Essay · Section B22 September 2026

What belongs to everyone is cared for by no one.

Consider an ordinary day’s newspaper. A narrow strait in the Gulf, through which much of the world’s oil must pass, is under siege, and a second narrow strait at the mouth of the Red Sea is under attack. A great power admits that it has placed weapons in orbit around the Earth. Indian scientists report that a dangerous fungus in hospital wards now resists most of the medicines we use against it. In Maharashtra, 83 talukas have gone more than twenty days without rain, and tankers are carrying water to villages whose wells have run dry. Five stories, from the sea floor to outer space. They share one feature. Each concerns something that no one owns and everyone uses.

The observation is old. Aristotle, criticising Plato’s scheme of common property in the second book of the Politics, wrote that “that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.” Each person, he said, thinks chiefly of his own and hardly at all of the common interest. In 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the idea its modern name in an essay in Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Imagine, he wrote, a pasture open to all. Each herdsman gains the full benefit of one more animal, while the cost of overgrazing is shared by everyone. So each adds one more, and then another, until the pasture is destroyed. No one intends the ruin. Everyone contributes to it.

The five stories fit the model almost exactly. A strait is a shared highway, and any state that sits beside it can gain by holding it hostage. Earth orbit is a shared shelf, and every debris-creating test or weapon adds a cost that all satellite users will bear; scientists have long warned of cascading collisions that could make some orbits unusable. The effectiveness of antimicrobial drugs is a shared resource too, invisible until it is gone: every unnecessary dose of an antifungal, in a hospital or on a farm, spends a little of it, and the bill falls on a stranger in an ICU years later. Groundwater is the most intimate commons of all. The farmer who digs a deeper borewell gains the water; the neighbour whose well dries up pays. And the atmosphere, into which the rich countries poured most of the historical emissions, has now sent its bill to Nepal in the form of flash floods, which is why Kathmandu has begun speaking not of relief but of climate justice.

If the story ended there, the essay’s statement would be a law of nature. It is not. The same newspaper carried a reminder that the tragedy can be averted. The Straits of Malacca and Singapore, which run for about 800 kilometres and carry an enormous share of the world’s trade, were once treated as a no-man’s sea. In 1971 Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore jointly challenged that view and began working together. After the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea created the regime of transit passage in 1982, the three states built, with the users of the straits, what became the Cooperative Mechanism, launched in 2007. They levy no tolls on ships; they share the burden of safety and the environment with those who use the waterway. A narrow passage that could have become a chokepoint became a shared responsibility.

The larger lesson came from the economist Elinor Ostrom, who in 1990 published Governing the Commons and in 2009 became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Ostrom went and looked at real commons: Swiss alpine meadows, Japanese village forests, irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines. Many had lasted for centuries. They survived not because they were privatised or seized by the state, Hardin’s two remedies, but because the users themselves made rules with clear boundaries, watched one another, punished cheating gradually and had cheap ways to settle quarrels. What belongs to everyone, she showed, is cared for when “everyone” stops meaning “no one in particular” and starts meaning “all of us, with rules.”

The world has done it at the largest scale too. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 on substances that deplete the ozone layer became the first United Nations treaty to be ratified by every member state, and the ozone layer is on a slow path to recovery. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 declared the exploration and use of outer space to be “the province of all mankind” and barred nuclear weapons from orbit; for half a century it kept the worst of the arms race on the ground. Closer home, villages in Maharashtra such as Hiware Bazar became known for budgeting their water collectively, deciding together how much to draw and what to grow.

The counter-position must be stated fairly. Cooperation often fails. The cod fishery off Newfoundland, once one of the richest on Earth, collapsed and was closed in 1992 despite scientific warnings. Treaties are only as strong as the willingness of the powerful to obey them; the Outer Space Treaty does not forbid conventional weapons in orbit, and a state that sits beside a strait may decide that the leverage is worth the anger. Ostrom’s communities were small, stable and able to see one another. The global commons are none of these things. Perhaps, at the scale of a planet, Aristotle was simply right.

Yet the record suggests a narrower and more hopeful conclusion. Commons fail when three things are missing: knowledge of the damage, a forum where users can bargain, and some cost for cheating. Where these are built, as at Malacca or Montreal, shared things endure. That is why the demands now in the news, for disclosure of weapons in orbit, for wider susceptibility testing of drugs, for village-by-village mapping of groundwater, for a regional fund that treats loss and damage as a shared obligation, all point in the same direction. Each converts an invisible cost into a visible one and gives it an address.

India has particular reasons to take this seriously. It sits beside the Indian Ocean’s shipping lanes, it is a spacefaring nation, it carries one of the heaviest burdens of drug-resistant infection and it draws more groundwater than any other country. Its Constitution already asks the state to protect the environment in Article 48A and every citizen to do so in Article 51A(g). The statement in the title is best read not as a verdict but as a warning. What belongs to everyone will be cared for by no one only if everyone waits for someone else. The remedy begins when a people decide that the shared thing is theirs to guard.