India Last Week #18
A round-up of research & reportage on India across climate, energy, foreign policy, politics & more over the last week
Climate, Energy & Environment -
“In the Union Budget 2024-25, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the setting up of a Critical Mineral Mission. In August the Ministry of Mines organised a seminar to discuss its objectives. Officials noted that efforts are being fast tracked in ‘mission mode’ towards three aims: expand domestic production, prioritise the recycling of critical minerals, and incentivise overseas acquisition of assets… For India’s Critical Minerals Mission to succeed, New Delhi will have to find ways to leverage its existing partnerships with countries in Africa, a region that houses 30% of the world’s known critical mineral reserves… In this geopolitically fraught environment, where the African agency is looking to build viable alternative partnerships, there are some unique advantages that India could leverage. Indian construction companies have completed several projects in 43 African countries, which include transmission lines in Tunisia, hospitals in Tanzania, and railway lines in Ghana. In the African critical minerals landscape, identifying strategic projects with host countries and building mining-adjacent infrastructure are key to development.” Read more: Veda Vaidyanathan, The Hindu
“The Forest Rights Act 2006 (FRA), by recognising the rights of forest-dwelling communities to both access and manage their customary forests, offers a bottom-up vision of forest governance. Eighteen years on, progress in recognising these rights has no doubt been tardy. Only three states — Maharashtra, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh — have recognised such community forest resource rights (CFRRs) in several thousand villages each. Other states with a large potential for such rights have hardly begun. Even in the first three, many villages remain without these and many errors in the rights recognition process need to be corrected.” Read more: Gautam Aredath and Sharachchandra Lele, Hindustan Times
“As India is trending toward hotter summers, the northeastern, eastern, central, and north-western parts of India are expected to witness heatwaves in the coming decades…. Some of the hotspot states that have been witnessing both extreme heatwaves and erratic incessant rainfall events are Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Meghalaya, and Manipur. Through our analysis, we found that more than 84 per cent of Indian districts can be considered extreme heatwave hotspots, of which around 70 per cent have witnessed incessant and erratic rainfall more recurrently in the last three decades in the monsoon season JJAS [June, July, August, and September]… India urgently needs national and subnational strategies to heat-proof its population and economy. If a 1.5°C warmer climate is inevitable, we must brace for its impacts and ensure that we have the means to rebuild better and faster when disaster strikes.” Read more: Abinash Mohanty, Krishna Kumar Vsav, Vishal Sharma, Ananya Singh, and Shivangee Paul, IPE Global and Esri India
Economy -
“Global brands like KiK from Germany, Zeeman from Netherlands, and Pepco of Poland, among others, placed orders to be delivered before the Christmas and New Year and the average price of the garment ordered is to the tune of $3, said KM Subramanian, president of Tiruppur Exporters' Association (TEA)… A Sakthivel, head of the southern region of Apparel Export Promotion Council said Tiruppur has received fresh orders from global brands as some of them have diverted orders from Bangladesh to India.” Read more: Sutanuka Ghosal, Economic Times
“Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday mooted the idea of introducing a border adjustment tax (BAT) and suggested discussions on this with the steel industry to safeguard the interests of domestic players… The idea behind BAT is that Indian steel producers pay taxes like electricity duty, iron ore duty, and coal cess, while imported steel is often cheaper because other countries may not have similar taxes, giving their steel a price advantage. BAT would level the playing field.” Read more: Yash Kumar Singhal, Business Standard
“According to recent estimates by Dev (2024), the manufacturing share in employment increased from 8.9% in 1972-73 to 12.8% in 2011-12, a four percentage points increase in about 40 years…. Other available data indicate an increase in manufacturing employment between 2011-12 and 2018-19. Employment in organised manufacturing, as per the ‘Annual Survey of Industries’ (ASI), increased by about 2.7 million between these two years, and employment in enterprises of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC), which is a part of unorganised manufacturing employment, increased by 2.8 million.” Read more: Bishwanath Goldar, Ideas for India
“Spanning 8.1ha – around half the size of Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands – the facility is India’s first residential complex of such a large scale built by a state government for a private company. It is partly modelled on industrial townships in China and Vietnam… The state is investing in staff housing to not just attract global manufacturers and out-of-town qualified female workers, but also improve safety and reduce absenteeism and late reporting that affect productivity. This marks an attempt to shift from the scattered privately run women’s hostels in villages and towns to government-run housing that factories can rent for workers.” Read more: Rohini Mohan, The Straits Times
Foreign Policy & Security -
“India has slowed its investments for building future naval capabilities. Between 2000-2020, the Indian Navy benefited from some relatively significant capability investments… The key pivot came with the outbreak of the 2020 China-India border crisis… In India’s case, with scarcer resources and ingrained beliefs about the vulnerability of its land borders, the Ladakh crisis has, initially at least, derailed the military’s incipient naval modernisation. Only 4 years have passed since the Ladakh crisis began, so the empirical evidence is modest, but it is sufficient to draw provisional insights. Defence budgets and procurement patterns suggest a probable turning point in 2020, with resources reallocated from naval modernisation to reinforcement of the northern border… In sum, the picture that emerges suggests that investments in the Indian Navy’s future capabilities have been deprioritised since 2020. They are not keeping pace with earlier rates of Indian Navy capability development, let alone accelerating to keep pace with the impending growth of China’s naval presence in the Indian Ocean.” Read more: Arzan Tarapore, United States Studies Centre
“Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday (September 5, 2024) named India among the three countries he is constantly in touch over the Ukraine conflict and said they are sincerely making efforts to resolve it, state-owned TASS news agency reported… Separately, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Izvestia daily that India could help in establishing a dialogue on Ukraine…Mr. Modi on August 23 visited Ukraine where he conveyed to President Zelenskyy that both Ukraine and Russia should sit together without wasting time to end the ongoing war and that India was ready to play an "active role" to restore peace in the region. His nearly nine-hour visit to Ukraine, the first by an Indian prime minister since its independence in 1991, came six weeks after he held summit talks with President Putin that triggered anguish in some Western countries.” Read more: The Hindu
“The launch of the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, Agni-4, was carried out from the Integrated Test Range in Odisha’s Chandipur. The launch successfully validated all operational and technical parameters. It was conducted under the aegis of the Strategic Forces Command, a part of India's Nuclear Command Authority (NCA)… The range increased even further with Agni-4, which can hit as far as 4,000 kilometres. The 20-metre-long missile can carry a payload of 1,000 kg and can be fired from a road-mobile launcher.” Read more: Manjeet Negi, India Today
“The critical failure of response to the hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight IC 814 occurred at the Raja Sansi Airport in Amritsar… The fact is, the failures at Amritsar – and a majority of these emanated from New Delhi – were entirely avoidable and exemplify in extraordinary measure the institutional collapse that encounters each sudden or unforeseen crisis of internal security (indeed, perhaps, of governance at large) in India… The first of these was a complete absence of a co-ordinated media response. From the very beginning of the crisis, the Government and its officials spoke in a hundred conflicting voices, bringing its deliberations and decisions into the sphere of public debate at a time when restraint and sagacity – and not recrimination and the confused cacophony of ill-informed advice – were most needed.” Read more: K. P. S. Gill, The Wire
“By the late 2000s, China’s and India’s capabilities, interests, and areas of operation expanded—consequently, so did the canvas on which the two countries interacted. But this did not lead to greater cooperation. Instead, around 2006–9, contestation intensified, with each once side again seeing the other as impinging on its own space… The global arena has also shifted from being a cooperative to a contested space for China and India. Each is seeking to limit—if not undercut—the other’s influence in BRICS and the global South more broadly. New Delhi now sees China as trying to modify BRICS from a non-West to an anti-West grouping… When thinking about China-India contestation, there is a tendency to see it as recent and narrowly focused on the two countries’ boundary dispute. However, as this essay has detailed, their rivalry is not new, though it has become more fierce. It is also broader than just their disputed border, encompassing how China and India view each other in terms of their own strategic space.” Read more: Tanvi Madan, National Bureau of Asian Research
People & Politics -
“The Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation has quietly dissolved the 14-member Standing Committee on Statistics (SCoS) headed by eminent economist and former chief statistician of the country Pronab Sen, allegedly after its members questioned the delay in conducting the census. The reason it is being dismantled, according to an email sent to the members by Geeta Singh Rathore, Director-General of the Ministry’s National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), is that the committee’s work overlapped with that of the recently formed Steering Committee for National Sample Surveys… Dr. Sen, however, told The Hindu that the members were not given any reason for disbanding the panel. He added that, in their meetings, they had asked why the census, which is a major source of data, has not been conducted yet.” Read more: A. M. Jigeesh, The Hindu
“Strolling inside the quadrangle of Kashmir’s 600-year-old Jamia Masjid, worshippers stop to take pictures of the mosque’s large steeple, its outlines sharpened against the backdrop of Hari Parbat, the famous fort-hill of Srinagar. What they usually overlook is a limestone plaque with Persian inscriptions embedded in the wall just above the mosque’s entrance. In January 2024, when the Srinagar-based art historian Hakim Sameer Hamdani (he is currently the Design Director of the Jammu and Kashmir chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) examined the slab, he found that it mentioned names of medieval-era sultans and their governors involved in the repeated repair and rebuilding of the mosque since its original construction in 1402. At the bottom, he noticed the name of the engraver: Hari Ram… The medieval era in Kashmir, particularly the 14th and 15th centuries, when it gradually transitioned to Islam, has been sought to be presented in contemporary political and cinematic discourse as a period of widespread persecution of Hindus. The movie The Kashmir Files (2022), for example, has a scene where the protagonist describes the Kashmir of yore as a thriving seat of Hindu learning until it was despoiled by Islamic rulers in the 14th century. However, historic epigraphs such as the one in Jamia Masjid and elsewhere in Srinagar point to a culture that was more syncretic than confrontational.” Read more: Shakir Mir, Frontline
“A seven year old student of a prominent school in Amroha was expelled on Thursday for allegedly getting biryani, a non vegetarian dish, in his tiffin. A purported video capturing a heated argument between the boy’s mother and the school principal was circulated widely on social media, evoking condemnation.” Read more: Harveer Dabas, Times of India
“An ally of the BJP in the ruling National Democratic Alliance, Paswan’s party has just five members in the Lok Sabha. Yet, Paswan has been punching above his weight, taking credit for the government’s rethink on the Waqf Bill, and its rollback of lateral entry recruitments where mid-level bureaucrats were being hired by bypassing the established norms of reserving positions for Dalits, Adivasis and the backward castes… Most political observers, however, think it is unlikely the Lok Janshakti Party-BJP tussle would escalate, with the BJP itself turning cautious on matters of caste, and Paswan realising the limitations of his ambitions.” Read more: Abhik Deb, Scroll
Tech -
“The world's second-largest fab toolmaker, Applied Materials, with annual revenue of $26.52 billion, is planning to establish a manufacturing unit in India. If sources are to be believed, the firm may be looking at Tamil Nadu for its ambitious plans. This is also considered to be a China Plus One strategy, since the company recently lost its top spot as the leading semiconductor equipment maker to ASML. It depends on China for 43 per cent of its sales despite restrictions from the United States. Applied Materials is looking to establish an advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled technology development centre for semiconductor and equipment manufacturing in Taramani, Chennai. This is set to create 500 jobs.” Read more: Shine Jacob, Business Standard
“Swiggy’s IPO may seek to raise more than $1 billion, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. The Bengaluru-based company is waiting to get approval from India’s Securities and Exchange Board of India, known as Sebi, to proceed with the IPO filing, the people said. Founded in 2014, Swiggy partners with more than 150,000 restaurants across India to help deliver food in the world’s most populous nation, according to its website. It competes with companies including public-listed Zomato Ltd., e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc.’s India unit and conglomerate Tata Group’s BigBasket.” Read more: Economic Times
“There is potential for abuse of facial recognition technology such as Digi Yatra by private entities and more guard rails are needed to prevent the misuse of biometric data. And, the showpiece airport app may soon become the de facto gateway for checking in and boarding at all airports. These are among the key inputs provided by the ministries of IT, Civil Aviation and Home for a study on facial recognition technology and Digi Yatra, which was conducted by Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy with financial assistance from Niti Aayog, according to documents obtained by The Indian Express under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. The inputs were submitted by the ministries between August and October 2022. Since its launch in December 2022, over 55 lakh people have downloaded the Digi Yatra app, and more than 3 crore passengers have used it to travel, according to an official statement earlier this month. The technology is available across 24 airports in the country.” Read more: Aggam Walia and Soumyarendra Barik, Indian Express
Bonus -
“A gallery for functional design and art, Aequo in Colaba is a space designed for conversations at the intersection of art and culture. True to form, the latest exhibit at Aequo features a brand that has been working relentlessly at the interaction of design and activism: Chamar. The defiant label’s founder Sudheer Rajbhar has been working since 2017, to recontextualise the casteist term ‘Chamar’ from being derogatory to being rightfully associated with the intricate skilled leather work of the community. Through each collection, they seek out new ways to highlight and challenge the prevalent social injustices in the nation.” Read more: Fathima Abdul Kader, Homegrown
Watch/Listen -
Podcast: What Really Happened in India's 2024 General Election? | Conversation between Sanjay Kumar and Milan Vaishnav, Grand Tamasha podcast