How can India undertake its large projected growth in buildings while simultaneously meeting its development, energy and climate objectives? The Building and Research Information special issue sets out to help answer this question by developing and extending the growing body of research on the topic, with the aim to help define the built environment in India as an emerging and important field of socio-technical enquiry. The special issue’s framing of the problem departs from the often used techno-economic view and instead suggests that both technical infrastructures, such as the built environment, and social infrastructures, such as policies, professions, habits and norms, shape behaviour, and as a consequence offer significant potential for reducing overall energy demand and GHG emissions. This editorial, which contextualizes the special issue, sets a three-pronged multidisciplinary framework for current and future research on India’s building stock, and associates the papers in the special issue with this agenda. It also points to the importance of international research collaborations in seeking solutions to India’s energy and climate change challenges.
Suggested Citation: Khosla, Radhika and Kathryn B. Janda. 2018. “India’s building stock: towards energy and climate change solutions.” Building Research & Information 47(1):1-7.
Over the last year, CPR has been working to understand why the relationship between the business community and the Indian state has deteriorated so much over the last decade. Whether it is plunging private investment, increasing concentration of capital, the alienation of informal businesses and SMEs, or the rising NPA problem, many indicators show that India’s economy is in deep trouble, even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. No nation-state has grown without some degree of collaboration with its business community, and we strongly believe that trust needs to be rebuilt between capital and the Indian state in order to accomplish any of the optimistic goals that have been set out by successive governments.
This October 2020 of Seminar gathers a range of experts from business, journalism, policy research and academia to diagnose discrete problems of the business-state relationship, establish the background for why things have deteriorated, and suggest some possible directions to repair this fraying trust. We hope that some of the ideas from this issue can help capital and the state have productive conversations again.
Ecological fiscal transfers (EFTs) involve higher levels of government distributing funds to lower levels of government based on ecological indicators. In 2015 India established the world’s largest system of EFTs when its 14th Finance Commission added forest cover to the formula that determines the amount of tax revenue the Union government distributes annually to each state. Here we gather state-by-state data on forestry budgets to assess whether India’s EFTs incentivized states to protect and restore forests as evidenced by increases to their forestry budgets.
In 1976 India and China resumed their diplomatic interactions, which had been interrupted by the 1962 War. For the ensuing three decades both sides have been engaged in discovering a process that can identify the contours of a solution to the boundary question. The orthodox historiography of the post-1976 phase portrays India as a relatively intransigent actor still clinging to the past (pre-1962) and unwilling to truly explore a solution to the dispute. India is also painted as an unimaginative interlocutor, unable to offer proposals or counter-proposals; it is China that has supposed to have steered India toward a common position. This paper offers a nuanced corrective. India was not the only unyielding actor in this dyad; China too, despite its oft-expressed intent for a comprehensive settlement has been less than enthusiastic in translating its principles toward concrete proposals. Nevertheless, a modicum of progress has been attained, which is reflected in important bilateral agreements in the 1990s and 2000s. The author gets to the essence of the dispute and attempts to interpret the negotiating postures of both sides and conjectures why progress might have stalled since the mid-2000s.
A book review of Environmental Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court: Litigation, Interpretation, Implementation by Geetanjoy Sahu (Orient Black Swan, TISS), 2014.
I discuss Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer’s work on preventive healthcare in low-income countries. Their research in this field has changed the way that governments view cost-recovery for key preventive services, ranging from deworming to insecticide-treated bed-nets. Equally, their contributions also help us understand why markets likely under-produce preventive goods and how traditional economic thinking on externalities and subsidies may have to be reevaluated in the light of new experimental findings. Throughout, their research in this field typifies a deep commitment to learning from the setting that they are working in, as well as an unyielding dedication to improving the lives of the poor.
This paper explores the spatiality and temporality of women’s decisions to navigate particular forms of paid work, through means of a comparative analysis of three different sites and forms of work—at one’s own home (as home based workers), someone else’s home (in the form of paid domestic work) and conventional workplaces like factories (as shop-floor workers and as cleaners). By contextually situating the varying expressions of choice across the three sites, the paper argues that women’s efforts to choose one kind of work arrangement over another are embedded in the power and control that certain spaces of work entail. It further posits that women workers actively seek to reshape and redefine these spaces, through conscious negotiations in everyday practice as well as discourse.
Most Western theories presume that a titantic clash will occur during a power transition. But what if rising powers cannot assume the burden of underwriting the world order? We must contemplate alternate futures where a changing balance of power does not necessarily yield a new hegemony or a breakdown in the basic tenets of international order.
THE performance in the rural parts of India by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is perhaps the most impressive element of its sweeping victory in the 2019 election. Low food inflation, slow economic growth, and notebandi (India’s ‘demonetization’ exercise that severely restricted money stock) caused a number of analysts to suggest that rural India was facing economic distress. This seemed to be borne out by recent state election results in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan – all once considered BJP stronghold states that the party lost to its rival Congress – less than six months before the national election. Further analysis of the electoral results from these states confirmed that the BJP had been particularly punished in rural areas in the state elections,1 and it seemed natural to assume these trends would continue to the national election. But the BJP actually increased its tally from 282 seats in 2014 to 303 seats in 2019, further consolidating its vote share in rural India.
Farmers in India fear that new laws will enable corporations to exploit them. The most vocal protests have been in the states of Punjab and Haryana. The roots lie in the Green Revolution of the 1960s.
