Sagari Gupta

India has no shortage of building rules. The problem is making sure they produce safer buildings. The recent collapse of a building in Delhi’s Satya Niketan area, which killed six people and trapped dozens more beneath the rubble, brings into sharp relief the precariousness of the city’s built environment. The five-storey structure, housing a boys’ paying-guest accommodation near Delhi University’s South Campus, gave way while repair work was still under way. While the precise cause of the...

Nepal’s $5 billion reconstruction bill exposes a wider economic failure: when governments repeatedly restore vulnerable assets instead of investing in resilience, natural hazards become recurring fiscal shocks. Nepal needs $4 billion to $5 billion to rebuild after floods triggered by a glacier collapse killed more than 600 people in Nepal and Tibet on August 26. That bill equals nearly a tenth of the country’s economy. The bigger question is what this bill represents. $5 billion is the cost...

As fertility falls below replacement level in several states, India faces a new demographic challenge: fewer workers, faster ageing and a growing economic cost of family formation. India’s fertility rate has fallen to around replacement level nationally, but that headline conceals a far more consequential regional divide. Tamil Nadu’s total fertility rate is 1.7, Maharashtra’s 1.8, while Sikkim remains at 1.1 in NFHS-5. India’s fertility transition is no longer a single national story. It is...