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.
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:
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
Interpreting the Doklam Resolution
CPR FACULTY COMMENT
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS SECURITY
Read below a curated analysis by CPR faculty commenting on the resolution of the three-month-long Doklam stand-off between India and China:
Shyam Saran deconstructs how China constructs the modern narrative of power in The Quint. In another article, he writes that ‘while the Doklam issue has been defused, this does not mean that similar issues will not arise in the future’.
Srinath Raghavan writes in Livemint that the Doklam stand-off, even after being resolved, needs to be ‘seen for what it is – an indication of the steady deterioration in the ability of India and China to deal with such situations’.
According to G Parthasarathy in The New Indian Express, ‘by standing firm’ and not reciprocating to Chinese propaganda, India ‘won admiration across Asia’.
Brahma Chellaney writes that despite the resolution, the stand-off had further weakened the ‘already frayed bilateral relationship’ between India and China, which would not be easy to repair. In another article, Chellaney writes that the chief of the People’s Liberation Army of China was likely responsible for precipitating the stand-off in the first place, and it was resolved only after President Xi Jinping replaced the chief.
Nimmi Kurian writes that ‘shorn of its trappings, India’s China policy today is virtually caught in a double vision alternating between engagement and disengagement, cooperation and competition’, and analyses what this portends for the future.
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.
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.
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.
Watch the full video (above) of the talk by Amita Baviskar on the role of processed foods in the cultural imagination of Indians across regions, classes, and the rural-urban continuum.
Baviskar argues that the consumption practices industrial foods engender are productive sites for imagining citizenship cutting across social hierarchies, creating new identities, and diluting stigmatised ones.
Amita Baviskar is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.
CPR CO-ORGANISES WORKSHOP AT HK-SHENZHEN BIENNALE
URBAN SERVICES
The Government of India’s premier think tank NITI Aayog, in its three-year action agenda, has called for India to replicate the success of Shenzhen in China, not just as a successful Special Economic Zone but also as a shining example of organized urbanisation and modernization. Worldwide, Shenzhen has been upheld as a model for its rapid growth, for the boomtown phenomenon it spearheaded nicknamed ‘Shenzhen Speed’, earning it the moniker ‘Instant City’. But there’s more to Shenzhen than meets the eye. Can its success really be replicated? Can we really learn from Shenzhen, and if yes, how?
The urbanisation team at the Centre for Policy Research has been, since 2016, in a dialogue with scholars working on Shenzhen, to explore some of these questions. On 12-14 January 2018, CPR co-organised a workshop
Titled ‘Informal Plans, Planned Informality: Shenzhen as Model and Field’ at the Hong Kong/Shenzhen Architecture and Urbanism Biennale (UABB) to examine one of Shenzhen’s most prominent but least understood characteristics, the role of informality in the success of the city. The workshop was conceptualized by Mary Ann O’Donnell (Handshake 302, Shenzhen), Jonathan Bach (Associate Professor, Global Studies, The New School, New York) and Mukta Naik (Senior Researcher, CPR, New Delhi) and supported by the India China Institute.
Looking at informality as a necessary element of contemporary urbanisation, the workshop was an empirical exploration of how informality produces, and is produced by, the coevolution of the planned and the unplanned most visibly expressed by the continued relevance of, and changing State attitude to, urban villages. On Day 1, presentations by young scholars Kim Do Dom (PhD candidate in Anthropology at University of Chicago), Cai Yifan (PhD Candidate in Geography at Clark University) and Fu Na (Graduate Student, New School) generated a lively discussion on elements of informality in the realms of citizenship, intellectual property rights and entrepreneurship in Shenzhen. Post-lunch, Shaun Teo’s (PhD Candidate in Geography, University College London) guided exploration of the UABB venue and exhibits offered insights into the salient urban questions being asked by practitioners and researchers in the Pearl River Delta. Inclusion, participation, identity and sustainability were some of the recurring themes, in line with the UABB’s intention of being a space for critical thinking and free expression. Ironically Nantou village, its main site, was both sanitised and under surveillance, raising questions about the impact of large events on city neighborhoods.
On Day 2, Indian scholars took the stage, viewing Shenzhen ‘from’ India. CPR researchers Partha Mukhopadhyay and Mukta Naik reacted to the book ‘Learning from Shenzhen’ edited by Jonathan Bach, Mary Ann O’Donnell and Winnie Wong using examples of four Indian urban projects—Dholera, Sri City, Amravati and Gurgaon. Vamsi Valukabharanam from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, spoke about spatial inequalities in Indian cities, using the example of Hyderabad. Rohit Negi from Ambedkar University, Delhi, used the conversation on air quality in urban locations as a theme to explore the intersections between urban equity and ecology. Du Juan from Hong Kong University presented innovative design work done at her design lab that helped improve the habitat of renters in Hong Kong’s ultra-crowded subdivided apartments. In the afternoon, participants were treated to an exploration of Shennan Boulevard, Shenzhen’s major east-west road, led by anthropologist Zhou Ximin.
The conversations from the morning sessions spilled over onto the delectable lunches on both days, as participants discovered mutual interests, satisfied their curiosity about new cultures and raised provocative questions. It was no surprise that the writing workshop conducted by Mary Ann on Day 3, emerged as both introspection and synthesis, a delightful discovery of the power of written word to merge sentiment with academic insight.
A final visit to the Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening reminded us that as much as Shenzhen was a product of the selective absence of the State, it was also born of innovation and vision in the aftermath of Maoist socialism. In the spirit of comparison, we believe that studying Shenzhen, and perhaps other Chinese citymaking experiments, can reveal alternate possibilities to Indian cities, especially in accommodating informality even as they pursue the dream of modernity and ‘world-class’ urbanity. The workshop, in this sense, was another step in a continuing effort to “track algorithms that constantly produce…borders, which in turn keep re-producing the city”. As Mary Ann asks in her highly nuanced workshop report, “what does it mean…. to document uncertainty?”
TAKEWAYS FROM JOURNAL ARTICLE BY MUKTA NAIK
URBAN ECONOMY URBAN SERVICES
In an article titled, Negotiation, mediation and subjectivities: How migrant renters experience informal rentals in Gurgaon’s urban villages, published in Radical Housing Journal, Mukta Naik explores the experience of low-income migrant renters in the informal rental markets of Gurgaon that are controlled and managed by village landlords. The article builds on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Nathupur village in 2013-14 and Sikanderpur village in 2017, both urban villages bordering Delhi and some of the earliest to experience land acquisition and formal sector private real estate development in Gurgaon, to shed light on living conditions, nature of landlord-tenant relationships and strategies of mediation adopted by migrant renters.
Highlighting takeaways from the article, this blog describes how informal rentals – broadly understood as housing located in settlements without formal tenure and/or without registered lease documentation – are organised in Gurgaon and offers insights into the lived experience of migrant renters in urban villages, which have absorbed the lion’s share of rural-urban migration into the city especially in the 2001-2011 decade.
Types of Landlordism
Naik builds on London School of Economics Professor Sunil Kumar’s work to classify landlords in informal rentals into three types: subsistence, petty-bourgeois and petty-capitalist. It is often the landlord household’s caste position within the village and the community that determines the kind of landlordism they exhibit. Closely related is the access to land and capital that they have, the latter a function of how much agricultural land they sold to private developers when this part of Gurgaon city was being developed in the ‘80s.
Rental typologies: Affordability and living conditions
Urban villages in Gurgaon exhibit a range of informal rentals for migrant tenants with different levels of income and varying expectations in terms of amenities, privacy and security. Naik’s earlier work describes the range of informal rental housing available in urban villages in Gurgaon, from shacks with temporary construction to the ubiquitous tenements and increasingly one-room sets for middle-income renters. Rental prices are higher for properties with better quality of construction and migrant renters opt for housing that they can afford and that is near their workplace.
While informal rentals are successful is creating housing supply across price points, the levels of service are generally low because urban villages are under serviced, with severe water shortage issues and inadequate sewer networks. And even though landlords and tenants suffer because of this, additional strictures like rationed water, overpriced electricity, poor construction quality and poor light and ventilation means that renters particularly experience crowding and poor living conditions.
Perception influences contractual arrangements
Despite the unequal power relations, however, Naik finds that landlords depend significantly on rentals for household incomes and migrant tenants share a symbiotic relationship with the landlord, representing them as sometimes benevolent and at other times oppressive in their accounts. Perhaps because of this, the ubiquitous oral form of contract with exclusively cash payments, is not seen as a tool of exploitation by tenants. While landlords can enforce oral contracts through the mere threat of violent repercussions, which acts as a deterrent for rent defaults, tenants leverage informality to move through the city flexibly as they seek work. Emerging forms of documentation like police verifications, employer endorsements and tenant registrations in the wake of growing paranoia around security, terrorism and illegal refugees in India’s national discourse, indicate some start points for thinking about formalisation. Clearly, perception matters in contractual agreements. The wide use of oral contracts and the underlying forms of trusts, as well as contrasting moves towards documentation, complicate the notions of secure occupancy in the context of informal rentals.
Landlord-tenant relations remain inherently unequal across the board. Migrants cannot contend with the political power that landlords have. They maintain this by colluding to keep migrants off electoral rolls, mostly by refusing them proof of address that would enable migrants to register as local voters.
These unequal power relationships result in certain specific forms of exploitation. Migrants are often considered captive customers and forced to buy rations from the landlord’s grocery store or that landlords impose behavioural norms on tenants. Tenants report particular discomfort with the surveillance that they are subjected to by landlords, who often have a shop on the street level, which can be used to watch the comings and goings of tenants. This surveillance is ostensibly intended to ensure that tenants do not overcrowd or damage their premises and use water responsibly, but also to monitor visitors. Surveillance assumes moralistic overtones, seeking to ensure that tenants of opposite genders do not mix, outside of marriage. Tenants also face discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and gender in informal rental housing. In Gurgaon, surveillance is particularly harsh for unmarried women and young girls.
Despite the inequality, Naik finds points of connect between landlords and tenants. Subsistence and petty-bourgeois landlords often have close and long-term relationships with their renters, often going out of their way to help them; not hiking rents, permitting time extensions on rent payments, helping them start small businesses. Tenants in larger rental clusters often did not know their landlord directly, but in several cases trusted caretakers acted as intermediaries, smoothening daily functioning of tenements.
Experiences of discrimination and exploitation notwithstanding, tenants commonly characterise the landlord as ‘good’ or ‘helpful’. Landlords see themselves as protectors of tenants, with nearly every landlord in the sample mentioning their role in resolving disputes amongst tenants. The tenant’s status in the urban village appears to be affiliated with that of the landlords, for instance, tenants of politically powerful, rich or upper caste landlords enjoyed an implicit protection from harassment.
Mediation and negotiation helps migrants gain footholds
Within this context, Naik finds that migrant tenants leverage informal rentals in particular ways to secure a small foothold in Gurgaon’s urban economy. The diversity of rental typologies helps migrants find housing of varying quality at price points that suit their income situations. They use the flexibility that oral contracts offer to move ‘through’ the city, as they seek remunerative work. Migrants routinely use praise for their landlords as a way to appease them, while simultaneously being vocal about their negative experiences. Exploiting the economic dependence of landlords on rental incomes, they carefully navigate the good landlord/bad landlord narrative to carve out independent identities over time, to achieve regular employment and local identification papers to enable a long-term stay in the city. In contrast to these subtle negotiations, female renters from northeast India resist the objectification they face from male landlords and village residents in Sikanderpur simply by continuing to wear westernised clothing and claiming the streets as retail customers and pedestrian commuters. By not cooperating with the patriarchal norms that landlords seek to impose, these women exhibit what Scott calls ‘everyday forms of resistance.’
