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Every family has one. The child whose achievements get announced at dinner, whose mistakes are forgiven a little faster, and whose needs somehow make it to the top of the list. Maybe nobody officially declares a favourite, but you can usually tell who gets the most attention.&nbsp;

Governments have favourites too, just not necessarily in the way we think. They cannot respond to every citizen equally, so they have to decide who gets noticed, prioritised and helped first. Also sometimes, the people who get noticed are not necessarily those who need help the most. They are the ones the state can see most easily.

The Paperwork Test

Every welfare system starts with an act of classification. And before the state can provide food, housing or social security, it has to know who is eligible. That means categories, databases, documents, addresses, and eligibility criteria. And there is a good reason for that. No government can make a personal policy for each citizen. Well you have limited resources and so you have to target them. And to be able to target, you need some way of identifying beneficiaries.

But there is a catch: eligibility for administration can begin to replace actual need.

An example of this tension is India&rsquo;s <a href="https://dfpd.gov.in/distribution-of-food-grains/en">Public Distribution System</a>. Aadhaar-based authentication was introduced in part to reduce duplication and improve targeting. Research has also documented the new forms of exclusion that biometric failures and digital processes can create. For instance, a <a href="https://www.isb.edu/faculty-and-research/bharti-institute-of-public-policy/aadhar-authentication-failure-in-public-distribution-system-of-andhra-pradesh">study on the PDS in Andhra Pradesh</a> found that in the first sixteen days of December 2017, around 94,000 ration cards could not be authenticated through Aadhaar; of these, about 92% were because of biometric mismatches.

It&rsquo;s not that digitization is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the government has employed technology to increase the mobility of the system. The <a href="https://dfpd.gov.in/faqs/en">One Nation One Ration Card</a> scheme now allows NFSA beneficiaries to collect their entitled foodgrains from any ePoS-enabled fair price shop anywhere in the country, a reform that is particularly relevant for those who move for work. The lesson is subtler. A system that is meant to make welfare more efficient can still create barriers if the person in front of the system does not perfectly match the system&rsquo;s requirements.

When Your Address Moves, But Your Entitlement Doesn&#39;t

A migrant worker working in Delhi, can hold a ration card from Bihar. Wherever they are, they need food. Welfare systems, in contrast, have traditionally been built on administrative boundaries and fixed residential locations. The pandemic showed how consequential this could be. Workers crossing state borders for work suddenly found themselves outside the systems through which they would normally have been entitled to support. It was not that their vulnerability had suddenly dropped out of sight but that the location no longer matched the administrative location to which their entitlements were attached.

One Nation One Ration Card is somewhat of an attempt to solve exactly this problem. The Department of Food and Public Distribution says portability is especially helpful for migrants who frequently change their place of dwelling in search of temporary employment. That in itself reveals something important about policy design: sometimes exclusion does not require the government to say &ldquo;no&rdquo;. It excludes a person. The system was designed around a citizen that stays put.

When the State Has No Box for You

There&rsquo;s another kind of invisibility: not fitting into a legal category that already exists. For decades, traditional employer-employee relationships were the basis of India&rsquo;s labour laws. That framework did not neatly accommodate gig and platform workers. This was changed with the <a href="https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2200767&amp;reg=3&amp;lang=1">Code on Social Security, 2020</a>, which recognised gig and platform workers as a category in law and laid down the legal framework for social-security schemes related to life and disability cover, accident insurance, health and maternity benefits and old-age protection. The Code came into effect in November 2025.

What changed was their legal visibility.

According to <a href="https://www.niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2023-02/25th_June_Final_Report_27062022.pdf">NITI Aayog,</a> India&rsquo;s gig workforce was 7.7 million in 2020-21 and is expected to expand to 23.5 million by 2029-30. Their eventual recognition demonstrates that policy can lag behind social and economic change: sometimes a problem can only be more easily tackled once the state has created a category through which to see it.

So, Does the Government Have a Favourite Child?

Not really.

The state is not required to pick winners and losers on the basis of bias. Governments require categories. They need databases. They require eligibility rules. They have to find ways to distribute limited resources at an enormous scale. But these systems can establish a pattern that counts: the citizen who is easier to find, count, verify and process is often easier to help. That gives us a different way of thinking about fairness in policy. We usually ask if a scheme reaches the people who need it? Perhaps we should also ask whether the scheme was designed to recognise those people anyway.

The problem, therefore, is not just to formulate more welfare schemes. It&rsquo;s about creating systems flexible enough to identify people whose lives don&rsquo;t fit neatly into the boxes created for them. For the government&rsquo;s favourite child might not be the richest, the poorest, the most deserving or the most vulnerable.

It might just be the one whose name is on the list already.

So the next time a policy is announced, don&#39;t just ask: Who is it helping? Ask: Who was this policy designed to see and who was it built to miss?

Who Is the Government’s Favourite Child? 

Every summer arrives with the familiar routine where news channels are showing a split screen of temperature touching 47 degree celsius, hospitals opening special wards, and municipalities issuing heatwave advisory notices.&nbsp;

Who actually pays for the heat

Not everyone faces the 45-degree afternoon the same way. A person working in a construction site, a vendor selling vegetables with no shade, a delivery rider, none of them get to escape into an air-conditioned room the way an office worker might. Same temperature, very different day.&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.downtoearth.org.in/climate-change/lost-in-the-heat-the-critical-miscalculation-in-indias-heatwave-mortality-data">IMD&rsquo;s own data estimates over 10,000 heatwave deaths in India between 2000 and 2020</a>, and honestly, this number is probably low. Heat rarely gets written down as a cause of death, health reports usually claim that the heart or kidneys were already struggling. Then there&rsquo;s the economic side, which gets far less attention than it should. <a href="https://lancetcountdown.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/India_Lancet-Countdown_2025_Data-Sheet-2.pdf">The Lancet Countdown&rsquo;s 2025 edition estimated that India lost 247 billion potential labour hours to heat exposure in 2024</a>, a rise of more than 120% since the 1990s. Behind that figure are daily-wage workers who simply couldn&rsquo;t afford to stop, and lost income they never got back.

<h2>Why Cities Make Their Own Problem Worse</h2>

A lot of this comes down to how Indian cities are physically built. Concrete, tar and glass soak up heat through the day. They let it go slowly, well into the night, so the temperature barely dips even after sunset. Urban planners call this the heat island effect. Fewer trees, disappearing wetlands, and the exhaust from every AC unit and vehicle only add to it, as the&nbsp; city is generating heat almost as much as the sunlight it&rsquo;s absorbing. Delhi this April ran about 3.1&deg;C above its usual seasonal average. On paper that doesn&rsquo;t sound like much, but on the ground, it&rsquo;s the difference between a hot day and one where hospitals start bracing themselves.

Green cover isn&rsquo;t helping much either.<a href="https://lancetcountdown.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/India_Lancet-Countdown_2025_Data-Sheet-2.pdf"> The same Lancet Countdown assessment found that average urban greenness across Indian cities fell by 3.6% between 2015 and 2024</a>, with Tamluk, in West Bengal, is the only city among 189 major cities rated as having genuinely high greenness. Fewer trees mean less shade and slower natural cooling in exactly the neighbourhoods that need it most.

<h2>What Governments Are Actually Doing</h2>

To be fair, India hasn&#39;t been sitting still. The story started&nbsp; in Ahmedabad, where a <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/press-releases/indian-city-launches-first-ever-heat-wave-preparation-and-warning-system">brutal 2010 heatwave pushed the city to launch South Asia&#39;s first Heat Action Plan in 2013</a>, early warnings, hospital training, cooling shelters, and rescheduled work hours for outdoor labour. Studies later credited it with saving hundreds of lives a year, and the model spread. Today,<a href="https://www.downtoearth.org.in/climate-change/indias-heat-plans-are-growing-but-the-real-test-lies-beyond-policy-experts"> over 250 cities and districts across 23 states</a> have some version of a Heat Action Plan.

This year&#39;s response has been the most visible yet. Delhi&rsquo;s 2026 plan brought <a href="https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/delhi-govt-tightens-heat-action-plan-with-focus-on-thermal-hotspots-public-safety/">thermal mapping of hotspots, &ldquo;cool rooms&rdquo; at over 30 hospitals, misting systems at bus stops, and a construction ban between 12 pm and 3 pm on severe-heatwave days.</a> The Disaster Management Act, 2005 now lets states tap disaster relief funds for heat, and the <a href="https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2024/08/28/guest-blog-pioneering-decision-from-the-indian-supreme-court-recognizing-freedom-from-the-adverse-effects-of-climate-change-as-a-fundamental-right/">Supreme Court&#39;s 2024 ruling in M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India went as far as reading a right to be free from climate change&rsquo;s adverse effects into Article 21.</a>

The catch, as experts keep pointing out, is that most of this is short-term triage. Water kiosks and ORS packets help someone survive today but don&rsquo;t fix a city that traps heat by design. A<a href="https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/heatwave-alerts-action-india-cooling-governance-urban-heat-126053000768_1.html"> study of nine cities by the Sustainable Futures Collaborative</a> found that longer-term measures, tree cover, open spaces, cool roofs, rooftop solar remain the exception, and are rarely aimed at the people who need them most.

<h2>Fixing the Emergency, Not Just Managing It</h2>

A plan that switches on every May and switches off by July only gets a city only so far. Cool roofs shouldn&#39;t be something a builder can choose to skip, they belong in the building code, full stop. Footpaths and bus stops need actual shade, not an afterthought once the concrete&#39;s already poured. Labour law needs a clause for heat stress the same way it has one for any other on-the-job hazard, with teeth for the gig workers and daily wagers who can&rsquo;t just decide to sit out a red-alert day. And someone in each city needs to be answerable for all of it, because right now heat sits across so many departments- health, municipal bodies, disaster management, that in practice belongs to none of them.

Heat is no longer just a seasonal phenomenon, it has become something you can&rsquo;t escape. The cities that treat it as an urban planning problem, not just a summer inconvenience, are the ones that will still be functioning through the April to come.

What would it take for your city to plan for heat the way it plans for floods? That&rsquo;s the conversation worth having before next summer arrives.

 
&nbsp;

The Heat is On: Why Indian Cities Can't Keep Winging It Every Summer

In the last week of July 2026, Brent crude <a href="https://www.rigzone.com/news/eir_still_sees_oil_at_100_in_h2_2027-05-aug-2026-184298-article/">climbed back above $100 a barrel</a> as a ceasefire between Iran, Israel and the United States collapsed. In China, dealership data for the same period showed electric vehicles <a href="https://www.scmp.com/business/china-evs/article/3356789/evs-capture-two-thirds-chinas-car-market-record-breaking-week">taking a record share</a> of new car sales. In Sri Lanka, the same week, <a href="https://democracyasia.com/articles/sri-lankas-recovery-hit-by-hormuz-blockade">reports described</a> a country still absorbing the fallout of an energy shock it had no part in causing. Three data points, one war, and two entirely different Asian experiences of it.

The consensus that has formed

Over the past weeks, banks, oil analysts and Chinese state economists have converged, largely independently, on the same conclusion: China&#39;s decade-long bet on electric vehicles cushioned it against the closure of the Strait of Hormuz far more than anyone expected. Analysts at Soci&eacute;t&eacute; G&eacute;n&eacute;rale have called China <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/22/energy/oil-price-china-dependence-iran-war-intl-hnk">the &quot;invisible hand&quot;</a> rebalancing an oil market that, by historical comparison to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, should have spiked far harder than it did. J.P. Morgan&#39;s Natasha Kaneva has <a href="https://www.benzinga.com/markets/asia/26/07/60468907/chinas-ev-taxi-boom-is-giving-the-worlds-biggest-oil-importer-a-buffer-against-strait-of-hormuz-supply-shocks">argued</a> that the war likely accelerated a structural shift in China&#39;s oil dependence that was already under way. Executives at <a href="https://www.scmp.com/business/commodities/article/3359696/peak-oil-chinas-crude-demand-set-fall-ev-bets-ease-hormuz-fears">China National Petroleum Corporation</a> now expect domestic crude demand to peak within five years. A <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/chinas-ev-boom-quietly-undermining-200000991.html">Jefferies analysis</a>, citing the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, puts a number on it: electric vehicles displaced an estimated 1.35 million barrels of oil a day in China in the first half of 2026, up 42% year-on-year. Chinese crude imports <a href="https://ground.news/article/china-turns-to-electric-taxis-to-soften-hormuz-oil-shock_58533e">dropped by about 41% in the month of June alone</a>, which was their worst month since 2016.

What the consensus leaves out

Of this coverage &quot;goes beyond China&#39;s borders&quot; only a small percentage. It is the divide this piece is concerned with, as the same five months that were relatively easy to absorb in China were experienced in all parts of the region.

The war in <a href="https://democracyasia.com/articles/dire-straits-the-farming-crisis">eastern India manifested itself as a crisis in fertiliser supply</a>, instead of a car market. The Gulf is expected to contribute about a third of the world&#39;s traded urea, and the disruption reduced global supply by an estimated one-third, causing a spot price increase of 40% at the time when farmers were using nitrogen for kharif sowing. Sri Lanka is also in midst of an IMF programme, having completed its 2022 programme, and <a href="https://democracyasia.com/articles/sri-lankas-recovery-hit-by-hormuz-blockade">did not have such a buffer in place either </a>&mdash; with over one third of its seaborne imports of fertiliser from the Gulf. Pakistan and Afghanistan were in a more difficult situation; they had even less fiscal space, had to rely on imported fuel and faced high levels of debt which meant they could not afford to simply wait for the price to go up like the Chinese refiners have done for months.

A matter of government rather than capability

Why was there an escape route in one part of Asia and there was not in other parts of Asia? The patently obvious one is money! A more useful answer is state capacity and political responsibility.

China&#39;s insulation was achieved in a particular way: state-owned oil firms were told to release their stocks instead of holding onto market shares, and a car industry that has been heavily subsidized for more than a decade was forced to the brink of war by the time of the insurrection when the price-sensitive were already looking elsewhere. Importantly, the loss of the combustion engine market doesn&#39;t impact the price at the pump or at the ration shop, it impacts manufacturers and provincial governments.

No equivalent instrument was available in any of the three countries: India, Sri Lanka or Pakistan. India invests a lot in fertiliser subsidy and not in manufacturing as much of the rural electorate is more interested in the price of urea while planting the crops than in the long run of the auto industry. The IMF programme in Sri Lanka provides little scope for the industrial wager Beijing made 10 years ago. For years, Pakistan&#39;s fiscal space has been eaten away by debt servicing and this war has imposed additional expenses on top of this for fuel and fertiliser.

A one-party state can absorb a demand shock by running a policy of industrial development for a decade without having to answer to any domestic electorate about the decisions it made. A government which would be compelled to face the voters about the cost of diesel or urea has no such luxury, the pressure is felt at once, within the current election cycle, before the same sort of hedge can get constructed even if there is fiscal scope.

The Way Forward

This is not the case that democratic accountability is a burden to be sacrificed for authoritarian planning, nor that democratic planning is superior. China&#39;s own economists have acknowledged the <a href="https://www.indexbox.io/blog/chinas-crude-oil-demand-to-peak-in-2026-amid-refining-overcapacity-and-strait-of-hormuz-crisis/">overcapacity of refining capacity</a> even while demand for refined products slows down, and <a href="https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Chinas-EV-Boom-Is-Quietly-Undermining-Oils-Biggest-Chokepoint.html">independent estimates</a> peg the impact of a full closure of the Hormuz Strait at nearly half of the crude imports for China, a closure dampened by electrification but not eliminated.

The more helpful lesson for the public-policy community in the region is on time horizons. Three levers stand out. First, there should be no more putting energy and food-security stockpiling on the chopping block when budgets are cut, it should be done as a fiscal priority outside of the election cycle, as China&#39;s refiners did. Second, the design of the subsidy counts: India supports the price of its inputs, such as fertiliser, while this helps consumers in the short term, it does not create a buffer for the next shock, and it can have a cumulative effect over a decade of time. Third, regional coordination &mdash; either via a SAARC-adjacent forum or via a bilateral reserve-sharing mechanism &mdash; can enable fiscally constrained countries to share this type of buffer that may not be available to them individually in the South Asian region.

The next regional shock, whatever its nature, will once again challenge the same question: which governments could plan ten years ahead, politically and financially, and which couldn&#39;t?

&nbsp;

Plugged in, Left out: The Two Asias of an Oil War

Climate change is one of the biggest collective action problems the world has ever faced. Despite growing agreement that the negative effects of climate change are real and are fast approaching, the policy efforts are yet to effectively tackle the issue. The most popular answer to the question why global warming and climate change is such a difficult problem to solve is that the issue has the characteristics of a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730">wicked problem</a>. However, the popularity of this rhetoric often shifts attention away from limitations of the decision-making process itself. A closer look at the policymaking process reveals that when faced with issues like climate change which are riddled with ambiguity and uncertainty, the decisionmakers tend to end up with non-optimal policy choices. This points towards inherent limitations in the decision-making process.&nbsp;

Any attempt to understand why global efforts to solve climate change remains in an impasse should also enquire into how decisionmakers make judgments and decisions when faced with uncertainty. The seminal work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on heuristics and biases offers an interesting framework that could be applied in this respect. According to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1738360">Tversky and Kahneman (1974)</a>, individuals tend to rely on heuristics or mental shortcuts to reduce complex decisions to simpler judgmental operations. Three such key heuristics are representativeness heuristic, availability heuristic and adjustments and anchoring. However, when faced with uncertainty, these heuristics could cloud the judgment and lead to erroneous decisions.&nbsp;

Representativeness heuristic refers to the situation where the degree of resemblance guides probability evaluation in decision-making. When encountered with situation A, its resemblance to situation B leads the decisionmaker to base the judgments on stereotypes about B. In climate change policy, this occurs due to the tendency to treat global warming as a typical environmental problem (<a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975714">Victor,2011</a>). The solution to environmental problems typically involves small technological shifts and simple regulatory policies. This does not work in case of the greenhouse gas emissions issue, which is fundamentally a global, inter-temporal problem with extreme uncertainty about the effects on both the economy and environment. Identifying the global warming issue as an environmental issue also means that there is an immediate tendency to apply solutions that have worked in case of environmental problems. This is also a problem of identification (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3525655">Jones, 2003</a>) in which people identify readily with previous solutions. One major example in this respect is the influence of ozone regulation efforts. As the ozone regulation efforts were largely successful, there is an inherent tendency to rely on the same set of strategies ignoring the fact that the problem at hand is different and situations have evolved. The situation also leads to an &lsquo;illusion of validity&rsquo; (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). Armed with a high degree of representativeness, the decisionmakers have more confidence in their capacity to predict outcomes. This, in turn, leads to stronger adherence to current frameworks and reluctance to look for alternative solutions that might be better suited to the issue.

The second heuristic that Tversky and Kahneman talk about is the availability heuristic which refers to the tendency of people to base their judgments on instances or events that immediately comes to mind. For example, a policy actor with personal experience of a climate disaster tends to approach and present the problem very differently. Similarly, a government might interpret climate risks differently after being faced with a natural disaster. Even if the association of the extreme event with climate change is negligible, they might give more weightage to these low-probability events. The &lsquo;biases of imaginability&rsquo; play a key role in the evaluation of probabilities (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). While the ease of imagination tends to overestimate the probability, the lack of immediate experience can lead to underestimation of the risks. The myopic response of climate deniers in less affected developed countries has to be understood in this context. The availability heuristic also explains why certain highly visible policy interventions receive disproportionate attention over other interventions which may be more effective but less visible and less cognitively accessible.&nbsp;

The third heuristic adjustments and anchoring occur when estimations start from an initial value (or an anchor) that is adjusted to yield the final answer. In other words, the starting point is already given, and adjustments are made (often insufficiently) based on this anchor. This bias creeps into climate change in multiple ways. One route is through the initial positions assumed by governments or decision makers. For example, at the international level, current positions assumed by many countries continue to be tied to their historical positions that were framed when the problem was initially conceived at the international stage. Though some might be consciously using it as a negotiating tactic, generally this has led to an anchoring effect in climate change platforms causing insufficient adjustments by involved parties. Similarly, despite the repeated failure to ensure compliance and enforce binding agreements, the UN-led architecture remains the dominant regime on which international climate policy efforts are anchored. This could be a reason why calls for shifting regulatory efforts to smaller influential groups are yet to gain traction in the international climate regime. The policy stasis commonly observed with respect to emission targets, threshold values, cost estimations etc. can also be attributed to anchoring effect.&nbsp; Once a particular figure gains widespread traction, subsequent revisions tend to be incremental if not completely ignored.&nbsp;

In the policy world riddled with uncertainty, complex decisions are inevitable. Policy makers have not much option but to rely on their heuristics from time to time. The way forward is not to abandon them altogether but to be better aware about the biases and systematic errors they lead us into.&nbsp;

Costly Shortcuts: The Mental Traps in Climate Policy

I like to travel, however, my work has always kept me in and around Hyderabad. I had begun to identify travel as an idea versus an experience. I was born and raised in Hyderabad, so everything outside of the city was unexplored. The opportunity to travel with my team from work changed this. My workplace sent me to Dandeli and Gokarna.I was finally going to see what it was like to leave Hyderabad and see what was waiting for me outside of my comfort zone. Something about leaving Hyderabad felt right, even if it was just for a work trip. For the first time, I was experiencing what it meant to leave something familiar behind. Starting anything is always going to be the <a href="https://medium.com/swlh/why-starting-is-the-hardest-part-and-how-to-overcome-it-ab87f5d1b577">hardest part</a>. This was no different. From the waiting area of the bus station to sitting in the bus that had Hyderabad in its rear-view mirror, I was able to get to know my coworkers in a different way. It felt natural. People I knew in a professional capacity became people with a personality that I could engage with. The path itself was an important part of the trip.At work, people are normally known by their responsibilities and titles. But outside of the office, they are not as important. A journey becomes a different kind of place, a place where all one does is chat, laugh, eat, tell stories, and spend some time.

Dandeli and Gokarna 
Dandeli taught me something new about<a href="https://medium.com/@mridulabhutda/travel-diaries-dandeli-india-5913719a7b8e"> travel</a>. The greenery, openness, and proximity to nature made me feel a distance from my daily surroundings. It helped me understand that at times we need to get away from our surroundings to know what the world has in store for us. From Dandeli, I made a trip to Gokarna, and the ambience totally transformed. Forests and adventure were replaced by beaches, waves, skies, and silence. Standing next to the sea made me think that sometimes travel is not only about reaching another tourist destination. Sitting there and chatting or just observing waves can make the trip unforgettable.

Beyond Language 
The next lesson I learned from my travels involved the differences that I observed, especially concerning <a href="https://airapps.co/blog/how-to-handle-language-differences-when-traveling-internationally">language</a> and communications. Sometimes, language is not enough for communication. However, communication proceeds. A smile, a gesture, being patient, or just trying to understand the other person is able to remove barriers even where language fails. Travel brings out the differences, but travel shows us something else too. Underneath different languages, traditions and cultures, different lifestyles of the people we meet, there are still many things that we share as human beings. These include curiosity, kindness, laughter, and communion that need no translation. 
&nbsp;

More than Colleagues 
Undoubtedly, the most important thing I discovered about my colleagues through this journey was how much more than just colleagues they are. Apart from all of the work-related activities, I had the opportunity to learn people and understand them better. Communicating on a more personal level, laughing, and having fun together helped me understand that travelling together creates a bond that is not necessarily created at a workplace. You might start your journey as a group of colleagues, but somehow you return as friends.

What I Have Brought Back 
Everything felt familiar when I came back to Hyderabad, but I was no longer the same person that I had been when I left. I came back carrying with me memories of Dandeli, the serene shores of Gokarna, conversations along the way, new acquaintances, and more appreciation of the world around me than before. My first venture out of Hyderabad opened up a whole new understanding to me that travelling is not just about places, but also about people, experiences, differences, conversations and viewpoints. Hyderabad is where my trip started, Dandeli provided me with an adventure, Gokarna with serenity, and the road in between them provided me with memories. My trip might have begun with this particular trip, but my travels do not end here. Sometimes you leave your familiar world to see the world, only to come back and find a little more of yourself in the process.

Beyond Hyderabad: The Journey That Changed My Perspective

Generative artificial intelligence has become one of the leading usages of artificial intelligence systems by a larger base of audience. While there are already enough instances to highlight the use of GenAI across the education or art sector, it is no longer a distant vision of seeing its usage in governance systems. There have already been documented instances of <a href="https://www.knkx.org/government/2025-08-26/washington-city-officials-chatgpt-write-government-documents-artificial-intelligence">usage</a> of popular platforms such as ChatGPT by Washington City officials and their <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/deloitte-ai-australia-government-report-hallucinations-technology-290000-refund/">use</a> by private consultants such as Deloitte. The problem is not very far away from India either as studies have <a href="https://aman.bh/blog/2025/ai-text-in-indian-government-documents">highlighted</a> the use of AI generated text in government documents. While the IT ministry has already brought in rules for photorealistic synthetic media (Deep, 2026), we are hence not far away from the labeling of AI generated text, something that is discussed in the given scenario.

The use of the AI system to summarize research and to generate policy language is a classic example of the use of economics of cheap generation, which <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LhDH1PgRdGzPt1kLalgGVzSBPcKw65RHZruELnB5GM/edit?tab=t.0">reduces</a> the cost of generation, but doesn&#39;t increase the verification capacity, hence causing the governance problem of a verification bottleneck.

The economics of cheap generation is the primary economic mechanism over here. With the use of the Generative AI systems in the pilot project, it is seen that while there might be an initial capital cost of setting up such GenAI tools, after the initial cost, the marginal cost that is the cost of generating additional information, approaches a near-zero value. As there is little cost of usage of GenAI tools after their creation, this effectively means tasks such as summarizing academic research, generating draft policy briefs and recommending regulatory languages, all of which was done by government officials previously, can be done at virtually no extra cost, and at a significantly lower time because of the new tools. All of the aforementioned tasks which would require human input and potential cost of hiring such human labor is no longer relevant as the GenAI tools can do it at a much cheaper price. Hence, the cost of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh2586">generating</a> content itself is very cheap, and the mechanism is of cheap generation.

It must be highlighted that one could also see delegated execution as another economic mechanism over here. It must be highlighted that summarizing research and drafting are largely in the domain of generative content, hence, it cannot be the primary, but rather only a secondary economic mechanism, and beyond the ambit of this policy brief.

In the absence of cheap generation, the initial governance problem was that of producing information or producing the governance drafts, or having to go through academic research. Now, with the advent of GenAI and the economics of cheap generation, the essential governance problem <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LhDH1PgRdGzPt1kLalgGVzSBPcKw65RHZruELnB5GM/edit?tab=t.0">shifts</a> from producing information to verifying the information. Initially, the cost of production of information was typically high as it would require detailed research and writing skills, which require comprehensive training and would require a few trained professionals to do the same. With the advent of cheap generation, the cost of information production has gone significantly down, enabling organizations to produce information at the humungous scale that was not envisioned before. While the cost as well as the scale of generation has changed, the capacity of the organization to verify the generated content has not necessarily changed. Initially, there was some congruence between the generated output and the verification capacity. Now, as the generated output has exponentially increased, the verification has become scarce, and the capacity is insufficient, hence <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922">causing</a> a verification bottleneck.&nbsp;

Hence, the question now is, who verifies these automated outputs? How can the verification capacity be increased? Could AI even be trusted with the verification of content that it itself has generated, with flaws in it as seen in the given case study. There is also a philosophical problem of epistemic externalities, particularly as cabinet notes and other decision-making instruments, if they are victim to the GenAI hallucination, then it can significantly <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LhDH1PgRdGzPt1kLalgGVzSBPcKw65RHZruELnB5GM/edit?tab=t.0">erode</a> the quality of decision environments, and subsequently, the decision itself.

For such complex problems, the use of Hood&#39;s <a href="https://archive.org/details/toolsofgovernmen0000hood_d0a8">NATO framework</a> provides guidance on designing policy instruments. The use of nodality or information based tools is particularly suitable in the given case. The proposed tool is to ensure that the GenAI tool in itself is built on government documents and government data and only provides content that is developed from this data. Only a government approved database of research papers can be a part of this training data set. This ensures that the risk of hallucination is lower in the tool. Complimentary to this, there must be a proper audit requirement, which must not be restricted to the algorithm, but to the usage as a whole, <a href="https://www.jkroll.com/papers/dissertation.pdf">requiring</a> labeling of content as AI-generated.

The basic mechanism is that of having auditing requirements. By restricting the database of the GenAI tool, the organization ensures that there would be lesser chances of hallucination, and reduces any potential information asymmetry. It brings about the need for verification, or usage of discretion before processing the given information. To illustrate, the problems of ghost citations or references to laws that don&#39;t exist will be infrequent occurrence as the data on which the GenAI tool primarily works would be an accurate data set, hence moving the verification requirement to ex ante instead of post generation. The auditing requirement of flagging the content highlights that for data of lower priority, such as internal notes, the requirement for verification could be lower, while high priority sensitive content, such as the cabinet notes would have a higher requirement for verifications. Hence, the limited verification capacity is matched as per the priority of verification. verification requirement. Essentially, the tool ensures that limited verification capacity is distributed as per priority of need.

GenAI in Government Policy Drafting: From Production to Verification

One of the biggest challenges in studying China is that Beijing rarely announces its intentions clearly. In the People&rsquo;s Liberation Army, promotions depend on loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), unlike most countries where they are based mainly on professional achievements. Promotions in the Xi era show who President Xi trusts, what capabilities he values, and the direction of the PLA. They signal China&rsquo;s strategic intentions in the military domain and, by extension, the security environment that India must prepare itself for.

On July 3, 2026, China&rsquo;s Central Military Commission (CMC) held its first promotion ceremony of the year, promoting senior officers to the rank of general. The promotions are particularly remarkable given the scrutiny the CMC has faced following the anti-corruption campaign of the CCP&rsquo;s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

Notably, Zhang Shuguang, secretary of the CMC Discipline Inspection Commission (CMCCDI) and director of the CMC Commission of Supervision, and Wang Gang, commander of the PLA Air Force (PLAAF), were <a href="http://en.cppcc.gov.cn/2026-07/06/c_1195306.htm">promoted</a> to the general rank, sparking speculation about a reshuffling in the CMC next year. As the 21st Party Congress approaches, these promotions deserve close attention.

When Xi Jinping assumed office as General Secretary of the CCP in 2012, the anti-corruption campaign was launched to target corrupt officials across the Party and the PLA. Rather than losing momentum over time, it dismantled numerous political and military factions. By 2017, CMC&rsquo;s membership shrunk from eleven members to just <a href="https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/how-chinas-military-is-hit-by-biggest-purge-in-decades-2943331-2026-07-08">seven</a>. Many analysts concluded that Xi had successfully consolidated control over the military.

The wave of purges and personnel changes subsided after 2017, and the CMC and the PLA became relatively stable by 2021. However, a fresh round of dismissals began in 2022, triggering renewed speculation in Beijing. Beginning in 2022, the CCP launched what can be called &ldquo;Phase Two&rdquo; of Xi&rsquo;s anti-corruption <a href="https://orcasia.org/anti-corruption-campaigns-in-china">campaign</a>, signaling that the effort to reshape China&rsquo;s military and political elite was ongoing.

This raises more important questions. What do these promotions reveal about Xi Jinping&rsquo;s military reforms? Most importantly, what are the implications for India&rsquo;s strategic environment?

The CMC is the top command of China&rsquo;s military and currently consists of only two members: Xi Jinping as chairman and General Zhang Shengmin as vice chairman. Over the past two years, five CMC members were removed. <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-67207353">Li Shangfu</a> was fired in 2023, followed by He <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-expels-two-top-generals-communist-party-anti-corruption-purge-2025-10-17/">Weidong</a> and Miao Hua in 2025, and Zhang <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8d0l0g8yz5o">Youxia</a> and Liu Zhenli earlier this year. The rapid restructuring has prompted questions about the future composition of the CMC

While Zhang Shengmin remains on the CMC, he has been <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-03/xi-replaces-anti-corruption-leader-in-purge-of-china-s-army">succeeded </a>as Secretary of the CMCCDI by General Zhang Shuguang. Although this does not automatically entail CMC membership, his eventual appointment would make him the second CMCCDI secretary to serve on the CMC, underscoring CMCCDI&rsquo;s growing importance in Beijing&rsquo;s military and political strategy.

&nbsp;

However, the promotion of Wang Gang is of particular interest to us Indians.

For the first time in decades, China has a strong opportunity to convert its qualitative edge over India into regional strategic advantage. The long-standing Sino-India border dispute spans nearly 3,500 kilometers, although most of it is impassable by the Himalayas. Even the 1962 Sino-India War broke out over the contested Aksai Chin region, surrounded by extremely rugged terrain. While the natural barriers contributed to the outcome of the war, they also impacted the nature of the fighting. More specifically, waging war in such conditions was logistically challenging, with both nations constrained by the local geography. Air superiority was paramount, although impossible for either nation to achieve given the limitations of their air power at the time.

Over six decades later, air power has become central to the prospects of renewed conflict. It is only logical to assume that air superiority will be decisive in any future Sino-India conflict. The promotion of Wang Gang is another sign that President Xi is determined to accelerate PLA modernization, with air power at the center of his vision.

Since 2015, Xi&rsquo;s <a href="https://rsis.edu.sg/rsis-publication/rsis/an-analysis-of-chinese-military-reform-towards-the-us-model/">military reforms</a> have altered the PLA&rsquo;s organizational structure. New institutions for aerospace, cyber operations, information support, and logistics now provide centralized functions across all military branches, allowing the PLAAF to operate within an integrated system. In contrast, India&rsquo;s military infrastructure remains comparatively more siloed.

For India, this represents a critical challenge, as competition between the two regional powers will take place not only on the contested border but also in the skies above it. The Indian Air Force ranks among the world&rsquo;s finest <a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/iaf-more-powerful-than-chinas-air-force-retains-worlds-no-3-rank-for-fifth-consecutive-year-wdmma/articleshow/132354673.cms?from=mdr">fighting</a> forces and possesses valuable operational experience. However, China enjoys advantages in size, domestic production, and industrial capacity. At present, India&rsquo;s defense industry relies on a combination of foreign suppliers and indigenous producers, whereas China has gradually increased its domestic production through state-owned companies.

In this context, the promotion of Wang Gang may represent the next step in the long-planned expansion of China&rsquo;s aerospace capabilities. With continued investment in aviation and network-centric capabilities, the PLAAF will be capable of projecting power deep into the Indian border areas. Thus, Wang&rsquo;s promotion has far-reaching implications for India&rsquo;s strategic military planning.&nbsp;

The implications for India extend beyond military competition. As China&rsquo;s military seeks to reduce geographical limitations through integrated structures, India&rsquo;s strategic planning must also account for an operational environment where air superiority could be just as important as territorial control.

Military promotions in China rarely serve only a ceremonial function. For Xi Jinping, each promotion is a key pillar in his strategy of transforming both the CCP and the PLA into truly formidable organizations. In turn, the appointments of General Zhang Shuguang and Wang Gang highlight the two aspects of this strategy, namely, China&rsquo;s political and military modernization. For India, such developments must always be regarded as matters of strategic significance, as they provide useful insights into the future intentions of China&rsquo;s military authorities.

As Beijing reshapes the relationship between political power, military organization, and future warfare, India&rsquo;s strategic community must focus on changes in China&rsquo;s military leadership as much as on advancements in its military equipment.

New Faces, New Priorities? Reading Xi Jinping's Military Promotions

In April 2026, a video showing hundreds of workers at a garment factory in Gurugram went <a href="https://scroll.in/article/1092960/how-big-tech-is-harnessing-the-data-of-indian-factory-workers-to-train-robots">viral</a>. Seated at their sewing machines, with head-mounted cameras, workers laboured on. The cameras recorded every stitch, finger calibration and hand <a href="https://www.theindiaforum.in/economy/ai-needs-human-hands-indian-workers-resist">movement</a>. Some of them work twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, with little or no extra pay for the first-person footage of the tasks that define their work.&ldquo;They are recording our work to prepare and train a robot, which is making us worried&hellip;it will mean job losses,&rdquo; said <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/indias-workers-train-ai-that-may-replace-them/video-77940078">Ravi</a> Kumar, a factory worker from Delhi. Another worker from Nagpur stated, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m <a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/business/workers-india-training-robots-replace-factory-10698712/">working</a> in my own grave.&rdquo;

Real human labour, contributing to large behaviour models (LBMs) and helping train AI-powered humanoid robots that could one day <a href="https://growjustindia.com/national/the-ai-eye-why-indian-workers-are-training-their-robot-replacements-33338">replace </a>them. This is not a one-off occurrence but a lived reality for thousands of blue-collar workers across India. Investigative reports conducted by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jun/24/indian-factory-workers-told-film-themselves-for-ai-robots">The Guardian</a>, <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/indias-workers-train-ai-that-may-replace-them/video-77940078">DW</a>, and <a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/business/workers-india-training-robots-replace-factory-10698712/">the Indian Express</a> highlight at least five states where the daily routines of workers are captured from factory floors. Workers from Delhi, Gurugram, Nagpur, Bengaluru, and Chennai are all contributors to an ever-growing pool of egocentric data. Data, critical for creating LBMs and developing humanoids.

The prize?

A market size of an astronomic 5 trillion dollars for humanoids by 2050, according to one <a href="https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/humanoid-robot-market-5-trillion-by-2050">Morgan</a> Stanley report.&nbsp; One billion humanoid robots could be in use by 2050. Most importantly, one could avail it for as low as $15,000 by 2050. However, terms and conditions apply. The technology must advance at an accelerated pace, production volumes must increase, and supply chains should be predominantly <a href="https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/humanoid-robot-market-5-trillion-by-2050">Chinese</a>.

The costs?&nbsp;

Several, but in this particular scenario, physical labour, the intellectual <a href="https://growjustindia.com/national/the-ai-eye-why-indian-workers-are-training-their-robot-replacements-33338">property</a> of informal workers, privacy, consent, collective harm and possible <a href="https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/looking-through-their-eyes-egocentric-data-collection-in-india">job loss</a>.&nbsp; Added costs include constant replacement anxiety, fears of workplace <a href="https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/looking-through-their-eyes-egocentric-data-collection-in-india">surveillance</a>, and extreme pressure from real-time <a href="https://growjustindia.com/national/the-ai-eye-why-indian-workers-are-training-their-robot-replacements-33338">monitoring</a>.

All of this, however, begs one simple policy question.&nbsp;

Is the direction of technology a choice?&nbsp;

Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon <a href="https://shapingwork.mit.edu/research/power-and-progress-our-1000-year-struggle-over-technology-and-prosperity/">Johnson</a> stipulate that, &quot;Better technology offers the potential of better lives for many people, but only if it creates sufficient new tasks requiring human expertise and workers have enough power to demand a matching increase in compensation.&rdquo;&nbsp;

In their book, <a href="https://samataindia.org.in/data/books/Power-and-Progress-Our-Thousand-Year-Struggle-Over-Technology-and-Prosperity-(Daron-Acemoglu-Simon-Johnson)-(Z-Library).pdf">Power and Progress</a>: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity, the writers highlight that throughout history, there have been several episodes of technological progress that produced &ldquo;<a href="https://samataindia.org.in/data/books/Power-and-Progress-Our-Thousand-Year-Struggle-Over-Technology-and-Prosperity-(Daron-Acemoglu-Simon-Johnson)-(Z-Library).pdf">no improvements&rdquo;</a> and led to &ldquo;even significant deterioration&rdquo;. According to them, if the market were to be left to its own devices, it would deliver great wealth to <a href="https://samataindia.org.in/data/books/Power-and-Progress-Our-Thousand-Year-Struggle-Over-Technology-and-Prosperity-(Daron-Acemoglu-Simon-Johnson)-(Z-Library).pdf">aggressive</a> investors and executives and leave out the rest.

In the past four and a half decades, much of the <a href="https://shapingwork.mit.edu/research/power-and-progress-our-1000-year-struggle-over-technology-and-prosperity/">industrial </a>world and the US have witnessed rising earning inequality, stagnation in earnings among <a href="https://shapingwork.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Acemoglu_Johnson_April-2024.pdf">non-college workers</a>, and an ever-shrinking share of labour in the national income. Data from the manufacturing sector, reflecting both US and global trends, show the precipitous drop in labour&rsquo;s share of value added from <a href="https://penguinrandomhouselibrary.com/book/?isbn=9798217182169">74 per cent </a>in 1981 to 46 per cent in 2016. A comparable contraction, though less severe, has been observed in the share of labour in national income both <a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32872/w32872.pdf#page=4.04">globally</a> and in the US.&nbsp;

According to Acemoglu, Johnson and David Autor, if the current tech sector efforts on &ldquo;even more automation&rdquo; hold, the pain for workers <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">&ldquo;will be magnified&quot;.</a> They caution, &quot;Really <a href="https://shapingwork.mit.edu/research/power-and-progress-our-1000-year-struggle-over-technology-and-prosperity/">bad</a> outcomes are possible when deluded technology leaders are able to impose their messianic visions on society.&rdquo;

The direction of technology is a choice. Striking a balance between automation and technologies that create new tasks is critical not only for stable wages and job creation but also for managing the cascading web of social consequences and <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">economic</a> disruptions it can trigger.

&ldquo;Pro-worker <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">Artificial Intelligence</a> (AI)&rdquo; and technologies &quot;that make human skills and expertise more valuable by expanding worker capabilities&quot; can provide a framework for intervention.&nbsp;

What is pro-worker AI?

By acting as a catalyst for new task creation, &ldquo;Pro-worker AI&rdquo; cultivates demand for novel manual proficiency. Consequently, such an approach can mitigate the <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">wicked</a> social challenges posed by job loss, rising inequality, and premature mortality.

Pro-worker AI acts as a force multiplier by combining human skills with technical expertise. They can enable workers to carry out &ldquo;more <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">sophisticated</a> tasks related to their jobs&rdquo;, &ldquo;tackle new tasks&rdquo; and also &ldquo;acquire new expertise&rdquo;. AI&rsquo;s ability to learn from examples by harnessing knowledge from unstructured information makes it a critical tool for augmenting worker capabilities.&nbsp;

Technologies are generally classified under five expansive and economically discrete categories as provided by <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">Acemoglu</a>, Autor and Johnson (2026). They can be labour-augmenting, capital-augmenting, automation-orientated, expertise-levellers or new-task creators. &ldquo;New task-creating technologies&rdquo; are <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">unambiguously</a> good for workers. They have the potential to expand what humans can do by creating entirely new tasks that did not exist a generation earlier, thus generating a demand for novel human expertise.&nbsp;

History offers a parallel precedent for pro-worker technologies. In the 19th century, as the industrial <a href="https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/2079/pba167p199_0.pdf">revolution</a> lowered labour share in the textile industry, the impact of automation was counterbalanced by expanding roles in manufacturing, railways, clerical and accounting roles. This trajectory manifested once more during the four decades post-World War II.

Pro-Worker AI in Practice

The <a href="https://www.se.com/my/en/work/support/myschneider-app/myschneider-electrician-app/">&ldquo;electrician&rsquo;s assistant (EA)&quot;</a> is a tangible example of <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/can-ai-be-pro-worker">pro-worker AI.</a> The tool leverages the expertise of electricians while providing real-time assistance from a large language model. By working collaboratively with the technician, it ensures efficiency with reliability, simultaneously allowing them to accomplish more challenging tasks. The tool not only increases the effective supply of workers but also boosts technical proficiency, meeting the definition of pro-worker AI.

<a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">&ldquo;Teacher&rsquo;s AI-aid&quot;</a> is another example of pro-worker AI. The support tool, trained on curriculum material, student preferences and real-time inputs from the class, can work collaboratively with the educator. Such collaborative paradigms can be extended to support workers in different domains like construction, plumbing, healthcare, team leadership, training and supervision.&nbsp;

However, despite its obvious potential for good, pro-worker AI has not been a mainstream phenomenon. <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">This is largely driven by</a>, first, the commitment to the overarching ideological vision of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and, most critically, market failures for firms deploying AI as well as its developers.

The Way Forward

Moving towards pro-worker AI calls for a recalibration of the pro-automation and pro-AGI mindset that currently dominates the tech market. <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">Acemoglu, Autor and Johnson,</a>&nbsp; through their research, provide policy levers that can significantly shift the needle towards pro-worker AI. Within India&rsquo;s blue-collar workers in the textile sector, two become absolutely critical.&nbsp;

<a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">Discouraging</a> the theft of expertise by firms that use their own employees to train AI models through legal frameworks and amplifying the perspective of these workers through institutional mechanisms will help prevent a future that is inherently anti-worker.&nbsp;

Imposing limits on a firm&rsquo;s ability to harvest their employee&rsquo;s human expertise, by providing workers a <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">decisive</a> say over how their data is used, will help limit the commodification of human knowledge.&nbsp;

Finally, at the <a href="https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-03/Building%20Pro-Worker%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf">institutional</a> level, civil society organisations, especially labour unions, should champion voices of frontline workers and advocate for protective strategies at the local, state and central levels.

Striking a balance between automation and collaboration, coupling human judgement and AI capabilities will be critical as the technology matures.&nbsp;

Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence: Reshaping the Direction of Technology

When we think about social status, we tend to focus on the things that people own and eventually on the money they spend: a luxury car, grand villa, designer clothing or even an extravagant wedding. Economists have largely reinforced this view, studying how people use <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ijcs.12852">consumption</a> to signal status, success or their place in the social hierarchy.&nbsp;

But is status really just about money?

<a href="https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/political-science/social-status-and-social-interaction">Social status</a> essentially refers to the position an individual or a household occupies within a social hierarchy. Some aspects of these positions are ascribed, i.e., we inherit them at birth. The family that we are born into, our caste, gender, religion, etc., shapes how society perceives us well before we make our own choices. There are other aspects that are achieved through personal effort, such as education, occupation, and income, which can alter our status throughout our lives. Together, these shape not only our opportunities but also the expectations placed upon us. Yet what we often fail to see is that status is rarely static. Whether inherited or achieved, social status has to be<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053535798800048"> maintained</a>. Relationships must be nurtured, social obligations fulfilled and one&rsquo;s own place in the community continually reaffirmed. Simply put, status is not just something we have, but constantly reproduce through our everyday lives.

This leads to another question: if status is something we maintain, what exactly do we invest in to maintain it?

Money is, of course, one answer. Thorstein Veblen&rsquo;s famous idea of <a href="https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=T3AAptSW8hkC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PT5&amp;dq=veblen+conspicuous+consumption&amp;ots=5q8717wHgA&amp;sig=uFvvCMrAkc-ZSZCc3JR1RFLlCM8&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q=veblen%20conspicuous%20consumption&amp;f=false">conspicuous consumption</a> argued that people often consume not only for utility but also to showcase their wealth and social standing. Since then, status has been observed through visible forms of expenditure communication, showing who we are or who we want to be. But this is only a part of the story. Imagine a family travelling for hours to attend a wedding, or neighbours who put their time into organising local events; these do not generate direct income, but people still do it. Why?&nbsp; None of these activities generates income, yet they require so much planning, commitment and above all, time.

Time, unlike money, is a resource every person possesses in equal measure. Every day offers twenty-four hours, no more and no less. But the way we spend those hours is anything but equal. Maybe these activities are doing something that we rarely pay attention to. They are not merely moments of leisure or recreation. They help build relationships, reinforce trust, maintain community ties, and demonstrate continued participation in a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00213624.2001.11506342">shared</a> social world. They are investments not of money, but of time.

Feminist scholar Hanna Papanek referred to this idea as <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493663">status production</a>. Rather than focusing on how people display status, status production asks how households actively create and sustain it. The emphasis shifts from visible consumption to the everyday practices that maintain a family&#39;s social standing. Attending community gatherings, participating in cultural events, maintaining kinship networks, or engaging in religious life are not always simply personal choices or hobbies. They can also be ways of fulfilling social expectations and reaffirming one&#39;s place within a community.

This distinction between status signalling and status production is subtle but important. Buying an expensive car may communicate wealth. Maintaining community relationships communicates reliability, belonging, commitment, or respectability. Both shape social standing, but they do so through very different means.

Looking at status through the lens of time also broadens our understanding of inequality. Not everyone has the same freedom to invest their time in maintaining social relationships. Paid work,<a href="https://www.emerald.com/ijse/article-pdf/50/7/969/1392725/ijse-03-2022-0164.pdf"> caregiving responsibilities</a>, <a href="https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2014/12/unpaid-care-work-the-missing-link-in-the-analysis-of-gender-gaps-in-labour-outcomes_d26d4043/1f3fd03f-en.pdf">household labour</a>, and other obligations all compete for the same twenty-four hours. The ability to participate in community life is therefore not simply a matter of personal preference; it is shaped by the social and economic constraints people face. Time itself becomes an unequally available resource.

This perspective also encourages us to rethink activities that are often dismissed as &quot;non-economic.&quot; Traditional economic analysis has become increasingly successful at recognising unpaid work, care work, and domestic labour as productive uses of time. Yet many activities that sustain social life continue to be classified as<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002972"> leisure</a> or personal choice, even when they involve strong social obligations and generate important social returns.

Perhaps this is because economics has long been better at measuring what can be bought than what must be sustained. By paying attention to how people invest their time, we begin to see a richer picture of how societies function. Social status is not built solely through consumption. It is also quietly produced through everyday acts of participation, reciprocity, and belonging.

Looking at status through the lens of time also reveals another important dimension: who bears the responsibility of producing it?

Status-producing activities are often imagined as gender-neutral. After all, everyone attends weddings, participates in festivals, maintains family ties or engages in community life. Yet the time devoted to these activities is far from evenly distributed. Data from <a href="https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2106113&amp;reg=48&amp;lang=2">India&#39;s 2024 Time Use Survey</a>, shows that once we account for the less visible forms of status production, such as childcare and unpaid domestic work that sustain a household&#39;s social position over time, women spend, on average, nearly 51 minutes more each day on status-producing activities than men.

This finding invites us to rethink a familiar question in economics: why do women continue to spend less time in paid employment than men, even as educational attainment has improved? One explanation has long pointed to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668282?seq=1">status considerations</a> within households. Looking at time use adds another layer to this discussion. It suggests that status is not simply an abstract preference shaping decisions; it also requires labour. Much of that labour is carried out through the everyday work of maintaining families, relationships, and communities.

Recognising this labour also changes how we think about inequality. The capacity to build and sustain social status is not determined only by income or education, but also by the time people are able or expected to invest. Maybe this is where the conversation on status needs to move next. If economics has taught us to ask what people spend their money on, it may also be time to ask what people spend their time on. In those everyday choices, and in the constraints that shape them, lies another story about how status is created, maintained, and reproduced across generations.

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