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Editorials - 07-09-2022

Given the desire to achieve developed country status in the next 25 years, the required rate is in the range of 8% to 9%

The National Statistical Office’s real GDP growth estimate of 13.5% for the first quarter of 2022-23 is 2.7% points lower than the Reserve Bank of India’s earlier assessment of 16.2%. Assuming that the central bank’s estimates of the remaining three quarters of the fiscal year at 6.2% in 2Q, 4.1% in 3Q, and 4% in 4Q are realised, the annual GDP growth using the NSO’s 1Q estimate works out to be 6.7%. Compared to the pre-COVID-19 GDP level of Rs. 35.5 lakh crore in 1Q of 2019-20, real GDP at Rs. 36.9 lakh crore shows an increase of only 3.8%. This indicates that the performance of the Indian economy is not fully normalised yet which would be consistent with a growth of 6.5% to 7%. In order at least to reach an annual growth of 7%, GDP may have to grow at about 5% in 3Q and 4Q of 2022-23.

Composition of growth

Out of the eight Gross Value Added (GVA) sectors, the first quarter growth performance is higher than the average of 12.7% in public administration, defence and other services (26.3%), trade, hotels, transportet al . (25.7%), construction (16.8%), and electricity, gas, water supplyet al. (14.7%). Agricultural growth has remained robust, showing a growth of 4.5% in 1Q of 2022-23, which is the highest growth over nine consecutive quarters. Growth in manufacturing, at 4.8%, however, is much below the overall average. A more relevant comparison would be to look at the increase with respect to corresponding output levels in the pre-COVID-19 normal year, that is in 1Q of 2019-20.

In this comparison, manufacturing seems to have done better with an increase of 7% in 1Q of 2022-23 while the trade, hotels, transportet al . sector has remained below its pre-COVID-19 level by a margin of minus 15.5%. This was the main contact-intensive sector which suffered the most during COVID-19 and which may show better recovery in succeeding quarters. Construction has also increased by a small margin of 1.2% when compared to its 1Q 2019-20 level.

On the demand side, all major segments showed magnitudes in 1Q of 2022-23 that were higher than their corresponding levels in 1Q of 2019-20. Recovery in domestic demand has been reflected in the growth rates of private final consumption expenditure (PFCE), at 25.9%, and gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) at 20.1% over the corresponding quarter of the previous year. As compared to its 1Q 2019-20 level, the GFCF showed a growth of 6.7%. The ratio of gross fixed capital formation to GDP at current prices is 29.2% in 1Q of 2022-23 which is 1% point higher than the investment rate of 28.2% in the corresponding quarter of the previous year.

The contribution of net exports to real GDP growth is negative at minus 6.2% points in 1Q of 2022-23 since import growth continues to exceed export growth by a tangible margin. Such an adverse contribution of net exports to real GDP growth is an all-time high for the 2011-12 base series. It is likely that import growth will continue to exceed export growth in the next few quarters, both in real and nominal terms, considering prevailing high global prices of petroleum products and other intermediate inputs and India’s growing demand for importing intermediate goods with a view to boosting ‘Make in India’.

On the feasibility

The Indian economy may still show a 7% plus growth in 2022-23 provided it performs better in the subsequent quarters, particularly in the last two. Two important areas of policy support for this purpose would be to further increase the investment rate and to reduce the magnitude of negative contribution of net exports. Available high frequency indicators for the first four to five months of 2022-23 indicate continuing growth momentum.

Headline manufacturing Purchasing Manager’s Index (PMI) was at an eight-month high of 56.4 in July 2022. It remained high at 56.2 in August 2022. PMI services were at 55.5 in July 2022, indicating 12 consecutive months of expansion. Outstanding bank credit by scheduled commercial banks (SCBs) grew by 15.3% in the fortnight ending August 12, 2022. Gross Goods and Services Tax collections have remained high at Rs. 1.49 lakh crore and Rs. 1.43 lakh crore in July and August 2022, respectively, although a good part of this may be due to the higher inflation levels of both Wholesale Price Index (WPI) and Consumer Price Index (CPI).

As seen in 1Q of 2022-23, GVA growth has been led by public administration, defence, and other services, with a growth of 26.3%. This has been driven by the central government’s frontloading of capital expenditure. The Centre’s capital expenditure grew by 62.5% during the first four months of 2022-23. This momentum needs to be maintained. This would be facilitated by a buoyant growth in the Centre’s gross tax revenues, which showed a growth of nearly 25% during the first four months of the current fiscal year. The relatively high tax revenue growth is in turn linked to the excess of nominal GDP growth at 26.7% in 1Q of 2022-23 over the real GDP growth of 13.5%. Such a large gap between these two growth measures reflects a high implicit price deflator (IPD)-based inflation which is estimated at 11.6% in 1Q of 2022-23. This in turn is because of the ongoing WPI and CPI inflation trends where the former continues to exceed the latter. With buoyant tax revenue growth, fiscal policy may strongly support GDP growth without making any significant sacrifice on the budgeted fiscal deficit target.

Raise investment rate

In the light of likely development in 2022-23, how confident are we of achieving the growth rate of 6% to 7% over a normal base? Given our desire to achieve developed country status in the next 25 years, the required growth rate is in the range of 8% to 9%. In 2023-24, we must try to achieve a growth rate of 6% to 7%. The key to growth lies in raising the investment rate. Public capital expenditure has shown a rise. In crisis years, it is particularly good. It can crowd in private capital expenditure. But this cannot be the normal. Private capital expenditures, both corporate and non-corporate, must rise. It is pointed out that capacity utilisation in industry has touched 75% in 4Q 2021-22. This should help to attract private investment if demand for goods continues to increase. The output loss because of COVID-19 and the consequent lockdown is greater if we measure it from the trend line rather than the base of 2019-20. Had we maintained growth of 7% since 2019-20 in successive years, the real GDP would have been Rs. 183.4 lakh crore in 2022-23. Even if we achieve a 7% growth in 2022-23 over 2021-22, there is a shortfall of Rs. 25.7 lakh crore at 2011-12 prices. The international environment for growth is bleak. Developed countries even fear a recession. India’s growth path in the next few years must depend on domestic investment picking up. Sector-wise growth in investment must be the focus of policymakers in removing bottlenecks and creating a favourable climate.

C. Rangarajan is former Chairman, Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and former Governor, Reserve Bank of India. D.K. Srivastava is former Director and Honorary Professor, Madras School of Economics. The views expressed

are personal



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With each election, the Conservative Party has chosen someone further to the right

Rishi Sunak, the self-declared underdog, did not become the U.K.’s first ethnic minority Prime Minister. Mr. Sunak was never expected to win, though he put up a spirited fight against Liz Truss in the “Darwinian system” (former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s description of the leadership contest) that produces leaders of the Conservative Party. Mr. Sunak arguably had the backing of economists and his parliamentary colleagues (though, notably, not his former cabinet colleagues) as the U.K. heads towards cascading crises of the economy, health and services. He was the technocrat, pitted against a maverick who had declared a war against economic orthodoxy. He was the safer, if gloomier, pair of hands. And it was expected that he would lose. His defeat raises a question: Did Mr. Sunak’s ethnicity have anything to do with his failure? The answer to that question is ‘it’s complicated’.

The ethnicity question

The first thing to note is that though the Tory leadership contest was modelled on a presidential system, the new Prime Minister was chosen by a small minority of the electorate — well under 0.5% of all eligible voters, as only members of the Conservative Party can vote for their new leader. Over 99% of the electorate had no say in the person declared Prime Ministeron September 5.So, this vote is not in any way representative of the wider U.K. public. It is also known that paid-up members of the Conservative Party tend to be older, white males, based in the affluent south-east, and strongly in favour of Brexit and controlling immigration. These are the people who chose Ms. Truss over Mr. Sunak, whereas, at the penultimate stage of the contest, involving parliamentary members of the Conservative Party with constituencies across the country, Mr. Sunak collected 137 votes compared to Ms. Truss’ 113.

Second, throughout the campaign, no overt mention was made of Mr. Sunak’s race or religion. Indeed, it was a complete non-issue that a practising Hindu was seeking the highest office in the land where the Queen is the head of the Anglican Church and the Church sends 26 Bishops to the House of Lords. This is to Britain’s credit, as is the fact that of the eight original competitors for the job, four were not ethnically white.

Immigration stand

Here is where the good news ends, for this was a campaign that veered to the right on culture wars and immigration. Mr. Sunak, a grandson of immigrants,played to right-wing concerns when he repeatedly raised the spectre of uncontrolled immigration. He doubled down on his support for the Johnson government’s policy, under Home Secretary Priti Patel, to deport to Rwanda those deemed illegal immigrants, even if they are seeking asylum. Ms. Patel’s policy is currently facing legal challenges, amid claims that the Home Office and other government departments were aware of serious concerns about Rwanda’s human rights record, which the U.K. has officially criticised in the past.

Both candidates vied with each other to sound tougher on immigration.In addition to his endorsement of the Rwanda policy,Mr. Sunakproposed introducing a cap on the number of refugees while also narrowing the means by which asylum may be sought; spoke of housing migrants on disused cruise ships, which might have fallen foul of British and international laws on arbitrary detention; and promised to increase the power of the state to detain and monitor those deemed illegal immigrants. He also promised to double deportations of foreign criminals.

Ms. Truss promised to extend the Rwanda policy to other countries; not be bound by the European Convention on Human Rights; increase border staffing; and, most controversially, potentially force back small boats making the dangerous Channel crossing, which would entail a very real risk of loss of life.

Part of the problem

A two-month campaign is a long time in politics, especially in an internecine war. The candidates, in order to distinguish themselves, had to criticise each other and present themselves as a fresh start. The flaw in this strategy was that they were part of the problem they criticised. If the economy is in trouble, the National Health Service is in crisis and there are large-scale strikes, it is because of the policies their government has put in place, while they were part of it. So, the candidates chose straw men to shoot down instead. Immigration was of course one — red meat to the Tory faithful. But there were other dependable straw men: Mr. Sunak attacked “left-wing agitators” for “taking a bulldozer” to British history and culture, and “woke nonsense” that does not allow him to use words like “man”, “woman” or “mother”. In the past, Ms. Truss attacked “pink bus feminism” and “fashionable” stances on gender and race. During the campaign, she criticised a “woke civil service culture”, even issuing a press release promising to protect Jews from “creeping anti-Semitism and wokeism”.

At one level, this is baffling. But the problem with such right-wing assertions on a campaign trail is that they have a long half-life: with each utterance these sentiments become more normalised and the counter moves further to the right. This leads to two observations about political life in the U.K. today.

One, as the Conservative Party, which has been in power since 2010, has cycled through three Prime Ministers, it has chosen someone further to the rightwith eachsuccessive leadership election. A mirror response in the Labour Party saw the Opposition move further to the left, something that the current Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, is trying to reverse. The centre ground, however, remains a wasteland. There is more polarisation in politics now than there was during the last changing of Prime Minister, and it will be interesting to see how the Conservatives will campaign during the next general election.

The second observation is that there is now a marked democratic deficit in the U.K. as a result of the free-for-all in this leadership campaign. The whole country was in suspended animation for seven weeks while the Conservatives chose their new leader — had the government fallen, a general election would have had to be called within 25 days. In order to win, the candidates had to promise to protect the interests of a minuscule minority, which, at a time of economic crisis, means that several people in low- and middle-income groups are left staring at a financial abyss because the candidate who won does not believe in handouts and will cut taxes for higher earners instead. This could be a long and cold winter.

Priyanjali Malik is an author and commentator based in the U.K.



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It is politically hard, but developmentally critical, to run port projects with coastal management sustainably

Revenues from the Rs. 7,525-crore deep-water port and terminal at Vizhinjam in Kerala will only be justified if the project provides sufficient safeguards against ecological destruction and addresses the rights of households displaced by the project. Nowhere is this socio-environmental imperative bigger than in Thiruvananthapuram because of its precarious ecology and coast-reliant economy. It is politically hard, but developmentally critical, to make a mid-course shift, to put port development with coastal management on a sustainable track.

A false dichotomy

Singapore, Shanghai, and Dubai took advantage of ports to become hubs, earn incomes, and drive economic growth. Vizhinjam’s proximity to east-west shipping routes, its natural undredged draft of some 20 metres, and suitability for large vessels all make it a unique site. But in a lopsided agreement, the Government of Kerala bears 67% of the financing and the Concessionaire (extended to a generous 40 years) 33%, with a low internal rate of return of 3.7% for the Government and 15% for the Concessionaire. Despite the locational advantages, the Adani Vizhinjam Port Pvt. Ltd., finds the deal attractive only with the inclusion of large real estate components in prime port property. The financial picture of the enterprise for Kerala State is dicey at best.

Another crucial issue is that any revenue generation is at the cost of a heavy human toll. Some 350 families that have lost homes to coastal erosion last year, and those living in makeshift schools and camps are just a foretaste of things to come if coastal erosion and extreme cyclones continue unabated. Port projects in China, Kenya, and Vietnam have seen vast resettlement and livelihood outlays by the owners over the life of the project.

A further danger is an irreversibly destroyed ecology, triggering deadlier hazards of nature. Ports without adequate safeguards in a highly delicate ecology unleash destruction on marine life and the livelihoods of the local population. Visakhapatnam and Chennai show how siltation, coastal erosion and accretion can be exacerbated by deepening of harbour channels in ecologically sensitive areas; this risk is just greater for Vizhinjam by an order of magnitude.

Building safeguards could potentially run economic growth and socio-economic sustainability in tandem. A 2017 study warned of the fallout for the shoreline and marine ecosystem from construction of breakwater and dredging. But no funds have been earmarked for maintenance dredging within operational expenses, based on the false premise that siltation would be “negligible”, with “minimum literal drift along the project site”.

Equally, project documents hardly address the effects of the port on the precious marine ecosystem and biodiversity, a huge priority for Kerala. Recent studies have identified the Vizhinjam-Poovar stretch as a biodiversity hotspot and recommended that the region be recognised as a marine protected area. The discussion of flora, fauna, and lakes in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) is purely pro-forma.

The vital shoreline assessment in the EIA, released in May 2013, has come under heavy criticism for factual errors. For example, there is no mention of the ecological consequences of the dismantling of two hills in the Western Ghats to provide rocks for the project, aside from destroying a few promontories at the project site.

A just published study shows that during 2006-20, the sea gobbled some 2.62 square kilometres or close to 650 acres from the Thiruvananthapuram coast alone. The rate of erosion is faster between Pozhikkara and Veli. Also, 0.7 km2 of land was accreted.

The latest shoreline report, based on beach profile and satellite analysis, by the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), Chennai, appointed by the developer, shows significant erosion on the northern coast of the port (Poonthura, Valiyathura, Shanghumugham, Veli) and accretion in the port area and in the south (Poovar, Adimalathura) from 2015 to 2021 during port construction. Many of the spots themselves were the same during 2015-21 compared to previous periods, but new spots (Kochuveli, Cheriathura) too had emerged, post 2015.

The NIOT report attributes the erosion and accretion to climate change more than port activity, on grounds that construction has been modest in scale. That, in fact, aggravates the risk that stepped-up activity, without safeguards, will see more dire consequences. Anthropogenic climate change is unquestionably raising sea levels along Indian coasts, but the extreme stress north of the port cannot be explained by global warming, something that impacts everywhere.

In fact, a study of shoreline changes in Kerala by the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management attributes most of the drastic shoreline changes during 1972-2010 to structures built along its coast. Two-thirds of Kerala’s coasts are eroding, and precautions are a must before constructing structures along its “eroding and vulnerable” coasts. Thiruvananthapuram has the highest percentage of erosion, facts ignored in environment clearances.

With a port, reclamation, dredging and construction of breakwaters further complicate erosion. Breakwaters have exacerbated the drastic shoreline changes in and around its proximity. In almost all these areas, the coast to the north of the breakwaters is heavily eroded.

The polluter is responsible

A bedrock principle of environmental regulation worldwide is that pollution penalties should be high enough and borne by the creators of damages. For large-scale infrastructure projects, the financier and the borrower must implement sufficient safeguards to avoid marine pollution and destruction. On involuntary dislocation of people that society is willing to accept in return for financial gains, the project must allocate funds in recognition of people’s centuries’ old right to the sea and its resources.

There are many examples of projects that unduly harm the environment or society, which can be learnt from. Just to take two in relation to the Vizhinjam venture, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) supported the 4,150-Megawatt Tata Mundra coal plant (Gujarat) — the negligence greatly and unnecessarily exceeded the harm to the local poor people. Tata Mundra is one of the 50 biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. And in another more recent case, Bravus Mining and Resources (an Adani unit in Australia) has begun construction of its Carmichael thermal coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee basin to export vast amounts of coal to India — when the world is moving away from fossil fuels in a desperate effort to save the planet.

Whether there were pre-existing health conditions or not, when COVID-19 infection precipitates illness or death, the pandemic is labelled the proximate cause. The same way, when port construction without adequate social and environmental safeguards harms lives and livelihoods, even in the presence of climate change, the project must take full responsibility for compensation. Corrective action by way of hard-engineering solutions such as seawalls and soft responses such as vegetation is in order.

Steps to take

The first order of business, as in infrastructure projects worldwide, is that the project provides compensation to the displaced people and restores their rights. Second, the gross neglect of the damage to invaluable marine biodiversity must be redressed with an acceptable EIA, including inputs from experts in biology, ecology, and oceanography. Third, there needs to be an independent assessment of safeguards that port authorities must put in place as a precondition for any further construction.

A Turkish proverb says, “No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back.” That, in the context of unanswered financial, social and environment risks, means business as usual is not an option. On the other hand, rejecting the project, having approved it, is politically difficult. The way forward would be for the project management to take to heart, in the spirit of learning from experience, the red alerts, and the Government to allow continuation of the project only with agreement for a mid-course transformation, including a legal covenant to make the venture sustainable for Kerala.

Vinod Thomas is a former Senior Vice-President, Independent Evaluation, World Bank, and a former Director-General, Independent Evaluation, Asian Development Bank



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Systematic investmentin quasi-public goodsis essential to reduce domestic drudgery

On August 15, while houses hoisted flags, Malti rushed at the crack of dawn to the public tap 500 metres away before residents swarmed the place. Water supply lasts only two hours, twice a day, for a village shy of 10,000 residents. Even if Malti gets ahead in line, there is no guaranteed supply. She makes four-five trips home, carrying 10-12 vessels of water in less than an hour. She repeats the process in the evening to sufficiently provide for her low-income household comprising her husband, two sons, and in-laws. Like Malti, 75% of women across India undertake such time-consuming efforts every day to ensure their families have water (NFHS-5). But drudgery does not end here. The remaining hours are spent securing fuel and caregiving — gendered responsibilities that shackle them further to their homes. For these women, freedom is relief from domestic drudgery, from doing repetitive tasks out of no choice owing to socio-cultural norms and limited access to resources like water, fuel and household appliances.

Shackled to their homes

Malti’s daily drill was no different when India turned 50. As a pre-teen on the cusp of getting married, she queued up for an hour with her mother before it was their turn at the hand pump. If the hand pump was broken/empty, they walked 2.5 kilometres to the public well that promised longer queues and worse quality, losing four-five hours to collect water (National Commission for Women Report, 2005). The private wells of upper-caste neighbours, though nearby, continue to be out of reach. Purchasing water or waiting for the unreliable tanker, though costly, are the only alternatives.

After securing water, Malti’s chores at home, primarily cooking, begin. Unlike her mother’s reliance on firewood and/or agricultural residue, Malti uses a cleaner LPG cylinder received under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana. But with difficulties in refilling gas and increasing prices, she still searches for firewood, like 52% of rural India (Council on Energy, Environment and Water Report 2021). But Malti only gathers such fuel once or twice a week, unlike her mother who spent an hour each day (NITI Aayog). The absence of a refrigerator at home means daily shopping and cooking three fresh meals for her family, which takes three hours. Add serving food, doing the dishes, laundry, and looking after her boys, and Malti’s day is full. With rising inflation, Malti wants to add to her family earnings. She hopes to secure a sewing machine under the new government scheme. But this is not relief from drudgery; it is a few hours of work, though paid, after the family goes to bed.

Domestic drudgery has severe consequences: exhaustion, musculoskeletal disorders, lower immunity, and higher mental stress. It threatens women’s physical safety. Drudgery also affects women from an early age. Though universal education is promised, median years of schooling for girls is still 4.9 compared to 7.3 for boys. It is telling that Malti, like her mother and grandmother, had to forgo her school bag and shoulder water vessels. Though women bear these burdens for their family, drudgery also means less time devoted to childcare. Pallavi Choudhuri and Sonalde Desai (National Council of Applied Economic Research) find this can impact cognitive development and education levels among children.

The broader issue

It is tempting to think that specific government interventions for water/fuel will save women from domestic drudgery. For instance, in Banaskantha, Gujarat, researchers found that when indoor piped water supply is coupled with job opportunities through micro-enterprises, time released from water collection is converted into income earned. But such opportunities are out of reach for millions. Ashoka University’s Ashwini Deshpande and Jitendra Singh argue that the decline in the female labour force participation rate to 17% from 35% in the mid-2000s is because of demand-side problems in the employment market. The broader issue is India’s economic growth and the sluggish growth in employment opportunities.

India has come a long way in 75 years, now with its second woman President and accomplished women in every field. Yet, women are often paraded as brand ambassadors for household appliances. Even their hard-won struggles against domestic work are usually because of other women supplementing their efforts. There is no silver bullet to freeing women from drudgery. While restructuring household roles and responsibilities would be ideal such that men contribute equally at home, a more systematic investment, driven by sustained economic growth and better state capacity, in delivery of quasi-public goods is also essential.

Kadambari Shah and Shreyas Narla are research associates in the Indian Political Economy Program at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University



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A new policy of the Andhra government is expected to improve logistics service

Endowed with rich natural resources, a strong agrarian economy, a 979-km-long coastline, a string of airports and a well-connected road network, Andhra Pradesh should ideally be a preferred destination for investments, including Foreign Direct Investment, in south India. Andhra Pradesh achieved the first rank in the Ease of Doing Business for 2020-21, which was made possible by a slew of reforms initiated by the YSR Congress Party government.

But the State’s true potential has still not been tapped into, largely because of the lack of a comprehensive plan. Andhra Pradesh has good industrial infrastructure too, but nowhere close to what its neighbours — Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka — have. Taking this into account, the government has come up with a Logistics Policy 2022-2027. This is in tune with the PM Gati Shakti programme, which is aimed at providing multi-modal connectivity to industrial/economic zones.

The underlying objective of the Logistics Policy is to ensure logistics efficiency by putting in place a coherent policy and a regulatory and institutional framework. These are expected to fill the infrastructural gaps that have crippled various sectors.

The government is in the process of preparing the State Logistics Plan as per the guidelines of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade of the Government of India. An Empowered Group of Secretaries had been constituted to work out the plan covering all modes of transport in alignment with the National Master Plan. The plan envisaged a variety of fiscal incentives. Without these, no developer will come forward to make investments which matter more for the government as it is desperately looking for some major projects to host.

To start with, the government contemplated developing multi-modal logistics parks at Krishnapatnam, Visakhapatnam, Anantapur, Kopparthi in Kadapa district and between Rajahmundry and Kakinada, but they are all at a nascent stage. Then there are the Chennai-Visakhapatnam, Chennai-Bengaluru and Hyderabad-Bengaluru industrial corridors that are important for Andhra Pradesh but are at the infrastructure development stage. A host of railway projects have been planned, especially the 309 km-long Srikalahasti-Nadikudi line that falls in the purview of the South Central Railway. Considered a viable alternative to the Delhi-Chennai and Howrah-Chennai routes, the Srikalahasti-Nadikudi line is one of the critical pieces of infrastructure that were proposed in the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014.

However, except this project, many have failed to make significant progress due to issues involving land acquisition and cost-sharing by the Central and State governments. In fact, these projects are so entangled in technical and financial issues that they have become political hot potatoes. The BJP has alleged that the State government is not contributing its share of the expenditure and is not keen on solving the land acquisition issues either.

The Logistics Policy is expected to ensure superior rail and road connectivity to upcoming ports. The government has set the ball rolling, but the immediate challenge is to provide all the basic amenities that will encourage prospective entrepreneurs to make investments. The need of the hour, industry stakeholders say, is to have a stable policy framework and timely interventions when something goes wrong. If the tremendous potential of the agriculture and food processing sectors can be realised to the extent possible, it can spur economic growth and in turn lead to other benefits.

raghavendra.v@thehindu.co.in



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Air safety is paramount, and politicians should not be allowed to pressure ATC officials

The incident, on August 31, wherein two BJP Members of Parliament, Nishikant Dubey and Manoj Tiwari, and their entourage are alleged to have ‘forcibly obtained take-off clearance’ close to sunset, from the Air Traffic Control (ATC) at Deogarh airport in Jharkhand for their flight is a case of ‘tail-scraping’ established air safety norms. The politicians — they were in the State to meet the family members of a minor girl in Dumka who had been set ablaze by a stalker on August 23 — are reported to have reached the airport at around 5.25 p.m. to fly back to Delhi on a chartered twin-engine business jet. Based on complaints by the airport security-in charge and the Deputy Commissioner of Deogarh, the allegation is that the ATC was coerced into allowing the flight to depart, resulting in the Jharkhand police registering an FIR against the MPs and the others. Various sections of the Indian Penal Code such as ‘endangering life or personal safety’ have been applied. Mr. Dubey in turn filed an FIR in Delhi against the Deputy Commissioner and the Jharkhand police which includes, bizarrely, their being booked under Section 124A (sedition). It is at this point, air safety experts concur, that the clutter must be swept aside and the core issue of flight safety brought firmly into focus.

Deogarh, according to data available in the Aeronautical Information Publication, is still a Visual Flight Rules (VFR) airport, and night operations are not permitted. Further, point 3 under ‘En-Route–1.2 Visual Flight Rules’ states that “VFR flights shall not be operated between 20 minutes after sunset to 20 minutes before sunrise, except when exempted by air traffic control for local flights....”, the principle being that the airfield should be available in the event of an emergency after take-off under VFR conditions. It must be noted that sunset at Deogarh was at 6.03 p.m. and the flight left at 6.17 p.m. The difficulties the crew could have faced at such an airport in the event of an emergency, such as a bird hit or engine failure, do not have to be elaborated — avian life is active at twilight and Jharkhand is known to be a bird-rich spot. Other airports in the region available for a diversion are not close either. Additionally, to have one of the politicians who is part of a committee constituted by the Ministry of Civil Aviation attempting to push the boundaries of safety is unacceptable. The episode also highlights the pressures faced by air traffic controllers and officials, especially in small airports in India. As a member of the International Civil Aviation Organization and bound by its stringent rules, India must ensure that directives are followed and that there is a thorough and fair probe, with penalties, by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and the Ministry of Civil Aviation. The politics should be fenced off.



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Liz Truss will have to deliver results quicklyas the U.K. faces crises on different fronts

The United Kingdom’s Conservative Party has elected Liz Truss, earlier the country’s Foreign Secretary, as its next Prime Minister, making her the third woman to hold the top role in the country’s political executive. She ascends to the post at a difficult time for the U.K., economically and politically — the government is challenged by soaring energy costs and recessionary headwinds; and the war in Ukraine has left the country scrambling to find alternatives to Russian fuel while standing up to Moscow’s belligerence. Making matters harder, her path to the top has not inspired confidence in terms of her standing within the party. While she secured her victory with the backing of 81,326 of her party’s members, her rival and former Chancellor, Rishi Sunak garnered 60,399 votes in the final contest, a much narrower margin than expected and the narrowest margin of any election for party leadership held in the past two decades. It is also concerning that Ms. Truss won the support of less than 50% of Conservative Party members, as nearly 20% of them did not vote. In terms of policy implications this poses a challenge: in the coming months Ms. Truss will have to win over a Conservative Party cohort that prefers fundamentally different approaches to hers in tackling the most serious crises that the U.K. faces. For example, with her plan to introduce £30 billion in tax cuts including reversing the rise in National Insurance, temporarily dropping green levies on energy bills, and scrapping a planned rise in corporation tax, there are likely to be party members who will oppose her proposals.

Nevertheless, if there is one strength that Ms. Truss has demonstrated in the past, it is her adaptable politics, especially at times when this trait could improve her prospects in the big picture. Indeed, she has moved far from her political origins as a Liberal Democrat and also from her former position on Brexit as a Remainer. It was considered a politically astute move by her to steer clear of the Conservative coup that ended her predecessor Boris Johnson’s tenure in office, yet she managed simultaneously to avoid being seen as a staunch insider of Mr. Johnson’s political circle. She will need a strong measure of these skills to accomplish the mammoth tasks of lifting up the enervated reputation of the Conservative Party among the British public, carrying it past the sleaze scandals that plagued the Johnson government and, importantly, bringing down the soaring cost of living by tackling the energy crises and reinvigorating the sluggish U.K. economy with the right macroeconomic policy mix. Towards achieving this, Ms. Truss may do well to tap into her recent experience crafting post-Brexit deals with the European Union — and even extending that model to trading partners across the world. One thing is clear: she will have to hit the ground running and deliver positive results soon, else face harsh judgement by her constituents.



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Kanyakumari, Sept. 6: The Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, to-day made a strong plea for preserving the beauty spots of the country while welcoming commercial activities. While inaugurating the work on the new Tirunelveli-Nagercoil-Kanyakumari-Trivandrum rail link, Mrs. Gandhi said she still remembered the thrill of her first visit to Kanyakumari in 1931, “but to-day we do not find that stretch of multicoloured sands which had made Kanyakumari world famous.” She said that the Vivekananda memorial was beautiful, but she wished it had not been located on the rock. “I wish we could have retained the quiet and peaceful atmosphere, which had attracted and inspired Swami Vivekananda,” she said. “Is there now such a place for the contemplation of the depth and range of our philosophy? Little by little here and in other parts of the country we are encroaching on the serenity which alone can give inner strength to a person. Our country is large enough for commercialisation without encroaching on our beauty spots and places of pilgrimage,” she added.Mrs. Gandhi said that in olden days religion taught reverence for nature, but now in many places religious sentiments were subordinated to commercialisation. “It is easier,” she said, “to master technology and build railways than to recapture the old spirit of beauty and contemplation.” At the same time, she said she was fully conscious that there could be no contemplation or inner strength unless the living standards of our people were improved.



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The dairy sector, which accounts for over a fifth of the gross value added from Indian agriculture, needs to be prepared for a fresh resurgence of LSD, with deadlier consequences

Lumpy skin disease (LSD) has infected around 11.25 lakh cattle, caused nearly 50,000 deaths and spread to 165 districts in 12 states. Despite this officially confirmed data, there seems to be no coordinated national effort for dealing with what’s clearly more than a normal viral outbreak. The LSD virus, transmitted by mosquitoes and other blood-feeding arthropod vectors, was first detected in Odisha in August 2019 and the neighbouring eastern states by the year-end. Over the next two years, sporadic cases were seen, including in Maharashtra and Gujarat. The recent wave, since May-June 2022, is unusual not only for morbidity or the rate at which animals are contracting the disease, but also mortality. The symptoms, too, aren’t restricted to the mere appearance of skin nodules. In many cases, infected animals are experiencing acute pain, swelling in limbs and bleeding, alongside fever and loss of appetite.

For now, it looks that susceptibility to the disease is more among the cattle with hampered immune systems. That would include stray animals or even those in gaushalas not properly fed and looked after. To that extent, there may be no immediate impact on milk production (LSD hasn’t also been reported much in buffaloes). It is, moreover, possible that the current surge may have largely to do with an increase in vector population from the monsoon — and could subside for the same reason. But that only adds to the urgency to act now and launch a concerted vaccine-cum-awareness drive on the lines of the fight against Covid-19. The dairy sector, which accounts for over a fifth of the gross value added from Indian agriculture, needs to be prepared for a fresh resurgence that might come sooner than later — with deadlier consequences.

Three things should be done on a priority basis. The first is to step up supply of goat pox and sheep pox vaccines. Since LSD belongs to the same capripoxvirus genus, these vaccines can provide at least partial cross-protection against the former even if that is specific to cattle. At present, only the goat pox vaccine has been approved for administering to cattle against LSD. The same may be extended to sheep pox vaccines, for which there are many more manufacturers. Secondly, the government must expedite the commercialisation of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research’s recently-developed live attenuated homologous vaccine that is said to provide full protection against LSD. It could consider granting emergency use authorisation to enable large-scale production and roll-out, similar to that for Covid vaccines. Third, the vaccination should be done on mission mode, with the push coming from the top and not the department of animal husbandry and dairying.



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Imports remain robust as exports slow down sharply. Slowing global economy and trade suggest subdued outlook

After growing at a healthy 22 per cent in the first quarter of the ongoing financial year, India’s merchandise export growth has dipped sharply in the months thereafter. This is reflective of slowing global demand and price corrections. Data from the ministry of commerce and industry shows that export growth slowed down to 2.1 per cent in July, contracting by 1.2 per cent in August to a nine-month low of $33 billion. In fact, August was the first time that exports have contracted in 18 months. In comparison, merchandise imports have continued to grow at a robust pace, rising by around 37 per cent in August. While imports have been driven by fossil fuels (petroleum and coal), non-energy imports (such as electronics and machinery) have also surged. In fact, over this five-month period, non-oil imports have grown by 32 per cent, indicative of strong domestic demand. As a consequence of weak exports and robust import growth, the merchandise trade deficit (April-August) has more than doubled over the same period last year.

The disaggregated data shows that, excluding petroleum, the decline in India’s exports in August was sharper at 2.2 per cent. The fall was driven by engineering goods, cotton yarn, and gems and jewellery, among others. In its July update of the world economic outlook, the International Monetary Fund projected global growth to slow down to 3.2 per cent in 2022, from 6.1 per cent in 2021. The IMF had earlier forecasted growth at 3.6 per cent, but lowered its assessment as several shocks ranging from high inflation and tightening of global financial conditions, a slowdown in China, and negative spillovers from the war in Ukraine, are impacting economic activity. Growth for the next year has been pegged even lower at 2.9 per cent. Alongside, the Fund has also lowered its projection of world trade volume in goods and services to 4.1 per cent in 2022 (it had earlier assessed growth at 5 per cent), down from 10.1 per cent last year. It expects world trade growth to slow down further to 3.2 per cent in 2023.

On the other hand, services exports have continued to maintain their healthy growth, even as imports have seen a decline. As per some analysts, the services surplus is likely to exceed levels seen last year as demand remains firm, and the currency remains weak. Notwithstanding that, the sharp deterioration in the goods trade deficit will imply a worsening of the current account deficit. As per some assessments, the deficit will rise sharply in the second quarter. In times of globally tightening financial conditions, while financing this will be challenging, the recent turnaround in foreign portfolio flows provides some comfort.



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Campaign against Arshdeep Singh for a slip-up on the field is reprehensible, goes against letter and spirit of the game

As the ball slipped between his fingers and even before it hit the ground, the fate that awaited Arshdeep Singh, post-match, could have been foretold. A stand-up comic suggested that the young Indian pacer’s social media manager delete the apps from his phone, predicting a barrage of hateful messages. It was said half-jokingly. But what followed wasn’t funny at all. For hours after the match, the 23-year-old was vilified across social media platforms, his Wikipedia page edited to add references to Khalistan, prompting the government to seek an explanation from the website’s executives. All this over a dropped catch in the match in which India was defeated by Pakistan in the Asia Cup on Sunday.

The overreaction of sports fans isn’t new. It follows a tediously predictable pattern: Outrageous, xenophobic comments are made against a player in the garb of criticism; a show of support follows and, in rare cases, there’s condemnation of the vicious attacks from teammates; the outrage subsides and it is business as usual. Until the next such incident takes place. This has been happening since the time Chetan Sharma was hit for a last-ball six by Javed Miandad. But the recent wave of social media abuse is different – it has been directed prominently at players from minority communities. Before Arshdeep, Mohammed Shami was targeted after India’s defeat to Pakistan in the T20 World Cup last October.

Indian and Pakistani players have always enjoyed cordial relationships off the field. The bonhomie, however, has been missing on social media. TV studios fan the flames with a build-up that borders on warmongering. Social media executives, too, need to be much more responsible in ensuring their platforms are not used to spread hate. Every cricketer has made a slip-up like Arshdeep’s at one time or another. The reasonable reaction to such a mishap would be slapping the head or throwing it back in disappointment. Anything beyond that isn’t cricket.



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Manimugdha S Sharma writes: An alternative past is being imagined in which there is an unbroken continuity from the Mauryas, Guptas, Cholas, and Marathas, all the way down to the modern Indian Navy

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 2 unveiled the new naval ensign and dedicated it to Maratha king Shivaji, calling him the “father of the navy”. An explanatory video was soon released that talked about the Indian Navy’s “civilisational heritage” and explained how the new ensign was inspired by the Maratha chhatrapati’s seal design.

This prompted various people on social media, including a leading publishing house, to claim that Shivaji was the “father of the Indian Navy”. Some Navy veterans who weren’t very pleased with the aesthetics of the new design asked why the Cholas were missing from this nationalist celebration. But this claim about the force’s ancestry went largely unaddressed, as was the irony of the Prime Minister talking about shedding a symbol of slavery when, between 2014 and 2018, he had urged his countrymen to commemorate the colonial-era Indian military’s participation in the First World War.

Even though selectively deployed by Hindu nationalists to claim that they were written out of textbooks in favour of “Islamic” empires, the imperial Cholas still don’t have much rhetorical appeal in the Hindutva discourse, unlike the Marathas. That they did not have Muslim adversaries is one reason, but a largely medieval polity from the south of the country has a limited recall in the north where Hindu nationalist politics thrives. But any claim about the Cholas or the Marathas being the “father of the Indian Navy” hides historical reality.

The service history of the Indian Navy takes it back to the East India Company’s Marine, formed in the early decades of the 17th century — before the Marathas had their navy. Over the course of over three centuries, it became the Bombay Marine, Indian Navy, Her Majesty’s Indian Navy, Bombay Marine again, Her Majesty’s Indian Marine, Royal Indian Marine, Royal Indian Navy, and finally, back to Indian Navy when India became a republic in 1950.

This bit of history should have been familiar to all and sundry. Turns out, it is not. Instead, what is happening is an alternative past is being imagined in which there is an unbroken continuity from the Mauryas, Guptas, Cholas, and Marathas, all the way down to the modern Indian Navy. The limitations of such a construct become visible when “cultural and spiritual” connections are emphasised over physical ones.

The point that has been missed all along is that the maritime history of a country and the service history of a navy are two different things. India has a rich maritime history that goes back thousands of years. At various points in history, dominant polities operated navies, but these were usually brown-water navies that operated in littoral zone waters. There were some exceptions like the Cholas who were able to project their power across the waters, but exceptions were not the rule. Besides, historical navies operated in their context; modern strategic visions cannot be projected onto them.

Right-wing commentators, in keeping with the “India is vishwaguru” discourse, have been going on and on about Indians teaching Europeans how to navigate. But the fact remains that the coming of the European powers to India’s shores towards the end of the 15th century changed local attitudes towards naval warfare.

Powered by mercantilism and innovations in navigation and gunpowder technologies, European fleets presented an existential threat to Indian coastal powers. These powers tried to address this challenge with mixed results. For instance, the Muslim Kunjali Marakkars, fighting for the Zamorin of Calicut, challenged the Portuguese bid for control of the Malabar coast in the 16th century with some success. But eventually, their power was destroyed when the Zamorin ganged up with the Portuguese against them in 1600. This was a few decades before Shivaji was born.

Shivaji showed great military acumen in building a navy that by the time of his death in 1680 had expanded to 250 ships. But the strategic objectives of the Maratha navy in the chhatrapati’s lifetime seem to have been “to counter and, possibly, pre-empt the marauding Siddis (of Janjira) adept at projecting power on land from their sea bases”, write historians Anirudh Deshpande and Muphid Mujawar in their recent book on the Maratha navy, The Rise and Fall of a Brown Water Navy.

Even when they challenged European naval power, the Marathas could only do so in the littoral zone waters. Shivaji’s merchant vessels going towards West Asia, just like the Mughal vessels, had to pay for cartaz or special passes from the Portuguese who controlled the high seas.

The most brilliant phase of the Maratha navy came in the post-Shivaji era under the stewardship of sarkhel Kanhoji Angre, who successfully asserted Maratha sovereignty over the waters but whose own interests and that of the Maratha state didn’t always converge. But just like the Kunjali Marakkars, a similar fate befell the Angres when the Maratha Peshwa and the East India Company joined hands in 1756.

Despite all this exciting action along the western coast, the high seas forever remained under the control of the European fleets and the Marathas never had the means or vision to challenge them there. “The only exception was Mysore where a different naval vision seems to have arisen. Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan understood the importance of naval power like none of their Indian contemporaries. Compared with Mysore, the Marathas under the Peshwas influenced a longer strip of the coast but never conceived the possible construction of a blue-water navy,” Deshpande and Mujawar argue.

Today’s Indian Navy rightfully honours both the Angres and the Kunjali Marakkars and many others from India’s maritime history. But whether it needs to rewrite its past through acts of omission and commission is an open question. In any case, the acknowledgement of the colonial genesis of the Indian Navy is not a sign of “mental slavery”.

The writer is pursuing a PhD in History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and is the author of Allahu Akbar: Understanding the Great Mughal in Today’s India



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Despite the rainbow flags on the road, queer people continue to live dual lives due to the severe lack of legal, familial and social support

Written by Bhavya Gupta

The day part of Section 377 was repealed, I, like several other queer and trans people around the country, hoped for and expected a future of equal citizenship – a future in which expression, personal choice, private spaces and differential identities would be respected. What many of us celebrating at the Supreme Court underestimated was the rigidity in our culture, limitations of language, and an urgent need for various other legal reforms in the country. Four years after the repeal of part of Section 377, and my memory of the day is ironically plagued by my queer friends facing repercussions of being outed without consent while celebrating at the Supreme Court.

While the judgment held enough weight to change queer and trans lives in the country – since its delivery – the evolution of rights and legal recourse for queer and trans people remains stunted. The September 6 judgment remains the sole crutch in our legal repository, with much else left unaddressed amid a growing trend of violence against LGBTQI people.

The larger structure in the country continues to rely on narrow definitions of the LGBTQI community, based on western ideals. The ideal queer remains cis-gendered, upper-caste, elite, and English-speaking. Someone with the resources to be able to resonate with and acquire qualities of the “modern queer”. India is a country with plural cultures, and identities that stand at various intersections of caste, class and gender. This nuance is alien to a majority of the current conversations on gender and sexuality. This matters more so for a community for whom marginalisation is often compounded due to these very intersections.

The capitalisation of marginalised queer bodies stands at the centre of Pride Month. However, the regressive Transgender Act that is entrenched into the everyday life of the transgender and nonbinary community continues to remain a stark reality. The transition from laws to lives is an invisibilised one wherein queer and trans people are forced to encounter a severe lack of safety, care, and love every day.

Amid loud proclamations of “Love is love”, what we forget to question is: Is being queer solely about loving? More so, who can “come out” safely? We forget about the queer or trans person for whom reform is more a matter of life and death than being able to enjoy a romantic relationship. We forget that despite the rainbow flags on the road, queer people continue to live dual lives due to the severe lack of legal, familial and social support.

Queer and trans people must be supported outside of landmark judgments and specific months of the year. That they are recognised outside of their desire to “come out” or “love”. And that they are recognised as an intersectional group with varied requirements for safety, care, and justice by the legal institutions, movements as well as other queer and trans people of privilege. To be queer outside fetishised definitions and cis-gendered heteronormative standards is to live lives hemmed in by unjust barriers. The ideas surrounding intimacy and desire are not solely related to the act of sex or the body but spread into the realm of the larger queer experience, wherein imitation of the heterosexual becomes imperative to survival.

To recognise that queer and trans emancipation cannot be limited to the repeal of a judgment is to recognise the complexities of language, grief and solidarities that sit at the centre of these lives. As unsettling as the thought may be, most queer and trans identities remain hidden and sidelined more by choice than force, due to the acute lack of knowledge, as well as accessible knowledge production. A life of dignity and equality, unfortunately, remains solely aspirational for most queer and trans people within the country.

The writer is a researcher at the department of women and gender studies, Savitribai Phule Pune University



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A much-needed on-ground campaign is a massive step for the Congress Party. But to have any chance of competing with the BJP, it needs to learn from it

The ‘Mehangai Par Halla Bolo Rally’ in Delhi on September 4 was the soft launch for the Congress Party’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, led by Rahul Gandhi. On September 7, after a long time, the INC started a massive attempt to form an on-ground connection with the people of India. For many, this is a welcome move; a signal that the party can come out of its shell and address issues that affect the people of India, and not just protest in support of its leadership, as in the National Herald case.

With this Yatra, Congress is focused on building a strong campaign around Rahul Gandhi by touching on major national issues. The attempt is clearly to create a pan-India appeal for Rahul ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The Yatra is a bold move — perhaps an indication that the party finally dares to pitch the “Rahul vs Modi” battle to the people.

Congress is also trying to align itself with more popular concerns to challenge the narrative dominance of the BJP. And while the Yatra may help the party to an extent, especially to reach out to people and create a buzz among the masses, it is yet to match the BJP on many fronts. One of them is working on macro campaigns with a focus on micro-political elements.

Winning elections is not merely an emotional but a mathematical and scientific process. Good intentions are not enough. The BJP has cracked the formula of winning elections in India. It has well-oiled electioneering machinery: Starting with faces that have mass appeal at the senior-most level to enabling mechanisms of connecting with the most distant voters at the grassroots. Over time, the BJP has adopted a method that has helped the party dominate Indian politics. To truly challenge the BJP, Congress must understand and adopt some of the elements of this methodology.

First, the BJP was among the first political parties to understand the reach and power of social media. It invested both time and money platforms to have the upper hand. It has been ahead in mastering the utilisation of all SM platforms, an effective army of SM volunteers, onboarding of influencers and automation tools (for trending topics, etc.) at a time when the other political parties are still at the stage of merely having SM handles. Additionally, the BJP is “micro-targeting” using WhatsApp networks at the booth and community level.

Second, dissent, intra-party conflict and rebellion are common in Indian politics. Anything of this sort is yet to happen with the BJP. Strong leadership at the central level and a quick redressal mechanism help party unity. Also, the BJP has utilised power to accommodate party members by offering various posts and responsibilities. It has also managed to entice defectors from other parties, such as Jyotiradityanath Scindia, who was eventually given a ministerial position.

Third, the BJP has been winning state elections and is in government in more than 15 states. Even with an increased geographical spread, the party has been successful in taking strategic diversions from its narrative at the national level. It has been successful in the creation of micro, state-based narratives for assembly elections: In the Uttar Pradesh elections, it focused more on providing non-corrupt governance and law and order under Yogi Adityanath while in Uttarakhand, it focused on aspects of religious tourism, army welfare and national security.

Fourth, the BJP has initiated campaigns that principally revolved around reforming the perception and behaviour of the voter and rejuvenating the cadre simultaneously. The campaign is one element in politics which impacts the party in terms of making voters and the cadre feel more involved.

Creating a cadre is seen by many as the hardest task but a more difficult one is to hold on to them. Over the years, BJP has mastered not only the art of creating a gigantic cadre but also ensuring that they are engaged with regular campaigns — on the ground or digitally.

A much-needed on-ground campaign is a massive step for the Congress Party. But to have any chance of competing with the BJP, it needs to go beyond the padayatra with party members and look for linkages with the common masses. If it can replicate and adapt some of the BJP’s successful operations before the 2024 election, it can be truly competitive in the polls.

Raina is a Delhi-based independent researcher and has worked on political campaigns in Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. Pandey is a political researcher. Views are personal



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Manjula Padmanabhan writes: India at 75 is a country riddled with gender inequity. What will India look like at 100 if the problem is not addressed today?

India’s Ideal Citizen in 2047 will be male. It’s that simple.

At one stroke, every single problem that has beset the nation since the time of the Invasions* will be solved: The birth rate will fall to within absolutely perfect limits; there will be no more crimes against females; there will be perfect harmony in every home. (*All invasions: It doesn’t matter who the invaders were or when they plundered and destroyed our Glorious Nation. Our history books are being updated on an hourly basis, so that they will always reflect the truths, dreams and ambitions of the ruling party).

Because — let’s face it — all of the nation’s problems stem from the presence of females. They clog up the thoughts of all decent, god-fearing humans – by which, of course, we mean Men — with their mysterious, jiggling bodies. They cause inadequate dowries to be paid, by being born into impoverished families. By refusing to pay adequate dowries to the families of innocent bridegrooms, these impoverished females cause themselves to be murdered, bringing shame and international criticism upon the Nation.

Another vile quality of females is their ability to use their voices as weapons. It is easy to understand why they use words rather than, say, knives or brute strength. It’s because they are smaller and weaker, on average, than Men. So instead of fighting fairly — that is, with fists — they stand around shrieking at Men in their sharp, piercing voices. They harass us with lawsuits and divorce. And they march in the streets parading their vicious ideas about protecting the Earth which they cruelly stigmatise with the title of “Mother”. They oppose all forms of progress. Whenever Men want to do something to burnish the Nation’s image — such as by building giant dams, mining tribal lands or erecting towering statues — out they come, jiggling and wiggling, squawking about “environmental damage” and “climate change” and other godless nonsense.

There is absolutely no question of removing females by violent means. No, no, we are always and forever the most non-violent culture that the world has ever seen. Our methods of elimination will be completely natural and organic. First, by insisting that all births can only be of males. This is easily achieved by combining yogic breathing with ultrasound imaging. Whenever a female foetus is noticed on the ultrasound screen, the technician’s breath will automatically stop. This will lead to spontaneous and/or chemically assisted miscarriage.

Second, all existing females will, gently and with no coercion whatsoever, be convinced to stop eating and thereby “lose weight”. Millions of young women are already fully engaged in this form of self-removal. They refer to this practice as “dieting”, which already includes the word “die” in it, in order to remind everyone that it’s really about mortality. The most advanced form of weight reduction results in Total Body Loss. Crude and ignorant people will insist on referring to this as “death” but of course, we know that in the case of females, it means transference to a higher plane of existence. Whenever a female succeeds in this form of self-elimination, a statue will be erected to her. Eventually, every home will have a room filled with such statues. It will be a glorious sight to see. Perhaps even a tourist attraction.

Third, instead of employing the old, outdated methods of reproduction, the Government will provide all households with gleaming, fully-automated Cloning Units. All able-bodied Men will be expected to perform the sacred and patriotic rituals by which an endless tide of sons will be created. We know that the technology for this existed in the past, because our Sacred Histories mention the multiple births of a hundred sons from a single egg. If it happened once, it can be made to happen again. It is only a matter of faith. And we certainly have an unlimited supply of that!

While we can never for an instant doubt that our Nation has been great since it came into existence at the same time as the Universe was created, we must acknowledge that blemishes have developed now and then. All such blemishes have been the result of Invaders (see *note above). Fortunately, We have always been able to eliminate Invaders.

We have used one of three methods. (1) If they are very annoying and bring us useful technology in the form of railways and modern medicine, we wait until we have learnt to use their legal machinery and then we kick them out. (2) If they have occupied our Great Nation for so long that it’s almost impossible to tell Us and Them apart, we force Them to assimilate until some of Their celebrities are performing our own religious rituals for us! Yaay! (3) We only record those items in our news media and history books that suit our version of the truth. This is actually the most effective system of all.

Frankly, by the time the Nation celebrates its 100th Anniversary, Method 3 will have been used so thoroughly that this article will itself have disappeared. We will no longer be celebrating a 100th Anniversary, because we will have declared ourselves as the Eternal Republic of India, having existed forever in the past and forever into the future. There will no longer be any history of wars, defeats, riots or negativity of any kind. All citizens will be identical and perfect in every respect. We will all be calm, pink-skinned, bearded and wealthy. Forever and ever! Ahhhhmen.

The writer is an author, playwright and cartoonist. This article is part of an ongoing series, which began on August 15, by women who have made a mark, across sectors



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Ashima Goyal writes: Focus must be on leveraging India's special circumstances and areas where India has a comparative advantage

The Indian economy was expected to collapse due to the pandemic. But its recovery has been better than that of most countries. Appropriate counter-cyclical policy enabled this but it worked because reforms had reached a threshold of adequacy. In the recent past growth suffered because of an excessive focus on structural reforms while neglecting the smoothening of shocks. Current policy has responded to the latter. But talk of the necessity of reforms is again in the air. So what reforms are required?

A major objective of international institutions such as the IMF-WB is to ensure advantages to other countries from India’s growth, in particular to their main financiers who are the large capital exporting countries. It follows that they want to ensure freer markets and fewer restrictions on all types of capital flows. Much of this is in India’s interest since we need more capital and better integration with world markets. But a democracy cannot ignore the concerns of its own citizens. The IMF-WB holy trinity of structural land, labour and other market-opening reforms harms many domestic citizens and, beyond a point, runs into severe resistance that imposes large political costs.

Liberalisation has reached a point of diminishing returns. Whatever was feasible in the above is surely in motion by now. Further organic reform will take place as states compete. Improving the supply-side has many other aspects. In choosing from the reform menu, the Centre must be guided by feasibility and pragmatism and ensure that benefits accrue to a majority.

The focus should be on leveraging the special circumstances that currently favour India. These include the impetus Covid-19 has given to digital aspects, where India has a comparative advantage, the possibility of supply chain diversification away from China, moving to a net zero economy and harnessing green initiatives as a source of investment and innovation. Attention should be given to developing skills and capabilities, improving employability, augmenting infrastructure, reducing logistics and other business costs through better Centre-state coordination, and enhancing the quality of governance and counter-cyclical regulation with good incentives. Much can be done to improve data use and privacy, functioning of courts and police. Instead of wasting political capital on reforms that encounter large resistance and shock the system, reforms should enhance favourable trends.

Yet, reform suggestions continue with the liberalisation agenda.

Privatisation of banks: There is a recommendation to privatise most public sector banks (PSBs), starting with those doing well. But the argument that PSBs are a drain on taxpayers’ money is based on the experience of the last decade. In the 2000s, they were doing better than private banks and withstood the global financial crisis better. NPAs rose because they were pushed into lending to infrastructure where there are inherent asset liability mismatches for commercial banks. Moreover, it was the first time that the lending was to private companies. Therefore, a full resolution had to await the setting up of the missing regulatory framework for bankruptcy. Improvements in PSB governance and risk-based lending profiles have resulted in falling NPA ratios and strong capital adequacy even under the pandemic shocks. Social schemes that were a drain on PSB resources are now largely financed through direct subsidies by the government.

Diversity in institutions and approaches makes for a more stable financial sector. PSBs are trusted by many savers. They have garnered Rs 1.7 trillion in their Jan Dhan accounts, while private banks have hardly any. PSBs can leverage their advantages in low-cost deposits through many co-lending opportunities and partnerships. The economy has suffered very low credit growth through the last decade and is ready for a turnaround. Private banks alone could not increase credit adequately — when lending from PSBs had slowed. This is not the time to disrupt the recovery in credit growth. PSBs should be allowed to compete and raise resources on their own. Only those who cannot do so, or have other serious weaknesses, should be allowed to exit through the privatisation or merger route. The strong will prosper. The Chinese way of growth, where the public sector shrinks as the private sector grows faster, would work better for India also.

Overshooting of the exchange rate: There are recommendations that the rupee should be completely market-determined. It should be allowed to sink under foreign outflows since this would benefit exporters. But pass-through of exchange rate depreciation is much faster in Indian imports, which are dominated by dollar-denominated commodities such as crude oil. Indian exporters largely have little market power and are forced to share the benefits of depreciation. Many studies show they do not gain from volatility. As imported inflation rises, monetary tightening follows and hurts the real sector. Real appreciation results in and requires more nominal depreciation. Any gain to exporters from overshooting is temporary. The fall in the exchange rate of the rupee from about Rs 8 in the 1990s to about Rs 80 currently has not brought about a sustained rise in exports.

Market panics and large deviations from competitive real exchange rates hurt the economy and most participants. Lower volatility in the real exchange rate helps both gainers and losers when there are changes in the rupee value. Both positive and negative deviations from equilibrium real rates are harmful. Only a fraction of the foreign portfolio flows (FPI) that look for trading benefits gain from volatility, not the majority that has a steady commitment and is here to benefit from India’s growth. Trading FPIs want to be the first to go out, take profits and then wait for a rupee crash before coming back in. If they know there will be no crash, there is less incentive to be the first out. The country’s risk premium falls. This may have contributed to a reversal of outflows.

Some rupee volatility is good and encourages firms to hedge currency risks. Central banks typically let the currency fall under outflows, so exiting FPIs get less. Then the bank comes in, buying low, stabilising the currency and reducing the overshooting. Trend depreciation has to compensate for inflation and productivity differentials. That US inflation exceeds that of India, and productivity tends to rise with growth, reduces the required depreciation. It helps exports if the rupee depreciates as much as major export competitors. Depreciation has been close to that of the Chinese currency. So intervention that prevents overshooting has only facilitated the working of markets and their discovery of equilibrium values.

The writer is member, Monetary Policy Committee and Emeritus Professor, IGIDR



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S Y Quraishi writes: Given poverty and inequality in India, it is important that we reaffirm the value and necessity of welfare programmes and the urgent need to expand them

There are two questions here: First, is this fanciful, excessive and often misleading vein of promise-making indistinguishable from the state-led provision of basic goods in a rights-based, welfarist apparatus? Second, must there be judicial or EC intervention to tackle the issue of freebies?

The recent debate sparked by the Prime Minister’s comments on what he termed “revdi culture” has reignited the significance of the above two questions. Let me first address the second question.

Promises made by the political parties, often driven by short-term electoral calculations, can be divided into two types: Promises made before the elections are announced and those made after. These promises are made by both the ruling and Opposition parties, with the ruling party having a distinct advantage as they control the treasury. They are also in a rush to make such promises before the EC plays spoilsport with its much-dreaded model code of conduct.

The second type of promise is the one made through manifestos after the elections have been announced. The government cannot announce new schemes after the declaration of poll dates because of the model code of conduct. The promises made in the manifestos, however, do not attract the model code. This is also why the EC has no powers to question the manifestos as they are perfectly legal, however infeasible their promises may seem.

Even the SC, in its judgment dated July 5, 2013, accepted that the promises in manifestos cannot be construed as “corrupt practice” under the RP Act. However, it conceded that they do “influence the people and shake the roots of free and fair elections”. It directed the EC to frame guidelines with regard to the content of manifestos in consultation with all the recognised political parties. In their meeting with the Election Commission, angry political parties argued that in a healthy democratic polity it is their “right and duty” towards the voters to make promises to them through their manifestos. Agreeing with this in principle, the EC, however, underlined its “undesirable impact”.

In my opinion, neither the EC nor the SC can get involved in this perfectly legal and legitimate democratic instrument. Even if the promises are unrealistic or absurd, it is for the rival parties and the media to expose them. And the voters do remember which promises have been fulfilled and which have not been. They are now seen constantly rewarding good performance and punishing non-delivery.

Moreover, as matters of economic policy lie in the hands of elected representatives, neither the EC nor the SC must intervene in the purely political domain of the legislature. It is ultimately for the voter to judge the economic and fiscal implications of freebie policies.

We must now turn to the first question: Welfarism vs freebies. The PM’s remark about “revdi culture” is indeed surprising as it strikes at the legitimacy of welfarism itself, particularly state-led welfarism, as a suitable model of development in which his government has done enormous work.

Oxfam’s 2022 annual report on inequality in India has many troubling, stark revelations. The number of poor doubled to 134 million as its dollar billionaires’ wealth doubled. The richest 1 per cent have amassed 51.5 per cent of the total wealth while the bottom 60 per cent of the population a mere 5 per cent. All of these indications clearly suggest a picture of a nation that is more fractious and unequal.

Critics have pointed out that provisions to poor beneficiaries are termed as “revdi” while state-sponsored support to the rich is called “incentive”. In September 2019, the government slashed corporate tax rates for domestic companies from 30 per cent to 22 per cent, and for new manufacturing companies from 25 per cent to 15 per cent. The government took just 36 hours to implement this decision. The Oxfam report has stated that these corporate cuts resulted in a loss of 1.5 lakh crore.

The report further highlighted that the government managed to compensate for the shortfall in direct taxes (income tax, corporate tax and capital gains tax) by increasing indirect taxes (goods and services tax, excise and customs duty) during the pandemic. This directly led to a rise in fuel prices impacting the prices of essential commodities such as foodgrain, which only impact the poor.

These policies are the main reason that helped make the rich richer, while the national minimum wage has remained at Rs 178 a day since 2020. Reduced federal funding to local administrations amidst growing privatisation in the health and education sectors has further boosted inequalities. Meanwhile, our nation is home to a quarter of the world’s undernourished people, according to the World Food Programme.

Given this overall socio-economic context, it is important that we reaffirm the value and necessity of our welfare programmes, and the urgent need to expand them. Providing its citizens with food, education and employment is the most fundamental responsibility of a democratic state.

The so-called “freebie” promises like cheap foodgrains and free items of utility have actually done considerable good to further the dream of democracy. Starvation deaths haven’t occurred since Rs 1-2 kg rice was introduced. The distribution of bicycles had improved enrollment and retention of girls in schools in Bihar. Employment guarantee schemes have brought visible relief to the rural poor.

Finally, I firmly believe that our nation would become a greater democracy if we redirect our concerned attention from “revdi” and “freebies” to rights and freedoms.

The writer is a former Chief Election Commissioner of India and the author of An Undocumented Wonder — The Making of the Great Indian Elections



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Rahul Gupta writes: Dignity at the workplace and pride in uniform compensate for lack of resources. But they need to be nurtured and reinforced with proactive interventions

Some time ago, an inspector came to my office. He requested me to immediately send a constable in the district police back to his home with 60 days’ leave. I asked him what the issue was, to which he replied that the constable was showing signs of severe mental stress on account of being away from home and living under constant anxiety that some unknown person will attack him. He was sent on leave as requested by the inspector. The constable is from Bihar and has been serving in the Arunachal Pradesh Police since 2000. It appeared that with his salary, he could not afford to bring his family here and the leaves granted in the past (last time, 32 days in September 2021) were not enough to compensate for the agony of being away from home.

The stress affecting the mental well-being of uniformed personnel is downplayed and overlooked. Uniformed forces are tightly structured with a command-and-control hierarchy system. A senior officer is the reporting authority for his immediate junior and this junior has to fulfil their tasks with manpower under his/her command. The hierarchy is rarely breached. The system ensures discipline, clarity of roles and accountability. However, it tends to become inhuman, especially to those who cannot communicate their personal issues in an appropriate forum.

In July, The Indian Express reported on a Court of Inquiry’s findings about a case of fratricide at a Border Security Force (BSF) camp in Amritsar. The person who shot his colleagues had shown signs of mental stress but these signs were not given enough attention. He was assigned tasks that may have aggravated the stress. Mental stress is a less-understood medical condition in India. Those who express the problem are termed as weak and are seen as shying away from the rigours of life. In a uniformed setup, subordinate staff do not want to appear weak as the “macho man” stereotype weighs them down.

The constabulary accounts for around 85 per cent of state police and CAPFs. These personnel perform their duties as directed by their seniors. They mostly remain in the background of the organisation with less recognition for their achievements and more frequent persecution for failure. A salary alone may not provide them with enough job satisfaction vis-a-vis the hardships they endure. Good working conditions, leave, allowances and housing should be provided as entitlements. Over the years, more recruitment and better funding have contributed to the fulfilment of some of these entitlements. Yet, there is a long way to go.

To cope with the difficulty of such a setup, personnel often resort to alcoholism and drug abuse. In the latter cases, defaulters are punished as per the law and suitable departmental action is also taken. Bad apples should be eliminated but those with underlying issues must be identified and a different approach adopted. This is where the role of the police leadership comes into the picture. We should strive to create a working environment that provides personal fulfilment to personnel and reduces the chances of mental stress and illness.

As police leaders, we must increase communication with all the ranks. The enforcement of discipline has to go hand-in-hand with concern for staff well-being. Regular sampark sabhas need to be conducted where personnel can air their grievances and proper follow-up action must be taken on all possible issues. The senior’s office should be open to all ranks 24/7. Reward and recognition act as big motivators. Often, the incentive system is at the whim and fancy of the head of the organisation. It has to be formalised in every setup. It has also been established that sports and cultural programmes increase bonhomie and create bonds between personnel, who support each other during crises.

Additionally, during random inspections on the field, friendly communication with personnel on duty does not hurt discipline — it only increases his trust in the leadership and dedication to duty. Dignity at the workplace and pride in the uniform compensate for any lack of resources. But this has to be reinforced with proactive interventions.

I called the constable after a few days to check on him. I suggested that he bring his family here for some time and promised that we will provide whatever help possible.

The writer is an IPS officer serving as Superintendent of Police in Arunachal Pradesh. Views are personal



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The tragic road accident on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway that caused the death of prominent businessman Cyrus Mistry has put the spotlight on the importance of wearing the rear-seatbelts in cars.

But in addition to this factor a seven-member forensic team which includes two PHDs from IIT Kharagpur, mechanical and civil engineers, and one member who specialises in simulations and modelling, and which has been commissioned by the SaveLIFE Foundation, has reportedly found that an infrastructure issue also contributed to the crash: “The bridge parapet wall was found to be protruding into the shoulder lane.”

It bears reminding that Union road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari himself has told TOI that the main reasons for road accidents and deaths are faulty road engineering, defective DPRs (detailed project reports), bad designing of junctions, inadequate signage and road markings.

Likewise the ministry’s report on road accidents in 2020 notes that violations such as overspeeding and driving on the wrong side do not constitute human error alone, although these are usually the official causes; instead it is important to scope out road engineering measures to address problems which are, prima facie, considered to be human error and enforcement issues.

So if one takeaway from this high-profile accident is that there must be a strong public focus on wearing rear-seatbelts, the other is that road accidents are usually multi-causal and the road environment plays a critical role and should be improved.

A well-designed highway for example should facilitate high mobility while safely segregating the slower-moving traffic and its merging with urban roads should be methodical as well. If countries with much higher speed limits than India have far fewer road fatalities, one reason is definitely that their highways don’t come up haphazardly but are well-designed.



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That some parts of Bengaluru, including areas where the very wealthy live, slid into crisis following two days of heavy rain is a combination of a good thing, an economic boom, and a curse many other Indian cities also suffer from, terrible urban planning and realtor greed. True, Sunday’s was the third heaviest rainfall ever recorded in Bengaluru in September. But it could have been handled better had the city evolved differently and city managers done their job. Before the IT boom, Bengaluru was as much a city of lakes and tanks with interconnected channels as it was a city of parks. The chaotic pace of the city’s development, rising land prices and scarcity of land coupled with developer greed and official collusion ensured that an intricate ecosystem meant for irrigation underwent a rapid change in character.

Some lakes and tanks have been filled up, others including their channels have been choked by concrete from all sides, and many tanks could do with dredging to improve water-holding capacity. Changing rainfall patterns aggravated this vulnerability. But small changes can still make big differences. Bengaluru areas that had their stormwater drainages repaired recently were reportedly spared this time, while many plush enclaves, which ignored the problems beneath, were waterlogged. The situation facing Bengaluru isn’t unique. Hyderabad, another city of lakes and tanks, is regularly hit by waterlogging, including “flash floods”. Cities with rivers flowing through them like Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi also face the risks spawned by rapidly depleted floodplains.

Revealingly, as outrage grew in Bengaluru, Karnataka CM Basavaraj Bommai stepped in and offered details of funds released for stormwater drains etc. Why does a mega city like Bengaluru generating thousands of crores in revenue have to be micromanaged by a state government, which also has the rest of Karnataka to administer? Decentralising governance and devolving powers is key if cities are to fashion a new planning and development paradigm. But it all boils down to politics. No state government will let go of controls over big urban centres because real estate is key to practising the business of politics. The truth is if India’s cities continue to be victims of bad/corrupt planning and political machinations, future disasters will make what happened in some parts of Bengaluru look like a walk in the park.



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In a landmark judgment four years ago the Supreme Court decriminalised homosexuality. But, of course, a law founded on prejudice being struck down doesn’t mean the prejudice withers away. And one egregious example of this is ‘conversion therapy’, which aims to ‘cure’ sexual orientations and gender identities that fall outside heterosexual conventions. It is a measure of how strong bigotry is that this practice persists despite frequently inflicting trauma, including depression and suicidal ideation. It took a Madras high court directive for the National Medical Commission to finally and firmly direct all state medical councils to take disciplinary action against medical professionals who practise conversion therapy.

But NMC needs to practise what it has been asked to preach – because prejudice runs deep. A study of medical school students, interns and postgrads in India has found that only around 20% respondents believe homosexuality is not an illness and another survey of Calcutta National Medical College students reports that only 55% strongly disagree that homosexuality is an illness. Further and shockingly, the Indian Psychiatric Society de-pathologised homosexuality only as late as in 2018.

US data indicates that around half the persons receiving conversion therapy are adolescents, whose cooperation is often extracted from their desire to be a ‘better’ son or daughter. Of course, it’s the parents who need to be better instead, not to mention physicians who inflict pointless and heart-breaking treatments on defenceless children. The same, or worse, holds for India, including among educated parents. That some of India’s young are made to suffer what is essentially 19th-century quackery is thanks to doctors who offer such services. That’s why NMC must ensure that severe disciplinary action is actually taken against such practitioners.



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​​For Dhaka, water-sharing has always had an outsized importance, which has served to fuel anti-India sentiments. While an agreement on the Teesta waters continues to be a work in progress, India has demonstrated its commitment by addressing the river water-sharing as a broader issue - there are 54 rivers the two countries share - including working out an agreement on Kushiyara.

Sheikh Hasina's visit marks an important moment in India's neighbourhood policy and its commitment to play a supportive role in the region. The Bangladeshi prime minister's visit comes at a time when her country faces the challenge of an energy crisis resulting from high global prices.

Energy is an important area where this partnership has potential to grow. The operationalisation of the first unit of the supercritical coal-fired thermal power plant at Rampal, Khulna, set up at an estimated cost of $2 billion, with $1.6 billion as Indian Development and Economic Assistance under Concessional Financing Scheme, could help ease the ongoing energy crisis in Bangladesh. An investment in coal appears out of sync given the climate constraints. However, there is a real need to provide a guard rail given escalating energy prices.

Going forward, India should focus its energy partnership on the transition to a low-carbon economy. Signs of this shift have been evident in the discussions between Narendra Modi and Hasina, and India Inc's engagement with the visiting leader.

For Dhaka, water-sharing has always had an outsized importance, which has served to fuel anti-India sentiments. While an agreement on the Teesta waters continues to be a work in progress, India has demonstrated its commitment by addressing the river water-sharing as a broader issue - there are 54 rivers the two countries share - including working out an agreement on Kushiyara.

India has made it clear it views Bangladesh's growth as an opportunity, and will be part of this endeavour. The seven agreements showcase a broad-based engagement, as do the other issues discussed that include New Delhi helping Dhaka to maintain its own in a region that 'interests' China.
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The government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will need to guide the banking system through the evolving situation. Although climbing up the ranks, India's trade with Russia is not in the same league as that with the US and the EU. Getting the financing mechanism off the ground is the first hurdle. Settling the rupee-rouble exchange rate and deciding what to do about the lopsided trade are bigger issues.

GoI is trying to allay skittishness among banks to set the ball rolling on rupee-denominated trade with Russia. Since announcing the settlement mechanism in July, it has told banks to stay clear of sanctioned Russian entities to avoid being dragged into secondary Western sanctions.

Yet, Indian banks are hesitant even as Russian banks that have not been cut off from the international cross-border payments system are eager to open vostro accounts for settling trade. India's trade deficit with Russia is rising on increased energy imports and reduced exports due to disruptions owing to the war in Ukraine. The Western sanctions are dynamic and could widen.

The government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will need to guide the banking system through the evolving situation. Although climbing up the ranks, India's trade with Russia is not in the same league as that with the US and the EU.

Getting the financing mechanism off the ground is the first hurdle. Settling the rupee-rouble exchange rate and deciding what to do about the lopsided trade are bigger issues. A market-based exchange rate is difficult to arrive at because the rouble is not being traded.

Finding the peg - a third currency or a trade-weighted basket - is the key, and has been the cause of differences in earlier avatars of local currency trade with Russia. Then there is the question of money piling up in Indian banks for oil purchases.

Russian interest in buying Indian government debt on offer may not be strong. Nor would Indian corporate interest in expanding business in an economy facing sanctions. Export incentives for rupee-denominated trade have a limited scope as long as Russia's war drags on.

The rupee trade finance mechanism has to resolve these issues if it aspires to outlive its immediate necessity. Since the need is strategic, the government must provide guard rails for commercial interests to operate within this framework. In order to broaden their engagement, India and Russia will have to look closer at policies that limit bilateral trade.
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The vandalisation amounting to slander, reportedly traced back to servers in Pakistan, poses a threat to India's peace, and GoI has a legitimate concern how it was allowed to be on display for some 15 minutes. Wikipedia tackles vandalism within minutes through bots and human editors, as it contends it did in this case.

GoI has sought an explanation from Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the non-profit user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, over vandalisation of an article about cricketer Arshdeep Singh following a loss to Pakistan in an Asia Cup match. The vandalisation amounting to slander, reportedly traced back to servers in Pakistan, poses a threat to India's peace, and GoI has a legitimate concern how it was allowed to be on display for some 15 minutes. Wikipedia tackles vandalism within minutes through bots and human editors, as it contends it did in this case. India's expectation of a safe and trusted internet rests on the filtering mechanism employed by information platforms beyond its jurisdiction.

The world over, lawmakers are seeking greater accountability over misinformation. The process is largely cooperative to encourage authoritative gathering and dissemination of information. This involves consensus among a wide set of players that include information gatherers and moderators, online platforms and public authorities. Vital to this approach is a self-regulatory code for information intermediaries and a rapid response system aided by disinformation experts. And since the menace is felt across the board, greater international cooperation is needed. Ultimately, governments can counter misinformation by becoming more proactive with credible information they share, forcing information intermediaries to reach up to a higher benchmark.

Technology and the market, too, have a role to play here. Algorithms and amplification mechanisms will improve to weed out misinformation. Advertising money, or user donations in the case of Wikipedia, will moderate content on online platforms in addition to fences erected by AI. Aggregators, on their part, will need a dynamic set of content policing rules to retain and increase their audience. Lawmakers need to pool together the constraints imposed by innovation and the profit motive to keep information flowing over the internet healthy. Trying to dam the information flow is counterproductive.

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Duplication is possible, as an investor can open demat accounts with multiple brokers. Nevertheless, work from home, rise in mobile and data penetration, and fall in brokerage rates have supported this growth. It shows greater formalisation of the economy, too. The low interest rates earlier on fixed deposits and debt instruments also led to money flowing into the markets.

India's dematerialised (demat) accounts have crossed the 100 million mark from about 40.9 million in March 2020, shows data from National Securities Depository (NSDL) and Central Depository Services (CDSL). Millennials are opening more accounts and investing directly in the stock markets. Duplication is possible, as an investor can open demat accounts with multiple brokers. Nevertheless, work from home, rise in mobile and data penetration, and fall in brokerage rates have supported this growth. It shows greater formalisation of the economy, too. The low interest rates earlier on fixed deposits and debt instruments also led to money flowing into the markets.

Retail investors invest much smaller amounts in the markets compared to institutional investors. Many booked profits during the upturn, bought at dips, invested in exchange-traded funds and switched between multiple demat accounts to pocket discounts. Overall, the rise in retail investment to stock trading shows that young and new investors are willing to take a certain amount of risk. Apparently, this helped counterbalance the stock dumping that FPIs had undertaken.

Global stocks have weakened now following central bankers' warning to investors to prepare for a sustained period of higher interest rates to fight inflation. Concerns that this could have destabilising effects on emerging markets are valid. So, caution is in order for rookie traders, and also new investors doing futures and options. IPOs attracted many retail investors. But these applicants reportedly lost money in 40% of the fresh issues this year. So, while India's economic prospects remain bright and stock valuations over a 10-year horizon would only be higher, investors can't afford to ignore bumps.

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A nationwide study carried out by the Union ministry of education and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in March has, once again, underlined the deepening crisis in India’s public education sector, made worse by the pandemic. The study found that 37% of students enrolled in Class III have “limited” foundational numeracy skills, such as identifying numbers. And 11% lack “the most basic knowledge and skills”, the Indian Express reported on Wednesday. The study, the largest ever assessing foundational level learning, also showed that 15% lacked “basic skills” in English, and 30% were found to have “limited skills”. Based on one-on-one interviews, the study assessed 86,000 students in 10,000 schools. Its outcome is important because 80-90% of the brain develops when a child is six to seven years old. Therefore, building a solid foundation with the right educational and nutritional inputs is essential.

It is important to remember that attaining foundational skills was a critical challenge even before the pandemic. Data from the 2019 Annual Status of Education Report showed that less than half of Grade 5 students had mastered Grade 2 level literacy. That the last two pandemic years have only accentuated the problem, especially in underprivileged communities that mostly access State-run schools and face hurdles in online education, is well documented. The status of learning among students in under-resourced and localised “English medium” schools mushrooming in rural and peri-urban centres could be worse. Now that school attendance has stabilised, it is essential to see what kinds of remedial studies and reorientation have been done in State-run schools and whether they are showing results. There is absolutely no room to waste time.

The ministry-NCERT report’s findings will set the baseline for NIPUN Bharat (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy), the Centre’s scheme to improve foundational learning. The government’s focus is welcome since this strategy, if rolled out properly with the help of state governments, has the potential to empower children to rebuild what was lost and ensure wider-ranging impacts on education systems, communities, and the country.



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Delhi announced a complete ban on the manufacture, storage, sale and use of firecrackers in the Capital till January 1, 2023, keeping in line with the practice in recent years where the Supreme Court and the city administration have clamped restrictions on the celebratory usage of crackers as part of efforts to check spiralling air pollution. The announcement, which has come earlier than usual this year, may give the civic administration more time to fine-tune its implementation, which has been patchy and unsatisfactory in the past few years, allowing illegal shops to sell crackers. It might also help avert the financial losses suffered by manufacturers who find it difficult to deal with inventory with a late ban announcement.

When burst in large quantity simultaneously — as happens during a number of festivals, including Diwali — crackers lead to a spike in pollution levels, with gases, pollutants and heavy metals such as arsenic, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen being released, alongside dust. The combustion process leads to a spike in both PM 2.5 and PM 10 concentr-ations, often reaching 20-30 times the safe standard. The impact is transient, but it doesn’t help that this spike happens at a time of the year when farmers in Punjab and Haryana burn stubble, wind speeds are low, rainfall non-existent and temperatures dip, creating a noxious vortex of pollutants shrouding the Capital.

Last year, for instance, Delhi woke up to one of its most polluted post-Diwali mornings in 2021. This was not because the ban was unsatisfactorily implemented but due to farm fires that had spiked in the run-up to the festival (and had contributed as much as a quarter of the pollution load on Diwali) and sluggish wind speeds that were inadequate to disperse the pollutants. Another report by the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research (Safar) found that if no firecrackers were to go off, air quality in Delhi would still stay in the poor range, but that widespread bursting would likely push air quality into the severe range (if only temporarily). This underlines the importance of announcing the ban early, promoting awareness among the people, creating robust mechanisms to implement it and prevent violations, and looking at the restrictions as part of a holistic plan to clean the city’s air and not as an isolated policy response. It will be interesting to see if Punjab, which, like Delhi, is governed by the Aam Aadmi Party, is equally proactive in dealing with stubble burning — a bigger problem than firecrackers when it comes to bad air.



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The Indo-Pacific is front and centre in this week’s high-powered diplomacy, whether it be aligning the coordinates on geo-economics at the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF)’s ministerial meeting in Los Angeles, geo-strategy at the Quad meeting in Delhi or a series of India-Japan ministerial dialogues in Tokyo. The takeaways from each of these conversations will be consequential in further consolidating the building blocks of a rules-based Indo-Pacific amid a fluid balance of power, order, values and ideologies.

The conversations in Tokyo is of pivotal importance as 2022 is a decisive year in the Japanese calendar. Tokyo is buzzing with debates on shoring up deterrence by rewiring the National Security Strategy (NSS) as the era of great power competition returns. The NSS of 2013 does not reflect the drastically altered strategic calculus as it predates the US-China disorder, the emergence of Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) in the strategic lexicon, the resurrection of Quad, the pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

De-cluttering the domestic discourse, it is imperative to understand how India is weighed in the current national security debate, and largely in the post-Abe politics. Today, the primacy of Delhi in the Japanese security outlook is firmly entrenched, as evident in the 2022 Defence White Paper, which featured India as an “extremely important country for Japan” owing to its strategic geography, demographic profile and economic potential. Some in Tokyo also argue the case for a possible G3 (the United States, China and India) in the next decade shaping the basic direction of global politics, and Tokyo’s urgency to buttress the strategic arc with India.

The discussions in Tokyo will allow India to sharpen its understanding of Japan’s evolving character as a security actor amid turbulent tides in the Taiwan Straits. It is important to grasp the nuances in national security discourse — be it doubling defence spending despite fiscal pressures, framing of the Taiwan contingency, domestic discourse on nuclear- sharing arrangements alongside Japan’s three non-nuclear principles, or pursuing counter-strike capability within the constraints of an exclusively defence-oriented policy.

While none of these strands is new, the Ukraine conflict has accelerated the prevailing trends in Japanese national security discourse. This echoes in the marked shifts in Japanese public opinion on security, compared to a decade ago.

As the defence and foreign ministers meet, one of the key lookouts includes how the revised NSS designs the China strategy? The 2013 NSS frames China as a “mutually beneficial relationship based on common strategic interests”. In today’s strategic calculations, this sounds disoriented. Tokyo today talks of a “three front war” in its threat assessment — from China, North Korea and Russia.

One of the fundamental fault lines is their competing visions of the regional order. And yet, the discussion of a two-tier economic policy — intensifying free trade on one hand and pushing back on Chinese coercive economic statecraft on the other — demonstrates the challenge Japanese policy elites are navigating. It also shows that Japan’s posture on economic security does not inevitably imply economic decoupling from China. Defence and security verticals constitute one of the core pillars of our partnership.

While the latitude of our maritime security cooperation stands on qualitative depth, discussions on defence equipment and technology cooperation need greater traction.

Japan has eased its arms export policy in 2014, but that in itself is not sufficient. Despite the prowess of its civilian manufacturing base and dual-use technology, cost competitiveness owing to structural constraints and relative inexperience in the global arms market are fundamental challenges confronting the Japanese defence industry.

Going forward, positioning the economic security agenda centre stage is critical. Complex policy choices balancing national security and economic cost are at play while dealing with high-tech supply chains. The discussion between the government and the private sector needs a deeper dive to realise better synergy.

Before Prime Minister Narendra Modi heads to Tokyo later this month to bid a final goodbye to India’s biggest champion, Shinzo Abe, these ministerial dialogues will be a force multiplier in advancing the late PM’s vision of a “Confluence of the Two Seas”, and position the India-Japan arc as a net-positive asset in stabilising the Indo-Pacific.

Titli Basu is associate fellow, Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and AnalysesThe views expressed are personal



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The locus of India’s development is at the state level. Almost two-thirds of the expenditure is by state governments, which covers the most critical aspects of development. While many chief ministers (CMs) are now focused on welfare and service delivery, they also need to prioritise economic growth. Apart from being the engine of prosperity, rapid economic growth also creates resources that the government can redistribute.

Five states — Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Karnataka — account for around 40% of India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Other than UP, all of them have a per capita Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) above the national average. UP wants to catch up with others as CM Yogi Adityanath has recognised that with accelerated economic growth, he can create jobs and fulfil people’s aspirations. I call these five states the Five Horsemen as I see them pulling away from the rest. The competition is fierce, with several states such as Delhi, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Telangana being well poised to keep pace. However, this is also an opportunity for states such as West Bengal, Rajasthan, Kerala and Punjab to emulate other states, and return to a high-growth path.

China’s example is instructive: Five Chinese provinces — Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, Zhejiang and Henan — account for 40% of China’s GDP. These provinces on the eastern seaboard (Henan is a bit inland) have led the nation’s miraculous economic growth over the past four decades. Guangdong and Jiangsu are each within 15% of the $2-trillion GDP mark. Shandong and Zhejiang crossed the $1-trillion threshold in the past few years and Henan will do so in the next year or two. Eight other provinces/municipalities are at the $0.5-1-trillion mark, and with aspirations to enter the trillion-dollar club.

What can we learn from the Five Horsemen and the Chinese miracle?

Aspirations and Targets:Four of the Five Horsemen have announced an aspirational target of a $1-trillion GSDP, and the fifth one (Gujarat) has a medium-term goal of achieving $0.5 trillion. Maharashtra is projected to achieve a $450 billion GSDP this fiscal year and can reach the trillion-dollar goal the earliest. The other four states are at $250-300 billion GSDP and even though the trillion-dollar target may seem distant, these states are determined to accelerate growth and get there sooner. India’s structural transformation has been slow, so these states must reduce the percentage of the labour force in agriculture by 10 points by 2030, and consequently increase the share of services and industry by five percentage points each.

Chinese provincial leaders are fiercely competitive, and their key performance indicator (KPI) is economic growth. Lower-level officials at the 3,000-odd county divisions are held accountable for economic growth and job creation. Every state must follow this path and set aspirational targets following their current baseline.

Exports: Four of the Five Horsemen (other than UP) are coastal states that have prioritised exports — collectively, they account for almost 65% of India’s exports. They will continue to dominate and three other states (Haryana, UP, Telangana) each account for almost 5% of total exports. These states must supercharge exports (three-four times the current level by 2030) with a particular focus on labour-intensive exports. Four Chinese provinces account for 64% and another three account for around 15% of their national exports. All, but one, are coastal states, and the same strategy can be taken up by the Five Horsemen.

Industrialisation and pro-business reforms: States must be pro-business and investment. Some states such as Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra (especially the western region) have industrialised rapidly. UP and Bihar have diverged with the former making capital outlays that are 4-5x the latter’s to create the enabling infrastructure for industrialisation (roads and industrial parks). UP plans to spend over 20% of its net expenditure in FY23 on capital outlays while Bihar and West Bengal linger around 12-13%. India can grow at over 10% if all our CMs spend a larger percentage of the budget on targeted and effective capital expenditure, create the enabling conditions for business, and have the right attitude to attract private investment.

Urbanisation: States must proactively increase the level of urbanisation by five percentage points by 2030. Cities are the engine of growth for services and innovation, which, in turn, leads to improved productivity and higher wages. Investment in urban transport (particularly metro lines), higher floor area ratio, and affordable housing will increase the size and density of cities. States should follow the National Capital Region (NCR) model to create mega clusters — e.g., Greater Lucknow, the State Capital Region, which is already work in progress — with a 100km radius around the core centre. Services are the largest share of GSDP and must grow at 10+ % real growth rates per year.

If India wants to catch up during Amrit Kaal (the run-up to 2047), then every CM must make economic growth their top priority, set aspirational 2030 targets, develop a strategic and implementation plan, appoint the best officials in key posts, prioritise enabling infrastructure, drive better outcomes in social sectors, and usher in real ease of doing business. This is the surest way to reduce poverty.

My personal dream is that the Five Horsemen will all cross the trillion-dollar mark by 2035, and many others will be galloping swiftly behind them.

Ashish Dhawan is the founder-CEO of The Convergence Foundation (TCF) and founding chairperson, Ashoka University The views expressed are personal



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The high-level segment of the 77th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will begin in the third week of September in New York. In some ways, this will be the first “normal” UNGA after 2019. During the high-level week, a significant side event will be a high-level ministerial meeting to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the L.69 Group, which is committed to comprehensive reform of the UN Security Council (UNSC). It gets its name from the draft resolution number L.69 tabled by this group in 2007, which eventually led to establishing the informal Intergovernmental Negotiation (IGN) process in the UN in 2008, the deliberations of which are supposed to lead the member-States towards Security Council reform.

L.69 has 30 members, including India and several developing countries from Africa, Latin America, Asia-Pacific and the Caribbean. It is chaired by the dynamic Permanent Representative of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Ambassador I. Rhonda King. St Vincent and the Grenadines became the smallest member of the UN to get elected to the UNSC (2020-21), where it left an impressive imprint on the Council’s work.

L.69 has emerged as an unequivocal voice for UNSC reform. It derives its strength from the fact that it has developing country members, ranging from Small Island Developing States to medium-sized countries to large nations such as India, Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria.

But equally important, it has many members that do not themselves aspire to be permanent members of the Council, but are deeply committed to reform and, inter alia, the expansion of the Council in both the permanent and non-permanent categories of membership. Even more significantly, L.69 members have withstood poaching from those against reform or the “nay-sayers” and stayed in the group. Such commitment has been critical for L.69’s credibility.

L.69 is quite unlike the G-4 Group or Uniting For Consensus (UFC) Group, since G-4 consists of “aspirants” and UFC consists of “nay-sayers”. For example, in UFC, for India you have naysayer Pakistan, for Brazil you have Mexico, for Germany you have Italy (and others), and for Japan, the Republic of Korea. Outside the UFC, China and Russia are nay-sayers for Council reform.

But the IGN process, after 15 years, is regressing. The naysayers in IGN have stopped any progress by invoking, incorrectly, the need for consensus to take decisions, thereby ensuring that they effectively have a veto on any progress. They have stopped text-based negotiations without which no text can be adopted by UNGA. IGN is now hostage to them. The outside world, demanding reform due to a paralysis of UNSC — the recent example being the conflict in Ukraine — can’t even witness IGN proceedings since they are not open for public viewing, unlike other UN meetings. IGN now serves as a smokescreen for the naysayers.

African nations have always claimed, rightly so, that their historic injustice needs to be corrected, especially since they are now 54 countries and many of the agenda items in the Council are from Africa. The common African position has been outlined in the Ezulwini Consensus (2005) and the Sirte Declaration (1999), which, inter alia, calls for two permanent seats for Africa, which L.69 has strongly supported. But the African Group has been plagued by internal contradictions (readily exploited by the naysayers), which prevent them from taking their common position forward. Many pro-reformists amongst them are not vocal. Their common position has remained only on paper. This year, they even opposed text-based negotiations. Do they only want to keep talking about UNSC reform?

The G4 faces headwinds primarily because of opposition to Germany and Japan by China, Russia, the Republic of Korea and others. India has widely been recognised to have the strongest claim for permanent membership. Among the current five permanent UNSC members, the P-5, France and the United Kingdom (UK) have been vocal in their support for India; China has demurred. However, expressing support to individual candidates is only the next stage after the reform resolution is adopted.

Developed countries, especially from Europe, lament that the P-5 have paralysed the Council through their veto, but show little enthusiasm for pushing IGN to an outcome. They merely tinker with procedures and hold them up triumphantly as reform. The price the developing world pays is heavy. Only 51 members formed the UN in 1945. We now have 193. The worsening decade-old problems in Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere stand as mute witness to the impact of vested interests of the P-5 on international peace and security.

In this scenario, if there has to be any movement on Council reform, one has to go outside the IGN process for an outcome. Reform must be done in a formal process, transparently and in an inclusive manner, which IGN is not.

The primary vehicle thus must be L.69. It’s time the L.69 high-level ministerial meeting in September takes the bold step of tabling a draft in the UNGA and start negotiations in earnest. No one can stop L.69 from tabling a draft. Such a move will galvanise the UNSC reform process and bring back sceptics. Naysayers can no more hide behind smokescreens. Let’s focus on the outcome now, not just the process. September 2022 is as good a time as any to start.

TS Tirumurti is former Permanent Representative/ Ambassador of India to the United Nations in New York and President of the Security Council for August 2021The views expressed are personal



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The crippling floods in Pakistan have also been deadly. Much is being written about the causes of this flood with the usual homilies about the role of the climate crisis in exacerbating this flood. And yet, it would be dangerous for India to ignore the larger context of global processes driving these floods which are present over central-western and northwestern India as well.

The drivers of these floods are reaching in from far and wide; from the Atlantic into the Pacific and back over to the Arabian Sea — flooding not only Pakistan but also northern Maharashtra, western Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and into Rajasthan and Punjab. For example, many locations in Gujarat saw rainfall totals swing from serious deficits this season to significant surpluses in just a few days. The death toll in India has also crossed a thousand albeit in different states and different events.

The Pakistan floods are very much related to the circulation changes affecting central-western and northwestern India. We can see ocean and land warming and circulation changes affecting the subcontinent, starting with the monsoon over Pakistan.

The southwesterly winds that sweep across the Arabian Sea over to India shipping in 200 lakh crore buckets of water during the monsoon do not reach Pakistan directly. Pakistan’s monsoon season is related to the arrival of the monsoon trough into northern India, with a majority of the moisture supply arriving from the Bay of Bengal. The onset of the monsoon happens only in early July. Pakistan is essentially an extension of the desert northwest India with rainfall amounts mostly below 500mm except for the northeastern corner where the totals can reach as high as 900mm. As with the Indian monsoon, everything about the Pakistan monsoon is also changing — the onset, the withdrawal, the length of the rainy season, seasonal totals and extreme events.

What's unique about Pakistan’s monsoonal circulation is that it is a mix of monsoonal winds in the east meeting the northerly and northwesterly winds in the west. The confluence of these winds can set up cyclonic circulations over Pakistan during the monsoon which are now being made more frequent by the northward shift in the southwesterly winds over the Arabian Sea. The northern Arabian Sea has warmed rapidly and can pump in boatloads of moisture.

The land itself has warmed much faster from West Asia to Pakistan, contributing to the northward shift of the southwesterly winds. The Arabian Sea in the northern reaches has warmed significantly as well because of a combination of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) warm pattern and its influence on the western Pacific. The AMO is able to warm the Arabian Sea directly during the winter months and also facilitate the warming during spring via its influence on the western Pacific which is another warming hotspot.

As we know from the El Niño and La Niña impacts on the Indian monsoon and the global weather patterns, what happens in the Pacific does not stay in the Pacific. The western Pacific sustains the Arabian Sea warming into spring and the southwesterly wind changes feed on this warmer ocean. The net result has been that rainfall over Kerala has seen a decrease in recent decades whereas the northern end of the Western Ghats into Gujarat and Pakistan have seen an increase in rainfall intensity.

In other words, the Pakistan floods are not an isolated pattern. They are very much related to ocean warming and circulation changes in our own backyard as well. This should raise a flag for India because it is likely that such devastating floods may also occur a little further to the east over central-western and northwestern India as well. This season has been the flag bearer of this potential for large-scale flooding.

India has been fortunate to have avoided such submerging large-scale floods in this region so far but a similar increase in widespread floods has also been occurring over central India. It would be a subcontinental scale flood if the two regions of widespread floods were to occur at the same time.

India has a multi-scale prediction system from short (1-3 days), medium (3-10 days), to extended (weeks 2-4) range weather forecasts. However, as the floods in Bengaluru this week have shown, monumental changes are needed to be able to brave these floods, without our cities crumbling. India’s forecast system has shown steady progress thanks to the massive investments in human and computational resources. India also has training programmes for many of the neighbouring countries near and far in the use of these forecasts and the forecasts are also shared with many neighbours. It is now time to acknowledge that the climate vulnerabilities of the neighbours are not only of great concern for India’s climate vulnerability and economic development, but also note that some of these could grow into national security issues.

Dr Raghu Murtugudde is visiting professor Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, emeritus professor University of Maryland

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Imagine there’s a person who has been livestreaming their gaming and has been able to accumulate a good amount of following on a behemoth social media platform because of that. Now, they’ve decided to take their top fans off this social network and onto another website or app, where there may be better monetisation tools. Or maybe they’re building a company and assembling tools to start their business, while also focusing on their craft. Or maybe they’ve gained enough influence that their fans want to connect with them on a more personal level.

This ecosystem is the creator economy, with more than 50 million folks around the world considering themselves to be creators of content, be it articles, videos, podcasts, music, games or digital books. Just imagine: An entire economic system built by independent creators connected to businesses and audiences through the internet. The audience supports the creator monetarily by engaging with their content, purchasing their merchandise, buying from brands the creator is associated with or by, just simply, making the creator a thought leader. And it’s so dominant that more kids in the United States (US) want to be creators rather than astronauts, according to one survey.

Do you have a phone, a stable internet connection, some adequate lighting and an indomitable spirit that won’t be undermined by the judgment of strangers? You’re on your way to becoming a creator. After all, Covid-induced digitisation has led to better mobile networks, more access to tech and creator-centred social networks, disrupting the status quo. Sounds easy, right? Not quite. You still have a ton of work to do. You still need to have engaging content, compelling storytelling, painstaking attention to detail when it comes to editing for visual medium and more. Or else, just be (conventionally) good-looking enough, where the rest of the above doesn’t matter all that much and you can jump on the bandwagon for what’s trending and copy stuff. And if you’ve built out that fan-following, you have companies available to support you.

There was a time when production companies were pulling the strings, when it came to producing content and what the audience ought to like, thereby controlling the distribution. Then, social platforms came along to help democratise content, but also had certain rules in place to moderate and control content. Being paid for ad revenue share for bringing in an audience transitioned to brand sponsors paying creators for their reach. These creators would work with sponsors to promote something or push a message, but the advent of influencer marketing also meant that some trust was lost with every paid post. Also, prudent creators had to, thus, cross-promote their content and diversify, in case one platform changed priorities or strategies and cut down on opportunities for creators. Many social media corporations don’t share advertising revenue with creators, though a social media platform like YouTube, seemingly, takes 55% of ad revenue and leaves the remaining 45% for the creator.

And then, creators realised that a dedicated fandom would follow them irrespective of platform, and harnessing this, they could build full-on ventures with multiple revenue streams beyond ads and even become platform-agnostic. So, instead of desperately trying to get views with clickbait, creators can be empowered to build their niche for people who truly understand them. Newer platforms are trying to uproot the media juggernauts, with Substack and Patreon allowing creators to get about 90% of the revenue derived and more.

With the creator economy strapped to a rocket, the pressures of working in the ecosystem are mounting, what with more revenue streams and more audience. Once an artist, creators have to, now, wear many hats such as a designer, e-commerce administrator, product manager, community head, and more. Creator economy startups include a growing number of unicorns, including Patreon, Cameo, and Substack. It’s become a multi-billion industry, with the generation of “micropreneurs” being estimated to reach about $104 billion in 2022.

And with great power comes great responsibility. It’s also a time for great resilience to be bred by these independent entrepreneurs, who can create a buffet of what revenue stream they best vibe with. Have a wacky esoteric interest? There are certainly one or two creators out there who can feed that and build a sustainable career. Eric Freytag of Streamlabs remarked, "Rather than ten TV shows consumed by billions of people, we now have hundreds of millions of shows that cater to billions of people. You could be only one of ten people in the world interested in a niche topic, but chances are you'll find content for it. Additionally, the people who are creating content for that topic are truly and authentically passionate about it."

Venture Capitals (VCs) are, increasingly, supporting the creator economy. One would think it would be by investing directly in creators themselves, but by supporting the market for services targeted at creators. Funding for the VC-backed creator economy ventures was about $940 million in 2021.

According to Antler, an early-stage venture capital firm, there are five main categories, when it comes to the creator economy on platforms:

1. Audience Curation

This allows creators to build foundational audiences, transforming regular fans into superfans. These include newsletters, event platforms and livestreaming.

2. Audience Monetisation

This allows creators to monetise their audience, once they have a substantial following. These include courses, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), social tokens, brand deals, live shopping and fashion marketplaces.

3. Vertical Platforms

Here, the focus is, solely, on one area, like education, gaming, music, podcasts and fitness.

4. Community Management

This allows creators to manage communities through strategies like community tools, integrating all media in one place and membership platforms.

5. Creator Tools

This allows creators to grow and build their businesses. Such platforms include audio & video, design tools and website builders.

Social media goliaths have recognised the potential of the creator economy. Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta plans to invest $1 billion in creators by early 2023 by funding bonus programmes, creator funds and other monetisation strategies to empower creators.

He wrote, “We want to build the best platforms for millions of creators to make a living, so we're creating new programs to invest over $1 billion to reward creators for great content they create on Facebook and Instagram through 2022. Investing in creators isn't new for us, but I'm excited to expand this work over time.” His company is allowing creators to promote fan subscriptions, sell gifts and host paid virtual events and, overall, participate in a branded content marketplace. Instagram allows its creators to open virtual shops and sell products and badges. YouTube announced it would inject about $100 million into a fund for its short video feature, Shorts, getting its creators paid by engagement and viewership. Snap is being called a dark horse for providing innovative content creator tools by pioneering Augmented Reality lenses and introducing short-form video content Spotlight. That being said, some have opined its rollout of monetisation features has been slow.

India has the potential to be the premium hub for the creator economy. Jio penetrated the internet market, with the number of Indian internet users estimated to reach about 1.5 billion by 2040. With over 750 million internet users in India, as of 2020, it seems naturally inclined for success. But, then again, it’s a country that’s diverse in culture, religion, languages and more. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on how creators and brands can utilise the market. Nonetheless, there cannot be a homogenous market for creators in India. Regional content across various languages can have a huge impact on hyper-defined pockets of people with different interests and common dialects. Providing opportunities for budding creators in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, regional creators also provide a conduit for brands to tap into regional audiences. This may not have been possible without the advent of the creator economy.

About 150,000 professional content creators are able to monetise their services effectively in India, according to one report by Kalaari Capital, a tech VC. The others may still be trying to decode how to best leverage their craft monetarily. For all of them, it seems like the creator economy is here to stay, especially in India. No longer at the whim of gatekeepers, there is much less pressure to adhere to brand narratives or weak monetisation strategies. These creators can rely on themselves and startups can identify how their target audience can be catered to. This may be the path to redefine the booming global economy with the creative resources of creators.

We’re at an inflection point in history. Social media giants and investors are betting on unleashing the power of creators. This is the era of the creator economy and it is markedly different from what you’re used to.

Shrija Agrawal is a business journalist who has covered startups and private capital markets before it was considered cool in India

The views expressed are personal



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India is the largest democracy in the world but over most of its life as an independent nation saw its politics being dominated by one party. It took 30 years for a political formation to unseat the Congress with its legacy of the freedom struggle; but the Janata experiment which did the unthinkable proved unsustainable and the Congress was back in the saddle.

The political instability of the 1990s produced fragmented electoral results and experimentation continued. After Rajiv Gandhi’s landslide victory in 1984, it took another 30 years for a party to win a majority of its own. Narendra Modi led the BJP and the National Democratic Alliance to victory in 2014.

The Opposition is so weak that there is no party that can claim the post of Leader of the Opposition following the last two elections as it needs 10 per cent seats in the Lok Sabha. It is in this background that the Kanyakumari to Kashmir Bharat Jodo Yatra (Unite the Nation Walk) of the Congress and its leader Rahul Gandhi is to be seen.

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The 3,500 km Yatra, as per the Congress, seeks to unite the people against policies of the NDA government which it alleges have resulted in the economic ruin of the country. Another goal of the yatra is to mobilise people to resist what it says are the BJP’s attempts to spread hate and to divide the nation on religious lines.

The Congress believes that the Yatra will help it reinvent itself. The party is in a hopeless position when it comes to numbers in the Lok Sabha and it runs governments only in two states. But the fact is that the party and its apparatus still exist in most states except perhaps Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the two most electorally significant states.

However, the Congress is either the main Opposition or the United Progressive Alliance it leads is at striking distance of power in several states. The party scored an unexpected number of votes when elections were conducted last in states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana, signalling the acceptance it still enjoys in these key states.

It looks as if the problem is not with the party rank and file, but with the leadership which seems to have no plan to present before the people. It watched disinterestedly when the BJP torpedoed its governments in several states. That the grand old party of Indian politics has no leader for the last three years says much about the total disarray at the top.

To occupy the Opposition space and prepare people for a regime change are the democratic mandates the Congress has. Whether the party has planned for it or not, the main yatra which passes through 12 states and two Union territories and the contributories in several others will surely connect it with the grassroots. It will also impart a fresh momentum to the UPA.

The critical point, however, is whether or not the party leadership has a plan to fight the Narendra Modi government which it blames for the ills of the country. If it can do that, it will survive its opponent and be back in the game.



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The primary cause of the civic disaster that struck Bengaluru may have been the heaviest September rainfall on a single day last Sunday. But what lay hidden as Nature, the great equaliser, sent even the elite of India’s Silicon Valley scrambling for hotel rooms as their villas got flooded and their luxury cars became afloat like so many idling speedboats, was decades of poor governance, steep corruption and an unholy nexus between politicians and developers.

As India’s fastest growing city since the 1980s expanded unrecognisably beyond Bangalore, the old garden city once revered by retired pensioners, city planning rules and regulations were thrown to the winds to satiate the IT hub’s appetite for office towers and residences for techies. As the growing city took over lake, tank beds and their surroundings to be converted into a concrete jungle, channels through which rainwater used to drain into the lakes got choked.  

No government or municipal corporation has been honest in dealing with the demands of a runaway metropolis where traffic flow is a daily nightmare, power supply likely to fail any time and garbage clearance at best a patchwork. Unbridled growth, coupled with poor civil engineering, contributed to the crisis that came to a head at a time of climate change rendering places prone to intense rainfall events in short spans of time.

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Small mercy then that the old inner city fared better than the metropolis that encompassed semi-rural areas which were later linked by the Outer Ring Road. A waterlogged Greater Bengaluru is a warning for all big cities of India that don’t bother about monitoring city planning permissions and how builders bend them at will. Bengaluru is not the only city that suffers when nature’s bounty, occasionally tending to such fury, manifests itself in intense rainfall. Water bodies and waterways had long ago given way to the developer’s greed to startling effect. All of India's metropolises are grossly mismanaged.



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This one went down to the wire. Until the last moment, no one was sure whether UP’s additional chief secretary (home) Awanish Kumar Awasthi would get an extension or be allowed to superannuate. The radio silence on the issue from both the Yogi Adityanath camp and the Centre ensured that rumours kept swirling. Finally, Mr Awasthi was allowed to retire, and senior IAS officer Sanjay Prasad has been given additional charge of the state home department. Also, as a corollary to the ongoing churn and perhaps as an attempt to “tame” the babus, the Yogi government has transferred 16 senior IAS officers, including controversial additional chief secretary (health) Amit Mohan Prasad.

While often discussed in quiet conversations, the Awasthi episode has once again brought the uneasy Centre-UP government equation to the fore. Most observers would have expected Mr Awasthi, who was known as a confidante of chief minister Adityanath, to stay on, but it seems the Centre did not process his file and kept it pending until it was too late.

The UP-Centre cracks in the woodwork are now clearly revealing signs of strain. The normally subterranean tussle between the two power centres has resurfaced. And no surprise, it has hit the babudoms that both Yogi and the Centre need and use. Whether it is an internecine war confined to UP is unknown, but the Awasthi saga bears the telltale signs of a border skirmish. We await further developments on this front.

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Karmayogi Bharat: Ramadorai an exceptional choice

The Modi Sarkar is hoping that private sector talent will help create a competent civil service with the aim of effective and efficient public service delivery. For that noble end, former Tata Consultancy Services vice-chairman S. Ramadorai is being brought in to chair the Karmayogi Bharat, the government programme for capacity building in the civil services. In other words, the government wants to mould babus into karmayogis, rooted in the Indian ethos.

Karmayogi Bharat owns, manages and maintains the digital platform iGOT Karmayogi on behalf of the government for the implementation of the Mission Karmayogi.

In Ramadorai the Modi Sarkar has made an exceptional choice to head this programme. Building institutions is what the formidable ex-Tata honcho knows best among his other qualities. Further, he has an inside view of government, having been the adviser to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the National Council on Skill Development, holding the rank equivalent of a Cabinet minister. His expertise in economics, leadership and governance could prove useful provided babus are open to imbibing the wisdom of a “non-babu”!

Sansad TV CEO goes, but may move to Prasar Bharati

Sansad TV CEO Ravi Capoor has been relieved of his duties at the end of his tenure, which surprised many observers. It was widely assumed that as in the case of Rajya Sabha secretary general P.C. Mody whose term was recently extended, Mr Capoor too may get an extension. Utpal Kumar Singh, who is secretary general of the Lok Sabha has been asked to manage Sansad TV as an additional responsibility.

But the final word on Mr Capoor’s career is yet to be written, say some. Apparently, the buzz is that he is likely to be named as the next CEO of Prasar Bharati, which has functioning under an ad hoc arrangement since the tenure of its CEO Shashi Shekhar Vempati ended two months ago. And if rumours of a proposed merger of Sansad TV and Doordarshan under the Prasar Bharati have any substance, it would give Mr Capoor a good chance to head the public broadcaster.

Mr Capoor, a retired IAS officer, was appointed CEO of Sansad TV in March last year after the decision to merge Lok Sabha TV and Rajya Sabha TV.

Of course, nothing is certain about the course the government will eventually adopt, but it may be premature to write off Mr Capoor from the list of potential candidates. His hat is still in the ring.



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In the third week of August 2022, the news of the emergence of “tomato flu” or “tomato fever” became a major headline in India. It started with the correspondence in the medical journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine on August 17, which had reported that a new virus and disease -- “tomato flu” and “tomato virus” -- had emerged in some Indian states. The correspondence reported that around 100 cases had been reported in some Indian states, with the majority of cases in children younger than nine years.

Two weeks since then, it has become amply clear that what has been reported is not a new virus or disease but rather a form of the “hand, foot and mouth diseases” (HFMD) -- a common illness for children up to 10 years and regularly reported from India.  Moreover, “tomato virus” is not the name of any virus which causes diseases in humans.  Tomato fever is not the official name of any disease. In short, the publication and news that followed about tomato virus and disease were close to information excess and misinformation.

The hand, foot and mouth disease is caused by a group of viruses called Coxsackie A16, Coxsackie A6, Enterovirus A71 and Echovirus, etc. All these viruses have been known for years. Across the country, pediatricians and physicians attend many patients with HFMD on a regular basis. Then, as in most viral diseases, the affected children develop symptoms such as cough, cold, fever and rash in mouth, extremities and feet, which can be painful. However, the disease is self-limiting and usually people recover within four to seven days without any medication.

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Clearly, the entire episode of “tomato flu” draws our attention to the continuing challenge of misinformation and “info-demic” in the health sector. The info-demic was first acknowledged during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the situation has not improved much in the last two years. In fact, there has been an increased curiosity among people about the viruses and disease occurring in any part of the world. It is this demand for information that we regularly read and hear about in the mainstream media -- almost every now and then -- about emergence of new viruses and diseases, such as Langya Virus, Marburg Virus or Ebola Viruses. The viruses and diseases were always emerging, but now they get sizeable space and attention in the newspapers, on TV channels and of course all over the social media.

Arguably, there are three broad reasons for “tomato fever” getting this kind of exaggerated attention. First, the correspondence was published in a sister journal of the prestigious Lancet; and thus it received wider attention. It became a sensation as it was widely (and wrongly) quoted as “a new study”, while it was merely correspondence. The publication under this section has the lowest weightage in hierarchy of scientific evidence and is not externally peer reviewed. Such articles are to share some ideas or to generate debate and peer scrutiny on a new topic.

Second, even though it has been published in reputed journals, health experts and scientists since then have argued that it is a very poorly written and incompletely substantiated correspondence which fails to stand up to scientific scrutiny. There is no primary data presented by the authors and all they quote as a source are two newspaper reports to support their entire claim. Their conclusion seems definitive and exceeds the information they have used.  In fact, the authors went ahead by naming the virus “tomato virus”, while the naming of the new viruses follows a prescribed procedure and done by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV).  The “tomato virus” is not the official name of any virus which causes disease in humans. It is fair to say that if subjected to external peer review, this correspondence may not have been published.

Third, after the news about “tomato flu” emerged, the Government of India did issue an advisory to clarify that “tomato flu” was not a new disease but a new form of the hand, foot and mouth disease. However, as it happens, the official advisory came nearly a week later. The advisory was drafted as a dull and lifeless document and repeated information already published in the media and had barely used additional scientific information and epidemiological data.  The Indian government’s health adviser has the ability to do much more than that. No surprise then that the advisory barely received any attention in the media or by the public.

In Covid-19, it has been argued that while the virus itself was a challenge, an equal or arguably bigger challenge was “info-demic” -- the epidemic of information or information excess. HFMD is a self-limiting condition and not a public health problem. Yet, the entire “tomato flu virus” episode is a reminder how a trivial matter could become sensational and may cause alarm and panic. It is a reminder that the challenge may continue in the times ahead. It is, therefore, extremely necessary that the governments (both Central and state), the media and every citizen assume some responsibility. Governments at all levels must take prompt steps to curb misinformation. The health experts and policymakers need to be better trained and equipped in scientific communication. The government’s advisories and information system must be adapted to the new age needs of social media communication.

Health reporting is a complex matter and needs to be nuanced. Covid-19 has made the task for journalists even tougher as they have to wade into competing space and fulfil the information needs of readers who have already seen various verified and unverified sources. It’s time health news is covered in a “matter of fact” way, with a balanced viewpoint, and catchy headlines are avoided. In many nations, media houses have well-known doctors as their health news editors or advisers. It’s time this is considered in newsrooms in India. There is a need for better engagement between health policymakers, experts and journalists. Well-curated fellowship programmes for health journalists and editors and regular platforms for engagement need to be considered.

Then, citizens need to be aware about credible and reliable sources of health information and get detailed information only through these sources. It is important that no social media posts should be forwarded without fact-checking, and unverified “forwards” should be avoided. Health misinformation will be a big challenge in the coming months and years, and it will be possible to tackle them only with coordinated action by governments, health experts, the media and citizens.



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