Amit Kapoor

Swachh Bharat expanded coverage. Now cities must build the capacity to sustain progress

Regulation is one instrument for meeting Delhi's housing demand and public provision is another, and the capital has relied heavily on the first

A city is not an inventory of assets but a metabolism, drawing in water, energy, land and people and returning them in usable form or failing to do so

In building the first city-level portrait of urban work, the National Statistics Office has taken a step towards the evidence-based view that sound urban policy depends on

We have built an economy that can deliver everything - from iPhones to biryani - to a doorstep in 10 minutes, but it cannot deliver a fire engine through a lane in 20

Urban India's income distribution deserves to be looked at distinctly from rural India's

While our cities need investment, they also need something harder to build and easier to ignore to become truly livable

India's Swachh Bharat Mission has transformed urban cleanliness, but gaps in water safety and public health show why sanitation rankings must evolve from visible cleanliness to urban resilience

The scale of the challenge becomes clearer when one examines who is expected to design India's urban future

As urban populations surge, the call is growing for cities built around people's lived realities, not outdated templates or top-down planning

Cities are crumbling, but the local bodies that govern them remain powerless

Its current horizontal devolution formula is insufficient to prepare cities to deal with floods and droughts caused by climate change

Migration is not a problem to be managed away-it is the source of urban vitality

Urban agglomeration has long been assumed to lead naturally to growth, but India's failing infrastructure and environmental stress tell a different story

Employers are betting on smaller cities - but without a governance model that keeps pace with economic change, the gains may not last

As India navigates through the complexities of sustainable development, the blue economy offers a compelling strategy to align urban development with social inclusion and environmental resilience

The government needs to actively push greater cultivation of millets, while encouraging farmers to move away from water-guzzling wheat and rice

As of now, paddy has the largest area under cultivation in India, and agricultural input subsidies are skewed towards paddy production

The government already offers a higher minimum support price (MSP) for millets like Bajra and Jowar compared to paddy

Projections indicate that by 2036, Indian cities will have close to 600 million inhabitants, i.e. 40 per cent of the country's population