articulate them.

1. Reward law-abiding citizens; penalise law-breaking. This is the foundational incentive structure of a functioning state. Slums invert it.

• A slum dweller is competing with a law-abiding citizen who lives 30 minutes or more away, pays full rent for legal accommodation, and pays for the commute as well. The cost of being legal is much higher than the cost of being illegal. This is unfair.

• I have always said: in India, the cost of complying with the law is high and the benefits are low; the cost of breaking the law is low and the benefits are high. If we want a law-abiding society, we have to flip this — put a real penalty on those who break the law, and a real reward on those who don’t. Slum dwellers cannot be allowed to enjoy a permanent cost advantage over law-abiding citizens, or we have given up on the rule of law itself. This is exactly the argument I made in the Police Officer at every corner piece — law and order is the first step toward real development.

2. Slums contradict urban design.

• Many experts now prefer in-situ rehabilitation of slum-dwellers. I think this defeats the purpose. You cannot rebuild the city’s spatial logic if the slum footprint is frozen in place.

• Slums occupy land where critical infrastructure needs to come and then become a permanent hindrance. Mumbai airport’s development was choked for decades by surrounding slums, notwithstanding the security risk those slums pose to aircraft. The Eastern Freeway, the Western Express, every major transit-corridor project — all carry the same scar.

• Urban development is a feedback-loop system. If you let a slum transform into a regularised residential block, you have changed the city’s development map. The consequences propagate outward — traffic, lost development potential of legal areas, distorted commercial rents.

3. Economic distortion

• Slums prevent economic activity from moving to other parts of the country. By keeping Mumbai’s cost advantage artificially intact, slums hold capital in Mumbai that should have helped build cities in Bihar, eastern UP, and the rest. The result is more income polarisation, more political backlash. This is what I had written back in 2005 in: Why Bihar should ensure there are no slums in Mumbai? (2005)

What should replace them?

It follows from the above what should — and should not — replace demolished slums.

1. Replace the population mix, not just the buildings.

• Planners need to think about the income profile of the area. The ratio of low-income, middle-income and high-income households was doing real work in the local economy. If we just clear the slum and build only middle and high-income towers, we create a structural gap — domestic workers, drivers, delivery riders, sanitary workers have nowhere to live within reach of the jobs.

• Transit-oriented planning calls this the X:Y rule — for every X high-income household you add, you also plan for Y low-income service households. The 2023 piece on Limiting growth of cities? makes the same point: housing supply has to be planned by income mix, not by sale price.

2. Replace the supply-chain function with legal alternatives.

• The supply-chain depots inside the slum kept Mumbai’s cost of goods down. If we demolish them without a legal replacement, costs rise across the city.

• The replacement is dedicated, planned, legal-zoned bulk-breaking and logistics areas — at the edge of the dense city, served by transit, with one-window licensing. The same logic applies to small-scale repair and refurbishment activity that today happens in slums.

3. Replace illegal informality with cheap, fast legality at the bottom of the pyramid.

• This is the conclusion I came to in The story of illegal hawkers (2022). The reason informality persists is that being legal is too expensive and too slow. Fix that — and you do not have to fight informality, you starve it. The Street Vendors Act 2014, combined with ONDC, is the architecture; what is missing is implementation.

• Unlike the standard story, poor people are willing to pay a fair price for a legally sound shop, residence, or service. They just cannot afford the bribe, the delay, and the harassment that today come with being legal.

4. Public housing at scale — some learn from Singapore, Indonesia not from SRA.

• Singapore went from 90% slum housing in 1960 to 90% home-ownership in HDB units within a generation, on the back of compulsory land acquisition, CPF-financed mortgages, and a state that treated housing as nation-building.

• Indonesia’s Kampung Improvement Programme upgraded conditions for five million urban poor between the 1960s and 1980s — and a 2024 evaluation finds those kampungs now have higher formal-sector employment and school enrolment than matched controls.

• The lesson is not to copy either model — it is to copy the seriousness. India’s PMAY-U has scale. What it needs is design discipline.

How to ensure they do not come up again?

Slums are the confluence of three things — (a) lack of opportunities outside the cities, (b) inadequate supply of affordable legal accommodation inside the city, AND (c) an ineffective law-and-order system. Prevention has to attack all three.

1. Opportunities outside the cities. This is mostly outside the scope of city administration. It depends on state and central policy — power, roads, port and airport access, ease of doing business in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. The Bihar argument I made in 2005 is essentially a call for this: it is in Bihar’s interest, even more than Mumbai’s, that the slum-formation pull weakens.

2. Affordable housing inside the city. This is squarely within city administration’s remit. It is a second-order problem and most city administrators do not understand it. What we need is structural — FSI reform, single-window approvals, digitised land records, rental public housing alongside the ownership push.

Another aspect of Affordable housing is Affordability threshold. Slums are a symptom citizens having means below the affordability threshold. It results in the homelessness we see in developed country cities. It relates more to jobs and labour mobility and deserves a separate research paper to itself.

Finally, we also need information sharing between cities. A Reddit-like platform for civic officials, planners, and informed citizens — anonymised where needed — where one city’s solution to a sewage-billing problem becomes another city’s reference within a week, not within a five-year report. Most municipal innovation in India happens in isolation and dies in isolation.

3. Law and order. A weak law-and-order machinery follows from an ineffective polity. Fixing the politics is more social change than regulatory change.

• Police reform on the lines successive commissions have already recommended — separation of investigation from law-and-order duty, magistrate-level accountability, digitised low-discretion enforcement, an end to the 1861 Police Act. Without this, more police simply means more rent extraction. With it, an omnipresent constable becomes a precondition for orderly urban development — exactly what I argued in Police Officer at every corner.

• Active citizenry. Politicians respond to incentives. If the local residents’ association can mount a public, named, sustained campaign against any new encroachment, the equilibrium shifts. Most encroachments are tested first — if they meet no resistance in week one, week two becomes a building.

• Connect the dots between Encroachments and corruption, illegal hawkers, and slums. They are not separate problems. They are the same problem in different uniforms — the high cost of legality, paid by the citizen and pocketed by everyone in the chain that gatekeeps it.

In Sum

Slums are not the problem - they are the symptom of state-capacity which is the real problem. Fix the state — at the municipal level, in policing, in land records, in business registration — and the slum problem becomes tractable. Mumbai is starting to clear its slums. Lets fix what creates slums in the first place.

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Notes and Related reading

• Why Bihar should ensure there are no slums in Mumbai? — Rahul Deodhar (2005)

• Encroachments and corruption — Rahul Deodhar (2022)

• Police Officer at every corner!! — Rahul Deodhar (2005)

• Limiting growth of cities? — Rahul Deodhar (2023)

• The story of illegal hawkers — Rahul Deodhar (2022)

• UN-Habitat — The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003

• Marx, Stoker & Suri — The Economics of Slums in the Developing World (JEP 2013)

• Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson — The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development (AER 2001)

• Galiani & Schargrodsky — Property Rights for the Poor (JPubE 2010)

• Jaideep et al. — Demolition, forced evictions and wellbeing in the city (IDMC 2019)

• Citizen Matters — 27 years on, Mumbai’s SRA has failed to deliver

• Question of Cities — 25 Years on, Mumbai’s SRA Model

• PRS Legislative Research — Evaluation of PMAY (Urban) 2023

• ORF — Strengthening Urban India’s Informal Economy: Street Vending

• Auerbach — Neighborhood Associations and the Urban Poor (World Development 2017)

• Glaeser — Urbanization and its Discontents (Harvard)

• Duranton — Growing through Cities in Developing Countries (World Bank 2016)

The UGC Equity Regulations 2026 originated from tragic student deaths (Rohith Vemula in 2016 and Payal Tadvi in 2019) and a related 2019 PIL filed in the Supreme Court. In a delayed response in the PIL, UGC proposed to amend the rules.

The UGS released a balanced draft in February 2025 included protections for SC/ST students while preserving institutional autonomy, due process for all, and penalties for false complaints to prevent misuse. The PIL petitioners were not happy and through their lawyer Indira Jaising, a known leftist anti-India player, they proposed further additions to the 2025 draft.

The final regulations, gazetted on January 13, 2026, seem to have largely adopted the Indira Jaising modifications. The result was that the regulations shifted dramatically: they narrowed caste-based discrimination protections asymmetrically to SC, ST, and OBC students only, introduced features like Equity Committees, Equity Squads/Ambassadors, anti-retaliation clauses, debarment powers, and mandatory proactive measures, but removed safeguards against malicious complaints.

A more detailed version of events can be read here.

New regulations opened a can of worms

The solution proposed by leftist lawyers for the victims was quite drastic. It opens the General category to malicious prosecution.

But that was not all. In something coming right out of 1984 or some leftist dystopian universe, the new rules have surveillance committees that have open mandates and unlimited power. The redressal mechanisms are also scuttled and tilted against the General category.

This is what happens when regulation aims for victim protections as against action against perpetrators.

How can it be made better?

The reality is that BOTH exists

• some people (many from OBC category themselves) who commit caste based discrimination.

• some OBC/SC/ST who abuse the protective laws.

No law, by itself, or in conjunction with an elaborate enforcement mechanism (no matter how elaborate) can prevent a certain person from FEELING victimized, as that feeling is flexible and comes from the persons own assumptions. (Refer the scar experiment on bias).

The problem is perpetrators are often serial perpetrators - i.e. those actually discriminating do it to many. These acts are often below the "legal threshold" for discrimination and hence they escape punishment. Western law has used the class-action as crutch to get around to this solution. Yet, it is still a crutch not a solution.

The solution is also not to loosen the definitions of discrimination or make up lop-sided enforcement mechanism. The more elaborate the law and the enforcement mechanism the more false positives it will throw up. And the more it will lend itself as a tool for misuse.

The real solution is to make these acts accretive.

If a few person levels allegation it could be fluke (CISCO case). But if many report the person for being discriminatory then it will reveal the pattern.

In India we need to create a anonymous reporting system that allows potential victims to report a person and discriminatory acts add up when more people report. The perpetrator is identified and investigated if the score based on impact of single act of discrimination and number of such acts crosses a certain threshold. This process should work in sexual harassment and gender bias cases too.

I believe, if a well thought out system is created based on above it will be a proper legal infrastructure innovation at global level.

Clarification with respect to “anonymous” reporting.

The reporting is not itself anonymous, the database is black boxed. It means I can submit complaints with my annexures. These complaints are analyzed by anonymizing the names of perp and vic. They are then entered into this black boxed database. They are scored based on gravity of allegation, validity of proofs submitted (CCTV etc. is stored) AND number of allegations.

Thus

• If there are many allegations against one person his score increases and the entire lot (ALL allegations with their known complainants and their submissions) is opened and investigated.

• Similarly if there is just one allegation but it is quite serious, it will still trigger an investigation.

• Further, a grievous false allegation is also reported and such a false complainant can be tagged and reported.

• During open investigation the identities of all will be available to investigating and judicial/quasi-judicial team.

This prevents minor misunderstandings from escalating into witch-hunts. At the same time it ensures those who are casually discriminatory but just below the threshold are still caught.

The conduct of investigation and penalties and punishments are not mentioned in the proposal. They are governed by current law.

Current law does not punish the false complainant.

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In a X thread, Sameer critiques an article in The Print by Karanjeet Kaur, arguing that it misinterprets Gen Z’s cultural trends as a shift toward conservatism or religious orthodoxy.

Instead, Sameer says, Gen Z is proudly reclaiming and modernising Indian culture—such as through “Bhajan Raves,” ethnic clothing, and spiritual tourism (e.g., preferring the religious Mathura over drug-alcohol-Goa)—as a rebellion against older generations’ internalised view that modernity equals Westernisation.

Sameer highlights how “Boomers and millennials continually moral policed speech, belief, and identity for decades”. He further states that

“Millennials and boomers are not “neutral observers” here. They are the repressed generation that has been convinced that anything Indian and culturally oriented is “conservative” and “regressive”. GenZ is proud and aggressive because boomers were apologetic and docile.”

This highlights two important points for me. First Gen Z is ready to take its place as heirs to our cultural traditions. And second, that Boomers and Millennials should make some room for their cultural expression.

Coming from what is called Gen X, between Boomers and Millennials, I want to explain our position and expand the discussion.

Sameer is right.

Boomers to Millennials (me being GenX) have imported the structure of culture from our Western education.

Many in our generation believe culture is rigid and structured around rituals and discipline. These generational brethren of mine shudder at some of the cultural changes that Gen Z is experimenting with.

To an extent, it is not their fault. We knew our “culture” from what we found in Western narratives, our textbooks, and socialist-communist-influenced media and intelligentsia. We knew this wasn’t right. But we were ridiculed. We did not have proper arguments, research, and power. Many of us were fighting economic survival.

We, as did generations before us, felt it was our responsibility to “save” what we “know” of our culture and bide our time till we can explore for ourselves the facts and interpretations of our culture. That saving required a conservative outlook, a rigid structure bolstered by rituals and discipline.

But we knew this “knowledge” of our culture is also not totally uncorrupted. It is why, to an extent, we have isolated our GenZ kids from our imposed understanding of culture. But yes, we may have confused our Gen Z kids to a certain extent.

So we did what we could.

We tried to fit what WE know from our culture into the “singular foundational definition” of culture as taught in the West.

We discovered it did not fit, and we have lived with this dissonance and sought its roots. We did not find discomfort in our dissonance, and that struck us as a core strength of our culture.

We just realised that what we “know” of our culture is the flawed Western observation of it. We are realising that the lens through which our culture was being observed was flawed and that the observer herself was unaware.

Yes, we, and generations before us, have held on to the past. We held on to it for a time when we can observe, understand, examine, rectify, nurture this culture of ours and allow it to grow and evolve. That time has come. That is why Rajiv Malhotra calls for a scrutiny of our culture using our lens.

Culture is not static. It needs to change, evolve and grow.

I have felt what Sameer accuses my generation of. I realise we have to remain neutral in our observations of Gen Z’s actions. But I also think Gen Z needs to convince us that they will join us in researching, examining, debating, rectifying and understanding the journey of our culture thus far as we go about nurturing, evolving and growing this amazing culture into the future. These days, I am confident they will. It is a good feeling.

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India’s GDP numbers have confounded real economists1 for some time now. The growth is numerically robust but the real experiences do not tally with these high numbers.

I have a hypothesis as to what is happening on the ground. To understand that we need to simplify the reality of Indian economy. Lets dive in.

Jackets & Juices - A simplified economy!

Imagine an economy with just two industries - jackets and juices.

Now imagine that most of the jackets are made in formal economy by corporations or high-turnover professional tailors etc. Therefore the workings of jackets industry is visible to government, appears in most of the reported data and is trackable. There is a small percentage of jackets industry that is artisanal and hence not visible in the data.

Juice industry, on the other hand, is a cottage industry. It is largely informal and most of the production, sales and inventories of this industry is outside the measured economy. Now some small segment of juice industry is actually formalised and involves corporates and hence effectively reports good data.

Estimating the GDP of this Jackets-Juices Economy in theory

By definition, GDP of this economy will be the actual production of jackets and juices in that particular year.

GDP growth will represent how much the production of this year is higher/lower than previous year.

Clearly, just adding number of jackets and juices will not make sense. Hence GDP is measured in value of the jackets and juices produced.

To calculate value we multiply number of jackets and juices produced by its respective price. When we multiply the number of jackets and juices produced in ONE year with the prices of THAT year we get NOMINAL GDP.

NOMINAL GDP of this country may increased over last year in various ways. One, the number of jackets and juices may remain the same but their prices may have increased. OR Two, the number of jackets and juices may have increased but their prices have remained same. OR Any other combination of these two.

But GDP measures only production not prices. We added prices because it did not make sense to add jackets and juices together to get a measurable number. So how do we compare this years GDP with past year’s GDP. To clarify this we introduce a concept of BASE YEAR.

We fix a BASE YEAR arbitrarily - say 2011. We note down the prices of jackets and juices in this year. Now this year we take number of jackets and litres of juices and multiply with 2011 prices. This gives us REAL GDP of this year.

This is all ok if we know the exact number of jackets and number of litres of juices produced this year.

• We know reasonably the number of jackets produced this year because all the factories and tailors report them because they are formal industry. We get their number.

• But we know that some jackets are made by artisans. How to estimate that number? What if it increases suddenly? What if there is a make-your-own-jacket campaign and many people are doing so? To understand this number we do a survey of these artisans all over the country. Again this happens on any random year - say 2018. Based on the survey we get to know that for every 100 jackets produced by the formal industry, 10 are produced by artisans informally.

• We use this equation to estimate the number of jackets in 2025. Now over the years between 2018-2025 things may change so we do that survey after every few years to be certain of our approximations.

Now to juices!

How to estimate the number of litres of juices produced? This is a largely informal industry. So what can we do?

• Survey! Here we undertake a survey and estimate the size of juice industry in one particular year - say 2015.

• Then we compare the size of jacket industry with juice industry in 2015. We conclude that in 2015 juice industry is about the same size as the jacket industry.

• So for every year subsequently, we estimate that juice industry will be the same size as the jacket industry.

• Thus in 2025 too we presume that juice industry will be same size as jacket industry.

• Is it actually so? We wonder. Hence we check with the formal players in the juice industry to check if they are growing in line with the jackets industry. We also do a random survey of very few empanelled juice sellers and check if their sales matches the jacket industry.

After confirming these we compute 2025 GDP

• We take jacket production, adjust it for informal jackets produced

• We assume juice production has changed just as much as jacket production did. We verify the numbers.

• We multiply these with prices of 2011.

• Now we get REAL GDP of 2025!

Estimating the GDP of the Jackets-Juices economy in practice!

Armed with above theory you start meeting Jacket industry people and ask them for jacket production numbers. They look confused - which jackets they ask. Rain jackets, winter jackets, diving jackets, mountaineering jackets, evening jackets, dinner jackets… One jacket company counts thick-twill shirts as jackets. There is confusion about waist coats and vests.

So, to avoid all confusion, you take the units sold, current prices and total sales and you get out of their office. After getting that shock in formal organised Jacket industry you are crestfallen before going to juice industry.

The juice industry sells different juices, concentrates, ready-to-drink, fresh, pasteurised, frozen varieties of juices of different fruits. Even within fruits the prices vary - alphonso mango, Himachal Apples, Florida Oranges, etc. There is confusion if Coconut water is juice or not. Some juice makers are actually selling pulps. Are pulps juice concentrates or are they separate. It makes no sense adding litres of pulp to litres of orange juice. So here too, you take the number of litres, current prices and total sales and leave.

Now how to compute the GDP?

• You get the nominal GDP contribution of 2025 of Jacket Industry by looking at their sales for the year 2025.

• You will apply the approximation of Juice Industry will do just as well. You will confirm it by calling up Juice companies and empanelled juice sellers.

• You will add the two and arrive at the total Nominal GDP for 2025.

• Now you will look at the details for Jackets

  • There will be jackets that are being sold in 2025 but they were not created in 2011, your BASE YEAR. All these can be classified as Speciality Jackets or Other Jackets.

  • You compare the various types jackets sold in 2025 with those in 2011 your BASE YEAR.

• You will do the same exercise with Juices.

• You compare the prices of various types of jackets and juices sold in 2025 with those in 2011 and in 2024. The change in these prices will help you calculate something called the GDP DEFLATOR.

• Now you will estimate the current real GDP by reducing the Nominal GDP by the GDP Deflator.

What I mean is…

GDP calculations are a lot of data manipulation. Even for our simplified Jackets-and-Juices economy we have landed up with so much complexity. A real economy has many products, sub-products, services, valuation of services etc.

That does not mean it is all made up. As Dr. Subir explained to me once, GDP is a statistical analysis that tries to come as close to the reality as it can. It will always have errors and will not EXACTLY measure the real economy. What we want is the process to be true and it should be able to capture the change in the economy effectively. Hence total GDP is one thing but GDP growth is better metric as it eliminates the consistent gaps.

Think of GDP calculations as looking at the economy though a foggy or rainy windscreen. You wont see the road clearly but you should see enough to alert you to what is ahead. At the same time it cannot be bad or broken glass which creates distortion.

With this background let me propose what has happened in India.

Here is my hypothesis:

1. The Total GDP of India is like the GDP with Jackets (formal, relatively easier to estimate and mostly visible) and Juices (informal, not easy to estimate, hardly visible).

2. However, a confluence of forces have impacted the nature of Indian economy since 2011:

   1. Transition from a high-inflation to low-inflation regime. This has affected the price of Jackets and Juices. This is as much a psychological process as it is rational demand-supply decision. I wrote about this back in 2019. This transition, imported goods deflation from China, and fluctuating energy and food commodity prices result in wildly oscillating GDP DEFLATOR.

   2. Financialisation and digitisation: Thanks to JAM trinity, a large part of payments have moved to digital realm. Government is also streamlining taxes (just a bit but right direction) and attempt to reduce unnecessary regulations. This moves the participating industries into formalisation. It also increases the VISIBILITY of their GDP contribution. Thus, in our example, the Juices part of the economy has started becoming more visible. Experts see it as “reduction” in informal sector. I see it as better or more accurate counting.

   3. Nature of the economy has changed: Our consumption pattern (how many jackets and how many types of juices and how much) are changing drastically as more young people become adults. Technology and new realities like pandemics are reshaping our consumption habits. The BASE YEAR does not account for such change.

3. Finally, the formula, the algorithm for calculating GDP, the validation systems, the empanelled sources and methodology for survey to measure informal GDP are showing cracks.

   1. These are not wrong - just old.

   2. But a $4 Trillion economy needs to have better mechanisms to measure the prices of various products and services in a more error-free manner.

   3. IMF realises this when it gave Indian data a “C-grade” implying/positing that India may be under-reporting the correct GDP numbers.

   4. Central Government has taken steps with corrective statistical tools being designed and new GDP series with new BASE YEAR supposed to be announced soon. COVID has delayed some of these developments (for instance census, Consumption Survey, NSSO survey, The Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE), etc.)

4. The VISIBLE GDP has grown very fast (because we are able to count more juices and that small part of Jackets too).

5. The INFORMAL GDP has partly been formalised and partly remains informal. It is growing too. Our capability to estimate it has become better. But since we are using old series we are trying to reduce errors.

6. The adjustment because of the GDP DEFLATOR and the way it is calculated has amplified the GDP growth. As a mathematical corollary, it excessively suppressed the GDP growth previously. Since it is more of mathematical adjustment and hence the on-the-ground euphoria is missing.

7. Consequently, the Total GDP may have grown like usual - i.e. both Jackets and Juices clocking the usual growth.

   1. It seems to be lesser than what the numbers make us believe.

   2. And it may have been higher than what numbers stated in earlier time 2015-2020.

In Sum

The GDP growth conundrum is a misunderstanding. It may correct itself partly just with passage of time (inflation regime adjustment) and mostly with better computational capabilities of new series. But, in the mean time, policy makers need to understand this dynamic. I believe the numbers pushed the RBI into cutting interest rates later than ideal.

I think it would be better to follow Nominal GDP and inflation together along with Real GDP to understand the Indian economy better.

Thank you for reading this far. If you need to dive in more detail refer to notes, readings and references section.

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Notes, Readings, References.

Here are some articles highlighting the discrepancies in GDP reporting. These sources range from academic working papers to financial news analysis, focusing on the disconnect between headline GDP figures and the “ground reality” of the Indian economy.

• India’s GDP Mis-estimation: Likelihood, Magnitudes, Mechanisms, and Implications [Harvard Kennedy School (Working Paper by Arvind Subramanian)] This seminal paper argues that India’s change in GDP methodology (post-2011) led to a significant overestimation of growth, potentially by 2.5 percentage points annually. It posits that the new method heavily relies on formal sector data (like corporate filings) as a proxy for the informal sector, thereby missing the declines in the real, unorganized economy. [Download here]

• Is India’s Q2 GDP Surge Believable? [The Wire by Arun Kumar former professor of economics at JNU] This December 2025 article, couched in anti-Modi language, questions a specific surge in GDP (8.2%), noting that high-frequency indicators (like diesel consumption and freight traffic) did not match the headline growth. It highlights how the “production side” estimates often decouple from the “expenditure side” due to a lack of real-time data on the informal sector, leading to massive statistical “discrepancies.”

• Beyond The Headlines: A Closer Look At India’s Higher-Than-Expected Q2 Growth [Swarajya by Pramod Hegde] This analysis focuses on the “Deflator” problem. It explains that when wholesale inflation (WPI) is negative, it artificially inflates the “Real GDP” number. The author calculates that this statistical anomaly likely added over 1 percentage point to the headline growth, meaning the “real” volume of economic activity was much lower than the 8%+ figure suggested.

• GDP data revisions—why India still struggles with sharp variations [The Print but article is by AK Bhattacharya, Editorial Director, Business Standard] This article critiques the reliability of the data itself, noting how initial growth estimates are often revised drastically upwards or downwards years later. It suggests that these constant, sharp revisions indicate a struggle to accurately capture economic activity, making the “final” numbers less credible as a real-time policy tool.

Also read

Moneylife Article: How Lower Inflation Lowered Economic Growth with Many Knock-on Effects

This poem comes from The Parent’s Tao Te Ching by William Martin.

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.

Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.

Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.

Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.

Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.

Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.

And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.

It is said we live in our minds. Our thoughts make the world we see. If we help make our children see the world with hopeful reality, we would have done our job as parents. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. And we need all of the village to help our children grow.

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I read recently how Japan is good at many things. Japan is winning - from best Pizza restaurants, pastries, confectionaries, wines and whiskey to best crafted shoes, jeans, to cars and watches and more.

Melissa Chen commented on this, contrasted this with the Chinese attitude of “Cha bu duo” (差不多), a Chinese phrase that means “close enough” or “more or less,”. Many commentators have taken similar line when it comes to Indian “jugaad” culture. The understanding is Chinese or Indian excellence will not be like the Japanese.

But it is not true.

The industrial culture developed with different styles across the world.

At first there were two routes - mass manufacture and artisanal manufacturing. Britain and US followed the mass manufacturing route. France and Italy chose the artisanal manufacturing. Germans tried to bring artisanal qualities to mass manufacturing, their focus was artisanal when it came to engineering and design but it was mass manufacturing mindset when it came to operations. That is why design, innovation etc. seemed separate from cold, calculating Operations.

When Japan entered the fray, they tried to imitate this. But failed. Rather Demming, Juran and their Japanese counterparts from Ishikawa to Ohno to Taguchi experimented with adapting the western concepts to Japanese culture. The result was exceptional Japanese Industrial renaissance.

Japanese made the operators into craftsman/artists. Japanese art culture is blend of discipline and rules with flair and Iki (a japanese word difficult to translate - more like flirting beyond the no-go rules). It allows for these artists in operations. But such artists also become masters and can blend into engineering and design. Thus came the feedback loop with Kaizen powered small but relentless improvements with jumps in between. Japanese directed these characters first to quality, then to efficiency and then started to deploy it to design and innovation. If you check out Japanese packaging you will realise what I mean.

China too has the same character.

But such character needs inner motivation not CCP herding to come to fore. CCP herding of Chinese entrepreneurship has mitigated many risks and thus expanded the operations driven industries. In time the Chinese will bring artistry and aesthetic to whatever they produce. But that requires freedom, experimentation and failure.

India too is in similar boat.

But India never had the risk moat. In fact, Indian government actively increased the risks for new entrepreneurs. Indians have spent last five decades building safety nets under their families. The risk-taking generation has just burst forth. To help, Indian government is shedding its anti-rich approach and trying to encourage entrepreneurship. Over the next 20 years you will see Indians developing pathways to excellence - trying, failing, succeeding and making a mark on the world.

To achieve that we need to look INTO our own culture. We will need to adapt the global learnings to our way of doing. Our future companies may look totally different. Our employment styles will look totally different from what we see globally. All of those things will need rediscovering, reimagining, innovating and leapfrogging. The next 20 years are going to be super exciting for Indian companies.

We WILL get to excellence.

Further reading

Urban air quality is big driver of quality of life. Like every year, this year too Delhi’s air quality dropped substantially in winter. The major contributor to this well understood to be the stubble burning in neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana. This problem is confined to the North down-wind areas from Punjab and Haryana.

However, in other parts of India too people have noticed something. If you look at the telecast of cricket matches in India and compare them to those in England or Australia you will see a lot of difference. This difference should not be visible in photos (since they go through photoshop corrections) but it is still evident. The reason is air quality.

Understanding Air Quality

Air quality depends upon the following factors:

The chemical composition of air (the gas pollutants)

These include various gases such as :

1. Nitrogen Oxides (NOx, including NO and NO2) NOx are major contributors to urban smog and acid rain. In cities, they primarily come from combustion processes in power plants, industrial facilities, and heating systems. Domestic fossil fuel use for cooking or heating also adds to levels, especially in densely populated areas. These gases can react with VOCs to form ground-level ozone.

2. Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) SO2 is a pungent gas that leads to respiratory problems and contributes to acid rain, damaging buildings and ecosystems. Urban sources include coal-fired power plants, industrial processes like metal smelting, and oil refining. In some cities, the use of residual fuel oil for shipping or heating exacerbates this issue.

3. Carbon Monoxide (CO) is an odourless, toxic gas that reduces oxygen in the blood and is particularly dangerous in enclosed urban spaces. Key sources include incomplete combustion from industrial boilers, waste incineration, and household appliances such as gas stoves or heaters.

4. Ground-Level Ozone (O3). Unlike stratospheric ozone, ground-level O3 is a secondary pollutant formed by reactions between NOx, VOCs, and sunlight in urban heat. It irritates the lungs and worsens asthma. Urban contributors include emissions from solvents, paints, and industrial activities that release precursor chemicals.

5. Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are a diverse group of chemicals that evaporate easily and contribute to ozone formation and indoor/outdoor pollution. In cities, they’re released from consumer products like paints, cleaning agents, adhesives, pesticides, printing inks, and personal care items (e.g., perfumes, cosmetics). Industrial evaporation and leaks from storage tanks are also significant sources of concern.

6. Other Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs or Air Toxics) include substances such as benzene, formaldehyde, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), lead, and heavy metals (e.g., arsenic). They cause cancer and other serious health effects. Urban sources encompass industrial emissions, waste burning, and chemical manufacturing. Lead, although reduced, can still come from legacy sources, such as old paint or batteries.

7. Ammonia (NH3). Often overlooked, NH3 contributes to the formation of secondary aerosols and eutrophication. In urban areas, it’s emitted from waste decomposition, sewage treatment, and agricultural activities on city fringes, as well as some industrial processes.

The physical composition of air

These include the actual particulate matter termed as suspended particulate matter (SPM) and can be classified as:

1. Dust and heavy particulates (heavier can settle down but easily resuspended by wind). These are not inhalable, but they pose other risks, including to the eyes and ears.

2. Coarse Particles (PM10 or Thoracic Particles): These have diameters of 10 μm or less (but larger than 2.5 μm). They are inhalable and can lodge in the upper respiratory tract, such as your nasal hair or mucus. If a higher percentage of these particles is present, it clogs the nasal passage, causes throat irritation and/or a burning sensation. Common sources include road dust, construction debris, agriculture, and wind-blown soil. Dust from these activities often dominates this category.

3. Fine Particles (PM2.5 or Respirable Particles): Diameters of 2.5 μm or less. These can penetrate deep into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream, posing greater health risks like cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. While finer dust (e.g., from combustion or industrial processes) contributes, this category encompasses more from secondary atmospheric formation.

4. Ultrafine Particles (PM0.1 or Nanoparticles): Diameters of 0.1 μm (100 nanometers) or less. These are the smallest, often from combustion sources, and can cross into the brain or other organs. Dust rarely falls here, as it’s typically coarser, but ultrafine dust can form from mechanical grinding or vehicle wear.

Most Indian cities have a problem with dust!

The problem in most Indian cities is not the noxious gases. Instead, it is dust - both from human and natural sources.

1. Construction and Demolition Activities: Dust is generated from excavation, building, demolition, and material handling at construction sites. This is a significant source of coarser PM10 particles in growing urban areas.

2. Industrial Processes: Factories and manufacturing facilities release dust through emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, chemical reactions, and material processing, often containing toxic elements such as heavy metals.

3. Power Generation: Coal-fired power plants and other energy production sites emit fine particulates from combustion and smokestacks, contributing significantly to urban PM levels.

4. Household and Domestic Combustion: Burning solid fuels, such as wood, charcoal, coal, or kerosene, for cooking, heating, or lighting in homes releases substantial amounts of particulate matter, especially in densely populated areas.

5. Waste Management and Burning: The open burning of municipal waste or agricultural residues near urban fringes, along with dust from landfills and waste handling, contributes to airborne particulates.

6. Raw Material Stockpiles: Wind-scattered dust from uncovered stockpiles of materials (e.g., near ports, factories, or construction yards) contributes to fugitive dust in industrial zones.

7. Consumer Products and Volatile Compounds: Everyday items like cleaning agents, paints, cosmetics, and perfumes release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can react in the atmosphere to form secondary particulate matter.

8. Wind-Blown Soil and Crustal Dust: Erosion of exposed soil, unpaved surfaces, or dry earth in urban green spaces or outskirts, resuspended by wind, forms a baseline of natural particulates.

9. Biological and Pollen Particles: Naturally occurring pollen, spores, and plant debris in city parks or along streets can contribute to organic dust, especially during certain seasons.

10. Geological Events: Rare but impactful sources like volcanic ash (from distant eruptions) or thunderstorm-generated dust can occasionally affect urban air.

11. Natural location: There is an ecological reason for the high prevalence of dust in Indian cities. India is located within a “desert zone” that lies between 15 and 30 degrees latitude. Hence, India experiences a very concentrated rainy season between June and October. The rest of the year is bright and sunny, which dries the moisture from the soil. This means, unlike other countries, India will have to work harder to ensure there is no soil-generated dust.

The Solutions

1. Construction and Demolition Site Management: Construction is a primary source of coarse dust (PM10). Key controls focus on minimising fugitive emissions:

   • Dust Suppression Techniques: Utilise water sprinklers, mist cannons, or chemical suppressants (e.g., polymers) on exposed surfaces and during excavation operations. Enclose sites with barriers or tarps to contain particles.

   • Material Handling Protocols: Cover stockpiles of sand, gravel, or debris; limit vehicle speeds on-site; and clean wheels before exiting to prevent road resuspension. In cities like Los Angeles, mandatory wetting and covering have reduced local dust by up to 70%.

   • Phased Scheduling and Permits: Require permits that mandate dust control plans, with phased work to minimise exposed areas. Fines for non-compliance encourage adherence.

2. Road and Traffic Dust Suppression: Road dust from unpaved surfaces and vehicle movement contributes significantly to urban PM.

   • Paving and Maintenance: Pave unpaved roads with asphalt or permeable materials; apply gravel or stabilisers to rural-urban fringes. Regular street sweeping and vacuuming remove accumulated particles.

   • Vegetative Barriers: Plant roadside hedges or grass to trap dust; maintaining vegetation cover reduces exposed soil erosion.

   • No uncovered open soil: Uncovered open soil dries out quickly and, along with the wind, adds to the particulate matter in the air.

3. Industrial and Waste Management Controls: Industries and waste burning release fine particulates (PM2.5) alongside dust.

   • Emission Control Technologies: Install filters, such as baghouses or electrostatic precipitators, on stacks; switch to low-emission processes or fuels. Chimneys require proper emission management systems. Relocating heavy industries from city centres, as in China’s eastern cities, has helped.

   • Waste Collection Improvements: We will need covered garbage bins and high-quality garbage trucks to effectively manage waste collection.

   • Waste Processing Improvements: Ban open burning and promote recycling and waste-to-energy initiatives. Covering landfills and using leachate controls prevent dust from waste sites.

   • Parali-processing power plants: Buy the crop stubble from the farmers and use it as a fuel for thermal energy generation. The plant should be able to use gas as an alternative fuel and should be equipped with bag filters and carbon scrubbing technology.

   • Zoning and Standards: Enforce zoning laws to separate industrial zones and establish strict emission limits, utilising real-time monitoring with IoT sensors connected to SMART City control rooms for seamless tracking and compliance.

4. Transportation and Vehicle-Related Measures: While focusing on non-exhaust PM (e.g., tyre/brake wear, road dust), these reduce overall particulates.

   • Electrification and Clean Fuels: Shift to electric vehicles (EVs) and buses, which produce less brake dust; phase out diesel in public fleets. Cities like Shenzhen have electrified transport to lower PM.

   • Reduce stand-still traffic spots: The more vehicles stand still on the road, the more the SPM emissions. Common bottlenecks are traffic signals, toll booths and roadworks.

5. Urban Planning and Greening Initiatives: Design cities to naturally mitigate dust and PM.

   • Green Infrastructure: Create urban forests, green roofs, and parks to absorb particulates—trees can filter up to 30% of local PM. Vertical gardens and “green corridors” enhance this in dense areas.

   • Building and Ventilation Design: Utilise wind mapping to optimise building layouts, enhancing airflow and reducing pollutant concentrations; incorporate carbon-capturing materials into structures.

   • Sustainable Land Use: Minimise soil disturbance through compact development and protect natural buffers, such as wetlands, ponds, and lakes.

6. 6. Household and Indoor Controls: Indoor sources contribute to outdoor PM via ventilation.

   • Green Energy Transitions: Replace solid fuels (wood, coal) with gas, electricity, or renewable sources for cooking/heating, reducing ambient SPM.

   • Cleaning conventional energy: Carbon scrubbing and carbon capture technologies must be deployed in industries that use coal, wood, or oil for fuel.

7. Policy, Monitoring, and Community Engagement: Overarching frameworks ensure sustained impact.

   • Regulatory Incentives and Restrictions: All of these ideas require regulation and strong enforcement. As a corollary, we will need dispute resolution mechanisms and corruption control.

   • Advanced Monitoring Networks: A certain amount of fact collection can be augmented using sensors to gather real-time data on PM hotspots; utilise AI and smart traffic lights to dynamically adjust flows.

   • Public Awareness and Collaboration: Ultimately, public awareness and engagement can drive more effective enforcement.

In Sum

Urban pollution is a multi-dimensional problem. India has taken many steps in improving the chemical composition of air. Yes, more can be done but substantial progress has already been achieved in this area.

However, we need to focus our attention on Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM) levels and we need to tackle this challenge in all our cities.

Note:

For detailed references you can email me.

Contrary to popular opinion, I have maintained that there is no “skill gap” anywhere in the world including in India.

Skill gap is artificial construct, a lame excuse. Anyone can be skilled. If they see profits or opportunity, companies will train Grade-4 dropout to code, manufacture or whatever we think is “high-skilled”.

Companies influence skill development in two main ways.

First, by paying higher for skills they desire. This process creates a longer feedback loop for skill development. Depending upon the depth of the skills, universities invest in creating technical courses and attracting students to these courses. This creates the talent that is absorbed by the industry. Companies often co-invest with universities and they often allow their own employees to teach at these universities to ensure training aligns with industry requirements.

For quicker results, companies pick up adjacent skilled people and train them. This requires investments in training - seeking out managers who can train people repeatedly while on the job. After skilling companies need to offer higher wages to these newly skilled employees. Some employees adapt these skills to create separate businesses themselves.

In fact most famous companies came from skills created like above

• Amancio Ortega (Inditex/Zara): With no education beyond age 13, he started as a shop hand in a shirt factory, mastering garment production and supply chains through daily hands-on work. He then founded Zara, building the world’s largest fashion retailer by creating fast, affordable style for millions.

• Ralph Lauren (Ralph Lauren Corporation): Lacking any college degree, he learned menswear trends and customer preferences on the job as a sales clerk at Brooks Brothers. He launched his own tie line, scaling it into a billion-dollar global apparel empire that redefined American luxury.

• Zhou Qunfei (Lens Technology): Leaving school at 16 with minimal education, she mastered precision glass manufacturing by polishing lenses in a watch factory. She started Lens Technology in a garage, becoming the top touchscreen supplier for Apple and Samsung, worth billions.

• Henry Ford (Ford Motor Company): Formal schooling ended after eighth grade; he learned engineering and assembly through machinist apprenticeships and shop-floor tinkering. He founded Ford, inventing the moving assembly line to mass-produce affordable cars, transforming global industry.

• Colonel Harland Sanders (KFC): Education stopped at eighth grade; he perfected his fried chicken recipe through decades of on-the-job cooking in restaurants and steakhouses. At 65, he franchised KFC, building a $27 billion fast-food empire from a single recipe.

• Joyce Hall (Hallmark Cards): Dropping out at 14 with no higher education, he learned greeting card design and sales through door-to-door vending and bookstore work. He founded Hallmark, growing it into the world’s largest card company with $5 billion in annual revenue.

• Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA): Leaving school at 17 without further qualifications, he honed sales and flat-pack design skills selling matches and furniture door-to-door. He founded IKEA, revolutionizing affordable home goods into a $50 billion global retail giant.

It is all about demand!

When companies do not see demand, they come up with such plethora of excuses to not enter the fray. But when push comes to shove, they can and will compete AND win too.

Here is news about US skilling people for manufacturing.

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You can picture this. There are many street vendors selling everything from clothes, bags, vegetables, food, drinks, books, electronics and knick-knacks. They have encroached on the footpath. You do not have space to walk. There are people haggling with these vendors. Yes, of course, there is a demand for those goods.

But just behind them, there are shops - proper airconditioned shops and not many customers in there. Why don’t those shops not sell these fast moving items? The reason is regulation.

The Restaurant Case

While researching for a legal case of a restauranteur, I learnt that

• It takes 40+ licences to start a restaurant in Mumbai. And all of these need to be updated - some monthly, some six-monthly, some annually, some at random time intervals.

• Around 12 different inspectors/officers conduct visit of the restaurant.

• 450+ times he is interacting with some official or other during the year, filing forms, inspection, certificate grant, getting copy of the certificate, etc.

• The process is smoothened by bribes.

• Yet, many officers are antagonistic, treating the restauranteur as a criminal at the very outset. Others are pragmatic and state their “demands” upfront.

The food-stall right outside the restaurant simply pays one bribe a day. His process is smooth and officers are friendly. Yes, sometimes they raid these stalls, break them and cause losses but they often give advance notice of such raids.

Regulation makes it tough to do business legally.

What I described about the restaurant business is true of all stalls vs legal shops. This is the problem with current regulation. This brings us to the current reality in India:

Cost of complying with the law is HIGH & benefits are LOW
AND
Cost of breaking the law is LOW & benefits are HIGH

The central government and some states have tried to ease this but city-level governance is still colonial. It proceeds with the assumption that the citizens are cheaters and culprits. This assumption was seeded by the British colonial power that wrote these laws. It was incumbent on the free-India’s state machinery to recolonise the laws and institutions. Something it has failed to do as yet.

The people’s response to such an extractive state has been to subvert it. I explained it in this post.

It is time to de-regulate intelligently!

It is now critical that we de-regulate. Compliance of law should be easy. We need to trust the citizens to do the right thing.

But it should not mean there is no oversight. Oversight should be benign. It should be driven from place of care not from a need to control. There is a BIG difference in those two attitudes.

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This week, I told my father that Trump does not drink or smoke and is against drugs. He is also against tattoos and believes his children should focus on studies. My father said Trump sounds a lot like Gandhi. I thought he meant Rahul Gandhi - and one can argue that. But he insisted that there were many similarities between Trump and Mahatma Gandhi! I was taken aback.

But it is true.

Mahatma Gandhi was against alcohol, smoking, drugs and tattoos. As is Trump. But the similarities do not end there.

Mahatma Gandhi supported Swadeshi (boycott of foreign imported goods). Trump’s MAGA policy echoes this. In fact, both Gandhi and Trump have used Swadeshi / MAGA as a tool for economic warfare.

Gandhi favoured non-cooperation, something Trump has used recklessly against supplier countries. In fact, both Gandhi and Trump have used non-cooperation against their own party. Gandhi famously sat on “fasts-unto-death” to make his Congress Party change policies and bent it to his will. Trump has unleashed RINO tags, pushing centerist Republicans into a corner.

Both were fallible to ego massaging. Gandhi famously subverted India’s first choice for PM - the upright and mince-no-words Sardar Patel and installed the charming, rose-trotting, laundry-in-Paris Nehru.

Gandhi was against wars. So is Trump. But despite their policies, both supported “their” wars. Gandhi was against only those wars that were against the British. He favoured Indians fighting FOR the British, even at the cost of losing the chance to gain independence. Trump has just renamed the Department of Defence to the Department of War!

Mahatma Gandhi was also fond of women and sexuality, as detailed in his autobiography. While Trump’s escapades are well known. Gandhi tried to add a veneer of justification using “experimenting with TRUTH”, while Trump was quite crass about this in his public utterances. If Trump has the courage to write about it, he may try to justify it too.

And finally,

Gandhi screwed the nation by accepting the partition that resulted in the death of 2 million people. His policies and ideas would subvert the rise of India for decades.

In a way, Trump is following the same path.

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If we map out all the transactions in any industry from raw materials to finished products, you will find that there are risks within every industry. The entrepreneur bears this risks and for this, s/he is rewarded. The entrepreneur uses capital investments to reduce the risk or to mitigate it or make it easier to bear.

You will find that where there is risk, there is capital.

This capital refers to financial capital, intellectual capital, human capital. Financial capital is loans or funds. Intellectual capital refers to new ideas or designs (e.g. coca cola recipe ) or new ways of doing business. Human capital refers to skills and productivity of those employed (jewellery craftsmen for instance).

Agricutlure is different - it is misaligned.

In agriculture, all the risks is borne by the farmer. The creditors, supplier to the farmer and customers of the farmer are in collusion.

Modi’s farm laws were meant to tackle collusion present in the Indian agricultural system. This is a reform that is necessary.

The collusion aspect is not present in developed countries’ agricultural industry. But the rest of the story is the same. There is far too much risk in the system and farmer is not capital-rich (in all forms of capital) to bear the risk. The entire focus in global agrictulral development has been to improve yields and productivity.

Farmers will need institutional support from multiple directions - choice of crops, farming know-how (called agricultural extension), market synchronisation through different types of contracts and contract enforcement, transportation and storage of agri-produce, etc.

We need a comprehensive system in place which allows all the parts to work together. I proposed a Smart Agriculture Management System to do just that. You can read about it here.

Till such a reform is brought in, agriculture will be in difficulty as a business.

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