Under the British, Shimla housed around 25,000 people. Now it welcomes roughly 2.7m visitors each year. Much of its expansion was unplanned. The skyline is a maze of modest homestays—their sun-faded signs promising views that are often blocked by the building next door. Houses cling to 75- degree slopes, flouting both gravity and bylaws. Shimla’s carrying capacity—the population that its drains, roads and waste management can sustain—has been exceeded many times over. Lanes designed for horse-drawn carriages host up to 26,000 cars a day. Entire neighbourhoods have started sinking. Locals watch for newly uncovered tree roots and cracked walls—signs that the earth might give way. Such problems are shared by many of India’s other hill towns. Their troubles attest to overdevelopment that has occurred all across the Himalayan states, say worried observers. In recent years, places including Himachal Pradesh (of which Shimla is the capital), Uttarakhand and Sikkim have benefited from big centrally funded projects, such as hydropower stations and new roads. At the same time environmental matters “have not just gone downhill, it’s been an avalanche in all the Himalayan states,” says Avay Shukla, a former official in Himachal Pradesh. Weather across the Indian Himalayan region is growing less predictable. Springtime seems to be shortening; dry winters become scorching summers. Environmental damage is increasing the harm that extreme weather events may cause. In the past decade, disasters such as landslides, flash floods and forest fires have killed 10,543 people in Himachal Pradesh alone. In August India’s Supreme Court said that if developers keep cutting into mountains, the state could “vanish into thin air”. In Shimla, experts in conservation and disaster preparedness want fewer tourists to come. They want authorities to impose a tourist tax and withhold new hotel licences. They want steps to curb a building spree, including fresh efforts to enforce existing rules about construction. Yet that would be at odds with the state government’s goal of tripling the number of tourists who visit Himachal Pradesh each year. Workers are expanding the main roads into Shimla. The Shimla Development Plan 2041 —the town’s first master plan in four decades—overrides earlier
construction bans. Tikender Singh Panwar, a former deputy mayor, is worried. He calls it “a disaster in the offing”. ■ Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential India, our free weekly newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//asia/2026/05/14/indias-legendary-hill-towns-are-sinking
India’s pricey private universities want to take on the Ivy League Billionaire founders are bankrolling their efforts May 14th 2026 NINETY TYPES of tree sway in the arboretum at the heart of Ahmedabad University, in the western state of Gujarat. “Always be in Beta”, say motivational signs that hang in the institution’s wide halls. The university’s four thousand or so learners toil in smarter surroundings than the average Indian student—and that is not surprising. Each year of undergraduate study at this private non-profit costs around 500,000 rupees ($5,300), well above a typical Indian’s annual wage. Ahmedabad is one in a crop of young, elite private universities promising they can put Indian higher education on the map. The country’s massive college and university system has quadrupled in size since 2001. It now has
45m students, the most in the world after China. Yet across India, teaching and research can be dire. Even at the creamy end, Indian outfits lag foreign peers. Not one Indian institution features in the top 100 of any of the most- respected global rankings. Posh private outfits bent on changing this began setting up around 15 years ago. They take inspiration from their famous American counterparts, including when it comes to costs: annual fees at some can rise above 1m rupees. Already a handful rank “right up there with the very best institutions” in India for some subjects, reckons Pushkar, an author and academic in Goa (who goes by only one name). This trend owes much to Indian billionaires, who have come to see higher education as a cause worthy of their philanthropy. O.P. Jindal Global University was set up near Delhi in 2009 using funds provided by Naveen Jindal, a steel tycoon. A few years later came Shiv Nadar University, named after its chairman, the founder of HCL, a technology firm, and Ashoka, opened in 2014 with support from a coalition of some two hundred big donors. Boosters make somewhat grand comparisons with America in the 19th century, when filthy-rich industrialists set up places such as Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Stanford. The new crop of private universities set themselves apart in several ways. From the beginning they have sought to excel in research, not just in teaching. Many emphasise humanities and social sciences, says Eldho Mathews, an education researcher in Kerala—which in other Indian institutions are often considered secondary to science-based subjects and also to training for the professions.
Too many elite Indian institutions produce automatons with a limited view of the world, says Pankaj Chandra, vice-chancellor at Ahmedabad. His university encourages students to learn across disciplines: to combine, say, a main degree in physics with a minor one in history. They must also complete a practical project (to show they can tackle real-world problems) and do voluntary work. Ten years ago his holistic approach might have scared Indian parents. “Not today,” he reckons. Lately some big global trends have begun to work in these universities’ favour. English-speaking countries that attract a lot of well-off Indian students have started narrowing the gates for foreigners. Donald Trump’s bashing of American universities is making it slightly easier for Indian ones to attract and retain staff. Indian academics who have well-established careers in America are not fleeing in great number. But those who are just completing their doctorates are becoming more open to moving home. Yet to take full advantage, the elite private universities will need to swerve home-grown obstacles. Though they are somewhat less trussed up in red tape than India’s public institutions, regulation remains onerous. Just like America’s posh colleges, they are under pressure to become more inclusive —though they lack endowments quite as bottomless as those American outfits can draw on to pay for scholarships. They are also about to face more
competition: from foreign universities recently granted the right to set up campuses in India. British ones including Bristol, Liverpool, York and Southampton are among those already operating in India, or about to enroll their first cohorts. A big worry is the Indian government’s intolerance for research or opinion that it finds irksome. Self-censorship is rife in the social sciences in particular, says one academic. Publishing an inconvenient finding can easily “blow up in your face”. Sensitive topics include religious freedom and the state of India’s democracy. Recent years have brought a number of cases in which academics who have fallen out with the government have been forced from posts in private universities, or prevented from taking them up. Young universities have much to lose from upsetting politicians. And irate officials are not beyond putting pressure on their rich founders, who tend to have interests outside education to protect. “We anticipated that private universities would enjoy more autonomy than public ones,” says Christophe Jaffrelot, an observer of Indian politics at Sciences Po in Paris. “In fact it is the other way around.” ■ Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential India, our free weekly newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//asia/2026/05/11/indias-pricey-private-universities-want- to-take-on-the-ivy-league
Drama in the Philippines after the vice-president is impeached Sara Duterte’s political career hangs in the balance May 14th 2026 THE IMPEACHMENT of the vice-president of the Philippines, Sara Duterte, on May 11th marked the start of a dramatic week in Manila. The spectacle ramped up on May 13th when pro-Duterte senators holed up in the Senate building, claiming to be under violent siege by government law enforcers. The chaotic scenes, unusual even by the notorious standards of Philippine politics, speak to what is currently on the line: the kind of leadership that will take over the country from 2028. Ms Duterte, the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, a former strongman president, represents one of the country’s two most powerful political clans. In 2022 she hitched her fortunes to the leader of the other one, Ferdinand
“Bongbong” Marcos, whose own father was a corrupt, violent dictator. Bongbong rode to the presidency on their combined ticket. Then the two fell out spectacularly. For Mr Marcos’s backers, with a solid majority in the House, the impeachment is a chance to finish off Ms Duterte and her clan (whose power and politics is rooted in gun-ridden Mindanao in the south, where feuding starts before breakfast). The Senate must now put Ms Duterte (pictured) on trial; conviction requires a two-thirds majority and would prevent her standing for president in 2028. Yet the president’s sway in the Senate is tenuous. For now Ms Duterte is still the favourite to take the Philippines’ top job in two years’ time. In 2024 Ms Duterte boasted that, should anything befall her, she had booked an assassin to kill Mr Marcos, his wife and the speaker of the House at the time. Yet insiders think that is the weakest of four articles of impeachment. The strongest, they say, are charges of corruption and unexplained wealth. The Anti-Money Laundering Council says it has uncovered at least 6.8bn Philippine pesos ($110m) in suspicious transactions tied to Ms Duterte’s and her husband’s accounts. Ms Duterte’s allies are now attempting to prevail in the 24-member Senate. Just before the impeachment, Alan Peter Cayetano, a Duterte ally, secured the votes necessary to unseat the Senate president. He swiftly granted protective custody to Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who was Rodrigo Duterte’s police chief and overseer of his extrajudicial war on drugs, in which thousands died. Mr Duterte is now in The Hague awaiting trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of murder, torture and rape. In the Senate chamber on May 11th Mr dela Rosa reappeared from hiding to help vote Mr Cayetano president. Federal agents attempted, but failed, to serve an ICC warrant on him. Then, in the evening of May 13th, gunshots were heard inside the Senate building. Pro-Duterte senators inside claimed to be under siege by government agents. On television, Mr Marcos denied any government operations. It smells of a manufactured crisis; the Senate’s own forces, now reporting to Mr Cayetano, may have fired the shots—at whom, if anybody, remains unclear. (In the chaos, Mr dela Rosa appears to have slipped away.)