Articles by Shevika M

Shevika M is the founder of Kuviraa, a non-partisan initiative that aims to build political engagement and leadership in girls across India. Prior to this, Shevika managed Ashoka’s Changemaker Schools programme in South Asia and worked at the Directorate of Education in Delhi on capacity building for government teachers. Shevika serves as a consultant at the India Climate Collaborative and has earned a master’s in Public Policy from the University of Oxford as a Chevening Scholar.

On February 1st, the finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, while presenting the union budget for 2022-23, announced a plan to steer urban planning and development, referring to the fact that by 2047, half of India’s population will be urban. Her budget speech proposed nurturing of megacities to become centres of economic growth and preparing tier 2 and 3 to take on a similar path in the future. Her proposal included setting up a high-level committee consisting of urban planners, urban economists and institutions to make recommendations on urban sector policies, capacity building, planning, implementation, and governance.  As our cities grow larger,…

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