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Biswajit Dhar

One of the more enduring images from the iconic film from the 1950s, Do Bigha Zameen, was its poster showing the family of a marginal farmer looking anxiously at the sky hoping that rains would save his tiny holding, their only source of livelihood, from being appropriated by the landlord. 

Seven decades later, the importance of timely rains remains critical for the survival of the millions of small and marginal farmers in India, especially for those who are dependent on the kharif (summer) crops. Therefore, year-after-year, the progress of the monsoon is watched with much anxiety.

In April, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) predicted that in the 2024 southwest monsoon season, rainfall would be 106 percent of the “long period average” of 870mm, based on rainfall data during 1971-2020. 

This scenario was based on the assessments made by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in March that the El Nino climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean, which adversely affects, among other things, rainfall in several regions, including South Asia, was at the end of its 2023-24 cycle. 

The La Nina climate pattern bringing favourable weather was likely to take effect from July-August. 

A more precise reading of the WMO assessment meant that India would experience better rains in the later phase of monsoon.

El Nino effect slow to wear off

However, three months after the WMO’s assessment, it appears the effect of El Nino has been slow to wear off. The onset of the monsoon has been delayed in large parts of the country. 

The monsoon usually sets in around June 1 in the southern states and spreads nationwide by the first week of July. This allows farmers to plant the kharif crops, including the most important staple, rice, besides millet, cotton, maize, pulses, soybean and sugarcane. 

This year, the monsoon arrived in Kerala two days early, but its progress has slowed resulting in insufficient coverage by mid-June. The delay will impact the planting of the kharif crops.

The latest IMD assessment said that the rainfall over the entire country until June 18 was “64.5 mm which was 20 percent less than its Long Period Average (LPA) of 80.6 mm”. 

Except for the southern states, every other region had moderate to high levels of rain deficiency. The worst affected is the northwest region with a 70 percent deficiency, while central India had a shortfall of 31 percent. 

Dryness and heat are worrying signs

These regions were not only extremely low on precipitation, but they also suffered from extreme heatwaves, making conditions worse for farmers to begin planting once the rains arrive. 

These are worrying signs for the agricultural sector. 

The states most affected by deficient rains account for more than a quarter of the total rice production in India and are also major producers of millet, soybean, sugarcane and pulses. 

The prospects of rainfall for the entire month of June are somewhat better with the IMD predicting an eight percent shortfall as compared to the “long period average” and this may not have a serious impact on the levels of production of the major crops.

Even if the monsoon continues to play truant, adversely affecting the production of rice, two developments may help the government tide over short-term domestic rice supply constraints. 

First, the Food Corporation of India currently holds 50 million tonnes (MT) of rice, nearly four-fold higher than the buffer of 13.5 million tonnes for July 1. 

Second, the government had banned non-basmati rice exports in July 2023 to prevent domestic supply shortages and to keep prices in check. 

However, at the same time, the government allowed limited exports to certain countries to meet their food security needs. 

According to data provided by the Department of Commerce, Government of India, this caused rice exports in 2023-24 to fall by nearly 26 percent (6 million tonnes) as compared to a year before. 

Indications are that the export ban will continue in the current financial year as well.

Irrigation issues

There’s a good reason why a large section of India’s farmers continues to depend on the monsoon. Irrigation facilities remain significantly inadequate in several states, more than five decades after the Green Revolution was introduced. 

In 2019-20, the latest year for which data are available, 65 percent of rice production was under irrigation This figure is deceptive since there were considerable variations among states as regards availability of irrigation facilities. 

The largest rice producing state, West Bengal, has 51 percent of area under irrigation, while two other major rice producing states, Chhattisgarh and Odisha have 37 percent and 32 percent respectively.

The NDA government has been popularising the consumption of millet, but the major varieties grown in India, jowar and bajra, are not under widespread irrigation. In 2019-20, only 11 percent of jowar production was under irrigation, while for bajra, it was a little higher at 15 percent. 

The deficiency of irrigation in the country is the result of inadequate infrastructure supporting agriculture. This is a consequence of decades of neglect. 

For years, agriculture has received progressively smaller share of the country’s overall investment. In the 1950s, agriculture’s share was nearly 25 percent, but four decades later, the share had halved. 

After 1991, share of investment in agriculture has consistently remained in single digits. In 2021-22, the latest year for which this figure is available, agriculture’s share was below six percent. 

Unless the government shows the political will to prioritise the development of agriculture by ensuring that irrigation facilities, together with adequate drainage are provided, uncertainties of the monsoon will continue to adversely affect the economic well-being of a majority of India’s farmers.

 Biswajit Dhar is Distinguished Professor, Council for Social Development, New Delhi.

 Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

Also check out our story from The Core edition of April 10 about a revolutionary waste management technology, which converts garbage mountains into charcoal.

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Veena Sahajwalla

Microfactories, an innovative approach to extracting value from waste materials, point the way to sustainable production and consumption.

At a waste depot in Shoalhaven, NSW, 200 km south of Sydney, old mattresses, fabric and dirty glass left over from household recycling are being transformed into something completely different: Green Ceramics, a versatile commercial product. 

These high-performance, nontoxic hybrids can be used for a variety of architectural and decorative applications, including furniture and ceramic tiles. The materials that go into them are difficult to recycle using traditional methods, which means they usually end up in landfills. But now they have a new purpose. 

The Shoalhaven Green Ceramics Microfactorie, which went online in October last year, is among the first of its kind. It was developed through a partnership between the local city council, Kandui Technologies and UNSW’s Sustainable Materials and Technology (SMaRT) Centre, a research centre aimed at translating new recycling science into real-world environmental and economic benefits. The partnership has been supported by UNSW, EPA Trust, OCSE, and recently the Trailblazer for Recycling and Clean Energy.

This Microfactorie can process around 450 tonnes of glass, mattresses and other textiles per year, but it is part of a much bigger concept – the movement towards a ‘circular economy’, which would get rid of the ‘throw-away’, consumer economy that relies on continuous extraction and use of raw materials and production of huge amounts of waste. 

Instead, production and consumption are aimed at minimising resource extraction, cutting down waste and lowering carbon emissions. Sustainability in every step in the cycle is the goal. 

The circular economy idea is growing in parallel with environmental movements and awareness of climate change. Processes around extracting raw materials, product manufacturing and waste disposal are carbon intensive and rely on finite resources.

Along the way, as conservation and sustainability have evolved into mainstream concerns, people and communities have adapted to different ways of dealing with waste. Recycling has become a routine for most people – many local government councils in Australia have programmes for recycling paper, plastic and glass, and recycling clothing, electronics and other materials has become more commonplace and more accessible. 

The ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra is familiar to everyone, but the circular economy is about more than that – one key element that makes it different from business-as-usual is ‘reform’. 

Reforming is about reimagining, redesigning and remanufacturing – not taking old bottles and turning them into new ones, but taking old plastics and turning them into new plastic filaments to be used in a 3-D printer to make all kinds of new objects, or taking old bottles and mixing them with old textiles and turning them into new Green Ceramics. 

With technology, the equation is more complex. The vast amounts of e-waste produced by obsolete, outworn and discarded technology present huge challenges. Many of the devices that people depend on every day contain rare earth metals that are costly and in short supply. They frequently contain a variety of other valuable metals. And they are constructed with high-grade polymers. 

Given the way technology products – mobile phones, computer hard drives, circuit boards, battery packs and so many others – are designed, constructed, and integrated, taking them apart can be an extremely difficult puzzle. So, they often end up in landfills, creating environmental hazards, or they are shipped off to places where poverty and desperation create economies of extraction, pulling apart the remnants of technology to salvage any valuable materials and discarding the rest. 

But new methods developed by the SMaRT Centre have created ways to deal with these challenges. The Microfactorie concept is central to the process – using the right tools, techniques and mechanisms to disassemble complex e-waste and recover the materials that went into it. 

Microfactories are designed to be either co-located to the waste source, such as a landfill, or located with an end-user, such as a manufacturer, to enable the substitution of virgin resources with waste materials. 

Their adaptability – the ability to perform the right tasks for the given inputs, and to create usable outputs based on need – creates economies of purpose. Each of the modules may look very different in each region, creating products and tackling waste in a way that is relevant and useful to the communities and industries they are a part of. 

Through successful embodiments of the circular economy, everyone will begin to view waste as a valuable resource. But it will take everyone in the value chain collaborating to redesign and remanufacture products to reduce the pressures on our planet and create more sustainable communities. 

A few years ago, no one would have imagined that a partnership between the local council, a university research centre and an industrial enterprise could lay the foundation for remanufacturing in the region with products made from waste glass and textiles being installed in new commercial and residential developments across the country. 

What is happening on a landfill site in Shoalhaven is proof that with imagination and commitment, the circular economy is within reach. 

Professor Veena Sahajwalla is Founding Director the UNSW Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) Centre and an Australian Research Council Laureate. She is an internationally recognised materials scientist, engineer and inventor. In 2018, Veena launched the world's first e-waste MICROfactorie and in 2019 she launched her plastics and Green Ceramics MICROfactories. She was named the 2022 NSW Australian of the Year in recognition of her work.

Anirban Ghose, head of Microfactories at the Smart Centre at UNSW, contributed to reporting.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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Sajan Thomas and Titto Idicula

India's new government faces the pressing challenge of mitigating the economic concerns of the southern states, which are demanding their due share within the country’s federal framework and rebelling against ‘fiscal injustice’.

The main point of contention is the alleged discrimination in the distribution of central funds against the more developed South Indian states not ruled by the BJP as compared to its pro-BJP northern counterparts, which contribute less to the national economy.

Estimates show that out of the 28 states and eight union territories in India, the combined contribution of five South Indian states — Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh — to the country’s GDP is more than 30 percent. These remittance-rich states also contribute significantly to India's forex reserves, which recently reached a record high of USD$648.7 billion.

In 2018, the ruling Left government in Kerala criticised the Union government for failing to provide adequate support to the 'Rebuild Kerala' initiative after the state experienced its worst floods in a century.

In April 2024, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu were at loggerheads with the Union government over the release of relief funds for casualties caused by floods, Cyclone Maichung and drought. During protests in Delhi, Karnataka highlighted the pending drought relief as a key issue, alongside injustice in tax dispersal.

It was only after the respective state governments moved the Supreme Court, invoking the violation of the fundamental rights guaranteed in the Indian constitution, that the Union government released ₹3,730.32 crore (USD$37300 million) as 'relief assistance for natural calamity' from the National Disaster Response Fund during the last week of April.

While examining the petition filed by the Karnataka government, the Supreme Court division bench stated, 'Let there not be a contest between the Union and states’.

During our fieldwork in the flood and landslide-affected regions of northern Kerala in 2019 and 2020, the widespread perception that exists became clear: the state government should ‘own’ the climate disasters and provide compensation to victims for both human and economic losses.

Earlier this year, the Chief Ministers and ministers of Karnataka and Kerala, along with prominent leaders of Tamil Nadu's ruling party DMK), organised a protest in the national capital against unjust practices in tax devolution and grant-in-aid from the Union government.

In response to the Union Budget 2024, D.K. Suresh, a Lok Sabha member and brother of the Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister, made a provocative separatist threat, stating, "South Indian states may be forced to demand a separate nation if the Centre does not provide them with adequate funds."

Although much has already been discussed about the economic dimensions of the north-south drift in Indian politics, its underlying connection to climate change remains largely unexamined.

Climate scientists have warned that South India is more sensitive than the rest of the country to changes in temperature. In a 2021 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that global warming could lead to extreme rainfall events in South India, in addition to monsoon rains. The Western Ghats, renowned for tourism and agriculture and primarily traversing Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, are highly susceptible to climate-related disasters.

Research has shown the link between urban-centric growth models and the likelihood of climate disasters in emerging economies, and this is particularly applicable in a development-craving, corruption-prone country like India.

As explained by political scientist Shaji Varkey, "A vibrant economy with little to no environmental planning leads to uncontrolled urbanisation, resulting in concrete jungles, encroachment on water bodies, blocked drainages, indiscriminate quarrying, sand mining, and land use changes. This makes South India more vulnerable to floods, landslides, urban heat islands, and water shortages."

Bengaluru, the so-called 'Silicon Valley of Asia', is a textbook case of this 'great Indian vulnerability'. Studies indicate that unabated, unplanned and untenable urbanisation is the driving force behind Bengaluru's transformation from what was once known as the 'Garden City' into an urban dystopia, characterised by recurring episodes of flash floods and acute water shortages.

The South Indian states face an environmental opportunity cost by growing at a rate higher than the national average and contributing more to the federal coffers than what they are allocated in return.

Over the past few years, compensation for climate disasters through central funds has become a point of contention between the Union government and the southern states of India.

Welfarism and competitive populism have made deep inroads in the political landscape of South India since the 1960s. State governments have no alternative but to respond proactively to the climate crises affecting the people.

Even though the Union Government did not release sufficient funds, the DMK-led Tamil Nadu government granted ₹6,000 each to those affected by the 2023 floods in seven districts. Politically, they have no choice but to advance the relief as the previous AIADMK government had granted compensation to those impacted by Cyclone Gaja in 2018.
Due to populist pressures, the Karnataka government decided in 2020 to give higher compensation to flood victims than what the Centre mandated, despite worsening state finances.

The new government in India must tackle the recurring climate disasters and associated casualties affecting its economic powerhouse in the south, which drives the country's growth engine. 

New Delhi can no longer go forward with its leadership role in the Global South on climate change debates by overlooking its own southern states striving for ‘climate justice’ within India's federal arrangements.

Sajan Thomas is a novelist and columnist who teaches Political Science at St. John’s College, Anchal, which is affiliated with the University of Kerala. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Bergen, Norway, and his other accomplishments include a fellowship from Harvard University and being a visiting scholar at NIAS, Copenhagen.

Titto Idicula is a consultant neurologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. He is a fellow of the American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry, Chief Editor of NevroNEL, and a columnist at onmanorama.com.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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Suzannah Lyons, Shirley Scott

Introduction

Countries are currently meeting in Kochi, India for the 46th Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting.

Held every year, the purpose of these meetings is for the 56 states who are parties to the treaty, to carry out the collective business of implementing it.

But while the Antarctic Treaty — which enshrines the use of the continent for peaceful purposes only — has long been seen as an example of successful international cooperation, recent reports that Russia has been prospecting in the region have caused alarm in other countries.

The governance of Antarctica involves balancing conservation, research, tourism and economic interests in a unique and fragile environment.

Not only does a changing climate and more volatile world order impact the future of the continent itself, it also has far-reaching repercussions for the rest of the world.

On that note, here’s a ringside view of the geopolitics heating up the coldest place on earth.

How politics and climate could affect the Antarctic Treaty

The Antarctic Treaty System has long been hailed as an example of successful international cooperation. But could that be at risk?

It's been hot in Kochi, in southern India, where representatives from at least 60 nations have gathered for two important meetings on the future of the world's coldest continent, Antarctica.

The 46th Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting and accompanying 26th Meeting of the Committee for Environmental Protection also attracts observers from several non-governmental organisations with an interest in the regulation of Antarctic tourism and the protection of its environment.

But unlike the temperatures outside, the atmosphere inside the meeting venue has been frosty following recent reports Russia has discovered vast amounts of oil and gas in the British Antarctic Territory.

Mining activities in Antarctica are banned under the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, which was adopted in 1991, with Australia playing a lead role.

Russia's activities are worrying other countries that fear they will essentially be ripping up the treaty if prospecting goes any further.

Which all sets the stage for an interesting meeting about a part of the world more critical to Australia's national interests than you might realise.

The Antarctica Consultative Meetings are regular annual meetings of the states party to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty.

The meetings are where states conduct the business of collectively implementing the treaty, which is the cornerstone of the governance system for Antarctica, known as the Antarctic Treaty System.

The Antarctic Treaty was considered a diplomatic triumph at the height of the Cold War.

Concerned that the continent might become a place of conflict, the original 12 states meeting in Washington DC who signed the treaty agreed to use Antarctica for peaceful purposes only.

The treaty does permit the use of military personnel or equipment for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes, but prohibits measures of a military nature such as the carrying out of military manoeuvres or weapons testing.

Perhaps the most fundamental question addressed by the treaty is that of the geopolitical status of the continent.

Seven states had made claims to specific portions of Antarctica — Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Some of the claims overlap.

The situation was complicated further by the fact that neither the United States nor the then-USSR had made a formal claim.

Australia has territorial rights to the Australian Antarctic Territory, which covers 42 percent of the Antarctic continent.

Contrary to popular opinion, the fact that few other countries have explicitly recognised Australia's title does not detract from its legal validity.

The treaty includes an agreement to disagree on the question of territorial sovereignty. Australia is not required to renounce its sovereignty but neither are other states required to respect our territorial title during the life of the treaty.

The Antarctic Treaty is therefore of particular importance to Australia because it protects Australia's legal rights in respect of the Australian Antarctic Territory. Australia is an active and strong participant within the treaty system.

The treaty has been widely hailed as an example of successful international cooperation.

It is easy to assume that harmony in respect of Antarctica was — and will continue to be — guaranteed by its remoteness, and to underestimate the significant achievement of the treaty system.

But shifting geopolitics and a changing climate could both impact this final frontier, which would have implications for the whole world.

The 2023 meeting adopted a Declaration on Climate Change and also agreed to new wording for the website of the treaty system — both of which can be understood in part as responding to the common misapprehension that the prohibition on mineral resource activities, other than scientific research, will come to an end in 2048.

The prohibition has no end date. Any party can request its review from 2048 onwards, but overturning the ban would involve a relatively complex process that is by no means guaranteed to succeed.

Political tensions are felt at the meetings, although more in respect of those issues with higher stakes. Both Russia and Ukraine are parties to the treaty and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has caused some antagonism.

Russia prepared a paper for the 2023 meeting, which addressed what it referred to as the "politicisation" of the gathering.

There are concerns that even before we reach 2048, greyzone activities — nefarious or coercive activities that stop short of overtly breaching established rules and norms — may weaken the force of those norms or even lead to a complete breakdown of the treaty system.

One of the most obvious rules in relation to which there could be greyzone activities is that of prospecting versus scientific research.

The alarm greeting Russia's reported oil and gas activities can be understood in this light.

There are also concerns regarding China's Antarctic ambitions, both in respect of dual use technology and also in terms of China's aim for far greater access to the resources of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.

Earlier this year China opened its fifth Antarctic facility, the Qinling Station, on Inexpressible Island in the Ross Sea.

Australia's official Antarctic priorities or interests are set out in the 2022 update of the Australian Antarctic Strategy and 10 Year Action Plan.

There is also a current federal government inquiry into the importance of Antarctica to Australia's national interests.

Due to our proximity to Antarctica, climatic changes there like the melting of Antarctic ice sheets and resulting rising sea levels, could have a profound impact on geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific.

There is even concern that the spread of bird flu to Antarctica could impact Australian poultry farms.

A strong Australian voice when it comes to matters of Antarctic governance remains critical for ensuring a peaceful and sustainable future for Antarctica.

Professor Shirley Scott is a Professor of International Law and International Relations in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra. Her research interests include Antarctic governance and non-militarisation. In 2023, Professor Scott was an academic observer with the Australian delegation to the 45th Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting and 25th Meeting of the Committee for Environmental Protection.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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Venni V Krishna

When Narendra Modi became India’s Prime Minister in 2014, there was expectation his election would awaken the dormant potential of Indian scientific research and innovation.

While several initiatives were announced in subsequent years, the spending on science research and innovation remained stagnant.

The Principal Scientific Advisor to the government acknowledged recently that "if you look at any commonly used indicators to measure the scientific strength of a country, we are far behind, well below the global average”.

He said there was a need to improve indicators such as Gross Expenditure on R&D, the number of researchers per million population, women in science, the number of patents, and others. 

After a decade of policy discussions aimed at increasing the gross expenditure on R&D, the government in 2023 established the National Research Foundation with a budget provision of nearly USD$6 billion for five years. However, only USD$30.9 million was allocated to the foundation in the national budget for 2023-24.

Over the last decade, India, in fact, has witnessed a throwback to the uncritical glorification of ancient knowledge to the detriment of science education. 

The removal of certain rational and scientific themes — such as the Periodic Table, water conservation, air pollution and resource management — from the curriculum has caused alarm in the scientific community.

The exclusion of Darwin from the syllabus, for example, is not an innocuous change. It represents a setback for the teaching of science and poses a threat to scientific temper.

The optimism which greeted Modi’s ascension to power has evaporated.

And the future, if he returns for a third term, does not seem promising. 

The most fundamental requirement for advancing science and innovation is adequate gross expenditure on R&D as a proportion of the GDP. 

India's expenditure on R&D as a proportion of GDP has remained relatively stagnant, actually decreasing from 0.8 percent in the 1990s to 0.65 percent in 2023. Despite successive governments since 2000 reaffirming their commitment to allocating 2 percent of GDP for R&D, this has always fallen short.

To comprehend the extent of India's regression in scientific progress, a comparison with China is illuminating. 

In the early 1990s, both India and China invested similar amounts in R&D, each allocating around 0.7 percent of GDPD. Remarkably, during this period, India's scientific publication output, as gauged by the ISI database, exceeded China's, with nearly 10,000 papers per year compared to fewer than 6,000 for China. 

However, by 2020, China had outstripped India's scientific output threefold, attributed to a substantial increase in R&D investment, which had escalated to 2.2 percent of GDP by 2021. 

In contrast, India's investment stood at 0.65 percent of GDP in 2023. An analysis of the R&D budget structure reveals that over 65 percent is allocated to three major strategic sectors: defence, nuclear and space, leaving a mere 35 percent for civilian R&D.

The lack of sufficient investment in R&D has hindered governmental efforts to realise the science and development agenda across various flagship programs, with the exception of Digital India. 

That program has had some successes, such as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platforms that allow free and fast money transfers using fintech apps. These platforms processed over USD$1 trillion in transactions in 2022 and India now  leads the world in real time digital payments. Another success story is Aadhar, which  emerged as India’s personal identity platform covering over 1.2 billion people. 

Despite a big announcement in 2015, not a single model 'Smart City' — sustainable and inclusive cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its citizens, a clean and sustainable environment and application of 'smart' solutions — has been established.

National budget estimates from 2022 to 2024 clearly indicate that a dozen science missions, ranging from quantum technology to telecommunications (including 5G and 6G), are struggling due to inadequate funding. 

In 2024, India, therefore, finds itself nowhere near the global frontiers of science and technology. 

Modi arrived in office with a grand vision for science and innovation – articulated not only in his speeches at the Indian Science Congress Association’s annual events but also in his government’s policy pronouncements.

He made clear commitments to eliminate bureaucratic hurdles in laboratories, reduce red tape, and increase transparency to inspire the scientific community.  He followed up by announcing key policy initiatives, along with additional budget allocations for their implementation. 

He wanted India to be among the top three science producing countries. In 2020, the government even introduced the National Education Policy, which declared India's aspiration to become a leading force in science and technology. 

In his second term, a dozen frontier "science missions" were announced to advance science and capitalise on innovations in AI-enabled technologies, machine learning and supercomputing, frontier electronics, quantum technologies, electric mobility, geospatial policy, a manned space flight through Gaganyaan, data protection and cloud computing, the graphene and green energy technologies. Again, the success was limited.

Such grand ambition needs skilled scientific manpower as well as financial resources. The lack of substantial R&D investments in universities, for example, has severely hindered their ability to compete globally. 

While China boasts more than seven universities in the top 50 and 100 rankings, only a couple of Indian institutions (such as the IITs and Indian Institute of Science) have managed to secure ranks between 200 and 400. The lack of autonomy and relative freedom of expression has also significantly impeded scientific research and creativity in universities. 

The internationalisation of higher education in the new education policy and the vision of building world-class universities remains elusive. Instead the policy clearly articulates its emphasis on "the rich heritage of ancient and eternal Indian knowledge and thought.”

Under these constraints, one cannot assume that a third term for Modi will result in a radical revision of India’s science and innovation agenda. 

Venni V Krishna is Honorary Professor, University of New South Wales and concurrently Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, Australia

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

Nailed it: Anxieties over job displacement due to automation or emerging technologies aren’t new. They bubbled after the invention of the printing press, during the Industrial Revolution, with the advent of the internet, and during the outsourcing boom of the early aughts. The common thread linking all these disruptions is that new technologies always create new jobs. What kinds of occupations, then, can we expect to see as a result of AI upending the labour market? The answer lies in a fascinating theory called the ‘manicure economy’. Every time there’s a threat to ‘human’ occupations, the economy creates new ones that demand interpersonal skills, something machines aren’t adept at. Consider that manicurist and skincare specialist jobs grew fivefold in the US during the outsourcing boom, or that personal tutors and private cooks became whole new professions in the same way dotcom-related everything did. The feature also explains why women and middle skill job workers will have an advantage in the AI age. Lesson: it literally pays to have social fluency.

No dodge, this: There are many ways to sell the India story, but infrastructure is the juiciest of all. That’s what Infrastructure India Plc (IIP), a London Stock Exchange-listed company floated by a bunch of British executives to ride the BRICs wave in the naughts, appears to be. When things went south two years after its 2008 listing, a couple of American executives, Tom Tribone and Rahul “Sonny” Lulla, who were running Guggenheim Global Infrastructure Company, a Cayman Islands offshoot of financial services giant Guggenheim Partners, stepped in. Guggenheim is co-owned by Mark Walter, who owns major stakes in the Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Chelsea Football Club. What followed is a tale of millions of dollars from Guggenheim-owned entities flowing into IIP and then to Lulla and Tribone as management fees. IIPs barely makes any money but the company’s valuation, on the basis of which the fees are paid, continues to rise. Several investors have lost their investment in the process. Police are on the company’s tails too. This Bloomberg investigation says that at last count, Guggenheim entities have about $320 million stuck in IIP.

A game of shares and loans: The best thrillers are made of power games and power-hungry people. But the best real-life stories of greed are often tucked away in stacks of boring paperwork. Dig into them, and one finds the many creative ways in which Indian ‘gurus’ and business owners siphon away money and avoid paying taxes, and even successfully fool seasoned bankers (for a while). This investigation by The Reporters’ Collective uncovers one such case of Baba Ramdev, the celebrity yoga guru and face of Patanjali Ayurved. The story digs into the financial statements of Patanjali group’s nonprofit firm Yogakshem Sansthan (among other entities) to show two things: (a) Patanjali claimed to plough profits into charity but its charitable trusts did no work, and (b) these trusts acted as fronts to transfer money without paying taxes or revealing who owns what in the group. The transactions discussed in the story move around in circles, indicating dubious financial intent. But will Baba Ramdev and Co. ever be brought to book themselves? 

Protect the waters: In March 2021, the Ever Given, one of the largest container ships ever built, spent six agonizing days wedged in the Suez Canal. The megaship’s grounding froze up to $10 billion of global trade, highlighting the critical role of these maritime shortcuts. Fast forward to 2024, and the risk of these straits clogging is even higher. Take the Danish Straits, where nearly half of Russia's oil exports slither past Denmark's shores. With the US cracking down on Russian oil shippers, Russia has started deploying decrepit, aging ships to dodge sanctions. If one of those ships meets an accident and triggers an ecological disaster, Denmark will have no choice but to padlock the waters, potentially sending energy prices into the stratosphere. This Bloomberg Businessweek analysis identifies six such global trade "choke points" that could cripple the world economy if they get jammed.

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Stuti Bhatnagar

With India positioning itself as an influential voice on matters of global importance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy is under the microscope.

A post on X (formerly Twitter) in April asked Indians to “Vote for BJP and make Bharat a superpower globally!” The quote was accompanied by an image that pointed to the party’s “Target Audience” (India) and the “Actual Audience”, the entire world. What appeared to be a standard promotional tweet by India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), marked the start of a six-week election campaign which will draw to a close on June 1. Results will be announced on June 4. 

While foreign policy tends to be a minor subject in Indian elections, the BJP’s post shows that this election campaign is equally focused on India’s place in the world, with the party taking every opportunity to boast of its global achievements since it took power in 2014. India has great-power aspirations and the last few years have been significant for its foreign policy.

India hosted the G20 Summit in September 2023 and was recognised as the world’s fifth-largest economy. It has expanded international partnerships with new trade and security deals, championed the cause of the Global South, and promoted its claim to a global leadership position. 

The global player

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has constructed a narrative of a “New India” that is open for business and ready for a seat at the global table. In its 2024 election manifesto, in addition to highlighting its vision and “success” in “Good Governance and Vikas (Development)”, the BJP has highlighted its many foreign policy achievements. 

The manifesto promises Modi’s guarantee for a Bharat First foreign policy, one that will uphold India as a global friend — a “reliable, trusted and dependable voice”, a leader of the Global South. The BJP promises to strengthen India’s maritime vision, expanding its diplomatic network and strategic partnerships if returned to power. 

The manifesto claims that “Bharat is the mother of democracy” and that India’s “civilisational values, thoughts, wisdom and traditional knowledge have found a place of pride at the world stage”. This flows consistently with arguments that previous governments have held India back with their insistence on non-alignment, secularism, and preference for values over pragmatism in foreign policy. 

Modi has been credited with giving “wings to India's aspirations of playing a larger international role”, through an assertive foreign policy that has upheld crucial national security interests while championing soft power and the promotion of India’s cultural heritage. 

As the election campaign heats up, the opposition has lost no time in drawing attention to the BJP’s failures and shortcomings, which have, in turn, provoked the PM’s party to pooh-pooh previous governments as cowardly peaceniks. 

Neighbours first to shutting them out

Modi began his innings as Prime Minister of India by inviting leaders of neighbouring nations to his swearing-in ceremony in 2014, indicating a neighbour-first foreign policy. The next year, Modi made a surprise stopover in Pakistan on his way back from a three-day tour of Russia and Afghanistan, ostensibly to wish Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister, on his birthday. But by the end of the first five-year term, Pakistan-based terrorists had twice attacked Indian army camps and India responded with missile attacks on camps across the border, erasing the political goodwill. 

India’s relations with China too followed a similar trajectory. Within months of returning to power, Modi rolled out the red carpet for visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping. Bonhomie was the dominant theme in handout pictures as the two leaders chatted away with Chola sculptures of Tamil Nadu’s Mahabalipuram in the background. The relationship soured soon after Himalayan border troops of the two countries clashed in the Galwan Valley. India banned Chinese social media apps and put curbs on investments and imports. 

The BJP’s election campaign has shifted from an initial focus on economic development to familiar tropes of inflammatory statements on Pakistan and India’s religious divide — painting the Congress as a party that favours Muslims and failed to act decisively against terrorism emanating from Pakistan. 

In projecting its proactive and muscular foreign policy, BJP leaders have returned to speeches about giving a befitting reply to Pakistan. There have been renewed calls for the integration of Pakistan-administered Kashmir with India. Modi has lashed out at the opposition, the multi-party political alliance, INDIA, an acronym for Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, calling its leaders “cowards” who were “scared of Pakistan's nuclear power”.

Any incoming government will inherit foreign policy achievements but also continuing challenges. India has struggled to retain influence with almost all of its neighbours participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Additionally, anti-India sentiment has grown in Maldives and Bangladesh. 

While the BJP manifesto makes a rudimentary promise to follow a neighbourhood-first policy, the Congress has pledged to repair India’s relations with its neighbours — specifically with Nepal and Maldives. 

The direct territorial challenge from China on India’s northern border continues to be a flashpoint for active conflict. Bilateral negotiations have made slow progress and both sides have intensified border patrols and infrastructure development. 

Although the BJP has promised robust infrastructure development in border areas, it has largely failed to resolve this issue. China remains conspicuously absent from the party’s election rhetoric — as noted by the opposition parties.

A significant part of India’s foreign policy overtures in the Modi years has been towards Western powers and the broader Indo-Pacific region. The West, especially the US, sees India as a viable, democratic counterweight to China. It is an important cog in the US’s strategy to “contain” Beijing. India’s strong democratic credentials and respect for the rule of law at home and abroad add to its value. 

However, concerns over democratic backsliding, restrictions on press freedom and a dwindling human rights record, have begun to strain New Delhi’s foreign policy engagements. This became apparent last year, when Canada blamed India for the assassination of Canadian citizen and Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Vancouver. India considered Singh a terrorist associated with the extremist Khalistan movement. 

While the incident soured India-Canada relations, similar charges have since been made by the US and Australia, accusing Indian agencies of international espionage and using criminals for assassinations. While the Modi government’s responses have ranged from diplomatic restraint to outright rejection, these issues are likely to become an irritant for future governments.

Twin conundrums in Ukraine and Gaza

India’s international posture has also displayed a lack of clarity in an increasingly polarising world. This became clear when it refused to condemn or sanction Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. India chose a path distinct from its Western friends. The Indian leadership has continued to emphasise its need and right to prioritise its own interests in this case and, after initial criticism, India’s partners have reconciled to its stand.

Similarly, Indian diplomacy was put to test following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the latter’s invasion of Gaza. Although India has historically supported Palestine, the Modi government has fostered a close partnership with Israel over the past decade that extends to an ideological alignment between the BJP and Israel.

Unlike the Ukraine conflict, where India stood to benefit directly and immediately from its friendship with Russia, the stakes are relatively low in the Israel-Hamas war. It reflected in the clarity and steadfastness of its stance vis-à-vis Russia and the ambivalent, see-sawing approach to Gaza. 

India initially abstained from United Nations resolutions calling for a ceasefire but, in December 2023, voted for a draft resolution in the UN General Assembly that demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and unconditional release of all Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The conflict will remain a challenge for any incoming government in Delhi. 

By all accounts, this is a polarising election between two distinct schools of thought: one that considers Modi as the “best candidate” and a “harbinger of change” and another that highlights the damage his administration has inflicted on India’s democratic ethos and economy.

The impact of domestic and regional challenges as well as India’s efforts to walk a tightrope in global politics will undoubtedly continue to shape foreign policy in coming years. While the government celebrates Indian democracy, it has called out Western nations “interfering” in its domestic politics. 

However, given the geopolitical environment, broader foreign policy goals are likely to remain unchanged no matter which government comes to power — not necessarily owing to ideological approaches or an activist foreign policy but because of the continued value of India’s economy and strategic relevance to global affairs.  

Stuti Bhatnagar is a visiting researcher at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. She specialises in Indian foreign policy and South Asian politics. She is the author of “India’s Pakistan Policy: How Think Tanks Are Shaping Foreign Relations”, published by Routledge in 2021.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

Building the future of knowledge in its past: OpenAI is probably among the most important private enterprises of our times, and we now know many details of its inner workings. One such revealing moment was the surprise ouster and return of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman late last year. Another, less dramatic aspect of the company is the physical library it has built in its San Francisco head office. This visual story in The New York Times documents OpenAI’s massive collection of books suggested by its 1,200 employees. The library, which doubles up as a quiet collaborative working space, houses somewhat poignant titles such as American Prometheus and Cosmos. Others are rather on the nose, given OpenAI’’s impact on the world — the library has a copy of Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? about a post-apocalyptic world overrun by artificially intelligent robots. Depending on who you ask, the idea of OpenAI nurturing a library could be poetic or cruel; don’t forget, several news outlets are suing the company for copyright infringement. 

China shapes a new world order: It is an old prediction that China will one day emerge as a new world power, challenging the US’ long-standing hegemony. That prediction is finally taking shape, thanks to a series of events that have lined up incentives in China’s favour. This story in the Financial Times analyses how China is using international trade to build economic ties with non-western countries blockaded by the US. Apart from helping American “enemies” like Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and Belarus, China is rushing to rescue Russia from the aftermath of the Ukraine war that has left it isolated from its western ties. Governments and bureaucrats on both sides are helping each other out while millionaires from China’s industrial centres are taking frequent trips to Russia to seize new business opportunities. In return, China has been lapping up Russian oil. Two roadblocks remain: who is seen “winning” the Ukraine war, and, in the long term, how quickly global trade moves sheds the dominance of the US dollar. But academics warn that until the world transitions decisively to a new superpower, we may see an era of unstable alliances in a multipolar world.

I spy you: This story reads like a script of a critically reviewed spy thriller, except cheesier. Swiss federal police raid a century-old hotel in a picturesque village. The new owners of the hotel, a Chinese couple, are taken into custody, handcuffed. One of them only speaks Mandarin. No concrete evidence exists; it’s all speculation — the couple might be covert agents for China’s communist government. Meanwhile, a stone’s throw away from the hotel, the Swiss military parks F-35s, the world’s most advanced Jet fighters, which can purportedly invade any airspace without getting noticed. The Chinese government, the US believes, would go to any length for intel on the F-35s, including, say, sending an ordinary couple in Switzerland to buy a hotel near the airstrip, where F-35s were originally supposed to land in 2028. Under pressure from the US, Switzerland, a historically neutral country, takes away the hotel from the Chinese couple and finds a new owner: the Swiss military. The Wall Street Journal tries to make sense of it: was it indeed the case of elaborate Chinese espionage or merely the US arm twisting the government of Switzerland? 

In defence of vaccines: Astrazeneca telling a UK court that its COVID-19 vaccine caused blood clots in rare cases has again thrust vaccines into the heart of a polarising debate. Are vaccines really as indispensable as they’re made out to be? The short answer: yes. A new research has analysed data, concluding we’re better off with vaccines. Since the World Health Assembly launched the Extended Programme on Immunization in 1974, an estimated 154 million lives have been saved from diseases such as tetanus, polio, measles, and smallpox. Children have benefitted the most. A child aged 10 has approximately 40% greater chance of reaching its next birthday compared to if vaccines were not available. This article in The Conversationlists out a few warnings though. Global coverage of childhood vaccines is declining in many countries, including in Australia, which could, well, reverse the gains of the past 50 years.

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Rajat Kathuria

India’s glass is half-full – and half-empty. 

The good news is India is the fastest-growing major economy in the world, on course to overtake Germany and Japan in the next five years in aggregate GDP. It will become the third-largest global economy after the US and China. 

However, there is a concern that the benefits of fast GDP growth are being undermined by low job growth and an accompanying pro-rich bias. 

Unemployment among young people with graduate degrees is at an all-time high of 29 percent, and overall youth unemployment is hovering around 10 percent. This has prompted some young Indians to travel  to war zones in search of employment and higher income opportunities.

Rapid economic growth in the past two decades has contributed to an unprecedented fall in poverty. The poverty headcount ratio, which indicates the proportion of the population living below the poverty line, fell from 37 percent in 2004-05 to 22 percent in 2011-12.

This pulled 140 million people out of poverty.

Recent estimates by India’s Knowledge Commission or NITI Aayog show that multidimensional poverty in India declined from 29.17 per cent in 2013-14 to 11.28 per cent in 2022-23, with about 250 million people moving out of deprivation.

At the same time, the share of the national income going to the top 10 percent of the population has almost doubled in the four decades between 1982 and 2022, to about 60 percent. The bottom 50 percent of people had 15 percent of the national income in 2022. The top 1 percent’s share was estimated to be 22.6 percent. 

The wealth distribution is even more skewed.

Several factors, including the lack of quality broad-based education and all-purpose skills, are responsible for these disparities. 

An underlying feature of India’s unique structural transformation is also often cited as a reason. 

The stage of industrialisation in which a country experiences employment-intensive growth driven by manufacturing has been bypassed here in favour of services-led growth. The services-led economic growth since at least 1991 has had the side-effect of increasing inequality. 

National Sample Survey Organisation data shows that 45.5 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture, 12.4 percent in construction, and only 11.6 percent in manufacturing, with the rest in services. 

India’s inability to pull more of its workforce away from agriculture towards more productive and better-paying employment remains a pressing challenge. While the services sector has contributed to growth, its share in employment (approximately 29 percent) is a little more than half of its share in GDP.

The shortcoming of India’s sectoral composition of growth has, therefore, been that it has generated relatively fewer opportunities for productive employment for India’s poor.

With more than seven percent real GDP growth in the last three financial years, India is now the fifth-largest economy in the world. 

Growth projections remain optimistic.

In April, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) raised India’s growth projection for the fiscal year 2024-25 (FY25) by 30 basis points to 6.8 percent on the back of strong domestic demand, rising public infrastructure spending, and a growing working-age population. The World Bank forecasts 6.6 percent growth.

While there is no doubt that growth is necessary for the fight against poverty, it is hardly sufficient. 

The same is true for productive job creation, which has been high on the political agenda since at least the early 2000s. The ambition of "Targeting Ten Million Employment Opportunities Per Year" in 2002, or close to one million jobs per month, has now doubled to 20 million jobs yearly.

Rural youth unwilling to work in the place of their birth are increasingly seeking non-farm employment elsewhere. This includes foreign countries.

In May 2023, India signed an agreement with Israel to send workers for 42,000 jobs in construction and nursing. The government also started a scheme called Agnipath in 2022 to recruit soldiers, sailors and air force personnel.

Marking a departure from past recruitment policy, the Agnipath recruits have a four-year tenure with no gratuity or pension benefits for three-quarters of each batch who will be discharged after the period. The scheme's announcement was met with protests in different parts of the country.

The slow transition away from agriculture and into the non-farm sectors is a bleak characteristic of the Indian labour market. The share of manufacturing employment, despite firm policies, has been stagnant, at around 12 percent. 

Construction and services have absorbed excess labour but on the whole, most people are self-employed or in casual jobs. Nearly 90 percent of jobs are informal. The share of wages in the net value added by industries has declined while the share of profits has climbed, reflecting a capital-intensive production process, exactly the opposite of what a labour-abundant country like India needs. 

India thus needs to boost manufacturing growth to absorb more workers and realise the principal intent underlying the "Make in India" initiative. 

That would also reverse the "jobless" growth stigma which has typified the otherwise flattering Indian growth story.

Rajat Kathuria is a Professor of Economics and Dean, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Shiv Nadar University.

This article has been republished as part of a series on the 2024 Indian elections. It was originally published on April 25.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

What’s the deal with cocoa prices?: Cocoa prices were pretty stable for the last 10 years, averaging $2,500 a tonne. Then everything went up in flames. Crop failure in Ghana and Ivory Coast —which produce two-thirds of the precious commodity — in 2023 triggered a global shortage, and prices skyrocketed to $4,200, $6,000, then a whopping $11,000 a tonne this April. The global benchmark is now about $8,700 a tonne. Why so much volatility? The short answer is inane financial speculation. For the long answer, head to The New York Times, which explains how cocoa prices are set, the difference between seasonal and market rates, futures contracts, and why farmers prefer bean-to-bar brands. Also related: check out The Core’s story on uncertainty in India’s robusta coffee market.

Vainglorious erection: Buildings of massive scale have fuelled the vanity of rich men throughout history. Examples of such projects pepper the face of the earth. The newest such project is The Line, a 105-mile-long continuous structure deep in the Saudi Arabian desert. The official price tag of the dream project of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is $500 billion, but those working on it now put it at a more realistic $2 trillion. More than $237 billion of contracts have already been given out. Although the final ambition remains to build a 105-mile city, the initial phase has been scaled down from 10 miles in 2030 to 1.5 miles. That alone is expected to cost $100 billion. MBS, as the prince is popularly known, wanted to build something akin to Egypt’s Great Pyramids. Whether he succeeds or not, the project is likely to cost a pile like no other the world has seen. The Wall Street Journal does a reality check on the world’s biggest construction project.

China overdependence: What happened in the ‘90s that rendered India utterly reliant on Chinese exports for critical bulk drugs? This story in The Economic Times explains why Indian producers, for one, stopped manufacturing Penicillin G, a hugely common antibiotic. Per estimates, China started dumping a penicillin derivative into Indian markets at a third of global rates, owing to overproduction. The Indian formulation industry then switched to these cut-rate drugs. Soon after, the government, noting the mismatch between medicine prices and the much lower costs of the Chinese raw materials, slashed prices — a move that delivered the final blow to Indian bulk drug manufacturers. The domestic market slipped from their grasp, and, confronted with losses, many of them shut operations.  

Minibars of death: What do you do when medicine becomes an addiction? Just like opiates in the US, medicinal tinctures could become a deadly epidemic in India’s northern states. All because of a loophole in an 80-year drug law. This story in The Economic Times traces the rise of a Rs 3,000 crore business of tinctures — medical formulations in 80-85% ethanol — sold as a cheap alternative to country liquor. Unlike licensed liquor shops, medical shops are allowed to run 24x7. And a rule in the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 lets them sell cardamom-laced tinctures meant to cure colds and cough over the counter. Result: hundreds of medical shops in cities like Agra have turned into all-night mini bars, some even offering namkeen and water to customers. ET’s story narrates excise officer Rajesh Singh’s lonely fight against the powerful ‘tincture syndicate’. For years he pushed various regulators to come together and amend the law, banning the open sale of high-alcohol tinctures. 

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Iman Kumar Mitra

Google Trends, which provides data on the most-searched items on Google, has a recently curated database according to which, in 2022 and 2023, there was a rise in the number of searches from around the world on topics related to the cost of living. 

People everywhere searched for information on inflation, interest rates, wages, credit and savings. Searches for why certain things were expensive in all the languages used on Google also reached an all-time high.

The database also provides country-wise trends.

In the United States, between 2012 and 2023, searches related to "why college is so expensive" (in the category of ‘Books and Education’) were at the top for six years (2013-14, 2016, 2018-20). In 2023, the biggest query was on the increased price of eggs – which goes well with the worldwide trend.

In India, the queries were different, focusing heavily on the expensive nature of "appliances and technology", but not just any kind of appliances. 

For most of the seven years from 2015-16, Indians were trying to discover why Apple products were so expensive. More curiously, in 2017 and 2019, the maximum searches were about the exorbitantly high price of Evian Water, which costs Rs 150 for a 500ml bottle. 

What these searches tell us is hard to determine. 

It would be easy to conclude that Google search is not a dependable indicator of what the common people of India desire. 

This view assumes that access to the internet is still limited in the vast rural landscape of the country, but recent data shows that rural India is slightly ahead of its urban counterpart in terms of internet usage—there are more internet users in rural India than in urban India. 

The shift started to take place after 2020, during the COVID-19 outbreak. This does not mean income gaps and other disparities between the urban and rural sectors have disappeared. Still, a considerable rise in total internet usage has been recorded over the last four years, from 41 percent to 55 percent. 

If more than half of the country’s population has access to the internet, the most searched items seem to carry some significance.

In understanding the immediate reality, we often lose sight of the huge roles played by desires, aspirations and fantasies. 

The desire to look for answers as to why something is prohibitively expensive (Apple products or Evian) compared to something that was once in the reach of common people (like eggs or education) may come from an obsession with the forever unattainable – which is what those products are for the vast majority of people in India.

Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi have recently published a study on income and wealth inequality in India over 100 years from 1922-2023.  

The concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few has seen an unprecedented surge in the last three decades since the liberalisation of the Indian economy. The average annual income of the top 1 percent of the population (Rs 53,00,549) is 22.6 times more than the national average income (Rs 2,34,551) in 2022-23.  

The one-percenters will probably never ask Google why Apple products are expensive. Those who ask may never be able to buy them. This paradox of the Google Trends data is the hallmark of our time where the translation of desire into demand hangs on the aspirational fantasies of millions. 

How does one make sense of the chimera of this data politics? One may look for answers in history. 

In the early 1870s, Dadabhai Naoroji, the grand old man of Indian nationalism, proved beyond doubt that the British East India Company, followed by the British crown, had been systematically draining India of its wealth and rendering the country poorer during their century-long reign.

His weapon was also plain and simple data. He calculated the per capita production of food grains and other crops for different provinces and compared these with the estimates of the cost of "necessary living" from the meals and clothing given to the prisoners in the Indian jails. 

“It will be seen,” he wrote in his book Poverty and un-British Rule in India, “from the comparison of the above figures, that, even for such food and clothing as a criminal obtains, there is hardly enough of production even in a good season .”

This was a good start in the direction of using the concept of "cost of living" to expose the absurdity of the data provided by the British government by which they claimed that Indians were not living in criminally abject conditions. 

A hundred and fifty years later, we have come to a situation when the same concept can be used to call the poor an aspirational class. Reminding ourselves of this history of how data is a tool of demystification rather than a sovereign presence awaiting our unconditional submission is perhaps the only way to resist such platitudes.  

Iman Mitra is an assistant professor of history at Shiv Nadar University. His research focuses on economic history.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

The Papal urine that piss-ed off the church: In the 1950s, a young Jewish scientist who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, was in search of urine. Bruno Lunenfeld had spent the previous four years injecting the urine of menopausal women’s urine into mice and found that they tended to ‘hyperovulate’. He had accidentally discovered a way to induce fertility, the very basis of modern-day IVF treatments. But to create a drug fit for humans, he needed thousands of bucketloads of urine from menopausal women. What’s more, not even one drop could come from someone who had ever been pregnant. Few large groups of women could ever reasonably fulfil these criteria. Luckily, an Italian pharma company run by the brother of the Pope no less, suggested a novel idea: nuns. This long story in Vanity Fair narrates how the first fertility drug named Pergonal was invented with the secret support of the Vatican, needed because of the science of the drug itself. It profiles not just Lunenfeld but also the Pacelli brothers who were powerful in Vatican City, the Catholic Church, and Italian business. And as the Catholic Church takes hardline stances against both contraceptives and IVF, the story leaves you relishing the irony of the role it played in their invention. 

Judging Google: The District Court of Columbia will decide tech giant Google’s fate in the next few days. Closing arguments will be heard before the week ends and judge Amit P Mehta will soon decide whether the world’s fourth-most valuable company used illegal deals to preserve its search monopoly. The antitrust case brought by the US Justice Department argues that Google paid device makers such as Apple and Samsung billions of dollars to use its search engine as default on their phones. Indian-origin judge Mehta has a reputation for scrupulously weighing evidence and going deep into the subject matter. Born to an engineer father and laboratory technician mother, Mehta arrived in the US when he was a year old. This New York Times profile paints the picture of a man of high integrity, intellectual sophistication, and a taste for hip-hop music. Mehta’s judgement will set a precedent for a series of upcoming antitrust cases, including those against Amazon, Apple and Meta.

Staid of affairs: “Move fast and break things” may be the go-to mantra for Silicon Valley, but banks won’t touch it with a bargepole. After startups’ favourite lender Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) went into receivership last year, and depositors fled First Republic Bank and Signature Bank, the banking sector has doubled down on being boring. The era of glitzy, breakneck growth is over. Small and regional banks like Columbia Banking System, Firth Third Bancorp, and PNC Financial Services are popping their collars in ads and earnings calls about being dull. That’s because the last thing depositors want is a mercurial lender. Read more in Bloomberg Businessweek.

To test or not to test?: Cancer often catches its victims off-guard. An estimate suggests that almost half of cancer patients are diagnosed too late, reducing survival odds. That's also precisely why the idea of multi-cancer screenings, dubbed 'cancer supertests' by companies selling the tech, is so exciting: one simple blood test to screen for over 50 types of cancers at once. It's not an entirely new concept, though. Patients who already know they have cancer are recommended blood-based testing. What's new is selling it to seemingly healthy individuals. Pathologist Benjamin Mazer outlines the potential drawbacks of the commercial rollout of such supertests in this essay for The Atlantic. While no cancer test is perfect, a false positive from such a supertest could have graver consequences. Doctors will go tumour-hunting across countless organ screenings, as a blood test can only indicate the possibility of cancer, but not its location in the body. One unlucky individual had his testicles removed for a cancer that didn't exist, not to mention the time and money wasted on unnecessary tests.

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Samata Biswas

Indian migrant workers have a long history of repression and poor treatment. In 2024, nothing has changed.

In the award-winning Sea of Poppies, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh immortalised the journey of 19th century indentured labour migrants— called "girmitiyas"—aboard a ship to Mauritius during the heyday of British colonialism.

It’s 2024. Another group of migrant workers trudges through New Delhi international airport carrying cheap plastic suitcases, wearing clothing bought off roadside flea markets.

They are the new age "girmitiyas" in search of a promised El Dorado. 

More than 60 Indian construction workers left for Israel in early April amid mounting concerns for their safety and rising opposition from trade unions in India, but to no avail.

The low cost Azerbaijan Airways flight, which took these worker armies to the outskirts of Tel Aviv, was jam-packed. Some workers were shunted off to an Ethiopian Airways flight which took an even more circuitous route to the promised land. 

These workers travelled despite their government having warned Indians that Israel is now a war zone and it's best to avoid any travel there.

In March, the Indian government advised Indians in Israel to move to safer locations following the killing of migrant worker Pat Nibin Maxwell.

But India’s worker-migrants have kept marching.

When Israel’s war on Palestine erupted last October, Israel cancelled the permits of Palestinian workers, and sought to replace them with as many as 100,000 migrant workers from countries like India, continuing an agreement between the two governments.

While Israel’s recruitment of workers in a conflict zone is worrying, far worse is India’s willingness to send its workers into the line of fire. 

More than 18,000 Indians, mostly care workers, already work in Israel. Another 6,000  were to join them in April. Some reports indicate that the travel plans for the remaining are on hold.

The motivations of the Indian government — which actively facilitated the recruitment of Indian workers to Israel under its National Skill Development Corporation — come into question. 

The answer can be found in India’s strained relationship with its migrant workers — both under British colonialism and after independence.

Labour migration’s troubled history 

After the first steps were taken toward the  abolition of slavery in the 19th century, Britain recruited more than 1 million workers from colonial India to work in sugar, coffee, rubber, tea and cotton plantations, in laying railway tracks and in mining, in colonies across the globe, from the Caribbean to the Pacific as well as in India itself.

The indentured workers entered a contract for three to five years. They would be advanced a certain amount of money, and at the end entitled to free passage home. 

Across the great Gangetic plains, thousands of agricultural workers in economic distress joined the sea voyages, part of the system that continued until 1917. To the government, they came to be known as “coolies”. 

While the workers were supposed to be subjects of the British Indian government, in reality plantation lobbies and commercial interests had considerable say in the system. From the moment they signed up for indentureship, the workers were subjected to multiple authorities, including the labour recruiter, the agent, the ship’s captain and eventually the plantation owner.

Plantation work and other work was often risky and backbreaking. The presence of single women was considered ‘immoral’, leading to calls by Indian nationalists to demand an abolition of the system.

Some commentators have termed indentureship a "new system of slavery", while others argue that indentureship was better than the life of poverty and hunger they left behind in debt-ridden United Provinces or modern-day Bihar.

Between 1914 and 1918, more than 500,000 Indian signed up as non-combatants in World War One, working in the medical, ordnance and transport services, as grass cutters, blacksmiths, veterinary personnel and in various other jobs that need to be done in and around a regiment.

These included porters recruited from prisons as well as young men signing up to the Indian Porter Corps and Indian Labour Corps from United Provinces, Bihar, Assam, Bengal, Orissa, Burma and the North Western Frontier Province–much of it the same catchment area which supplied the indentured workers. 

More than 17,000 Indian non-combatants were killed in the World War One. The wounded were racially segregated for treatment, which was not up to the standard of care for the British.

Much like indentured workers who were denied their rights as sovereign British-Indian subjects, or the workers shipped out during the World War One, the migrant workers in Israel will be navigating work amidst an ongoing war and a newly developing crisis with Iran, with no safety net in place.

A crisis of the present 

As for the modern-day labourers, their willingness to sign up to work in a conflict zone such as Israel is testimony to their acute financial distress.

A recent International Labour Organization report shows that total unemployed youth in India almost doubled from 35.2 percent in 2000 to 65.7 percent in 2022.

The COVID lockdown of 2020 and the spectacular distress of migrant workers, employed in various unorganised sectors ranging from agriculture to construction, showed the precarious nature of their employment and their flimsy incomes.

Construction workers selected for jobs in Israel were quoted in the media as saying that despite the obvious dangers of their job, the payment was too lucrative to turn down. For many, it was almost ten times what they make in a month. For others, devoid of any safety nets, their existing jobs also leave them vulnerable.

Two Indian workers recruited under false pretences but made to work with the Russian military were killed in the past two months, while reportedly 100 like them continue to work in Russia, having migrated through an agent.

Although not in a conflict zone, various Gulf countries, including Qatar, have been criticised for large numbers of migrant worker deaths — especially in the lead up to the FIFA World Cup in 2022. 

Between 2014 and 2022, 2,400 Indian nationals were reported to have died in Qatar, falling victim to harsh working conditions and unfavourable laws, including the now-scrapped Kafala system.

Families claim  the only time the Indian government steps in to help migrant workers and their families is when their bodies have to be returned home. The case of Pat Nibin Maxwell was no different. 

Maxwell travelled to work in Israel through a recruitment agency, unlike the ones now being recruited through direct government intervention in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. 

The Indian Embassy’s first intervention in his life was in his death, as it was for Hemil Mangukiya and Mohammed Asfan in Russia. 

Meanwhile, as their families grieve, five other Indian states are keen on joining the recruitment process.

Postcolonial India does not seem any better than its colonial avatar in caring for its migrant workers. The state retreats from its obligations of security and protection of its citizens, this time, outside its borders. 

Samata Biswas is Assistant Professor of English at The Sanskrit College and University, Kolkata and a member of Calcutta Research Group (CRG).

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

TikTok’s rearguard: The economic success of China in the past 30 years also helped several US investors who rode the wave early to make billions. But they are now caught in a raging geopolitical storm that threatens to unravel their fortunes. Jeff Yass is one such billionaire. A significant chunk of his $30 billion fortune is a 15% stake in TikTok parent ByteDance held through his Susquehanna International Group (SIG). In fact, SIG has invested more than $3.5 billion in over 350 Chinese firms, including chip designers and 49 artificial intelligence-related startups. President Joe Biden’s crackdown on private investment in Chinese companies has trapped SIG too, enraging Yass enough to lavish money on Republican candidates. He has shelled out more than $46 million, making him the largest donor in this election cycle. He has backed, in vain so far, anyone who would oppose a ban, including a super-political action committee aligned with senator Rand Paul, reports the Financial Times.

Dry, desperate, and seeking votes: Unlike much of India, people in Rajasthan’s Barmer constituency will have more choices in the 2024 election than just the BJP incumbent and a challenger from the opposition alliance. This long story in Mint profiles Ravindra Singh Bhati, a 26-year-old student union leader whose biggest claim to fame is his 2.3 million followers on Instagram. Bhati, once a member of the RSS-allied student group ABVP, is fighting it alone after successfully winning local elections in an independent run. On paper, Bhati is the ideal candidate: he is young, energetic, shorn of any political lineage, and focused on fixing Barmer’s crippling unemployment and water scarcity crisis. Yet, many voters are wary of his right-wing sympathies and his Rajput identity—a dominant caste locked in power struggle with the area’s Muslims and other important castes such as the Jats. Besides, many of his campaign promises are identical to his rivals’. So does Bhati really represent a brand-new choice for Barmer’s voters? 

Wartime home: Dubai’s Russian diaspora is changing the face of the city. Two years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, thousands of rich Russians fled to Dubai to park their assets. They bought properties, founded businesses and tried building a life afresh in a home away from home. This photo essay in Bloomberg explores this new home—and how in ways, both big and small, Russians are bringing Russia to Dubai. For one, in elite neighbourhoods of UAE’s largest city, one can spot outlets of cafe chains popular in Russia, such as Dodo Pizza and Angel Cakes. Russian is the new lingua franca in the city’s palatial shopping malls, and Russian-speaking staff throng medical centres and sailing schools. Russia’s top performing artists also make sure they make a pitstop in Dubai. In the most striking photograph, kids and adults are on the street, dancing and celebrating the festival of Maslenitsa, which marks winter making way for the warm spring. 

Laid to waste: India is already quarter way through to achieving its 2030 target of having 280GW of solar power output. Much of this is thanks to solar parks across Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, and Karnataka. The country has a target of installing another 39 similar parks in 12 states by 2026. If that sounds great, hold on to your horses for the next bit: this growth comes with the downside of solar waste. The Central Pollution Control Board has a protocol to handle such waste, which includes authorised e-waste contractors and a timeframe of 90 or 180 days. But contractor selection is heavily centralised, and transporting waste from remote solar parks is an exercise in futility. This has birthed an unorganised scrap sector, where unlicensed operators mine bits and pieces for precious metal—without any safety measures.

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Deepanshu Mohan, Zahid Iqbal Shah, and Najam Us Saqib

Electronic voting machines are coming under the spotlight as India prepares for its general election.

There are fears about the fairness and openness of India’s voting system, with the previous unwavering faith in the country’s EVMs now in doubt.

The Indian Supreme Court has reserved its order in a plea seeking cross-verification of votes cast in EVMs with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT).

The potential for voting machine hacking has cast a shadow over India’s democratic landscape. There is apprehension in some quarters that the devices can be manipulated. 

The Opposition has directly alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi relies on EVM hacking to win elections. At a recent rally in Mumbai, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s largest opposition party, asserted: “The king’s (Modi’s) soul is in the EVM”.

Electoral processes have evolved significantly over time. Initially, voters used traditional ballot papers, manually writing candidates’ names and depositing them in  designated boxes. 

As India’s population grew and concerns about electoral fraud associated with ballot papers escalated, the People’s Representation Act was amended in 1989 to enable EVMs to prevent electoral fraud. In 1998, EVMs made their debut during legislative assembly elections. Their first use at a general election was in 2004.

This transition to voting machines underscores the nation’s commitment to modernising its electoral infrastructure, ensuring efficiency, transparency and integrity of the polling process.

In 2017, the Delhi Assembly convened a special session, where Saurabh Bharadwaj, an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislator, demonstrated with a dummy EVM how easily it could be hacked.

Bharadwaj claimed that a “manipulator” could enter the polling booth during voting and input a unique secret code, resulting in subsequent votes being directed to a particular candidate. 

He also claimed an EVM’s motherboard could be changed in just 90 seconds. AAP later posted the results of this demonstration on its Twitter page, showing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) receiving more votes than it  actually obtained in the final results.

As the majority party in the Delhi Assembly and now governing Punjab, AAP’s vocal stance against voying maschine integrity has implications for the trust of India’s 969 million voters in the election process. 

The scepticism surrounding voting machines has intensified, with opposition parties including AAP and INC voicing concerns about potential bias favoring the ruling party. 

Recent state elections in Rajasthan, Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh showed discrepancies between election results and exit polls leading to vehement protests. 

An incident during the Bihar elections further eroded trust. The manipulation of EVMs left citizens questioning the legitimacy of results The Election Commission of India (ECI) attempted to address these concerns but widespread scepticism remained.

A critical revelation emerged from a Right to Information (RTI) request: EVMs do not have software permanently burnt into one-time programmable (OTP) chips, as previously claimed by the ECI. Instead, they use chips that can be reprogrammed. 

While hacking EVMs would still require physical access to the machines used in elections, this revelation has fuelled mistrust among voters.

The apprehensions harboured by the general populace regarding the integrity of voting machines have transcended the concerns of political parties to encompass civil society at large. 

In a noteworthy demonstration of dissent, numerous individuals, including Ambedkarite advocates, legal professionals, and other members of civil society convened at Delhi's Jantar Mantar on February 2, 2024.demanding the prohibition of EVMs. 

Advocates of this stance have persistently voiced their reservations regarding EVMs across various regions of India, notably through the #EVM_ban campaign in anticipation of the forthcoming 2024 general elections. Thousands of tweets were made under this hashtag from across the country. 

Some people even tweeted that they would stay away from the election process if  EVMs are not replaced. The objections regarding EVMs is not a recent development. Intriguingly, its origins go back to the 1980s, predating their actual deployment in elections. 

The seminal legal case of AC Jose vs. Sivan Pillai represents an early instance, wherein a petition was filed seeking a stay order on the utilisation of EVMs for an impending bi-election in Kerala.

The SC ruled in the favour of the petitioner and ordered a repoll in the 50 booths using paper ballots.As a result, Jose defeated Pillai, the winner in the first vote, with a margin of around 2000 votes. 

During the 1990s, Election Commissioner T.N. Seshan recognised the urgency of addressing ballot frauds. He championed the development of EVMs as a potential solution. While political parties have raised concerns, no concrete evidence has been presented to prove EVM manipulation. Nevertheless, the issue persists. 

As India prepares for the 2024 general elections, addressing EVM-related apprehensions remains critical.

In order to save the democratic ethos of India, EVM hacking must be addressed. Enhancing accountability and transparency in EVM deployment and procurement processes can boost voter confidence. 

Robust oversight procedures, such as impartial audits and exacting testing procedures can be employed. Additionally, procuring advanced EVM technology with enhanced security features, such as end-to-end verifiable systems and paper audit trails, can strengthen the integrity of electoral outcomes. 

Raising public awareness and engagement through comprehensive civic education initiatives can empower citizens to actively participate in safeguarding the electoral process. This will boost the confidence of a common voter in the electoral process. 

Instead of completely rejecting the use of EVMs, efforts must concentrate on utilising technical innovations to uphold democratic principles (and ensure due process in the machine’s use). 

It is vital that everyone – the ruling parties, opposition parties, civil society organizations, voters, democratic institutions, and technology centres – are brought together in this democratic exercise to take joint action in securing the sanctity of the world’s largest and most expansive electoral process. 

Deepanshu Mohan is Professor of Economics and Dean, O.P. Jindal Global University. He is a Visiting Professor at London School of Economics and University of Oxford. 

Zahid Iqbal Shah is a doctoral student with the Central University of Kashmir. 

Najam Us Saqib is a doctoral student with Central University, Kashmir, and a Research Analyst with Centre for New Economics Studies, O.P. Jindal Global University.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

Cable sentinels: Modern life is unimaginable without the Internet. As we swipe and type away on smartphones, internet connectivity is taken for granted. What we do not see is the 800,000 miles of cables that snake along the ocean floors which transport 99% of the world’s data back and forth between continents. If all those cables snap simultaneously—about 200 cable breaks happen every year—the world will stop spinning in a manner of speaking. Keeping them in ship shape are an unknown bunch of people who spend most of their lives on sea. They work through storms, tsunamis, and even dangerous nuclear radiation. There are 77 cable ships in the world but only 22 dedicated to repairing them. It’s an ageing fleet manned by ageing teams. It is hard to find new recruits for the solitary life far from land and family. There are other challenges too such as constant pressure from the industry to reduce costs and geopolitical tensions. The Verge follows cable maintenance ship Ocean Link and its crew to bring alive the fascinating industry that makes the world tick.

Cute fits hide uncomfortable truths: How many times have we bought a cute outfit online after seeing someone wearing it on social media? In the US, Chinese fast fashion retailer Shein made it to the top selling a mind-boggling array of cheap, shiny clothes via influencers and bloggers long before it became a business model for all. This story in The Guardian tells Shein’s story through the eyes of a fashion enthusiast who spent the 2010s drawing inspiration from enthusiasts of vintage fashion and DIY, before being seduced away by Zara and later, H&M. These brands, synonymous with ‘fast fashion’, have struggled to shake off the image of exploitative factories and landfills full of cheap clothes. None of that has stemmed Shein’s rise. Rather, anti-China sentiments are fuelling American backlash to the company and its plans for a public listing in the US. None of this matters though; after all, kids are buying Shein, not adults. 

All hype, little substance: Molly White is best known for Web3 Is Going Just Great. Perhaps the most high-profile (and badass) crypto and Web3 sceptic, White has now set her sights on artificial intelligence (AI). Sorta. In the latest edition of her newsletter Citation Needed, she stresses that there’s a yawning gap between what AI majors are promising to clients, investors, and the media, and the reality of how today’s AI tools function. That’s not to say ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc. are utterly useless. But their indispensability, if at all, begins and ends with menial or repetitive tasks even in coding, where White says they (relatively) shine. Why then are companies claiming that AI will be able to write, edit, draw, or even direct? Your guess is as good as ours.

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K Ramanathan

India’s nuclear energy expansion programme turned ambitious over the past ten years. 

During this time, it took significant strides towards needs-based expansion of its clean energy basket, focusing on energy security, reliability and sustainable development.

As a relatively clean source of stable energy, nuclear power emerged as a potential option, especially given the advances in the development of Small Modular Reactors (SMR) and Advanced Small Modular Reactors (ASMR) alongside a favourable international environment.

In September 2023, 22 countries called for “unprecedented collaboration between government and industry leaders to at least triple global nuclear capacity by 2050”. 

Then in December 2023, this was officially endorsed at COP28 held in Dubai, while recognising the “critical role of nuclear energy for reducing the effects of climate change”. 

A nuclear renaissance is thus on the horizon.

India also enjoys a degree of competitive and comparative advantage on the nuclear energy front since the Department of Atomic Energy (DoAE) has been working on a three-stage development strategy for over 60 years, which has led to significant advances in technology and human resource development. 

The nuclear power programme is largely indigenous and it aims to utilise India’s vast thorium reserves, estimated at 1.07 MT, to achieve energy independence.

But the road now and in the future remains bumpy. 

In the past, a number of challenges—technological, geopolitical, financing and policy-related—deterred energy planners from proceeding with nuclear projects. 

For instance, the construction of a prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR) at Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu, scheduled for completion in September 2010, was delayed by over 14 years, resulting in the cost doubling.

At the same time, safety concerns arising out of nuclear plant-related disasters, such as the 1986 Chernobyl and 2011 Fukushima accidents, also lurk in the periphery.

Add to this the concerns expressed two years ago about the safety of the  Zaporizhia nuclear plant in Ukraine.

Of greater concern has been India’s institutional framework for its civil nuclear energy sector. The “deadlocks precipitated” by the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act (CLNDA) passed into law almost 14 years ago contributed significantly in deferring the realisation of objectives such as sourcing about “40GW of capacity from international suppliers” and the slow progress in fulfilling the goals set out by the 2005 India-US nuclear deal.

A specific provision of the act—stipulating supplier liability obligations—discouraged domestic companies from supplying components for nuclear power plants.

International suppliers too were wary of this provision, causing uncertainty over the future of the Indian civil nuclear power programme.

Subsequently, however, the DoAE’s clarifications did assuage domestic industry concerns, but the liability clause continues to remain a sticking point for foreign suppliers, including the French company Electicite de France, which had bid for construction of six nuclear power reactors at Jaitapur in Maharashtra in 2021.

American companies too have been cautious and hesitant. Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which supplies high-output nuclear power plants, has been apprehensive about sales to India because of the “absence of a durable assurance on limited liability in the event of an accident”. 

Talks with Westinghouse for building six AP1000 reactors in Andhra Pradesh ground to a halt some time ago, preventing the US and India from realising the "commercial promise” of the civil nuclear deal.

Geopolitical challenges also loom large.  This is linked to India not being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), which has led to apprehensions on the part of some countries about potential weapons proliferation. 

Additionally, India’s bid for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), which regulates global nuclear commerce, is seen as a challenge to the country’s full integration into the global nuclear market. Despite these seemingly insurmountable challenges, the future holds many promises and opportunities.

In March, India achieved a historic landmark in its nuclear energy development with the successful core loading of the country’s first indigenous 500 MWe Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR) at Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu. In February 2024, two new indigenously built 700 MW reactors were commissioned at Kakrapar in Gujarat, boosting domestic generation capacity.

The Kerala government recently proposed exploring the possibility of tapping the rich thorium deposits in the state.

The Nuclear Power Corporation (NPCIL) is planning to commission a new reactor every year. 

To augment finances, the central government is planning to tap the private sector to invest around $USD$26 billion in nuclear energy. 

The Water-Water Energetic Reactor (VVER) 1200 developed by Russia promises 20 percent higher power output, a 60-year lifespan, high-capacity utilisation (90 percent), an 18-month refuelling cycle and capable of producing 9.1 trillion kWh per year.

However, this could be achieved if the DoAE fast-tracks utilising its thorium deposits and developing SMRs and ASMRs, which would address many of the concerns related to technical, safety and cost aspects.  The Nuclear Harmonization Initiative of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could help in this regard.

About a year ago, the US NuScale Power Corporation received a crucial design certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for its SMR design. This could pave the way for potential future deployments of these smaller, more flexible reactors.

Equally important is the moulding of public perception on the importance of nuclear energy as a clean, secure and safe energy source. Resolving issues related to liability and insurance is therefore essential for attracting international partners and investment.

A global partnership for managing the risks of reactors and proliferation also appears desirable in this context. Similarly, a dialogue between nuclear and non-nuclear states can help build mutual trust and reduce tensions. 

A comprehensive set of institutional reforms, a robust civil nuclear programme with sufficient checks and balances and continued thrust on engineering and research and development could hasten India’s nuclear renaissance.

K Ramanathan is a Distinguished Fellow at TERI. Formerly a member on the Central Electricity Authority, Ramanathan provided consultancy support through TERI on numerous technical issues related to power sector development. He is also a member on the State Advisory Committee of Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) and serves as Adjunct Faculty with the TERI School of Advanced Studies. The views expressed here are personal. 

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

Murder, he sold: The notorious American football star OJ Simpson is dead. Simpson was best known for his high-profile trial on charges of murdering his then-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994. You may remember him from the infamous legal argument “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”, referring to a pair of black gloves tied to the murder that Simpson famously tried on in court before a jury, to demonstrate that it wouldn’t fit his hand. It helped him escape the charges. A decade later, he was in prison for armed robbery. This Vanity Fair piece from 2017 picks up Simpson’s story after he was released from jail, broken but determined to hog the limelight once again. Unfortunately for him, Fred Goldman, the father of Ron Goldman, was also determined to suck Simpson dry of all the money Simpson ever made in public appearances. Alas, the revenge-fuelled hide and seek wasn’t enough; Simpson died comfortably in a luxurious mansion at the ripe age of 76.

Trespassers will be… hired: There never has been a better time to be a finance pro in India. Unlike Wall Street or the City in London, all manner of financial services firms—banks, broking firms, fund stewards, wealth managers, and high-frequency traders—are hunting for high quality talent. The booming stock market and the tantalising India growth story are clearly the reasons for the buoyant mood. Demand for talent is so high that sometimes candidates are getting their asking price to shift jobs. Some are even ghosting potential employers. Although fat, the paychecks are still not as big as New York or Singapore but are comparable or even better when measured against what money can buy in Mumbai or Delhi. How long the good times last is anybody’s guess. The pay inflation itself could become a performance risk, says this Bloomberg report. 

Back to basics: This past decade, the tech industry has been on the lookout for the next big thing that could replace the smartphone. AR, VR, the metaverse, voice assistants… all these have turned out more forgettable than not. It’d hardly be a shocker if AI-powered hardware, pitched as smartphone-killer, meets the same fate. Well, maybe the answer to the question of what could disrupt the smartphone lies not so much in the future, but in the past. We know that quite a few people have switched to dumbphones. But increasingly, it is becoming clear that this is a ‘sticky’ trend. People are tired of overstimulation, and offering hardware that isn't designed to distract them is a business opportunity. Dumbwireless, a US e-commerce company, reportedly sold seventy thousand dollars’ worth of products last month. The Light Phone is receiving bulk orders from schools and churches. A burgeoning cottage industry is catering to beleaguered smartphone users desperate to escape their screens, says this report in The New Yorker. 

Breaking the ice: The US and Australia are the only countries with guidelines for reporting harassment—sexual and otherwise—on Antarctica, a continent where two dozen other countries have bases. Such guidelines aren’t enough yet, but it’s taken decades of suffering and subsequently, pushback by women to even get there, as this WIRED story shows. Life on the White Continent is isolating as it is. But surrounded by throngs of male researchers, the few women in Antarctica have little to no recourse in terrifying situations. From having rocks thrown at them while urinating (there are no bushes to hide behind) to being flashed at, name-called, and threatened with academic death, women geologists, contract workers, and sociologists have suffered the narcissistic male bosses who consider themselves the new Ernest Shackleton. One of these was a former Boston University geologist who had a glacier named after him. That man, David Marchant, was disgraced and removed from his post, but other predators and enablers remain.

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VS Chauhan

It's an almost entirely preventable disease but cervical cancer kills one woman in India every seven minutes.

That represents 21% of global cervical cancer deaths, and makes it the second most common cancer in Indian women, with 125,000 women being diagnosed and over 75,000 dying from the disease in India each year.

Vaccinating people against the human papillomavirus or HPV, which causes the vast majority of cervical cancer cases, is a highly effective way of preventing the disease.

HPV vaccines were first introduced in 2006 in the United States, and Australia became the first country to roll out a national vaccination programme the following year.

But until recently, the cost of the vaccines—as much as Rs 4,000 for a single dose with usually at least two doses required—has put preventing cervical cancer this way out of reach of most low- and middle-income countries across the world, including India.

Launched in September 2022, India's first indigenously-developed quadrivalent HPV vaccine, Cervavac, has the potential to improve access to vaccines and revolutionise cervical cancer prevention in these countries.

Developed by the Serum Institute of India, one of the largest vaccine producers in the world, it's currently priced at half of the cost of its competitors Merck & Co's Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix at 2,000 rupees per dose with plans announced to produce 200 million doses.

But as production is scaled up, the Institute hopes to be able to make a dose of Cervavac available to the public at a price of between Rs 200-400 in the near future.

The vaccine alliance Gavi signed a new three-year partnership with the Indian government in February 2023, with the aim to extend life-saving vaccines to millions of children nationwide, including helping the country introduce the HPV vaccine into India's national immunisation regimen.

And in February 2024, the government announced the vaccine would be part of the Universal Immunization Program, following endorsement from the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization.

During her recent interim budget speech for 2024-25, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman emphasised the government's commitment to actively "encourage" vaccination as a proactive measure against cervical cancer—a significant announcement for women's health in India.

It hasn't only been affordability that has hindered the widespread adoption of HPV vaccines in India. 

When Merck & Co's and GlaxoSmithKline's HPV vaccines were introduced in India in 2008, there was controversy around the safety and efficacy of Gardasil and Cervarix.

This controversy around the vaccines was compounded by cultural and societal factors, including the fear that they would lead to sexual promiscuity, contributing to vaccine hesitancy.

In the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim's initial vaccination drive in 2018, 119 minor and one serious adverse events following immunisation were reported. In the subsequent campaign in 2019, there were 83 minor and three serious cases. This sparked heated debates about the vaccines and raised public apprehension.

Out of the many women who were immunised, four deaths were recorded. However, subsequent investigations concluded that these deaths were unrelated to the vaccine, emphasising the importance of thorough investigation and scientific scrutiny. 

Recent studies of India's Cervavac vaccine show initial antibody responses to the vaccine are on par with initial responses to Gardasil. Follow-up studies will be required to evaluate how long-lasting and hence how durable this protection is.

It also remains to be assessed whether a single dose of Cervavac would provide a sufficient and durable immune response. This follows the World Health Organization's recommendation of a single-dose schedule for other HPV vaccines, which would further reduce the cost of HPV vaccination.

As the global focus shifts towards eliminating cervical cancer as a public health problem, increasing vaccination coverage, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, is a crucial step towards ensuring the World Health Organization's target of 90 percent of 15-year-old girls vaccinated with the HPV vaccine is achieved by 2030.

Currently, Australia is on track to be the first country in the world to eliminate cervical cancer, with modelling suggesting this could occur by 2035. But there are promising signs other countries in the Indo-Pacific could soon follow suit if health inequities can be overcome.

Strong vaccination programmes work best alongside strong cervical screening programmes. Now that the vaccine is available, the need of the hour is to significantly enhance awareness, screening, and vaccination programmes.

The introduction of HPV vaccines nearly 20 years ago marked a significant milestone in the global fight against cervical cancer, offering a safe and effective means of prevention.

Moving forward, it is crucial to address barriers to vaccine access and ensure vaccine safety to pave the way for a future free of this disease.

By addressing barriers to vaccination access and expanding other preventive measures like screening, countries like India can continue to make strides in reducing the burden of cervical cancer and save potentially thousands of women's lives.

Continued collaboration, innovation, and advocacy will be paramount to make cervical cancer a preventable and treatable disease for all.

VS Chauhan is President of the Malaria Vaccines Development Program. He is also the Chancellor of GITAM University, Co-Founder of Biotide Solutions LLP and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Institution of Eminence University of Delhi.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

Keeper putters: At its highest level, sport sometimes produces unmatched drama that not only immortalises the dramatis personae but also the props they use. This happened in 1997, when Tiger Woods won the Masters golf tournament by 12 strokes. As he produced one birdie after another, the instrument with which he was conjuring magic, a Scotty Cameron putter called Newport 2 TeI3, was also being broadcast in close-up. While Cameron’s handcrafted putters were already sought after, Woods' touch elevated them to objets d’art. The more famous one that the golfer uses, Newport 2 GSS, with a distinctive red dot, sells at auctions in excess of $200,000. Today, Cameron putters have an exclusive but devoted fan following with their own forums and events, says this Bloomberg story on the famous “blades” and “mallets”.

Pandemic (un)preparedness: The WHO hopes it would have a definitive text on the world's first pandemic treaty before its annual assembly meets in May. Hope is, however, a dangerous thing. The Financial Times reports that despite nine rounds of international negotiations, the latest of which was held last month, attended by officials from 198 countries, countries are nowhere close to agreeing on an accord. The Global South insists on strict rules for sharing information about new pathogens. Pharma companies are hesitant, as sharing genetic information would hamper their ability to develop exclusive, patented vaccines. There's another imminent threat. If Donald Trump were to return to the White House, the US may pull out of discussions entirely. Under Trump, the US (in)famously withdrew from the WHO. At this moment, it seems probable that the pandemic treaty, which was to be a guiding light to governments so they don't make the same fatal mistakes they did during Covid-19, will never see the light of day. 

Diaries of a rockstar (manager): The lives of music icons have always been scrutinised closely even as fans elevate their more problematic traits to the pedestal of genius. But behind the stories of Elvis Presley’s serial womanising to Led Zeppelin’s proclivity for destroying hotel rooms are the tales of their managers who led them to success. This long story in The New Yorker traces the evolution of music managers and the many roles they have taken on in the last 60 years. Music managers have gone from being powerful figures that brought home the dole (such as Presley’s Colonel Parker) to abusive characters preying on the wealth and fame of too-young stars (such as Britney Spears’ management) and now, to becoming the artist’s villain. Taylor Swift’s legal battle with star manager Scooter Braun over the rights to her earliest albums perhaps is the nadir of musician-manager relations. As top artists choose to walk away from record labels too, could this be the end of the music manager altogether? 

Unwanted by one, unwanted by all: In December 2023, the US-Mexico border witnessed a record 300,000-plus “migrant encounters”. But Mexico isn’t the only major source of asylum seekers to the US. Desperate migrants from all over the world are pouring into the country in the runup to a crucial election that’s seeing even President Joe Biden adopt more hawkish stances. And Eagle Pass, Texas, is at the eye of the storm. Texas’ Republican governor Greg Abbott is now sending buses packed with migrants—who tear through barbed wire fences and duck-and-avoid border patrol guards—to “sanctuary cities” such as Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. They’re not up for the task though. Denver is now shipping asylum seekers elsewhere, and what’s unfolding as a result is a humanitarian crisis even as Biden’s challenger Donald Trump doubles down on conservative rhetoric.

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Dhananjay Tripathi

The Maldives is a key player in the Indian Ocean, positioning itself to benefit from India and China’s rivalry.

India is about to start withdrawing its military personnel from the Maldives—80 men in uniform who operate two helicopters and a Dornier aircraft that provide humanitarian and medical services in the Indian Ocean nation. 

After years of close relations with India, the Maldives elected a new president, Mohamed Muizzu, last year. One of his first directives on assuming office was that India withdraw its "military presence" from the archipelago. 

Muizzu is widely perceived to be “pro-China”. But that is not the whole story. 

The domestic politics of the Maldives tends to swing between pro-India and pro-China political players and has considerable impact on its foreign policy.

Muizzu’s predecessor, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, for example, was close to New Delhi and resolutely maintained an "India First" policy. Now the pendulum seems to have swung to the other extreme.

The Maldives has become a playground for strategic competition between the big powers in Asia. 

Its geostrategic location makes it important for both Asian giants, India and China. 

Maritime scholars describe the Maldives as the “toll gate” between the western Indian Ocean chokepoints of the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Hormuz and the eastern Indian Ocean chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca.

More than half of India’s external trade and 80% of its energy imports passes through the sea lanes close to the Maldives. 

For China, 80% of its crude oil imports from the Gulf pass through the Strait of Malacca. Experts believe that over-dependence on the Strait of Malacca increases China’s energy supply vulnerability. 

China's overcautiousness about the Indian Ocean region sea lanes is often described as its "Malacca dilemma"—a possible scenario when an antagonist blocks the sea lanes. To avoid this, China has invested heavily in its navy, with special focus on the Indian Ocean.

Beijing is especially apprehensive of US and Indian influence in the Indian Ocean. It perhaps believes that a deepening Indo-US partnership, especially in the Indo-Pacific context, can make things difficult for it as well. 

Aware of these potential challenges, China has sought to increase its strategic presence in the Indian Ocean. It now has a formidable presence at strategically located ports such as  Gwadar in Pakistan and Hambantota in Sri Lanka. 

Gwadar, which is part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the Belt and Road Initiative, is just 400 km from India. The port is managed by China Overseas Port Holding Company, which is under a legal obligation to support the People's Liberation Army’s overseas operation, if and when necessary.

The Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka is controlled by the China Merchants Port Holdings Company Limited and is also a cause of concern for India.

China is involved in building or financing 17 ports in the region, of which it is directly involved in the construction of 13.

In 2017, China established a military base in Djibouti and it is now eyeing to expand its military presence in Africa. 

With a strong Chinese presence in the Maldives, the so-called "string of pearls" strategy of surrounding India with its strategic naval presence in the Indian Ocean will reach its logical conclusion.  

In 2022, China also launched the China-Indian Ocean Region Forum on Development and Cooperation. In the forum’s second meeting in 2023, more than 350 representatives from 30 countries participated. The central theme was “Boosting Sustainable Blue Economy to Build Together a Maritime Community with a Shared Future”.

These are all examples of Chinese focus on defending its strategic interest in the Indian Ocean, if not dominating it. 

India has taken serious note of Chinese strategic expansion and followed a two-pronged strategy to safeguard its interests. It has tried to consolidate its position in the region by investing in its armed forces and developing better ties with countries in the region. It also launched an initiative called SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) in 2015.

The SAGAR plan seeks to build a climate of trust and openness, address regional concerns, increase maritime cooperation, resolve maritime issues in a peaceful manner and enjoins all Indian Ocean countries to adhere to international maritime rules and norms. 

It is one of India's biggest maritime diplomatic initiatives encompassing security, economic and ecological issues. It projects India as the “net security provider” in the region.

Apart from the SAGAR initiative, India started the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium in 2008 to foster better maritime ties with the navies of Indian Ocean  states.  There are 25 members and eight observers, including China. 

In 1992 India initiated the “Dosti (Friendship)” exercise to link  the Coast Guard forces of India and the Maldives. Sri Lanka joined in 2012.

Recently, 'Dosti-16' was held in the Maldives, even when there were ongoing controversies about the presence of Indian military personnel in the country.  

The second prong of the Indian strategy is to develop closer alliances with the US and other Western powers active in the Indian Ocean. The increasing engagement of India in the region and the close military cooperation between the Quad nations are indicators of this.

In recent months, India-Maldives relations have captured the headlines, not only because of the "notice" served on India to remove its military personnel. There have also been acerbic statements about India by Maldivian ministers trying to woo tourists away from the Maldives, and media commentary in India critical of President Muizzu’s government.

The change in government in Maldives is usually cited as the reason. But this is not the whole story. It ignores the underlying intensity of the Sino-India competition in the region. Tension on the China-India border in the Himalayas remains high, and India is apprehensive about the increasing footprint of China in South Asia, while China is suspicious of the growing defence cooperation between India and the West.

There is a larger political tussle between the two Asian heavyweights going on in the Indian Ocean, and it is likely to be ongoing and not going to be limited to only the Maldives. 

Dhananjay Tripathi is Chairperson and Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, South Asian University, New Delhi.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

ICYMI

Rumble in the jungle: Three thousand three hundred and eighty-nine birds. Over 3,000 herbivores, more than 1,200 iguanas, 857 marsh crocodiles, 229 leopards, and 76 ‘hybrid’ lions. Elephants. Tigers. Hippopotamuses. Chimpanzees. Grizzly bears. A Komodo dragon, And much, much more across 134 species in total. This is Anant Ambani’s 3,000 acre Vantara, an animal rescue and rehabilitation centre situated inside Reliance’s refinery complex in Jamnagar, Gujarat. It now houses more animals than Delhi’s National Zoological Park and has as many individual creatures as New York’s Bronx Zoo.

Before his pre-wedding celebrations with fiancée Radhika Merchant, the youngest Ambani scion did a media tour about Vantara’s crown jewels, an elephant welfare trust and the Greens zoological centre equipped with facilities and word-renowned veterinarians you won’t find anywhere else in India. But how did it acquire so many rescued animals in the first place? The answer to this question is a sprawling 12,000-plus word investigative story in Himal Southasian. The scale of the collusion between government bodies, forest officials, state zoos, and shady animal breeders both here and abroad to acquiesce to one man’s bizarre need to build a Noah’s Ark has resulted in trafficking that’s undoing years of conservation efforts. Read this, and rage.

The people behind modern AI: The Transformer Eight. It’s a term that has nothing to do with the Takara Tomy and Hasbro media franchise or the Michael Bay films, but rather, everything to do with the genesis of AI as we know it today. And Google was the nucleus. Seven years ago, eight Google scientists authored the epochal paper Attention Is All You Need. This thesis on transformers, a neural network architecture, has resulted in a present where countries and corporations play chess in the war to dominate the most disruptive technology since the internet. They are: Jakob Uszkoreit, cofounder and CEO of Inceptive; Character AI’s Noam Shazeer; Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmer of Essential AI; OpenAI researcher Lukasz Kaiser; Cohere cofounder-CEO Aidan Gomez; Llion Jones of Sakana AI; and Near cofounder Illia Polosukhin. WIRED profiles the eight in this anatomy of a breakthrough, taking us back to 2017, when the lot were still with Google and blissfully unprepared for the eventual outcomes of their work.

End of the fund? One of the world’s most popular investment instruments, mutual funds (MFs) manage assets worth about $20 trillion in the US and worth $63 trillion globally. Yet, the industry is peaking. In the three years up to the end of 2023, $1 trillion flowed out of US MFs. February was the first time in two years the industry saw any net inflows; $13 billion. The biggest reason for MFs decline is the rising popularity of exchange traded funds or ETFs. In the same period that MF inflows fell, ETFs grew by $2 trillion, $575 billion of which came last year alone.

The mutual fund was invented a hundred years ago by Edward Leffler. The value of Lefler’s invention is best captured by Jenny Johnson, chief executive of Franklin Templeton, which manages $1.5 in assets, “we got here because there was a fundamental recognition that the system was unfair. The little guy wasn’t getting the investment returns of the equity markets.” MFs caught on after it was streamlined by law in 1940 and later in the 1980s after they became part of the tax-saving retirement plan widely known as the 401(k) plan. Now ETFs are threatening Leffler’s invention, says the Financial Times. In the five years to 2023 the number of ETFs rose to 2,000 and their assets jumped from $2 trillion to $8 trillion.

Keepin’ it in the family: The rise of recreational genetics in the aughts killed off the age of paternity secrets. In the US in particular, cheap DNA tests became all the rage. Dozens of firms such as AncestryDNA and 23andMe sell mail-in test kits and match their customers with other individuals who share similar DNA profiles. In turn, you can’t be an anonymous sperm donor anymore; more likely than not, a curious offspring will sleuth you out. More critically, widespread genetic testing is also exposing how startlingly common incest remains in modern society.

In the ‘90s, for example, frequency of incest was pegged at one in a million. But when geneticist Jim Wilson analysed an anonymised UK biobank database, he found that one in 7,000 people were children of first-degree relatives (parent-child or siblings). And now, as Sarah Zhang writes for The Atlantic, widespread genetic testing is “uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives”. Zhang's recent feature narrates how forty-something Steve Edsel discovered that his biological father was also his mother's father. It spotlights another open secret: the prevalence of young girls sexually abused in their own homes.

In God, should we trust?: In Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code, the Opus Dei was the secretive, powerful group of the elite running the world from the shadows—a plot device every good thriller needs. In reality, Opus Dei’s 95,000 members that are linked to banks and governments worldwide are guilty of something much more serious. This investigation in the Financial Times traces how Opus Dei spent decades luring young, rural, working-class women across the world with false promises of free education, only to force them into unpaid labour via psychological manipulation. Women profiled in this piece describe how they hoped to become numeraries or supernumeraries, dedicating their lives to prayer and a vocation. Instead, they spent their best years washing the underwear of male Opus Dei members, and scrubbing toilets for endless hours and no pay. One ran away and another was whisked back home by her parents, horrified at her living conditions. As always, the Catholic Church tried hard to look away, even canonising Opus Dei’s founder Josemaria Escriva in 2002.

Econ 4chan: Frustrated nerds are the lifeblood of 2000s-style messaging boards such as 4chan, but one doesn’t ordinarily imagine a top university’s economist when thinking about said nerds. Yet EJMR (now XJMR), has become a hotbed of toxic anonymous discussions about the highly insular world of economics academics. This story in Bloomberg traces EJMR’s evolution from a discussion board about jobs in academia for economists to viral, anonymous accusations of plagiarism that have nearly decimated the careers of top economists in the US. Besides this, EJMR is infected with posts lamenting the failings of ‘feminists’. It’s a product of the long-standing sexism in economics; even today there is a widespread belief among successful men in the field that women are simply not apt for the job. There’s also a trio of economists who fight back. Using Nvidia chips running nine quadrillion calculations, they identified where the majority of EJMR posts come from and proved that the toxicity runs right to the top. Then, there are the women: an undergrad’s paper proving EJMR’s latent sexism urged more women to openly fight back against the forum.

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India was the largest weapons importer in the world during the five-year period 2019-23. Its arms import rose 4.7% between the 2014–18 five-year period and the 2019–23 spell.

There is, however, a change in the composition of India’s suppliers. New data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which tracks the global weapons trade, shows that for the first time in 60 years, India imported less than half of its overall foreign weapons from Russia. It still accounted for 34% of all Russian arms exports, which overall shrank by 53% to a dozen countries in 2023 as opposed to 31 in 2019 as US-led sanctions tightened.  

France replaced Russia as the world’s largest arms exporter in 2019-23 and India became the single biggest buyer of French weapons, mainly fighter planes. 

Rising global tensions and conflicts have pushed most large nations to stock up on arms. European nations, scared stiff after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are rebuilding their depleted armouries. Their imports nearly doubled and 55% of the weapons came from the US in 2019-23. A new report from the London-based think-tank, International Institute for Strategic Studies says global defence spending increased by 9% to a record $2.2 trillion in 2023 and is expected to go up even more in 2024.

Shorbori Purkayastha of The Signal Daily (TSD) podcast caught up with army veteran Lt General DS Hooda, who is also the co-founder of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, a New Delhi based think-tank to make sense of the global arms race. 

TSD: So far NATO has been the base of the European line of defence. But is that stance changing and why so?

Gen Hooda: So really the stances are changing. In fact, after, you know, the war in Ukraine, NATO has decided to up its spending. So it was supposed to be spending 2% of its GDP on defence, which it was not doing. But it's now committed. And you know, as per the latest data, at least 18 countries of NATO have actually reached a target of 2%. So I think with what's happened in Ukraine and the sort of fears of Russia, you're going to see NATO, you know, taking its appropriate role in European security. I mean, that was one problem that the Americans, particularly President Trump always had, that the Europeans are not...the NATO is not doing enough. But I think you will see as far as European security is concerned, a greater role for NATO. And we are also seeing a number of other European countries wanting to join NATO. So I see an expanded role for NATO in the US and European security.

TSD: If we turn to Asia, rocky China-US relations are underpinning a lot of spending. China alone is spending massively on defence; its defence spending reportedly worth $219.5 billion accounted for nearly 43% of all of Asia's defence spending last year. On the other hand, Taiwan also boosted its defence budget by nearly 20%. Japan has abandoned its pacifist policy. And as for India, it is the world's largest arms importer, accounting for 9.8% of the total global imports in the five years up to 2023. How would you read India's position in this arms race?

Gen Hooda: Okay, so let's look at the issue. Its defence spending. So it's driven by two things. One, as you mentioned, the US China rivalry. And so China has steadily increased its defence budget, because it sort of wants to modernise and become what can be called a peer competitor to the US now. It may not achieve that immediately but the ultimate aim is that they want a sort of fully modernised military force that can stand up to, you know, any American pressure. So as you mentioned, more than 40% of Asian spending is actually by China. So that's one driver. 

And the second driver is, you know, the increasing Chinese aggressiveness. And that's leading to countries you mentioned, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, increasing their defence budget. It's not only the direct threats. Also look at the ASEAN countries. Looking at China’s behaviour, for example, the Philippines and Vietnam are also enhancing their defence budget. So, there is a bit of a sense of insecurity. 

Coming to India, 2020 has been a sort of transformative year in my assessment. Before that, you know, diplomacy and political engagement could keep the Chinese military at bay and (there was a sense) that they won't use military force. 2020, I think, changed that impression. So, you're also finding, you know, a greater emphasis of the Indian military on its northern borders, in the maritime space… in the Indian Ocean. So clearly, I'm not even suggesting that there could be war, but definitely India and China are going to remain strategic competitors. That to some extent will drive the Indian defence budget. The need to indigenize (has put in place) the whole atmanirbhar programme. Although, honestly, it will take time to mature. We are still going to remain highly dependent on imports as far as defence equipment is concerned.

TSD: The International Institute for Strategic Studies used the phrase “the era of insecurity”. Do you think this really is the era of insecurity? What could it possibly indicate?

Gen Hooda: Of course, it is. Who would have thought a few years ago that you would see a major war in Europe, a war that will lead to massive internal and external migration. Just six months back, we were all saying that (conflict in) the Middle East has gone down, and that there is growing engagement between the Arab nations and Israel and that will lead to some sort of lasting peace. And then you see what happened in Gaza. 

As I mentioned, the US-China rivalry has intensified. And it's taking shape in many ways. I mean, look at the trade and technology sanctions that have been applied. So, all this that you are seeing today, rightly you can call it the era of insecurity. And, therefore, you are seeing enhancement of defence capability and enhancement of defence budgets. 

I want to point out one more thing, which is the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on what were our traditional calculations of how much stocks of equipment you would need. The kind of massive expenditures that have taken place, the material losses that have taken place, are leading to countries in Europe, the US, and China actually revising their estimates of what defence production capability you need. You find countries ramping up their defence production, even the number of shells that they will require for a war. And that's also one thing that is adding to, you know, when you're looking at expenditures on defence, really looking ahead. Of course, the real blowups could happen in Ukraine, because I mean, you had occasions where, you know, President Putin has been talking about the use of nuclear weapons. You have the French president now talking about NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine. And that's, that's something that could flare up. Even if you look at Gaza, it looks like a limited conflict. But if you look at what the Israelis are saying, the real enemy is Iran. And that Iran needs to be sorted out if we want peace in this region. And so again, if this is the kind of thinking that is happening, you're looking at an escalation, you're looking at an expansion of conflicts. So things you know, the way they're happening, could lead to an escalation. I mean, really, you can't rule it out.

ICYMI

Horror hedonism: OnlyFans—growing, profitable—is the world’s only success story from the creator economy. By handing control over to creators, it promised to be an ethical alternative to mainstream porn websites that routinely feature nonconsensual videos including revenge porn. Yet, this Reuters investigation found that OnlyFans is plagued by the same problem. Hundreds of women in the US and other major OnlyFans markets have complained that creators on the platform are selling videos of them in sexual acts without their consent. Some women say recordings of their sexual assault are up for sale on OnlyFans. Law enforcement has been unable to help and OnlyFans’ moderation processes are inadequate. Ironically, the platform’s paywall has made it even harder for the police to gather evidence and close cases. But OnlyFans continues to make money off of the sale of women’s exploitation. 

A tycoon’s death: Well-connected billionaire shipping magnate Angela Chao died in a freak accident at her sprawling ranch in a remote Texas county on February 9. Chao and her friends were celebrating the Chinese New Year and catching up that weekend. She left them at the guest house just before midnight and headed towards the main building in the 900-acre ranch in her Tesla Model X. What would have been a four-minute drive ended up in a fatal mishap when she accidentally shifted the car into reverse instead of drive. The SUV raced backwards and went over an embankment into a pond and completely submerged. Chao didn’t have enough time to hit the window roll-down button–otherwise a great convenience– to escape. And once submerged, the buttons wouldn’t work. In modern cars, something that greatly enhances safety on the road–laminated glass–also becomes a death trap underwater as it cannot be broken with ordinary tools. This The Wall Street Journal story pieces together how her Tesla became Chao’s watery coffin. 

Nothing sticks: There was a time when the internet gathered people of the world together in a single, global experience. Call it the Early Age of the web, back when conversations were mostly in English, dominated by people from the west, and laid out in posts or long-winded blogs. The internet of today is vast, multilingual, and incredibly fractured. The result: nothing goes viral anymore or everything does (depends on your POV). This essay in The Washington Post argues that competing algorithms, endless niches, and inflated social media metrics have made ‘vitality’ meaningless. Previously impressive numbers of views and engagements are now easily achievable, meaning judging if something has truly hit a chord with a significant section of the internet is well-nigh impossible. Something trending in one corner of the web may never see the light of day in all the others. If you ask us, the last thing that truly went ‘viral’ on the internet in the true sense of the word was perhaps (discussions about) the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Into the depths: What transpires when an architect also happens to be a keen scuba diver? It creates something remarkable: a 40-foot diving pool filled by natural geysers. Emanuele Boaretto, who owned a spa hotel in Montegrotto Terme near Padua in Italy, built Y-40, a warm water dive training facility. Filled with 4.3 million litres of water, it is the world’s deepest geothermally heated pool. A favourite of ballerinas, casual divers, and freediving enthusiasts, it is also popular with film and music video makers. Freediving also got a leg-up after Netflix released the documentary, The Deepest Breath, starring the world freediving champion Alessia Zecchini, boosting Y-40’s popularity even more, reports the Financial Times. 

Can purpose be profitable?: Your garden variety venture capitalist in Silicon Valley or around Wall Street would answer the question with a resounding “no”. And Hemant Taneja would beg to differ. The CEO of VC firm General Catalyst or GC rankled his peers in November when he released the 14-page Responsible AI Protocol, a clarion call to prioritise AI safety and risk mitigation over returns on investments. He also called for more synergies (see what we did there?) with regulators. Taneja’s playbook for GC, which has $25 billion in assets, is “responsible innovation”, and the first-generation immigrant from New Delhi has gone the whole hog to work towards it. The Information profiles the atypical venture capitalist, who we personally believe should be emulated more.

Predator’s Playground: Andy Rubin, founding father of the Android operating system, left Google in 2014 after the company’s internal investigation determined he’d had an inappropriate  relationship with a subordinate. But Google rewarded him with a $90 million severance package. Rubin later co-founded VC firm Playground, and there too, he exited with a multimillion dollar pay package. The reason behind his departure is unknown. This backdrop is important because it spotlights Silicon Valley’s tolerance of alleged sexual misconduct. Now another Playground co-founder is in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. Peter Barrett reportedly tried to reinstate Erik Holser, the former CEO of semiconductor startup xLight, in his capacity as board member of the company. Court documents in an ongoing litigation between Holser and another xLight executive reveal that Holser’s ex-girlfriend filed a domestic violence restraining order for harassment and stalking. When will the status quo change?

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Jane Kelsey 

The 13th World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial conference in Abu Dhabi has failed to resolve any issues of significance, raising the inescapable question of whether the global trade body has a future.

The three-day meeting was due to end on February 29. But late into a fourth extra day, the 164 members were struggling to even agree on a declaration, let alone the big issues of agriculture, fisheries and border taxes on electronic commerce.

The closing ceremony was sombre, and the ministerial declaration bland, stripped of the substantive content previously proposed. Outstanding issues were kicked back to the WTO base in Geneva for further discussions, or for the next ministerial conference in 2026.

Briefing journalists in the closing hours, an EU spokesperson noted how hard it would be to pick up the pieces in Geneva after they failed to create momentum at the ministerial conference. She predicted:

“[Trade] will be more and more characterised by power relations than the rule of law, and that will be a problem notably for smaller countries and for developing countries.”

Restricted access

That imbalance is already evident, with power politics characterising the conference from the start.

There were accusations of unprecedented restrictions on non-governmental organisations (NGOs) registered to participate in the conference. These bodies are crucial to bringing the WTO’s impacts on farmers, fishers, workers, and other communities into the negotiation arena.

A number of NGOs have submitted formal complaints over their treatment by conference host the United Arab Emirates. They say they were isolated from delegations, banned from distributing papers, and people were arbitrarily detained for handing out press releases.

Critical negotiations were conducted through controversial “green rooms”. These were where the handpicked “double quad” members – the US, UK, European Union, Canada, China, India, South Africa, and Brazil – tried to broker outcomes to present to the rest for “transparency”.

Influence of power politics

These powerful countries largely determined the outcomes (or lack of them). The US, historically the agenda-setter at WTO ministerial conferences, appeared largely disinterested in the proceedings, with trade representative Katherine Tai leaving early.

The final declaration says nothing about restoring a two-tier dispute body, which has been paralysed since 2019 by the refusal of successive US Republican and Democratic administrations to appoint new judges to the WTO’s appellate body.

The EU failed to secure progress on improvements to the appeal process. Likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has already announced he would impose massive WTO-illegal tariffs on China if elected.

China, Japan, the US and EU – all big subsidisers of distant water fishing fleets – blocked an outcome aiming to protect global fish stocks, an issue already deferred from the last ministerial meeting.

The six Pacific Island WTO members lobbied tirelessly for a freeze and eventual reduction in subsidies. But the text was diluted to the point that no deal was better than a bad deal.

The EU, UK, Switzerland and other pharmaceutical producers had already blocked consensus on lifting patents for Covid-19 therapeutics and diagnostics, sought by 65 developing countries. A deal brokered in 2021 on Covid vaccines is so complex no country has used it.

Domestic and global agendas

India’s equally uncompromising positions also reflected domestic priorities. The 2013 Bali ministerial conference promised developing countries a permanent solution to prevent legal challenges to India’s subsidised stockpiling of food for anti-hunger programmes.

A permanent solution was a red line for India, which faces an election next month and mass protests from farmers concerned at losing subsidies.

Agricultural exporters, including New Zealand, tabled counter-demands to broaden the agriculture negotiations. The public stockpiling issue remains a stalemate, without any real prospect of a breakthrough.

India and South Africa formally objected to the adoption of an unmandated plurilateral agreement on investment facilitation.

The concerns were less with the agreement itself and more with the precedent it would create for sub-groups of members to bypass the WTO’s rule book. This would allow powerful states to advance their favoured issues while developing country priorities languish.

Crisis and transformation

The face-saver for the conference was the temporary extension of a highly contested moratorium on the right to levy customs duties at the border on transmissions of digitised content.

Securing that extension (or preferably a permanent ban on e-commerce customs duties) on behalf of Big Tech was the main US goal for the conference. Developing countries opposed its renewal, so they could impose tariffs both for revenue and to support their own digital industrialisation.

The moratorium will now expire in March 2026, so the battle will resume at the next ministerial conference scheduled to be held in Cameroon that year.

But there is every likelihood the current paralysis at the WTO will continue, and the power politics will intensify. As the previously quoted EU spokesperson also mused:

“Perhaps the WTO needed a good crisis, and perhaps this will lead to a realisation that we cannot continue like this.”

Ideally, that would result in a fundamentally different international institution – one that provides real solutions to the 21st century challenges on which the WTO is unable to deliver.

Jane Kelsey is Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau.

This article is republished from https://theconversation.com under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article at https://theconversation.com/wto-conference-ends-in-division-and-stalemate-does-the-global-trade-body-have-a-viable-future-224948 

ICYMI

Fiat fracas: Gianni Agnelli died in 2003. And with that, an all-out Succession-like war—though far uglier—would be waged over the next two decades and counting.

The grandson of Giovanni Agnelli, founder of Fiat, Gianni built an automobile empire that made him the richest man in Italy. The Agnelli family has stakes in Dicembre, the parent of listed holding company Exor. For perspective, these are the companies Exor has stakes in: Stellantis, of which Fiat is now part; Ferrari; Dutch conglomerate Philips; The Economist; and Juventus football club. Exor’s holdings are currently worth €33 billion ($36 billion). And it's this multi-billion euro empire that’s up for grabs between feuding family members.

After Gianni died, his daughter Margherita transferred her Dicembre stake to her mother, who in turn willed it to Margherita’s children. Now Margherita wants her due back, but her successors, led by son and Stellantis chief John Elkann, are having none of it. Head to the Financial Times for the full, gripping story.

Nothing regal about this: Speaking of Stellantis’ John Elkann, here’s a Bloomberg opus that features him in a guest appearance, though not in a flattering way. The Fiat scion also owned a stake in Monacair, a helicopter company that held exclusive rights to transfers between Nice, France, and the Principality of Monaco—a tiny tax haven synonymous with casinos, the Grand Prix, luxury, and now, alleged palace-sanctioned corruption.

The country of Monaco has been ruled by the same dynasty for 700 years. Its current ruler, Prince Albert II—son of Prince Rainier III and Hollywood actress Grace Kelly—has attracted bad press in his country and neighbouring France for favouring his nephews (the sons of Albert’s older sister, Princess Caroline), Pierre and Andrea Casiraghi, for business deals that have virtually monopolised industries in Monaco. These include the aforementioned helicopter route (Monacair is their company), real estate projects that flouted building rules before being greenlit, and now, even film production. That’s the tip of the iceberg. This story’s cast of characters also include a trusted royal accountant left for the wayside, judges and law enforcement who are up against a prince who can’t be criminally tried, and spoilt nephews who seem to believe an entire country is theirs for the taking. Don’t miss this for anything.

Jay to the con?: An Indian monk going west to teach Americans about the ancient wisdom of Hinduism is a tale as old as time. The latest incarnation of that archetype is Jay Shetty, a pop-psychologist guru known for his podcast On Purpose and two bestselling books. Shetty’s influence has now breached the holy confines of Hollywood: he officiated the 2022 marriage of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. Naturally, this meteoric rise comes with its own set of questions and prodding about the man and his numerous claims. Like his association with ISKCON, and whether he actually ever went to India as much as he claims. Or the Jay Shetty Certification School, where students pay thousands of dollars to be like him. To know about shady Shetty, read this in-depth profile in The Guardian. 

Manufacturing woes: Thanks to the ‘China Plus One’ supply chain/manufacturing strategy becoming a global norm after Covid-19, many factories are being established in India. Attached to such facilities are sprawling townships, such as those run by iPhone contract manufacturer Foxconn. Established in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, the Foxconn township employs close to 15,000 workers, 80% of them women. This atypical gender ratio, while welcome, comes with some disturbing caveats, as this Scroll investigation found. Most of these women are made to live in far-flung dormitories with questionable hygiene. To top it all, they’re not allowed to leave during weekdays. They are allowed to travel for a brief 12-hour window only on Sundays. If these adult women do wish to travel on other days or for a longer duration, the warden must confirm the same with their parents. The practice seems to stem from Foxconn’s China model, and it’s one that should concern us all, India’s manufacturing ambitions notwithstanding.

The Fat Cat is losing weight: When a little-known investment firm Wesray bought Gibson Greeting Cards company—owner of Garfield the cat—it paid up only $1 million from its pocket and borrowed $289 million to fund the transaction. It was among the first few such transactions in the world, now known as leveraged buyouts, the cornerstone of the private equity industry. Wesray made so much money off the purchase, The New York Times had joked about reaping profits from the ‘fat cat’ aka Garfield. Most people and institutions with money to spare have spent decades pursuing the PE fat cat, now worth $5 trillion in assets under management worldwide. But as Financial Times argues in this column, the cat ain’t fat anymore. A combination of factors—rising interest rates, fewer companies going public, and too many PE firms floating about—have depressed the industry’s once magical returns. Yet, there are enticing benefits to putting money in illiquid securities whose performance is often conveniently benchmarked to make PE fund managers look good. Was it all always a conjuring trick? Or has the fat cat simply run too hard for too long? 

Stuck in the past: For decades now, residents of Mumbai have squabbled over the state of the city’s infrastructure even as residents of other cities pronounce the death of Mumbai. In this story for Asterisk Magazine, researcher Saarthak Gupta argues that the primary reason for the ‘ruin of Mumbai’ is the severe restrictions on floor area ratios (FARs), or what Mumbaikars know as FSI (floor space index). FSI is a measure of how much area of real estate a developer can build on a given plot of land. Compared to densely populated urban sprawls such as Tokyo and Manhattan, Mumbai’s FAR is a lot lower, meaning developers build smaller homes in shrinking land parcels, forcing higher population density rather than lower, as the FSI policy intended. Besides, Gupta argues, historic rent control in the city has held landlords back from buying property to rent it out, squeezing the supply of rental units and forcing people to enter into informal contracts. In sum, Mumbai is neither growing nor prospering as it should while its residents squeeze into poorly constructed homes in badly managed residential areas. Given the city’s Municipal Corporation recently rebuilt two connecting flyovers so badly they’re six feet apart in height, can it even fix this mess? 

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Santosh Mehrotra 

Israel plans to bring in 70,000 workers from abroad, including 10,000 from India, to boost its construction sector. A labour shortage has emerged after 80,000 Palestinian workers were barred from entering the country after the October 7 Hamas-led attacks.

Figures suggest that India is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Between July and September of 2023, it grew at a pace of 7.6%. If it continues along this current growth trajectory, India will become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027.

The fact that thousands of Indian workers are nonetheless queuing up to secure a job in a conflict zone abroad is a consequence of a jobs crisis at home. Despite the country’s apparent economic growth, many Indians – even those with a university degree – are struggling to secure stable employment.

Casual work makes up 25% of the workforce, while only 23% of workers are paid a regular salary. The remainder are self-employed, and quite vulnerable to irregular and insecure income too.

But India has a large working-age population (people between 15 and 64 years of age), so the demand for jobs is immense. India needs to create an estimated 10 million to 12 million jobs each year for the unemployed, new workforce entrants, and surplus agricultural workers to be able to secure non-farm work.

How can India provide jobs for its increasingly educated young? It needs even faster economic growth and for this growth to be labour intensive. This will, in turn, generate demand in the economy from all sections of society (not just the middle class and above).

Structural change

Between 2004 and 2014, India’s economy grew at a rate of nearly 8% per year (despite the global financial crisis in 2008). This rapid growth was accompanied by a hastening of structural change in employment.

During that period, the economy created on average 7.5 million new non-farm jobs every year. The number of manufacturing jobs in India rose from 53 million in 2004 to 60 million by 2012.

However, ₹500 ($6) and ₹1,000 ($12) notes were taken out of circulation in 2016, making 86% of India’s currency illegal. The cash recall was intended to accelerate the country’s transition towards a formal economy. But it led to acute shortages of cash, destroying jobs in the construction and manufacturing sectors.

Growth slowed to 2020 when, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, the Indian government imposed a nationwide lockdown at four hours’ notice. The lockdown caused India’s gross domestic product (GDP) to contract by 5.8% – more than twice the rate at which the global economy shrank.

Employment in manufacturing jobs fell again, especially in labour-intensive manufacturing where employment had already been in decline for five years following the botched implementation of demonetisation. Around 60 million workers returned to jobs in agriculture, reversing the structural change in employment that had been underway for 15 years.

To take advantage of its bulging working-age population, India needs to create more non-farm jobs. In his new book, Breaking the Mould, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, says that India needs to focus on exports of services, drawing on the country’s new digital infrastructure and IT-based services growth for the domestic (and export) market.

But a focus on services alone will not suffice. This “New India” economy currently constitutes less than 15% of the country’s economy and a fraction of that in employment. Such a strategy will generate jobs mainly for highly skilled people, rather than the millions of Indian workers that are searching for non-farm jobs.

What India needs is a manufacturing strategy akin to China’s that focuses on labour-intensive manufacturing. China has pursued an industrial policy since the 1950s, which has become even more evolved since the 1980s, helping the country establish dominance in global high-tech manufacturing.

Creating jobs in India

In India, the demand for jobs will only be met if several different factors come together. Construction activity needs to continue at its current brisk pace. But, for the next year or two, it must be led by public sector investment as private investment remains sluggish.

India’s investment-to-GDP ratio is still below 30%, and has remained below the 31% inherited by the current government when it came to power ten years ago. The potential for a twofold increase in construction employment (a trend that was observed between 2004 and 2012) over the next five years hinges on the revival of private investment.

Labour-intensive manufacturing by micro, small, and medium enterprises also needs a sustained fillip. The government’s focus is currently on large companies – so-called “national champions” like industrial conglomerates Tata and Mahindra – which are being encouraged through subsidies.

If these subsidies were instead redirected towards smaller enterprises, they might do more for employment generation. Large corporations typically use highly capital-intensive methods of production, whereas smaller ones tend to absorb more labour. Historically, it is the latter that has generated most of the non-farm jobs in developing countries.

The third area where employment can be generated is, indeed, services. Public expenditure should prioritise public health, education, vocational training and universities.

These sectors are labour-intensive, contribute to the creation of public goods, and will build the human capital needed by both manufacturing and modern export-oriented services. That is the only way India’s health and education services can reach the levels observed in east Asia and attract more foreign investment.

A renewed focus on smaller enterprises across these sectors is needed. Inclusive growth requires providing jobs rapidly at the bottom of the pyramid, not only at the top of the wage – and skill – distribution.

Santosh Mehrotra is Visiting Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, University of Bath.

This article is republished from https://theconversation.com under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article at https://theconversation.com/indians-are-fleeing-their-growing-economy-to-work-abroad-even-in-conflict-zones-heres-how-to-create-more-jobs-at-home-222092 

ICYMI

Skin in the game: You may not be a gamer, but chances are you’ve heard of Counter-Strike if you’ve ever owned a PC. One of the most famous first-person multiplayer shooter games of all time, its offshoot CS:GO (short for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) alone has been downloaded by an estimated 205 million people since 2012. Counter-Strike’s developer-publisher Valve accounts for 50-70% of all PC game downloads. It also owns Steam, which distributes Valve and third-party games and hosts a thriving user-generated forum. Consider the scale of it all when you read this Barron’s investigation into Counter-Strike’s skin gambling economy. Highly-prized in-game items, such as cosmetic changes to weapons, are converted into digital currency on gambling sites. Game streamers on Twitch and YouTube sponsored by such skin gambling sites are reeling in underage players, and worse, Barron’s found that Valve was pulled up in 2016 for not addressing this menace… only to have seemingly gotten away with less than a rap on the knuckles.

Testing times: When students had no test centres to take the SAT in, colleges in the US began waiving the requirement or at least, making it optional. Now, four years later, they’re finding it hard to close the proverbial Pandora's box. Prestigious American colleges are unsure whether to continue keeping SAT scores—a long-standing requirement—or reinstate it. This story in Intelligencer explores the impact of going test-optional on both students and colleges. The SAT has been fraught with controversies as studies increasingly show a higher score is correlated with being rich and racially privileged than with intelligence. Universities that don’t require the test are using the ambiguity to admit students who tend to score less on standardised tests, such as people of colour and students from poorer homes. They’re also earning more as students, unsure whether they’ll get admitted to the college of their choice, apply to many more places. However, some top colleges are concerned that admitting students who don’t disclose their scores (assuming they were low) will be unable to keep up with their rigorous coursework. At the heart of it is an age-old debate raging in the US and in India: do tests reflect merit or privilege? 

How David Zaslav survived Avada Kedavra: If you’re a fan of Harry Potter, you’ll know the story of The Boy Who Lived starts with him surviving the killing curse Avada Kedavra as a baby. Yet, the Harry Potter franchise and its creator, author JK Rowling, came dangerously close to squandering their place in literary history. Rowling’s contracts have allowed her tight control over how her characters are used, ensuring Warner Bros Discovery cannot churn out Harry Potter adaptations in the manner of Marvel or DC. But Rowling has very nearly killed her own standing with her young fan base worldwide with her staunch opposition to the rights of trans women, who she says cannot be the same as ‘real’ (read: cisgendered) women. But business > politics, which is why Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav spent months flying to the UK to placate the author. This story in The Wall Street Journal traces the history of Harry Potter from the 1990s, when Warner Bros first acquired it, to today, as the studio tries to loosen Rowling’s control and create a new TV series on the original books costing hundreds of millions of dollars for the streaming service Max. This is a story of how the studio, the author, and The Boy, survived the business equivalent of the killing curse.  

Moving targets: You know about the digital ad industrial complex. But do you know about its scale? If you don’t, here’s a mind-boggling explainer in WIRED, detailed through the profile of one man: Mike Yeagley. A defence contractor with a background in location data scouting, Yeagley worked with companies such as PlaceIQ and PlanetRisk. The former has the CIA as an investor. The US intelligence agency has a venture capital arm called In-Q-Tel that pours money into “social media monitoring services”. And geolocation-based ad data is a big part of it. Every individual who uses a smartphone has an anonymised advertising ID that’s bidden for on ad exchanges. One data broking company, UberMedia, collected 200,000 bid requests per second on mobiles worldwide at its peak. But such data isn’t just used by advertisers. It’s purchased by federal agencies to spy on refugees, inner circles of heads of state, and people like you and us in a giant effort called ADINT, or ad intelligence.

Solitary on Mars: “A human mission to a planet so distant that a cry for help would have to travel through the solar system for 22 minutes before it was heard.” That takes some time to sink in. It’s not easy to fathom the isolation that a human would face far away from Earth. Even on terra firma, humans devised isolation as a method of torture precisely because of what it can do to the psyche. Mars Dune Alpha is a Mars habitat Nasa built in a warehouse at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to study the psychological effects of isolation. Under the project called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) for slightly more than a year, four people would live as if they were on the red planet, complete with astronaut food, experiments, surveys and innumerable directions from mission control. All that is in preparation for human landing on Mars, which Nasa expects would be no later than 2040. This story in The New York Times Magazine is about keeping sane in isolation and monotony for months and maybe years. 

No country for women: An ageing South Korea has been trying to get its citizens to have babies. The country has the lowest—and falling—birth rate in the world. If it continues, its population will halve by the turn of the century. Korea has spent $286 billion in the past 20 years trying to incentivise couples to have babies. It pays cash, subsidised housing, cab services, and even exemption from conscription for young dads of three children. Throwing money has not helped because the underlying cause is women do not want to have children. In fact, no one consulted them in the first place. Korea’s work culture and social norms, as in many other countries, treat women and men differently. Women end up working and taking care of home and family with barely any help from their partners. It is pushing women to stay single and find everyday contentment, if not happiness, in workplace success. This BBC story paints a stark picture of a broken society.

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Spenser A. Warren

Fresh US intelligence circulating in Congress reportedly indicates that Russia is developing an anti-satellite weapon in space with a nuclear component.

News reports speculating about what the weapon could be abounded after Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, released a cryptic but alarming statement on Feb. 14, 2024, regarding the information, which he framed as a “serious national security threat.” Some sources suggested a nuclear weapon. Others suspect a weapon that is nuclear-powered but not a nuclear warhead.

The White House confirmed the following day that the Russian system under development is a space-based anti-satellite weapon and that if it were deployed, it would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans weapons of mass destruction in space. The Kremlin responded by dismissing the reports as a “malicious fabrication.”

While the exact weapon remains unknown to the public, the events raise the spectre of nuclear weapons in space at a tense time. Relations between the United States and Russia are at their lowest in decades, and Russia is currently waging a war of aggression in Ukraine.

As a scholar of nuclear strategy, I know the US reports come at a time when the nuclear world order is shifting significantly. China and others are expanding and modernising their arsenals. Iran is close to being able to produce a nuclear weapon. Other countries may eventually want their own nuclear weapons.

At the same time, several countries are developing new weapons to attack targets in space. This list includes Russia, the US, China and India, although none currently field weapons in space.

Cold War schemes

The recent revelations about Russian space weapons raise the spectre that countries may decide to deploy nuclear weapons in space at some point. Some have tried before.

The US and Soviet Union researched nuclear detonations in space during the Cold War. In the late 1960s, the Soviets tested a missile that could be placed in low Earth orbit and be capable of coming out of orbit and carrying a nuclear warhead to Earth.

Neither country placed nuclear weapons in space permanently. Both were parties to the Outer Space Treaty and the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which outlawed nuclear detonations in space. Moscow and Washington negotiated these treaties to contain the Cold War arms race.

These treaties constrained behaviour in the late Cold War. However, Russian violations of nuclear arms control treaties, as well as US and Russian withdrawal from various treaties since 2002, suggest they may not in the future.

Nukes in space

But why would a country want space nukes? There are a few reasons.

Countries could point space-based nuclear weapons toward Earth. In theory, weapons from space could avoid early detection radars and missile defenses. However, there are significant disadvantages to firing nuclear weapons directly from space.

Placing weapons in space to strike targets on Earth may have defensive or offensive motivations. Weapons that evade missile defenses might ensure nuclear deterrence. This is a defensive strategy intended to prevent aggression against the state that placed them in space.

Alternatively, these weapons may help a country achieve a first-strike capability. A first strike requires the ability to destroy enough of an adversary’s nuclear weapons – or the nuclear command, control and communications systems necessary to manage them – to prevent nuclear retaliation.

Countries could point space-based weapons toward other regions of space, like the Russian weapon under development. This conjures images of nuclear weapons striking asteroids to defend Earth from a collision.

Satellite killers

The reality is less dramatic but no less worrisome. The most likely use would be to destroy an enemy’s military satellites. Damaging navigation satellites would hinder an adversary’s ability to fight a war. Both precision-strike weapons and ground-based forces rely on satellite constellations like GPS or the Russian GLONASS system to find and reach targets.

Countries may also want the ability to destroy an enemy’s space weapons, including space-based missile defenses. While no country has deployed these weapons yet, leaders may fear future capabilities and deploy space weapons first to hedge against this threat.

Most dangerously, these weapons could destroy or damage satellites critical to an enemy’s nuclear command, control and communications system, including early warning satellites that track missile launches and communication satellites that relay military orders.

The idea of attacking an enemy’s satellites has a long history.

Nuclear weapons damage satellites because of a wave of gamma radiation that is created by a nuclear detonation. This radiation damages critical subsystems within a satellite.

But such weapons produce significant drawbacks. A detonation would damage any satellites within range of the gamma radiation – including those of the attacking country, its allies and neutral countries.

However, a space-based nuclear anti-satellite weapon may have some advantages over other options for attacking countries. Ground-based anti-satellite systems can only reach targets in low Earth orbit.

Even a nuclear-powered anti-satellite weapon in space would create a novel threat without a nuclear warhead. Such a device would have a greater range than anti-satellite weapons on the ground and could perform its mission over an extended period of time. Both factors would increase the number of satellites it could damage or destroy.

Many of the satellites a country may want to take out are located at higher orbits beyond the range of ground-based systems. This is true for some of the US systems that Russia may want to target.

The Kremlin’s interest in space weapons could be an attempt to reduce America’s capability to fight a war; threaten nuclear command, control and communications systems; or hedge against space-based missile defenses. Alternatively, the Russian defence industry may drive their development for profit.

New arms race?

Whatever their initial purpose, placing nuclear weapons in space could be destabilising. While there is not a universally accepted definition of strategic stability, scholars frequently define it as a combination of crisis stability, based on the risk of nuclear escalation during a military crisis, and arms race stability – when countries can avoid actions and reactions that spiral into a costly and dangerous arms race.

Space-based nuclear weapons increase the risk that a country would resort to nuclear weapons during a crisis. Both weapons pointing toward Earth and those aimed at targets in space create incentives to use nuclear weapons preemptively.

The threat of either strike creates use-it-or-lose-it pressure, incentivising a preemptive nuclear strike to limit the damage an adversary can do. In turn, a preemptive nuclear strike would likely provoke further escalation, eventually ending in a total nuclear war.

Placing nuclear weapons in space could spark a new arms race. Because one purpose of space weapons is to destroy an adversary’s space weapons, the U.S. may respond to Russian weapons with their own. Russia may then counter with new weapons to maintain its advantage. Others, like China, may react to American weapons, which could prompt a response from India, followed by one from Pakistan.

Escalatory pressures and the threat of an arms race exist even if the first mover places weapons in space defensively. Introducing space weapons could create what international relations scholars call a security dilemma: actions that enhance one country’s security but make another insecure.

Defensive and offensive weapons are often indistinguishable. The weapons that could enhance one country’s security by hedging against space-based missile defence could also be used offensively against nuclear command, control and communications systems. Even if leaders in one country thought the other was acting defensively today, there is no way to know they will not act offensively tomorrow.

Spenser A. Warren is Postdoctoral Fellow in Technology and International Security, University of California, San Diego.

This article is republished from https://theconversation.com under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article at https://theconversation.com/is-russia-looking-to-put-nukes-in-space-doing-so-would-undermine-global-stability-and-ignite-an-anti-satellite-arms-race-223702 

ICYMI

How to build castles in the  air  UK: Bangladesh, ranked among the most corrupt countries in the world, does not allow its citizens to amass wealth abroad. At least, that’s what its central bank says. Yet, a former minister, Saifuzzaman Chowdhury, has accumulated property worth more than £200 million ($253.4 million) in the UK, this Bloomberg investigation found. These include tony townhouses in London’s richest neighbourhoods and cheap student apartments in Liverpool, even properties in Manhattan. What’s more, many of these properties have been bought and resold by companies owned by Chowdhury and funded by bank loans. These transactions have driven up prices of his homes, adding heft to his sprawling real estate empire. The UK has been trying to stem the tide of foreign billionaires laundering wealth in the country, especially since oligarchs began moving their money abroad during the Russian War. But the fines are paltry, and agents and lawyers have little incentive to say no to business worth millions, making the crackdown ineffective. Chowdhury’s wealth shows how the UK, for all its institutional strength, continues to be a safe haven for politically-exposed elites from around the world. 

Barons of wealth: Rothschild is a name deeply etched in the modern era of global finance and wealth. Perhaps the best comparison to be made would be the Italian banking family, the House of Medici. The Rothschilds are arguably one of the most influential bankers to the wealthy. There are two branches of the family, one based in Paris and the other in Switzerland, which were operating on separate turfs until recently. Now the Paris Rothschilds have entered wealth management, the traditional territory of the Swiss branch, Edmond de Rothschild Group, led by baroness Arianne de Rothschild. Alexandre de Rothschld, chairman of Rothschild & Co, is now muscling into Arianne’s territories, rapidly buying up companies and teams to add heft. The French Rothschild wants to merge with the Swiss one, but the latter does not want to. The two had fought over the family name in 2015 but settled in 2018 with a deal on how to use the family name. That has not stopped customers from being confused though, reports Bloomberg. 

Bought in parts, sold for parts: Paramount Global, owner of MTV and maker of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun franchise, is a child of a bygone Hollywood era. Its founder Sumner Redstone was best known for extravagant parties and a string of young girlfriends. Redstone is now dead, and his empire of movie theatres and cable TV is looking more and more like a relic. In this long story for Bloomberg Businessweek, Lucas Shaw breaks down how Paramount declined from a money making machine to a dying business gutted by the decline of cable and the rise of Big Tech in the entertainment business. After years of rebuffing lucrative takeover offers, heir Shari Redstone is now seriously considering new ones coming her way. But then, when Sumner was buying up businesses to build Paramount, it was advantage Redstone. Now buyers are circling the pit, willing to wait for a bargain as Paramount declines further. This is a warning for media entrepreneurs everywhere: if you can’t evolve with the times, just cash out. 

Not so utopian after all: Auroville was founded over 50 years ago as “the city the earth needs”. Conceived as a self-sustaining eco-city that’d support 50,000 people from 60-plus countries, it’s currently home to just 3,300 residents… perhaps for a reason. In this detailed ground report from Auroville, Atmos details the goings on about town: infighting that’s resulted in two councils and two working committees but most of all, the schism between its predominantly-white residents and the locals who helped build Auroville in the first place. As the city expanded, village lands were snapped up for thousands of rupees—land that would’ve sold for lakhs and even crores today. Several villages around the city still exist to “service” it, and even Tamil Aurovillians are relatively inactive in decision-making. That’s the bitter truth about a supposedly-egalitarian township.

Netting problems: For long, the most effective weapon in the war against malaria was cheap mosquito nets. Papua New Guinea (PNG) and its population of more than 10 million people experienced this firsthand. But whatever little progress they witnessed soon turned to dust. By 2022, PNG was grappling with an 88% spike in infections. Why? Because they relied on nets made by the Swiss company Vestergaard. Sometime in 2017, Vestergaard introduced an update to their nets called PermaNet 2.0. This was the root of the malaria upsurge, because the new nets were less effective due to the change. Older versions of the nets had ‘forever chemicals’, which were replaced with cheaper, inferior alternatives. This one decision has set back the fight against malaria by years. To understand more about how public health was compromised for business, read this insightful piece by Bloomberg. 

Betting the farm: You’d think a psychiatrist would know better; then again, no one’s safe from the dopamine trap. The reason gambling is so addictive is because anticipation—rather than the outcome of, say, spinning the slot machine—is what causes the high. The brain releases dopamine when you place a bet, which explains why so many continue gambling despite losing their life savings and sometimes, even their lives to it. . This story in The Wall Street Journal focuses on Kavita Fischer as a stand-in for Americans who’ve succumbed to the lure of betting apps. Despite multiple requests to her “VIP” customer representative at betting giant DraftKings to delete her account, the mental health professional never got the help she received. Instead, betting platforms kept her hooked with credits, cash bonuses, and other incentives as she continued losing nearly half a million dollars on the habit.

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Robyn Klingler-Vidra and Steven Lai

China’s national champions for computer chip – or semiconductor – design and manufacturing, HiSilicon and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), are making waves in Washington. 

SMIC was long considered a laggard. Despite being the recipient of billions of dollars from the Chinese government since its founding in 2000, it remained far from the technological frontier. But that perception — and the self-assurance it gave the US — is changing. 

In August 2023, Huawei launched its high-end Huawei Mate 60 smartphone. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (an American think tank based in Washington DC), the launch “surprised the US” as the chip powering it showed that Chinese self-sufficiency in HiSilicon’s semiconductor design and SMIC’s manufacturing capabilities were catching up at an alarming pace.

More recent news that Huawei and SMIC are scheming to mass-produce so-called 5-nanometre processor chips in new Shanghai production facilities has only stoked further fears about leaps in their next-generation prowess. These chips remain a generation behind the current cutting-edge ones, but they show that China’s move to create more advanced chips is well on track, despite US export controls.

The US has long managed to maintain its clear position as the frontrunner in chip design, and has ensured it was close allies who were supplying the manufacturing of cutting-edge chips. But now it faces formidable competition from China, who’s technological advance carries profound economic, geopolitical and security implications.

Semiconductors are a big business

For decades, chipmakers have sought to make ever more compact products. Smaller transistors result in lower energy consumption and faster processing speeds, so massively improve the performance of a microchip. 

Moore’s Law — the expectation that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years — has remained valid in chips designed in the Netherlands and the US, and manufactured in Korea and Taiwan. Chinese technology has therefore remained years behind. While the world’s frontier has moved to 3-nanometre chips, Huawei’s homemade chip is at 7 nanometres. 

Maintaining this distance has been important for economic and security reasons. Semiconductors are the backbone of the modern economy. They are critical to telecommunications, defence and artificial intelligence.

The US push for “made in the USA” semiconductors has to do with this systemic importance. Chip shortages wreak havoc on global production since they power so many of the products that define contemporary life. 

Today’s military prowess even directly relies on chips. In fact, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “all major US defence systems and platforms rely on semiconductors.” 

The prospect of relying on Chinese-made chips — and the backdoors, Trojan horses and control over supply that would pose — are unacceptable to Washington and its allies.

Stifling China’s chip industry

Since the 1980s, the US has helped establish and maintain a distribution of chip manufacturing that is dominated by South Korea and Taiwan. But the US has recently sought to safeguard its technological supremacy and independence by bolstering its own manufacturing ability.

Through large-scale industrial policy, billions of dollars are being poured into US chip manufacturing facilities, including a multi-billion dollar plant in Arizona. 

The second major tack is exclusion. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has subjected numerous investment and acquisition deals to review, ultimately even blocking some in the name of US national security. This includes the high-profile case of Broadcom’s attempt to buy Qualcommin 2018 due to its China links.

In 2023, the US government issued an executive order inhibiting the export of advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment and technologies to China. By imposing stringent export controls, the US aims to impede China’s access to critical components. 

The hypothesis has been that HiSilicon and SMIC would continue to stumble as they attempt self-sufficiency at the frontier. The US government has called on its friends to adopt a unified stance around excluding chip exports to China. Notably, ASML, a leading Dutch designer, has halted shipments of its hi-tech chips to China on account of US policy. 

Washington has also limited talent flows to the Chinese semiconductor industry. The regulations to limit the movements of talent are motivated by the observation that even “godfathers” of semiconductor manufacturing in Japan, Korea and Taiwan went on to work for Chinese chipmakers — taking their know-how and connections with them. 

This, and the recurring headlines about the need for more semiconductor talent in the US, has fuelled the clampdown on the outflow of American talent. 

Finally, the US government has explicitly targeted China’s national champion firms: Huawei and SMIC. It banned the sale and import of equipment from Huawei in 2019 and has imposed sanctions on SMIC since 2020. 

What’s at stake?

The “chip war” is about economic and security dominance. Beijing’s ascent to the technological frontier would mean an economic boom for China and bust for the US. And it would have profound security implications.

Economically, China’s emergence as a major semiconductor player could disrupt existing supply chains, reshape the division of labour and distribution of human capital in the global electronics industry. From a security perspective, China’s rise poses a heightened risk of vulnerabilities in Chinese-made chips being exploited to compromise critical infrastructure or conduct cyber espionage. 

Chinese self-sufficiency in semiconductor design and manufacturing would also undermine Taiwan’s “silicon shield”. Taiwan’s status as the leading manufacturer of semiconductors has so far deterred China from using force to attack the island.

China is advancing its semiconductor capabilities. The economic, geopolitical and security implications will be profound and far-reaching. Given the stakes that both superpowers face, what we can be sure about is that Washington will not easily acquiesce, nor will Beijing give up.

Robyn Kingler-Vidra is Associate Dean, Global engagement and Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and Sustainability at King’s College, London. Steven Hai is Affiliate Fellow, King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence at King’s College, London

This article is republished from https://theconversation.com under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article at https://theconversation.com/chinas-chip-industry-is-gaining-momentum-it-could-alter-the-global-economic-and-security-landscape-222958

ICYMI

The Ozempic town: Kalundborg is probably the most important town in Denmark, more so than its capital city of Copenhagen, situated 100-odd kilometres away. It is in this town of 16,000+ where Europe’s most valuable company — Novo Nordisk is based. Novo Nordisk found initial fame in selling drugs used in the treatment of diabetes. Its new-found success, making it a household name, however, comes from weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. That race to maximise profits have played a significant role in Kalundborg’s growth, with the company investing a lot into the town and paying a lot of taxes. This detailed story in The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, looks at the town’s unique history — from its pre-war shipbuilding roots to becoming home to Carmen, the hair curler company in the 1960s, to the Novo Nordisk era when Kalundborg is a city transformed.

Guided gamblers: “The average time an Indian trader holds an option is less than 30 minutes.” That is a startling figure. But there is more; 90% of retail traders lose money in derivatives and their collective losses added up to $5.4 billion in FY22. Skyrocketing stock indices, swelling company valuations and burgeoning individual wealth has been breathtakingly covered by the media and content creators on social media. It has drawn million of retail investors, a sizeable number of them for the first time, to the stock markets, and often to instruments that require knowledge and patience which they sorely lack. Bloomberg reports how social media influencers have interjected themselves into this milieu as guides along the roads to riches, offering courses and tips on private messaging groups and becoming millionaires themselves in the bargain. They also double up as a funnel for broking firms. It has surprised market regulator Sebi that enthusiasm for short-term trading has not died down despite losses. It is now punishing unscrupulous finfluencers and erecting safeguards. But it also does not want retail participation to dwindle. After all, there is no market without speculators.

The real deal: It isn’t surprising that the elites want to keep something exclusive to them. For a long time, that something was Davos. Of late though, Davos is anything but exclusive, leaving The Institut International d'Études Bancaires to take its place. The institute has been bringing together the who’s who of European finance and politics for 73 years now. The institute takes its exclusivity very seriously; members, meeting agenda and minutes are never made public. The three-day biannual extravaganza seeks to promote familiarity amongst the leaders of the industry, with that familiarity leading to eventual partnership. Like the 1997 merger of Swiss Bank Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland for $29.3 billion. To know more about this world and its secrets, read this interesting article in the Financial Times. 

Harbinger of change: That’s how VCs would describe themselves. Everything they touch has the potential to change the world because they’ve the midas touch. That 99% of VC bets fail is both, a fact well-known and easily forgotten. Yet, VCs are glorified and praised for their world changing zeal, if not anything else. Trail Mix Ventures or TMV is another such VC but it’s different because they’re actually putting their money where their mouth is. Established by Marina Hadjipateras and Soraya Darabi, TMV has invested in startups that fit the impossible trident of fixing the climate, fixing humanity, and making piles of money. Their latest bet is on the logistics sector, with investments in startups that are solving for per-voyage emissions, cargo demand, managing warehouses etcetera. It’s not an easy task, but this detailed profile of the women behind TMV in the Wired does a pretty decent job of explaining their adventures. 

Depp and Salman play Jai and Veeru: Fighting off sexual assault charges in an ugly public battle can really leave a man lonely. Or worse, still, fighting off charges of brutally murdering and dismembering a famous journalist. Perhaps that is why actor Johnny Depp and Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud are hanging out together so much. Or maybe it’s just the money. This story in Vanity Fair is an inside look into the budding bromance between Depp and MBS. It started with the Saudis offering to fund Depp’s flailing film Jeanne du Barry and has now ended in guitar strumming sessions and late-night chats on MBS’ luxury yacht on the Red Sea. Depp has joined a bevy of Hollywood (and Bollywood) celebrities supporting Saudi Arabia’s ambitions to become a global entertainment centre, attending the Red Sea film festival and shooting parts of their film in the kingdom. Can Depp help MBS make inroads into ‘progressive’ Hollywood the way Saudis have spent their way into Silicon Valley and international sport? If he succeeds, this friendship could be the image whitewashing redemption arc both men need. 

When cultures collide: In times of great polarisation and ethnic violence, we forget that cultures are more complex than we realise. Take the example of the 8th century CE language Arwi. This story in the BBC traces the history and evolution of the language, written in a modified Arabic script, but with words and meanings borrowed from the Tamil language. Arwi was born from the interaction of Arab seafaring traders and local Tamil communities, mostly from the need to understand each other and conduct trade seamlessly. Slowly, it became the language that brought together intercultural couples: Arab traders often married Tamil muslim women and turned business ties into personal ones. But the language is dying out and old books written in the language are often rescued from various states of abandonment. Yet, hundreds of villages and communities in Tamil Nadu painstakingly preserve oral and written Arwi traditions; some younger folks have even built an Arwi language Android keyboard!

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Shandana Khan Mohmand 

Cricketer-turned-politician and former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s fate was sealed last summer when his Pakistan Tehreeq-e-Insaf party (PTI) workers allegedly attacked a military corp commander’s house in Lahore. That was an affront the all-powerful army would not forget. 

The Pakistan state went after Khan and PTI with a vengeance. Just ahead of the elections, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Khan was anyway being held in jail since August while on trial. His party was stripped of its election symbol—a cricket bat—and candidates were forced to contest as independents with different symbols in different places. Nomination papers of most PTI candidates were rejected putting the fairness and legitimacy of the polls in question, and political stability in jeopardy.

Achieving political stability is paramount to addressing numerous challenges, including a weak economy, soaring inflation and escalating foreign debt.

Pakistan does not have a good track record of free and fair elections.

For almost 34 years, the country has been under direct military rule. When not in power, the military has resorted to political engineering to manipulate poll outcomes or dismissed governments that were not to its liking. 

Voters, who?

All the talk as Pakistan heads to the polls on February 8 was about the two main political parties, their beleaguered leaders and the military’s role in choosing who will govern the country.

What’s not talked about so much is how Pakistan’s 128 million voters participate in elections.

Pakistan has lurched from one crisis to another: devastating floods, an intense economic crisis, near bankruptcy, a cost of living crisis, and an impossible debt crisis marked by rounds of negotiations with, and bailouts by, the IMF.

The past 20 months have also seen Pakistan’s army become more visible in politics. Even those who insisted it did not play a role in the 2018 election, which delivered Imran to power, have argued that it will determine the results in coming days. The Pakistan military does not want a genuinely popular civilian political leader in power backed by an electoral mandate. It also wants a civilian government that would protect the core interests of the military in policy-making.

The military would no longer like to be burdened with the responsibilities of power. Instead, it prefers a “guided democracy” – a formal democratic structure maintained and legitimised through elections. This façade of democracy shrouds the actual role and power of the military as an institution in the civil-military equation.

But if an election is heavily manipulated, what does it mean for the voting behaviour of the millions who lined up at voting booths on election day?

Pakistan’s electoral turnout has ranged between 44% and 54% over the last three elections. Although exact figures are not yet available, various analyst estimates suggest it has not crossed 50% this year too. That means about 60 million people turned out on February 8.

The general story on voting behaviour in Pakistan is that it is determined by relations of patronage and clientelism; by ethnic and kinship politics; or by dependence on powerful landlords. While this is not untrue, it is marked by so much variation across location, class, and gender that this characterisation is essentially unhelpful in understanding the country’s voting behaviour.

A majority of Pakistan’s voters are rural. This is the group that is usually characterised as dependent on the economic and social power of landlords. These landlords use their power and their ready vote bank to become dynastic politicians in Pakistan’s political parties.

Parties thus function as networks of such ‘electable’ politicians that can carry their vote base from party to party, leading to a phenomenon of frequent party switches.

Yet, if we dig deep, as this book Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters did, we find that this defines a very small minority of voters. A reduction in land sizes and other economic and social changes over the decades means that this is now a dated story.

What we find instead is a fair amount of agency that rural voters exercise, but given the weakness of Pakistan’s political parties, this agency is exercised through collectives organised around kinship, or biraderis.

Again, while some voters are drawn into these groups on the basis of social linkages, for many voters these groups represent a space in which to increase their numbers to better negotiate with landlords and politicians for scarce services and other benefits.

In many cases these are relationships of pure clientelism – my vote in return for street paving or teacher attendance at the village school – but for a large majority, these represent more strategic forms of organising politically in the most readily available spaces.

Why these are the only spaces available has to do with the weakening of student, labour, and trade unions and political parties in the military-dominated politics of Pakistan.

The main source of variation in rural politics comes from economic and social equality– more unequal villages and members of lower biraderi groups (which function much like castes) have more dependent and clientelistic politics, while those of higher castes and in more equal villages can use their vote for more strategic bargaining at election time.

A very rapid pace of urbanisation means that more and more of Pakistan’s voters now live in urban areas where the logic of politics is not based on landlord power or the ability to strategise within biraderis.

A study in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city with a population of over 11 million, shows that voting behaviour here revolves instead around partisan preferences or support for political parties and their leaders.

Voters in cities are driven by the ideological, populist, or charisma-led appeal of political parties, rather than by personalistic promises or co-ethnicity. This is not different from how politics functions in many cities around the world, including those in more developed countries. The variation here comes from the usual differences of class, age, and gender.

This brings us to a particularly important group of voters – women. Pakistan has one of the largest gender gaps in voting in the world – about 11 million fewer women than men voted in the last election.

Part of this is explained by difficulties in registering women as voters, but the gap above represents those who are already registered, and this gap is larger in urban than in rural areas. There is one major reason for the gender gap – the fact that women remain invisible to political parties and policy processes in Pakistan.

Even though women hold 20 percent of seats in the national parliament, parties do not see women as a distinct political constituency with needs, preferences, and demands that are different from those expressed by men.

Why then do women in rural areas vote more than in urban areas? A simple explanation is the collective form of voting discussed above, which works to draw out all members of a kinship group to help inflate numbers and signal strength to patrons and politicians. Where voters are individualised, such as in cities, women disappear off the political agenda.

Most of the analysis above hinges on the weakness of political parties. These must be strengthened to allow other forms of mobilisation and organisation for rural voters; to respond to party programmes for urban supporters; and to recognise and mobilise women as a distinct and valuable constituency.

Research has shown that attempts to mobilise both women and men in urban households can close the gender gap very quickly.

The strengthening of political party organisation is difficult in contexts where non-political forces are involved in electoral politics. But the good news is that the increasingly strategic voting behaviour of most rural and urban voters makes it harder to manoeuvre elections, at least on election day.

The elections may be rigged and without credibility for PTI sympathisers, according to political scientist and historian Ayesha Jalal. “But there are other parties in the fray that accept the exceptional and constraining circumstances in which national polls are being held,” Jalal, Mary Richardson Professor of History and Director of the Centre for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University, Boston, US, told 360info in an interview. 

“In other words, whatever the doubts about the fairness of the 2024 elections, the exercise is necessary constitutionally and better than the alternative — martial law — in what is a bitterly divided and ungovernable country.”

Shandana Khan Mohmand is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, UK, and the lead of its Governance Research cluster and Pakistan Hub.

The Intersection editors have also used sections from ‘Pakistan, Where Democracy Wears An Army Uniform’ by Ajay Darshan Behera, Professor at MMAJ Academy of International Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, in this article.

Both pieces were originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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Our daily podcast, The Signal Daily, has been nominated for the HT Smartcast x Mint Podmasters Awards in the Business and Entrepreneurship category. 

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Dean there, done that: What do some of the US’ most prestigious B-schools—Harvard, Cornell, Kellogg, the Chicago Booth School, Stern, and McDonough—have in common? They all either had or have people of Indian origin as deans. Consider that over 80 Indian-Americans serving as deans and senior academics are part of a WhatsApp group. The Financial Times reveals that easy availability of tuition in the country is a huge factor, and so is Indians’ general reverence for higher education and/or academic excellence, which propelled a generation of doctoral students to rise up the ranks of university administrations. But there’s a flip side. Almost all these deans studied in India and settled in the US, which underlines India’s perennial “brain drain” problem and “the weaknesses of India’s own higher education system.”

Bit of a stretch: At the peak of his career—if one can even call it that—Ben Armstrong aka BitBoy had over a million YouTube subscribers. That, and around $40 million worth of crypto… or so he claimed. Turns out the supposed millionaire’s assets belonged to the holding company that managed his video production business. The New York Times profiles the crypto influencer whose rise-and-fall trajectory mimics that of the industry itself: the shilling of shitcoins, wary business partners, and the promotion of a rags-to-riches, ostentatious lifestyle that’s a façade. This one’s got extra masala though. It guest stars FTX, a supercar that triggered Armstrong’s downfall (yup), and an extramarital affair. Don’t miss.

Going for a (tail)spin: In May 2021, Patrick Britton-Harr, a Florida-based serial entrepreneur who’d previously dabbled in the medical services business, set his sights on a booming $25 billion industry that got a pandemic leg-up: private aviation. With AeroVanti, Britton-Harr wanted to disrupt the expensive space by opting for a membership-based model, where members pay a monthly fee of $1,000 and $1,500 per flight hour, way cheaper than industry standards. With a supposed $110 million in funding, 300 members in its first year, and five leased jets, AeroVanti was poised to take off. It did for a while, before Britton-Harr turned into a toxic bro (firing his pilot father, not following regulations on pilot safety, and not paying bills), and the company nosedived before briefly shuttering operations last year. Today, AeroVanti is the subject of multiple lawsuits and federal investigations. How did it all go wrong? This longread in the Bloomberg Businessweek has all the deets.

An agritech spring in the funding winter: In the ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) years of 2021-22, cash rained on India’s agritech startups. It didn’t amount to much. Funding fell by nearly half in 2023. And although Indian agriculture is valued at $400 billion, not one of India’s well-funded agritech startups has become a ‘unicorn’ ( >$1 billion valuation). This story in Mint explains how investors driven by FOMO pumped cash in agritech entrepreneurs, who had little on-ground experience and were solving problems that don’t exist. Several, such as WayCool, pivoted to other business models in search of profit. All is not lost though. The funding winter put the spotlight on tech innovations for farmers that take time to scale up. Meanwhile, investors who focus exclusively on agriculture say India may not need an agritech unicorn but will have an agritech IPO soon. 

Falling bird: Jack Dorsey genuinely believed Elon Musk could save Twitter. Dorsey, the founder and twice-chief executive of the micro-blogging site in two separate stints, even advised him to take the company private. He wanted Musk to pivot the company away from advertising as, otherwise, it will never be free. “If it has a centralised entity behind it, it will be attacked,” he told the mega billionaire, who wanted to turn Twitter into a true champion of freedom of speech (in hindsight, for himself). That is, until he discovered the perils when others—for instance, activists who beseeched advertisers to pull out of Twitter—enjoy that freedom. He decreed those activists banished from the platform. But even Dorsey underestimated Musk’s remarkable ineptitude and lack of empathy, and watched helplessly as he ran the company to the ground. He (Dorsey still owns 3% of Twitter, now X) also understood his own folly. “It all went south,” he admitted. This fascinating account is a Bloomberg adaptation from Kurt Wagner’s Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter’s Soul.

Emperor Penguin: One doesn’t normally associate the publishing world with cut-throat competition and intense boardroom drama. But when you’re as gargantuan as Penguin Random House, what more can you expect? The publisher has endured a rocky few years, with antitrust regulations and public in-fighting among executives. Perhaps that’s why it opted for a calm and self-effacing Nihar Malaviya as its chief executive. While his business acumen is unquestionable, some have wondered whether he possesses the literary know-how to churn bestsellers. The fact that most in his staff don’t know his reading preferences probably adds to this… wondering. Check out The New York Times’ gripping profile of Malaviya in this breezy read. 

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Vasudha Narayanan

The consecration rituals of the icon of Lord Rama were performed in a newly built mega-temple in the town of Ayodhya, India, on Jan. 22, 2024. The prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, performed the rituals during a 48-minute period considered auspicious by Hindu astrologers. Lord Rama, an avatara or incarnation of Vishnu, is one of the most important deities in the Hindu tradition.

Amid the carefully staged pageantry, the media’s hysteria over the guest lists and the celebrations of exultant Hindus – not just in India but from Golden Gate Bridge to Times Square – the religious significance of the rituals, known in Sanskrit as “prana pratishtha,” or “establishment of breath,” was completely lost.

Media all around the world, particularly in India, referred to the icon of Lord Rama as an “idol.” However, the term does not capture the Hindu belief that matter transforms into divine reality during this ritual. Although there are many nuanced Sanskrit words, there is no English term that does justice. In fact, the word “idol” has pejorative implications.

As a professor of religion who has studied the religious significance of deities in temples, I want to highlight this important ritual, which is said to transform the material image.

From matter to deity

The ritual of “prana pratishtha” is a culmination of several days or even weeks of preparation. At crucial moments during the performance of the ritual, many Hindus, though not all, believe that the divine being comes to abide in a carefully carved icon.

In an idea roughly analogous to transubstantiation in the Catholic Church – where, when the priest consecrates the bread and wine, the whole substance of the bread and wine is believed to become the body of Christ – through prana pratishtha, the material icon becomes a divine presence.

Although several Hindu texts speak of the supreme being as being beyond form, gender and even number, paradoxically, Hindus also see the supreme entity as graciously taking a “material” form and abiding in a temple as an incarnate deity worthy of worship.

Despite textual and regional variations, there are many common practices in this ritual. During the process of prana pratishtha, this image carved by a master sculptor is initially purified, then covered in water, grains, fragrant substances, herbs, flowers and other materials. In doing so, it is said to absorb the energies of the universe. Texts called “Puranas” and “Agamas,” composed in the first millennium C.E., give many details for the procedure.

There are fire sacrifices in a pavilion outside, the deity is taken formally into the temple and also in a procession through the town, and there is recitation of mantras.

Precious stones and metals, as well as a yantra, a metal plate with geometrical drawings, are buried in the ground in the inner shrine where the deity is to be installed.

The eyes of the icon are also ritually opened. Since the unrestricted power or “shakti” of the deity is believed to blaze out through its gaze, a mirror is held in front of it both to guide the sculptor in opening the eyes carefully and also to reflect the power back to it. In Ayodhya, a scarf was removed from the eyes of the deity.

The consecration ceremony at the Rama temple in Ayodhya.

At the crucial time, the chief priest invokes the divine being, inviting it to abide in the icon. With the opening of the eyes and the invoking and transfer of breath, the material icon is said to be transformed into an incarnation of the deity.

Controversies over the temple land

The “prana pratishtha” rituals have been done in thousands of temples in India and globally. But the Ayodhya one has arguably drawn the most attention politically and has also been the most controversial.

The new temple has been built on the land where a 16th century mosque – the Babri Masjid – was destroyed by Hindu activists in December 1992. Some Hindus claim that the mosque had been built by razing a 15th century Rama temple, said to be the site of his birth. While there seems to be evidence that a temple stood where the mosque was built, scholars have disputed the claim that that spot was the very one where Rama was born. Representatives of Jainism, another ancient religion of India, have also claimed that a sixth century Jain temple existed on this site before the mosque was built. Several scholars have argued that the destruction of the mosque is directly connected with Hindu nationalism and communal violence.

Hindus’ and Muslims’ rights to worship at the site have been litigated for more than a hundred years, and in 2019, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the land be given to a Hindu trust and a five-acre lot be given to the Muslims to build a mosque. Building the temple was started soon after this judgement.

Politically, the attention accompanying the rites highlighted the metaphor of Rama “returning home.” It refers to an incident in the story of Rama as told in the ancient epic, the “Ramayana,” when he is exiled from Ayodhya on the eve of his coronation and returns home after 14 years of exile.

Devotees’ sentiments as well as speeches at the inauguration of the temple spoke of Rama’s return to Ayodhya after 500 years of being banished from his birthplace.

It was a clear reference to what the government and many Hindus believed to be a return of Rama to Ayodhya after his presence was “banished” with the building of the mosque in the 16th century.

‘Not in our names’

There were many Hindus who objected to the politicization of the event as well as the active role of the government and its agencies in the ritual fanfare. Indian Air Force choppers rained flowers on the temple after the consecration.

Some observers, including outsiders sympathetic to Hinduism, saw these rituals as a glorification of Modi, not Rama. The event was also contested in religious circles. Several monastic heads refused to join the event, but a prominent Hindu writer said that these religious leaders were not representative of Hinduism and refuted their objections.

Despite these controversies, for those Hindus who supported the building of the temple, it was a sacred moment. For during the prana pratishtha, the divine is said to become present in the icon, if the rituals are properly performed. The “idol” made of material substance is then transformed, and the temple becomes the home for the deity.

Vasudha Narayanan is Distinguished Professor of Religion, University of Florida.

This article is republished from https://theconversation.com under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article at https://theconversation.com/the-opening-of-indias-new-rama-temple-made-waves-but-heres-what-the-central-ritual-actually-meant-221715 

ICYMI

Decolonising space: At the height of the US-Russia (then USSR) space war, a wary world, still reeling from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, united to create the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. The dictum was idealistic: that space is “the province of all mankind”, and that signatories will operate in space only “for peaceful purposes”.

But today’s space wars—centred on launching commercial satellites—render the Outer Space Treaty obsolete, especially since there are no treaties or laws governing space traffic. There are over 9,000 active satellites and counting in low earth orbit, and most are operated by one company: Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As Amazon and other private operators scramble to profit from this lucrative industry and concerns mount over inevitable collisions and ensuing wars, budding space lawyers from the Global South are participating in mock trials that prep them for plausible conflicts. The trials are part of the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition (!). And the countries dominating the competition? South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Nigeria, and Chile, to name some. WIRED charts the fascinating story of an intrepid Zimbabwean team that almost reached the finals.

Stunning collapse: When you read this profile of the once high-flying genomics start-up 23andMe by The Wall Street Journal, there's a good chance you'd find similarities to Theranos. There’s a high-profile female founder in Anne Wojcicki (sister of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, ex-wife of Google’s Sergey Brin), high profile investors in Sequoia Capital and DST’s Yuri Milner, and A-list celebrities using its products. Today, it has all come crashing down, from its market cap (once worth $6 billion) to its reputation. Why? Business. 23andMe once wanted to collect and supply basic ancestry and health data “to give consumers more control over their healthcare”. That goal has now morphed into drug development, where 23andMe had an erstwhile partner in GSK. That resulted in a $69 subscription product, which hasn't scaled, summing up 23andMe’s execution failures.

Evergreen trope: In a perfect homage, Los Angeles is becoming a hub for one of the most famous tropes in cinema history: train robberies. Thieves are stealing from moving trains or stopping them in the middle by cutting the brake hoses. These trains generally transport e-commerce packages and the thefts indicate hints of collusion; thieves have come to target specific cars loaded with electronics and tires. This has become such a massive issue that the US Department of Homeland Security estimates $15-35 billion in annual losses from these thefts. A majority of these hijacked goods are laundered into the online ecosystem, turning up for sale on e-commerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Facebook Marketplace through third party sellers. It’s like the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Art Of Noise: No, not the band, even though we’re suckers for ‘80s synth-pop.

They say there’s a word in German for everything, and Stadtklanggestalter is one such. It translates to “urban soundscape planner”, and Berlin-based Thomas Kusitzky is apparently the only person in the world with that job title. His mission is to make cities less acoustically jarring and champion acoustically-sound architecture. Sample this: a Cold War-era structure called the Admiralbrücke is built in such a way that it has an “urban canyon”, which amplifies the sounds within but keeps outside noise, well, out. In this eye-opening piece for Noema, journalist-editor Jeffrey Arlo Brown interviews Kusitzky and in the process, informs us why buildings with glass facades are the worst, why asphalt roads are preferable, and how EVs may or may not be a solution to the noise problem. Most importantly, he writes about the sonic extinction of birdsong—and the way that’s affecting avian reproduction and population; not least the irony of city dwellers who are willing to pay a premium for properties surrounded by more natural sounds, yet paying little heed in contributing to ear-blasting ways of life.

They’re (not) out there 🛸: You would think that in the age of the omnipresent smartphone camera we’d stop believing fantastical tales without 4K video evidence. Yet, there is a renewed collective frenzy over an old obsession of the 1990s—that aliens visit us and the US military is hiding UFOs. This time, credible folks, including a Harvard astronomer and a high-ranking US intelligence officer are making such claims. Despite the paltry evidence and an inconclusive hearing in the US Congress, the public firmly believes authorities are hiding evidence of alien visits. So much so that a top Pentagon official resigned. This story in Intelligencer traces the history of UFO mania and profiles the key people involved in its resurgence, including journalist Leslie Kean (whose former partner was a famous UFO advocate/speaker). The story argues that the latest rash of ‘flying saucer’ sightings is probably something more banal: scientific and/or military balloons 

The childcare parent trap: A woman considering going back to work after having a child is often picking between two terrible choices. (A) She could go back to work, trying to make up for time lost during her maternity break only to spend all her earnings on expensive child care, or (B) forgo her career and financial independence entirely and devote herself to family instead. Working women in rich countries are increasingly demanding laws that make child care more affordable. But, as this column in The Economist points out, motherhood inevitably drives out a large number of women from the workforce. In poorer countries, many abandon their careers right after marriage. As fertility rates fall in countries like South Korea, childfree couples increasingly say having children just isn’t worth it. Data from this story shows they may have a point.