Author: cprindia

What kind of economic processes do we see emerging in small towns?

We can summarise the multiple and complex economic processes playing out in small towns into four broad types. Locally, these four ideal-types are interlaced with each other:

• Small towns are incorporated into metropolitan and large cities,
• Small towns are entrepreneurial, resilient and innovative localities,
• Small towns are ordinary market towns,
• Small towns are large villages that expand and grow including a work-force moving away from the farm sector.

What are the main characteristics of small towns under the influence of metropolitan expansion?

There are a number of places that are growing due to the diffusion and re-localisation of economic activities in the peripheries of large cities – both of these activities are in a phase of rapid expansion.

Diffusion: A heterogeneous amalgam of investments in infrastructure, real estate, commercial ventures, industrial parks and educational institutions surround small towns, which, in turn, become central places, i.e., nodes and sites of agglomeration and not just for accessing markets and services. In this case, the agency of local actors is limited. The urban transformation depends of such localities depends on their attractiveness seen in terms of:

• Accessibility and location (new roads, mass transportation, etc.),
• Cost of land,
• Local tolerance to pollution,
• Availability of a labour force and its willingness to accept the offered working conditions, often characterised by low wages, daily contracts and a weak level of unionisation.

Often, the weakness of the local government in enforcement, with its limited capability, becomes an added advantage in terms of attractiveness.

Over time, however, the physical planning of metropolitan regions, megaprojects, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and real estate promoters’ appetite for new land opportunities can be destabilising factors for existing flourishing clusters of activities that depend on intensive workforce, inherited knowledge and local capital (such as the Kartarpur furniture industry in the periphery of Ludhiana, discussed in chapter 18 by Rémi de Bercegol and Shankare Gowda).

For example, India, which recently opened its doors to Foreign Direct Investment, has limited availability of large tracts of lands within large cities. Here, much of the globalisation related investment is occurring in peri-urban areas. This is where megaprojects such as SEZs materialise. Hence, often banal and polluting activities are de-concentrated from the city centre to these peripheral small towns alongside industrial development parks.

Re-localisation: Daily commuters constitute the second component of vibrant small towns around large cities. Their circular migration (i.e., not a permanent movement to the city but periodically going back and forth from a place of residence, which can be for short periods of time, or even daily commuting) towards jobs within the city transforms the small towns bringing in new households, mostly young people, who cannot find affordable housing in the core city. They stimulate a diversification of local economies and alter the local political equilibrium. The youth of small towns, notably those who have access to technical colleges, are also more engaged in commuting. This daily circulation tends to adjust itself as major firms relocate their factories and offices to peripheral parks, thus ensuring that circular migration comes full circle as people from the core city start commuting to the periphery.

What are the conditions of emergence, expansion and adaptation to change of entrepreneurial and innovative towns?

Outside the direct influence of metro cities, there are many vibrant small towns. This is due to a strong and often fast growing network of entrepreneurs and skilled workers who contribute to the development of industrial clusters. They are able to expand their market, adapt to change, and innovate.

Small and medium towns prove to be interesting locations to set up and develop productive activities, particularly in response to the immense demand constituted by the vast majority of Indian families that do not belong to the middle and upper urban class. In these locations, entrepreneurs innovate to create low cost products that respond to the specificities of the non-metropolitan environment with solid and rustic equipment that is easy to operate and repair using local skills. It is an environment of jugaad, by which we mean doing more with less. Such innovative products, notably vehicles adapted to bad roads and difficult weathers, are not just limited to the Indian customer base as some small companies even manage to export to other emerging low cost markets such as Africa (see Chapter 19 by Yann Philippe Tastevin for rig drilling trucks in South India).

Apart from industrial activities, these towns also provide locations for the establishment of technical colleges, which recruit beyond their local geography. Often, some of these towns do not grow in an isolated manner but belong to a group of small towns, co-specialising in a sector. This is also the case for more traditional activities, such as textile or leather industries, that are similarly integrating into the global value chain and up-scaling.

Besides the vibrant small towns, what constitutes the majority of small towns where most of the non-metropolitan urban citizens live?

These are of two broad types, as indicated earlier.

First, ordinary mandi or market towns.  These cater to the needs of the rural areas in their hinterland constitute a large proportion of small towns. Many of these towns have historically been market towns or administrative centres. Depending on their administrative functions (whether they are home to a block office or a police station, etc.), and the dynamism of local agriculture (such as the nature of production and volume of cash crops), they can be more or less dynamic.

Second, emergent census towns. With a decline in farm employment, people have to generate incomes with access to minimal resources. This is how mandi towns as well as large villages, become more diverse.  More of the labour force opens petty shops, becomes daily workers in the construction sector or at brick kilns – either locally or in other towns through seasonal migrations. In turn, their remittances stimulate the morphing of their place of origin.

This morphing, which occurs in villages gives rise to growth in the number of census towns, as the workforce shifts away from non-farm work. In this case, the local economy tends to move away from agricultural activities as in the settlements above. However, here, there is no previous history of urban-like activity such as administration or regional markets. As such, the emergence of these census towns is not supported by the presence of a local elite related to the presence of a market, educational or administrative functions, but markets do emerge.

These emerging urban areas, smaller than the towns referred to above, consolidate and diversify because there is a need for their population to create new activities and access resources through self-employment and mobility. These settlements, therefore, also often serve as local transport hubs assisted by improved rural roads and a growing access to vehicle finance from formal banks.

Is this typology airtight or do some small towns straddle these different ideal-types?

None of the types of small towns described above exists in a pure configuration. Each one is the product of multiple influences carried by an increasingly diverse population, which is often well connected with distant places.

The multiplication of small towns and the urban transformation of villages constitute the material expression of the current socio-economic transition in India that is characterised by important reduction of jobs in the farm sector and poor creation of employment in the industrial sector, associated with a limited level of residential migration towards large cities. Many of these emerging small urban centres are places where people struggle daily to access resources but prefer to stay in a known environment where local values of solidarity support them.

The other pieces in the series can be accessed below:

• ThoughtSpace Episode 20: Social and Economic Transformations in Small Towns of India
• What is happening beyond large cities? Understanding census towns in India
• Understanding Subaltern Urbanisation in India and its Impact  

Watch the full video of the panel discussion on ‘Understanding India’s Energy Transition in Global Context’, organised as part of CPR Dialogues, featuring Michael Grubb, Navroz K Dubash, Radhika Khosla, Ashok Sreenivas, chaired by Ajay Mathur.

India faces three substantial challenges in the coming decades with enormous implications for its future energy demand. First, India has yet to provide clean cooking energy to 800 million people, and electricity access to 200 million people; failure to achieve this will dramatically reduce the human development possibilities for vast numbers of Indians. Second, India has to create jobs at pace with our shifting demography, which cannot happen without more and better power – electricity demand is likely to at least double in the next fifteen years at a time when clean energy is rising up the national and global political agenda. Third, the quality and form of India’s urban transition has enormous implications for energy needs.  Managing these simultaneous pressures poses a severe challenge because India has to transform to the energy sector of the 21st century even as we grapple with 20th century problems of waste, theft and unreliability.

Moreover, India’s energy transition is taking place within a larger global energy context, which will shape available supply options. Globally, the steep fall in price of renewable energy technologies has sparked a conversation about how, not when, economies will transition to a predominantly renewable energy future. However, the transition costs and challenges are potentially substantial and hotly disputed. Moreover, global oil and gas economics and politics have been cast into uncertain territory with the development of shale oil and gas technologies. And not least, the imperative of addressing climate change in the face of ever more dire warnings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change hangs like a shadow over global energy futures, and in particular puts pressure on an expansion of coal-based energy.

Historically, India has viewed pressures to mitigate climate change, in particular, as a threat to development. And indeed, India’s energy needs remain substantial, and any pressures to absolutely limit energy use or increase the costs of energy will have negative social and economic effects. At the same time, India is grappling with many other challenges that could also be solved by judicious shifts toward energy efficiency and cleaner energy: energy security due to import dependence in oil could be mitigated by renewable powered electric cars; congested cities could be cleared by energy-saving public transport; and air pollution could be mitigated through energy efficiency and renewable energy. The question before India, therefore, is whether India can productively leverage global energy trends through a judicious mix of demand and supply approaches even while meeting its own energy needs? Or do these trends pose a challenge to India as the country expands energy use in service of development?
From one perspective, rapid global change provides an opportunity: India has yet to lock into technologies and institutional paths that were designed for coal, oil and centralized power, and can build an energy and electricity system better suited for the 21st century. From the other, negotiating a complex technology and institutional transition, while dealing with the overhang of 20th century energy problems of low access and weak and inefficient systems, seems only to be a challenge.

This panel explored to what extent India’s energy transition, in the context of a global energy transition, provides opportunities versus throws up challenges, and what India can do to effectively negotiate this transition.

Ajay Mathur is Director General, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI).

Michael Grubb is Professor of Energy & Climate Change, Bartlett School Environment, Energy & Resources, Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London.

Navroz K Dubash is a Professor at CPR.

Radhika Khosla is Research Director, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, University of Oxford and Visiting Fellow, CPR.

Ashok Sreenivas is Senior Fellow at Prayas (Energy Group).

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here.

Key takeaways about the Dialogues by Michael Grubb can be accessed here.

Watch all other sessions of the Dialogues below:

• The International Climate Change Regime: Looking Back to Look Forward 
• Research for Policy Action on Air Pollution, in collaboration with CECFEE
• India’s Technology Transition: The Present and the Possible
• CPR Youth Awards: A Youth-Driven Agenda for Change
• India’s 21st Century Transitions
• The Emerging World Order and India’s Role
• Is the Urban Future Metropolitan? Big Cities in Urban Systems
• Geopolitics and Geo-Economics in a Changing South Asia

Watch the full video (above) of the recent CORP seminar discussing the private septic tank emptying sector in India through case studies, in-depth ethnographic work and projections of business models.

Tarun Sharma discusses the market for private septic tank emptying services in the three cities of Dehradun, Jaipur and Bhubaneshwar, while Marie-Helene Zerah and Sweta Xess discuss the findings of a deep-dive ethnographic study of these operators in the peri-urban settlement of Aya Nagar (near the Delhi-Gurgaon boder). Finally, Anindita Mukherjee and Prashant Arya present the results of a projection exercise showing the progressive impact that regularisation and formalisation would have on the operations of these enterprises.

The presentation and the subsequent discussion dwelt on the need, and potential consequences of, regularising an informal sector with broad public health implications, the role of manual scavenging in such enterprises and the hidden costs of labor, and the need to understand the fundamental role that caste and community identities play in this particular kind of work.

Marie – Hélène Zérah is a Research Fellow at CESSMA (Centre d’études en sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains et asiatiques) / IRD (Institute of Research for Sustainable Development) deputed to the Centre for Policy Research.

Sweta Celine Xess is a Research Associate with the Centre for Policy Research.

Tarun Sharma is Director and Co-founder of Nagrika, a social enterprise focused on the issues of small and mid-sized cities.

Anindita Mukherjee is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Research working in the project, Scaling City Institutions for India (SCI-FI): Sanitation.

Prashant Arya is a Research Assistant with the Centre for Policy Research.

The question and answer session that followed the seminar can be accessed here.

Land transformation has been at the centre of economic growth of post-colonial, Asian nation-states. While their political reforms and economic policies have focused on land governance, the outcomes have resulted in promoting privatisation and speculative business interest in ecologically sensitive landscapes that are also under diverse forms of common use by resource-dependent communities. A three-year study undertaken to understand community-level responses to land use transformation in India, Indonesia and Myanmar shows that the current scale and approach of land–intensive development in these large democracies is facilitated by fast-paced, top down policy changes. These policies are ‘stacked’ (when multiple layers of current and revoked laws are simultaneously in use) rather than integrated and their implementation is the responsibility of various authorities and agencies that overlap.

Growing private investments in land that has remained within varying degrees of state control have changed the way land is managed. Land has become increasingly securitised and ‘out of bounds’ for small farmers and other land-users with or without recognised forms of ownership and use rights. Land conflicts are caused due to coercive acquisition processes or land grabs, unlawful operations of projects and long pending remedies to social and environmental impacts. In many instances, these conflicts begin even before the final decisions on projects are taken and persist for years.

Highly capitalised land use change brings powerful investors and corporations, governments and local communities in unequal and precarious arrangements of negotiation and confrontation. Citizens and communities affected by land use change, use varied strategies such as administrative complaints, protests, litigation, media campaigns and political advocacy, and engage in improving project design and implementation, increase compensations, restore community access to resources and get a review on the operations of harmful projects. These are done under conditions of political intransigence and criminalisation of those who speak up. While all three countries have recognised land conflicts and their impact on development plans and proposals, they are yet to give affected people a formal and effective role in land and natural resource governance.

The study reports on India, Indonesia and Myanmar and an overview of the study’s methodology and findings can be accessed here.

A series of blog posts over the next two months will highlight specific research findings and case studies.

This study was carried out by the CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program, supported by a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

By Bharat Karnad

Several mega-trends are visible in international affairs on the cusp of the third decade of the 21st century. After a trillion dollars spent on the 18-year old war with the Taliban in Afghanistan following a similar amount expended in Iraq and Syria, the US is drained of its wealth, stamina and will for military confrontations of any kind. A reactive and retreating America under President Donald Trump, besides generating unprecedented levels of uncertainty and anxiety, has accentuated the conditions of unusual flux in the international system. Second, with the old certainties gone, traditional alliances (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), trading regimes (Trans-Pacific Partnership), schemes of regional peace (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), and technology and supplier cartels (Missile Technology Control Regime, Nuclear Suppliers Group, et al.) are all alike in disarray; their concerns are now matters of contestation with China staking claim to the pole position vacated by the US. And finally, these developments are compelling major countries to try to protect themselves the best they can by handling things on their own, in coalition with other similarly encumbered nations, and by exploring new security/military cooperation agreements. There is particular urgency in Asia to blunt China’s hegemonic ambitions and preclude its domination from taking root.

State of Play 

Unfortunately India finds itself on the wrong side of these trends in the main. This is because it has, in the new millennium, accelerated its efforts to join the very same nonproliferation regimes and cartels that had victimized it all along. Worse, by sidling up to the US and virtually outsourcing its strategic security to Washington, India’s historical role as prime balancer in the international balance-of-power set-up – courtesy its hoary policies of nonalignment and its latter-day avatar, strategic autonomy – has been imperiled. This is at a time when doubts about the US commitment to other countries’ security have increased along with the apprehensions of allies and friends. With security made a transactional commodity by the Trump administration, treaty alliances have been weakened, unsettling West European and Far Eastern states traditionally close to the US.¹ India’s trend-bucking policy, in the event, will only cement the growing perceptions of the country as unable to perceive its own best interests and to act on them. Its downgrade, as a result of its more recent strategies, to the status of a subordinate state and subsidiary ‘strategic partner’ of the US means that India will have restricted strategic choices. Its foreign and military policies will therefore lose the freedom and latitude for diplomatic manoeuvre that they have always enjoyed.

Thus, the 2008 civilian nuclear deal, for all practical purposes, signed away India’s sovereign right to resume underground testing and froze its nuclear arsenal at the sub-thermonuclear technology level (as the 1998 fusion test was a dud). Agreeing to the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement and the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement – the so-called ‘foundational accords’ – will, respectively, permit the US to stage its military forces out of Indian bases and embroil India in its wars in the extended region, and (ii) to penetrate the most secret Indian communications grid, including the nuclear command and control network.

The Indian government’s eagerness to cement the partnership is astonishing considering the trust deficit evident in a long history of duplicitous US behaviour and policies.² By clinging to a feckless and demanding US, India’s profile as a fiercely independent state has taken a beating, distanced the country from old friends such as Russia (which is pivotal to balancing China and the US) and Iran (central to India’s geostrategic concerns in the Gulf, Afghanistan and Central Asia), lost the nation its diplomatic elan, and has seriously hurt vital national interests.

Placating China is the other imprudent theme that Indian foreign policy has latched on to. It has mollycoddled its most dangerous adversary and comprehensively capable rival in Asia with giveaways – such as non-use of the Tibet and Taiwan cards, refraining from nuclear missile-arming states on China’s periphery as a tit-for-tat measure for Beijing’s missile-arming of Pakistan, giving the Chinese manufacturing sector unhindered access to the Indian market through a massively unfair and unbalanced bilateral trade regime, etc. On the other hand, it has treated Pakistan, a weak flanking country, as a full-bore security threat when, realistically, it is only a military nuisance. This strategy is at the core of India’s external troubles. It has practically incentivized Beijing to desist from peaceful resolution of the border dispute. It has also undermined India’s credibility and credentials as ‘security provider’ to and strategic partner of a host of Asian littoral and offshore states fearful of an ambitious and aggressive China, as well as complicated the country’s attempts at obtaining a tier of friendly nations around it as buffer.

A topsy-turvy threat perception has also meant a lopsided Indian military geared to handle Pakistan but incapable of defending well against China, even less of taking the fight to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on land, air and distant seas; it is also laughably unprepared for future warfare featuring cyber pre-emption, remotely controlled armed drone swarms, robotic weapons systems managed by Artificial Intelligence, space-based weapons platforms, and clean micro-thermonuclear bombs. In the context, moreover, of a recessive foreign policy and a military that seems unable to wean itself away from imported armaments, it is almost as if the Indian government and armed services have given up on national security. This bewildering state of affairs is in urgent need of drastic overhaul and repair.

Geopolitical Vision and Strategy

Strong nations in the modern era have transitioned into great powers not only through expansive national visions, but also, more significantly, by pursuing policies disruptive of the prevailing order and multilateral regimes they had no hand in creating. India in the 21st century, on the other hand, seems content with the existing international system, measuring its foreign policy success in terms of entry gained or denied in congeries of international power (UN Security Council) and trade and technology cartels (Nuclear Suppliers Group, Missile Technology Control Regime, etc.). In other words, it covets a place at the high table on terms set by other countries. It is not a mistake made by China or the US (or, to go back in history, Elizabethan England, Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union and now Vladimir Putin’s Russia). The Indian government is hampered by its mistaken belief that upholding the current regional and international correlation of forces and mechanisms of order, and stressing its soft ‘civilizational’ power, will make the country great.

India with its many infirmities is in no position to undertake system disruption by itself.³ For India to rise as the premier Asian challenger to China and as the other economic-political-military power node in the continent in the shortest possible time – which should be the legitimate national aim and vision –it requires a subtle but telling approach. It needs a double-pronged strategy. One prong should stress absolutely reciprocal positions and policies. Thus, Beijing’s insistence on ‘One China, two systems’ should be met with a ‘One India’ concept. Similarly, the non-acceptance by Beijing of all of Jammu and Kashmir (including the Pakistan-occupied portion) as inalienably Indian territory should lead to formal recognition of and relations with Taiwan; it should also spark off New Delhi’s world-wide advocacy of a free Tibet and a free East Turkestan, and of campaigns against ‘cultural genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Tibet and Xinjiang.⁴ And China’s nuclear missile arming of Pakistan should, even if belatedly, trigger India’s transferring strategic missiles to the states on the Chinese periphery, so that China too thereafter suffers permanent geostrategic disadvantage.

Hamstringing China should also involve meta-measures to carve out separate, loose and specifically anti-China security coalitions from the two important groups India is part of. BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) is an entity dominated economically and trade-wise by China. This is something that arouses wariness in the other three countries, which can be mobilized to form a smaller, informal, security-cooperation-minded coalition, BRIS (Brazil-Russia-India-South Africa). It will assist in hedging Beijing’s military options and affect China’s economic expansiveness. Likewise, the US’s importance to international security has to be whittled away. The Quadrilateral (US-Japan-India-Australia) proposed by Japan’s Shinzo Abe to contain China in the Indo-Pacific is problematic owing to the centrality accorded yo the capricious US. India could propose a different set-up – a modified Quadrilateral or ‘Mod Quad’ with India, Japan, Australia and the leading littoral and offshore states of South East Asia (Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore) disputing China’s claims in the South China Sea; a cooperative Taiwan could be accorded ‘observer’ status. This would at once define the strategic geopolitical face-off between ‘rimland Asia’ and a hegemonic ‘heartland’ China, and reduce the uncertainty attending on America’s security role (given that the US and China, owing to their close economic and trading links, are inseparable). Mod Quad will clarify the strategic calculi of member states, while encouraging the US to contribute militarily to the extent it wants to at any time but as an outside party.⁵

BRIS and Mod Quad are extremely practicable geopolitical solutions to share the cost, divide the danger, and generate synergy from the wide-spectrum capabilities, singly and together, of the member states in these two collectives. At the same time, they would stretch China’s military resources and minimize the uncertainty and confusion attending on any US participation. These new arrangements adhere to the time-tested principle of vision shaping strategy but geography driving it, which makes for cohesion and sense of purpose. BRIS and Mod Quad will enable their member states to be less inhibited in cooperating with each other to deal with the overarching security threat posed by China, but without the intimidating presence of the US (which, typically, pursues its own particular interests). They will instill in the Indian government’s external outlook an outcomes-oriented, competitive bent. It may result, for instance, in getting the east-west Ganga-Mekong connectivity project – as a rival to China’s north-south Belt & Road Initiative – off the ground.⁶

But BRIS and Mod Quad leave Pakistan out of the reckoning. Pakistan is strong enough to be a spoiler and, in cahoots with China, pose a substantial problem. More than 70 years of tension and conflict with India haven’t helped. For a lasting solution it is essential to break up the Pakistan-China nexus. The military palliative for terrorist provocations – air and land strikes – will only drive Islamabad deeper into China’s camp. A Kashmir solution roughly along the lines negotiated with General Pervez Musharraf in 2007 that Prime Minister Imran Khan has said Pakistan will accept, is a reasonable end state to work towards.⁷ But India can lubricate such an offer with policies to co-opt Pakistan (along with India’s other subcontinental neighbours) economically, by means of trade on concessional terms, and easy credit and access to the Indian market for manufactures and produce. This will obtain the goal of unitary economic space in the subcontinent and lay the foundations for a pacified South Asia – the first step in India’s long overdue achievement of great power. Such actions should, however, be preceded by several unilateral and risk-averse military initiatives (outlined later) to establish India’s peaceful bonafides and to denature the Indian threat that Pakistan perceives. Simultaneously, prioritizing strategic and expeditionary military capabilities against China and for distant operations jointly with friendly states in the Indian Ocean Region and in Southeast Asia will secure India’s extended security perimeter.

National Security Policy Priorities

Lack of money has never been the hitch. Rather, the problem has been and continues to be the misuse of financial resources by the three armed services with their faulty expenditure priorities. Intent on equipping and sustaining inappropriate force structures geared to the lesser threat, they have squandered the colonial legacy of expeditionary and ‘out of area operations’. Consequently, they have shrunk greatly in stature even as they have increased in size.⁸ Persisting with thinking of Pakistan as the main threat long after it credibly ceased to be one post the 1971 war has resulted in an Indian military able to fight only short-range, short-duration, small and inconclusive wars. Indeed, so geared to territorial defence and tactical warfare are the Indian armed services that they have paid scant attention to strategic objectives and to the means of realizing them. The political leadership, for its part, has shown marked lack of interest, failure to articulate a national vision, and inability to outline a game plan and strategy in this respect. It has chosen the easy way of relying on the armed services professionally to do the right thing by proffering the right advice – which they haven’t.

Breaking the Pakistan-China nexus is an imperative. It requires the Indian government to first seed a conducive political milieu by making certain safe unilateral military moves. What the Pakistan Army most fears is India’s three Strike Corps; if this ‘threat’ is denatured, a milieu with enormous peaceful potential can be created. Considering the nuclear overhang and zero probability of the Indian government ever ordering a war of annihilation – which is the only time when these armoured and mechanized formations will fight full tilt – three corps are way in excess of need. They can be reconstituted and the resources shifted to form a single composite corps adequate for any conceivable Pakistan contingency. The rest of the heavily armoured units can be converted to airborne cavalry, and to light tanks with engines optimized for high-altitude conditions; three offensive mountain corps can thereby be equipped to take the fight to the PLA on the Tibetan Plateau. The nuclear backdrop can likewise be changed for the better by India removing its short-range nuclear missiles from forward deployment on the western border and perhaps even getting rid of them altogether, because hinterland-based missiles can reach Pakistani targets with ease. These two moves made without demanding matching responses will cost India little in terms of security, establish a modicum of trust, persuade Pakistan of India’s goodwill, and confirm China as the Indian military’s primary concern. It will hasten normalcy in bilateral relations.

Tackling China at a time when it is widening the gap with India in all respects necessitates India using the playbook the Chinese successfully used against the US – Pakistan against India, and North Korea against America – when facing an adversary with a marked conventional military edge. It means resorting to Nuclear First Use (NFU) and deploying weapons to make this stance credible. Emplacing atomic demolition munitions in Himalayan passes to deter PLA units ingressing in strength across the disputed border is one tripwire. Another is to declare that any forceful Chinese military action that crosses a certain undefined threshold may automatically trigger the firing of canisterised medium- and long-range Agni missiles, now capable of launch-on-launch and launch-on warning. Additionally, the large numbers of Chinese missiles positioned in Tibet should be seen as the third nuclear tripwire. As there is no technology to reliably detect and determine the nature of incoming warheads, any missile PLA fires will reasonably have to be assumed to be nuclear-warheaded. Such a hair-trigger posture leaning towards action will create precisely the kind of uncertainty about the Indian reaction and response that will bolster its deterrent stance.⁹

Exorbitantly priced aircraft carriers are unaffordable and, in the age of hypersonic and supersonic missiles, a military liability. The Indian naval budget should instead prioritize nuclear-powered ballistic missile-firing and attack submarines, and a surface fleet of multipurpose frigates. The Indian Air Force needs to radically cut the diversity of combat aircraft in its inventory, rationalize its force structure and streamline its logistics set-up. This will be facilitated by limiting the fleet to just two types of fighter planes – the multi-role Su-30MKI upgraded to ‘super Sukhoi’ configuration in the strike and air superiority role and progressively enhanced versions of the indigenous Tejas light combat aircraft for air defence, the follow-on Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft for longer reach and bigger punch, and lease-buying 1-2 squadrons of Tu-160M2 ‘Blackjack’ strategic bomber from Russia as the manned, recallable, vector in the country’s nuclear triad.

Politically, the most difficult policy decision for the government will be to resume nuclear testing. This is absolutely necessary to obtain tested and proven thermonuclear weapons of different power-to-yield ratios. India has got by with a suspect thermonuclear arsenal for 20 years. It is time India’s strategic deterrent acquired credibility.

Other pieces as part of CPR’s policy document, ‘Policy Challenges – 2019-2024’ can be accessed below:

• The Future is Federal: Why Indian Foreign Policy Needs to Leverage its Border States by Nimmi Kurian
• Rethinking India’s Approach to International and Domestic Climate Policy by Navroz K Dubash and Lavanya Rajamani
• India’s Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World by Shyam Saran
• Need for a Comprehensive National Security Strategy by Shyam Saran
• A Clarion Call for Just Jobs: Addressing the Nation’s Employment Crisis by Sabina Dewan
• Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy by Mukta Naik

¹ An unreliable US, in fact, so concerns its NATO allies that the French defence minister Florence Parly in Washington asked a little plaintively, ‘What Europeans are worried about is this: Will the U.S. commitment [to NATO] be perennial? Should we assume that it will go on as was the case in the past 70 years?’ See ‘French defense chief questions US commitment to NATO’, AFP, RadioFreeEurope, Radio Liberty, 18 March 2019, https://www.rferl.org/a/french-defense-chief-questions-us-commitment-to-…
² Bharat Karnad, Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 187-219.
³ For a detailed analysis of its various infirmities that preclude India’s becoming a great power anytime soon, see Karnad, Why India Is Not a Great Power (Yet).
⁴ China sees itself as the main protector of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Visiting Islamabad during the Pulwama crisis, the foreign minister Wang Yi declared: ‘No matter how things change in the world and the region, China will firmly support Pakistan upholding its independence and territorial integrity and dignity.’ See Sutirtho Patranobis, ‘China firmly with Pakistan, says Beijing as Islamabad raises Kashmir in top talks’, Hindustan Times, 19 March 2019, https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/china-firmly-with-pakistan-say….
⁵ Bharat Karnad, ‘India’s Weak Geopolitics and What To Do About It’, in Bharat Karnad, ed., Future Imperilled: India’s Security in the 1990s and Beyond (New Delhi: Viking, 1994), 19-20.
⁶ Bharat Karnad, Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition (New Delhi: Penguin-Viking, 2018), ch. 4.
⁷ Imtiaz Ahmad, ‘2-3 solutions available to Kashmir issues, says Pak PM Imran Khan’, Hindustan Times, 4 December 2018, https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/2-3-solutions-available-to-kas….
⁸ Karnad, Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet), ch. 5.
⁹ Bharat Karnad, ‘Shifting the Nuclear Security Focus to China’, in Lieutenant General A.K. Singh and Lieutenant General B.S. Nagal, eds., India’s Military Strategy in the 21st Century (New Delhi: Centre for Land Warfare Studies and KW Publishers, 2019); Karnad, Staggering Forward, 344-349.

A global study at the beginning of the decade indicated that one billion people—15% of the world’s population—practice open defecation (OD), of whom 626 million live in India. OD, however, is not only practised by those lacking toilet facilities. Even among those who have toilets, some prefer OD. Data shows that the practice of OD is related neither to education and literacy status nor to poverty. The reluctance of the Indian poor to use toilets, and their preference for OD, poses a sanitation puzzle.

The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM-U), launched in 2014, strived to make urban India open defecation-free by 2019. It aimed to provide sanitary toilets to all urban households.  In Oct 2019, India has been declared Open Defecation Free by Prime Minster, Narendra Modi.  But does construction of toilets necessarily promote usage? Why do people in urban slums show reluctance to use toilets?  To what extent, and in what ways, do sociocultural norms, behaviours, and practices influence the toilet behavior?

Purity and Pollution

Traditional norms of purity and pollution are crucial in determining sanitation practices in India. Hindu norms of pollution and purity have many dimensions that centre on connotations of dirt and pollution, purity and cleanliness, physical spaces as pure or impure, and the human body as a site of purity and impurity.

• Dirt: Viewed as polluting and disorderly, there are two connotations of dirt: physical dirt, such as human excreta and garbage, and cultural dirt, such as that associated with menstruation, birth, and death. Sometimes, the boundary between physical and cultural dirt is thin. Human excreta is considered physical dirt, but even when modern toilet technologies make the dirt invisible and destroy its toxic potential, toilets are still considered ‘unclean’ by Hindu households. Therefore, toilets are built at a distance so as not to pollute the pure, such as food cooked in the kitchen, and sacred spaces where deities are kept for household worship. Not only is human waste considered defiling and impure, the body also becomes impure during the process of defecation, which is a release of dirt. Both men and women are required to bathe after defecation so that their bodies are purified.

• Space: The purity of the inner space of the house must be guarded by assigning separate spaces to different kinds of dirt: the toilet is kept outside the house, shoes are left outside the entrance, and menstruating women stay away from spaces of worship and cooking. The inner space is ritually purified following the pollution of birth or death. Similarly, the body has to be purified through a ritual bath after menstruation. As women are assigned the responsibility of maintaining the purity of the inner space, they have to bathe in the morning before their household chores so that they are ritually pure to worship or to cook.

• Caste: The castes that deal with materials considered polluting—human waste, dead bodies, dirty clothes, human hair, and the hide of dead animals—are considered impure and untouchable. Those who deal with human waste and dead bodies are considered the ‘lowest of the low’ and work as sweepers and scavengers, and are the traditional bearers of night soil. The castes rendered untouchable live in hamlets on the outskirts of villages, away from the upper castes. In cities, they live in peripheral, common places such as railway lines and riverbanks, close to morgues and slaughterhouses. The casteist notion of cleanliness is thus more social than physical. Social order is maintained through ritual cleanliness, which may not necessarily be a matter of hygiene.

Tradition, Modernity and the ‘Non Negotiable’

The connotations of physical dirt and ritual dirt influence sanitation behaviours in urban spaces with varying degrees of compromise and adaptation. However, even the urban environment cannot make people compromise on what can be called the ‘non-negotiable’ aspects of culture. For example, when a toilet is constructed within the house and it coexists with the pure spaces, the place for defecation is barricaded from the living inner space of the house. While the middle class can separate some rooms, such as puja ghar (place of worship), kitchen, and living space from the toilet, the poor do not have sufficient space to construct separate, barricaded spaces for what is considered pure.

Regardless of their location and technology, toilets carry the connotation of ritual impurity. Hence, toilet behaviours remain the same in middle-class as well as poor households. All castes, whether rich or poor, employ manual scavengers from the untouchable castes to clean their septic tanks and pits.

Traditionally, women are considered the custodians of the purity of the inner, private space of the house. In slums, women continue to perform that role. They keep the space physically clean by removing dirt and household garbage. They change into separate clothes during defecation, regardless of whether they practise OD or use a toilet. Women refrain from performing puja when their bodies are considered impure, such as during menstruation and after delivery. The inner space is not only the space inside the house; it includes the outer space attached to the house. Every Hindu household worships the tulsi plant grown outside.

Why Open Defecation?

OD is a common practice despite its inconvenience and physical and health risks. It is practised not only by those who do not have toilets. Those who have toilets use them selectively: at night, during illness, and in the rainy season; in addition, old people and women, particularly pregnant women, old women, and adolescent girls often use toilets.

There are many reasons why those who have toilets do not use them: the fear that the pit will get filled too soon; the high cost associated with cleaning the pit; the feeling that the dirt, though underground, is too close to living, cooking, and worship spaces in small dwellings; cultural notions of purity and pollution; and social norms of shame and avoidance that regulate defecation in the presence of the elderly, males (in the case of women), and guests. Water is also a significant constraint in the use of toilets at home, since water supply in slums is erratic and inadequate.

Infrastructural Constraints

The majority of slum households use pit and improved pit toilets. Many of these toilets are poorly designed and lack adequate technology. Some households have toilets that are connected to drains and canals, where they discharge their effluents. Not all toilets used for defecation have a superstructure. Some are without the superstructure altogether, while others have half-erected ones covered with clothes, rags, and plastic bags.

Slum dwellers prefer to spend their money on houses rather than on toilets because they see houses as necessary for safety and shelter, but toilets as replaceable with alternatives. The construction of a toilet at home is determined by many factors, such as financial resources; the availability of physical space; the needs of the old, the sick, and the women in the family; and considerations of purity and pollution that become particularly constraining in small houses.

Having a toilet in the house does not mean that the household members’ defecation practice is hygienic, as most people use unsanitary toilets. These, along with spatial constraints, blur the lines between ritual and physical dirt for the urban poor. The poor, therefore, prefer to construct toilets outside the living space. When a toilet is located inside a very small house, people are more likely to refrain from using it.

Bridging the Gap

Culture does not operate alone, but interacts with a host of other factors: the availability of physical space, financial resources, and access to infrastructure and technology. Behavioural change is conceptualised as the shift required in practices of purity and pollution that deter Hindus from using toilets. But behavioural change does not take into account these factors. Hence, we find that among households with toilets, their use is determined by existing technology and the availability of physical space and water.

Due to the SBM-U’s emphasis on the physical target of a specific number of toilets that need to be constructed within a specified time period, any localised, complex, or nuanced understanding of culture escapes the current policies. There is no scope in the policies to accommodate how culture manifests in the local context. A lack of community consultation and participation further limits information about the specific needs of people. The failure to adapt to local requirements also restricts implementers from customising policies. Women play a significant role in both private and public sanitation but are seldom consulted about their needs and choices.

It is imperative that policies expand their scope to include understanding culture. It is likely that the governance of sanitation at the local level will follow.

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This blog is based on findings of the article, Culture and Sanitation in Small Towns: An Ethnographic Study of Angul and Dhenkanal in Odisha by Ranjita Mohanty and Anju Dwivedi. The article can be accessed here.

Recent webinars on understanding the sanitation landscape in India as part of the Sanitation Insights at CPR series can be accessed here.