Author: cprindia

As Kashmir continues to be on the boil for over 60 days now, a factual trajectory of the history of the state and its conflict (from 1947 till 2006) is captured in this primer by the late B G Verghese of CPR.

The primer was written with the objective of educating people, given the lack of easily accessible literature on the subject, and presents the central story of the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) conflict post 1947–in a series of snapshots.

From the history of its invasions, coups, and accession, to the account of the UN resolutions, to the resulting Indian, Pakistani and Chinese territorial control of the erstwhile princely state of J&K in 1949, the following wars, the many attempts at the peace process–including the origins of the plural, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual tradition of Kashmiriyat–the primer is an important reference point for understanding and contextualising the current situation of the state.

A visual timeline of the highlights from the primer can be accessed above.

VIDEO RECORDING OF CPR-CSH URBAN WORKSHOP
URBAN GOVERNANCE

Watch the full video (above) of the preliminary findings presented by Sanjeev Vidhyarthi from his research on the actors shaping the fast growing Indian cities and their metropolitan regions.

The findings focus both on the changing perception of spatial plans, as well as the range of urban actors and how their plans are beginning to shape Indian urban regions in unprecedented ways.

Sanjeev Vidyarthi is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

EXCHANGE OF VIEWS BETWEEN EXPERTS FROM INDIA AND AUSTRALIA
POLITICS INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Watch the full video (above) of a public forum organised by the Centre for Policy Research, which brought together experts from Niti Aayog (government of India’s think tank) and Australia, to discuss policy reforms, and how these can be enacted.

There was an exchange of views between the two coutnries on how to manage the policy environment, assess and analyse government and non-government stakeholders, and effect good policy. Particularly, since designing and implementing effective policy reform in multi-tiered complex democracies is difficult and challenging, especially where there are vocal and entrenched interests and stakeholders involved.

ANALYSING THE PM’S RESPONSE
POLITICS KASHMIR INDIA-PAKISTAN

SOUTH ASIA
CPR faculty G Parthasarathy comments on the Prime Minister taking stock of the situation in Kashmir following the death of Burhan Wani on DD News.

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO
WATER RESEARCH

Watch the full video of the talk (above) by Anthony Acciavatti focusing on a decade-long-project to create a dynamic atlas of the Ganges Machine–a method of mapping that exposes the juxtaposing layers of infrastructure and adjoining built forms. The goal of this dynamic atlas is to not only map space, but also map how spaces change over time.

Acciavatti also discusses the importance of mapping the choreography of water and human settlement at a time when the Government of India is beginning to invest a $1.5 billion loan from the World Bank to clean up the Ganges river.

A LITERATURE REVIEW AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY BY SUSAN E CHAPLIN
SANITATION URBAN SERVICES RIGHTS

Susan E Chaplin finds that existing literature provides little evidence of how sanitation inequalities impact the daily lives of poor women and girls.

What is the research about?

In this working paper, Susan Chaplin examines existing literature to find out what is known about how inequalities in urban sanitation access impacts the lives of poor women and girls, who have to queue up each morning to use public toilets, or have to decide which open defecation sites are the least dangerous to use.

How was the research conducted?’

The 68 articles and reports discussed in this literature review were largely collected using Google Scholar searches and the website Sanitation Updates, which provides regular email alerts on recently published journal articles and reports. Most of the evidence-based research and grey literature focused on India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and South Africa

What are the key findings?

Despite the focus on gender inequalities and sanitation in low income countries, within development goals, programmes, and projects, only 16 articles and reports either addressed gender inequalities or used gender analysis in examining results from their research projects.
The urban sanitation inequalities faced by working women, along with those who were ageing, disabled or living on pavements, has been largely ignored in the literature.
The linkages between gender-based violence and the lack of urban sanitation are poorly researched, documented or addressed in practice.
There is a lack of understanding in urban sanitation policies of how gender inequalities create toilet insecurity for millions of women and girls.

Conclusion

To understand how gender inequality operates at multiple levels across societies in the cities of the Global South, in relation to sanitation access, there is a critical need for better data collection which is gender aggregated. Most national statistics, at best, often just provide a very broad overview of sanitation facilities at the household level. These statistics don’t provide an adequate overview of the everyday lives of poor women and girls who are compelled to develop strategies to cope with lack of access to safe sanitation facilities. For many poor women and girls, this specifically means finding ways to cope with gender-based violence that occurs around community/public toilets and open defecation sites.
There is an urgent need to develop gender-sensitive understanding of the heterogeneous nature of slums and informal settlements, the diversity of the people who live in them, and the relationships between them, if urban sanitation inequalities are to be addressed to meet Sustainable Development Goals.
Data and research is also needed on how this lack of access impacts poor women and girls, women working in informal sectors, women with disabilities, ageing women, and homeless women. The understanding created by this new research could then be used to develop more appropriate and effective strategies to reduce gender inequalities in urban sanitation provision.

FULL VIDEO OF PANEL DISCUSSION AS PART OF CPR DIALOGUES
SOUTH ASIA INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Watch the full video of the panel discussion on ‘Geopolitics and Geo-Economics in a Changing South Asia’, organised as part of CPR Dialogues, featuring Nimmi Kurian, Zorawar Daulet Singh, Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, chaired by Srinath Raghavan.

The contemporary phase of international politics is full of uncertainty and fluidity. The US is unable to enforce its writ over the system, nor is it able to supply the public goods necessary to produce a stable and flourishing world economy. Rising powers are contending for new roles and seeking to reshape the rules that govern world order. If we step back, however, what we notice is actually a recurring cycle in world history. A pattern of struggle and competition where each epoch has ultimately produced a larger and more dynamic process of capital accumulation and international division of labour. After a struggle for leadership, the baton passes towards a new contender who resuscitates world order and assumes the onus of managing the process of economic globalisation. Does the present phase portend such a scenario? What aspects of the ongoing power transition are similar to the past and what is distinct? Can the dominant power and its rivals arrive at a modus vivendi that avoids a zero-sum confrontation?

Coming to India and its region, the changing international environment has profound consequences. Both the geoeconomic order – an open world economy where capital and goods could move relatively freely between states – and a peaceful geopolitical setting underwritten by a great power peace has enabled India since the end of the last Cold War to focus on economic growth and development. Profound changes to this status quo imply that policymakers and strategic thinkers are being called upon to supply fresh ideas and frameworks for India’s foreign policy.

If unrelenting pressures on globalisation do continue to increase, it would imperil South Asia’s economic story. Short of finance capital, non-renewable energy resources, and industrial technologies, South Asia’s transformation for the past two decades has been intrinsically linked to reliable access to economic resources from other high-income and emerging economies. Any disruption to trans-national and trans-continental interdependence, will naturally push the region to look within it own socio-economic base to sustain its economic transformation. This would place greater responsibilities on India to safeguard not only its own economic prospects but supply public goods and assist its neighbours too. And, there is no sensible reason why India must seek to do this alone with its scarce resources and growing domestic claims. Cultivating diverse partnerships are, therefore, not a luxury but a strategic necessity. Setting the terms and shaping how other major powers with greater economic heft engage with the South Asia is one of the central challenges for India’s foreign policy. What have been missing from Indian debates are more sophisticated approaches to the multitude of regional visions and connectivity ideas that are being espoused by several great powers. Can India leverage its unique location at the crossroads of many of these geoeconomic visions provides to mediate and steer Asia’s political economy evolution in directions that advance its interests?

Furthermore, a fundamental assumption – indeed a sacrosanct premise – for India’s strategic thinking in the post-Cold War period has been internalising the reality of one preponderant power centre that shaped political and economic life across the globe. This structural setting – unipolarity as it was described by many – led to a basic Indian foreign policy framework of a sustained, albeit gradual and tentative at each step, integration into the US-led order as well as of course a transformation in bilateral relations with the US and its key allies. This has been a bipartisan strategy and for the most part it could be claimed that Indian policymakers accomplished this process within the broad confines of strategic autonomy with some success. But given the geopolitical changes now underway, without a careful strategic readjustment and a sensible assessment on Asian geopolitics, India’s foreign policy risks losing the advantages that might accrue from a multipolar Asia. How should India reimagine its place in this diffusion of global power and disintegration of the unipolar consensus?

The panel explored these and related themes to understand what possible roles can India realistically adopt to shape the ongoing power transition in a way that advances its domestic transformation and security along with a stable Asian and world order.

Srinath Raghavan is a Senior Fellow at CPR.

Nimmi Kurian is a Professor at CPR.

Zorawar Daulet Singh is a Fellow at CPR.

Ambassador Shivshankar Menon is the former National Security Advisor and Indian Foreign Secretary.

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

Coverage of the panel by ThePrint (digital partner for CPR Dialogues) can be accessed here.

WATCH THE VIDEOS OF THE CONFERENCE ORGANISED BY CPR AND THE BRUEGEL INSTITUTE
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS ECONOMY

India and Europe share common interests in dealing with global economic challenges including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the crisis of the trading system, climate change and the digital transformation. They also share and shape the global geopolitical environment within which these challenges are unfolding.

The purpose of this webinar was to compare the approaches of Europe and India to some of these common challenges and assess how far they converge or contrast with each other and what can be done to increase convergence through both multilateral and bilateral initiatives.

India and the European Union are both strong supporters of multilateralism and a rules-based global order, and influential actors in multilateral fora such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Paris Agreement. They are also strategic partners and their Leaders have endorsed at the 15th EU-India Summit held in July 2020 the “EU-India Strategic Partnership: A Roadmap to 2025” as a common roadmap to guide joint action and further strengthen the EU-India Strategic Partnership over the next five years.

The webinar consisted of four virtual sessions, each 90 minutes long, led by two panelists, one Indian and one European. All four sessions were co-chaired by Amb Shyam Saran of CPR and Andre Sapir of Bruegel. The sessions were on following topics:

Strategic Environment
Trade
Climate Change
Digital Transformation
Watch the other sessions as part of this webinar:

International trade relations in the emerging global economic order
India-Europe engagement on Climate Change
Addressing common challenges of digital transformation and promoting rule-based global data governance

FULL AUDIO OF TALK
RIGHTS POLITICS

Listen to the full audio of the talk (above) by Chandra Bhan Prasad on changing rural caste dynamics, based on his extensive travels in Uttar Pradesh. Citing stories and narratives from the field, he talks about how social, economic and political forces have come to define, dominate and reshape caste in ways that deserve serious attention from scholars as well as policymakers.

Discussing the lack of scholarly literature on evolving cast dynamics in Indian villages, Prasad highlights how increasingly the hierarchies of ‘Thakur’ and ‘Praja’ have been redefined due to greater mobility and access.

More information about the talk can be found on the event page.

CLEARING THE AIR: MONTHLY COLUMN IN THE HINDUSTAN TIMES BY NAVROZ K DUBASH
POLITICS CLIMATE CHANGE

In the sixth instalment of a monthly op-ed series in the Hindustan Times entitled ‘Clearing the Air,’ Professor Navroz K Dubash explores two equally true, but fundamentally different, ways of understanding climate change in India in light of the recent UN Climate Action Summit.

The enduring image of the United Nations (UN) Climate Action Summit held on September 23 is the young climate activist, Greta Thunberg. “How dare you continue to look away?”, she demanded, invoking wide-scale suffering, collapsing ecosystems, and the beginning of a mass extinction due to climate change.

Thunberg and burgeoning groups of other climate activists are responding to a drumroll of news of a destabilised global climate. According to the scientific report submitted to the UN, the last five years are on track to be the warmest ever recorded; higher carbon dioxide has made the ocean 26% more acidic; the four lowest levels of winter sea-ice were recorded in the last five years; and heatwaves and cyclones have become more common and more deadly. A short list of implications for humanity is greater food insecurity in the face of heat, drought, and declining crop yields; greater exposure to heatwaves causing illness and decreased productivity; and decreases in GDP, particularly for poorer and warmer countries. None of this accounts for the risk of catastrophic climate change, which could happen if certain tipping points are reached.

Faced with this growing science and growing pressure from the street, the UN secretary general called for leaders to come to the summit with far-reaching plans, not speeches.

What he, and we, got was, for the most part, slightly warmed-over policies. A few countries pledged to reach net-zero carbon by 2050, a bold stretch. Many others, including India, reiterated that they will meet their Paris Agreement pledges, sometimes with a few teasers thrown in (such as India’s statement we would increase renewable energy to 450GW, but with no date, and an intriguing proposal for a coalition on disaster resilient infrastructure). A sizeable minority, including the United States, Brazil, Japan and Australia, were simply no-shows. Thunberg is right: We are looking away.

Beneath this failure to act sit two equally true, but different, ways of understanding the climate problem.

The first is that climate change is an existential problem that threatens life on earth and ecosystems, and requires extraordinary measures. And the evidence is mounting that business as usual measures — an energy saving light bulb here, a few percentage points more renewable energy there — are not going to solve the problem. The UN secretary general is informed by this view when he calls on all countries to halve their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and go to net zero by 2050. Implicit in this view is that everyone needs to act with urgency.

By contrast, the second, closer to India’s historical view, is that while action is needed, agreeing on which countries need to act and how much — how to divide the carbon pie — is equally important. From this perspective, understandably, it is outrageous to ask a country like India, whose citizens use less than a tenth the amount of electricity on average than an American, to take equivalently strong measures to address climate change. From this perspective, climate existentialism is threatening, as it ramps up the pressure for poorer countries to take on equivalent obligations to richer countries, which may risk short-circuiting future development by curtailing energy use.

The tension between the two perspectives is heightened by the rise of nationalism in several countries. That the US, historically the largest emitter, is unwinding its domestic climate policies on the basis of tenuous arguments about its economic competitiveness lends weight to those concerned about how the pie will be divided.

When the governments of major countries like Brazil also express scepticism about climate change, it further lowers the incentive to act. This explains the lukewarm statements by India and China that they are fulfilling their existing pledges, and this should be quite enough. These divided perspectives place India in a particularly difficult place. As a poor country deeply vulnerable to climate change, we should be in the climate existentialism camp. But as a country with considerable future energy needs, we vociferously stress that the carbon pie has to be divided equitably.

In the meantime, India, as with most other countries, continues with business as usual policies. We add renewable energy, but also look to sign oil and gas contracts and attract investment in coal. In this, we are not dissimilar to other countries. But neither are we leaders. Reconciling climate existentialism and the fair division of the carbon pie is not easy. But it is not clear that India is really seeking the answer. Like everyone else, we, too, are looking away.

Navroz K Dubash is a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research. This is the sixth article in a monthly op-ed series in the Hindustan Times entitled ‘Clearing the Air.’ The original article, which was posted on September 25, 2019, can be found here.

Read more in the Clearing the Air series:

India needs environmental governance
Green industrial policy is a timely idea for India to explore
Our clean air plan is a missed chance
Can India grow now and clean up later? No, it can’t
How to Avoid the Middle Income Trap