Two families may live in the same forest landscape. Both may have land, family labour, livestock, traditional knowledge and community networks. Yet after the same crop failure, wildlife loss or employment shock, one household manages to recover while the other slips deeper into insecurity. Why?
An average can hide a great deal. According to the 2011 Census, 70.6 per cent of urban households in India had access to piped water [1]; but only around 62 per cent of those used treated piped water [2]; and almost 13 per cent of urban households continued to practice open defecation [3]. Such statistics give a comforting impression of progress at the national level. But they tell us nothing about where such progress is lacking. This policy approach views such deficiencies as shortages in pipes, toilets, and wastewater facilities. In this blog post, I will try to demonstrate why such framing is inadequate. It becomes clear from research that in addition to the physical deficiency, there exists an institutional issue as well. Municipalities differ widely in terms of the things they can do in a legal sense, the amount of resources available for spending, and even in the availability of personnel to manage constructed infrastructure. Such inequality is just inequality of capabilities at the household level.
The PARIVARTAN (Programme for Accelerated Renewal and Incentivization of Vehicle Assets for Reducing Transport Air Pollution and Network Emissions) Scheme, 2026 is a Government of India initiative aimed at reducing vehicular pollution in the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR). The scheme addresses emissions from ageing commercial trucks and buses, which are significant contributors to particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and other pollutants in the NCR.
India’s shift towards cleaner energy is also closely linked to how efficiently its existing domestic resources can be turned into commercially useful energy. The Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation (SATAT), launched by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas in October 2018, was introduced to create an ecosystem for producing Compressed Bio-Gas (CBG) from waste and biomass and to encourage its use alongside natural gas.
The human race, the anthropocene, has deeply integrated itself into every system while moulding itself into a better one. Governance and legal systems, economic and market systems, infrastructural and technological systems, socio-cultural systems, ecological and natural systems have always influenced each other too. However, they are bound by ecological limits or the greater concept of limits to growth that restrain the resources, driving scarcity to reform a global transition.
India's power system is adding clean generation faster than it can store it. Installed generation capacity stood at 520.5 GW on 31 January 2026. The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) projects 1,121 GW by 2035-36, with non-fossil sources rising to about 70% of capacity from about 52% today (CEA, 2026).
In 2011, manufacturing still accounted for just over 16% of India's GDP (Government of India, 2011). To reverse this trend, the government launched the National Manufacturing Policy (NMP), with two numerical targets for 2022, raising this share to 25% of GDP and creating 100 million jobs (Government of India, 2011).