India Last Week #5
A round-up of research & reportage on India across climate, energy, foreign policy, politics & more over the last week
Climate, Energy & Environment -
“The DRI, an agency under the Ministry of Finance, opened an investigation nearly a decade ago into whether Adani Group and other companies had used offshore intermediaries to inflate the price of coal supplied to utilities. But the probe was prevented from progressing in 2019 after Adani won a case in the High Court of Bombay that blocked the DRI from seeking details about shipments… The alleged overpricing would not only burden ordinary Indians with inflated fuel costs. Burning lower quality coal also produces more pollution, a scourge responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths in India in 2019, according to a recent study published in the Lancet.” Read more: Anand Mangnale, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
“Tamil Nadu’s ambition to harness renewable energy is limited by the state’s lack of commercially viable storage options and its reliance on coal for energy security and affordability. The speaker [at a workshop] also noted that in a rapidly growing economy, the state-owned utilities prioritize providing uninterrupted, high-quality power at affordable rates to consumers, often placing environmental and climate change concerns lower on their list of priorities.” Read more: Neelima Jain, CSIS
“The 56-year-old farmer from northeastern India’s Assam state lives with his wife and son on Sandahkhaiti island on India’s Brahmaputra River. The island, like two thousand others on the river, floods with increasing ferocity and unpredictability as human-caused climate change makes rain heavier and more erratic in the region. The family move away with every flood, and move back to their house every dry season. Ali said politicians in the region have made promises to provide relief for them, including during the current election, but little has changed for his family. For now, they contend with being displaced for large parts of the year.” Read more: Anupam Nath, Associated Press
“Between 1990 and 2019, average heat wave-related excess deaths (number of deaths above ‘normal’ conditions) amounted to 1.53 lakh (153,078) deaths globally, with India making for one-fifth of these mortalities, found a recent study. To minimise the impact of heatwaves, the IMD advises to “avoid going out in the sun between noon and 3 p.m.” But this is not an option for workers such as Bhima and Susheela. “India is particularly vulnerable because most of our workers are in the informal sector, which means they’re working outside,” pointed out Dhindaw [ Jaya Dhindaw, Executive Program Director, Sustainable Cities at World Resources Institute, India]” Read more: Pragathi Ravi, Mongabay
Economy -
“An analysis by ThePrint found that the major reason for the fall in the value of actual FDI in India is the surge in the amount that foreign companies pulled out of the country, which grew to $44.4 billion during 2023-24, up 51 percent from the previous year. This is the highest amount that foreign companies have taken out in a single year, since at least 2011-12, when the RBI started releasing this data.” Read more: TCA Sharad Raghavan, The Print
“Baba Ramdev and his associates run a tax-exempt charitable organisation to park money and investments, including in bankrupt consumer goods company Ruchi Soya that Patanjali acquired, an investigation by The Reporters’ Collective has found.” Read more: Tapasya, The Reporters’ Collective
“By 2030, one out of five working-age people on Earth will be Indian, and India needs to create 115 million (11.5 crore) jobs by 2030 to both absorb underutilised working and incoming labour force. Specifically, the country will need to generate 16.5 million (1.65 crore) jobs per year, up from 12.4 million (1.24 crore) per year for the last decade, and of which, 10.4 million (1.04 crore) will need to be formal jobs.” Read more: Trinh Nguyen, The Print
“Unlike some developed countries, women students actually constitute the majority at the Master’s level in India. Yet, evidence suggests that women’s presence in economics academia is less than one-third in all three dimensions. Through interviews and further data analysis, the study explores factors that impinge on women’s presence in economics academia.” Read more: Ambrish Dongre, Karan Singhal and Upasak Das, Feminist Economics
Foreign policy & Security -
“The Indian government has developed a repertoire of tactics for repressing criticism abroad, and is currently deploying all of them as part of a campaign of intimidation in the United States. Human rights activists, experts, and Indian American community organizers are aware of India’s efforts and speak of its campaign as an everyday concern for themselves and people they know. Which means it’s probably working… The [U.S.] administration has a policy of letting India get away with anti-democratic behavior. It has decided that American leverage on the issue is limited, and that securing India’s help against China is more important than condemning Modi.” Read more: Zack Beauchamp, Vox
“Despite the public debates about past border management, from an outside perspective the Congress and the BJP’s substantive remedy to the China challenge appears quite similar going forward, even if there are stylistic differences in rhetoric. The Congress manifesto claims they will “work to restore the status quo ante on our borders with China” through “quiet attention to our borders and resolute defense preparedness.” Read more: Tamanna Salikuddin, Daniel Markey and Sameer Lalwani, USIP
“China has built hundreds of villages along the border in recent years, and it continues to expand and upgrade both civilian and military infrastructure in the area. China is not alone in developing infrastructure along the border. Alarmed by China’s border buildup, India also launched its own program to build villages in Arunachal Pradesh and other border states. However, China has demonstrated an enormous capacity to develop these regions, and India will find it challenging to keep pace with China.” Read more: Jennifer Jun and Brian Hart, China Power, CSIS
“The 7,200 km INSTC project was conceived in 2002 to reduce the time and cost of moving cargo from India to Russia via Iran. More countries have now joined but the progress is very slow. However, even when it becomes a reality, the Chabahar port may not be part of the preferred route as the Iranian ports in the Caspian Sea are closer and better connected from Bandar Abbas. Thus, the Chabahar port appears to be a step forward, but we have to wait and see how it develops and helps trade grow in the coming years.” Read more: T. N. C. Rajagopalan, Business Standard
People & Politics -
“In the run-up to the election, at least four BJP candidates and leaders asked voters to re-elect the party with an overwhelming majority so that it can make changes to the Constitution… “Modi ji’s advisor Bibek Debroy has said the Constitution will be replaced with a new one in 2047,” he [Devraj, a Dalit Pasi from Uttar Pradesh] said, referencing an opinion column written by the chairperson of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. Devraj had not read the column, which had appeared in the English-language business newspaper Mint, but he had heard about it in videos he had seen on YouTube.” Read more: Supriya Sharma, Scroll
“What Indian capital wanted was a pro-business regime which could manage mass discontent without tilting the scales against the larger interests of capital. Narendra Modi, first as the chief minister of Gujarat and then as the Prime Minister for ten years has provided exactly that. It is no wonder that corporate funding to the BJP has reached unprecedented levels in India today.” Read more: Roshan Kishore, The Hindustan Times
“A defining feature of life in India today is the suffocating atmosphere of menace and threat to critics of the government. Shah [India’s Home Minister] is the face and embodiment of this fear, which lurks everywhere, from the newsrooms to the courtrooms, and which inspires a sense of alarm that is bigger than the sum of the facts and anecdotes that can be amassed to illustrate it… Many of the people I contacted for this story spoke to me on the condition of anonymity or refused to speak altogether. Retired supreme court judges, former central government ministers and even political journalists told me they had nothing to say about the home minister… One of the country’s top lawyers laughed at my suggestion of doing an interview over Zoom. When he was done laughing, he said: “No.” Shah himself initially agreed to meet me, I was told by a BJP spokesperson, but then changed his mind without any explanation, and the spokesperson stopped responding.” Read more: Atul Dev, The Guardian
“Is Mr. Modi a charismatic leader? Not everyone may agree with this statement, but that is the essence of Weber’s theory: charisma is what is perceived; it is subjective. Given that the Prime Minister’s campaigns draw thousands of people, every pre-poll and post-poll survey since 2014 has recorded his immense popularity, and his followers believe that he is heroic, possesses the power of mind and speech, and is capable of extraordinary acts such as “stopping the war in Gaza” or single-handedly preventing black money from flowing in the economy, he can be characterised as charismatic.” Read more: Radhika Santhanam, The Hindu
Tech -
“Among digital influencers, on average, the highest median engagement accrues to interviews by Curly Tales, but that is very closely followed by Samdish and Raj Shamani. However, of these three, only Samdish does expert political interviewing, and this appears to be beneficial since he gets more median engagement than even Beer Biceps. Indeed, expertise does pay off; for instance, Technical Guruji, despite having a significantly higher following, receives far fewer engagements. Among the interviewers, Technical Guruji also has a style that seems most removed from the political style of back and forth, rarely challenging a politician during an interview. This suggests that rather than just the person conducting the interview, it is the content and style that matters in terms of the overall reach.” Read more: Rudransh Mukherjee, Shaily Desai, Dhruv Raghavan, and Joyojeet Pal
“Meta’s systems failed to detect that all of the approved adverts featured AI-manipulated images, despite a public pledge by the company that it was “dedicated” to preventing AI-generated or manipulated content being spread on its platforms during the Indian election. Five of the adverts were rejected for breaking Meta’s community standards policy on hate speech and violence, including one that featured misinformation about Modi. But the 14 that were approved, which largely targeted Muslims, also “broke Meta’s own policies on hate speech, bullying and harassment, misinformation, and violence and incitement”, according to the report.” Read more: Hannah Ellis-Petersen, The Guardian
“While the global discourse on deepfakes often focuses on misinformation, disinformation, and other societal harms, many Indian politicians are using the technology for a different purpose: voter outreach. Across the ideological spectrum, they’re relying on AI to help them navigate the nation’s 22 official languages and thousands of regional dialects, and to deliver personalized messages in farther-flung communities… The scale and frequency of AI calls have increased considerably during this general election campaign, a seven-phase marathon that began in April and ends on June 1. Most of them are one-way blasts. In the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a company called IndiaSpeaks Research Lab contacted voters with calls from dead politician J. Jayalalithaa, endorsing a candidate, and deployed 250,000 personalized AI calls in the voice of a former chief minister. (They had permission from Jayalalithaa’s party, but not from her family.)” Read more: Nilesh Christopher and Varsha Bansal, Wired
Bonus -
“Before the final, an Indian Air Force aerobatics team carried out a flypast, unusual at a cricket match, and possible only on government demand. Meanwhile, it emerged that India’s two World Cup-winning captains, Kapil Dev and M. S. Dhoni, had not been invited. One explanation was incompetence, though Kapil had not endeared himself to the BJP by co-authoring a letter with several team-mates from the 1983 team objecting to the authorities’ public manhandling of Indian Olympic wrestlers, who were protesting against the conduct of the head of the wrestling federation, a BJP MP. And while Kapil was absent, Ranveer Singh – the actor who played him in the film 83 – was invited.” Read more: Sharda Ugra, The Wisden
“Bhavani Devi’s Olympic qualifiers are done, she lives a two-hour drive away from Paris and the Games are in little over two months. But she is not going to be in it. It’s a reality the Indian sabre fencer is struggling to come to terms with… Bhavani trains five days a week. On weekends, her limbs are usually so sore from 35 hours of lunging, thrusting, parrying and ripostes, that she can barely get out of bed. It's also her preferred way of coping with the lost opportunity.” Read more: Susan Ninan, The Hindustan Times