Indian cities need to think in circles

For those of us who live in Delhi-NCR, every winter is now déja vu wrapped in smog; except it is not imagined but real. The script is also too familiar and almost normalised by now; AQI indices spike, schools close, flights circle, and the usual cast of villains takes the stage - stubble burning, diesel trucks, firecrackers and unhelpful winds. By February, the haze lifts just enough for everyone to move on with their lives. The real affliction in Indian cities and especially Delhi runs much deeper. The city is not just polluted but it is simply wasteful. Indian cities are designed to discard value as fast as they create it.

- AMIT KAPOOR AND MEENAKSHI AJITH

India’s urbanisation is still built and continues to be built ona linear idea of growth: extract, produce, consume, throw away. This logic perhaps made sense in the early decades of industrialisation when raw materials were cheap and land was abundant. However, as we see now, this linear growth becomes brittle as it matures. Each tonne of waste, each plume of smoke, each overflowing drain marks not expansion but inefficiency. A waste of resources burned, nutrients dumped, energy lost. Delhi's smog is the visible form of an economic design flaw. Modern economies thrive when they learn to reuse their own leftovers.

When the waste of one process becomes the input of another, output grows without new extraction. Each loop raises productivity a little; together they create a new source of growth. The cities that master this circulation as we see in Copenhagen with its district heating, Amsterdam with circular construction and Seoul with waste-energy grids, can gain efficiency as their next comparative advantage. India’s cities, by contrast, still chase scale rather than symmetry.