were no more productive than before. Unless states lay the groundwork, AI could end up only deepening the bureaucratic morass. ■ For exclusive coverage of Asian politics, economics and security, sign up to Asia Bulletin, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/asia/2026/08/27/can-ai-make-dysfunctional-governments- more-effective
A hundred days of BJP shock and awe in West Bengal The party finds taking on local customs and the opposition easier than fixing the economy Aug 27th 2026 FOR MANY years the Hindu nationalists’ student group at Jadavpur University in Kolkata was so unpopular that it imported middle-aged activists to pad out its rallies. But in May the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party led by Narendra Modi, the prime minister, won West Bengal, the state that has Kolkata as its capital. For days in August emboldened students assaulted leftist rivals and torched their flags and posters. A minister urged more such “surgical strikes”. “They have the muscle power and the money power,” complains a 19-year-old political-science major, “and now they will start controlling this campus.”
Until now, West Bengal has been everything the Hindu-nationalist BJP is not: secular, left-leaning and abysmal at business. So victory for the party, its first-ever in the state, was especially sweet. But the mismatch also makes West Bengal among the biggest headaches the BJP has had to cope with in its 12 years of ruling India. The party promised big changes in its first 100 days, which expired on August 17th. But it has found waging culture wars is easier than fixing the economy. For decades Communists and the Trinamool Congress, a regional party, ran West Bengal in fairly similar style. Their appetite for bribes and aversion to business reduced what was once one of India’s industrial strongholds to a “syndicate raj” of dodgy influence-peddling. May’s election unseated Trinamool’s Mamata Banerjee, a three-term chief minister and a fierce critic of Mr Modi. Many did not vote for the BJP so much as against her party’s corruption and thuggery. After decades of bad blood between state and centre, things are smoother now . Infrastructure projects that were stalled are moving, including an extension to Kolkata’s metro system. Since the election, Delhi has pledged 1trn rupees (about $10.5bn) for railway projects in West Bengal. But winning over private-sector investors is a slow and thankless task. “I am on a hunt for one huge, iconic investment,” says Swapan Dasgupta, a maverick intellectual now serving as the state’s finance minister. One coup would be persuading Tata Group, India’s biggest conglomerate, to return with a big manufacturing project—two decades after Ms Banerjee staged a hunger strike and drove a planned Tata car factory out of the state. The sweet talk is saved for businesses: the new government seems brazen about imposing an alien culture of Hindu nationalism on secular-minded, meat-loving Bengalis. “I will work for the Hindus,” announced Suvendu Adhikari, the new chief minister of a population that is close to 30% Muslim. The BJP has cleared Muslims at prayer from public roads and made it harder to sell halal meat. In a rush to deport “illegal infiltrators”, even some Indian citizens who happen to be Muslim have been pushed across the border into Muslim-majority Bangladesh. A brief attempt to remove eggs from midday meals in schools outraged many Hindus, who eschew the “pure” vegetarianism preferred by the Hindu nationalists of the north. Though many voters complain that Ms Banerjee coddled her Muslim vote-
bank, few want the government to mess with West Bengal’s syncretic culture. The BJP has also co-opted much of the opposition. In the national parliament in Delhi, 20 out of 28 Trinamool politicians have defected to Mr Modi’s coalition. In the state assembly, 65 of 80 Trinamool representatives have distanced themselves from Ms Banerjee as part of a breakaway faction that keeps suspiciously quiet on the BJP. Many, say critics, did so to ward off investigations by central law-enforcement agencies. One Banerjee loyalist was found hanging from the ceiling of the party office on August 16th, with a suicide note begging his family never to get into politics. The BJP is rushing to show results in West Bengal before the next national election, expected in 2029. Because about 57% of state revenues come from Delhi, fixing the economy by such a tight deadline means that West Bengal must stay at the top of the national government’s list of priorities. The second challenge stems from the BJP’s decision to strengthen its presence in the state by inducting scores of high-profile Trinamool politicians into its ranks. These turncoats, including some tainted by corruption scandals, make it harder to convince voters and financiers that the state really has turned a page. ■ 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/2026/08/27/a-hundred-days-of-bjp-shock-and-awe-in- west-bengal
Nepal flash floods Aug 27th 2026 Devastating flash floods struck an area on the border between Nepal and Tibet, apparently triggered by the fall of a huge chunk of ice that broke off a glacier. A destructive torrent tore down the valleys below. Hundreds were dead or missing, including many tourists. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/asia/2026/08/27/nepal-flash-floods
Indian cities should embrace skyscrapers Local rules prevent their construction. Hyderabad shows why that’s silly Aug 27th 2026 DONALD TRUMP’S popularity may be plummeting in America and around the world, yet India’s appetite for buildings bearing his name remains undiminished. This month a local developer licensing the Trump name announced the details of the latest such project. Promising “every comfort, convenience and indulgence” and spread across two towers of 65 storeys each, it will be the country’s largest Trump-branded property. But those who are expecting to find this monument to the tastes of India’s new rich in high- rise Mumbai, brand-obsessed Delhi or tech-fuelled Bangalore will be disappointed. The home of the newest Trump towers is, surprisingly, Hyderabad.
The capital of the wealthy southern state of Telangana, Hyderabad is little known outside India. Domestically its reputation rests on its distinct culture (it serves as a meeting point for north and south India), wonderful cuisine (it produces the best biryani known to humanity, no matter what those misguided souls in Lucknow tell you) and thriving tech industry (Google, Microsoft and Amazon all have huge offices there). It is not famous for skyscrapers. Yet it has more of them than any Indian city bar Mumbai, which was forced into vertical growth by its island geography. How did the country’s sixth-most populous city build its second-largest concentration of tall buildings? It got out of the way. Near the top of the long list of things holding India’s cities back is something called “floor space index” (FSI), or the ratio of permissible built-up area to land area. In successful Asian cities like Singapore, FSI is set as high as 25, meaning that for every square foot of land, a developer can build up to 25 square feet of tower. In India local authorities worried about meagre civic infrastructure set the number somewhere around 2. It rarely exceeds 4. The central government’s latest economic survey describes restrictive FSI as a distortion responsible for urban low-rise sprawl. Worse, the finance ministry’s economists write, it “raises land values and creates artificial scarcity in core urban areas”. Hyderabad, unique among India’s cities, abolished FSI in 2006. And then, miraculously, life went on. NIMBYs foretell all sorts of doom the moment anyone talks about building anything. They warn of Gothamesque ghettos with gridlocked streets, dry taps and overflowing sewers. Nonsense. Today tall residential blocks line the highways in Hyderabad’s western suburbs and traffic still flows faster than in most major Indian cities. Dozens more towers, including the Trump ones, are sprouting in a neighbourhood called Kokapet that was not long ago full of custard-apple orchards and is now a forest of construction cranes. There are two reasons Hyderabad has not descended into dystopia. One is its 160km-long orbital motorway, the first bit of which opened in 2008 and is now an arterial road in the new skyscraper belt. The other is that abolishing the arbitrary cap on FSI did not mean the abandonment of all rules. Regulations covering minimum street widths and required setbacks still apply. Aviation authorities impose restrictions around air-traffic funnels. The
effect is that developers can build high only if they have a large enough plot next to a wide enough street somewhere far enough from an airport. Markets decide the rest. The cost of construction rises with height, so a builder’s decision about how much to pay for land and how tall to go rests on whether potential buyers of flats will cough up enough to make the project profitable. That has prevented a housing bubble. The lesson for other Indian cities is not “abolish FSI”—or not just that, at any rate. It is that civic administrators should think about what purpose their cherished rules serve, and whether better designed policies can achieve those goals. Hyderabad’s stewards—across parties and across decades—had the uncommon wisdom to anticipate both the problems and the opportunities breakneck growth would bring, and to plan accordingly. The results are plain. Mumbai is in the midst of an infrastructure boom that its residents and businesses agree should have happened half a century ago. Delhi’s now-decades-old metro transformed the city. Bangalore, India’s foremost tech hub, is still an embarrassing morass of ugly sprawl, poor roads and interminable commutes. Hyderabad, which covets its tech crown and is rare in having planned ahead, is a sleek, modern city that looks the way Bangalore should. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/asia/2026/08/23/indian-cities-should-embrace-skyscrapers
The long arm of the Chinese state China’s latest cash cow is a clunky cartoon bull Chinese women are falling behind in the office
The long arm of the Chinese state Like America, China wants its laws to apply everywhere Aug 27th 2026 AMONG THE grievances the Communist Party has long nourished in its official telling of China’s story, the extraterritorial abuses of foreign powers loom especially large. In the 19th century it was colonial powers refusing to come under Chinese laws in the Chinese ports they controlled. In the 21st century it is America enforcing its will beyond its borders, through sanctions and export controls, against countries that displease it. All the more striking, then, that China now wants to play the extraterritorial game, waging lawfare with ever more gusto. A notable instance came in April, when China ordered Meta, which owns Facebook, to unwind its $2bn deal to buy Manus, an AI startup registered in Singapore. Meta complied, as did Manus’s Chinese founders, who had been