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To turn my eyes outwards now and to say a little about the relationship between the Indian writer and the majority white culture in that midst he lives, and with which his work will sooner or later have to deal: Common to many Bombay-raised middle-class children of my generation, I grew up with an intimate knowledge of, and even sense of friendship with, a certain kind of England: a dream-England composed of Test Matches at Lord's presided over by the voice of John Arlott, at which Freddie Trueman bowled unceasingly and without success at Polly Umrigar; of Enid Blyton and Billy Bunter, in which we were even prepared to smile indulgently at portraits such as 'Hurree JamSet Ram Singh,' 'the dusky nabob of Bhanipur.'

I wanted to come to England. I couldn't wait, and to be fair, England has done all right by me, but I find it a little difficult to be properly grateful. I can't escape the view that my relatively easy ride is not the result of the dream- England's famous sense of tolerance and fair play, but of my social class, my freak fair skin, and my 'English' English accent. Take away any of these; the story would have been very different. Because, of course, the dream of England is no more than a dream.

Sadly, it's a dream from which too many white Britons refuse to wake. Recently, on a live radio program, a professional humorist asked me, in all seriousness, why I objected to being called a wog. He said he had always thought it a rather charming word, a term of endearment. 'I was at the zoo the other day, 'he revealed, 'and a zookeeper told me that the wogs were best with the animals; they stuck their fingers in their ears and wiggled them about, and the animals felt at home.'

The ghost of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh walks among us still. As Richard Wright found long ago in America, black-and-white descriptions of society are no longer compatible. Fantasy, or the mingling of fantasy and naturalism, is one way of dealing with these problems. It offers a way of echoing in the form of our work the issues faced by all of us: how to build a new, 'modern' world out of an old, legend-haunted civilization, an old culture that we have brought into the heart of newer ones.

But whatever technical solutions we may find, Indian writers in these islands, like others who have migrated into the north from the south, are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society. We can offer this stereoscopic vision in place of 'whole sight'.

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 I grew up in a small town not far from Kalimpong. In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just material things but also ideas. Magazines — old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic — arrived late too, after the news had become stale by months or, often, years. This temporal gap turned journalism into literature, news into legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those who knew no other life, we accepted this as the norm. The dearth of reading material in towns and villages in socialist India is hard to imagine, and it produced two categories of people: those who stopped reading after school or college, and those — including children — who read anything they could find. I read road signs with the enthusiasm that attaches to reading thrillers. When the iterant kabadiwala, collector of papers, magazines, and rejected things, visited our neighbourhood, I rushed to the house where he was doing business. He bought things at unimaginably low prices from those who’d stopped having any use for them, and I rummaged through his sacks of old magazines. Sometimes, on days when business was good, he allowed me a couple of copies of Sportsworld magazine for free. I’d run home and, ignoring my mother’s scolding, plunge right in — consuming news about India’s victory in the Benson and Hedges Cup....

Two takeaways from these experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial reader’s life: the sense of belatedness, of everything coming late, and the desire for pleasure in language. .... Speaking of belatedness, the awareness of having been born at the wrong time in history, o f inventing things that had already been discovered elsewhere, far away, without our knowledge or cooperation, is a moment of epiphany and deep sadness. I remember a professor’s choked voice, narrating to me how all the arguments he’d made in his doctoral dissertation, written over many, many years of hard work (for there indeed was a time when PhDs were written over decades), had suddenly come to naught after he’d discovered the work of C.W.E. Bigsby. This, I realised as I grew older, was one of the characteristics of provincial life: that they (usually males) were saying trite things with the confidence of someone declaring them for the first time. I, therefore, grew up surrounded by would-be Newtons who claimed to have discovered gravity (again). There’s a deep sense of tragedy attending this sort of thing — the sad embarrassment of always arriving after the party is over. And there’s a harsh word for that sense of belatedness: “dated.” What rescues it is the unpredictability of these anachronistic “discoveries” — the randomness and haphazardness involved in mapping connections among thoughts and ideas, in a way that hasn’t yet been professionalised.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “The Provincial Reader”, by Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books]

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Until the Keeladi site was discovered, archaeologists by and large believed that the Gangetic plains in the north urbanised significantly earlier than Tamil Nadu. Historians have often claimed that large scale town life in India first developed in the Greater Magadha region of the Gangetic basin. This was during the ‘second urbanisation’ phase. The ‘first urbanisation phase’ refers to the rise of the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation. Tamil Nadu was thought to have urbanised at this scale only by the third century BCE. The findings at Keeladi push that date b ack significantly. … 

Based on linguistics and continuity in cultural legacies, connections between the Indus Valley Civilisation, or IVC, and old Tamil traditions have long been suggested, but concrete archaeological evidence remained absent. Evidence indicated similarities between graffiti found in Keeladi and symbols associated with the IVC. It bolstered the arguments of dissidents from the dominant North Indian imagination, who have argued for years that their ancestors existed contemporaneously with the IVC. … 
All the archaeologists I spoke to said it was too soon to make definitive links between the Keeladi site and the IVC. There is no doubt, however, that the discovery at Keeladi has changed the paradigm. In recent years, the results of any new research on early India have invited keen political interest, because proponents of Hindu nationalism support the notion of Vedic culture as fundamental to the origins of Indian civilisation. … 

The Keeladi excavations further challenge the idea of a single fountainhead of Indian life. They indicate the possibility that the earliest identity that can recognisably be considered ‘Indian’ might not have originated in North India. That wasn’t all. In subsequent seasons of the Keeladi dig, archaeologists discovered that Tamili, a variant of the Brahmi script used for writing inscriptions in the early iterations of the Tamil language, could be dated back to the sixth century BCE, likely a hundred years before previously thought.

So not only had urban life thrived in the Tamil lands, but people who lived there had developed their own script. ―The evolution of writing is attributed to Ashoka’s edicts, but 2600 years ago writing was prevalent in Keeladi,” Mathan Karuppiah, a proud Madurai local, told me. ―A farmer could write his own name on a pot he owned. The fight going on here is ‘You are not the one to teach me to write, I have learnt it myself.’ ” 

[Excerpted from ―The Dig”, by Sowmiya Ashok, Fifty-Two]

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The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post.

Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection —this feverish, electric, unliveable hell. The curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms.

Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and moaned about articles that had been commissioned to make people moan. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation.

The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse. Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct —like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them.

This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-travelled on Instagram; why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; and why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the centre of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, by Jia Tolentino, Random House, 2019.]

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Down by the sandy banks of the Yamuna River, the men must work quickly. At a little past 12 a.m. one humid night in May, they pull back the black plastic tarp covering three boreholes sunk deep in the ground. They then drag thick hoses toward a queue of 20-odd tanker trucks idling quietly with their headlights turned off. The men work in a team: While one man fits a hose’s mouth over a borehole, another clambers atop a truck at the front of the line and shoves the tube’s opposite end into the empty steel cistern attached to the vehicle’s creaky frame. ‘On kar!’ someone shouts in Hinglish; almost instantly, his orders to ‘switch it on’ are obeyed.

Diesel generators, housed in nearby sheds, begin to thrum. Submersible pumps, installed in the borehole’s shafts, drone as they disgorge thousands of gallons of groundwater from deep in the earth. The liquid gushes through the hoses and into the trucks’ tanks. The full trucks don’t wait around. As the hose team continues its work, drivers nose down a rutted dirt path until they reach a nearby highway. There, they turn on their lights and pick up speed, rushing to sell their bounty to factories and hospitals, malls and hotels, apartments and hutments across this city of 25 million.

Everything about this business is illegal: the boreholes dug without permission, the trucks operating without permits, the water sold without testing or treatment. ‘Water work is night work,’ says a middle-aged neighbour who lives near the covert pumping station and requested anonymity. ‘Bosses arrange buyers, labour fills tankers, the police look the other way, and the muscle makes sure that no one says nothing to nobody.’ Teams like this one are ubiquitous in Delhi, where the official water supply falls short of the city’s needs. A quarter of Delhi’s households live without a piped-water connection; most of the rest receive water for only a few hours each day.

So residents have come to rely on private truck owners —the most visible strands of a dispersed web of city councillors, farmers, real estate agents, and fixers who source millions of gallons of water each day from illicit boreholes, and sell the liquid for profit. The entrenched system has a local moniker: the water-tanker mafia.

A 2013 audit found that the city loses 60 percent of its water supply to leakages, theft, and a failure to collect revenue. The mafia defends its work as a community service, but there is a much darker picture of Delhi’s subversive water industry: one of a thriving black market populated by small-time freelance agents who are exploiting a fast-depleting common resource and in turn threatening India’s long-term water security.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from: “At the Mercy of the Water Mafia”, by Aman Sethi, Foreign Policy]

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The Maldives has chosen a new leader, replacing President Ibu Solih, who won by a landslide in 2018, with Mohamed Muizzu, the Mayor of Male and the choice of the previous ruling party, the PPM. Mr. Muizzu won Saturday’s presidential run-off that followed an inconclusive first round in which no candidate crossed 50% of the vote, winning nearly 54% to Solih’s 46% in this round. Mr. Solih’s electoral loss is being attributed to a heavy anti-incumbency sentiment and concerns over the post-COVID-19 economy that is dependent on tourism, the rift within Solih’s party, the MDP, due to a rupture in his old friendship with former President Mohamed Nasheed, as well as concerns over “sovereignty” issues, whipped up by Mr. Muizzu’s PPM that is behind an “India out” campaign to oust Indian military personnel.

PPM chief and former Maldives President Abdulla Yameen, the chief architect of that campaign and serving a jail term of 11 years, was openly at odds with India during his tenure. He had paved the way for a free trade agreement with China and loans for infrastructure projects that the Opposition said had led the Maldives into a “debt trap”. Mr. Solih turned the Maldives’s international compass, committing publicly to an “India First” policy, as New Delhi undertook many infrastructure projects, assisted the Maldives during the pandemic, and helped it during the campaign to have Maldives Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid elected President of the UN General Assembly. As a result, the Solih-Muizzu run-off was billed as an India versus China contest by commentators, who have sought to portray the result as a “setback” for India.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the first to congratulate President-elect Muizzu on social media. New Delhi must avoid the impression that it has favourites within the Maldivian polity. The ball is now in Mr. Muizzu’s court to take up the promise of keeping India-Maldives ties close — he has not himself criticised India in the way his party has. Among his tasks would be shoring up the Maldivian economy as debt repayments come due, and taking lessons from events in the neighbourhood such as Sri Lanka’s handling of its economic crisis.

It remains to be seen whether he will ensure the release of Mr. Yameen, and what control the previous President will have over the new government. Mr. Muizzu will have to preside over an upcoming referendum vote, which Mr. Nasheed has pushed for, to decide whether the Maldives will revert to a parliamentary system rather than the presidential one. Given its location in the Indian Ocean, along key shipping routes, Mr. Muizzu will have to balance traditional, strategic interests with India, which is its closest and most powerful neighbour, while engaging China and the United States, that keenly watch developments there. It is important that neither Delhi nor Male view these interests through the prism of “zero sum” games, as that has led to tensions between them in the past.

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The climate change crisis has now reached every country; extreme weather events are costing all economies. It is clear that the world is failing by many marks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So, the idea that is gaining traction, once again, is to build a carbon market that will allow countries and companies to buy credits by doing all things good—from planting trees to distributing clean cookstoves to investing in renewable energy. This market would put a price on every tonne of carbon dioxide or the equivalent greenhouse gas avoided, reduced or sequestered, which can then be used to offset emissions of companies and countries.

It is simple in some ways; complicated in others. Because of this carbon market, you will be able to pick up a luxury bag that is labelled “carbon-neutral”; or take a flight that has “offset” your emissions; or even read about an oil or food company that has declared a “net-carbon footprint”. You may wonder how. These items and companies become carbon-neutral by “buying” credits—these credits are issued against activities that either reduce greenhouse gas emissions (like building a solar plant or using an efficient cookstove) or remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (for instance, by planting trees). The management of this “market” of buyers and sellers is done through a paraphernalia of registries, project developers, validators, verifiers and carbon exchanges.

The idea of carbon credit began in the first decade of the 2000s, after the Kyoto Protocol, set up under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), entered into force. Countries agreed to set up the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) for the purchase of carbon credits from developing countries. But with the end of the Kyoto Protocol, this market dried up. It was replaced by an unregulated global market of buyers and sellers, called the voluntary carbon market.

It is hoped that soon there will be an internationally negotiated agreement for an official carbon market. At the next Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the UNFCCC to be held from November 30 to December 12, discussion on the Article on creating the rules for the carbon market (Article 6 of the Paris Agreement of 2015) is top billed. Once these rules are finalised, there will be a public registry of all projects and countries will be allowed to trade either bilaterally (under Article 6.2) or through a global programme like what existed earlier under CDM (under Article 6.4).

This is an important way to move ahead. Countries, including India, need financing to transition to a low-carbon energy system, and the buying and selling of carbon credits will provide that investment.

[From an Editorial Published in..Down to Earth on October 6, 2023 named ‘ Men in Black’]

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Retail inflation, or the inflation rate for consumers, eased to a four-month low of 4.87 per cent in October even as food inflation remained broadly static at 6.6 per cent, data released by the National Statistical Office (NSO) on Monday showed. Though this marked the third month of a moderation in inflation, with the latest print, the retail inflation rate has now completed four years of remaining above 4 per cent in the 4+/- 2 per cent band of Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) medium-term inflation target.
Food prices are still being seen as a risk to retail inflation. Consumer Food Price Index (CFPI) recorded an inflation rate of 6.61 per cent in October as against 6.62 per cent in September, which was revised up from 6.56 per cent. It had stood at 7.01 per cent in October 2022.

Cereals inflation stood at 10.65 per cent in October, continuing to be in double digits for the second month in a row. There is a growing trend of inflation in egg, fruits, pulses and products, which recorded inflation rates of 9.30 per cent, 9.34 per cent and 18.79 per cent, respectively, in October as against 6.42 per cent, 7.30 per cent and 16.38 per cent in September. Vegetables inflation, however, provided relief by easing to 2.7 per cent in October from 3.39 per cent in September. The decline in retail inflation rate in October was mainly driven by non-food items. Core inflation — non-food, non-fuel segment — eased marginally to 4.4 per cent in October from 4.6 per cent, reflecting weakening of demand, economists said.

Fuel and light group recorded deflation of 0.39 per cent in October as against deflation of 0.11 per cent in September, reflecting the impact of the cut in cooking gas prices and no change in pump prices of diesel and petrol. Miscellaneous inflation, representing services mainly, also moderated to 4.40 per cent in October from 4.77 per cent in the previous month. The overall retail inflation rate in October was higher at 5.12 per cent in rural areas than 4.62 per cent in urban areas. Food inflation for rural areas was 6.58 per cent in October, lower than 6.63 per cent in urban areas. Going ahead, weak prospects for Kharif harvest and Rabi sowing are expected to impact food prices along with a low base effect which will also push up inflation rate in November.
“Going forward, below par monsoon rainfall is likely to have its impact on cereals inflation, this along with pulses inflation is expected to keep food inflation elevated. Food inflation has potential to push retail inflation higher as witnessed in July and August 2023,” Devendra Kumar Pant, Chief Economist & Senior Director – Public Finance, India Ratings and Research said.

[From an Editorial Published in.. The Indian Express on 14 November 2023 named ‘October retail inflation drops to four-month low of 4.87%’]

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The ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) has approached the Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs (CCEA), seeking approval for revised cost estimate for the Bharatmala Project. The cost of the flagship project has ballooned to Rs 10.6 trillion from Rs 5.35 trillion, when it was approved in October, 2017

The cost escalation has been due to higher cost of land acquisition and inflated cost of inputs. The delay in approvals is leading to awarding of new projects falling much behind the targets this year.

The land cost (compensation paid to owners) accounts for close to 35% of the total cost of construction of highways. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act of 2015 has increased the cost of acquisition substantially.

As the CCEA approval is awaited for revised costs, the Department of Expenditure in an order on Thursday that no new works are approved and no contracts are awarded under Bharatmala under any phase until approval is received.

Expenditure has been capped at 20% above the cost estimates first approved by the cabinet. Apart from awarding, fresh liabilities cannot be created for land acquisition and pre-construction activities under the project as per the order.

The order of the expenditure department has the agencies involved in highway construction looking for clarity on what to do with the tenders for fresh awards that are already in the different stages of bidding, an official said.

Already the total length of highways awarded during the April-October period has gone down to 2595 km from a little over 5000 km in the same period last year. For the full year the target for awarding new highway projects has been kept at 12,500 km.
Earlier, MoRTH had flagged its concern over the slowing speed of award in a communication to the cabinet. It had said if the target for Award has to be met for this year, decision on the proposal for approval of the revised Bharatmala Phase-l or alternate programme needs to be taken expeditiously. It had also warned that shortfall in award this year will reflect in the progress of construction in 2024-25.

Highway constriction is one of the key priorities for the government as it pushes public spending to support growth. For this year it has provided Rs 2.58 trillion for capital expenditure to MoRTH, up 25% from last year’s revised estimates.
Bharatmala Pariyojana was first approved by CCEA in 2017. It envisaged development of 34,800 km of national highways corridors. Till dte work for 26,348 km of stretches have been awarded that would cost Rs 8.24 trillion. Of the total target, 14,300 km of highways under the project have been constructed.

[From an Editorial Published in.. The Financial Express on 25 November 2023 named ‘Highway ministry seeks fresh Cabinet nod for Bharatmala’]