Walking into a Metropolitan civic body on any particular working day in India, one would notice that the person signing off on critical determinants of urban life in the water pipeline contracts, hiring sanitation staff, and deciding ward-specific allocations is not the mayor. The person who determines these is the municipal commissioner, typically an IAS officer answerable to the chief secretary rather than to the electorate. The mayor is often a short-term appointment whose

Lives overturned. Dreams broken. Loved ones lost. This is the story behind the thousands of fire incidents that happen in India. These incidents often make it to headlines but only stay relevant until the next place fumes up. Till then, the conundrum of fire safety infrastructure rests in cold boxes, and when it wakes up, it is already too late. For a country that lost over 7,435 people in 2022 alone due to fire accidents, this should not be dismissed as negligence. Illustra

India never truly planned to urbanise at all, and that is exactly why it finds itself with over 500 million people living in towns and cities that it never truly decided to build, or at least properly planned to. No sector in Indian policy demonstrates the gap between policy intent and administrative reality quite like urban governance. The fundamental issue in the sector, in simple terms, is that Indian cities have been given far too much responsibility without the actual po

Almost every day, mainstream media reports a tragic incident: ‘a young man died after his car plunged into a water-filled construction pit’, ‘a car disappeared into a flooded underpass, students died in an unsafe basement’, ‘a bridge collapsed days after repair, a construction site caved in, burying many workers alive’, which captures the attention of the nation. The next few days are followed by mourning, outrage, promises of inquiry, and accountability of the responsible au