India Last Week #25
A round-up of research & reportage on India across climate, energy, foreign policy, politics & more over the last week
Climate, Energy & Environment -
“Air quality in India's capital Delhi has deteriorated to severe and extremely poor levels in the past few days, data shows. Pollution levels crossed 25-30 times the World Health Organization (WHO)’s recommended safe limit at several locations in the city last week.Experts have warned that the situation will worsen in the coming days due to weather conditions, use of firecrackers during the festival of Diwali on Thursday and burning of crop remains in neighbouring states…Like every year, the Delhi government has announced a complete ban on the manufacturing, storage and sale of fireworks ahead of the festival, which falls later this week. But such bans have not been completely effective in the past as people source fireworks from other states. The Delhi government has also enacted its Graded Response Action Plan, known as GRAP, to tackle pollution. .” Read more: Nikita Yadav, BBC
“India’s mining ministry informed the villagers that they were sitting on a fortune: 5.9 million metric tons of lithium, a silver-white metal that is a core component of the batteries necessary for India’s transition to clean energy. The discovery — a first in India — would make the country the holder of the fifth-largest lithium reserve in the world, mining officials announced…Two years later, nothing has happened. The government tried to auction the lithium block twice in March, and failed both times, due to a lack of bidders. The extraction plans have been halted indefinitely… For one, the amount of lithium in the Salal reserve is much less significant than initially reported, Rao and other industry experts told Rest of World. They said that only about 0.02 million tonnes of lithium carbonate is present in the ore body, a small fraction of the levels seen in other major reserves. Secondly, the reserve holds minerals in clay-deposit form, which is difficult to mine commercially.” Read more: Yashraj Sharma, RestofWorld
“Under Trump, U.S.-India clean energy cooperation was more limited but still present, with efforts focused on energy trade, private sector engagement, and foundational partnerships. Launched in 2018, the SEP promoted cooperation in energy security, including renewables, oil, and gas. The SEP facilitated technology transfer and joint research in areas like energy storage and grid modernization, supporting India’s clean energy transition… Under Trump, who has previously criticised climate finance mechanisms, such as the Green Climate Fund, labelling them as wealth redistribution schemes unfavourable to the U.S., there may be a reluctance to allocate funds for international climate efforts, including those in India. Going by the last experience, however, India may see some bilateral and private sector investments into clean projects. For instance, in 2018, the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) committed $350 million to ReNew Power, one of India’s largest renewable energy companies.” Read more: Archana Chaudhary, CarbonCopy
Economy -
“A new breed of monopolists has taken its place. They have amassed colossal wealth, even as India has become far more unequal and unfair for everybody else. Our institutions no longer belong to our people, they do the bidding of monopolists… In contrast to the “match-fixing” monopoly groups, there is a larger number of amazing “play-fair” Indian businesses, from micro-enterprises to large corporations, but you are silent. You persevere in an oppressive system… The government cannot be allowed to support one business at the expense of all others, much less support benami equations in the business system. Government agencies are not weapons to be used to attack and intimidate businesses.” Read more: Rahul Gandhi, Indian Express
“The recently released data of the ‘Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises’ (ASUSE) for 2021-22 and 2022-23 show that the estimated number of establishments in unincorporated sector manufacturing (hereafter, informal manufacturing) increased from 17.25 million in 2021-22 (April 2021 to March 2022) to 17.83 million in 2022-23 (October 2022 to September 2023) – an annual increase of 2.2%. The number of workers in such manufacturing establishments increased by 6.3% in 2022-23, and gross value added (GVA) at current prices grew by about 19%, which translates into a remarkable 12% growth rate in real GVA after adjusting for inflation… Comparison across states reveals that the largest annual increase in the number of informal manufacturing establishments – at about 33% – occurred in Bihar, up from 525,000 in 2021-22 to 808,000 in 2022-23… Our recent research (Goldar and Aggarwal, 2024a, 2024b) reveals that a women-centric industrial development has been taking place in India in recent years. Women workers accounted for about 64% of the incremental manufacturing employment between 2017-18 and 2022-23, indicating the feminisation of industrial labour.” Read more: Suresh Chand Aggarwal and Bishwanath Goldar, Ideas for India
“India is short on festival cheer this year as consumption continues to slow, extending a year-long decline and leading to piling inventories across auto and consumer products… Retailers are now hoping for a 10% increase in this year's Diwali sales over last year, even though sales growth has averaged just 4% in the first half of the fiscal year (April to September). The next 15-20 days will determine if this pick-up can be sustained, Rajagopalan said… No such luck for mass consumption goods such as staples and soaps, where volume growth has been weak to negative in the July to September quarter, prompting Nestle India Chairman Suresh Narayan to lament the shrinking of India’s middle class… It’s worse in the auto industry, where small cars are struggling to sell and inventory levels hit a “historic high” of 80-85 days, leaving dealers with a stock of 790,000 vehicles worth 800 billion rupees, the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations said in a statement on Oct 7.” Read more: Menaka Doshi, Bloomberg
“Nestlé India, which reported its slowest quarterly growth in eight years last week, is feeling the heat due to reduced spending by middle-class Indians, impacting it in the last few quarters. However, the FMCG giant doesn’t see it as an endemic issue, with a hope of demand revival in the coming months. One of the major FMCG players, the company saw volumes decline by 1% over a year, with the largest hit being the milk and chocolates segment. Suresh Narayanan, chairman and managing director of Nestlé India, said the market has become polarised, with premium consumption remaining fairly strong but the middle segment, where most FMCG players used to operate, shrinking… Other major FMCG players have also flagged slow growth volume with shrinking demand.” Read more: Richa Sharma, Business Today
“Japanese brokerage Nomura on Monday said the Indian economy has entered a phase of "cyclical growth slowdown" and the Reserve Bank's estimate of 7.2 per cent GDP expansion is "overly optimistic". The brokerage said it sees "rising downside risks" to its GDP growth estimates of 6.7 per cent in the ongoing FY25 and 6.8 per cent in FY26… The RBI maintained its FY25 growth estimate at 7.2 per cent earlier this month, even as some watchers have been coming out with lower numbers. Nomura said urban consumption indicators have been softening lately, and pointed to the slump in passenger vehicle sales, moderation in airline passenger traffic and FMCG companies flagging weak urban demand.” Read more: Business Standard
Foreign Policy & Security -
“There are several reasons for the Modi government to be delighted with Mr. Trump’s victory. The President-elect has made it clear that he intends to build on his past history with India, which will include building trade ties, opening up more technology for Indian companies, and making more U.S. military hardware available for Indian defence forces. He will pick up the broken threads of negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement, which saw intense negotiations in 2019-2020 before he lost power, and which former President Joe Biden showed no interest in continuing. Rather than pushing India on carbon emission cuts, Mr. Trump is likely to encourage India to buy into U.S. oil and LNG, along the lines of the Memorandum of Understanding for the Driftwood LNG plant in Louisiana in 2019, which would have brought $2.5 billion in investment from Petronet India into the U.S. but was shelved a year later… So, where could the trouble come from? The first problem is Mr. Trump’s persistent focus on cutting trade tariffs, which saw his administration impose a series of counter-tariffs, file World Trade Organization complaints, and then withdraw India’s GSP status for exporters… Perhaps the most testing times were during the U.S.’s tensions with Iran: in June 2018, he sent the then United Nations envoy, Nikki Haley, on a mission to New Delhi to virtually threaten India with sanctions. Subsequently, India “zeroed out” its oil imports from both Iran and Venezuela.” Read more: Suhasini Haidar, The Hindu
“The military talks between India and China to work out the modalities of patrols have reached a deadlock over the “extent and routes of patrolling” at Depsang along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh. Sources said the Chinese military negotiators, tasked with working out the “patrolling arrangements”, had been “dragging their feet” on coordinating the schedule of Indian Army patrols at points patrolled in the pre-April 2020 period. The Chinese side has also expressed reservations over the extent of patrolling… Last evening, the Indian Army had stated that it had successfully conducted a patrol to one of the points at Depsang. Yesterday’s patrol was to one of the latter three routes, the sources said, but did not specify which one. Patrolling is being coordinated in a manner that troops of both sides inform each other before a patrol party is launched. The coordination is part of the measures to prevent a face-off... After the modalities were decided at the brigade commander level, the first patrol was conducted at Demchok last week. The “patrolling arrangements” do not mention resumption of patrolling at other contentious spots in eastern Ladakh where disengagement has been done. These are Gogra, Hot Springs, Pangong Tso and Galwan.” Read more: Ajay Banerjee, The Tribune
“If President Donald Trump’s first term is any guide, India may appear well placed to deal with his second stint at the White House. But the past is not necessarily a guide to the future, and Delhi will have to take a close look at the implications of Trump’s ambitious agenda for the second term…Dealing with Trump’s second term is not just about finding policy fixes for the many divergences that are bound to emerge between Delhi and Washington. It demands coming to terms with Trump’s plans to overhaul the global order and the US role in it. That is compounded by two additional factors. One is Trump’s intensely transactional approach. The other is the strengthening of America’s position in relation to Europe and China, thanks to Washington’s recent impressive economic performance. Together they turn America into a more powerful interlocutor than before… India will have a deep interest in contributing to the US debate on separating the “bad” immigration from the “good”. It is already taking back illegal Indian immigrants deported from the US. Delhi may also want to look beyond the H-1B visa framework to develop a more sustainable connection between India’s technical talent pool and the US plans for accelerated technological innovation.” Read more: C. Raja Mohan, Indian Express
“The Indian foreign ministry’s pointperson for Afghanistan met the Taliban’s acting defence minister Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob for the first time on Wednesday and discussed ways to expand relations between the two sides. People familiar with the matter described the meeting in Kabul between Yaqoob and JP Singh, joint secretary of the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran division of the external affairs ministry, as a significant development. Yaqoob, the son of Taliban founder and late supreme leader Mullah Omar, has not publicly interacted with Indian interlocutors in the past, they said on condition of anonymity… Like most other countries, India doesn’t recognise the Taliban regime in Kabul. After pulling out all its diplomats after the Taliban takeover, India re-established an official presence in the Afghan capital by reopening its mission and deploying a “technical team” in June 2022. Since then, the Indian side has engaged the Taliban and provided humanitarian aid, including wheat, medicines and medical supplies, for the Afghan people.” Read more: Rezaul Laskar, Hindustan Times
People & Politics -
“On July 30, the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly amended the State’s stringent anti-conversion law of 2021 to make it even more repressive. The maximum jail term was increased to life imprisonment, securing bail was made more arduous, and the scope of illegal conversion was widened to include promise of marriage and trafficking. These changes express the intentions of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to intensify its attempts to criminalise interfaith relationships and consensual conversions to minority faiths, as part of its Hindutva ideology… What is worrying is that while amending the Section, the government had acknowledged that the competency to lodge FIRs was being redefined to “resolve certain difficulties” that arose in its “interpretation” in several cases. A substantial number of accused persons have challenged the legality of such FIRs lodged by third-party elements. In many cases, accused persons have received legal relief after courts questioned the locus of the complainants.” Read more: Omar Rashid, The Hindu
“Bihar’s per capita income, for example, is higher than only Sierre Leone, Malawi and Niger in sub-Saharan Africa. This article looks at that case of ‘sub-Saharan India,’ economically and developmentally speaking. The origins of unbalanced development across regions in India are deeply rooted in history. How did Bihar get here despite the avowed objective of balanced development? After all, we had embarked on our development path as a democracy, however new or complex… The poverty headcount ratio in Bihar is the highest in India. It is also among the most densely populated and least urbanized states, but at the same time has the youngest population too (close to 60% is under 25), along with India’s highest fertility rate at 2.98 (NFHS-5), much higher than the replacement rate of 2.1… Bihar urgently needs an economic plan with a strategy to seize its demographic dividend and spur rapid economic growth and development. Human-capital growth and large-scale trading are two turnaround engines the state could start with.” Read more: Prachi Mishra, Mint
“The Supreme Court’s November 2019 decision to award the title in Ayodhya of a small piece of land in favour of the Hindu litigants was also momentous, but in a profoundly different way… The 2019 Ayodhya judgement of the Supreme Court confirmed that there was no evidence that a Ram temple was demolished to build the Babri Masjid as the Sangh and the BJP claimed. But it problematically sidestepped the legal, constitutional and moral implications of effectively rewarding the parties responsible for the crime of the frenzied mob demolition of the mosque in 1992… In the last weeks of his term as Chief Justice of India, DY Chandrachud first came out as the author of the judgement. And along with this, he made a startling claim. He said he and his brother judges had heard the matter for three months but were still confused. At this time, he turned to his god, and his god guided him to write the judgement that he finally authored… This raises a whole set of tangled and worrying constitutional questions. First, in times of confusion and doubt, judges need to be guided exclusively by constitutional morality and emphatically not their personal religious beliefs.” Read more: Harsh Mander, Scroll
“The data offer compelling evidence that Indian Americans continue to solidly favor the Democratic Party. However, one in three survey respondents intends to vote for Donald Trump. This modest drift toward Trump appears to be driven by Indian American men, particularly young men born in the United States… Forty-seven percent of respondents identify as Democrats, down from 56 percent in 2020. The share of Republican identifiers has held steady while the percentage of independents has grown. However, when considering independents who lean toward one party, the decline in Democratic respondents is perfectly offset by a rise in Republican identifiers. Despite this shift, the share of respondents who self-identify on the ideological left has grown since 2020… Sixty-seven percent of Indian American women intend to vote for Harris while 53 percent of men, a significantly smaller share, say they plan to vote for Harris. Twenty-two percent of women intend to vote for Trump while a significantly larger share of men, 39 percent, plan to cast their ballots for him. When further disaggregated by age, this gender gap appears starkest with younger voters.” Read more: Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, and Milan Vaishnav, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Tech -
“The government’s promise of subsidies, low tariffs, cheap labour, government efficiency, and a friendly business environment follows the standard playbook of globalisation, often prescribed by liberal economists as a pathway for developing countries to set up new industries. However, such discussions often obscure the contradiction at the heart of semiconductor business—while it is a highly globalised industry, comprising supply chains based on an international division of labour, it has never followed the fundamental globalisation principle of free trade… While a nimble industrial policy may produce some success for India, its larger ambitions will be determined by its foreign policy. The foreign policy here does not just mean trade deals and technology cooperation, but the country’s overall position in the global security order. India’s current foreign policy and its strategic relationship with the US, China, and other Asian countries places limits on its plans to become a chip-making hub… As globalisation comes under greater strain, geopolitics will increasingly influence the direction of trade and technology flows. In such an environment, developing nations such as India will have to learn the art of effectively combining industrial policy with foreign policy.” Read more: Sandeep Bhardwaj, The India Forum
“Wikipedia has denied receiving any notice from the Indian government, countering recent reports. Earlier this week, reports said that the Information and Broadcasting ministry has sent a notice to the platform asking why it should not be treated as a publisher instead of an intermediary. Now, a Money Control report says that Wikipedia Foundation – the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia said that it has not received any official notice from the Centre on Wikipedia in the last two days… In September this year, the Delhi court warned that it will issue an order to block Wikipedia - which advertises itself as a free online encyclopedia - in India. Justice Navin Chawla, presiding over the case, issued a contempt notice to Wikipedia and delivered a stern warning to the company. “If you don't like India, please don't work in India... We will ask government to block your site,” Justice Chawla said. The court's fury was provoked by Wikipedia's alleged failure to disclose information about editors who made controversial changes to ANI's Wikipedia page.” Read more: Times of India
“The Indian government launched the third annual nationwide Digital Life Certificate (DLC) Campaign, on November 6, 2024, for pension verification through digital methods. The Ministry of Public Personnel and Grievances, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and State Minister Dr Jitendra Singh, inaugurated the campaign, which will operate in 800 cities across India between November 1- 30, 2024… In 2021, the government launched the Face Authentication for Digital Life Certificates (DLC) but questions remained regarding its online accessibility… Moreover, facial recognition technology has limitations, especially when applied to ageing populations. A case in March 2023 highlighted this issue, where a person was unable to get a duplicate SIM card due to the Department of Telecommunications’ ASTR facial recognition system misidentifying them. The system failed because the photo they submitted 15 years ago didn’t match their current appearance, leading to complications for the elderly person.” Read more: Sakshi Sadashiv, Medianama
“Swiggy IPO has been subscribed 34 per cent or 0.34 times so far on the second day. The IPO opened on Wednesday saw a muted response from investors with a 12 per cent subscription… Ahead of the IPO, the food delivery platform mobilised ₹5,085 crore from anchor investors by allotting 13.04 crore shares to 151 funds at ₹390. The IPO targets ₹11,327.43 crore through a combination of fresh issue worth ₹4,499 crore and offer for sale of 17.51 crore shares worth ₹6,828.43 crore. Up to 75 per cent of issue is reserved for qualified institutional bidders, 15 per cent for non-institutional investors (HNIs) and 10 per cent for retail investors. The company has also reserved 750,000 shares for employees, which will get a discount of ₹25 from the issue price..” Read more: Madhu Balaji, The Hindu BusinessLine
Bonus -
“Feral horses are free-roaming horses that descended from a domesticated stock. But they have lived in the wild for almost 80 years in Dibru Saikhowa. According to a 2021 study published in the Open Journal of Bioresources, “Feral horses mostly prefer grassy river flats, forests and woodlands. They use open areas where predators can be seen from a distance. They are found within a 5–6-kilometre range of water sources. Some of the areas in Dibru Saikhowa where feral horses are found are Churke Tapu, Arna Tapu, Kathalkuthi near Mieli Camp, Kobu Chapori.” There are multiple theories about the origin of the feral horses in the region. The most popular one is that these horses are descendants of the ones used by the Allied forces against the Japanese in World War II.” Read more: Nabarun Guha, Mongabay