The price of stability in an unstable world

October 19, 2026 Leave a comment

We have been sold a dangerous idea that stability is normal and disruption is the exception, but is it? Yes, stability is an achievement, though an expensive one! Every morning, when the electricity is on, the internet works, the bank processes a transaction, food reaches you from a quick-commerce platform, a child gets to school, a salary arrives on time, and a hospital has the medicines it needs, it means thousands of invisible systems are doing their job in the background. We notice them only when they fail. For most of modern history, perhaps the greatest privilege was not wealth but predictability, the reasonable expectation that tomorrow would look broadly like today. That expectation is now harder to sustain as wars are disrupting supply chains, climate events are destroying livelihoods, artificial intelligence is unsettling occupations, financial volatility travels across borders in milliseconds, and demographic change is altering the very structure of families and work. We are entering an era in which instability may no longer be a temporary interruption to ordinary life but may become the usual.

So, who pays for stability in an unstable world? The obvious answer is governments, which build roads, maintain electricity grids, regulate financial systems, run hospitals, banks, police, and borders, subsidise food, respond to disasters, and provide social protection. But businesses pay too, as they maintain inventories, assets, diversify suppliers, retain cash and build redundancy into systems that would otherwise be cheaper and more efficient. So do families, as they keep emergency savings, buy insurance, invest in education, maintain social networks and sometimes make profoundly conservative choices because the consequences of failure are too high. Individuals pay in ways that don’t appear anywhere on a balance sheet. They stay in jobs they dislike because they’re secure. They postpone starting a business because they cannot afford six months without an income. They choose a predictable career over an uncertain vocation. They save instead of spending. They remain in cities they don’t particularly love because the city offers better healthcare, schools and employment opportunities. Stability, in other words, is not free, and we purchase it every day, often without realising that we are doing so.

But we don’t all pay the same price for instability. A wealthy household can absorb a medical emergency, while a poor household may have to borrow, sell an asset or withdraw a child from school. Likewise, a large corporation can survive a temporary collapse in demand, whereas a small enterprise may shut down permanently. A professional with savings can spend six months learning a new skill, and at the same time a casual worker may not be able to afford six days without income. The ability to absorb a shock is itself becoming a form of wealth. We have traditionally measured inequality through income, consumption and assets. Perhaps we now need another measure: the unequal distribution of uncertainty. Two families earning the same amount can live completely different lives if one has savings, insurance, secure housing, social capital and access to credit while the other survives from one monthly payment to the next.

Consider the millions of informal workers in India whose economic lives were disrupted during the COVID-19 lockdown. For many, the crisis was not simply about losing a job. It meant losing the entire architecture through which survival happened, like their daily wages, transport, access to urban work and sometimes food itself. The images of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres home became one of the defining visual memories of the pandemic. The crisis revealed how much of India’s economic stability was being privately financed by people with almost no financial cushion. When formal systems failed, the burden was transferred to households, communities and individual workers, where families became the insurance company of last resort.

Something similar happens every day, at a smaller scale, when an illness strikes a low-income household. India has made enormous progress in expanding healthcare access, insurance and public health infrastructure, but for millions of families, healthcare expenditure can still become a destabilising financial event. The difference between a middle-class household experiencing a serious illness and a poor household experiencing the same illness is not simply the quality of medical treatment available. One family may recover financially after recovering medically, while the other may spend years repaying debt. The illness turns into a crisis cascade of healthcare expenses, debt, reduced consumption, interrupted education and sometimes the sale of productive assets.

Climate change is producing another version of the same problem. Take a small farmer in Bihar, Assam, Odisha or Rajasthan. Agriculture has always involved uncertainty, but climate volatility is changing the scale and frequency of that uncertainty. An unexpected flood, prolonged heat, irregular rainfall or pest outbreak can wipe out months of effort. We often respond by telling farmers to become ‘climate resilient’, adopt new practices, diversify crops or use technology. All of these can be useful, but we tend to forget that resilience requires resources. A farmer with savings, irrigation, crop insurance, access to credit and market information has options. A farmer who owns little land and depends entirely on one seasonal harvest has very few. We cannot keep asking the poorest citizens to become more resilient without asking whether we have given them the financial and institutional infrastructure with which resilience can actually be built.

The same contradiction is visible in India’s growing, small-enterprise economy. We celebrate entrepreneurship and tell young people to become entrepreneurs, women to start enterprises, rural communities to build businesses and small producers to enter digital markets. Yet entrepreneurship is, by definition, an encounter with uncertainty. A person with substantial capital can afford entrepreneurial failure, but, say, a woman investing her family’s only savings in a small enterprise cannot. When a rural woman starts a tailoring unit, food-processing business, handloom enterprise or digital service centre, she is not merely creating income but is taking a financial risk on behalf of her household. This is why access to credit alone is not enough and entrepreneurs need markets, digital access, business capabilities, working capital, insurance, peer networks and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to fail without falling into destitution.

And then there is the instability coming from new-age technology. AI may create extraordinary new opportunities, but it will also change the value of many existing skills. We tell older workers to remain employable in a labour market changing faster than the institutions designed to train them. But learning itself requires time, money and psychological space. The person working ten hours a day to pay rent cannot effortlessly become an AI-enabled professional at night. The person supporting a family cannot always afford to experiment with a new career. Adaptability is not simply an attitude; it is an economic resource.

This is where our understanding of resilience needs to change. We have increasingly turned resilience into an individual virtue of being adaptable, keep learning, diversify your income, build an emergency fund, exercise, take care of your mental health, prepare for the future, etc., etc. There is nothing wrong with any of this, but we risk creating a society in which structural instability is increasingly privatised. At some point we have to ask whether we are confusing resilience with the ability of individuals to absorb risks that should partly be shared by institutions.

How to prevent uncertainty from becoming catastrophic for ordinary people, perhaps, will be the central economic challenge of the next few decades. We cannot promise a farmer that the monsoon will behave, a worker that her job will exist for thirty years, or that the next pandemic, financial crisis or geopolitical shock will never happen. But we can design systems in which these events do not permanently destroy a person’s future. That would require a different conception of social protection. The welfare state of the industrial era was largely built around protecting people from particular risks of unemployment, old age, illness, disability and poverty. The unstable world ahead may require something more dynamic, like systems that help people move through disruption. 

The cost of living without psychological certainty is another hidden cost of instability that economists struggle to capture, where uncertainty consumes mental bandwidth. When you don’t know whether your job will survive, whether a medical emergency could wipe out your savings or whether your child’s education will remain affordable, some part of your mind is permanently occupied by contingency planning. And that has implications beyond individual wellbeing. A society in which people are perpetually afraid of falling backwards is unlikely to be as entrepreneurial, innovative or creative as a society in which people know that failure will not destroy them.

This produces a fascinating paradox as we want an innovative economy, but innovation requires risk. Perhaps, therefore, the goal should not be stability in the conventional sense. We should stop trying to build a world in which nothing goes wrong, as such a world does not exist. The goal should be recoverability, where the capacity of people, families, businesses and communities to recover when something inevitably goes wrong should be present. This is ultimately a question of what kind of social contract we want. The price of stability will rise as the world becomes more volatile. Governments will spend more on resilience. Companies will pay more for redundancy and security. Families will save more. Individuals will invest more in skills and insurance. But if we allow every emerging risk to be pushed downwards from governments to companies, from companies to workers, from institutions to families and finally from families to individuals, we will create a society that appears economically efficient while becoming increasingly fragile.

We have become obsessed with efficiency precisely when the world is demanding resilience. We have spent decades removing buffers because buffers looked like waste, including excess inventory, spare capacity, multiple suppliers, idle infrastructure, permanent workers, and generous social protection. Everything had to be optimised, become leaner, faster and cheaper. Until the world reminded us that the things we call inefficiencies are sometimes the very things that keep systems alive when they break. So, the question we should be asking is not how much stability we can afford. It is how much instability ordinary people can afford to absorb before a temporary shock becomes a permanent change in their lives. Because the future will not belong to those who successfully predict every disruption. Nobody can. It will belong to societies that make disruption survivable. And if we fail to build those societies, we may discover a deeply uncomfortable truth that the poor will not merely be the people with the least money, but they will be the people who can afford the least uncertainty.

(The cover image is generated using AI)

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Behavioural Systems Approach to Rural Entrepreneurship Development

October 12, 2026 Leave a comment

The popular approach to rural entrepreneurship in India often includes providing poor households with access to credit, skills training, subsidies, or market linkages, which will naturally lead to entrepreneurship development. This assumption has shaped countless development programs led by governments, NGOs, microfinance institutions, and multilateral agencies. Two individuals living in the same village, receiving identical training and similar financial support, often experience vastly different entrepreneurial trajectories. One may build a sustainable enterprise, expand into new markets, and improve household income, while another may abandon the effort entirely despite possessing comparable resources. Conventional development frameworks struggle to explain this divergence because they remain overwhelmingly focused on material inputs rather than behavioural systems.

I am proposing the READ Framework (Readiness, Exposure, Aspiration, and Direction), which can shift the analytical lens from resource scarcity to behavioural conditions that shape economic action. Rather than treating entrepreneurship as a linear outcome of financial or technical support, the model suggests that enterprise creation depends on a dynamic interaction between psychological preparedness, social exposure, aspirations for mobility, and clarity of execution pathways. This perspective is particularly important in contemporary India, where entrepreneurship has become central to the national development narrative, and yet rural livelihoods remain constrained by social inequality, institutional gaps, and behavioural barriers that are often invisible within conventional policy frameworks.

India’s economic transformation over the past three decades has generated significant growth, but it has also exposed structural contradictions. Although India aspires to become a major global economic power, a large proportion of its population continues to live in rural areas dependent on fragile agriculture-based livelihoods. According to the World Bank, nearly two-thirds of India’s population still resides in rural areas, while agriculture contributes a relatively small share of GDP. This imbalance has intensified pressure on rural households to diversify income sources beyond farming. Rural entrepreneurship is therefore increasingly viewed as a pathway for employment generation, women’s empowerment, local economic resilience, and reduction of distress migration. Government initiatives such as Startup India, Mudra Yojana, and the National Rural Livelihoods Mission reflect this policy emphasis. However, despite substantial investments in microcredit, self-help groups, and skill development programs, many interventions continue to produce limited or unsustainable outcomes. The limitations of conventional entrepreneurship models arise partly from their assumption that individuals act rationally once economic barriers are removed. The prevailing logic can be summarised as a straightforward sequence of inputs leading to skills, enterprise, income (Inputs -> Skills -> Enterprise -> Income).

Development economists such as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have demonstrated that poverty fundamentally shapes cognition and decision-making. Scarcity creates what behavioural economists describe as a ‘bandwidth tax,’ reducing people’s ability to plan long-term, tolerate risk, or experiment economically. Poverty is therefore not merely a shortage of money, but a condition that influences imagination, confidence, emotional resilience, and perceptions of possibility. The READ framework is developed upon this intellectual foundation but advances it further by conceptualising entrepreneurship as an interconnected behavioural ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated economic variables.

The framework proposes that entrepreneurial outcomes are a function of four interacting dimensions: Readiness, Exposure, Aspiration, and Direction.

E = f(R,Ex,A,D)

The formulation is simple and treats entrepreneurship as emergent behaviour rather than a direct consequence of inputs. This framework rejects the assumption that entrepreneurship automatically emerges when capital or skills are introduced. Instead, it recognises that deficiencies in any one behavioural dimension can undermine the entire entrepreneurial process. An individual may possess technical capability but lack confidence, another may have ambition but no understanding of viable business pathways, making entrepreneurship an emergent behaviour shaped by multiple interacting conditions rather than a predictable economic reaction to incentives.

The first dimension, Readiness, refers to the psychological and situational preparedness required to undertake entrepreneurial activity. This includes emotional resilience, confidence, time availability, family support, and willingness to tolerate and adapt to uncertainty. In rural India, readiness is deeply shaped by social structures such as gender norms, caste hierarchies, and family expectations. A rural woman may receive training in tailoring, computer operations, or food processing yet still hesitate to establish a business because domestic responsibilities, mobility restrictions, or patriarchal control limit her ability to act independently. Similarly, entrepreneurs belonging to marginalised communities may face exclusion from traditional market networks or social resistance when attempting to enter certain occupations. Readiness, therefore, is not simply an individual psychological trait but a socially conditioned state shaped by power relations and everyday realities.

Readiness also resonates strongly with the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen, who argued that development should be understood not just in terms of resources but in terms of people’s actual freedoms to pursue lives they value. Sen distinguishes between capabilities and functioning. Individuals may possess capabilities in theory, yet structural and social constraints may prevent them from converting those capabilities into real economic action. The READ framework extends this insight into the domain of entrepreneurship by recognising that the existence of opportunity alone does not guarantee participation.

The second dimension, Exposure, is about the importance of social learning, networks, role models, and market visibility. Entrepreneurship is rarely an isolated individual act, and is deeply influenced by social environments. Individuals often become entrepreneurs because they observe others navigating similar pathways successfully. In many rural communities, however, exposure to growth-oriented enterprises remains extremely limited. People may encounter only subsistence-level economic activity and therefore struggle to imagine entrepreneurship beyond survival-oriented self employment. A young person in a remote village who has never interacted with digital commerce, branding strategies, or scalable enterprises may lack exposure to viable economic possibilities, and not necessarily ambition or intelligence.

Economic sociology has consistently demonstrated the importance of networks in shaping entrepreneurial success. Urban startup ecosystems thrive partly because of dense social environments that provide mentorship, peer learning, investment access, and visible examples of success. Rural entrepreneurship programs often fail to replicate such ecosystems because they focus narrowly on asset distribution or technical training. The READ framework’s emphasis on exposure therefore addresses a major gap in existing development practice. Exposure is not simply informational, as it also creates legitimacy. Seeing people from similar social or economic backgrounds succeed changes what individuals believe is socially and economically possible for themselves.

The third dimension, Aspiration, is socially conditioned and unevenly distributed. Development programs frequently assume that poor households naturally aspire toward upward mobility. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that social structures shape individuals’ ‘horizons of possibility,’ influencing what they perceive as achievable for people like themselves. Similarly, economist Debraj Ray has written extensively about the ‘aspirations window,’ suggesting that exposure to successful peers influences economic ambition and long-term planning.

In many rural contexts, especially among historically marginalised communities, entrepreneurship may not appear imaginable as a pathway to transformation. Young people may aspire primarily toward government employment or urban migration because these trajectories are socially visible and culturally validated. In contrast, business ownership may appear risky, uncertain, or inaccessible. The READ framework recognises that aspiration is not simply a motivational issue but a socially produced cognitive condition. This insight has profound policy implications because it suggests that entrepreneurship promotion requires more than financial support, and often also requires interventions that expand people’s imagination of possible futures.

The fourth dimension, Direction, refers to clarity regarding viable pathways, execution strategies, and market navigation. Many rural entrepreneurs possess determination and ambition but lack strategic guidance. They may not know how to identify profitable sectors, understand customer demand, access supply chains, navigate regulations, price products competitively, or scale operations sustainably. Traditional entrepreneurship programs frequently provide generic training but fail to offer long-term mentoring or strategic support. Participants may learn technical skills without understanding how to build viable enterprises in dynamic market environments.

Direction has become increasingly important in India’s digital economy, where market participation requires familiarity with e-commerce platforms, logistics systems, digital payments, and branding practices. Without adequate guidance, rural entrepreneurs often remain trapped in highly localised, low-margin markets vulnerable to competition and economic shocks. The READ framework’s emphasis on direction therefore highlights the need for sustained mentoring ecosystems rather than one-time training interventions.

The proposed READ framework uses a systems orientation, with an understanding that human behaviour does not operate through isolated causal pathways. Entrepreneurial action emerges from interactions between psychological, social, economic, and institutional conditions. A person may possess high aspiration but lack direction, leading to frustration rather than enterprise creation. Another may have exposure to successful entrepreneurs but insufficient readiness due to household resistance or emotional insecurity. By recognising these interactions, the framework aligns with broader systems-thinking approaches increasingly influential in public policy and development studies.

The framework can prove to be useful when examining women’s entrepreneurship in rural India. Many livelihood programs targeting women measure success primarily through participation rates or loan disbursement numbers. However, women’s formal inclusion in enterprise programs does not necessarily translate into genuine entrepreneurial autonomy. Women may technically own businesses while male family members control decision-making and finances. The READ framework suggests a more nuanced understanding of these realities by examining the behavioural and social conditions surrounding enterprise participation. A woman may receive training and capital yet still lack readiness because of household opposition, exposure because of mobility restrictions, aspiration because of internalised gender norms, or direction because she lacks mentorship networks. This multidimensional perspective provides a richer understanding of why many women-led enterprises remain small-scale and economically vulnerable despite extensive policy attention.

At the same time, the framework raises important conceptual and methodological questions. Behavioural dimensions such as aspiration or readiness are difficult to quantify reliably. Self-reported surveys may suffer from social desirability bias, contextual inconsistencies, or cultural variation. Constructing a robust ‘READ Index’ would therefore require careful psychometric validation and adaptation across diverse social contexts (I am working on defining and designing the Index, and will publish once I am ready). Rural India is not a uniform behavioural landscape, as aspirations, gender norms, and economic expectations vary significantly across regions, castes, religions, and linguistic communities.

Another concern is that behavioural frameworks can unintentionally shift responsibility onto individuals while underemphasizing structural inequalities. Entrepreneurial failure is not always the result of behavioural deficiencies. Infrastructure gaps, poor logistics, corruption, climate shocks, monopolistic market structures, and digital exclusion remain major constraints. A highly motivated entrepreneur with strong exposure and clear direction may still fail because of unreliable electricity, exploitative intermediaries, or lack of transportation infrastructure. Behavioural systems approaches should therefore complement rather than replace structural analysis. Otherwise, there is a risk that development discourse becomes overly individualised, framing poverty as a problem of mindset rather than political economy.

The framework also raises broader questions about the increasing romanticisation of entrepreneurship within contemporary development policy. Entrepreneurship is often presented as a universal solution to unemployment and rural distress. However, not every individual seeks or benefits from entrepreneurial risk. Many rural households prioritise stability and security over growth-oriented enterprise. Excessive emphasis on entrepreneurship can obscure the state’s responsibility to generate decent employment, strengthen public services, and reduce structural inequality. The READ framework has the potential to become most valuable when used as an analytical and program-design tool rather than as an ideological justification for reducing state responsibility.

Despite these concerns, the framework can offer substantial practical relevance for policymakers, NGOs, and development practitioners. If empirically validated, it could reshape the design of rural livelihood programs across India. Interventions could move beyond transactional models toward more relational and behaviourally informed approaches. Programs might assess behavioural readiness before enrollment, create peer-learning ecosystems, facilitate exposure visits, incorporate aspiration-building modules, involve families in sensitisation processes, and provide long-term mentoring rather than short-term training alone. Such approaches would recognise entrepreneurship as a socially embedded process rather than merely an economic activity.

The broader significance of the READ framework is in its attempt to bridge economics, sociology, behavioural science, and development practice. It recognises that poverty is not solely material deprivation but also a condition that shapes agency, imagination, and action. By integrating behavioural insights with systems thinking and capability theory, the framework challenges simplistic assumptions about how development occurs. It asks a deeper question than most entrepreneurship programs currently address, that why do some individuals act on opportunity while others facing similar conditions do not? The answer to that question may be central not only to rural entrepreneurship policy but to the future of inclusive development in India itself.

References

  1. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics, PublicAffairs, 2011.
  2. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1999.
  3. Debraj Ray, Aspirations, Poverty, and Economic Change, Oxford University Press, 2006.
  4. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
  5. World Bank rural population and development indicators.
  6. International Labour Organization reports on informal economies and entrepreneurship.
  7. NITI Aayog policy papers on women entrepreneurship and rural livelihoods.
  8. National Rural Livelihoods Mission (Government of India) operational and policy documents.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organization, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.

The cover image is generated using AI.

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Humans, AI, and Singularity

September 13, 2026 1 Comment

For decades, artificial intelligence (AI) belonged to the margins of intellectual conversation in India. It appeared occasionally in science fiction paperbacks, in obscure academic journals, and in the late-night philosophical arguments of university students who spent more time debating the future than preparing for exams. Today AI has escaped the lab and entered dining table conversations. Hardly a day passes without newspapers carrying stories about machine learning, humanoid robots, generative AI, autonomous weapons, AI tutors, AI doctors, AI girlfriends, AI layoffs, or the looming question of whether machines may someday surpass human intelligence altogether.

I read these reports with fascination and a peculiar sense of déjà vu. They take me back more than thirty years, to conversations I had as a young student with my peers and professors about singularity, machine consciousness, and the possibility that intelligence itself might eventually become independent of biology. Back then, those conversations were treated as the eccentricities of a teenager. Most people dismissed them as fantasy, a youthful obsession fed by too much science fiction and too little realism. However, today many of the same questions have escaped philosophy departments and entered boardrooms, parliaments, military doctrines, and ordinary households.

Over the years, I discovered that very few people took such conversations seriously. In fact, until now, I have met only two individuals who shared similar views with genuine conviction: a young computer scientist then in his twenties, and a CEO of a major technology company then in his sixties, around 2010. One represented the restless optimism of a generation growing up with intelligent machines, and the other carried the hard-earned realism of someone who had spent decades building technology at scale. Despite the difference in age and experience, both sensed the same thing, that humanity may be approaching a transition far larger than another technological cycle.

The idea of technological singularity was always unsettling because it challenged one of humanity’s oldest assumptions that intelligence is uniquely human and therefore naturally tied to human control. The singularity hypothesis suggested something far more radical that technological systems could eventually improve themselves at a pace beyond human comprehension, producing an intelligence that exceeds human cognitive capability. At the time, in 1993-96, even discussing such ideas in India invited amused smiles. We were a country still grappling with unreliable electricity, landline waiting lists, and typewriters in government offices. To talk about self-improving machines in that era sounded absurdly premature.

But history has a habit of moving slowly for decades and then suddenly all at once. The internet changed how humans accessed information, and smartphones changed how humans interacted with information. AI now threatens to change what information itself means. This is not another technological wave comparable to social media or e-commerce, but it can potentially bring a civilizational shift. The printing press democratised knowledge, electricity mechanised labour, and the internet connected humanity. I think AI may redefine cognition itself. That is why the current AI moment feels fundamentally different. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other emerging systems are doing something historically unprecedented as they are beginning to perform tasks once considered exclusively intellectual. They write essays, generate code, compose music, summarise legal documents, diagnose diseases, create artwork, conduct research, and converse with startling fluency. 

Many critics comfort themselves by pointing out AI’s current flaws, as it hallucinates, lacks emotional depth, and cannot truly ‘understand.’ But this criticism misses the larger pattern of technological evolution. Early automobiles were unreliable and slower than horses on rough roads. Technologies mature exponentially while human intuition remains linear. We judge the future by the limitations of the present, forgetting how quickly those limitations disappear.

This is why singularity debates no longer feel theoretical. The unsettling part is not that AI can already imitate human capabilities; instead, it is the speed at which it is improving. Systems that seemed miraculous two years ago already appear primitive today. The interval between breakthrough and obsolescence is shrinking dramatically. Humanity is accustomed to gradual adaptation, and it seems that AI may deny us that luxury.

The greatest immediate threat from AI may not be killer robots, instead, it may prove to be social destabilisation. Human societies are built on meaning, and not only economics. Work is not only about income; it is also about identity, dignity, and social relevance. What happens when millions discover that cognitive labour, which was once considered secure from automation, is no longer uniquely valuable? For decades, developing countries like India viewed knowledge work as the path to upward mobility. Entire generations were told to study harder because intellectual labour was future-proof. But AI is beginning to challenge precisely that very foundational assumption.

Industrial automation disrupted blue-collar work first, and AI may disrupt white-collar work next. Lawyers, designers, coders, writers, analysts, accountants, customer support executives, and even educators are already witnessing AI-assisted transformation. Some roles will evolve, others may disappear entirely, and new professions will emerge. But transitions of this magnitude are never painless. History celebrates innovation retrospectively while ignoring the generations displaced during the process.

India possesses one of the world’s youngest populations and also has one of the largest digital workforces. AI could dramatically increase productivity and democratize access to education, healthcare, governance, and entrepreneurship. Rural women entrepreneurs, local language interfaces, AI-powered agricultural advisory systems, and intelligent public services could transform development outcomes. Yet AI could simultaneously intensify inequality if access, ownership, and benefits remain concentrated among a small technological elite.

Technology itself is never neutral, and it reflects the priorities of those who build and deploy it. This is where India’s conversation on AI remains surprisingly shallow. Much of our discussion still focuses on whether AI will make us globally competitive. The urgent questions are political: who controls AI infrastructure? Whose languages does AI understand? Whose biases does it inherit? Which jobs become expendable? Who captures the economic gains? What happens to human agency in societies increasingly mediated by algorithms?

The deeper issue is that AI is forcing humanity to confront uncomfortable truths about itself. For centuries, intelligence has formed the basis of human exceptionalism. We accepted that machines could outperform us physically because intellect remained our final frontier. But if machines begin outperforming humans cognitively in many domains, our understanding of value may fundamentally change. Perhaps that is why AI discussions evoke such emotional intensity. 

Every technological revolution reshapes not only economies but human psychology. Industrialisation changed family structures, television changed attention spans, and social media altered social validation itself. AI may reshape cognition, creativity, and even interpersonal relationships in ways we barely understand. Already, many people interact more comfortably with algorithms than with neighbours. And yet, despite these anxieties, I remain cautiously optimistic. Not because AI will automatically produce a better world, but because humanity has repeatedly demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for adaptation. The printing press triggered religious wars and political upheaval before enabling mass literacy. Electricity displaced industries before creating entirely new economies. The internet generated misinformation and addiction but also democratized knowledge and communication on an unprecedented scale.

AI, too, will produce both liberation and disruption. We are entering an era where ethical frameworks, governance systems, educational models,  and labour structures designed for the industrial age may no longer suffice. Yet our political systems remain trapped in short electoral cycles while technological acceleration operates exponentially. This mismatch worries me more than the machines.

Thirty years ago, singularity debates felt abstract because technological reality lagged far behind imagination. Today, imagination struggles to keep pace with reality, and that shift alone should humble us. Human civilisation may be approaching one of its most consequential transitions since the Industrial Revolution, yet our collective response often oscillates between hype and distraction.

Perhaps the most important question is not whether AI will surpass human intelligence, but the more important question is whether humanity can develop the wisdom necessary to coexist with technologies more powerful than any we have previously created. Intelligence without wisdom is dangerous, whether biological or artificial. And maybe that is the defining feature of our age. For the first time in history, humanity is no longer merely imagining intelligent machines; we are living alongside their early forms. The distance between science fiction and social reality has collapsed dramatically within a single generation. The singularity may still be decades away, or perhaps it may never arrive in the dramatic form as futurists have predicted. But one thing is certain that AI is no longer a peripheral technological development. It is becoming the central force shaping economics, politics, labour, warfare, creativity, and perhaps eventually even human identity itself. The question is no longer whether AI will change civilisation, but whether civilisation is prepared for what AI may become.

(The cover image is generated using AI)

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The missing business case for ending Tuberculosis

August 24, 2026 Leave a comment

Tuberculosis (TB) presents one of the most enduring paradoxes in global health. It is preventable, diagnosable, and curable, yet it remains among the world’s deadliest infectious diseases. Every year, millions of people fall ill, and more than a million lose their lives to a disease that medicine has known how to treat for decades. The burden is concentrated overwhelmingly in the Global South, particularly in countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Yet despite this enormous human and economic cost, TB continues to attract only a fraction of the funding mobilised for many other global health challenges. The question is not whether TB is a public health emergency, but rather why a disease with such a high burden struggles to attract sustained investment.

The answer lies less in epidemiology and more in economics. Global health financing is often driven by a combination of political attention, public visibility, strategic interests, and commercial incentives. Diseases that threaten wealthier populations, generate public fear, or offer lucrative opportunities for innovation tend to attract substantial resources. Tuberculosis does none of these particularly well. It is largely a disease of poverty, affecting populations with limited political influence and weak purchasing power. As a result, the market signals that typically drive investment remain weak, even when the social need is overwhelming.

This disconnect is evident in the global financing landscape. Governments meeting at the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Tuberculosis in 2023 committed to mobilising US$22 billion annually for TB prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care by 2027, alongside US$5 billion annually for research and development. Yet current financing remains far below these ambitions. Many high-burden countries continue to face significant resource shortages, and funding gaps persist across national TB programmes. Research funding is even more constrained. Global investment in tuberculosis research remains only a fraction of what experts estimate is necessary to develop better diagnostics, shorter treatment regimens, and more effective vaccines. The world has repeatedly declared its intention to end TB, but its financial commitments suggest otherwise.

A major reason for this shortfall is the narrow donor base supporting the global TB response. Unlike some other health sectors that benefit from a broad coalition of governments, foundations, corporations, and private investors, TB relies heavily on a small number of actors. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GFTAM) remains the largest external financier of TB programmes worldwide. A handful of bilateral donors and philanthropic organisations account for much of the remaining support. Outside this relatively small circle, engagement is limited. Family foundations, corporate social responsibility programmes, impact investors, and development finance institutions have yet to embrace tuberculosis as a priority issue at scale.

This concentration of funding creates vulnerability. Any reduction in donor commitments, shifts in geopolitical priorities, or fiscal pressures in donor countries can quickly undermine progress. Recent debates around development assistance budgets and declining aid commitments have highlighted the fragility of the current model. The reality is that the global TB response rests on a financial foundation that is both narrow and uncertain.

The deeper challenge, however, is that tuberculosis has never been successfully positioned as an investment opportunity. Unlike cancer therapies, medical technologies, or chronic disease management solutions, TB offers limited prospects for commercial returns. The populations most affected are often served by publicly funded health systems or donor-supported programmes. Pharmaceutical companies face uncertain revenue streams, while investors struggle to identify scalable business models capable of generating attractive financial returns. In a world increasingly shaped by market logic, tuberculosis suffers from a lack of investability.

Yet this perception obscures a much larger economic reality. Tuberculosis may be one of the highest-return investments available in international development. The disease primarily affects people during their most productive years, reducing labour force participation, household earnings, and economic mobility. Children leave school to care for sick relatives. Communities lose workers, caregivers, and local leaders. The economic impact extends far beyond health systems, affecting productivity, human capital formation, and long-term development outcomes. Every case prevented and every patient cured generates benefits that ripple across households, communities, and economies.

The problem is that these returns are largely social rather than financial. The benefits accrue to governments, employers, families, and society as a whole rather than to any single investor. Economists describe this as a classic market failure. The social return on investment is extraordinarily high, but the private return remains relatively low. As a consequence, the market underinvests in solutions despite their obvious public value.

This is precisely why tuberculosis requires a different financing narrative. For decades, the disease has been framed primarily as a public health challenge. While this framing is accurate, it is insufficient. Tuberculosis should also be understood as a development challenge, a labour market challenge, and a human capital challenge. Countries across Asia and Africa are investing heavily in education, skills, entrepreneurship, and economic growth to capitalise on their demographic dividends. Yet the continued prevalence of tuberculosis silently erodes these investments by reducing productivity and weakening workforce participation.

Reframing TB as an economic issue rather than solely a health issue could unlock new sources of capital. Development finance institutions could view TB investments as essential components of economic resilience. Corporate CSR programs could recognise tuberculosis as a workforce and community development issue. Family offices and philanthropists interested in inclusive growth could support interventions that strengthen human capital among vulnerable populations. Impact investors could explore opportunities in diagnostics, digital adherence technologies, and community-based healthcare delivery. Innovative financing mechanisms, including blended finance and outcome-based funding, could help bridge the gap between social value and financial participation.

Such approaches would not replace traditional public health financing, nor should they. Governments must remain the primary funders of national TB responses. However, relying solely on governments, multilateral agencies, and a handful of foundations is unlikely to generate the scale of resources required to end the epidemic. The financing ecosystem must expand, and that expansion will only occur if the narrative changes.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of tuberculosis is that its persistence is no longer primarily a scientific problem. The tools to diagnose and cure the disease already exist, and innovations are emerging. What remains missing is sufficient investment and political commitment to deploy these solutions at scale. In an age that celebrates technological breakthroughs and billion-dollar innovation ecosystems, the continued burden of a curable disease reflects not a failure of medicine but a failure of financing.The global community has largely treated tuberculosis as a charitable cause. It is time to recognise it as an investment in human productivity, economic resilience, and social stability. Until funders, policymakers, and investors view tuberculosis through this broader lens, the gap between disease burden and financial commitment will persist. The missing business case for ending tuberculosis is not a lack of evidence that the returns are absent.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

Cover image is generated using AI

First Published on LinkedIn: 26 June 2026

Filed under Opinions, Social Impact Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why rural digital entrepreneurs matter

August 10, 2026 Leave a comment

When policymakers in India discuss infrastructure, they usually refer to roads, electricity, telecommunications, railways, and industrial corridors. These investments are undeniably important. Yet there is another form of infrastructure that receives far less attention despite its growing importance in connecting citizens with markets, government services, and economic opportunities, which is rural digital entrepreneurship.

Across India, thousands of rural entrepreneurs are quietly performing functions that neither government offices nor private companies can efficiently deliver on their own. They help citizens access digital services, complete applications, make online payments, obtain certificates, access welfare schemes, receive medical advice, connect with markets, and navigate an increasingly digital economy. In doing so, they have become an essential layer of last-mile infrastructure.

India’s digital transformation has been remarkable, especially in the last 10 years or so. Digital public infrastructure, including Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, and numerous online government services, has created unprecedented possibilities for inclusion. However, access to digital platforms does not automatically translate into digital participation. Millions of citizens still face barriers related to literacy, language, confidence, connectivity, documentation, and procedural complexity.

For many rural households, the challenge is not the absence of technology but the absence of trusted intermediaries who can help them use that technology effectively. This is where rural digital entrepreneurs play a critical role. A villager seeking to apply for a government scheme, update land records, register a grievance, obtain a certificate, access telemedicine, or complete an online transaction often relies on a local entrepreneur who understands both the technology and the community. These entrepreneurs bridge the gap between sophisticated digital systems and the realities of rural life.

Their contribution extends beyond service delivery. They generate local employment, build trust in digital systems, reduce transaction costs for citizens, and create pathways for financial and social inclusion. In many communities, they serve as informal advisors, helping citizens navigate an increasingly complex administrative landscape.

The importance of this role is likely to increase rather than diminish. As artificial intelligence, digital governance, online education, telehealth, e-commerce, and digital financial services continue to expand, the demand for local assistance will remain substantial. Contrary to the assumption that digitalisation eliminates intermediaries, experience often shows that new technologies create demand for new forms of facilitation and support.

The success of India’s digital future therefore depends not only on technological innovation but also on human infrastructure. However, rural digital entrepreneurs continue to operate largely at the margins of policy discourse. While considerable attention is paid to startups, MSMEs, and technology companies, relatively little focus is placed on strengthening the ecosystem that supports last-mile entrepreneurs. Access to affordable finance, business development services, training, digital tools, market linkages, and growth pathways remains uneven.

Women entrepreneurs face additional challenges in the form of social norms, mobility constraints, and limited access to resources, which restrict their ability to expand their enterprises. However, where these barriers are addressed, women-led digital enterprises often become powerful catalysts for household income growth, community trust, and social change.

Therefore, a more deliberate policy approach is needed. Rural digital entrepreneurs should be recognised as a strategic component of India’s development architecture. Their role goes beyond commerce, as they enable access to rights, services, and opportunities. Entrepreneurship development programs should move beyond one-time training and focus on long-term business viability. Mentorship, market access, technology support, and peer learning networks are often more important than short-duration capacity-building interventions. Partnerships between government, civil society, and the private sector can create sustainable service ecosystems. Rural entrepreneurs are uniquely positioned to deliver a wide range of services, from financial inclusion and digital literacy to telemedicine, skilling, and e-commerce support. Finally, impact measurement frameworks should capture not only income generation but also the broader social value created through improved access, reduced exclusion, and enhanced citizen participation.

India’s development story has often been driven by investments in physical infrastructure. The next phase may depend equally on investments in human infrastructure—people who connect citizens to systems, opportunities, and institutions. As India advances toward a more digital, inclusive, and knowledge-driven economy, these rural digital entrepreneurs deserve greater recognition not merely as service providers but as builders of development infrastructure. Their work may not be visible in satellite imagery or national construction statistics, but its impact is felt daily in villages where citizens gain access to opportunities that were once beyond reach.

The future of inclusive development will not be determined solely by the technologies we create. It will also be shaped by the people who help others use them.

If this essay made you reflect on digital infrastructure, rural entrepreneurship, and human potential, subscribe to my blog for one new article in your inbox every week. It’s free!

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

(Photo: A rural digital entrepreneur from Jharkhand)

First published in LinkedIn on 9th June 2026

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Opinions Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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