Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has weighed in on India’s city gridlock, arguing that unchecked metropolis progress is not simply unsustainable—it mathematically breaks down.
In a submit on X, Vembu mentioned India’s main cities require “extraordinary funding in public transport” to stay useful.
However past site visitors, he warned of a deeper structural downside: as cities develop, the per capita price of infrastructure doesn’t simply rise linearly—it scales with the inhabitants, inflicting complete funding must develop exponentially.
“That results in complete funding rising because the sq. of the inhabitants,” he wrote. “In the end this units a mathematical higher restrict on how huge cities can get.”
Vembu pointed to Tokyo’s instance—the place makes an attempt to maintain up with infrastructure for over 34 million individuals led to “excessive public debt and very poor demographics.” The implication: excessive infrastructure prices eat into any GDP good points, driving up the price of residing and miserable fertility charges.
“There’s a dimension of metropolis that’s ‘optimum,’” Vembu mentioned, pegging it between 100,000 and 250,000 residents—what most would nonetheless name “cities.” At that scale, he argues, cities retain the advantages of city clustering with out the crushing infrastructure burden.
His feedback additionally supply a clue into Zoho’s personal working philosophy. “Now you already know the place our workplaces are typically positioned and why!” he added.
