Author: cprindia

AS PART OF ‘POLICY CHALLENGES – 2019-2024: THE BIG POLICY QUESTIONS FOR THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND POSSIBLE PATHWAYS’
CPR WATER RESEARCH

By Srinivas Chokkakula

Interstate rivers and national water security

India’s 29 states and 7 UTs (Union Territories) share its 20 major river basins. This simple framing presents how India’s water security is embedded in a canvas of deeply-interdependent interstate hydrogeographies. India’s water security is defined and determined by how its interstate rivers are governed.

The state of policy and institutional set up for interstate river water governance does not inspire confidence though. Interstate river water disputes emerge and recur frequently. Their adjudication incurs long delays, marked by adversarial litigations. States often defy judicial directives from either the tribunals or the Supreme Court, leading to constitutional crisis. Implementation of the tribunal awards/decisions suffers from an acute absence of reliable interstate institutional models/mechanisms. Each escalation or recurrence of disputes incur huge costs to the economy. Antagonistic politics and politicization characterize interstate river water relations.1 On the other hand, implementation of interstate river development projects and rejuvenation programmes too, are impaired by the larger void of a robust interstate coordination or collaboration ecosystem.

The history of interstate river water governance of India partly explains this state of affairs. Since independence, it has been that of exigency-driven contingent responses. The policy ecosystem is primarily set to respond to the exigencies of conflicts and remained oblivious to the idea of interstate cooperation. There is practically no ecosystem for interstate coordination and collaboration over river waters. A simple fact extends support to this assessment. The Interstate (River) Water Disputes Act 1956, for resolving interstate river water disputes, has been amended at least a dozen times. Yet another amendment bill has been tabled before the Parliament in 2018. In contract, the River Boards Act 1956, enacted at the same time as the former and meant to enable interstate collaboration has never been touched since its inception. Further, it has never been used to create any boards, not even once! For some inexplicable reason, the river boards so far created draw on alternative and ad-hoc channels – either of notifications of the government, or state-bifurcation laws, or sometimes through separate acts of Parliament. The act has remained untouched even when it was found unusable for the purpose it was intended for.

The constitutional division of powers with respect to water, and its practice is the other reason. The subject of water is listed under the Entry 17 of the State List. This however is subject to the Entry 56 of the Union List pertaining to the regulation and development of interstate rivers.2 In the initial years of single party dominance, the negligence of carving its role definitively – some called it, “wilful abdication of its role” – has led to the states assuming unfettered and exclusive powers over water governance.

This trajectory of evolution has contributed to the entrenchment of territorialized perceptions and competitive approaches of states towards water resource development. This has been aided generally by the transformation of Indian state and polity over the years. The initial single party dominance has given in coalitional politics giving greater room for subregionalism and territorial assertion of states.

An outcome of this for the centre-state relations over water governance is the increasing resistance of states to any attempt of the centre’s assertion of its role under the Entry 56, over interstate river water governance. Central institutions like CWC and CGWB are perceived increasingly irrelevant. States pursue their respective territorial visions of water resource development with little or no appreciation for the cumulative impact, with adverse implications to national water security.

Ambitious plans and ambiguous foundations

Several practical reasons necessitate this revisiting of interstate river water governance with particular focus on centre-state relations. The country has set itself ambitious plans for greater economic growth and these depend on strong and reliable interstate river water cooperation. These plans have both development and conservation goals. The development projects are not just the conventional supply augmentation, but also include inland waterways. The proposed inland waterways over 105 national waterways poses new challenges for interstate river water governance.3 The interlinking of rivers, though much contested, has received patronage from consecutive governments – yet could not make much headway due to, partly the hurdles of interstate coordination.

The flagship programme of Ganga rejuvenation is a response to the intensely stressed river ecosystems. It has received unprecedented attention and investments. Yet the ‘blind spot’ with respect to the tenuous centre-state and interstate relations remains an unaddressed challenge. This centre’s fully-funded programme may effect some temporary impact. But sustaining it over longer term will require a deeper institutionalization of the programme among the states, in addition to closer interstate coordination and collaboration.

The vital shift towards Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) mooted by the National Water Policy 2012 will itself require a consensus among states. An articulation of national policy simply will not achieve states’ compliance. The historical geographies of uneven water resource development among states will warrant deliberating over the tradeoffs in shifting to IWRM. The shift has to be led by the centre with the consent of the states.

Above all, there are new challenges of climate change linked risks. This big unknown adds to the challenges of interstate coordination with its uncertainties over space as well as time. Interstate collaboration and cooperation is central to coping with the risk of disasters such as floods.

Shift focus to enabling cooperation

In order to realize the development goals of these ambitious projects, and in the interest of longer term water security, the government has to begin proactively engaging with the challenge of interstate river water governance. This requires a fundamental strategic shift, away from the current reliance on conflict resolution, and make deliberate efforts to enable and nurture an ecosystem for interstate river water cooperation. Such an ecosystem is useful for disputes resolution as well in essential terms. Interstate river water disputes resolution often fails because there are no reliable mechanisms for implementing the tribunal awards or decisions. It can only be possible when the party states collectively contribute to “giving effect” to the decisions. Thus, interstate river water cooperation ecosystem is a necessary condition for effective conflict resolution.

This intricate link in fact accentuates the emerging understanding about the nature of transboundary relationship when rivers are shared between territorial entities. The binary of either conflict or cooperation is a flawed premise to address the challenges of transboundary river sharing. Instead it is increasingly evident that the complex political ecology of transboundary river water sharing constitutes a coexistence of conflict and cooperation.4 The design of policy and institutional solutions has to acknowledge this character, and cannot rely on legal instruments alone. It has to be supplemented with other elements of ecosystem: policy, institutions, and politics.

First, there has to be clearly articulated policy intent. The National Water Policy has to declare that creating and nurturing an ecosystem for interstate river water cooperation as one of its priorities, and enunciate specific steps towards setting the process in motion.

Second, politics have to make the policy reforms possible. In view of the historical evolution of centre-state-water relations in practice, the policy and institutional reforms for interstate cooperation will have to build on a political consensus for setting out on this path. At the core of this consensus will be how the centre has to (re)position itself. The political process has to aim at redefining the centre’s role under the Entry 56 of the Union List, considering the emerging challenges of interstate river water governance. This does not mean reorganizing the constitutional division of powers, which will likely to face vehement resistance from states. Instead, the goal will be to redefine the existing centre-state division of powers in terms of functional and operational responsibilities required to pursue the ambitious plans and programmes. In other words, the water agenda has to be elevated for a federal consensus, say, along the lines of the GST reforms.

The idea of building federal consensus for water reforms is not entirely new. The need for such political process and forum was felt before as well. For instance, the National Water Resources Council has been created under the aegis of the Ministry of Water Resources. The National Development Council is another forum for such federal deliberations. These forums failed to deliver for variety of reasons. A key reason is their failure to assuage states about their neutrality and objectivity in enabling deliberations; these are perceived as politically-subjective and serving the agendas of the particular political regimes in power.

The Interstate Council may be nurtured as an institutional space for these federal deliberations. The constitution provides for the Interstate Council, for the specific purpose of interstate coordination. Yet this vision for the Council has been lost for inexplicable reasons. This crucial federal forum has been neglected, and undermined due to its ill-conceived purpose and location. The Interstate Council has been ill-conceived as a department of the executive – a politically subjective space. Instead, it should have been conceived and cultivated as an institution at par with other institutions serving key constitutional functions for deliberative democracy.

The Article 263 providing for Interstate Council incidentally follows the peculiar Article 262 providing for barring the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. The constitutional framers were conscious of the limitations of the courts in addressing challenges posed by interstate river water disputes; and, that a robust deliberative process is essential for their resolution. The success stories of water reforms in other comparable federal contexts are often celebrated, say from Germany or Australia. Central to these success stories is a strong institution offering a space for federal deliberations: the LAWA (Working Group of the Federal States) in Germany, or the COAG (Council of Australian Governments) in Australia. The Interstate Council has to serve a similar function to pursue the proposed reforms. Just as these deliberative spaces, the Interstate Council can be a permanent deliberative forums to take forward reforms. The Council’s scope however may not be restricted to water resources alone, but can have working groups for different sectors serving the purpose of interstate coordination.

The third element is to develop strong and resilient institutional models for interstate coordination, or compliance or collaboration – primarily to give effect to any interstate project, programme or agreement. A River Basin Management Bill 2018 has been proposed, replacing the River Boards Act 1956, for the purpose. But it assumes that centrally driven river basin authorities can serve these functions. Some states have already resisted this conception. It is unlikely these authorities will be effective without a consensus about the functional roles of the centre and states, and the operational domain of river basin authorities. The bill does not build on such a consensus; instead assumes that including representations from states is sufficient to make the institutions work. River Basin Authorities or any other form of interstate institutional models need to emerge from, and build upon the contours of the respective functional spaces emerging from the federal consensus. An enduring and empowered deliberative forum, such as the Interstate Council will enable such consensus building and evolution of collaborative solutions.

The fourth is pursuing an effective strategy for interstate river water disputes resolution. It requires a course correction. A historical understanding of the unusual approach – of barring courts’ jurisdiction and setting up tribunals for adjudication – reveals that these arrangements were conceived with an intent of ensuring finality to the resolution, and in a swift manner. Deliberative approaches were integral to tribunals’ adjudication of the disputes. This was the approach used by the first generation of tribunals, constituted for Krishna, Godavari and Narmada disputes. Over time, the subsequent amendments to the act have turned tribunals into courts and increasingly relying on adversarial litigations. This is one of the reasons for extended delays in giving away awards. The recent decision of the Supreme Court modifying the Cauvery tribunal award is just another instance of this trend. Extending Supreme Court’s jurisdiction opens up additional layers of judicial litigation. The processes of adjudication by tribunals needs to be reviewed, with due attention to courts’ limitations in addressing interstate river water disputes. It has to consider strengthening the adjudication with deeper integration of deliberative processes, and building on the cooperation ecosystem. The Interstate River Water Disputes amendment bill 2018 proposing a Permanent Tribunal has made a feeble attempt to incorporate this element, while continuing with the adversarial character of tribunals’ functioning. A Disputes Resolution Committee has been proposed, to attempt resolution through mediation. Its proposed composition does not inspire confidence though.

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
• Time for Disruptive Foreign and National Security Policies by Bharat Karnad
• Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy by Mukta Naik
• Schooling is not Learning by Yamini Aiyar
• Clearing Our Air of Pollution: A Road Map for the Next Five Years by Santosh Harish, Shibani Ghosh and Navroz K Dubash
• Protecting Water while Providing Water to All: Need for Enabling Legislations by Philippe Cullet
• Managing India-China Relations in a Changing Neighbourhood by Zorawar Daulet Singh

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¹ To illustrate, the Supreme Court is currently deliberating on the suit filed by the Tamil Nadu for a compensation of Rs 25,000 crore for crop losses due to alleged failure of Karnataka to release Cauvery waters in time in just one season.
² This was the basis for enacting the River Boards Act 1956.
³ The National Waterways Act 2016
⁴ Mirumachi N (2015) Transboundary water politics in the developing world. Routledge, Oxon

FULL VIDEO OF BOOK DISCUSSION
POLITICS BUREAUCRACY

Watch the full video of author Jairam Ramesh in conversation about his new book, ‘Intertwined Lives: P N Haskar and Indira Gandhi’ with Srinath Raghavan.

The book is the first full-length biography of arguably India’s most influential and powerful civil servant who was Indira Gandhi’s alter ego during her period of glory. Educated in the sciences and trained in law, P N Haksar was a diplomat by experience and a communist-turned-democratic socialist by conviction. He knew Indira Gandhi from their London days in the late 1930s and in May 1967 she appointed him as the secretary in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat. He then emerged as her ideological beacon and moral compass, playing a pivotal role in her signature achievements including the nationalisation of banks, abolition of privy purses and princely privileges, the creation of an independent Bangladesh, the signing of the Indo-Soviet Treaty and the emergence of India as an agricultural, space and nuclear power, to name a few.

Drawing on Haksar’s extensive archives of official papers, memos, notes, and letters and using his unique personal knowledge of people and politics, Jairam Ramesh presents a compelling chronicle of the life and times of a remarkable Indian who decisively shaped India’s political and economic history in the 1960s and 1970s.

Jairam Ramesh is an Indian economist and politician belonging to the Indian National Congress. Srinath Raghavan is a Senior Fellow at CPR.

CPR FACULTY REACT TO NEW GOVERNMENT POLICY ON ‘LATERAL ENTRY’ INTO HIGHER ADMINISTRATIVE POSITIONS
BUREAUCRACY CPR VIEWS

India’s bureaucracy is in urgent need of reform. As Prime Minister Modi himself has often said ‘India cannot march through the 21st century with the administrative systems of the 19th century’. The government’s recent move to introduce a policy for lateral entry, especially domain experts from the private sector, into joint secretary level positions, is an important step in the direction of reform. The move has however generated a lot of public debate.

In this first edition of ‘CPR Views’ CPR faculty and experts, many of whom have significant experience working within government, share their comments on this key development.
Yamini Aiyar,
President and Chief Executive, CPR

‘In principle, I welcome the idea of lateral entrants into the bureaucracy. It is now a widely acknowledged truth that the art of governance is becoming increasingly complex, and this complexity requires a degree of expertise that a career generalist may not have. As a career policy wonk, and self-professed expert (as most of my think tank colleagues are), I can’t but argue for the importance of domain “expertise” in policy making!

But from the perspective of what ails India’s bureaucracy, it is worth considering if lack of expertise is the primary illness or whether the problem lie elsewhere? To my mind the core failing with bureaucracy in India is not the lack of expertise. Frankly, we under-estimate the capacity and capability of our IAS in public debates on bureaucracy. Moreover, in discussions on the bureaucracy’s need for domain expertise, we have rarely considered the fact that the government is adept at seeking expertise when required. In my view, the government has been quite effective at bringing in “experts” and seeking expert advice from a wide gamut of actors – NGOs, activists, think tanks and private sector specialists are all part of government committees and discussions where advice is regularly sought and given, in abundance. In my profession we are often asked about the “impact” we make on policy making. I often worry that we have too much impact because our government has outsourced all the thinking to us “experts”. As a result, policy making is becoming far too technocratic and domain specific even as policy challenges increasingly require inter-sectoral approaches and most importantly, political engagement.

The real challenge in our governance today is one of institutional design and organisational culture. Our bureaucracy is set up for a very limited set of functional domains – and as these have expanded – moving from mere regulation and delivery of statutory services to market development, delivering citizen rights, changing entrenched social behavior, managing and enforcing contracts – we have never asked ourselves the question of whether a top-down, centralised narrowly trained system can in fact deliver on these complex tasks.

India’s bureaucracy is, as Lant Pritchett argues, designed for “thin” tasks – logistical tasks (like running a post office) that can be monitored based on “thin” information (has the letter reached). Thin systems define performance in simple, thin terms. Yet, as the role of government has expanded, expectations of performance have changed. Government in the 21st century has to perform a range of what Pritchett calls “thick” tasks – transaction intensive activities that require significant discretion in decision making. Governance today is not about building a road it is also about maintaining it, it isn’t about building a school but ensuring that students learn, it is about developing and maintaining complex public-private relationships. These are a range of tasks where performance cannot be reduced to thin metrics. Monitoring teacher performance is one example – where thin metrics like teacher qualifications or syllabus completion simply cannot capture the complexity of what goes on inside a classroom. Performance of a teacher ought to be determined on the nature of the multiple interactions teachers have with students inside the classroom. This is a “thick” activity that requires teachers to assess their context and modify their behavior accordingly.

Thus, the real failure with governance in India today is that we assume that “thin” systems can in fact perform “thick” tasks. We expect the government to be iterative, innovative, nimble and most importantly deliberative. Yet, we have paid scant attention to the structures, systems and culture within the government and never asked whether these systems are in fact aligned with the tasks at hand. Bringing an “expert” into a broken system is unlikely to fix the problem. At best, experts will be like Islands – which is, in my view, the role that many like Vijay Kelkar, Montek Ahluwalia (names that are doing the rounds currently as examples of why lateral entry is important) played. And at worst, they will get lost in the fundamental, structural problem that India’s governance system faces today.

In the end there are no short cuts. We have to fix the roots of the problem. Lateral entry is, to quote Abhijeet Banjerji, no more than “putting band aid on a corpse”.’

T R Raghunandan,
Advisor to the ‘Accountability Initiative’ at CPR and a former Joint Secretary

‘I welcome the idea of lateral entry into the government. The higher levels of bureaucracy are largely a monopoly of civil servants, mostly from the IAS (Indian Administrative Services), but there is no logical reason why that should be so. Monopolies eventually do not provide any incentive for excellence. Lateral entrants are likely to be ignorant of the labyrinthine processes of governance, which insiders worship without question. They are likely to bring in fresh ideas and a greater motivation to see them through to their implementation.

Detractors of lateral entry often refer to the robustness of the ‘system’ that screens talent within the civil services, to ensure that the best reach the top. However, those within this system know that often, its objectivity is distorted by tribal loyalties and biases. Therefore, the ‘system’ is sufficiently moth-eaten for reasonable people to not regret its demise.

Yet, the process envisaged for lateral entry, as it is configured at the moment is seriously flawed. The government has advertised for a few posts, laid down a few conditions of experience, sought for a rather low academic qualification – only a graduate level standard – and indicated that the selection will be done after an ‘interaction’ with a selection committee. This is a recipe for confusion and corroborates some of the fears of naysayers. For example, many fear that lateral entry could become a revolving door for corporate interests to come in and tweak policies to their advantage, or for cronies of the political party in power to hold critical positions in key ministries.

There are practical problems too, with the process envisaged. The civil services, still has a lustre attractive enough to motivate lakhs of aspirants to apply for the entrance exam and run the gauntlet of a three stage, year-long selection process. It is therefore not unlikely that at the very least, many thousands will apply for the advertised lateral entry positions. The selection process will be overworked and its veracity questioned, if it is only confined to an interview like process by a selection committee. Given the constitutionally mandated primacy of the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) to undertake the selection of senior civil servants, it is also likely that the process of lateral entry may be questioned on legal grounds.

Yet, how long will this rejection of outsiders continue? Professionals outside the government are befuddled with the bureaucracy. Their feeling that they could do better if given a chance, is growing stronger by the moment. The lateral entry window, once opened will not be shut. Competent outsiders will not give up the pressure for lateral entry once they taste blood.

Therefore, in my view, opposing lateral entry is not the right way forward. The focus must be on how to improve the rigour and objectivity of the lateral entry selection process. Furthermore, in the larger context of reforming the civil services and ensuring that the best talent reach the top, lateral entry is but one instrument. There are other ideas that could be tried, such as more objective and open screening processes for picking people to rise in the service, or picking officers for higher level positions such as Additional Secretaries and Secretaries from an internal pool of talent and experience, rather than going almost entirely by seniority.

All in all, even though the current process of lateral entry is seriously flawed, this idea is not going to die. It is a desirable one and it should be carried out much better than as envisaged at present.’

D Shyam Babu,
Senior Fellow, CPR
Domain experts, like salt, must be used sparingly. Less may be bad but more will be a disaster. The adage ‘excess of anything is bad,’ is true even if the thing in question is good and desirable. The Centre has decided to induct non-IAS government officers as well as personnel from the private sector as joint secretaries through lateral entry, in other words, through the side door. The government is now accepting applications for ten such posts. Since one of the aims of the policy is to ‘augment manpower,’ the trickle may soon turn into a downpour.

We can surmise three considerations that might have informed the policy. One, IAS officers are ‘generalists’ and hence unsuited to manage technical or highly specialised areas of governance. Two, non-IAS persons, especially from the private sector, are less enamoured by cumbersome bureaucratic procedures that clog the wheels of development, and will put the country on a fast-track. Three, the interaction between the rule-bound IAS and goal-oriented outsider will result in cross pollination of ideas, cultures and temperaments.

We would celebrate the day when these hopes have become a reality. But, meanwhile, some reality check may be warranted.

One, what is assumed to be a problem is not a problem. Democratic governance is conservative by nature and any talk of radical change is a mere rhetoric. India is no exception. We want our officials to be accountable and diligent. Due diligence must take primacy over efficiency. Where is the evidence to prove that our senior officers are inefficient or lack domain expertise? It is a different matter if they are corrupt or in collusion with their political bosses.

Two, we are making too much of domain expertise. Though our public universities and research outfits are run by the so-called domain experts, they are no founts of either efficiency or fresh ideas. It’s less said the better about the private sector.’

Keshav Desiraju,
Board Member, CPR and former Health Secretary

‘Joint Secretaries (JS) in the central secretariat come mainly from the IAS but also from other services. They bring field experience, especially in the nitty-gritty of the state-subjects, healthcare, primary education, agriculture, rural development, women and child development, land revenue and management, and forest management. They also bring an understanding of how a federal structure works and how political priorities are set. They have also, all, sworn allegiance to the Constitution of India.

Given India’s realities, it is possible that most have not had the time to develop a specialisation. However, many are first class candidates. When they become JSs in Delhi, working often in policy areas of which they have no direct experience [Environment & Forests, Steel, Mines, Coal, Economic Affairs, Civil Aviation, Commerce] they need to learn the details but a five year tenure has enabled many to acquire full control. The current proposal is to bring in JSs into ten ministries, nine of which are in this category. In principle, officers of the regular services coming to these posts will need to upgrade skills and develop subject matter expertise. Even where they know their subjects, they will need to learn the craft of policy making.

Lateral entrants have been suggested as a breath of fresh air and inspired thinking after the stuffiness of the babu. They are probably more skilled at quantitative methods and presentation, better educated, and with better English. They have probably worked in more orderly work environments, have enjoyed security of tenure, have been assessed better at their performance and have probably been held more accountable for the jobs they have been entrusted with. Some of them may even be very good.

Some of these skills can be taught even if it may take longer for the work environment to change in government settings. What the lateral entrants lack is a knowledge of the context in which government functions. They do not bring a knowledge of the field, they do not have experience of working with elected representatives, and they do not know how party politics at the state and district levels can impact on an officer’s performance. They do not also have experience of working in an environment where objectives are hazy, tasks unspecified and the responsibility is total. Hence, what IAS officers do should not be undervalued.

Lateral entrants work on short term contracts. They may perform well but when they leave they take their experience with them without contributing to the process of building institutional knowledge. In any case, the system has already provided for non-service experts in many departments; ICAR in Agriculture, ICMR and DGHS in Health or the specialist cadres in the science ministries. These bodies have to be improved.

There are also JSs, many from the IAS, who are lazy, incompetent, ill-motivated and corrupt. That is not a problem which lateral entry will solve. It is also not necessarily the case that highly qualified lateral entrants will not misuse their positions.

India has followed a conventional approach to recruitment to the public services. The Union and State Public Service Commissions seek to identify potential and, as of the present, the UPSC is still one major constitutional body, which has not been majorly tainted. Candidates are assessed on the basis of what they know to which the Commission brings its sense of how they are likely to perform. Lateral entrants are to be recruited on the basis of proven performance. Their subject matter expertise is not in doubt. What is not so clear is their understanding of deprivation, bias and the lack of opportunity. There is a fear that lateral entrants will seek IT based solutions to all problems of human development. IT is an invaluable tool and we must push for much greater use of IT applications in all spheres of development, in the management of data and in assisting evidence-based policy making. But IT applications are not in themselves the answer.

Ten positions within the entire secretariat are not going to make a big difference. It may even do some limited good. The positions are open to serving officers as well, which is a good way of encouraging specialisation. However, if the practice is to spread we must ask whether it will be subject to the rules of reservation. In the name of professional expertise we cannot ignore a constitutional requirement.

There is also the fear that lateral entrants will be brought in on the basis of ideology or commitment to the political parties in power. While it is true that many officers from the IAS and other services become closely aligned with one party or the other, and some, indeed, with several parties over the course of their careers, our system has not so far actually placed persons in executive positions on the basis of ideology and nothing else.

There is much to be done in the area of civil service reform, recruitment, training, promotion, etc. However all that is peripheral to the crucial issue of the use and abuse of power. How much responsibility, and consequently power, will an elected government delegate to unelected civil servants? Can a responsible civil servant be assured by the government she serves of physical and professional protection from elements within the party constituting that government? Can an officer be assured by her government that political and civil servant corruption will not be tolerated?

Conscientious serving officers learn, in hard times, to remain true to themselves and to the people of India. These are situations which lateral entrants to government service do not need to confront.’

G Parthasarathy,
Honorary Research Professor, CPR, and former Indian diplomat

Recruitment to All India Services was conceived in the years immediately following independence. The aim was to see that the bureaucracy across the States of a diverse India was drawn substantially from people outside the State, so that the higher echelons could ensure that partisan considerations of caste and religion did not dominate day to day administrative issues, ranging from law and order to economic development projects.

The system, however, has become corrupt from top-down. Significant corruption emanates from the highest political levels. The bureaucrat tends to emulate his political masters, making the entire system rotten. Eliminating political level corruption requires primary emphasis.

The Civil Service Cadres need to get in early in their career, into areas of specialisation, such as Law and Order/Security, Development, Social Issues and Finance. Any system of lateral recruitment promotes, casteism, corruption and nepotism. Lateral entry should be only for highly specialised jobs, effected through transparent procedures and organisations not subject to political, caste or religious prejudices of preferences. These posts should be normally for a three-year-tenure, though in some very special cases this could be extended to five years.’

ACCESS THE FULL JOURNAL ARTICLE
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

The 1956 Suez conflict was not inevitable. The involvement of an impartial third party had offered an exit ramp for the main protagonists. Largely forgotten today, India strove to reconcile the interests of the Westerns powers with Arab nationalism. Displaying creativity and perseverance in attempting to arrest the sudden deterioration in security in its extended neighborhood, India’s unceasing but responsible support for a weaker Arab state in the backdrop of determined Western coercion is a useful illustration for contemporary policymakers who are attempting to craft a sustainable approach towards a tumultuous West Asia. Using previously unused archival documents, this paper adds to the small literature on India’s involvement in this crisis by offering the first detailed account of India’s attempt to prevent the outbreak of hostilities in those fateful months of 1956. By doing so, this article also reveals interest- ing facets of India’s approach to conflict management and regional stability in the 1950s, a role that was predicated on not just promoting strategic restraint between antagonistic states but also enabling conflict resolution options that preserved the vital interests of competing actors.

CPR FACULTY ANALYSE
INDIA-PAKISTAN SOUTH ASIA POLITICS

Post the surgical strikes by India on the Line of Control, compiled below is the commentary by CPR faculty.

In the Die is Cast, Pratap Bhanu Mehta analyses the strikes and what these mean for the future of India-Pakistan relations.

In The Times of India, G Parthasarathy writes that the strikes have sent an important signal to Pakistan, and that India knows its nuclear threshold, well aware that ‘while Pakistan’s army may be adventurist, it is not suicidal’.

In the Hindustan Times, Brahma Chellaney writes that even though the strikes mark an end to years of Indian indecision and inaction, a one-off attack ‘can do little to help reform the Pakistani military’s conduct’, and the critical question remains whether India ‘will be willing to stage more raids’.

In An Indo-Pak Cold War, Sanjaya Baru writes that the strikes were ‘waiting to happen for many years now’, and the challenge going forward, for both countries, would be to ‘manage a long period of bilateral disengagement’.

In A face-saving move or planned retaliation, Bharat Karnad writes ‘there was nothing particularly novel or new about the’ surgical strikes, and that the time lapse between the Uri attack and the strikes suggests that it was a ‘face-saver’. However, in another article, he comments that being belated, the strikes have ‘changed the rules of the game that Pakistan was playing by’.

FULL VIDEO OF PANEL DISCUSSION AS PART OF CPR DIALOGUES
TECHNOLOGY

Watch the full video of the panel discussion on ‘India’s Technology Transition: The Present and the Possible’, organised as part of CPR Dialogues, featuring Shweta Rajpal Kohli, Anu Acharya, Shyam Divan, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, chaired by Ananth Padmanabhan.

CPR is proud to announce the launch of its new initiative Technology and Society Initiative (TechSoc). The initiative to strengthen CPR’s efforts towards research-driven conversations and policy thinking on emerging technologies, building an indigenous innovation ecosystem in India, and regulating the same.

Technology transitions have been a defining feature of the 21st century. The first important transition was the shift towards the semantic, machine-readable web from the read-write web of the late 90s and early 2000s. This shift has been instrumental in unlocking the power of data to facilitate advances such as neural nets, deep learning techniques, and broader artificial intelligence solutions. It has also spawned the growth of the sharing economy, which monetises the predictive possibilities of such data. Parallel developments in autonomous systems and hardware miniaturisation have opened possibilities for human skills augmentation through robotics, internet-of-things, drones, and augmented and virtual reality. A third strand of innovation seeks to decentralise data storage and eliminate or diminish the presence of intermediaries, with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies being on the vanguard of this transition to greater trust and transparency. Fourth, and possibly with the highest transformative potential, is the convergence of the digital with the biological, leading to an array of nascent technologies dealing with the human body such as sophisticated gene editing, neuromorphic computing, and brain-chip interfaces. These transitions are poised to reshape healthcare, mobility, education, agriculture, and various other domains. And to provide strong consumer uptake and market base for these technologies, engineering has transitioned from its heavy technical focus to a more fluid understanding of human-machine interfaces and user-friendly design.

In an emerging economy like India, the most prominent marker of this techno-transition so far has been the smartphone – the ordinary Indian’s window to the world. In this pocket-sized gadget converge many of the advances highlighted above, with more to be integrated soon. It would not be an exaggeration to state that the promise of Digital India has largely been constructed around the smartphone. But clearly, nationalistic and policy aspirations only begin, and do not end, here. In the past couple of years, governments both at the Centre and the States have engaged with several new advances including artificial intelligence, drones, crypto-currencies, and DNA fingerprinting. The often-erratic nature of such interventions, however, compel us to take a step back and critically explore the background conditions required for India to leverage innovation-led growth effects, while sufficiently safeguarding against the negatives of such innovation on individual, collective, and national interests.

In this regard, there are three broad questions one is confronted with. The first relates to the innovation ecosystem needed to motivate the development of emerging technologies in the country. Even with India’s recent startup boom, criticism is rife that Indian innovation remains functional and valuation-driven rather than elemental and frontier-breaking. How can the right set of policies and incentives be structured to ensure R&D in sunrise technologies, creation of a requisite talent pool, and successful business models around such technologies? The second relates to the regulation of such technologies. The refrain that regulation often stands in the way of innovation is amplified in the Indian context simply due to weak regulatory capacity and slow-paced responses to understanding the technology at hand. How can the regulatory framework in India be redesigned to adapt to technology transitions in a manner that broadly supports innovation while guaranteeing a set of responsible practices? The third relates to the conflict between innovation on the one hand and individual and community rights on the other. While big data-driven solutions can inform better policies and products, they can also invade upon individual and group privacy, result in exclusionary policies through reliance on biased datasets, and even lead to more sophisticated State surveillance. Can existing constitutional and legal safeguards assure responsible and inclusive innovation, and if not, what are the new conceptual and procedural interventions needed?

Our panel of experts from business, entrepreneurship, policy, and law explored these questions deeper, and deliberated upon ways to contend with them.

Ananth Padmanabhan is a Fellow at CPR.

Shweta Rajpal Kohli is Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs at Salesforce India & South Asia.

Anu Acharya is the Chief Executive Officer, Mapmygenome India.

Shyam Divan is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani is Founder and Executive Vice-Chairman of Info Edge (India) Limited.

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

The launch of CPR’S Technology & Society (TechSoc) Initiative featuring Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India and Venktesh Shukla, General Partner, Monta Vista Capital and Ex-Chair TiE Global, can be accessed here. The question and session session that followed this discussion can be accessed here.

Ananth Padmanabhan’s article in the Hindustan Times (print partner for CPR Dialogues) can be accessed here.

Coverage of the launch of CPR’s TechSoc Initiative by ThePrint (digital partner for CPR Dialogues) can be accessed here.

Access the key takeaways about the Dialogues by Venktesh Shukla and Sanjeev Bikhchandani.

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
• The Emerging World Order and India’s Role
• CPR Youth Awards: A Youth-Driven Agenda for Change
• India’s 21st Century Transitions
• Understanding India’s Energy Transition in Global Context
• Is the Urban Future Metropolitan? Big Cities in Urban Systems
• Geopolitics and Geo-Economics in a Changing South Asia

NEW BOOK BY SRINATH RAGHAVAN
SOUTH ASIA SECURITY

Srinath Raghavan’s new book India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945 will be launched on 29 April, 2016. In the run-up, read the interview (below) with Raghavan about his book, which has been replicated from The Hindu:

The book is called India’s war. Yet, not one Indian was consulted before Viceroy Linlithgow’s decision to enlist the Indian Army.
Even if India was an unwilling participant in the conflict, the conflict had huge implications for India. So, even if we were dragged into it kicking and screaming, those years turned out to be foundational for India in the Independence movement.

But still not India’s war. The Army was treated like bonded labourers, bundled off to fight without any say…
That’s not entirely the case. The Congress certainly opposed India’s participation because it wasn’t consulted, but others saw it as an opportunity. You had people like Ambedkar, who realised that for the Dalits, this was an opportunity for social mobility, to have their voices out. You also had Savarkar who said that this was a great opportunity for the Hindu community to get into the Army, which was dominated by the Sikhs and the Muslims.

Are you saying it was the war that gave these leaders and their ideologies their original prominence?
I think many of the ideological fault lines that we associate with 1947, in some sense, came to the fore during the war years, and that’s why we need to study them more closely. Because of what happens in the period 1935-1939 — you have the first elections under the Government of India Act, and Congress ministries are formed. It seemed as if the Congress was the most dominant force, and only Congress versus the British Raj played out. But then you had the war; the Congress was sidelined, and that cracked open the scenario for others who wanted their voices heard. So you had Jinnah coming into prominence with his demand, you had Ambedkar, you had Savarkar, and a number of others.

If you look at the books about India’s participation in World War II, especially Northeast India and the Malacca frontlines, they are titled the ‘forgotten war’ or the ‘forgotten Army’. Why is it important that they are not forgotten?
If you look at much of the way our history is taught, and the way the public imagines the 1940s, it is basically about the Congress party resigning, the Cripps Mission failing, and then you talk about post-war developments leading up to Independence. So the 1940s are remembered for this march to Independence and Partition that came as a cost of it. The war never really comes into focus. What I wanted to do was say, if you put the war in the front and at the centre and study its impact, then much of the 1940s becomes much clearer and explains why we ended up with what happened on August 15, 1947. Without the war, it is unlikely that the Muslim League would have gained prominence vis-a-vis the Congress in order to push through their demand for a separate country.

You don’t often refer to yourself in your books, but here you speak of your own regiment and how it fought. Do you think there is a bigger need to acknowledge this part of World War II as India’s war, for the Army’s sake?
To begin with, it is important from a military history point of view. This period marked the biggest expansion the Indian Army saw. For a generation of people, now forgotten, the war was foundational for their lives. They travelled abroad for the first time, served in very difficult conditions. I don’t think I would have even got into the subject but for my own military background; I may not have written it but for the fact that I served in the Rajputana Rifles regiment that features prominently in the book. When you have two and a half million Indians in uniform and many more millions recruited for war-related activity, how can we just forget that story? The Indian Army has got caught in the middle of this. If you are a ‘nationalist’, you will see the Army as an instrument of British control; a force of collaborators. But most of the Army was deeply nationalist. Others want to portray the anti-British movement as a subaltern revolution led by the peasantry, yet what was the Indian Army if not made up of the peasants and poorer classes? So, why ignore this side? Finally, let’s remember that along with Partition, the Indian Army was partitioned as well. Companies that fought together in those wars were subsequently made to fight each other, beginning with the first Kashmir war. As a result, World War II dropped out of the picture. Because now both the Indian and Pakistani armies wanted to play up the stories of their valour against each other, to suit their independent national interests, and not some war that was a collaborative effort. One of the things I mention in the book is that there is a 25-volume official history of the war, and it had to be compiled by a combined inter-services effort from both India and Pakistan, right? But acknowledging this joint history has become very difficult, and very inconvenient, to both countries.

In his memoirs, President Pranab Mukherjee writes that he was against attending commemorations for World War II because it was an insult to the Independence movement, and particularly to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, whose Indian National Army fought against British forces.
I very strongly disagree with that view. Netaji and the INA’s effort were quite important, no doubt. I do bring out in the book that the INA’s importance was not really about military contribution, but political impact. It had about 25,000 soldiers, prisoners of war captured by the Japanese, who went over to form Netaji’s Army. The Indian Army was about a hundred times larger, 2.5 million Indians. So why should we only valorise 25,000 people and try to say that recognising the others is somehow a denigration of national history? That’s the lens I am trying to move beyond. Just because some people were in the Army doesn’t mean they wanted British rule. Many fought simply because it was a job; others needed access to food.

There’s an interesting point in the book when Chiang Kai-shek comes to meet the Indian leadership and asks them to support the war because the soldiers won’t be able to fight if they feel they do not have the country’s backing. Why was that significant?
One of the other forgotten parts of our history is that one of the biggest alliances was that of the Indian and Chinese armies during the war. Once the Japanese captured Burma, the land routes were cut off, much of the Indian Army’s mandate was to enable the nationalist Chinese Army to be supplied to fight. Much of the aerodrome-building across Northeast India was to supply the nationalist Chinese. Given the turn we took later, we must realise there is a pre-history too. India and China both emerged from the crucible of World War II. The idea that Asian nations which have come out of colonialism will have a shared future goes back to then. Of course, things didn’t work out that way, and we tend to forget this.

Most wars end the empire of the defeated side. Would you say that World War II was unique because it ended the empire of the winning side, the British?
I think it was clear even at the time that World War II would change the world forever… I think the key point is that the British lost the empire not just because they were weakened by the war, but because they lost the Indian Army’s support by the end of it, which was their instrument of control. That’s what the impact of the INA mutiny was, to show that the British could raise this massive Army, but that it could turn on them too. People like Churchill had even questioned the expansion of the Indian Army and said: “Someday it is going to shoot us in the back”.

You are now seen as a master of the archives through each of your books. What was the biggest challenge during your research for India’s war?
To be honest, I began this book thinking I could do most of my research in India itself. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. I found that the National Archives don’t even have a clear record of the war period. They don’t even have a catalogue for the military department during the war, so a lot of the military details came from the British Library and other archives. But what I feel most satisfied about was my effort to discover the voice of the Indian soldier.

 

Read book reviews, which have appeared thus far:
Independent
The Washington Times
The Diplomat
The Spectator
Open Magazine
Financial Times
The Asian Age
The Wire
The Economist
Open Magazine
Live Mint
Mail Today
The New Indian Express
Wall Street Journal

Additionally, read book excerpts in Scroll and Outlook. 

Outlook also profiled him.

NEW EDITED VOLUME BY SHIBANI GHOSH
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

For more than three decades now, the Indian courts have delivered far-reaching judgments on a range of significant environmental matters. In their effort to adjudicate complex disputes with serious environmental repercussions, involving the interplay of multiple social, economic and political factors, the courts have developed a framework of environmental rights and legal principles, which now forms an integral part of Indian environmental jurisprudence. The judiciary invokes this framework creatively to identify constitutional, statutory and common law obligations of public and private actors to protect the environment, and to enforce the performance of related duties. There is, however, limited in-depth study of these crucial rights and principles in existing legal literature.

Indian Environmental Law: Key Concepts and Principles fills this gap through its critical analysis of the evolution of this environmental legal framework in India. It studies the origins of environmental rights, substantive and procedural, and the four most significant legal principles— principle of sustainable development, polluter pays principle, precautionary principle and the public trust doctrine—and elaborates how Indian courts have defined, interpreted and applied them across a range of contexts.

As environmental litigation and legal adjudication struggle to respond to worsening environmental quality in the country, conceptual clarity about the content, application and limitations of environmental rights and legal principles is crucial for the improvement of environmental governance. With chapters written by Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, Lovleen Bhullar, Shibani Ghosh, Dhvani Mehta and Lavanya Rajamani, this book explores the judicial reasoning and underlying assumptions in landmark judgments of the Supreme Court, the High Courts and the National Green Tribunal, and aims to provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding of the framework of rights and principles.

Indian Environmental Law: Key Concepts and Principles has been reviewed by The Hindu and Down to Earth. To learn more about this book, read the chapter descriptions below.
Chapter 1: The Judiciary and the Right to Environment in India: Past, Present and Future

By Lovleen Bhullar

Bhullar discusses the evolution of the right to environment as a substantive right in Indian environmental law. Drawing from judgments of different fora, she identifies the linkages made by the Indian judiciary between environmental protection and the Constitution, specifically Articles 21, 47, 48A and 51A(g). She finds the courts to have adopted a predominantly anthropocentric approach to environmental protection, with occasional recognition of the right of the environment. While the path of evolution of the right to environment, and its realization, has been problematic, Bhullar argues that the inherent imprecision of the right, while unfortunate in some cases, allows courts the flexibility to adapt their directions to a given fact situation, often in the interest of the environment.

Chapter 2: Procedural Environmental Rights in Indian Law

By Shibani Ghosh

Ghosh examines three procedural environmental rights – the right to information, the right to public participation, and the right to access to justice – in detail, and identifies loopholes and limitations in the adjudication of each right. In particular, the chapter refers to relevant provisions of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986, the EIA Notification 2006, the Right to Information Act 2005, the Forest Rights Act 2006, and the National Green Tribunal Act 2010. Ghosh concludes that despite statutory expression of procedural environmental rights, there is no room for complacency as these three rights are routinely curtailed and denied.

Chapter 3: Sustainable Development and Indian Environmental Jurisprudence

By Saptarishi Bandhopadhyay

Bandhopadhyay critically analyses the principle of sustainable development, as interpreted and applied by the Indian judiciary. The chapter provides a succinct description of the historical evolution of the principle internationally. It analyses the Vellore judgement to distill the Indian Supreme Court’s definition of the principle, and examines the Narmada judgement to reveal how the Supreme Court has ‘instrumentally harnessed the vagueness inherent in sustainable development’. Bandopadhyay concludes that while the interpretive flexibility of the principle diminishes the extent to which litigants and lawyers can expect the Court to justify its determinations, this flexibility is not necessarily undesirable, as it leaves the field of legal argumentation and political struggle relatively open.

Chapter 4: The Polluter Pays Principle: Scope and Limits of Judicial Decisions

By Lovleen Bhullar

Bhullar discusses the origin of the polluter pays principle in Indian judicial decisions, and poses five questions to understand how the Indian courts have operationalised it – who is the polluter; how and when is the application of the principle triggered; how is the loss assessed and compensation determined; what does the polluter pay; and finally, what are the limits of the principle. She concludes that while the flexible way in which the Indian judiciary has operationalised the principle has allowed different aspects of the principle to be fleshed out in each case, it has also led to courts speaking in contradictory voices.

Chapter 5: The Precautionary Principle

By Lavanya Rajamani

Rajamani explores the conceptual underpinnings of the precautionary principle, tracing its definition, interpretation and legal status in international law, before turning to Indian law. She argues that the application of the principle in the Vellore judgement is at odds with the Supreme Court’s own definition of the principle. The chapter discusses this lack of clarity in the Court’s engagement with the principle, and the blurring of lines between two distinct legal principles – precaution and prevention. Rajamani concludes that the invocation of the indigenous version of the precautionary principle may be instrumentally useful in arriving at environmentally favourable judicial outcomes, but it does not bode well for the development of a clear line of jurisprudence.

Chapter 6: Public Trust Doctrine in Indian Environmental Law

By Shibani Ghosh

Ghosh traces the growth and application of the public trust doctrine, and explains why it is difficult to identify how the doctrine could lend predictability to decision-making regarding public trust properties. She explains the contours of the doctrine as inferred from Indian judicial pronouncements – the source of the doctrine, properties that are held in public trust, and principles that are applied by courts while implementing the doctrine. Rather than insisting on its redundancy, she argues that it is desirable to make the doctrine more relevant, and proposes ways in which it may afford greater protection to natural resources held in trust.

Chapter 7: The Judicial Implementation of Environmental Law in India

By Dhvani Mehta

Mehta provides an overview of the compliance and enforcement mechanisms available to environmental regulatory authorities in India, and then, with references to case law (many of which rely on the four legal principles in this book), illustrates the implementation mechanisms developed by the Indian courts. She concludes that judicial implementation mechanisms have had mixed success. Apart from external factors, there are certain internal weaknesses that impact the implementation process: courts have been inconsistent while deploying implementation mechanisms, their orders require more robust legal reasoning and they need to integrate better with the existing regulatory framework.

FULL VIDEO OF LECTURE
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS ECONOMY

Watch the full video (above) of the talk by Jahangir Aziz, where he analyses the changes in global economy precipitated by the post-2008 recovery and their effect on emerging markets.

With a focus on the prospects of growth for the Indian economy, Aziz discusses the ‘new characteristics’ assumed by the recovering global trade in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Jahangir Aziz is the Head of EM Asia Economic Research at J.P. Morgan.

FULL VIDEO OF THE LECTURE
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Watch the full video (above) of the lecture by Prof. Sunil Amrith where he shows how multiple Indian diasporas have been a cultural, economic, and political force in the making of the modern world. Over the last 200 years, tens of millions of people have left India’s shores to make their living on every continent. Until recently, their experiences have been missing from the accounts of both Indian history and global history.

Prof. Amrith is the Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on trans-regional movement of people, ideas, and institutions. He was awarded the Infosys Prize, 2016, in Humanities.